The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘So where does he come from?’ I asked, pointing at the shell.

  ‘Broome,’ said Alex, definitely.

  He drew his forefinger across the dusty ping-pong table and rattled off all the ‘stops’ across the Gibson Desert, between Cullen and Broome.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You get the pearl shells from Broome? What do you send back?’

  He hesitated, and then drew in the dust an elongated oval.

  ‘Board,’ he said.

  ‘Tjuringa?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘Sacred business? Songs and all?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘That’, I said to Rolf as we walked away, ‘is very interesting.’

  THE SONG STILL remains which names the land over which it sings.

  Martin Heidegger, What Are Poets For?

  BEFORE COMING TO Australia I’d often talk about the Songlines, and people would inevitably be reminded of something else.

  ‘Like the “ley-lines”?’ they’d say: referring to ancient stone circles, menhirs and graveyards, which are laid out in lines across Britain. They are of great antiquity but are visible only to those with eyes to see.

  Sinologists were reminded of the ‘dragon-lines’ of feng-shui, or traditional Chinese geomancy: and when I spoke to a Finnish journalist, he said the Lapps had ‘singing stones’, which were also arranged in lines.

  To some, the Songlines were like the Art of Memory in reverse. In Frances Yates’s wonderful book, one learned how classical orators, from Cicero and earlier, would construct memory palaces; fastening sections of their speech on to imaginary architectural features and then after working their way round every architrave and pillar, could memorise colossal lengths of speech. The features were known as loci or ‘places’. But in Australia the loci were not a mental construction, but had existed for ever, as events of the Dreamtime.

  Other friends were reminded of the Nazca ‘lines’, which are etched into the meringue-like surface of the central Peruvian Desert and are, indeed, some kind of totemic map.

  We once spent a hilarious week with their self-appointed guardian, Maria Reich. One morning, I went with her to see the most spectacular of all the lines, which was only visible at sunrise. I carried her photographic equipment up a steep hill of dust and stones while Maria, in her seventies, strode ahead. I was horrified to watch her roll straight past me to the bottom.

  I expected broken bones, but she laughed, ‘My father used to say that once you start to roll, you must keep on rolling.’

  No. These were not the comparisons I was looking for. Not at this stage. I was beyond that.

  Trade means friendship and co-operation; and for the Aboriginal the principal object of trade was song. Song, therefore, brought peace. Yet I felt the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organised his social life. All other successive systems were variants – or perversions – of this original model.

  The main Songlines in Australia appear to enter the country from the north or the north-west – from across the Timor Sea or the Torres Strait – and from there weave their way southwards across the continent. One has the impression that they represent the routes of the first Australians – and that they have come from somewhere else.

  How long ago? Fifty thousand years? Eighty or a hundred thousand years? The dates are insignificant compared to those from African prehistory.

  And here I must take a leap into faith: into regions I would not expect anyone to follow.

  I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, ‘I AM!’

  37

  I HEARD THE noise of the plane coming in to land. I ran across the airstrip and was in time to watch Arkady get out carrying an ‘Eski’. The golden mop of Marian’s hair followed. She looked deliriously happy. She was in another flowered cotton dress, no less ragged than the others.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘This is wonderful.’

  ‘Hello, old mate!’ Arkady smiled. He dropped the ‘Eski’ to the ground and drew us both into one of his Russian hugs.

  ‘Let me introduce you to the memsahib,’ he said.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The memsahib.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three days ago,’ said Marian. ‘And we missed you and missed you!’

  ‘That is a piece of news!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she giggled. ‘It was a bit sudden.’

  ‘I thought you were married,’ I said severely to Arkady.

  ‘Was married,’ said Arkady. ‘But the day I left, I went home to change and there was this fat envelope on the doormat. I thought it looked oppressively official. “Leave it!” I said to myself. Then it occurred to me my divorce might have come through – and that was it.

