The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  I mistook this performance for a charade: it never dawned on me the old man could map-read. But then he splayed both first and second fingers into a V and ran them up and down the sheet, like dividers, his lips working silently, at speed. He was, as Arkady told me later, measuring off a Songline.

  Alan accepted a cigarette from Big Tom and continued to smoke in silence.

  A few minutes later, a ramshackle truck drove up, with two white men in front and a black stockhand hunched against the tailboard. The driver, a thin, weatherlined man with sideburns and a greasy brown hat, got out and shook hands with Arkady. He was Frank Olson, the owner of Middle Bore Station.

  ‘And this here’, he said, pointing to his younger companion, ‘is my partner, Jack.’

  Both men were wearing shorts and grubby sweatshirts and desert boots without laces or socks. Their legs were scabbed and pitted by thorns and insect bites. Because they looked so grim and purposeful, Arkady shifted to the defensive. He needn’t have worried. All Olson wanted was to know where the railway line was going.

  He squatted over the map. ‘Lemme see what the buggers are up to,’ he said angrily.

  For the past two weeks, he told us, the bulldozers had cleared a wide swathe through the bush right up to his southern boundary fence. If they went on following the line of the watershed, they’d wreck his catchment system.

  The map, however, showed the projected route curving away to the east.

  ‘Whew!’ said Olson, pushing his hat to the back of his head and wiping the perspiration with his palm. ‘No one thought to tell me, of course.’

  He spoke of falling beef prices, and the drought, and dead beasts everywhere. In a good year, they had twelve inches of rain. This year, so far, they’d had eight. Cut that to seven and he’d be out of business.

  Arkady asked Olson’s permission to camp beside one of his dams.

  ‘Right by me!’ he said, rolling an eye at Alan and winking. ‘You’d better ask the Boss.’

  The old man didn’t move a muscle but a faint smile filtered through the waves of his beard.

  Olson stood up. ‘Be seeing you,’ he said. ‘Look in for a bite of tea tomorrow.’

  ‘We will,’ said Arkady. ‘Thanks.’

  The evening had settled into a golden calm when we saw a streak of dust along the line of the road. It was Marian.

  She drove up at the wheel of her old grey Land-Rover, through the humpies, and parked fifty yards short of our fire. Two brawny women, Topsy and Gladys, squeezed themselves out of the cab and there were four thinner women behind. They jumped down, brushed off the dust, and flexed their arms and legs.

  ‘You’re late,’ Arkady scolded her, playfully.

  Her cheeks were creased with tiredness.

  ‘You’d have been late,’ she laughed.

  Since leaving Alice Springs, she’d driven 300 miles; treated a boy for scorpion bite; dosed a baby for dysentery; drawn an elder’s abscessed tooth; sewn up a woman who’d been beaten by her husband; sewn up the husband, who’d been beaten by the brother-in-law.

  ‘And now’, she said, ‘I’m famished.’

  Arkady fetched her a French roll and a mug of tea. He was worried in case she was too tired to go on. ‘We can spend the night where we are,’ he said.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  She had on the same skimpy flower-printed dress. She sat on the front bumper, planted her legs apart and stuffed the roll between her teeth. I tried to talk to her, but she looked straight through me, smiling the smile of a woman on women’s business.

  She drained the mug and handed it back to Arkady. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll go.’

  She strolled off and doused herself under a hydrant in the women’s section of the camp. Then she strolled back, silhouetted against the sunlight, glistening wet all over, the wet dress flattened out over her breasts and hips, and her hair hanging loose in golden snakes. It was no exaggeration to say she looked like a Piero madonna: the slight awkwardness of her movements made her that much more attractive.

  A crowd of young mothers formed a ring round her. She hugged their babies, wiped the snot from their noses and the dirt off their behinds. She patted them, jogged them up and down, and handed them back.

  So what was it, I wondered, about these Australian women? Why were they so strong and satisfied, and so many of the men so drained? I tried to talk to her again, but again the blank smile warned me off.

  ‘What’s up with Marian?’ I asked Arkady as we packed the gear. ‘I think I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘She’s always that way when she’s with the women.’

  If the women saw her hobnobbing with a stranger, they’d think she was a blabmouth and tell nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would explain it.’

  ‘Come on, you mob,’ he called the men away from the fire. ‘We’re off.’

  21

  THE LAND CRUISER bumped and lurched along a double rut of dust, the bushes brushing the underside of the chassis. Alan sat in front with Timmy, with his rifle upright between his knees. Marian followed hard after, with the ladies. We crossed a sandy gully and had to change to four-wheel drive. A black horse reared up, whinnied and galloped off.

  On ahead the country was open woodland. The trees made dark stripes of shadow over the grass and the ghost-gums, at this orange hour of the evening, seemed to float above the ground, like balloons that had let down their anchors.

  Alan raised his hand for Arkady to stop, whipped the .22 through the window and fired into a bush. A female kangaroo and young broke cover and leaped away in great lolloping bounds, their haunches white against the grey of the scrub.

  Alan fired again, and again. Then he and the man in blue jumped out and sprinted after them.

  ‘Giant red,’ said Arkady. ‘They come out for water at sunset.’

