Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

He left the collection in the care of Kath, his second wife, until their baby son Carl came of age, but this deepened the injury felt by a younger generation of Aborigines. For them the artefacts were elements of a sacred male domain: it was considered a gross violation for a woman to possess or to view them.

  Bruce did not yet appreciate what he had stepped into. His concern was to find out what he could about songlines and to buy a copy of Songs of Central Australia. Kath sold him an unbound proof. “I put a map in the back so he could see where the songlines were.” She also produced her husband’s daybooks and diaries for Bruce to read. The next couple of hours defined Bruce’s next four years. “I sat down, only for a morning,” he said, “and I suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just were.”

  A “songline” is the term popularised by Bruce for “tjuringa line” or “dreaming track”. It is not translatable in any sense. It is at once a map, a long narrative poem, and the foundation of an Aboriginal’s religious and traditional life. For an outsider, the songline’s sacred truth is inaccessible, its mechanism fantastically complex. It is secret and there are penalties for those who transgress in the manner Strehlow did.

  But to a writer like Bruce, searching for the essence of “wandering”, how attractive: to imagine that the meaning of a country could be established by the stories written across its landscape. Strehlow, by making accessible this landscape, revitalised Bruce’s thinking. He found in Strehlow’s work a structure on which to hang not only his nomad theories, but more or less everything else in his notebooks: quotations, meditations, sketches, telephone conversations, encounters which had taken place all over the world whether in an Afghan bazaar, a Sudanese desert or a New York drawing room. Later that year Bruce would appear in a television discussion with Borges. The programme was prefaced by Borges’s parable of a lost man who discovers himself on his deathbed: “A man set out on a quest to discover the world. Through the years he populates a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses and people. A little before his death, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.”

  Strehlow was overwhelmed by the beauty of the songlines as an idea as well as baffled by their complexity. He compared his attempt at understanding them to opening a door in a secret palace and entering “a labyrinth of countless corridors and passages”. To Bruce, the whole notion of the tracks of ancestors seemed a “vastly grander” conception to anything man had hitherto constructed: “The pyramids are little mud pies in comparison.”

  Through Kath, Bruce became a fellow of the Strehlow Foundation. His uncritical rediscovery of the author of Songs of Central Australia eventually led to the charge that he did not tackle the ethical issues thrown up by Strehlow, but repeated his errors.

  “If there is one criticism I have of Bruce,” says the anthropologist Geoff Bagshaw, “it’s that he rightly appreciated the scholarship of Strehlow’s work, but fell enslaved to the myth which resided in Strehlow’s head. Aborigines would say: ‘If you want to understand our culture today, don’t go to white writers, we’re perfectly capable.’ It’s a Dances-with-Wolves syndrome, that you need a white guy to mediate and render Aborigines intelligible.

  “Bruce is part of a uniquely English tradition of men in rumpled white shirts at the far-flung corners of the world. I’m not saying he didn’t have some understanding, but The Songlines is the fictionalisation of a reality that in part was filtered through his understanding of Strehlow and presented as solid fact.”

  Bruce flew to Alice Springs to study Strehlow’s book in situ and to test his theory. “I wanted to find out how it worked.” He spent February in Central Australia. He would return to Alice one year later, for a further month. His visits to the interior amounted, in total, to nine weeks.

  As it had in Patagonia, Bruce’s brief foray caused resentment. His ability to encapsulate infuriated the white experts whose hard-earned knowledge he relied on. One of these was Jenny Green, who has worked with Aboriginal women from the settlement of Utopia since 1975 and compiled a dictionary of Alyawarr, one of the main Aboriginal languages spoken by several thousand people in the Utopia area. After 24 years, Green still approaches the deep stem of the songlines with a humility, respect and tentativeness that she found absent in Bruce’s endeavour. “None of us would dare to do it or presume to. I’m getting to the point of trying to translate a few lines of song. Even then I can’t work out where words begin.”

  But Bruce felt he had no choice. He did not speak the language, and although his interest in Aboriginal culture was authentic it was not a singular passion. “When you confronted any Australian ethnologist they would throw up their hands in horror and say, ‘Oh, you need 20 or 30 years before you understand this.’ Of course, I don’t have that amount of time.”

