The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  We were looking for a significant story to film, and—other than Vietnam, the war we disapproved of, yet hoped to visit—one of the most significant of all for the urban young was a strike by Aboriginal stockmen. These stockmen had worked at a cattle station run by the huge Vestey Brothers conglomerate on the tussock grass of the vast floodplain of the infrequently flooded Victoria River. It was very remote country where, one day, Vincent Lingiari, a soft-spoken Aboriginal drover of the local Gurindji tribe or language group, had sat beneath a desert oak in his big hat and declared not only discontent over low and token wages, but that the country he sat on was his Gurindji people’s land. The idea was so outrageous that it was even heard in the coastal cities.

  Into that flat country southwest of Katherine we drove our ridiculously fragile van with not enough spare tires, not enough jerry cans of fuel or water—adequate only in our supply of hemp, of which Andy in particular was an aficionado. We traveled on the red-dirt Buntine Highway and the God of Idiots protected us from ourselves.

  The Aboriginal people had walked away from the Vestey Brothers homestead to protest their disgraceful working conditions, and followed the fence line northwest to the Victoria River, which was dry at that season. In spacious country of desert oaks and natural pasture, they had set up a camp. It was both a protest and a claim.

  There, stumbling in like downriver crocodile fodder, we found them. We filmed the nuggety leader, Lingiari, a restrained, silkenly spoken prophet. With him was well-known novelist and communist Frank Hardy, and he and Lingiari spoke intensely. But Lingiari owned his own soul.

  Conservative folk would later say, “Those city commos stirred ’em up,” as if Lingiari lacked the wit to come to his own conclusions, or didn’t know when his people had been treated like dogs.

  Two well-equipped medical vans were there too, along with a youngish eye doctor. This man, who had an unscarred, part-combative, part-humorous face, would take up a powerful place in my life, but we took minimal notice of him at the time. He was named Ted Castwell. He was looking into the eyes of the Gurindji people with ophthalmoscopes and phoropters and tonometers—an exercise that only peripherally interested our cameras. Indeed, we did not understand fully what he was doing, or why. We were there for the politics, not for the scandal of Aboriginal desert blindness. Much later I would become aware that his care of eyes was as political as the Gurindji walkout itself.

  “Giz a look at your eyes, luv,” Castwell would say. Or “mate,” if it was a male. This question he addressed, in the days I first heard it, to Aboriginals of a number of indigenous nations, and later it was a command or request he directed to Nepalese, South Africans, Palestinians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Vietnamese, South Pacific Islanders, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans. It was normally followed by the cry, “Oh Jesus, that doesn’t look too bloody good, does it?” Castwell would then pull down and up on the eyelids, lower and upper. He had an international reputation as an ophthalmologist, but he dressed, as a friend said, in about $5 worth of clothing—the sort of stuff you might wear on a construction site where a sewage pipe rupture was an imminent possibility.

  I didn’t pay as much attention to Castwell as he would demand of me later. Instead, Andy and I focused on filming the striking Aboriginal families, the faces of a historic resistance. We felt honored to be there, and part expected them to find out we were not that experienced as cinematographers and order us away.

  In those days I had an eye on the casually beautiful Denise! But at least I behaved myself there, as I did with the two young nurses who worked with the crusty Castwell. I was lonely by night, under the piquant multitudes of stars, as Denise and my amiable sidekick, Andy, took mutual comfort in the riverbed.

  Meanwhile, the dignified anthracite-black male Aboriginal elder spoke to us about the walk-off. “My name is Vincent Lingiari. I come from Daguragu up there, Wattie Creek country. I got all the stories of that country.” He had gone on to turn the walk-off from a mere industrial issue into a title claim for his country.

  It would always be our footage of Lingiari and his friend Donald Nangiari that was shown whenever Aboriginal people made a land claim. Because Lingiari’s was the first such claim voiced, and we hapless children, Andy and Denise and I, were fortunate to be there to film it.

  “I been thinking this always been Gurindji country,” said Lingiari. “We been longer time here than that Lord Vestey mob.”

