The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  Graham was Lydia’s assistant. He was the boy I had seen in Alice as I was leaving the motel.

  ‘Just don’t speak to me about Graham,’ she shuddered. ‘I don’t want to know about Graham. If anyone says the word “Graham” again I may do something violent.’

  She made another half-hearted effort to clear up one of the desks, but stopped and took a deep breath.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s no use. I’d much rather face it in the morning.’

  She locked up, called to the boys, and made them put on their Space Invader t-shirts. They were bare-foot. They trailed us reluctantly across the compound, but since there were so many thorns and bits of broken glass we decided to carry them piggyback.

  We passed the Lutheran chapel, boarded up now for three years. We then passed the Community Centre: a blue-metal hangar on which there was painted a cartoon procession of honey-ants. From inside came the sound of country and western music. An evangelical meeting was in progress. I put David down and poked my head around the door.

  Onstage stood a pale Aboriginal half-caste in tight, white bell-bottom pants and a shiny scarlet shirt. His hairy chest was festooned with gold chains. His pot-belly seemed to have been added as an afterthought, and he was swivelling on his high heels doing his best to rouse a rather grumpy congregation.

  ‘OK,’ he crooned. ‘Come on now! Give it voice! Give voice to Je-e-e-sus!’

  The verses, projected on slides, came up one by one on to a screen:

  Jesus is the sweetest name I know

  And he’s the same as his name

  And that’s why I love him so . . .

  ‘Now you see’, said Arkady, ‘what some of us have to contend with.’

  ‘Bathos,’ I said.

  Lydia and the boys lived in a shabby, prefabricated house of three rooms, which had been set down in the shade of an ironwood. She threw her briefcase on to an armchair.

  ‘And now’, she said, ‘I’ve got to face the kitchen sink.’

  ‘We’ve got to face it,’ said Arkady. ‘You’ve got to put your feet up.’

  He took some toys off the daybed and guided her feet firmly on to it. There were three days’ dirty dishes in the kitchen and the ants were everywhere. We scoured the grease from aluminium saucepans, and boiled a kettle. I cut up some steak and onions for a stew. Over a second pot of tea, Lydia began to unwind and to talk, quite rationally, about Graham.

  Graham had come straight to Popanji from a teacher-training college in Canberra. He was twenty-two. He was innocent, intolerant, and had a smile of irresistible charm. He could turn quite nasty if anyone called him ‘angelic’.

  He lived for music – and Pintupi boys were born musicians. One of his first acts, on arrival, was to start the Popanji Band. He scrounged the sound equipment from a moribund radio-station in Alice. They practised in the disused doctor’s surgery, which still had its electric wiring intact.

  Graham took the drums for himself. There were two guitarists, sons of Albert Tjakamarra. The keyboard player was a fat boy who styled himself ‘Danny Roo’. The singer, and star, was a whiplike sixteen-year-old, ‘Long-fingers’ Mick.

  Mick had his hair in rasta plaits and was a mesmerising mimic. After five minutes of watching a video, he could ‘do’ Bob Marley, or Hendrix or Zappa. But his best performance was to roll his syrupy eyes and spread his huge, pouty mouth into a grin – and ‘become’ his namesake, Jagger himself.

  Travelling and sleeping in Graham’s old Volkswagen van, the Band toured the settlements from Yuendumu to Ernabella and even as far afield as Balgo.

  They sang a dirge about police killings called ‘The Ballad of Barrow Creek’. They had an upbeat number called ‘Abo Rasta’: another, more morally uplifting, against petrol-sniffing. They made a tape, and then a seven-inch disc, and then they had a hit on their hands.

  ‘Grandfather’s Country’ became the song of the Out-Station Movement. Its theme was eternal, ‘Go west, young man! Go west!’ Away from cities and government camps. Away from drink, glue, hash, smack, gaol. Out! Back to the desert from which grandfather was hounded. The refrain, ‘Mobs of people . . . Mobs of People . . .’, had a slightly liturgical tone, like ‘Bread of Heaven . . . Bread of Heaven . . .’ – and drove the audiences wild. At the Alice Rock Festival, where they played it, ancient Aboriginal greybeards were seen skittering and bopping with the kids.

