The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  Mrs Lacey readjusted her spectacles to fill out the American Express form. Arkady waved goodbye to Stan and we heard the triumphant rrumpff of the machine as we went out on to the street.

  ‘What a woman!’ I said.

  ‘Some nerve,’ said Arkady. ‘Come on. Let’s go and get a drink.’

  7

  I WAS WEARING rubber thongs and, since saloon bars all over Alice posted notices reading ‘No Thongs’ – with a view to discouraging Abos – we went to the public bar of the Frazer Arms.

  Alice is not a very cheerful town either by day or night. Old-timers can remember Todd Street in the days of horses and hitching posts. It has since become a dreary, americanised strip of travel agents, souvenir shops and soda fountains. One shop was selling stuffed koala-bear dolls and t-shirts with ‘Alice Springs’ written in flies. In the newsagent’s, they were selling copies of a book called Red over White. Its author, a former Marxist, insisted that the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement was a ‘front’ for Soviet expansion in Australia.

  ‘Which makes me’, said Arkady, ‘one of the leading suspects.’

  Outside the pub, there was an off-licence and the boys we saw earlier were lurching round it. In the middle of the street a battered eucalyptus reared its trunk up through the asphalt.

  ‘Sacred tree,’ he said. ‘Sacred to the Caterpillar Dreaming and a dangerous traffic hazard.’

  Inside, the public bar was noisy and crowded with blacks and whites. The seven-foot barman was supposed to be the best bouncer in town. There were puddles of beer on the linoleum, wine-red curtains in the windows, and a disorder of fibreglass chairs.

  An obese, bearded Aboriginal sat scratching the bites on his belly, and had set a buttock on each of two bar-stools. An angular woman sat beside him. There was a beermat stuck into her purple knitted cap. Her eyes were closed and she was giggling hysterically.

  ‘The gang’s all here,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mates from the Pintupi Council. Come on. Let me introduce you to the Chairman.’

  We bought our beers and threaded through the drinkers to where the Chairman, in a booming voice, was haranguing a knot of admirers. He was a huge, very dark-skinned man, in jeans, a black leather jacket, black leather hat and a studded knuckle-duster round his wrist. He extended a smile full of teeth, locked my hand in a fraternal handshake, and said, ‘Man!’

  I said, ‘Man!’ back and watched the pink tip of my thumb poking up out of his fist.

  ‘Man!’ he said.

  ‘Man!’ I said.

  ‘Man!’ he said.

  I said nothing. I felt that if I said ‘Man!’ a third time, we’d go on saying ‘Man!’ indefinitely.

  I looked away. The pressure of his grip decreased and, in the end, I got my crushed hand free.

  The Chairman went on telling the story he’d interrupted for my benefit: about his habit of shooting the padlocks off cattle-station gates. His listeners found this very amusing.

  I then tried talking to an urban activist, up here on a visit from Sydney. Or rather, since he averted his face, I found myself talking to the Aboriginal flag dangling as an earring from his left lobe.

  To begin with, I got no reaction other than the odd wobble of the flag. Then the face swivelled round and started speaking, ‘Are you English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back home?’

  He spoke slowly, in clipped syllables.

  ‘I just arrived,’ I said.

  ‘I mean all of you.’

  ‘All of who?’

  ‘White men,’ he said.

  The whites had stolen his country, he said. Their presence in Australia was illegal. His people had never ceded one square inch of territory. They had never signed a treaty. All Europeans should go back where they came from.

  ‘What about the Lebanese?’ I asked.

  ‘They must go back to Lebanon.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, but the interview had come to an end, and the face swivelled back to its previous position.

  I next caught the eye of an attractive fair-haired woman and winked. She winked back and we both sidled round the edge of the group.

  ‘Having a hard time with the Leader?’ she whispered.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Instructive.’

  Her name was Marian. She had driven into town only half an hour earlier, from Walbiri country, where she was working on a women’s land claim.

  She had level blue eyes and looked very innocent and happy in a skimpy, flower-printed dress. There were crescents of red dirt under her fingernails and the dust had given a smooth bronze-like sheen to her skin. Her breasts were firm and her arms were solid and cylindrical. She had slashed the sleeves of the dress to allow the air to circulate freely under her armpits.

