The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  Father Subiros – I was later to meet him in the monastery of his retirement – was a sweet-tempered man: short, fat, Catalan and bookish. Father Villaverde was a leathery Extremeñan, from Trujillo. Together for fifty years, they had suffered flood, famine, disease, mutiny, a Japanese bombardment, and many other onslaughts of the Devil.

  Boongaree was an hour’s walk from the coast. Roe River, on the other hand, lay a hundred and fifty miles upcountry and could be cut off by the ‘wets’ for three months or more. Neither was a mission in the usual sense but cattle-stations, which the Order had picked up for a song in 1946 and were intended as refuge areas for tribes whose lands had been taken by the pastoralists. They had proved to be a very sound investment.

  Coming as he did from the birthplace of the Pizarros, Father Villaverde felt obliged to cast himself in the role of Conquistador. He said it was useless to try and impress the heathen with acts of love, when all they understood was force. He forbade them to hunt or even to garden. The only hope for their economic salvation was to foster an addiction to horseflesh.

  He would snatch small boys from their mothers and set them on a bucking saddle. Nothing gave him greater joy than to charge through the bush at the head of his troop of young daredevils. On Saturday afternoons, he would preside over a sports meeting, with sprinting, wrestling, spear-throwing and boomerang-throwing – and in each event he took part himself. A natural athlete – although in his seventies – he rejoiced at the chance of showing off his superior, European physique. The blacks, who knew how to humour him, would hold back their strength, allow him to win, crown him with a victor’s wreath, and carry him shoulder-high to his quarters.

  He banned from the Mission all anthropologists, journalists and other snoopers. He prohibited ‘traditional’ ceremonies. Above all, with a kind of priestly envy, he resented his lads going off to look for wives. Once they got away, to Broome or Fitzroy Crossing, they picked up foul language, foul diseases and a taste for drink. So, having done everything to prevent them going, he did everything to prevent them coming back.

  The blacks believed he was deliberately trying to run down their numbers.

  I never went to either mission: by the time I got to Australia, they’d been closed for seven years. I only know of these goings-on from Father Terence, who, when Flynn arrived at Boongaree, was living a mile or so from the compound, in a hut of leaves and branches.

  Father Villaverde hated Flynn on sight and put him through every kind of ordeal. He made him wade up to his neck in floodwater, castrate bullocks and scrub the latrines. He accused him of eyeing the Spanish nursing sisters at Mass, whereas it was they – poor village girls sent out in batches from a convent near Badajoz – who had, of course, been eyeing him.

  One day, as the Spaniards were conducting a Texan cattleking over the mission, the Texan’s wife insisted on photographing a white-bearded elder, who sat cross-legged and unbuttoned in the dust. The old man was furious. He spat a neat gob of phlegm, which landed at the lady’s feet. But she, rising to the occasion, apologised, ripped the film from her camera and, bending forward with the air of Lady Bountiful, asked, ‘Is there anything I can send you from America?’

  ‘You can,’ he snapped. ‘Four Toyota Land Cruisers!’

  Father Villaverde was very shocked. To this authentic caballero, the internal combustion engine was an anathema. Someone must have been stirring up trouble. His suspicions fell on Father Flynn.

  A month or so later, he intercepted a letter from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra, thanking the Boongaree Council for their request for a Land Cruiser: the matter would receive consideration.

  ‘And what’, shrieked Father Villaverde, ‘is the Boongaree Council?’

  Flynn folded his arms; waited for the tirade to blow over, and said, ‘We are.’

  From that day on, there was open war.

  At the next Saturday’s sports meeting, just as Father Villaverde had hurled his winning throw, Flynn, in a white soutane, strode out from behind the Chapel carrying a spear which had been rubbed with red ochre. He beckoned the spectators to clear a space and, with an apparently effortless flick, sent the weapon soaring into the air.

  The length of the throw was over twice that of the Spaniard – who took to his bed in rage.

