The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  Whenever the afternoon was fine in Stratford, Aunt Ruth and I – with her cocker-spaniel, Amber, straining at his leash – would go on what she said was Mr Shakespeare’s favourite walk. We would set off from College Street, past the grain silo, past the foaming mill-race, across the Avon by footbridge, and follow the path to Weir Brake.

  This was a hazel wood on a slope that tumbled into the river. In springtime, primroses and bluebells flowered there. In summer it was a tangle of nettles, brambles and purple loosestrife, with the muddy water eddying below.

  My aunt assured me this was the spot where Mr Shakespeare came to ‘tryst’ with a young lady. It was the very bank whereon the wild thyme blew. But she never explained what a tryst was, and, no matter how hard I searched, there were neither thyme nor oxlips, although I did find a few nodding violets.

  Much later, when I had read Mr Shakespeare’s plays and did know what a tryst was, it struck me that Weir Brake was far too muddy and prickly for Titania and Bottom to settle on, but an excellent spot for Ophelia to take the plunge.

  Aunt Ruth loved reading Shakespeare aloud and, on days when the grass was dry, I would dangle my legs over the riverbank and listen to her reciting, ‘If music be the food of love . . . ,’ ‘The quality of mercy is not strained . . . ,’ or ‘Full fathom five thy father lies.’

  ‘Full fathom five . . .’ upset me terribly because my father was still at sea. I had another recurring dream: that his ship had sunk; that I grew gills and a fishy tail, swam down to join him on the ocean floor, and saw the pearls that had been his bright blue eyes.

  A year or two later, as a change from Mr Shakespeare, my aunt would bring an anthology of verse especially chosen for travellers, called The Open Road. It had a green buckram binding and a flight of gilded swallows on the cover.

  I loved watching swallows. When they arrived in spring, I knew my lungs would soon be free of green phlegm. In autumn, when they sat chattering on the telegraph wires, I could almost count the days until the eucalyptus inhaler.

  Inside The Open Road there were black and white end-papers in the style of Aubrey Beardsley which showed a bright path twisting through pine woods. One by one, we went through every poem in the book.

  We arose and went to Innisfree. We saw the caverns measureless to man. We wandered lonely as a cloud. We tasted all the summer’s pride, wept for Lycidas, stood in tears among the alien corn, and listened to the strident, beckoning music of Walt Whitman:

  O Public Road . . .

  You express me better than I can express myself

  You shall be more to me than my poem.

  One day, Aunt Ruth told me our surname had once been ‘Chettewynde’, which meant ‘the winding path’ in Anglo-Saxon; and the suggestion took root in my head that poetry, my own name and the road were, all three, mysteriously connected.

  As for bedtime stories, my favourite was the tale of the coyote pup in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Lives of the Hunted.

  Coyotito was the runt of a litter whose mother had been shot by the cowboy, Wolver Jake. Her brothers and sisters had been knocked on the head and her own life spared to give sport to Jake’s bull-terrier and greyhounds. Her picture, in chains, showed the saddest little dog-person I ever saw. Yet Coyotito grew up smart and, one morning, after shamming dead, she bolted for the wild: there to teach a new generation of coyotes the art of avoiding men.

  I cannot now piece together the train of associations that led me to connect Coyotito’s bid for freedom with the Australian Aboriginals’ ‘Walkabout’. Nor, for that matter, where I first heard the expression ‘Walkabout’. Yet somehow I picked up an image of those ‘tame’ Blackfellows who, one day, would be working happily on a cattle-station: the next, without a word of warning and for no good reason, would up sticks and vanish into the blue.

  They would step from their work-clothes, and leave: for weeks and months and even years, trekking half-way across the continent if only to meet a man, then trekking back as if nothing had happened.

  I tried to picture their employer’s face the moment he found them gone.

  He would be a Scot perhaps: a big man with blotchy skin and a mouthful of obscenities. I imagined him breakfasting on steak and eggs – in the days of food-rationing, we knew that all Australians ate a pound of steak for breakfast. Then he would march into the blinding sunlight – all Australian sunlight was blinding – and shout for his ‘boys’.

  Nothing.

  He would shout again. Not a sound but the mocking laugh of a kookaburra. He would scan the horizon. Nothing but gum trees. He would stalk through the cattle-yards. Nothing there either. Then, outside their shacks, he’d find their shirts and hats and boots sticking up through their trousers . . .

  3

  ARKADY ORDERED A couple of cappuccinos in the coffee-shop. We took them to a table by the window and he began to talk.

  I was dazzled by the speed of his mind, although at times I felt he sounded like a man on a public platform, and that much of what he said had been said before.

  The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. A man’s ‘own country’, even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred.

  ‘Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?’