  ‘I showered,’ he went on. ‘I changed. I mixed myself a drink, and relaxed into the sensation of being a free man. A fly had got into the studio and I kept looking at this bloody fly and saying to myself, “Now I’m free, there’s something I’ve got to do.” But I couldn’t think what it was . . .’

  Marian stuck out her tongue.

  ‘Honestly, I couldn’t!’ he grinned. ‘Then I jumped up, spilled the drink and shouted, “I KNOW! MARRY MARIAN!”’

  The three of us were walking towards Rolf’s caravan. The pilot had gone to fetch the mail-bag from the store; and when he left Rolf ran after us.

  ‘Rolf,’ I called once he was in earshot. ‘These two are married.’

  ‘It had to happen one day,’ he said.

  He had to stand on tiptoe when he kissed them both.

  I had scarcely noticed the clean-shaven, middle-aged Aboriginal who had also come on the plane and was tagging along behind Arkady.

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell it not in Gath,’ Arkady whispered. ‘He’s the spokesman for the Amadeus Mob. He’s got Titus’s tjuringas in his briefcase. I think I may have fixed it.’

  When we reached the caravan, Rolf went into a whirlwind of activity, arranged five camping chairs in a circle, and set about making coffee.

  The man from Amadeus stood watching: but within a couple of minutes Limpy appeared out of nowhere and, with a very friendly gesture, escorted him to the camp.

  ‘Now,’ said Rolf, pouring the coffee. ‘More about the wedding!’

  ‘Well, I got my divorce papers . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I went over to this lady’s house, and found two of her unworthy admirers in the kitchen. Very ratty looking, and more so when they saw me! So I called her out into the passage, and whispered in her ear. She nearly knocked me sideways with the force of her acceptance.’

  ‘Very romantic story,’ said Rolf. ‘A credit to you both!’

  ‘The lady’, Arkady went on, ‘then strode into the kitchen and with a positively beatific smile said, “Out! Sorry! We’re busy. Out!”’

  ‘So they went,’ Marian giggled. ‘There’s not much more to say. He went off to Darwin. I fixed up the house. I moped. He came back. There was a ceremony. A party. And now we’re here!’

  ‘All the news is good,’ said Arkady. ‘It’s good news . . . fingers crossed . . . on the Titus front. It’s good for Hanlon . . . non-malignant blockage. It’s good about the railway. They’ve looked again at the budget and can’t see a way to build the bugger. Work’s at a standstill. I’m out of a job, but who cares?’

  ‘And you know who hexed it?’ I said.

  ‘Old Alan,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Perhaps he sang it away?’

  ‘How’s the writing?’ he asked
?

  ‘The usual mess,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be so gloomy,’ said Marian. ‘We’ve got a lovely fish for supper.’

  In the ‘Eski’ there was a 4 lb barramunda and herbs to grill it with. They had also slipped in two bottles of white, from the Wynne Vineyard in South Australia.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘That is special. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Influence,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Where’s Wendy?’ Marian turned to Rolf.

  ‘Off with the kids, getting bush-tucker,’ he said.

  About five minutes later Wendy drove up at the wheel of her old Land-Rover. The back was crammed with grinning children, some of whom were dangling goannas by the tail.

  ‘These two’, said Rolf, ‘are married.’

  ‘Oh, but how wonderful!’ She jumped down and threw herself into Marian’s arms, and Arkady then joined in.

  Counting Estrella, we were a party of six at supper. We ate and laughed and drank and told ridiculous stories. Estrella was a fund of the absurd. Her favourite character was the Catholic Bishop of the Kimberleys, who had once been a U-Boat commander and now fancied himself as an air ace.

  ‘This man’, she said, ‘is a fenomeno . . . una maravilla . . . He flies his aeroplano into middle of cumulo-nimbus to see which way up-or-downside he come out.’

  After coffee, I went to clear up the caravan for the newly weds. Arkady started up the Land Cruiser.

  He wanted to leave for Titus at eight.

  ‘Can I come this time?’ I asked.

  He winked at Marian.

  ‘Sure you can come,’ she said.