  I forget the name of the three tribes camped around the mission. Father Terence scribbled them on a scrap of paper, but I lost it. The point to remember is that Tribe A was the friend and ally of Tribe B, and both were blood-enemies of the men of Tribe C – who, outflanked and deprived of their source of women, were in danger of dying out.

  The three camps lay equidistant from the Mission buildings: each tribe facing the direction of its former homeland. Fights would break out only after a period of taunts and accusations of sorcery. Yet, by tacit agreement, neither of the allies would gang up on their common enemy. All three recognised the Mission itself as neutral ground.

  Father Villaverde preferred to condone these periodic bouts of bloodletting: as long as the savages persisted in their ignorance of the Gospel, they were bound to go on fighting. Besides, the role of peacemaker suited his vanity. At the sound of screams, he would rush to the scene, stride through the clashing spears and, with the gesture of Christ calming the waters, say, ‘Stop!’ – and the warriors would shamble off home.

  The leading lawman of Tribe C had the unforgettable name of Cheekybugger Tabagee. An expert tracker in his youth, he had guided prospecting expeditions through the Kimberleys. He now hated every white man and, in thirty years, had not addressed one word to the Spaniards.

  Cheekybugger was built on a colossal scale: but he was old, arthritic and covered with the scabs of a skin disease. His legs were useless. He would sit in the half-shade of his humpy and let the dogs lick his sores.

  He knew he was dying and it enraged him. One by one, he had watched the young men go, or go to pieces. Soon there would be no one: either to sing the songs or to give blood for ceremonies.

  In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die. To allow that to happen was the worst of all possible crimes, and it was with this bitter thought that Cheekybugger decided to pass his songs to the enemy – thereby committing his people to perpetual peace, which, of course, was a far, far graver decision than conniving at perpetual war.

  He sent for Flynn and asked him to act as mediator.

  Flynn went from camp to camp, argued, exhorted and finally arrived at a formula. The snag was one of protocol.

  Cheekybugger had begun the negotiations: in Law, it was he who must deliver the songs in person. The question was how. He couldn’t walk. He would not be carried. He scoffed at the offer of a horse. In the end it was Flynn who hit on the solution: by borrowing a wheelbarrow from the Malay cook who worked the kitchen-garden.

  The procession set off between two and three of a blistering blue afternoon, when the cockatoos were silent and the Spaniards snoring through their siesta. Cheekybugger went ahead in the wheelbarrow, pushed by his eldest son. Across his knee, wrapped in newspaper, lay his tjuringa, which he now proposed to lend to the enemy. The others followed in single file.

  At some point beyond the Chapel, two men – from Tribes A and B – stepped from the bushes and escorted the party to the place of ‘business’.

  Flynn lagged behind, his eyes half-closed, with the air of a man in a trance. He brushed past Father Terence without a flicker of recognition.

  ‘I could see he was “off”,’ Father Terence told me. ‘And I could see we were in for trouble. But it was all very moving. For the first time in my life I had a vision of peace on earth.’

  Around sunset, one of the nursing sisters took a short cut through the bush and heard the drone of voices and the tak . . . tak . . . of boomerangs being clacked together. She hurried to tell Father Villaverde.

  He rushed out to break up the meeting. Flynn walked out from behind a tree and warned him to stay away.

 
; After the fight, people said that Flynn had simply clamped his hands around his attacker’s wrists and held them. This, however, did not prevent Father Villaverde from writing letter after letter to his superiors, claiming unprovoked assault and demanding that this acolyte of Satan be drummed from the body of the Church.

  Father Subiros advised him not to send them. Already, Aboriginal pressure groups were lobbying for an end to the missions. Flynn had not taken part in a heathenish rite: he had only acted as peacemaker. What if the press got wind of the affair? What if it came out that two elderly Spaniards had been stirring up tribal warfare?

