The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘And that’, Arkady piped up, ‘will be the beginning of a beautiful drinking friendship.’

  Everyone laughed at this, except for Flynn, who went on talking.

  The next point, he said, was to understand that every song cycle went leap-frogging through language barriers, regardless of tribe or frontier. A Dreaming-track might start in the north-west, near Broome; thread its way through twenty languages or more; and go on to hit the sea near Adelaide.

  ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘it’s still the same song.’

  ‘Our people’, Flynn said, ‘say they recognise a song by its “taste” or “smell” . . . by which, of course, they mean the “tune”. The tune always stays the same, from the opening bars to the finale.’

  ‘Words may change,’ Arkady interrupted again, ‘but the melody lingers on.’

  ‘Does that mean’, I asked, ‘that a young man on Walkabout could sing his way across Australia providing he could hum the right tune?’

  ‘In theory, yes,’ Flynn agreed.

  Around 1900, there was the case of an Arnhemlander who had walked across the continent in search of a wife. He married on the south coast and walked the bride back home with his new-found brother-in-law. The brother-in-law then married an Arnhemland girl, and marched her off down south.

  ‘Poor women,’ I said.

  ‘Practical application of the Incest Taboo,’ said Arkady. ‘If you want fresh blood, you have to walk to get it.’

  ‘But in practice,’ Flynn went on, ‘the Elders would advise the young man not to travel more than two or three “stops” down the line.’

  ‘What do you mean by “stop”?’ I asked.

  A ‘stop’, he said, was the ‘handover point’ where the song passed out of your ownership; where it was no longer yours to look after and no longer yours to lend. You’d sing to the end of your verses, and there lay the boundary.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Like an international frontier. The road signs change language, but it’s still the same road.’

  ‘More or less,’ said Flynn. ‘But that doesn’t get the beauty of the system. Here there are no frontiers, only roads and “stops”.’

  Suppose you took a tribal area like that of the Central Aranda? Suppose there were six hundred Dreamings weaving in and out of it? That would mean twelve hundred ‘handover points’ dotted around the perimeter. Each ‘stop’ had been sung into position by a Dreamtime Ancestor: its place on the song-map was thus unchangeable. But since each was the work of a different ancestor, there was no way of linking them sideways to form a modern political frontier.

  An Aboriginal family, he said, might have five full brothers, each of whom belonged to a different totemic clan, each with different allegiances inside and outside the tribe. To be sure, Aboriginals had fights and vendettas and blood-feuds – but always to redress some imbalance or sacrilege. The idea of invading their neighbour’s land would never have entered their heads.

  ‘What this boils down to’, I said, hesitantly, ‘is something quite similar to birdsong. Birds also sing their territorial boundaries.’

  Arkady, who had been listening with his forehead on his kneecaps, looked up and shot me a glance, ‘I was wondering when you’d rumble to that one.’

  Flynn then wound up the conversation by outlining the issue which had vexed so many anthropologists: the question of dual paternity.

  Early travellers in Australia reported that the Aboriginals made no connection between sex and conception: a proof, if proof were lacking, of their hopelessly ‘primitive’ mentality.

  This, of course, was nonsense. A man knew very well who his father was. Yet there was, in addition, a kind of parallel paternity which tied his soul to one particular point in the landscape.

  Each Ancestor, while singing his way across country, was believed to have left a trail of ‘life-cells’ or ‘spirit-children’ along the line of his footprints.

  ‘A kind of musical sperm,’ said Arkady, making everyone laugh again: even, this time, Flynn.

  The song was supposed to lie over the ground in an unbroken chain of couplets: a couplet for each pair of the Ancestor’s footfalls, each formed from the names he ‘threw out’ while walking.

  ‘A name to the right and a name to the left?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Flynn.

  What you had to visualise was an already pregnant woman strolling about on her daily foraging round. Suddenly, she steps on a couplet, the ‘spirit-child’ jumps up – through her toe-nail, up her vagina, or into an open callus on her foot – and works its way into her womb, and impregnates the foetus with song.