  We watched them go off to bed. They were two people made in heaven for each other. They had been hopelessly in love since the day they met, yet had gradually crept into their shells, glancing away, deliberately, in despair, as if it were too good, never to be, until suddenly the reticence and the anguish had melted and what should have been, long ago, now was.

  The night was clear and warm. Wendy and I dragged her bedstead outside the lock-up. She showed me how to focus the telescope and, before dropping off, I travelled around the Southern Cross.

  38

  BY EIGHT WE were on the move. The morning was clear and fresh but was bound to heat up later. The man from Amadeus sat between Arkady and Marian, clinging to the briefcase. Limpy, spruced up for the occasion, sat with me in the back.

  We headed out towards the scene of my abortive kangaroo hunt, but then turned left along the back road to Alice. After about ten miles, the country changed from the yellow-flowering scrub to a rolling, open parkland of bleached grass and rounded eucalyptus trees – blue-green, the colour of olives with their leaves turning white in the wind; and if you soft-focused your eyes, you’d think you were in the lit-up Provençal landscape of Van Gogh’s Cornfield near Arles.

  We crossed a creek and took another left along a sandy track. There was a neat corrugated shack set in a spinney of trees, and also Titus’s Ford. A woman jumped to her feet and ran off. The dogs, as usual, howled.

  Titus, in shorts and a pork-pie hat, sat in front of a boiling billy on a pink foam-rubber mat. His father – a handsome, leggy old man with a covering of inch-long grey bristles – was stretched out in the dust, smiling.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Titus gravely. ‘I wasn’t expecting you before nine.’

  He amazed me by his ugliness: the spread of his nose, the wens that covered his forehead; the fleshy, down-hanging lip, and eyes that were hooded by the folds of his eyelids.

  But what a face! You never saw a face of such mobility and character. Every scrap of it was in a state of perpetual animation. One second, he was an unbending Aboriginal lawman; the next, an outrageous comic.

  ‘Titus,’ said Arkady. ‘This is a friend of mine from England, Bruce.’

  ‘How the Thatcher?’ he drawled.

  ‘Still there,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t say I care for the woman.’

  He looked up at Marian, and said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘But what you didn’t know’, Arkady chipped in, ‘is that she’s been my wife for four days.’

  ‘Nights, you mean,’ said Titus.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Very pleased to hear it,’ he said. ‘Lad like you needs a sensible wife.’

  ‘I do,’ repeated Arkady, and hugged her.

  Arkady felt the time had come to introduce the man from Amadeus; but Titus raised his hand, and said, ‘Wait!’

  He unpadlocked the door of the shack, leaving it half ajar, and got out a blue enamel mug for the extra visitor.

  The tea was ready.

  ‘Sugar?’ he asked me.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘No,’ he winked. ‘I didn’t think you looked the type.’

  Once we had finished tea, he jumped up and said, ‘Right! To business!’

  He beckoned Limpy and the man from Amadeus to go on ahead. He then swivelled round to face us.

  ‘You mob,’ he said, ‘you’d be doing me a favour if you’d stay right here for half an hour.’

  The dead twigs crackled underfoot and the men were swallowed up among the trees.

  The old father lay there beaming, and dozed off to sleep.

  A tjuringa – it is worthwhile repeating – is an oval plaque made of stone or mulga wood. It is both musical score and mythological guide to the Ancestor’s travels. It is the actual body of the Ancestor (pars pro toto). It is a man’s alter ego; his soul; his obol to Charon; his title-deed to country; his passport and his ticket ‘back in’.

  Strehlow gives a harrowing account of some Elders who discover their tjuringa storehouse has been raided by white men – and for whom this is the end of the world. He gives a joyful description of some other old men who have lent their tjuringas to their neighbours for a number of years and who, when they unwrap them on their return, break into a peal of happy song.

  I have also read an account of how, when a song cycle was sung in its entirety, the ‘owners’ would lay out their tjuringas end to end, in order, like the order of sleeping-cars on the Train Bleu.