  His sources were the anthropologists and lawyers who had spent the necessary time with the Aborigines. Many were involved in the Land Rights movement and based in Alice Springs. Strehlow, for them, was not a name to bandy about with uncritical fascination. Not only was his research considered outdated (he had researched Songs of Central Australia when Aboriginals were nomadic, but by 1983 the Aranda community was settled and politicised), but his collection of sacred tjuringas remained an enormously contentious issue. Bruce landed in Alice Springs at a moment when the political struggle for land rights was judged more important than any anthropological study. His anachronistic, point-blank questions angered those involved in the practicalities of land title, housing, health, while he found “the White Land Council heavies . . . ludicrous in their pretensions and self-deceit.”

  “Bruce offended quite a lot of people who thought he was behaving inappropriately,” says Toly Sawenko, then a consultant to the Aboriginal land rights body of the Central Land Council. “He would come into the café where the Land Rights people congregated and fire questions at the top of his voice. ‘And in Aboriginal law who actually holds this knowledge?’ He was unaware he was breaking the code: that their job was not to disseminate Aboriginal culture. But he was being Bruce. His brain was in curiosity-overdrive all the time.”

  Alice Springs was a political town and Sawenko’s colleagues were maddened by Bruce’s lack of interest in the political issues. Moreover, they found his ethics questionable. They assumed a writer’s ethics were the same as an anthropologist’s (i.e. letting the people who you are researching know up front) and did not forgive the novelist’s lapses. Geoff Bagshaw, whom Bruce met at the Aboriginal community of Haasts Bluff, feels that Bruce was in promiscuous pursuit of knowledge, but lacked the wisdom to manage it. “He reflects the reaction of a cult without secrets. There is something intolerable in the West about secret knowledge. Everything has to be transparent.” Aboriginal society is, by definition, a secret society. Even to gain a rudimentary knowledge you have to pay your dues in a profound way, prove that you are a worthy and appropriate person. “There was an absolute obligation on Chatwin to demonstrate his respect for the people he dealt with,” says Phillip Toyne, the lawyer in charge of negotiating the hand-back of Ayer’s Rock to the Pitjantjatjara people. “They had very little to gain and much to lose by giving information.” Bruce, it was widely believed in Alice Springs, did not pay his dues. Instead, he plundered Aboriginal culture as Charlie Milward the Sailor had plundered the cave in Last Hope Sound.

  And yet people did compromise themselves. They did talk to him.

  Before Bruce left London, the Australian writer Robyn Davidson had given him a list of friends she had made in Alice Springs when writing her camel-odyssey Tracks. These contacts provided him with the two central characters in The Songlines. The first was Toly Sawenko, who resembles the charismatic Arkady Volchok who opens the novel: “He had a flattish face and a gentle smile . . . only when you came up close did you realise how big his bones were.” Sawenko happened to be engaged in mapping sacred sites for the Aboriginal Land Council, and was
using Strehlow’s map as an important reference. Once again Bruce had found the perfect guide. He was to make Sawenko, along with himself, the protagonists of what was to become the final version of his nomad book.

  Bruce represented himself as writing a serious academic study. He asked permission to accompany Sawenko on a site-mapping exercise. Sawenko, ever correct, sought authority from the Chairman of the Land Council, who agreed on condition Bruce took with him no camera, no notebook. “Fine,” said Bruce. Although the narrator of The Songlines is forever producing one, Sawenko is adamant: “I never saw a notebook on our journey.”

  On 8 February, Sawenko gathered his maps and swags and drove the English visitor up the Stuart Highway. He talked expansively as Bruce sat, rather subdued, beside him and only occasionally asked a question.

  They camped the first night in the truckstop town of Ti-Tree and in the morning collected several Aborigines from the settlement of Stirling. They then drove to Osborne Creek, where they camped a second night, returning next day to Alice Springs. The whole journey took three days.