  ‘To wound the earth’, he answered earnestly, ‘is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.’

  ‘Rilke’, I said, ‘had a similar intuition. He also said song was existence.’

  ‘I know,’ said Arkady, resting his chin on his hands. ‘“Third Sonnet to Orpheus.”’

  The Aboriginals, he went on, were a people who trod lightly over the earth; and the less they took from the earth, the less they had to give in return. They had never understood why the missionaries forbade their innocent sacrifices. They slaughtered no victims, animal or human. Instead, when they wished to thank the earth for its gifts, they would simply slit a vein in their forearms and let their own blood spatter the ground.

  ‘Not a heavy price to pay,’ he said. ‘The wars of the twentieth century are the price for having taken too much.’

  ‘I see,’ I nodded doubtfully, ‘but could we get back to the Songlines?’

  ‘We could.’

  My reason for coming to Australia was to try to learn for myself, and not from other men’s books, what a Songline was – and how it worked. Obviously, I was not going to get to the heart of the matter, nor would I want to. I had asked a friend in Adelaide if she knew of an expert. She gave me Arkady’s phone number.

  ‘Do you mind if I use my notebook?’ I asked.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band.

  ‘Nice notebook,’ he said.

  ‘I used to get them in Paris,’ I said. ‘But now they don’t make them any more.’

  ‘Paris?’ he repeated, raising an eyebrow as if he’d never heard anything so pretentious.

  Then he winked and went on talking.

  To get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime, he said, you had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis – with one significant difference.

  In Genesis, God first created the ‘living things’ and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.

  ‘So when an Aboriginal tells you, “I have a Wallaby Dreaming,” he means, “My totem is Wallaby. I am a member of the Wallaby Clan.”’

  ‘So a Dreaming is a clan emblem? A badge to distinguish “us” from “them”? “Our country” from “their country”?’

  ‘Much more than that,’ he said.

  Every Wallaby Man believed he was desce
nded from a universal Wallaby Father, who was the ancestor of all other Wallaby Men and of all living wallabies. Wallabies, therefore, were his brothers. To kill one for food was both fratricide and cannibalism.

  ‘Yet,’ I persisted, ‘the man was no more wallaby than the British are lions, the Russians bears, or the Americans bald eagles?’

  ‘Any species’, he said ‘can be a Dreaming. A virus can be a Dreaming. You can have a chickenpox Dreaming, a rain Dreaming, a desert-orange Dreaming, a lice Dreaming. In the Kimberleys they’ve now got a money Dreaming.’

  ‘And the Welsh have leeks, the Scots thistles and Daphne was changed into a laurel.’

  ‘Same old story,’ he said.

  He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

  ‘A song’, he said, ‘was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’

  ‘And would a man on “Walkabout” always be travelling down one of the Songlines?’

  ‘In the old days, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Nowadays, they go by train or car.’

  ‘Suppose the man strayed from his Songline?’

  ‘He was trespassing. He might get speared for it.’

  ‘But as long as he stuck to the track, he’d always find people who shared his Dreaming? Who were, in fact, his brothers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From whom he could expect hospitality?’

  ‘And vice versa.’

  ‘So song is a kind of passport and meal-ticket?’

  ‘Again, it’s more complicated.’

  In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualise the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology.

  ‘By episode’, I asked, ‘you mean “sacred site”?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘The kind of site you’re surveying for the railway?’

  ‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask the Aboriginal with you, “What’s the story there?” or “Who’s that?” The chances are he’ll answer “Kangaroo” or “Budgerigar” or “Jew Lizard”, depending on which Ancestor walked that way.’

  ‘And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?’

  ‘That’, said Arkady, ‘is the cause of all my troubles with the railway people.’

  It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus 111.

  By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning ‘creation’. No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went ‘Walkabout’ was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footprints of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor’s stanzas without changing a word or note – and so recreated the Creation.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Arkady, ‘I’ll be driving my “old men” through the desert, and we’ll come to a ridge of sandhills, and suddenly they’ll all start singing. “What are you mob singing?” I’ll ask, and they’ll say, “Singing up the country, boss. Makes the country come up quicker.”’

  Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see and sing it– just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors sang it.

  ‘So the land’, I said, ‘must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘In other words, “to exist” is “to be perceived”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sounds suspiciously like Bishop Berkeley’s Refutation of Matter.’

  ‘Or Pure Mind Buddhism,’ said Arkady, ‘which also sees the world as an illusion.’

  ‘Then I suppose these three hundred miles of steel, slicing through innumerable songs, are bound to upset your “old men’s” mental balance?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘They’re very tough, emotionally, and very pragmatic. Besides, they’ve seen far worse than a railway.’