  Indeed Lingiari had collaborated with Frank Hardy to erect a sign at his camp, and it said “Gurindji—Mining Lease and Cattle Station.” That seems a mild claim on the world now, but it was large for Lingiari and confirmed his pride in his land. For one thing it was the first time he’d seen his people’s name in script!

  Ted Castwell went on doing his daily eye work, but we considered him superfluous to our footage. For now it was the politics of the walk-off, and Lingiari’s humble yet unprecedented call to be given back his country, that attracted us. The footage we shot gave me my career, and Andy one too, as long as it lasted. Denise was already a professional.

  Feather-Shoed Correctors

  SO STARK AND I knew that only Clawback, exempted from the sleeping spell, had heard us coming. Our footfalls thudded in his heart, but he had time for a few more instants of alarm. All that was how things were expected to go. We knew now that his wife and children were in the hut, stricken with sleep, but he would not ever be there again. It always happened this way. The criminal led the feather-shoed correctors out into the country beyond. He was running to seek shelter amongst foreign people but would achieve nothing but lonely ground.

  Stark and I were slow-paced at first, finding Clawback’s tracks amongst the multitude of others coming and going on accustomed paths near the Lake. Stark took the wad of thornbud and ash and broke a piece for himself and one for me. After chewing it we could read, twice as fast as before, the tracks of Clawback’s flight showing up amongst the others like an increasingly clear path to the Nightside, whereas only the Heroes, the ancestors, the makers of the earth, could have read Stark’s and mine. Soon Clawback’s tracks were utterly on their own amongst the tracks of small nocturnal beasts, heading down towards the Great Snake River, which we knew to be the normal boundary of our daily concerns. It was a river vast enough to make the miscreant think he would be safe beyond it, that the land beyond was his haven. In that country beyond, which we had heard described chiefly in song, even we might have doubted our powers. But half the criminals went that way. The Morningside brought you to steep hills, the Nightside into drier country. Generally we, the punishers, flew after them and caught them on our side of things, and exacted the sad and necessary adjustment of punishment on familiar ground. But it seemed to those who sought to flee that the river was good to flee towards, and there were many tree-logged backwaters and marshes, enough to confuse a chaser and hide the escaper’s tracks. And enough to confuse the escaper too, for that matter.

  The truth was that if Clawback came to the river and crossed it, he would need to negotiate further passage with the elders over in that country. And some old woman, liking Clawback’s line of humor and frame and ignorant of his crimes, might take him in and make a husband of him, a gift fallen to her from another place. Meanwhile, in our country, dead fish would be cast up from the Lake, and children would leave their mothers’ wombs before they were ready. Stark and I knew, thus, that Clawback had to be caught.

  At times while we ran we sang the song for a stretch of country, for in some cases we had not been in these parts so often and needed the song to remind us where we were. The Lake usually kept its people close to it, and even hunting squads did not need to go too far afield, certainly not as far afield as we would go tonight. The bounty our ancestors had made for us at the Lake caused us to be strangers to many parts that were not so far away, parts occupied by a family if at all, or by a clan in good seasons. Stark and I both knew the song for the sky as well. We saw the darkness of the heart of the great path of stars. That darkness was the great
Dark Bird, who hung above as a judge.

  Chewing thorngum as night deepened, we were empowered to see Clawback’s tracks shine beyond a moonstruck stream, and amongst the trees around backwaters. We were not detained when his footprint disappeared—we saw it radiate on the other side of water or claypan. Not only were we incapable of exhaustion, but we knew that Clawback was subject to it. We knew, in fact, that it was in Clawback’s nature not to be too exacting a prey. He was too much of a joker, a popular man, a man made for skipping around campfires with children and one eye on the women. The jokes that seemed to be for children were, in fact, directed to their mothers, their sisters, their generous aunts who would sometimes expand their bodies to accommodate a humorous fellow. And now all that had happened, to a fault, with the Earless Lizard girl.