  Bruce could not possibly have realised at the time that he was going to make Sawenko his central character, nor that his book would be a novel. He still wanted to write a serious book on nomads, but once again what he wanted most eluded him. As he prepared to take the plunge, he panicked and suddenly found more congenial subjects in those who had helped him on to the diving board. They pointed him back to the personal – which is what gives The Songlines its pulse. It is a book about nomads, yet nomads are supplanted by a host of other characters.

  Bruce would base the central character of The Songlines on a man about whom he knew surprisingly little. Toly – short for Anatoly Sawenko – was the Australian-born son of a Ukrainian immigrant whose grandfather was born somewhere on the Black Sea. In 1918, the government seized his land and his family never saw him again. Sawenko’s father was forced at a young age onto the road. He learned how to survive with the gypsies; from them he learned to play the accordion and to make honey vodka. He married before the war and had a son whom he called Anatole. He served with the Russians in the Second World War, in a regiment that ran out of ammunition. The commander abandoned the troops, leaving orders to defend their position. Sawenko and his fellow soldiers fled the approaching tanks but were eventually captured by the Germans. Allowed into a cornfield to shit, he and two others escaped. At midnight, his companions judged it safe to stand up and were shot: all day the Germans had been waiting. He waited in the corn until they had left and with a bribe of honey vodka bought himself new papers. As a dispossessed Pole, he was interned in a civilian camp where he met a 17-year-old girl, also from the Ukraine. He married her, supposing it improbable that he would see his wife and son again, and by a stroke of fortune was offered a passage to Australia. A second Anatole was conceived on the voyage to Melbourne. This was Toly.

  In 1975, Toly’s mother returned alone to the Ukraine, while her husband remained in Melbourne. On her visit she established contact with his pre-war family. She met his original wife who had also remarried, to a fanatical and resentful patriot. And she met the first Anatole, a worker in a chemical factory. He wanted to know about his father. He imagined him to be immensely rich, having seen the napkins and tea towel in her suitcase. She returned to Australia with photographs and a crude 45rpm record cut in a shopping precinct. In Melbourne, Toly’s father listened to the voice saying: “I’m your son, how are you?” It was the only time Toly saw his father cry.

  In 1976, Toly’s father made his reluctant pilgrimage home. He was terrified. The KGB interrogated him about his war record and turned up at a banquet for him under the trees in the back yard of his home. Everyone wanted presents. After six weeks he was emotionally exhausted. He cut short his journey and on his return kissed the earth of Australia.

  Toly grew up speaking Russian. He taught his father enough English for him to read the Melbourne Age and graduated with a first in literature from Melbourne’s La Trobe University. He first came to Haasts Bluff to visit Phillip Toyne, a friend from university who was agitating for Aborigines to have their own legal representation. “It was like going to another country inside your own,” says Sawenko. He remained in Central Australia as a schoolteacher, first in Papunya and then in a settlement east of Alice where he lived in a caravan with Jenny Green. Jenny worked with the women, Sawenko taught and dispensed medicines. “Eighty per cent of the children couldn’t hear me. I spent a lot of time treating perforated ear drums.” The name of the settlement, Utopia, may have inspired Bruce to recast Sawenko in his book as “Arkady”.

  Sawenko had left Utopia by the time Bruce arrived in Alice. Unlike the Arkady figure who comes of age on a trip to Europe, Sawenko had only ever been abroad to New Zealand, where it rained all the time. During this trip he was contacted by the Central Australian Land Council: he was so good with people, would he consider acting as an intermediary, going to Aboriginal communities in order to help with the preparation of land claims? He began mapping sites for Aborigines who had been forcibly removed from the desert in the 1920s and 1930s. For six months he ferried people from their settlements back to their original lands in the remote country west of Tennant Creek. It amazed him to see how much the elders and their children remembered. “There were kids who had never seen the country, but had been taught the song.” He marvelled at how they learnt to orient themselves in featureless country, getting a precise fix by vegetation or a slight rise in the contour of the landscape. “Any tree was a neon sign. No bit of country was insignificant in their eyes. There were just degrees of significance.”

