The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  She sank to four feet again and advanced on us, then rose to full height once more before instantly letting herself flop, this time as if she intended to sleep. I did not trust the easy way she rolled on the earth, and I hoped the young men remembered from the songs the warning that the slicer could go from yawning to a terrible furor and speed in only a shudder of the eye.

  And her other gift to us was that when she moved again and clearly knew we were there, she pretended to be unsure as to whether we were phantoms. She began to run now, pawing herself forward with tumultuous muscles in her spotted fur while pretending to be interested in a different horizon than the one we were now tied to.

  So she arrived at a little claypan, where she bent down on her four mighty legs to drink some icy water pooling at the base of a rock, before rising to her hind legs and throwing off pretense as she eyed us with a sudden frankness which declared that she meant to have us. When she hurtled towards us, I wondered if the songs we had sung were adequate to have set up my son and his comrade for this splendid destroyer’s attack. I saw my son calmly step a few strides aside from the path of the beast, and heard the gruff, manly sound as he and his companion beat their narrow shields with spear shafts as if each wanted to be the one to draw the slicer to him. Both of them were brave to show themselves without hunching, to demonstrate to the creature that we ourselves were beasts of honor. We were the only animal that sang at such length, but there was weakness as well as sinew behind the songs. If a young man showed a being who he was and lived, then no one lesser could question his worth. As for me, I let forth a cry of pride, exultation, and terror as she entered within spear throw, and the two of them crouched.

  It was then that the creature’s path changed and my brave Son Unnameable was chosen by her. I saw with dread that my son’s task was to allow the being to prove its power to us yet again. As for my son, he stood and allowed the creature to vault and descend on him from the sky. There was just the narrow stick spear and its point and his leg planted back to answer the broad attack of the animal and its purpose. According to our desires, the desire of the people, the meeting about to occur was meant to lead to the expiration of the slicer and the gush of the beast’s heart blood. This was supposed to be followed by the emergence of the young man on the verges of the Lake as a surviving hunter, grinning and shouting, sometimes with a venerated claw slash across his upper body!

  In this case, though, my son’s spear point was not correctly aligned for the slicer. The shaft snapped, its point broke off, and the beast landed upon my son before I could move, and took to devouring him in her mouth while slicing at his throat with her monstrous thumbs. I heard my son’s brief terror uttered from within, his blindness as his face and eyes and nostrils were torn away, and the great wheeze of breath as his life gushed forth from his clawed-open neck. It happened with such awful quickness. My son’s companion tried to sink a spear deep into the slicer’s flank, but the spear did not accurately puncture the creature’s heart, and she continued with her whole being clenched on my poor, dangling son’s face.

  We all moved in recklessly then as the slicer released my son’s head from its mouth and reared on its paws to display its own bloody face. It seemed that we killed it many times over. As frantic as I was, overcome with the vision of my son’s bloody, meaty stump of head, I took account of where its forearm met its trunk and drove my own long spear exactly there and up into its soul. The creature looked up briefly, releasing her jaws as if to take a breath and a second of contemplation. Then she fell, one of her great slicing thumbs still in my Son Unnameable’s throat. Having seen for the last time the meeting of the earth and sky, the slicer sank dead on top of my son, having taught us her legendary lesson.

  The men helped me retrieve my son from under the great beast. He still had life in him, and I promised him impossible acts of cure. The other men now told me that he was dead. One of them had brought a pouch of ocher in case of a hunting death, and I wrapped my son’s head gently in a sack of netting, of the sort his sister would become adept at making. Then the men lit a fire and sang the death songs for my son, songs ending in a growl to frighten his confused soul away from us for the sake of its own peace and embrace of its death. I had by then taken the time to wash his mutilated face and body, which we anointed to the waist with ocher. One of the men felled a small tree with his axe of flint, and we marked it with our knives, incising on it the symbols of his mother’s god for him to seek. After that we buried him with the shield and spear with great reverence, again constantly consoling him and urging him back to the Heroes’ world he’d come from by way of Girly’s womb. I was gratified that, whatever hard designs the heavens and earth had for me, I did not have to present him to my wife, who would have lamented his devoured face.