  She and Arkady had been teachers at the same school in the bush. From the way she kept glancing at his blond thatch, shining in a spotlight, I guessed they must once have been lovers.

  He was wearing a sky-blue shirt and baggy fatigue pants.

  ‘How long have you known Ark?’ she asked.

  ‘All of two days,’ I said.

  I mentioned the name of the girl we both knew in Adelaide. She lowered her eyelids and blushed.

  ‘He’s a bit of a saint,’ she said.

  ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘A Russian saint.’

  I could have gone on talking to Marian, were it not for a grating voice at my left elbow. ‘And what brings you to the Territory?’

  I looked round to see a wiry, prickle-mouthed white in his thirties. His pumped-up biceps and sleeveless grey sweatshirt announced him as a Gym Bore.

  ‘Looking round,’ I said.

  ‘Anything special?’

  ‘I want to find out about the Aboriginal Songlines.’

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘Couple of months, maybe.’

  ‘Are you attached to any body?’

  ‘My own.’

  ‘And what makes you think you can show up from Merrie Old England and clean up on sacred knowledge?’

  ‘I don’t want to clean up on sacred knowledge. I want to know how a Songline works.’

  ‘You’re a writer?’

  ‘Of sorts.’

  ‘Published?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Science fiction?’

  ‘I hate science fiction.’

  ‘Look,’ said the Gym Bore, ‘you’re wasting your time, mate. I’ve lived ten years in the Territory. I know these Elders. They are not going to tell you anything.’

  His glass was empty. The one way to discourage this conversation was to buy the man a drink.

  ‘No thanks,’ he lifted his chin. ‘I’m all right.’

  I winked again at Marian, who was trying to suppress a fit of giggles. The other glasses were empty, so I offered to pay for a round. I went to the bar and gave orders for ‘schooners’ and ‘middies’. I ordered for the Gym Bore, whether he liked it or not.

  Arkady came over to help me with the glasses. ‘I say!’ he grinned. ‘You are having fun.’

  I paid and we carried them over.

  ‘Say when you want to get out of here,’ he whispered. ‘We can go over to my place.’

  ‘Ready when you are.’

  The Gym Bore winced as he took the glass, and said, ‘Thank you, mate.’

  The Chairman took his without a word.

  We drank up. Arkady kissed Marian on the lips and said, ‘See you later.’ The Gym Bore put his hand in mine and said, ‘See you around, mate.’

  We went outside.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Bad news,’ said Arkady.

  The town was quiet in the dusk. An orange rim smouldered along the line of the MacDonnell Ranges.

  ‘How did you like the Frazer Arms?’ he asked.

  ‘I liked it,’ I said. ‘It was friendly.’

  It was friendlier, anyway, than the pub in Katherine.

  8

  I HAD HAD to ch
ange buses in Katherine, on my way down to Alice from the Kimberleys.

  It was lunchtime. The pub was full of truckies and construction workers, drinking beer and eating pasties. Most of them were wearing the standard uniform of the Outback male: desert boots, ‘navvy’ singlets to show off their tattoos, yellow hard-hats and ‘stubbies’, which are green, tight-fitting, zipless shorts. And the first thing you saw, pushing past the frosted glass door, was a continuous row of hairy red legs and bottle-green buttocks.

  Katherine is a stopover for tourists who come to see its famous Gorge. The Gorge was designated a National Park, but some Land Rights lawyers found a flaw in the legal documents and were claiming it back for the blacks. There was a lot of ill-feeling in the town.

  I went to the men’s room and, in the passage, a black whore pressed her nipples against my shirt and said, ‘You want me, darling?’

  ‘No.’

  In the time I took to piss, she had already attached herself to a stringy little man on a bar-stool. He had bulging veins on his forearm, and a Park Warden’s badge on his shirt.

  ‘Nah!’ he sneered. ‘Yer dirty Gin! You couldn’t excite me. I got me missus. But if you sat on the bar here, and spread your legs apart, I’d probably stick a bottle up yer.’