  ‘The baby’s first kick’, he said, ‘corresponds to the moment of “spirit-conception”.’

  The mother-to-be then marks the spot and rushes off to fetch the Elders. They then interpret the lie of the land and decide which Ancestor walked that way, and which stanzas will be the child’s private property. They reserve him a ‘conception site’ – coinciding with the nearest landmark on the Songline. They earmark his tjuringa in the tjuringa storehouse . . .

  Flynn’s voice was drowned by the noise of a jet coming in low overhead.

  ‘American,’ said Marian, bitterly. ‘They only fly in at night.’

  The Americans have a space-tracking station at Pine Gap in the MacDonnells. Flying into Alice, you see a great white globe and a cluster of other installations. No one in Australia, not even the Prime Minister, seems to know what really goes on there. No one knows what Pine Gap is for.

  ‘Christ, it’s sinister,’ Marian shuddered. ‘I do wish they’d go.’

  The pilot applied his airbrakes and the transport slowed up along the runway.

  ‘They’ll go,’ Flynn said. ‘One day they’ll have to go.’

  Our host and his wife had cleared up the leftovers and gone off to bed. I saw Kidder coming across the garden.

  ‘I’d better be off now,’ he addressed the company. ‘Got to go and do my flight plan.’

  He was flying to Ayer’s Rock in the morning: on some business of the Ayer’s Rock Land Claim.

  ‘Give it my love,’ said Flynn, sarcastically.

  ‘See you around, mate,’ Kidder turned to me.

  ‘See you,’ I said.

  His shiny black Land Cruiser was parked in the driveway. He switched on the headlights and lit up all the people in the garden. He revved the engine loudly, and backed out into the street.

  ‘Big White Chief him gone!’ Flynn said.

  ‘Silly fart,’ said Marian.

  ‘Don’t be unkind,’ Arkady contradicted her. ‘He’s a good bloke, underneath.’

  ‘I never got that far.’

  Flynn, meanwhile, had leaned forward over his girl and was kissing her, covering her face and neck with the black wings of his beard.

  It was time to go. I thanked him. He shook my hand. I gave him Father Terence’s regards.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘Still in his little hut?’

  ‘Yes. But he says he’s going to leave it.’

  ‘Father Terence’, Flynn said, ‘is a good man.’

  13

  BACK AT THE motel, I was half-asleep when there was a knock on my door.

  ‘Bru?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Bru.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh!’

  This other Bruce had sat next to me on the bus from Katherine. He was travelling down from Darwin, where he had just broken up with his wife. He was looking for a job on a road-gang. He missed his wife badly. He had a big pot belly and was not very bright.

  At Tennant Creek, he had said, ‘You and me could be mates, Bru. I could teach you to drive a dozer.’ Another time, with greater warmth, he said, ‘You’re not a whingeing Pom, Bru.’ Now, long after midnight, he was outside my door calling, ‘Bru?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Want to come out and get pissed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh!’

  �
�We could find some sheilas,’ he said.

  ‘That a fact?’ I said. ‘This time of night?’

  ‘You’re right, Bru.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said.

  ‘Well, goo’night, Bru.’

  ‘Goodnight!’

  ‘Bru?’

  ‘What do you want now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said and shuffled off, dragging his rubber thongs shlip . . . shlip along the corridor.

  There was a sodium light on the street outside my room, and a drunk was burbling on the sidewalk. I turned to the wall and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t help thinking of Flynn and his girl.

  I remembered sitting with Father Terence on his empty beach and him saying, ‘I hope she’s soft.’

  Flynn, he said, was a man of tremendous passions, ‘If she’s soft, he’ll be all right. A hard one could lead him into trouble.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘Revolutionary trouble, or something like it. Flynn had to suffer a most un-Christian act and that alone could turn him. But not if the lady is soft . . .’

  Father Terence had found his Thebaid on the shores of the Timor Sea.