  Elders

  THERE WAS TO be a significant meeting between Heritage officers and elders to discuss the return of Learned Man to his country. I was considering ways to get to the Riverina, since it would be a chance to see Peter Jorgensen as well as to understand what might happen with Learned Man when the elders returned him to his country. The organizers and the elders told me that given my long-held interest in Learned I was extremely welcome to sit in on the proceedings. The plan of management was to be presented to the meeting, including to an elder of each of the three tribes. Despite all the arguing and activity of Learned Man’s familiar, Jorgensen, I guessed it would be inevitably modest, because of lack of input and interest from the white side.

  I called Jorgensen and was heartened to hear his sonorous, amiable voice.

  “Have you been invited?” I asked after we’d exchanged greetings.

  “Yes,” he told me. “More talk! But they’ve said I can speak to the elders. I think the bureaucrats want me to assure them that Learned is more than a Paleolithic freak. That he lived in country, and loved country, as they do. That he was a member of a whole community, which had a profound relationship to the land. Basically, I suppose, what you’d call stewardship for the earth. But love … that too. As if their land was a living relative.” He paused briefly then growled, “Anyway, you’ve heard me say all this.”

  I agreed, of course. Who wouldn’t?

  “There are riches in what Learned could say to the world,” he said almost plaintively. “But our crowd, the settlers, were not willing to listen. The process will be complete then. The circuit closed.”

  Jorgensen and I had often discussed the pictures of Aboriginal people in our school histories—a naked black woman and man and a few naked kids in front of a dead, hunted marsupial, a native dog, a miserable gunyah. People who needed a fire yet were implicitly unaware of the warmth of kangaroo fur. A primal nucleus. Learned challenged that picture, turned it on its head, spoke of a richer, more potent life.

  “I’m pleased that Brendan Hayes, who’s the new head bloke from Heritage, has asked me to speak,” he said. “Even if I harp on a little, even if I’m a bit of an embarrassment by now.”

  I knew what he was talking about. A few months before, Jorgensen had attended a ceremony at the Australian National University to hand back Learned Man to the three tribes of the Lake Learned system. During the event the elders from the Riverina were welcomed to country by Waradjuri elders, and the remains of Learned were brought forth while young dancing men from the Canberra Ngunnawal tribe and from Learned’s own country set a fire by the dais and smoked all ill will away from the place.

  During the proceedings a new smooth-faced vice chancellor made a speech acknowledging by name most people who’d been involved with Learned Man except the late Professor Spurling and the embarrassing Professor Jorgensen. He made no mention of Jorgensen as Learned Man’s first white encounter, making only a reference to the “discoverer” of what had not been lost. He also failed to mention the lack of archaeological protocols that had come to apply since Learned Man was discovered, which Jorgensen thoroughly agreed with.

  To treat Peter Jorgensen as the Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook of the L
earned Lake region, the embarrassing figure who proclaimed the discovery of what was not considered lost, seemed an undue sensitivity on the vice chancellor’s part. And in any case, Jorgensen had not wanted to be named as Learned’s vainglorious discoverer, but as his brother in an encounter, the man who had exchanged souls with him.

  After the handover was complete, the three elders of the tribe gave consent on behalf of the traditional owners for the remains of Learned and over a hundred other of his people to remain stored at the National Museum while arrangements were made for their future resting place.

  “Well, for better or worse, Peter, you’re not the slightest embarrassment to me,” I assured him now. “I won’t say what you are because you’ll get a big head.”

  But the longer I spoke, the more it felt to me as if I had swallowed something immovable. Something radiant with discomfort. Was the sensation one of pain? It was somehow broader than pain. It included pain as in a wrapping of furry unease. I had no appetite these days.