  Father Villaverde gave in, against his better judgment; and in October 1976, two months before the ‘wets’, Flynn left to take charge of Roe River. The previous incumbent refused to meet him and left for Europe on sabbatical. The rains came – and there was silence.

  Sometime during Lent, the Catholic Bishop of the Kimberleys radioed Boongaree to confirm or deny a rumour that Flynn had ‘gone native’ – to which Father Villaverde answered, ‘He is native!’

  On the first day fit for flying, the Bishop flew the Benedictine to Roe River in his Cessna, where they inspected the damage ‘like two conservative politicians at the scene of a terrorist bomb’.

  The Chapel was in disarray. Buildings had been burnt for firewood. The stock-pens were empty and there were charred beef-bones everywhere. Father Villaverde said, ‘Our work in Australia is at an end.’

  Flynn then overplayed his hand. He believed the Land Rights movement was advancing faster than it was. He counted on the assurance of certain left-wingers that missions all over the country would be handed over to the blacks. He refused to compromise. Father Villaverde trumped him.

  The affair had touched the Church at its most brittle point: the financial. It was not generally known that both Boongaree and Roe River had been financed with capital raised originally in Spain. A bank in Madrid held the title deeds as collateral. To forestall any attempt at confiscation, both missions were sold, secretly, to an American businessman and absorbed into the assets of a multinational corporation.

  The press campaigned for their return. The Americans threatened to close an unprofitable smelter, north of Perth, with a loss of 500 jobs. The unions intervened. The campaign subsided. The Aboriginals were dispersed, and Dan Flynn – as he styled himself – went to live with a girl in Broome.

  Her name was Goldie. In her ancestry were Malay, Koipanger, Japanese, Scot and Aboriginal. Her father had been a pearler and she was a dentist. Before moving into her apartment, Flynn wrote a letter, in faultless Latin, requesting Holy Father to release him from his vows.

  The couple moved to Alice Springs and were active in Aboriginal politics.

  12

  THE EX-BENEDICTINE was holding court to half a dozen people in the darker part of the garden. The moonlight shone on his brow-ridges: his face and beard were swallowed up in the darkness. His girlfriend sat at his feet. From time to time, she would stretch her lovely long neck across his thigh and he would reach out a finger and tickle her.

  He was, there was no denying it, difficult. When Arkady crouched beside the chair and explained what I wanted, I heard Flynn mutter, ‘Christ, not another!’

  I had to wait a full five minutes before he deigned to turn his head in my direction. Then he asked in a flat, ironic voice, ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’

  ‘There is,’ I said, nervously. ‘I’m interested in the Songlines.’

  ‘Are you?’

  His presence was so daunting that whatever one said was sure to sound silly. I tried to interest him in various theories on the evolutionary origins of language.

  ‘There are linguists’, I said, ‘who believe the first language was in song.’

  He looked away and stroked his beard.

  I then tried another tack and described how gipsies communicate over colossal distances by singing secret verses down the telephone.

  ‘Do they?’

  Before being initiated, I went on, a young gipsy boy had to memorise the songs of his clan, the names of his kin, as well as hundreds and hundreds of international phone numbers.

  ‘Gipsies’, I said, ‘are probably the best phone-tappers in the world.’

  ‘I cannot see’, said Flynn, ‘what gipsies have to do with our people.’

  ‘Because gipsies’, I said, ‘also see themselves as hunters. The world is their hunting ground. Settlers are “sitting-game”. The gipsy word for “settler” is the same as the word for “meat”.’

  Flynn turned to face me.

  ‘You know what our people call the white man?’ he asked.

  ‘Meat,’ I suggested.

  ‘And you know what they call a welfare cheque?’

  ‘Also meat.’

  ‘Bring a chair,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  I fetched the chair I had been sitting on and sat down beside him.

  ‘Sorry I was a bit sharp,’ he said. ‘You should see the nutters I have to deal with. What are you drinking?’

  ‘I’ll have a beer,’ I said.