  A promoter from Sydney took Graham aside, and seduced him with the blather of show business.

  Graham went back to his job at Popanji, but was hardly there in spirit. He had visions of his music sweeping Australia and the rest of the world. He pictured himself starring in a ‘road movie’. He was soon lecturing Lydia about agents, agents’ fees, recording rights and movie rights. She heard him out in silence, with misgivings.

  She was – she was too honest not to admit it – jealous. She had mothered Graham, fed him, sewn the patches on his jeans, tidied his house and listened to his idealistic hot talk.

  What she loved most in him was his seriousness. He was a do-er: the opposite of her ex-husband, whose idea it had been to ‘work for Aboriginals’ and who’d then nipped off to Bondai. What she dreaded, above all, was the thought that Graham might leave.

  To be alone, without home or money, with two boys to bring up, nagged with worry that the government might cut back funds and she be made redundant: none of that mattered as long as Graham was around.

  She was afraid, too, for Graham himself. He and his black friends would ‘go bush’ for days on end. She never pressed him for details, yet she suspected, just as she’d suspected her husband of heroin, that Graham was mixed up in Aboriginal ‘business’.

  Eventually, he couldn’t resist telling her. He described the dancing and singing, the blood-letting and sacred diagrams; and told her how he’d been painted all over, in bands of white and ochre.

  She warned him that Aboriginals’ friendship was never ‘pure’. They would always look on whites as a ‘resource’. Once he was ‘one of them’ he’d have to share everything.

  ‘They’ll have the Volkswagen off you,’ she said.

  He turned on her with a smile of amused contempt and said, ‘Do you think I’d care?’

  Her second set of fears she kept to herself. She was afraid that, once you joined, you joined: whether it was a secret society or a spy-ring, your life from then on was marked. At her previous post in Groote Eylandt, a young anthropologist had been given ritual secrets, but when he published them in his thesis, he suffered from headaches and depressions – and could now live only outside Australia.

  Lydia willed herself not to believe the stories of ‘bone-pointing’ and of sorcerers who could ‘sing’ men to their doom. All the same, she had an idea that the Aboriginals, with their terrifying immobility, had somehow got Australia by the throat. There was an awesome power in these apparently passive people who would sit, watch, wait and manipulate the white man’s guilt.

  One day, after Graham had gone missing for a week, she asked him, straight, ‘Do you, or don’t you, want to teach?’

  He folded his arms. ‘I want to. Yes,’ he replied with inconceivable insolence. ‘But not in a school run by racists.’

  She gasped, wanted to block her ears, but he went on, mercilessly. The education programme, he said, was systematically trying to destroy Aboriginal culture and to rope them into the market system. What Aboriginals needed was land, land and more land – where no unauthorised European would ever set foot.

  He ranted on. She felt her answer rising in her throat. She knew she shouldn’t say the words, but the words came bursting out, ‘In South Africa they’ve a name for that! Apartheid!’

  Graham walked from the house. The break, from then on, was total. In the evenings the bam-bam-bam of the Band struck her as something evil and menacing.

  She could have reported him to the education authority. She could have had him fired. Instead, she shouldered all his work and taught both classes herself. Sometimes she came into the s
choolroom and found ‘Lydia loves Graham’ scrawled up on the blackboard.

  Early one morning, as she watched the sunlight spread over the bedsheets, she heard Graham’s voice in the front room. He was laughing with Nicky and David. She closed her eyes, smiled and dozed off again.

  Later, she heard him tinkering in the kitchen. He came in with a cup of tea, sat on the end of her bed, and gave her the news.

  ‘We’ve made it,’ he said.

  ‘Grandfather’s Country’ was number 3 in the National Hit Parade. The Band was to be given star billing in Sydney, at The Place, all air fares and hotels paid.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, and let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I’m glad. You deserve it. You do, you know. Every bit of it.’

  Graham had accepted to play the first concert in Sydney on February 15th – and in his haste to sign the contract had put all other considerations aside.

  He forgot – or pretended to forget – that the rains came in February, and that February was the month for initiations. He forgot his friend Mick was due to be initiated into the Bandicoot Clan. And he put out of his mind the fact that he, Graham, in a moment of bravura, had agreed to be initiated with him.