  * * *

  Jorgensen called me back again the same day and asked me at some length how I was. After finally telling him about my health, we discussed it at length. He was far too genial a man ever to become a monomaniac and believe that his grievances trumped all those of others.

  “I wanted to say, don’t come to the meeting for my sake. I got a second email from Brendan. He says that he made a mistake when he said I could speak.”

  I made a sympathetic noise and was a little amazed. I assumed he was somehow entitled to speak on Learned in perpetuity. He had found Learned’s gleaming skull bone. He had found the wonder, and as the old Barkindji woman said, the wonder had found him. Many other elders had since told him the wonder had found him because Learned Man had a message for us. A spacious purpose. Yet so far only experts and enthusiasts knew of Learned. Peter Jorgenson knew that the purpose of the encounter had not been achieved.

  I realized all was inertia again in the future of Learned Man. Not for the elders. Learned Man, the patriarch, would go home to Lake Learned. And that was right. But all Peter Jorgensen wanted was to let humanity know the Hero was going home! When at last it happened, it was a day designed to be noticed in the world. Jorgensen believed the elders wanted that too. The bureaucrats wanted it. It was the powerful of the Commonwealth the news had not reached, in whom it had not activated any zealousness.

  It meant I need not make that ten-hour drive to support Learned Man, or have Cath make it for me. I felt a wistfulness for Peter Jorgensen. Learned remained in a box, like a wedding dress the nation would not put on.

  * * *

  I had a number for Brendan Hayes, out there in the Riverina. And so I called him, advisedly or not. I felt I must, since to me Jorgensen possessed the holiness imbued by the antiquity of Learned Man.

  “Look,” I said, “not my business, I admit. But Jorgensen just told me you don’t want him to speak at this meeting.”

  “He’s not on the proposed program, no,” Brendan replied with bureaucratic confidence.

  “Look, Brendan, I’m going to say it. Peter Jorgensen is eighty-six. He is not going to be available to speak at some future event when everything about Learned Man is settled. We have him now. And he’s the man who first clapped eyes on Learned Man since the old man’s burial in the Pleistocene. And he loves the elders. In any language, English or Barkindji. Could you let him talk for ten minutes or so?”

  “Please don’t think he hasn’t had many opportunities to talk to us all in the past. Or that we don’t honor him.”

  “No, but he had that kick in the teeth from his vice chancellor. He’s still recovering …”

  Brendan took time now, word-choosing time. “He ought to understand, I think, that the vice chancellor felt he had to put Learned Man himself at the center of that event. That it was political. That it was time, pretty much, to talk about the tragedy of European occupation, not about Jorgensen.”

  I felt fraternally angry for my old friend’s sake at Brendan’s implication that Jorgensen was himself ignorant of or indifferent to that tragedy.

  “Come on, Brendan! Jorgensen isn’t an egomaniac. But he knows what he’s done. Or, if you like, he knows what’s befallen him.” Silence came. As if Brendan were politely waiting to have what Jorgensen had done defined for him.

  “The point is,” I argued, “he chanced on the link, Learned Man and our shared humanness. Others defined the chain. He was the one who found it there, in the lake sediments. And he always believed, from the first day, that Learned was Homo sapiens. Not some intermediate hominid on the way to being us. Jorgensen discovered us. Our ancestors were Learned’s poor relatives in some cold Central Asia place, drifters. I doubt we lived as well, as majestically as Learned! But Learned is who we are and who we were, at a forgotten level. Peter Jorgensen, apart from anything else, gave us back our memory.”

  “But he might have just found what the traditional owners already knew was there,” said Brendan. “At least implicitly they knew Learned Man and all his kin were there, and they were content to have them. They were a secret we had left them. Something we hadn’t taken. There, buried in the lunette.”

  “Yes,” I argued, my sternum burning with such discomfort that it blinded me awhile, “yes, but he wasn’t some sort of thief.”

