Another Country

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Yolngu tradition, however, is nothing if not dynamic. It adapts and innovates. Its dances form an extended commentary on the recent past; its rituals combine the trace of history with precise, geometrically structured creation tales. The coming of the Macassan traders made a strong impact. So, naturally, did first contact with Europeans. In fact almost all Yolngu ancestral stories relate the deeds of incomers – and among those incomers is the yidaki.

  Intriguingly, Djalu speaks of his tradition as being “not paper knowledge, but something we know from stories, we remember from 2,000 years ago” – a date for the appearance of the yidaki in Australia that matches almost perfectly with the archaeological rock art evidence. Alice Moyle, doyenne of Australian ethnomusicologists, wrote a pioneering study describing the instrument as “a late musical intrusion” that had been superimposed, perhaps 1,500 years ago, upon a pre-existing tradition.

  Still, the adepts and yidaki tourists sitting dutifully round Djalu’s campfire love to say, no matter where it came from, or when, north-east Arnhem Land is definitely the music’s home base: here, at long last, underneath the tall, swaying stringybarks, they feel themselves close to the heart of the mystery: here they are at the source of the yidaki’s plaintive, throbbing call.

  But again the evidence paints a different, more nuanced, picture. The drone-pipe, or “speaking stick”, was widely played across the Top End, and as far afield as the Gulf country and the Kimberley, even before it began its spectacular expansion through mainstream Australia in recent years. There are scores of different playing styles and many different language names for the instrument. The yidaki may not even have been cut from stringybark trunks until historic times: in the Aboriginal Kriol of the Top End, it has a telling name, bambu, which could well give a hint of its geographic provenance.

  “Of course, among the instrument’s admirers, there’s a strong psychological impulse to seek out a single place of musical purity and origin,” says Karl Neuenfeldt, a Central Queensland University academic who has made the yidaki’s transformations his special preserve. “And it’s true it is inbuilt into Yirrkala – but so it is throughout Arnhem Land. For the white people who are taken with the yidaki and its supposed antiquity, the obsession is natural, almost predictable. It’s a form of imperialist nostalgia: you glorify what your culture once destroyed.”

  But behind the divertingly postmodern quality of the yidaki’s diffusion in the mainstream world lie familiar, serious issues. When, for instance, does Western appropriation of traditional music become theft? Who actually gains from cultural globalisation and stylistic synthesis?

  “In a sense the instrument and the music have been hijacked by outsiders,” says Neuenfeldt. “For most of the people who play it beyond Arnhem Land, there’s no repertoire, no instruction, no cultural protocols in place. There’s a strong argument today that music has no borders, that it should be allowed to evolve, that things are what they become, but you could also say the yidaki is being turned by outsiders into an extravagant piece of kitsch, in danger of losing its beauty, having its meaning worn away.”

  Its meaning! That, of course, is what the Yolngu are determined to preserve: the secret, coded layers that hide within the yidaki’s sound; all the enfolded tales and allegories, the symbolic systems that give sense to their universe. How much of that mystery has been stripped bare and scattered to the all-devouring outside world?

  During the few months I spent recently on the fringes of the yidaki scene, coming and going from Gove, I found myself increasingly preoccupied by these ideas. I had swiftly grasped that the meaning simply was the sound, and that the yidaki, when played by Djalu, had a grand, abrupt sobriety about it. And it was hard, too, not to realise that the essence of the instrument was something aerial and mobile, that it was always being likened in stories to a bird in flight, to an echo or a voice. Indeed, rather than as a fixed and physical thing, I began to picture the yidaki as a pulse, a gradient, a questing, yearning, wind-borne force.

  Instructional books soon came my way: the kind of thin, amateur-produced texts one often finds in remote Australian towns. They had titles like The Yidaki and Its Music, or Everything You Need To Know about the Didgeridoo. Their view was pretty straightforward: the yidaki was a phallic symbol, and an early creator being had helpfully contrived the instrument by inflating his member then blowing into it.