  Sawenko’s next job, upon which he had embarked shortly before Bruce arrived in Central Australia, was to advise on a railway line planned from Alice Springs to Darwin. He was to ensure that the proposed Alice-Darwin link avoided sacred sites. “My purpose was to identify who owned the country in the area where the railway people wanted to go and identify the areas that needed protecting. They’d say: ‘You can’t put the railway there, because it would damage this sacred site.’ But they were factoring into their heads where in their vision of the landscape they would find it acceptable.” Some sites were too important to talk about until threatened with a bulldozer, home to forces which if not ritually controlled would unleash themselves at a level of apocalypse. In Utopia, the engineer, Des Smith, wanted to lay the railway track between two hills. Out of the question, said the nervous Aborigines. Smith told Sawenko: “If I can’t go through that ridge, I want to know why.” The Aborigines explained. The gap was a Maggot Dreaming: if someone violated their sanctuary, bush fly maggots would come out of the ground and destroy everything. Sawenko was struck by how quickly the engineer accepted their world view.

  This was the sort of story that delighted Bruce, and Sawenko had lots of them. “At last! I’ve found the right formula for the book,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. “It’s to be called, simply, OF THE NOMADS – A Discourse. And it takes the form of about six excursions into the outback with a semi-imaginary character called Sergei during which the narrator and he have long conversations. Sergei is incredibly well-informed, sympathetic but extremely wary of generalisations – and is always ready to put the spoke into an argument. The narrator is a relentless talker/arguer. I’ve done two chapters and it really seems to work in that it gives me the necessary flexibility. Needless to say the models for such an enterprise are Plato’s Symposium and The Apology. But so what? I’ve never seen anything like it in modern literature, a complete hybrid between fiction and philosophy: so here goes . . . if only I can get this one off my mind, it will be an enormous relief and I might start living a relatively normal life thereafter.”

  * * *

  At Ti-Tree they had camped beside the tin shack of a brusque and likeable ex-seaman called Jack Clancy. Once prominent in the union movement, Clancy remained a Communist (he had given Sawenko a copy of Lenin’s speeches in Russian). Clancy had a withered arm, but was “tough as nails”, says Sawenko. “He treated Bruce l
ike a toffee-nosed Pom.”

  In The Songlines, their encounter constitutes a seven-page interlude. Apart from changing Clancy’s name to Hanlon, Bruce transcribes the incident as it occurs.

  “‘So you’re a writer, eh?’ Hanlon said to me.

  “‘Of sorts.’

  “‘Ever do an honest day’s work in your life?’”

  Sawenko says: “Clancy gave Bruce a real confrontation. But he was lonely for stimulating company. Bruce picked up on his vulnerability. When we left Clancy said to him, ‘There’s a caravan out there – if you want to write books’.”

  Clancy died in 1997. Today his tin shed is deserted, eaten by white ants, and the light pushes through a smashed window. No one has stolen his communist library, his collected Auden, nor the stove on which he slapped steaks for Bruce and Sawenko; outside, his derelict Chevrolet still pokes out of the tall grass.

  Fifteen years on, Bruce’s tracks are a bit derelict too, but they may be traced. Little of what occurs in his “novel” is invented. Mostly, it is modified reportage. The character of Arkady is at best an embellished version of Sawenko. So are the male and female characters that Bruce meets on his journey. The reader might be able to recognise the real-life characters, but none of them can recognise the narrator. If there is anyone who is truly fictionalised in this cast, it is the novel’s all-seeing narrator: the “I” named Bruce.

  Those who met Bruce while he was researching The Songlines noted a discrepancy between the Bruce they met and the Bruce in the book.

  “He places himself not only in the centre of every situation and scene, but reflects himself in the most positive and self-serving way,” says Phillip Toyne. “He’s sensitive, insightful and full of cosmic observations.”

  This was not how Toyne remembered Bruce. Having read and admired In Patagonia he provided Bruce with information. Toyne nonetheless grew irritated at the way Bruce behaved then. “He wanted to find out as much as he could on a super-accelerated fast-track basis, but he didn’t like to be told there were limits on his right of access to things that he would have to be here years to truthfully acquire. It’s disingenuous for him to say that he’s not interested in sacred knowledge because songlines are sacred knowledge. The very issue of songlines is as sensitive as you get with Aborigine people, who don’t readily talk.”