  Initiation ceremonies the world over are staged as a symbolic battle in which the young man – to prove his virility and ‘fitness’ for marriage – must bare his sexual organs to the jaws of a bloodthirsty ogre. The knife of the circumciser is a substitute for the carnivore’s fang. In Aboriginal Australia, the puberty rites will also include ‘head-biting’ – at which the Elders gnaw at the boys’ skulls or jab at them with sharpened points. Sometimes, the boys pull out their own fingernails and stick them back on with their blood.

  The ceremony takes place in secret, at a Dreaming site far from the eyes of strangers. Afterwards, at a seminar made unforgettable by pain, the sacred couplets are dinned into the heads of the initiates – who, meanwhile, are made to crouch over fires of smouldering sandalwood. The smoke is said to have anaesthetic properties which assist the wounds to heal.

  For a boy to delay his initiation is to risk being stranded in a lifeless, asexual limbo: to evade it altogether was, until recently, unheard of. The performance can drag on for weeks, if not months.

  Lydia was a little vague as to what happened. Graham, it seems, was frantic with worry they would miss the first concert: Mick made a terrible scene, and accused Graham of abandoning him.

  Eventually, everyone arrived at a compromise: whereby Graham would only suffer token ‘cuts’ and Mick would be allowed to shorten his period of isolation. He would return to Popanji in order to practise with the Band, but would have to spend several hours each day in session with the Elders. He also promised not to leave until two days before the concert.

  At first, everything went without a hitch and, on February 7th, as soon as Mick was fit to walk, he and Graham returned to the settlement. The weather was damp and sultry, and Mick insisted on rehearsing in a pair of skin-tight blue jeans. On the night of February 9th, he woke from a nightmare to find the wound had gone horribly septic.

  Graham then panicked. He bundled all the sound equipment and the players into the Volkswagen and, before dawn, drove off to Alice.

  Lydia got up that morning to find the house surrounded by a furious mob, some waving spears, accusing her of hiding the fugitives or helping them escape. Two carloads of men gave chase – in order to fetch Mick back.

  I told Lydia I’d seen Graham, looking more or less demented, outside the motel.

  ‘What can one do,’ she said, ‘except see the funny side of it?’

  28

  WE WERE ON the road by eight, under a blanket of low-hanging cloud. The road streaked ahead in two parallel ruts of reddish water. In places we had to cross a floodpan with low bushes breaking the surface. A cormorant flew up ahead of us, thrashing the water with its wings. We passed through a stand of desert oaks, which are a species of casuarina and look less like an oak than a cactus. They, too, were standing in water. Arkady said it was madness to go on, but we went on. The muddy water splashed up inside the cab. I gritted my teeth whenever the wheels began to spin, but then we would again lurch forward.

  ‘The nearest I came to drowning’, I said, ‘was in a flashflood in the Sahara.’

  Around noon we sighted Stumpy Jones’s truck. He was coming back from Cullen, from delivering the weekly supplies.

  He braked and leaned out of the cab.

  ‘Hi, Ark,’ he called. ‘Want a shot of Scotch?’

  ‘Wouldn’t say no.’

  He handed down the bottle. We each took a couple of swigs and handed it back.

  ‘Hear you got a date with Titus?’ said Stumpy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Best of luck.’

  ‘He is there, I hope?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be there all right.’

  Stumpy Jones was a grizzled, green-eyed man with enormous biceps and a ‘bit of the black in him’. He was wearing a red plaid shirt. The left half of his face was yellowish scar tissue. On the trailer he was carrying a caravan which was being sent for modernisation in Alice. He got out to check his lashings. His legs were so extraordinarily short that he swung himself from the door-frame on one hand, and lowered himself gently to the ground.

  ‘Happy landings,’ he waved to us. ‘You’re over the worst.’

  We moved ahead, through what seemed to be an endless lake.

  ‘What happened to his face?’ I asked.

  ‘Bitten by a king-brown,’ said Arkady. ‘About four years back. He got down to change a wheel and the bugger’d wrapped itself around the axle. He got over that one and the thing went cancerous.’

  ‘Christ!’ I said.