  Aboriginals believed that all the ‘living things’ had been made in secret beneath the earth’s crust, as well as all the white man’s gear – his aeroplanes, his guns, his Toyota Land Cruisers – and every invention that will ever be invented; slumbering below the surface, waiting their turn to be called.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘they could sing the railway back into the created world of God?’

  ‘You bet,’ said Arkady.

  4

  IT WAS AFTER five. The evening light was raking down the street and through the window we could see a party of black boys, in chequered shirts and cowboy hats, walking jerkily under the poincianas in the direction of the pub.

  The waitress was clearing up the leftovers. Arkady asked for more coffee but already she had turned the machine off. He looked at his empty cup, and frowned.

  Then he looked up and asked, abruptly, ‘What’s your interest in all this? What do you want here?’

  ‘I came here to test an idea,’ I said.

  ‘A big idea?’

  ‘Probably a very obvious idea. But one I have to get out of my system.’

  ‘And?’

  His sudden shift of mood made me nervous. I began to explain how I had once tried, unsuccessfully, to write a book about nomads.

  ‘Pastoral nomads?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nomads. “Nomos” is Greek for “pasture”. A nomad moves from pasture to pasture. A pastoral nomad is a pleonasm.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Arkady. ‘Go on. Why nomads?’

  When I was in my twenties, I said, I had a job as an ‘expert’ on modern painting with a well-known firm of art auctioneers. We had sale-rooms in London and New York. I was one of the bright boys. People said I had a great career, if only I would play my cards right. One morning, I woke up blind.

  During the course of the day, the sight returned to the left eye, but the right one stayed sluggish and clouded. The eye specialist who examined me said there was nothing wrong organically, and diagnosed the nature of the trouble.

  ‘You’ve been looking too closely at pictures,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you swap them for some long horizons?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Africa.’

  The chairman of the company said he was sure there was something the matter with my eyes, yet couldn’t think why I had to go to Africa.

  I went to Africa, to the Sudan. My eyes had recovered by the time I reached the airport.

  I sailed down the Dongola Reach in a trading felucca. I went to the ‘Ethiopians’, which was a euphemism for brothel. I had a narrow escape from a rabid dog. At an understaffed clinic, I acted the role of anaesthetist for a Caesarean birth. I next joined up with a geologist who was surveying for minerals in the Red Sea Hills.

  This was nomad country – the nomads being the Beja: Kipling’s ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’, who didn’t give a damn: for the Pharaohs of Egypt or the British cavalry at Omdurman.

  The men were tall and lean, and wore sand-coloured cottons folded in an X across the chest. With shields of elephant hide and ‘Crusader’ swords dangling from their belts, they would come into the villages to trade their meat for grain. They looked down on the villagers as though they were some other animal.

  In the
early light of dawn, as the vultures flexed their wings along the rooftops, the geologist and I would watch the men at their daily grooming.

  They anointed each other’s hair with scented goat’s grease and then teased it out in corkscrew curls, making a buttery parasol which, instead of a turban, prevented their brains from going soft. By evening, when the grease had melted, the curls bounced back to form a solid pillow.

  Our camel-man was a joker called Mahmoud, whose mop of hair was even wider than the others. He began by stealing the geological hammer. Then he left his knife for us to steal. Then, with hoots of laughter, we swapped them back and, in this way, we became great friends.

  When the geologist went back to Khartoum, Mahmoud took me off into the desert to look for rock-paintings.

  The country to the east of Derudeb was bleached and sere, and there were long grey cliffs and dom palms growing in the wadis. The plains were spotted with flat-topped acacias, leafless at this season, with long white thorns like icicles and a dusting of yellow flowers. At night, lying awake under the stars, the cities of the West seemed sad and alien – and the pretensions of the ‘art world’ idiotic. Yet here I had a sense of homecoming.

  Mahmoud instructed me in the art of reading footprints in the sand: gazelles, jackals, foxes, women. We tracked and sighted a herd of wild asses. One night, we heard the cough of a leopard close by. One morning, he lopped off the head of a puff-adder which had curled up under my sleeping-bag and presented me with its body on the tip of his sword blade. I never felt safer with anyone or, at the same time, more inadequate.

  We had three camels, two for riding and one for waterskins, yet usually we preferred to walk. He went barefoot; I was in boots. I never saw anything like the lightness of his step and, as he walked, he sang: a song, usually, about a girl from the Wadi Hammamat who was lovely as a green parakeet. The camels were his only property. He had no flocks and wanted none. He was immune to everything we would call ‘progress’.

  We found our rock-paintings: red ochre pin men scrawled on the overhang of a rock. Nearby there was a long flat boulder with a cleft up one end and its surface pocked with cup-marks. This, said Mahmoud, was the Dragon with its head cut off by Ali.