  I took my drink and went to the far end of the room. I got talking to a Spaniard. He was short, bald and sweaty, and his voice was high-pitched and hysterical. He was the town baker. A few feet away from us, two Aboriginals were starting, very slowly, to fight.

  The older Aboriginal had a crinkled forehead and a crimson shirt open to the navel. The other was a scrawny boy in skin-tight orange pants. The man was drunker than the boy, and could scarcely stand. He supported himself by propping his elbows on his stool. The boy was shrieking blue murder and frothing from the sides of his mouth.

  The baker dug me in the ribs. ‘I come from Salamanca,’ he screeched. ‘Is like a bullfight, no?’

  Someone else shouted, ‘The Boongs are fighting,’ although they weren’t fighting – yet. But the drinkers, jeering and cheering, began shifting down the bar to get a look.

  Gently, almost with a caress, the Aboriginal man tipped the boy’s glass from his hand, and it fell and shattered on the floor. The boy stooped, picked up the broken base and held it like a dagger in his palm.

  The truckie on the next stool poured out the contents of his own glass, smashed its rim against the lip of the counter, and shoved it in the older man’s hand. ‘Go on,’ he said, encouragingly. ‘Give it ’im.’

  The boy lunged forward with his glass, but the man parried him with a flick of the wrist. Both had drawn blood.

  ‘Olé!’ shouted the Spanish baker, his face contorted into a grimace. ‘Olé! Olé! Olé!’

  The bouncer vaulted over the bar and dragged the two Aboriginals outside on to the sidewalk, across the tarmac, to an island in the highway where they lay, side by side, bleeding beneath the pink oleanders while the road-trains from Darwin rumbled by.

  I walked away but the Spaniard followed me.

  ‘They are best friends,’ he said. ‘No?’

  9

  I WAS HOPING for an early night, but Arkady had asked me to a barbecue with some friends on the far side of town. We had an hour or more to kill. We bought a bottle of chilled white wine from the off-licence.

  Arkady lived in a rented studio apartment above a row of lock-up garages, in the lot behind the supermarket. The metal rail of the stairway was still hot from the sun. The air-conditioner was on and, as he unlocked the door, a cool draught blew in our faces. There was a note shoved through on to the mat. He switched on the light, and read.

  ‘Not before time,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  He explained how one of the Kaititj elders, an old man called Alan Nakumurra, had been holding up the survey for the last four weeks. He was the last male survivor of his clan and ‘traditional owner’ of the country north of Middle Bore Station. The railway surveyors had been champing to peg out this particular stretch of track. Arkady had put them off till Alan could be found.

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Where do you think?’ he laughed. ‘He went Walkabout.’

  ‘What happened to the others?’

  ‘Which others?’

  ‘The others of his clan.’

  ‘Shot,’ said Arkady. ‘By police patrols in the twenties.’

  The room was neat and white. There was a juice-extractor on the bar of the kitchenette and a basket of oranges beside it. Some Indonesian cloths and cushions were strewn over a mattress on the floor. Pages of sheet music, of The Well-tempered Clavier, lay open on top of the harpsichord.

  Arkady uncorked the bottle, poured two glasses, and, while I glanced at the contents of his bookshelf, he put through a call to his boss.

  He talked business for a minute or two and then said there was this Pom in town who wanted to go ‘out bush’ with the survey team . . . No, not a journalist . . . Yes, as Poms went, relatively harmless . . . No, not a photographer . . . No, not interested in watching rituals . . . No, not tomorrow . . . the day after . . .

  There was a pause. You could almost hear the man thinking on the far end of the line. Then Arkady smiled and gave a ‘thumbs up’ sign.

  ‘You’re on,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.

  He next called the truck-hire company to have a vehicle for Wednesday morning. ‘Make it a Land Cruiser,’ he said. ‘We might get rain.’

  On the bookshelf there were Russian classics, books on the Pre-Socratics and a number of Aboriginal studies. Among the latter were two of my favourites: Theodore Strehlow’s Aranda Traditions and Songs of Central Australia.

  Arkady opened a tin of cashew nuts and we both sat, cross-legged on the mattress.

  ‘Nazdorovye!’ He raised his glass.

  ‘Nazdorovye!’ We clinked glasses.