  I turned next to the classic works of north-east Arnhem Land anthropology – of which there are very many, since the hyper-intellectual Yolngu are ideal subjects for academic investigation. But here again, amid the endless intermesh of sacred songs and ceremonies and fertility cults, the yidaki tended to escape serious scrutiny in its own right: indeed, it was only with some difficulty that I eventually found my way to an authorised version of its part in ceremonial life, prepared by the Yirrkala Literature Production Centre in 1992.

  “The yidaki plays an important role in the retelling of our oral history,” it began, before running through the intricacies of the kinship system, the two components, or moieties into which the Yolngu world is divided, the various yidaki stories belonging to Djalu’s Dhuwa moiety, even the noise of the instrument, echoing between the ancestor spirits, back and forth: “Do-ooo-o-rp, that’s how it sounded as it drifted across to Rocky Point and then to the mouth of the Giddy River.”

  And just such stories would unfold again, with just such plaintive, drifting sounds, each time I found myself at Djalu’s workshop, listening as he told the tale of the yidaki for a new set of visitors: its gradual, lingering journey, as its echo went searching through Arnhem Land, looking for its home, until it found the Galpu clan; how it was itself law and power; how it had the ability to bring back emotions from the stories of the distant past.

  On one occasion, though, at the mid-point in his familiar narration, he paused, and shifted gear. He said he had formed a strong desire to travel far away, to Croker Island, and perform a revelatory ceremony before outside eyes – for the island, where he had been once before with his father as a young man, was bound up with the coming of the instrument: it was there that the yidaki’s journey had ended, long ago.

  Croker Island? It was a good 500 kilometres west of where we were, and far beyond the boundaries of the Yolngu world.

  By this stage quite perplexed, and yet feeling that the first stage of my yidaki journey was drawing to its appointed close, I went out that afternoon with Djalu’s sister, Dhangal, on a quest for bush honey in the forests to the south. After much searching, bee tracking and stringybark cutting, we stopped for a rest.

  “So,” I began, a touch reproachfully, “you didn’t tell me about your name – about the ancestral Thunder Man, and the sacred rock named Dhangal that he created, far out at sea, and the waterspout, and the turtle dreaming …”

  “No,” she said. “That’s quite true. I left all that bit out.”

  And she turned the conversation by degrees until we were talking about her own journey, along with Djalu and his whole family, to the inaugural European yidaki festival, which had been held the month before at the Hotel Bad at Eisenach in Germany’s Black Forest. There had been spiritual workshops of extraordinary intensity, she said. Djalu had played the yidaki against the hearts of all those present; they had been crying, sobbing: tears of ecstasy had flowed down everybody’s cheeks.

  “Our faces were wet,” she said, eyes shining. “Do you know what it was?”

  “The power of the yidaki?” I hazarded.

  “It was the voice of the Lord! It was his voice, speaking through the yidaki. It was an anointing.”

  She paused, and moved the bark-strip laden with bush honey closer to me. Parrots screeched through the tree canopy above.

  The sun beat down.

  “You don’t really know very much about the yidaki, in fact, do you?” continued Dhangal after a few more moments. “Do you really want to know – what the yidaki represents? What it is?”

  And she said a few more words – at which I produced my notebook,
but she only laughed, and shook her head: “Don’t put that in there. It’s not paper knowledge, what I told you. It’s just for you to know, and keep in your heart. That’s the trouble with people like you. You hear and find out our secret stories – and then you want to write them down as well.”

  II. THE LURE OF THE NORTH

  Capital of the Second Chance

  IT IS GROWTH AND WILD LUXURIANCE, it is youth, pleasure, sunshine, the exuberance of movement and the incessant rhythm of the tropics. It is the palms swaying against the harbour, purple nightfalls, frangipani blossoms, smoke plumes filling a hazy sky. But it is also the smell of rotting vegetation and decay, wet season thunder, cyclones, rain falling in thick curtains from lead banks of cloud. It is Paradise and Inferno cohabiting; grand hotels, plaques and war memorials at every turn, a marble parliament big enough for a superpower; and, close by, corrugated iron shacks, musty backpackers’ markets, wrecking cranes, an endless empire of second-hand car yards. It is characters who seem to have been sweated like dreams out of the ground: the eccentric Mr Barra at Frances Bay, the bohemians thronging Nightcliff Sunday markets, the Reiki therapists and head-massagers, the Tiwi Islander cross-dressers at Throb nightclub. But also it is conformism, the press of shared identity: neat, concentric suburbs, new-planned satellite communities, each with its school and safety house, and streets that run off optimistically into the mangroves.