  Amongst the ghost trees around the backwaters, silver gliders flew above our heads with a small, piercing shriek of joy that sparked Stark and myself onwards. We had seen the way Clawback’s tracks were now slewing, and knew that he must sleep soon. His traces showed that he had no animus against us pursuers, as we had no animus towards him. He knew he must be stopped for his own sake, and for the sake of the rest of us. But we understood that it is impossible for a normal man to sit still and wait for such an ending, though some had done so in the past, when they were too weak to move further. And Clawback might be cunning in his hiding place, and so delay us into another day, another night.

  We drank water from our water skins, ate thorngum, and continued without a meal through the darkness.

  * * *

  There was a backwater that had once been a reach of the river and had made its own hill during old, old floods, and that was where Clawback had chosen to rest. The day was breaking on our sunwards shoulders when we saw him spurt from rocks and saplings atop the hill and lope away towards the river, still distant though it was. We paused then, and took the time to drink, and then we were away again, skimming the ground beyond the trees of the backwater, bounding amongst the gray bushes, sure in our stride. It was clear dawn with the earth drenched in a frost we had not felt so much during the night. Our shoes remained compact on our feet, which were not influenced by edged stones or gravel or icicles. Clawback’s footprints now showed up black on a silvery terrain. As Stark and I ran, the earth seemed to move us further out into the daylight, stirring itself to run beneath our feet, dragging what was behind us into light.

  The morning wind came up from beyond the river and could be felt if we chose to. According to the rules of light and distance we could see a far-off dome of rocks beyond the river, glimmering as if it promised a short journey to those who might desire to go there, whereas it would take the first half of the day and some hours more to reach that place. Mother and Son Rocks—flung by a mother and her second son at the vile Cockatoo Woman who had tried but failed to create hatred between them. We could be sure Clawback had his eye on that, that it drew him even if he had no chance of getting that far. For the marks of his passage showed up as dark criminal welts, shallow but legible. He could not erase them, in the way ours were disguised or erased by our extraordinary feathered shoes.

  We saw his footprints once more skirting a backwater and its world of trees and rich water, frogs, lizards, the furred creatures of the trees and the sheltering bounders beyond, and then in a space amongst bluebush and within reach of the mercy of fallen branches, we came upon a family who had started a fire and were cooking their morning meal of grain and a flitch of point-nosed tailer. With them were an old man and a very weak old woman. The old man chewed the meat for her before passing it to her mouth. She who had been his beauty and his companion for long seasons. She had nearly gone from the earth now, and her feet were shriveled. But it should not be forgotten that young men returning from their trial may have once been grateful to be taken into the compass of her arms.

  The younger woman of the group carried an infant in a sling made of a small bounder’s skin, and the young man bent to the fire and called to two children who were dodging about at play. And near the fire slept Clawback, better at jokes than at flight. Certainly we flew, Stark and I, birds all at once, into the branches of a tree. We observed the family but were not ourselves observed.

  But even asleep Clawback saw us strange adorned birds there, and he woke and jumped to his feet and called to the old man, who turned to him. “They’re there!” Clawback cried out in our tongue, which this outlier family must have also shared, because they looked as he urged them to, but saw nothing. He grabbed his short hunting spear and his water gourd and was away, leaving one of his fur garments behind. We descended from the low tree; we were no more than an arm span from the earth, and were in stride as soon as our feet hit the dust, leaving it unmarked. Clawback was pitiful, running while we flew, lurching when we were direct. He was clownish in his attempts at escape. I began to weep for him then.

  * * *

  On the alien ground I had endured as a test when I was young, the ground the ghost woman told me I had been abandoned on, I ate sinewy meat with my sore jaw, from which my elders had taken my two lower fangs with a stone chisel. I spent an entire moon and days more there, expecting my elders to liberate me. One morning I saw them coming at last out of the sun, their faces painted white and yellow. Some of them trod carefully, having painful knees and cramped feet, but knowledge and mercy flashed about their heads and I wept to see them. The air was empty of all spiteful voices now, vacant of the ghost woman and chiding spirits. When they got to me, they covered my eyes with clay, gave me thorngum to chew, and led me away. It was half a day or more we walked, or so I believed, the clay drying and dragging at my eyes, but I was as happy as I had ever been in life.