  “No,” Brendan Hayes agreed. “He wasn’t a thief and they don’t think he was. Perhaps he was more like a trespasser. But they’re a forgiving people, Shelby.”

  The burning of the sternum distracted me. I managed to say, “Oh sure, he called in his mates from the university and they took Learned Man away like they’d taken Miss Learned earlier.”

  “Without referring it to the elders.”

  “No, but we were dumb about those things then. But not malicious.”

  I knew it was a bad argument as soon as I said it.

  “Well,” said Brendan, “we aren’t anymore. That’s what the meeting is about. It’s about what they want. I can understand Professor Jorgensen’s sensitivity. But they have heard from him before.”

  “But on a human level, why not listen to him again? He’s eighty-six, for fuck’s sake, Brendan. These are his dying words. And he wants to give them to you, to the elders, fraternally. Without arrogance. By some lights, it’s appalling if you don’t let him have his say. I mean, did you ask the elders?”

  I could hear the bureaucrat named Brendan. He was breathing on the line. After a while he said, “Have you ever thought that we whitefellas, Jorgensen and his friends, even me, even you, want to put Learned to rest on our terms? That at base we want to own Learned the way we thought we owned the land? And that might be the problem, you see, Shelby. I’m not being argumentative for the sake of it. What if Jorgensen tells them the way he sees it and they don’t see it that way? They’re polite people. They’ll accept him as an existing factor in things, but they’re too well mannered to tell him to stop pushing …”

  “But they all say Learned came back for a purpose. What’s the purpose? If it was to enlighten us, the enlightenment hasn’t happened. So I don’t see Jorgensen is pushing anything—or not in the sense you mean.”

  Brendan resisted, saying, “But … he says to them, ‘I see it more sharply than ever before. Learned and his people kept the country through two ice ages. And forty thousand years or more—a span of time no empire lasts, no civilization. Except yours!’ But they already know it. They know it in their blood and water. They know already that their culture was based on maintenance, not on ripping the shit from things. It’s a triumph. But they don’t need Jorgensen to tell them. And so he says to the three tribes, ‘We’ll build a great Keeping House according to your wishes. And it’ll celebrate not only Learned but his heroic community who lived amongst the megafauna. And the nation and all of the world will come darkside and applaud what was achieved here, that continuity, that culture!’ And believe me, there’s nothing wrong with Jorgensen’s oratory, Shelby. I have heard him at his best. The vision is splendid, believe me. And h
e’s right, but he’s also wrong. Because they, the Muthi Muthi, the Nygiampa, and the Barkindji, they always had Learned Man. They saw him in their dreams. They knew he was there and they didn’t need Jorgensen to tell them.”

  “Come on, Brendan,” I protested. “They keep saying Learned came back for a reason.”

  “Well, they might say that out of politeness. Have you ever thought of that? Because we bludgeon them with our intentions, Shelby. They have the good grace not to hit us over the head with theirs.”

  “They understand the wonder out there. But don’t they want the rest of us to get the message too?”

  “I’m beginning to think it might be more akin to their wishes if one day, a day they decide on, they just put Learned Man back to bed, out in the dunes somewhere. If they take us out of the picture, we can’t complain.”

  “It’s a bit bloody late to take us out of the picture,” I said too heatedly. Why was I like that? Was it because my own place in the said picture was under question?

  “Well, let me be straight with you, Shelby. I used to think like you that the elders were waiting for the vision about Learned Man to capture us all before he was returned to his country. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “But all the jobs it would bring out there,” I declared stupidly, like a rank politician.

  “They’ve heard that song before. Live in any country town during an election … politicians sing that song best. It is simply this, Shelby. Jorgensen can unsettle them. That’s why we didn’t want him to speak. And no sooner had that been decided than I sent him an email accidentally saying the opposite.”

  The idea of Brendan as a hapless emailer appeased me a little. I had had my say. The knot in my esophagus throbbed and I was aware of tiredness. My argument deteriorated into random statements such as, “Why don’t you give the poor old fellow a go?”