  ‘Four more beers,’ Flynn called to a boy in an orange shirt.

  The boy went eagerly to get them.

  Flynn leaned forward and whispered something in Goldie’s ear. She smiled and he talked.

  White men, he began, made the common mistake of assuming that, because the Aboriginals were wanderers, they could have no system of land tenure. This was nonsense. Aboriginals, it was true, could not imagine territory as a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather as an interlocking network of ‘lines’ or ‘ways through’.

  ‘All our words for “country”’, he said, ‘are the same as the words for “line”.’

  For this there was one simple explanation. Most of Outback Australia was arid scrub or desert where rainfall was always patchy and where one year of plenty might be followed by seven years of lean. To move in such landscape was survival: to stay in the same place suicide. The definition of a man’s ‘own country’ was ‘the place in which I do not have to ask’. Yet to feel ‘at home’ in that country depended on being able to leave it. Everyone hoped to have at least four ‘ways out’, along which he could travel in a crisis. Every tribe – like it or not – had to cultivate relations with its neighbour.

  ‘So if A had fruits,’ said Flynn, ‘and B had duck and C had an ochre quarry, there were formal rules for exchanging these commodities, and formal routes along which to trade.’

  What the whites used to call the ‘Walkabout’ was, in practice, a kind of bush-telegraph-cum-stock-exchange, spreading messages between peoples who never saw each other, who might be unaware of the other’s existence.

  ‘This trade’, he said, ‘was not trade as you Europeans know it. Not the business of buying and selling for profit! Our people’s trade was always symmetrical.’

  Aboriginals, in general, had the idea that all ‘goods’ were potentially malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion. The ‘goods’ did not have to be edible, or useful. People liked nothing better than to barter useless things – or things they could supply for themselves: feathers, sacred objects, belts of human hair.

  ‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘Some people traded their umbilical cords.’

  ‘I see you’ve done your reading.’

  ‘Trade goods’, he continued, should be seen rather as the bargaining counters of a gigantic game, in which the whole continent was the gaming board and all its inhabitants players. ‘Goods’ were tokens of intent: to trade again, meet again, fix frontiers, intermarry, sing, dance, share resources and share ideas.

  A shell might travel from hand to hand, from the Timor Sea to the Bight, along ‘roads’ handed down since time began. These ‘roads’ would follow the line of unfailing waterholes. The waterholes, in turn, were ceremonial centres where men of different tribes would gather.

  ‘For what you call corroborees?’

  ‘You call them corroborees,’ h
e said. ‘We don’t.’

  ‘All right,’ I nodded. ‘Are you saying that a trade route always runs along a Songline?’

  ‘The trade route is the Songline,’ said Flynn. ‘Because songs, not things, are the principal medium of exchange. Trading in “things” is the secondary consequence of trading in song.’

  Before the whites came, he went on, no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the Ancestor’s song and the stretch of country over which the song passed. A man’s verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he couldn’t do was sell or get rid of them.

  Supposing the Elders of a Carpet Snake clan decided it was time to sing their song cycle from beginning to end? Messages would be sent out, up and down the track, summoning song-owners to assemble at the Big Place. One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence!

  ‘To sing a verse out of order’, Flynn said sombrely, ‘was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.’

  ‘Worse,’ he scowled. ‘It would be to un-create the Creation.’

  Wherever there was a Big Place, he continued, the chances were that the other Dreamings would converge on it. So at one of your corroborees, you might have four different totemic clans, from any number of different tribes, all of whom would swap songs, dances, sons and daughters, and grant each other ‘rights of way’.

  ‘When you’ve been around a bit longer,’ he turned to me, ‘you’ll hear the expression “acquiring ritual knowledge”.’

  All this meant was that the man was extending his song-map. He was widening his options, exploring the world through song.

  ‘Imagine two Blackfellows’, he said, ‘meeting for the first time in an Alice pub. One will try one Dreaming. The other will try another. Then something’s sure to click . . .’