  On the other hand, if you smashed or lost your tjuringa, you were beyond the human pale, and had lost all hope of ‘returning’. Of one young layabout in Alice, I heard it said, ‘He hasn’t seen his tjuringa. He don’t know who he is.’

  In the Gilgamesh Epic, by way of extra comment, there is a strange passage in which Gilgamesh the King, weary of life, wishes to visit the Underworld to see his dead friend, the ‘wild man’ Enkidu. But the ferryman, Utnapishtim, says, ‘No! You may not enter these regions. You have broken the tablets of stone.’

  Arkady was peering through the door of Titus’s shack.

  ‘Don’t whatever you do go in,’ he spoke through his teeth, ‘but if you take a look in here, you may see something that’ll surprise you.’

  I eased back on my haunches and peered in. It took time for my eyes to get used to the dark. On a chest beside Titus’s bed was a stack of books, in English and German. On top of the pile was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘I am very surprised.’

  In less than half an hour, we heard a whistle through the trees and watched the three men stepping towards us in single file.

  ‘Business settled!’ said Titus, firmly, and sat down on his mat. ‘Tjuringas returned to their rightful owners.’

  The man from Amadeus looked relieved. The conversation turned to other things.

  Titus was the terror of the Land Rights Movement because whatever he had to say was bound to be original and uncalled for. He explained how, to the people of his grandparents’ generation, the outlook had been infinitely bleaker than it was today. Watching their sons go to pieces, the Elders had frequently handed their tjuringas to the missionaries to prevent them being broken, lost or sold. One man worthy of their trust was the pastor of the Horn River Mission, Klaus-Peter Auricht. ‘My grandfather’, Titus said, ‘gave several tjuringas to old Auricht when this one’ – h
e jerked his head at his snoring father – ‘got taken with the booze.’

  Before dying in the late 1960s, Pastor Auricht had taken the ‘collection’ to the Mission’s headquarters in Alice, where it was kept under lock and key. When the ‘activists’ got wind of the fact that Germans were sitting on sacred property ‘worth millions’, they raised the usual ballyhoo and lobbied for their return to the people.

  ‘What the fuckers don’t understand’, drawled Titus, ‘is there is no such person as an Aboriginal or an Aborigine. There are Tjakamarras and Jaburullas and Duburungas like me, and so on all over the country.

  ‘But if Leslie Watson’, he went on, ‘and that Canberra Mob so much as took one peep at my family’s tjuringas, and if we’re applying law to this situation, I’d be obliged to spear ’em, wouldn’t I?’

  Titus shook with laughter, and we all did.

  ‘I have to tell you’, he wheezed with a wicked grin, ‘that since I saw you last, I’ve had some very funny visitors.’

  The first were some young architects who wanted – in the name of the Pintupi Council and in the hope of shutting his mouth – to build him a house.

  Titus snorted, ‘They had in mind some kind of flat-roofed humpy. Fuckers! I told ’em if I was going to have a house, I wanted a house with a gable roof. I needed a library for my books. Living-room. Spare bedroom. Outside kitchen and shower. Otherwise I’d stay right here.’

  The next one had been even funnier: a glib-talking individual from the mining corporation, which wanted to run seismic lines through Titus’s country.

  ‘Bastard!’ he said. ‘Shows me his geological survey map – which, I might add, he’s obliged to by the Law of the Crown – and spouts a bunch of total garbage. “Here,” I say, “give that to me!” I take a look at his synclines, and I have to say there’s a fair chance of oil or natural gas over by Hunter’s Bluff. “But look here!” I say, “We have different ways of looking at this. We’ve got a lot of important Dreamings in the area. We’ve got Native Cat. We’ve got Emu, Black Cockatoo, Budgerigar, two kinds of Lizard; and we’ve got an ‘eternal home’ for Big Kangaroo. At a guess I’d say he was your oilfield or whatever. But he’s been sleeping there since the Dreamtime and, if I have a say in the matter, he’s going to go on sleeping for ever.”’