  He lived in a hermitage cobbled from corrugated sheet and whitewashed, and set among clumps of pandanus on a dune of floury white sand. He had guyed the walls with cables to stop the sheets from flying in a cyclone. Above the roof there was a cross, its arms lashed together from two pieces of a broken oar. He had lived here for seven years, since the closing of Boongaree.

  I came up from the landward side. I could see the hut a good way off, through the trees, standing out on the dune against the sun. In the paddock below, a brahma bull was grazing. I passed an altar of coral slabs and a crucifix suspended from a branch.

  The dune had drifted higher than the treetops and, climbing up the scarp, I looked back inland across a level, wooded plain. To seaward, the dunes were hummocky and speckled with sea-grass, and along the north side of the bay there was a thin line of mangrove.

  Father Terence was tapping at a typewriter. I called his name. He came out in shorts, and went in, and reappeared in a dirty white soutane. He wondered what had possessed me to walk all that way in the heat.

  ‘Here!’ he said. ‘Come and sit in the shade, and I’ll boil up a billy for tea.’

  We sat on a bench in the shade, at the back of the hut. Lying on the ground were a pair of black rubber flippers, and a snorkel and mask. He broke some dead branches, lit them, and the flames flared up under the trivet.

  He was a short man, with reddish hair, what was left of it, and not too many flaky brown teeth. He wrapped the teeth in a hesitant smile. He would soon have to go to Broome, he said, to have the doctor freeze off his skin cancers.

  As a boy, he told me, he had lived in the Irish Embassy in Berlin, where his father, a patriot, worked in secret to destroy the British Empire: the temper of this man drove his son to a life of prayer. He had come to Australia in the 1960s: to join a new Cistercian house in Victoria.

  He typed every evening at this hour: letters mostly, to friends all over the world. He had a long correspondence with a Zen Buddhist monk in Japan. Then he would read, then light the lamp, and read on into the night. He had been reading Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which another friend had sent him from England.

  ‘Madness,’ he gasped. ‘Elementary forms indeed! How can religion have an elementary form? Was this fellow a Marxist or something?’

  He was working on a book of his own. It would be a ‘manual of poverty’. He hadn’t yet decided on a title.

  Today, he said, more than ever before, men had to learn to live without things. Things filled men with fear: the more things they had, the more they had to fear. Things had a way of riveting themselves on to the soul and then telling the soul what to do.

  He poured the tea into two red enamel mugs. It was dark and scalding. We sat a minute or two until he suddenly broke the silence: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? To live in this wonderful twentieth century? For the first time in history, you don’t need to own a thing.’

  He did, it was true, have a few possessions in his hut, but soon he was going to leave them. He was going away. He had grown too fond of his little hut, and it pained him.

  ‘There is a time for quiet,’ he said, ‘and a time for noise. Now I would welcome some noise.’

  For seven years, the Desert Fathers had been his spiritual guides: to be lost in the desert was to find one’s way to God. But he was less concerned, now, for his own salvation than for the needs of people. He was going to work for derelicts in Sydney.

  ‘I believe something similar about the desert,’ I said. Man was born in the desert, in Africa. By returning to the desert he rediscovers himself.

  Father Terence clicked his tongue and sighed, ‘Dear, oh dear! I can see you’re an evolutionist.’

  When I told him of my visit to Fathers Subiros and Villaverde, he sighed again and, in a very strong Irish accent, said, ‘Those two! Quite a pair!’ I asked about Flynn. He paused before making a measured reply.

  ‘Flynn has to be some kind of genius,’ he said. ‘He’s got what you’d call a virgin intellect. He can learn anything. His grasp of theology is very fine, but I don’t think he was ever a Believer. He could never take the leap into faith. Didn’t have the imagination for it, and that did make him dangerous in a way. He got hold of one or two quite dangerous ideas.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Syncretism,’ said Father Terence. ‘The visit to Rome was a mistake.’

  It was in Rome that Flynn began to hate being patronised by his white superiors and to resent the beliefs of his people being mocked. By the time he got to Boongaree, he was already thinking for himself.