  ‘Did he hit her?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No. Look, they’re coming back.’

  Alan’s hat showed up first, above the level of the grass heads. The man in blue’s shirt was ripped at the shoulder, and he was bleeding from a thorn scratch.

  ‘Bad luck, old man,’ said Arkady to Alan.

  Alan re-cocked the rifle and glared from the window.

  The sun was touching the treetops when we came to a wind-pump and some abandoned stock-pens. There had been a settlement here in the old days. There were heaps of rotted grey timbers and the wreck of a stockman’s house. The wind-pump spurted a steady stream of water into two round galvanised tanks.

  A flock of galahs sat perched around the rim of the tanks, several hundred of them, pink-crested cockatoos which flew up as we approached and wheeled overhead: the undersides of their wings were the colour of wild roses.

  Everyone in the party surrounded a drinking trough, splashed the dirt from their faces, and filled their water-cans.

  I made a point of avoiding Marian, but she came up from behind and pinched me on the bum.

  ‘Getting to learn the rules, I see,’ she grinned.

  ‘Madwoman.’

  The country away to the east was a flat and treeless waste entirely lacking in cover. Alan kept raising a finger to a solitary bump on the horizon. It was almost dark by the time we reached a small rocky hill, its boulders bursting with the white plumes of spinifex in flower, and a black fuzz of leafless mallee bush.

  The hill, said Arkady, was the Lizard Ancestor’s resting place.

  The party split into two camps, each within earshot of the other. The men settled themselves and their swags in a circle, and began talking in hushed voices. While Arkady unpacked, I went off to hack some firewood.

  I had lit the fire, using bark and grass for tinder, when we heard the sound of pandemonium from the women’s camp. Everyone was shrieking and howling, and against the light of their fires I could make out Mavis, hopping this way and that, and gesturing to something on the ground.

  �
��What’s up?’ Arkady called to Marian.

  ‘Snake!’ she called back, cheerfully.

  It was only a snake-trail in the sand, but that was snake enough to put the women into hysterics.

  The men, too, began to get twitchy. Led by Big Tom, they jumped to their feet. Alan re-cocked the .22. The two others armed themselves with sticks; scrutinised the sand; spoke in hoarse, emotional whispers; and waved their arms like hammy Shakespearean actors.

  ‘Take no notice,’ said Arkady. ‘They’re only showing off. All the same, I think I’ll sleep on the roof of the Land Cruiser.’

  ‘Chicken!’ I said.

  For myself, I rigged up a ‘snakeproof’ groundsheet to sleep on, tying each corner to a bush, so its edges were a foot from the ground. Then I began to cook supper.

  The fire was far too hot for grilling steaks without charring them: I almost charred myself as well. Alan looked on with masterful indifference. None of the others gave one word of thanks for their food, but kept passing back their plates for more. Finally, when they were satisfied, they resumed their conference.

  ‘You know who they remind me of?’ I said to Arkady. ‘A boardroom of bankers.’

  ‘Which is what they are,’ he said. ‘They’re deciding how little to give us.’

  The steak was charred and tough, and after Hanlon’s lunch we had very little appetite. We cleared up and went to join the old men’s circle. The firelight lapped their faces. The moon came up. We could just discern the profile of the hill.

  We sat in silence until Arkady, judging the moment, turned to Alan and asked quietly, in English, ‘So what’s the story of this place, old man?’

  Alan gazed into the fire without twitching. The skin stretched taut over his cheekbones and shone. Then, almost imperceptibly, he tilted his head towards the man in blue, who got to his feet and began to mime (with words of pidgin thrown in) the travels of the Lizard Ancestor.

  It was a song of how the lizard and his lovely young wife had walked from northern Australia to the Southern Sea, and of how a southerner had seduced the wife and sent him home with a substitute.

  I don’t know what species of lizard he was supposed to be: whether he was a ‘jew-lizard’ or a ‘road-runner’ or one of those rumpled, angry-looking lizards with ruffs around their necks. All I do know is that the man in blue made the most lifelike lizard you could ever hope to imagine.

  He was male and female, seducer and seduced. He was glutton, he was cuckold, he was weary traveller. He would claw his lizard-feet sideways, then freeze and cock his head. He would lift his lower lid to cover the iris, and flick out his lizard-tongue. He puffed his neck into goitres of rage; and at last, when it was time for him to die, he writhed and wriggled, his movements growing fainter and fainter like the Dying Swan’s.

  Then his jaw locked, and that was the end.

  The man in blue waved towards the hill and, with the triumphant cadence of someone who has told the best of all possible stories, shouted: ‘That . . . that is where he is!’

  The performance had lasted not more than three minutes.

  The death of the lizard touched us and made us sad. But Big Tom and Timmy had been in stitches since the wife-swapping episode and went on hooting and cackling long after the man in blue sat down. Even the resigned and beautiful face of old Alan composed itself into a smile. Then one by one they yawned, and spread out their swags, and curled up and went to sleep.

  ‘They must have liked you,’ Arkady said. ‘It was their way of saying thanks for the food.’