  ‘Stumpy’s indestructible.’

  A couple of hours later, we saw a herd of camels, soaked in the downpour, and then through the mist we began to see the rounded hump of Mount Cullen, rearing up above the level of the plain. As we came up closer, the colour of the mountain turned from grey to purple: the colour of sodden red sandstone. A mile or two beyond, there was an escarpment of sheer, faceted cliffs, upraised into a peak at one end, and then tapering away towards the north.

  This, said Arkady, was Mount Liebler.

  On a saddle between these two mountains lay the settlement of Cullen.

  We drove along the airstrip, past the caravans of the white advisers, towards a building of galvanised sheet. There was a petrol pump outside it. The sun had come out and it was hot and sticky. Packs of dogs were squabbling over a few scraps of offal. There was no one about.

  Dispersed among the bushes were a number of humpies, but most of the Pintupi preferred to live in windbreaks of thorn. A few bits of washing were hanging out to dry.

  ‘Who would guess’, said Arkady, ‘that this is a flourishing community of four hundred souls?’

  ‘Not me,’ I said.

  The store was locked.

  ‘We’d better go and rout out Rolf.’

  ‘Who is this Rolf?’

  ‘Rolf Niehart,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

  He pointed the Land Cruiser towards a caravan set in some trees. There was a generator purring in a shed alongside. Arkady sidestepped the puddles and rapped on the door.

  ‘Rolf?’ he called.

  ‘Who’s that?’ someone answered in a sleepy voice.

  ‘Ark!’

  ‘Ha! The Great Do-Gooder himself!’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  ‘Your humble servant.’

  ‘Open up.’

  ‘Clothed or unclothed?’

  ‘Clothed, you little monster!’

  After a few moments of rummaging about, Rolf appeared at the caravan door, scrubbed and immaculate, like someone off the beach in St Tropez, in cut-off jeans and a striped French sailor’s shirt. He was built on a minuscule scale, and can’t have been more than four foot ten. He had a prominent bridge to his nose, but what was so arresting was the colour scheme: uniform amber – golden, sandy amber – the eyes steady and mocking; the
hair en brosse, very French; the skin tanned, oiled, unlined, without a pimple or blemish anywhere. And when he opened his mouth, he displayed a set of glittering triangular teeth, like a baby shark’s.

  He was the store manager.

  ‘Enter,’ he said, ceremoniously.

  Inside the caravan, you could hardly move for books: novels mostly, in shelves and in stacks; hardback and paperback; English and American novels; novels in French and German; from the Czech, the Spanish, the Russian; unopened packages from the Gotham Book Mart; heaps of the Nouvelle Revue Française and the New York Review; literary journals; journals of literature in translation, dossiers, files, card indexes . . .

  ‘Sit!’ he said, as if there was anywhere to sit until we’d cleared a space.

  By the time we had done so, Rolf had poured three cups of coffee from the espresso machine, lit himself a Gauloise, and was holding forth, in a staccato rat-tat-tat, against the whole of contemporary fiction. One after the other, the big names were set up on the block of this literary executioner, played with, and put down with a single syllable, ‘Shit!’

  The Americans were ‘bores’. The Australians were ‘infantile’. The South Americans were ‘over’. London was a ‘cesspit’, Paris not much better. The only half-decent work was being done in Eastern Europe.

  ‘Providing’, he snapped, ‘they stay there!’

  He next turned his venom on to publishers and agents until Arkady could take it no longer.

  ‘Look, little monster. We are tired.’

  ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘You also look filthy.’

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’

  ‘In a lovely, air-conditioned caravan.’

  ‘Whose caravan?’

  ‘Put specially at your disposal by the Cullen Community. With clean sheets on the beds, cool drinks in the fridge . . .’

  ‘I said whose caravan?’

  ‘Glen’s,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t moved into it yet.’

  Glen was a community adviser.

  ‘So where’s Glen?’

  ‘In Canberra,’ said Rolf. ‘For a conference. Silly ponce!’

  He nipped outside, jumped into the Land Cruiser and headed us towards a brand-new, smartly painted caravan a few hundred yards away. Hanging from the branch of a ghost-gum, there was a canvas bucket-shower, with two water containers under it.