  “You did well,” a number of them sang or murmured. All along whatever road we were on, they sang. It was as if they too were relieved, as one is, by the coming of a kindly day and the repeating of seasons. The earth sang its song to them and so they repeated it back.

  I asked an old man named Whisper, “Did you all keep watch on the border of the badland to make sure nothing but old meat reached me there?”

  He laughed with a keen amusement, as if no other young man, reborn, had asked him that question. “I am a man who likes my campfire,” he said, “and the company of friends and my wife. Do you think I and men like me had the need to wait out there? Just to stop good food coming your way?”

  “But did you sing the country so that no young animals approached me?”

  “It has always been a country where the beasts send their old and cursed to die. Surely you are convinced of that?”

  “Yes, I can tell you I’m sure of it,” I said, and this time I joined his laughter, for it was merriment and sorcery, and dying as a boy and rising as a man, and it had all been accomplished. Then someone sang, almost absentmindedly, of the coming Lake, and of the shield lizard who had made it shallow, for he had lost his power to swim, and grew a shield on his back to thwart his enemies. He was announcing we were near home, and near the deeper lake, the Nightside Lake that all creatures, including our Lake people, favored.

  I could already hear women shrilling, for they had seen us coming. It was at the top of the dunes that, singing a song in praise of sight, they met me and dragged the clumps of clay from my eyes and gave me some water to wash them. And the first thing I saw with new eyes were women milling and smiling. My mother was not amongst them, nor my aunt or sister. They had been ushered away from the shoreline to allow the other women to perceive me. My sore plant swelled, for it was as if one woman would come from the mass of them and favor me. They all cawed like crows over that, finding it hilarious. Picking up stones, they hurled them at me in mockery of my stiffness, stinging my flanks. The more I stung the more my plant rose. Manhood begins with the mockery and the love of women’s laughter. With women seeing at once and all together your great weakness, your lightning and your wound.

  The hardest-flung stones came from the hands of a number of women, older but not aged, one of them notable for her lo
ng tubular breasts and fine plump stretch of belly gleaming with bounder fat. Her name was Ash, wife of Glancer. The more she hurt me the more my itch for her enlarged. She moved forward now, a clod of earth in her hand, but she did not throw it. She began to dance before me. Women trilled in a sharper tone and then stopped all in the same instant. They turned and walked away, conversing in a normal manner, and were gone. Ash danced in a style not unlike that of the ghost woman, as arousing but with a different heart within it. While the ghost woman intended to take my soul, Ash wished merely to reward me, twisting before me and grasping both her inner thighs and somehow causing them to tremble in unison. The amused chatter of the old men vanished behind me. They were gone too.

  Ash and I were alone in the bowl of earth. She trod round me in a circle, chirping like a knowing bird.

  “I’m a man,” I insisted to her. In fact she made me feel like all men. “I am now all the men there have been since the start of the story.”

  Ash increased the volume of her trilling, as if she could deal with and take the surrender of all those men. She slapped her inner thighs. She claimed in answer to my boast, “If you are the man of men, my cunt is the cunt of cunts.” And I felt dragged to it as by the force of kindly spirits, muscular ones. She was now in a time of her own, a woman without husband, a woman open to the approach of a lover. She loosened the fur that hung down her back and flung it to the ground. She pointed. There was going to be a change in me. I would be taught and rendered down and given my final shape. She advanced then, still dancing, little puffs of pink and yellow dust thrown up by the energy of her feet. Raising one hand to distract my gaze, she reached to my plant with the other. She made a sudden soft mewl, a promise that she would not be rough with it. Then she took it in with the smallest effort and dragged me towards her and fell down and took me into her spacious, long-lipped mouth, and I felt her healing saliva and her gentle teeth. Here was my reward already for ignoring the ghost woman. I sang now, but nothing sensible. After she had healed my plant, demanding now and then that I not succumb yet and give her my sap too early, she eased herself backwards onto the fur and that great passage of hers was mine to go into. How we toiled. For all the men she had ever volunteered to welcome, I lurched and arched, bounded and trembled, bellowed and gave myself. In shorter time than I had been lost and found in the wasteland, I riotously gave all away to Ash, but then rose again to her as if not yet fully comforted.