  It is old-established Aboriginal families, indigenous ministers and department heads; it is the Greek Glenti Festival, the Chung Wah Society dinner-dance, shards of a multiculture so deep and vivid as to need no official encouragement. It is the vaguely raffish Roma coffee bar in Cavenagh Street, where the serious business of Territory government is transacted; and it is the solemn RSL across the road, with a memorial field gun mounted above the doors in case the Japanese come calling again.

  It is the lure of the North; it is grand hopes, and scams and schemes, and yearnings for the future; but it is also irony, hopelessness, hotel bars with TAB radios blaring and rake-thin old-timers slumped, staring into the rear-view mirror of their lives. It is the highway’s end, the point where choice runs out; it is the frontier, with all its peculiar duties: Navy patrols leaving port and steaming back with impounded fleets of Indonesian fishing boats in tow. It is its own weird, specific landscape: long, bright-graffitied pipelines, iron water towers rising high above the streets like sentinels.

  Darwin is these physical, visible things, of course, but above all else it is a mental place – the city Australians come to for their great stab at self-reinvention. And this is Darwin’s secret charm: it whispers softly in your ear that you can go round again; you can change the script of life. For all its harshness, it is the kindest, most welcoming of cities, home to a rich array of drifters, rolling stones, unrealistic dreamers – the capital of the second chance.

  *

  Suitably, then, Darwin needed several chances of its own to find its feet, after the amiable Commander of HMS Beagle, John Lort Stokes, at anchor in September 1839 on a turquoise sheet of coastal water, found his thoughts turning to a former companion, at that time still an obscure struggler in the realms of science. “It afforded us an appropriate opportunity of convincing an old shipmate and friend that he still lived in our memory; and we accordingly named this sheet of water Port Darwin.” Thus, in haphazard fashion, in the wake of various failed and misplaced early settlements, Australia’s northernmost capital, least intellectually pretentious of cities, acquired the name of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest geniuses.

  By the 1880s, Port Darwin was the ramshackle continental gateway: home to a few thousand Chinese goldminers and market gardeners, an unknown number of Aborigines and a scattering of colonial officials. One of the sanest of these was the laconic, ultra-cynical Alfred Searcy, fourteen years customs inspector for the entire Top End. (It was tough going – the government cutter he used to perform his duties, Flying Cloud, was reputed to sail backwards when headed into stiff winds.) Here is Searcy’s Darwin:

  From the wide-open door I could see the glassy sea fringed by dark mangroves, and backed by forest and jungle. A steamy, heavy smell arose from the mud and sand left by the receding tide. Then there were the crowing of cocks and the squealing of pigs emanating from the mass of bark or grass humpys built on the side of Stokes’ Hill. The Asiatics and the animals all lived together, for sanitation was not a strong feature of Darwin in those days.

  And yet, by some miracle of adaptation, within thirty years a new society – hybrid, subtle, full of codes and layers – had begun to form, and its influence and memory still hang over the city to this day. It is known, always affectionately, as “Old Darwin”. It was a mestizo world: Japanese, Filipino and Torres Strait pearl divers in their hundreds, Chinese traders, Larrakia Aboriginal families. Underneath the formal, public Darwin of administrators and officials, this second culture flourished, with its music, traditions, clubhouses and opium dens – and sometimes, even now, it comes back to life. During one recent city festival, devoted to the celebration of Old Darwin and the songlines that stretch across the Australian north, there were evenings when you could see it in all its lovely softness: string bands played, with musicians descended from the old Filipino masters; distinguished “aunties” from the best Darwin Aboriginal families danced together in their frocks and pearls; and one night at the Parap Railway Institute, the Mills Family performed their famous Creole version of “Waltzing Matilda” and brought the house down. It was Buena Vista in the Australian tropics: how sweet, how full of pain, the bite of the nostalgia was!