  The Church, he used to say to Father Terence, was wrong to picture Aboriginals as being stranded in some dreadful limbo: their condition, rather, resembled that of Adam before the Fall. He liked to compare the ‘Footprints of the Ancestor’ with Our Lord’s saying ‘I am the Way.’

  ‘So what was I to do?’ Father Terence asked me. ‘Hold my tongue? Or tell him what I thought? No. I had to tell him that, to my mind, the mental world of the Aboriginals was so confused, so heartless and cruel. With what could one lessen their sufferings if not the Christian message? How else to stop the killing? The name of one of their places in the Kimberleys means “Kill them all!” and “Kill them all!” is one of those sacred sites they think so much of these days! No! No! No! These poor dark children have only two alternatives: the word of Christ, or the police!’

  No one would deny, he went on, that in their concept of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginals had felt the first glimmerings of the life eternal – which was to say that man was naturally religious. But to confuse their ‘primitive’ magic with the word of Christ, that was confusion indeed.

  The black men were not at fault. For thousands of years, they’d been cut off from the mainstream of humanity. How could they have felt the Great Awakening that swept the Old World in the centuries before Christ? What did they know of the Tao? Or the Buddha? The teachings of the Upanishads? Or the logos of Heraclitus? Nothing! How could they? But what they could do, even now, was to take the leap into faith. They could follow the steps of the Three Wise Men and adore the helpless Babe of Bethlehem.

  ‘And there’, said Father Terence, ‘I think I lost him. He never understood the story of the stable.’

  It was cooler now, and we shifted to the front of the hut. A line of thunderheads, like a procession of aerial icebergs, stood out to sea. The milky blue rollers flopped ashore, and there were flights of terns, skimming low over the bay, piercing the sound of the surf with thin metallic cries. There was no wind.

  Father Terence talked about computers and genetic engineering. I asked him if he ever longed for Ireland.

  ‘Never!’ he raised both arms to the horizon. ‘Here I could never lose it.’

  Nailed above the door of the hut was a plank of driftwood on which he had carved two lines in ‘gaelic’
lettering:

  Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests

  But the Son of Man had no place to lay his head

  The Lord, he said, had spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, building neither house nor cell, but sheltering in the side of a well.

  ‘Come,’ he beckoned me. ‘Let me show you something.’

  He led the way over middens of pinkish shells: the spoilheaps of the tribe who once lived here. After about 200 yards, he stopped beside a cream-coloured rock with a fountain of clear water bubbling up under it. He lifted his soutane and splashed about in the water, like a little boy paddling.

  ‘Isn’t water in the desert a lovely thing,’ he called. ‘I’ve called the name of this place Meribah.’

  On our way back to the hut, a wallaby poked its head round the pandanus, and hopped towards him.

  ‘My brother the wallaby,’ he smiled.

  He went inside for a couple of crusts. The wallaby took them from his hand, and nuzzled its head against his thigh. He stroked it behind the ears.

  I said it was time for me to go. He offered to walk me along the beach.

  I took off my boots, hung them by the laces round my neck and the warm sand squeezed between my toes. Crabs scuttled sideways as we came up close, and there were flocks of waders which would flutter up and settle on ahead.

  What he’d miss most, he said, was the swimming. On a calm day he liked to snorkel for hours along the reef. The Customs’ boat had spotted him once – and mistaken him for a floating corpse. ‘And I was in birthday suit, I’m afraid.’

  The fish here, he said, were so tame you could float through a shoal and touch them. He knew all their colours and all their names: the rays, wrasses, wobbegongs, the baronessa butterfly, surgeon fish, scorpion fish, rabbit fish, angel fish. Each one was a ‘character’ with its own individual mannerisms: they reminded him of the faces in a Dublin crowd.

  Out to sea, where the coral ended, there was a deep, dark cliff where, one day, a tiger shark swam out of the gloom and circled him. He saw the eyes, the jaws and the five gill-openings, but the brute sheered off and vanished. He had swum ashore and lain on the sand, shaking with delayed shock. Next morning, as if a load were lifted from him, he knew he no longer feared death. Again, he swam along the same stretch of reef, and again the shark circled him and vanished.