  He unfolded his legs once more, pulled a photo album from the shelf and started turning the pages.

  The first pictures were all colour snapshots, mostly of himself, the record of any young Australian on his first trip overseas: Arkady on a beach in Bali; Arkady at Kibbutz Hulda; Arkady beside the temple at Sounion; Arkady with his wife-to-be in Venice, with pigeons; Arkady back in Alice with the wife and baby.

  He then flipped to the back of the album, to a faded black-and-white picture: of a youngish couple, on a ship’s deck, with a lifeboat in the background. ‘Mum and Dad,’ he said. ‘May ’47 when the ship docked at Aden.’

  I leaned forward to get a close look. The man was short, with a flat, powerful body, solid black eyebrows and slanting cheekbones. A wedge of dark hair showed in the neck of his shirt. His baggy trousers were cinched in at the waist and looked several sizes too big.

  The woman was taller and shapely, in a simple smock dress, and had pale hair tied up in braids. Her plump arm bulged over the stanchion rail. They screwed up their faces to the sunlight.

  Lower down the same page, there was a second photo of the man: shrunken and grey now, standing beside a wicket fence, in a garden of cabbages that could only be Russian cabbages. Beside him, forming a group, were a round peasant woman and two young bruisers in karakul hats and boots.

  ‘That’s my auntie,’ said Arkady. ‘And those are my Cossack cousins.’

  The karakul hats took me back to a stifling summer afternoon in Kiev and the memory of a squadron of Cossack cavalry exercising down a cobbled street: glossy black horses; scarlet capes, high hats worn at an angle; and the sour, resentful faces of the crowd.

  The date was August 1968, a month before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. All through that summer there had been rumours of unrest in the Ukraine.

  Arkady refilled the glasses and we went on talking of Cossacks: of ‘Kazakh’ and ‘Cossack’; the Cossack as mercenary and Cossack as rebel; of Yermak the Cossack and the conquest of Siberia; of Pugachev and Stenka Razin; Makhno and Budenny’s Red Cavalry. I happened to touch on Von Pannwitz’s Cossack Brigade, which fou
ght for the Germans against the Soviet Army.

  ‘Funny you should mention Von Pannwitz,’ he said.

  In 1945, his parents had found themselves in Austria, in the British-occupied zone. It was a time when the Allies were sending Soviet refugees, traitors or otherwise, back home to the mercy of Stalin. His father was interrogated by a British intelligence major, who accused him, in faultless Ukranian, of fighting for Von Pannwitz. After a week of intermittent interviews, he succeeded in convincing the man that the accusation was unjust.

  They were moved on to Germany, where they were billeted in what had been an officers’ club, below the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. They applied for emigration papers, to the United States and Canada: Argentina, they were told, was a better bet for people of doubtful status. At last, after a year of anxious waiting, there came news of jobs in Australia, and passages for the ones who signed.

  They took the chance, gladly. All they wanted was to get away from a murderous Europe – from the cold, mud, hunger and lost families – and come to a sunny country where everyone ate.

  They sailed from Trieste on a converted hospital ship. Every married couple was segregated on the voyage and could only meet in daylight on deck. After landing at Adelaide, they were interned in a camp of Nissen huts, where men in khaki barked orders in English. Sometimes, they thought they were back in Europe.

  I had noticed, earlier, something fierce in Arkady’s obsession with Australian Railways. Now, he explained himself.

  The job assigned to Ivan Volchok was to work as a maintenance man on the Transcontinental line, in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain. There, between the stations of Xanthus and Kitchener, without wife or children, driven crazy by the sun and the diet of bully-beef and billy-tea, he laboured at the work of replacing sleepers.

  One day they brought him back to Adelaide on a stretcher. The doctors said, ‘Heat exhaustion,’ and the railway paid no proper compensation. Another doctor said, ‘You’ve got a dicky heart.’ He never worked again.

  Luckily, Arkady’s mother was a capable and determined woman, who, starting with a street stall, built up a prosperous fruit and vegetable business. She bought a house in an eastern suburb. She read Russian novels to herself, Russian folktales to Arkasha and his brothers, and took them on Sundays to Orthodox Mass.