  Old Darwin was swept away in the first of the city’s great twentieth-century cycles of destruction. It was already half-displaced and covered by military encampments and air bases when, on 19 February 1942, the city was bombed and its core pulverised by Japanese fighter planes. The Commonwealth government, with its usual candour, announced a death toll of seventeen. The real figure was at least 250, and almost certainly a good deal higher. It was time to begin again – and whenever one’s eye is caught today by some colonial facade, it is invariably a re-creation close by attendant ruins. Alone among Australia’s capital cities, Darwin still wears the patina of its brief past, as though it is doomed – in imitation of the tropical seasons that batter it yearly – to rise and fall in its own repeated rhythm.

  Among the first generation to grow up in the post-war town was one of the Territory’s foremost champions of self-reinvention, Roger “Stainless” Steele, a stockman, former politician and current bed-and-breakfast operator. His soldier father came up in 1948. “In those days, this was just a place with bullet-holed buildings and bomb craters, and there was broken glass for miles,” Steele recalls. “None of the kids wore shoes. We all went to Darwin Primary and our school bus was a semitrailer with a mesh cage on it. There were grass fires burning all through town, and little speargrass shoots everywhere – you’d be dodging the grass and the glass and you’d always have some little wound in your feet.”

  Childhood was fights for money in the circus boxing tent, and general misbehaviour. The drunks would stagger out of the Bamboo Lounge in the old Don Hotel and fall over underneath the tamarind trees: “We kids used to steal up and tickle them under the nose with grass stalks; there was nothing else to do – yes, it was a small place.” So small, in fact, that when the twelve-year-old Steele broke into Ted’s Second Hand Store once too often, stole a bolt-action .303 rifle, a single-shot .22, a lever-action .310 and a Regina pistol, and was caught at Parap Camp and taken to Bennett Street police station where his father came to administer a public beating with a siphon-hose, it was pretty much the time to leave – to light out, in fact, for the Victoria River country and begin the unusual career that would lead Steele looping back, at last, to his time of greatest glory as Speaker of the Northern Territory Parliament.

  Rebuilding. Reconstruction. A touch of sleepy development. Those were Darwin’s tranquil, progressive days, when an intriguing new kind of community was b
eing forged amid the mangroves and the palms. If the local struggles were hectic and small-town, and a subterranean battle was beginning to emerge over indigenous rights, those things made little impact on the young families who lived in the suburbs spreading out.

  Delia Lawrie, daughter of one of the Territory’s best-known independent politicians from those days, still recalls a social paradise: “You were intrinsically surrounded by a bath of love and friendship. You didn’t know colour. Darwin then was the indigenous, Greek, Italian and Chinese families who had created the town. Their children played with the children of the families who came post-war, all those people like my parents who came here because they were escaping, moving away from the structured life down south. They were young, they all had this vision of somewhere, and in those days anyone with any skills could get a job: they built the city round them. That Darwin’s still there, underneath the surface: a gathering of eccentrics – and because we’re eccentrics, we love to gather.”

  Lawrie, as a girl, would head wherever the crowd was – the football at Gardens Oval, the netball at Parap – or there was the drive-in at Nightcliff on Friday nights: “It’d be packed, and you’d always go, knowing there was going to be a huge storm and you wouldn’t even be able to see the screen – and everyone was there and they’d all have a chat in their cars.”

  Even in those days, Lawrie picked up on the great, continuing theme of Darwin, the constant note amid unending change. “We’re pretty forgiving of failure here,” she says. “This is a place where people have a go. That’s why people came here and that’s why they still come – the people who settle here are those who travel up on holiday and never leave. And because they’ve had to fit in and make their way, they’re tolerant themselves. That’s the way that Darwin always was.”