  We lit a hurricane lamp and sat on a couple of camping-chairs, away from the fire. What we had witnessed, he said, was not of course the real Lizard song, but a ‘false front’, or sketch performed for strangers. The real song would have named each waterhole the Lizard Man drank from, each tree he cut a spear from, each cave he slept in, covering the whole long distance of the way.

  He had understood the pidgin far better than I. This is the version I then jotted down:

  The Lizard and his wife set off to walk to the Southern Sea. The wife was young and beautiful and had far lighter skin than her husband. They crossed swamps and rivers until they stopped at a hill – the hill at Middle Bore – and there they slept the night. In the morning they passed the camp of some Dingoes, where a mother was suckling a brood of pups. ‘Ha!’ said the Lizard. ‘I’ll remember those pups and eat them later.’

  The couple walked on, past Oodnadatta, past Lake Eyre, and came to the sea at Port Augusta. A sharp wind was blowing off the sea, and the Lizard felt cold and began to shiver. He saw, on a headland nearby, the campfire of some Southerners and said to his wife, ‘Go over to those people and borrow a firestick.’

  She went. But one of the Southerners, lusting after her lighter skin, made love to her – and she agreed to stay with him. He made his own wife paler by smearing her from head to foot with yellow ochre and sent her, with the firestick, to the solitary traveller. Only when the ochre rubbed off did the Lizard realise his loss. He stamped his feet. He puffed himself up in fury, but, being a stranger in a distant country, he was powerless to take revenge. Miserably, he turned for home with his uglier, substitute wife. On the way he stopped to kill and eat the Dingo puppies but these gave him indigestion and made him sick. On reaching the hill at Middle Bore, he lay down and died . . .

  And that, as the man in blue told us, was where he was.

  Arkady and I sat mulling over this story of an antipodean Helen. The distance from here to Port Augusta, as the crow flew, was roughly 1,100 miles, about twice the distance – so we calculated – from Troy to Ithaca. We tried to imagine an Odyssey with a verse for every twist and turn of the hero’s ten-year voyage.

  I looked at the Milky Way and said, ‘You might as well count the stars.’

  Most tribes, Arkady went on, spoke the language of their immediate neighbour, so the difficulties of communication across a frontier did not exist. The mystery was how a man of Tribe A, living up one end of a Songline, could hear a few bars sung by Tribe Q and, without knowing a word of Q’s language, would know exactly what land was being sung.

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Are you telling me that Old Alan here would know the songs for a country a thousand miles away?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  ‘Without ever having been there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  One or two ethnomusicologists, he said, had been working on the problem. In the meantime, the best thing was to imagine a little experiment of our own.

  Supposing we found, somewhere near Port Augusta, a song-man who knew the Lizard song? Suppose we got him to sing his verses into a tape-recorder and then played the tape to Alan in Kaititj country? The chances were he’d recognise the melody at once – just as we would the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata – but the meaning of the words would escape him. All the same, he’d listen very attentively to the melodic structure. He’d perhaps even ask us to replay a few bars. Then, suddenly, he’d find himself in sync and be able to sing his own words over the ‘nonsense’.

  ‘His own words for country round Port Augusta?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arkady.

  ‘Is that what really happens?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How the hell’s it done?’

  No one, he said, could be sure. There were people who argued for telepathy. Aboriginals themselves told stories of their song-men whizzing up and down the line in trance. But there was another, more astonishing possibility.

  Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’.

  Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. One phr
ase would say, ‘Salt-pan’; another ‘Creek-bed’, ‘Spinifex’, ‘Sand-hill’, ‘Mulga-scrub’, ‘Rock-face’ and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge – and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.

  ‘He’d be able’, said Arkady ‘to hear a few bars and say, “This is Middle Bore” or “That is Oodnadatta” – where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.’

  ‘So a musical phrase’, I said, ‘is a map reference?’

  ‘Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.’

  ‘I shall need some time to digest that.’

  ‘You’ve got all night,’ he smiled. ‘With the snakes!’

  The fire was still blazing in the other camp and we heard the burble of women’s laughter.

  ‘Sleep well,’ he said.

  ‘And you.’

  ‘I never had so much fun’, he said, ‘as I do with my old men.’

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The ground under my sleeping-bag was hard and lumpy. I tried counting the stars around the Southern Cross, but my thoughts kept returning to the man in blue. He reminded me of someone. I had the memory of another man miming an almost identical story, with the same kind of animal gestures. Once, in the Sahel, I had watched some dancers mime the antics of antelopes and storks. But that was not the memory I was looking for.

  Then I had it.

  ‘Lorenz!’

  22

  THE AFTERNOON I met Konrad Lorenz he was working in his garden at Altenberg, a small town on the Danube near Vienna. A hot east wind was blowing from the steppe. I had come to interview him for a newspaper.

  The ‘Father of Ethology’ was a gristly silver-spade-bearded man with arctic blue eyes and a face burned pink in the sun. His book On Aggression had outraged liberal opinion on both sides of the Atlantic – and was a gift to the ‘conservatives’. His enemies had then unearthed a half-forgotten paper, published in 1942, the year of the Final Solution, in which Lorenz had pressed his theory of instinct into the service of racial biology. In 1973 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize.