The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  He introduced me to his wife, who set down her weeding basket and smiled, distantly, from beneath the brim of her straw hat. We made polite conversation about the difficulty of propagating violets.

  ‘My wife and I’, he said, ‘have known each other since childhood. We used to play at iguanodons in the shrubbery.’

  He led the way towards the house – a grandiose, neo-baroque mansion built by his father, a surgeon, in the good old days of Franz Josef. As he opened the front door, a pack of rangy, brown-coated mongrels rushed out, set their paws on my shoulder and licked my face.

  ‘What are these dogs?’ I asked.

  ‘Pariah dogs!’ he muttered grimly. ‘Aach! I would have killed the whole litter. You see that chow, over there? Very fine animal! Grandparent a wolf! My wife took her round all the best chow studs in Bavaria to look for a dog. She refused them all . . . and then she copulated with a schnauzer!’

  We sat in his study, where there was a white faience stove, a fish-tank, a toy train and a mynah bird whooping in a cage. We began with a review of his career.

  At the age of six, he had read books on evolution and become a convinced Darwinian. Later, as a zoological student in Vienna, he had specialised in the comparative anatomy of ducks and geese: only to realise that they, in common with all other animals, also inherited ‘blocs’ or ‘paradigms’ of instinctive behaviour in their genes. The courtship ritual of a mallard drake was a ‘set-piece’. The bird would wag its tail, shake its head, bob forward, crane its neck – performing a sequence of movements which, once triggered off, would run their predictable course and were no more separable from its nature than its webbed feet or glossy green head.

  Lorenz realised, too, that these ‘fixed motor patterns’ had been transformed by the process of natural selection and must have played some vital role in the survival of the species. They could be measured, scientifically, as one measured anatomical changes between one species and the next.

  ‘And that was how I discovered ethology,’ he said. ‘Nobody taught me. I thought it was a matter of course with all psychologists, because I was a child and full of respect for other people. I had not realised I was one of the pioneers.’

  ‘Aggression’, as Lorenz defined it, was the instinct in animals and man to seek and fight – though not necessarily to kill – a rival of their own kind. Its function was to ensure the equable distribution of a species over its habitat, and that the genes of the ‘fittest’ passed to the next generation. Fighting behaviour was not a reaction but a ‘drive’ or appetite – which, like the drives of hunger or sex, would build up and demand expression either on to the ‘natural’ object, or, if none were available, on to a scapegoat.

  Unlike man, wild animals seldom fought to the death. Rather, they would ‘ritualise’ their squabbles in displays of tooth, plumage, scratch-marks or vocal calls. The intruder – providing, of course, he was the weaker intruder – would recognise these ‘Keep Out!’ signs and withdraw without a scene.

  A defeated wolf, for example, had only to bare the nape of his neck and the victor could not press home his advantage.

  Lorenz presented On Aggression as the findings of an experienced naturalist who knew a lot about fighting in animals and had seen a lot of fighting among men. He had served as an orderly on the Russian Front. He had spent years in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, and had concluded that man was a ‘dangerously aggressive’ species. War, as such, was the collective outpouring of his frustrated fighting ‘drives’: behaviour which had seen him through bad times in the primeval bush, but was lethal in an age of the H-Bomb.

  Our fatal flaw, or Fall, he insisted, was to have developed ‘artificial weapons’ instead of natural ones. As a species, we thus lacked the instinctive inhibitions which prevented the ‘professional carnivores’ from murdering their fellows.

  I had expected to find in Lorenz a person of old-fashioned courtesy and blinkered convictions, someone who had marvelled at the order and diversity of the animal kingdom and decided to shut out the painful, chaotic world of human contacts. I could not have been more mistaken. Here was a man as perplexed as any other, who, whatever his previous convictions, had an almost childlike compulsion to share the excitement of his discoveries, and to correct faults of fact or emphasis.

  He was a perfect mimic. He could project himself beneath the skin of any bird or beast or fish. When he imitated the jackdaw at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’, he became the wretched jackdaw. He became the pair of greylag ganders, entwining their necks as they performed the ‘triumph ceremony’. And when he demonstrated the sexual see-saw of chiclid fish in his aquarium – whereby a ‘Brunhilde of a fish’ refused the timid advances of her partner, yet turned into a simpering, all-too-submissive maiden the instant a real male entered the tank – Lorenz became, in turn, the ‘Brunhilde’, the weakling and the tyrant.

  He complained of being misinterpreted by people who read into the theory of aggression an excuse for endless war. ‘This’, he said, ‘is simply libellous. “Aggressivity” is not necessarily to do harm to your neighbour. It may just be a “pushing-away” behaviour. You can effect the same consequences simply by disliking your neighbour. You can say, “Wauch!” and walk away when he croaks back. That’s what frogs do.’

  Two singing frogs, he went on, would remove themselves as far as possible from each other, except at spawning time. The same was true of polar bears, which, fortunately for them, had a thin population.

  ‘A polar bear’, he said, ‘can afford to walk away from the other chap.’

  Similarly, in the Orinoco, there were Indians who would suppress tribal warfare with ‘ritual’ exchanges of gifts.

  ‘But surely’, I butted in, ‘this “gift exchange” is not a ritual to suppress aggression. It is aggression ritualised. Violence only breaks out when the parity of these exchanges is broken.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered enthusiastically. ‘Of course, of course.’

  He took a pencil from his desk and waved it towards me. ‘If I give you this gift,’ he said, ‘that means “I’m territorial here.” But it also means, “I have a territory and I am no threat to yours.” All we’re doing is fixing the frontier. I say to you, “Here I put my gift. I’m not going any further.” It would be an offence if I put my gift too far.

  ‘Territory, you see,’ he added, ‘is not necessarily the place you feed in. It’s the place in which you stay . . . where you know every nook and cranny . . . where you know by heart every refuge . . . where you are invincible to the pursuer. I’ve even measured it with sticklebacks.’

  He then gave an unforgettable performance of two angry male sticklebacks. Both were unbeatable at the centre of their territory. Both became progressively more fearful and vulnerable as they strayed from it. They would skirmish to and fro until they found an equilibrium and, afterwards, kept their distance. As he told the story, Lorenz crossed his hands under his chin splaying his fingers to imitate the stickleback spines. He coloured at the gills. He paled. He inflated and deflated, lunged and fled.

  It was this imitation, of the impotent, retreating stickleback, that reminded me, here at Middle Bore, of the cuckolded Lizard Man, who strayed from his own home country and lost his lovely wife to a stranger.

  23

  WHEN I WOKE next morning I was lying in the middle of the bright blue groundsheet, and the sun was up. The old men wanted more meat for breakfast. The ice in the ‘Eski’ had melted in the night and the steaks were swimming in blood-coloured water. We decided to cook them before they went ‘off’.

  I re-lit the embers of the fire while Arkady held a conference with Alan and the man in blue. He showed them on the survey map how the railway would miss the Lizard Rock by at least two miles and got them, reluctantly, to agree to this. Next, he pointed to the twenty-five-mile stretch of country through which he intended to drive.

  For most of the morning the vehicles edged slowly northwards over broken ground. The sun was blinding and the vegetation parched an
d drear. To the east, the land dropped away and lifted towards a ridge of pale sandhills. The valley in between was covered with a continuous thicket of mulga trees, leafless at this season, silver-grey like a blanket of low-lying mist.

  Nothing moved except the shimmering heatwaves.

  We kept crossing the path of fires. In places, all that survived of the bushes were upright, fire-hardened spikes, which staked our tyres as we ran over them. We had three flats, and Marian had two in the Land-Rover. Whenever we stopped to change a wheel, dust and ash blew in our eyes. The women would jump down, delightedly, and go off to look for bush-tucker.

  Mavis was in a very boisterous mood, and wanted to repay me for the thongs. She grabbed my hand and dragged me towards a limp, green bush.

  ‘Hey! Where are you two going?’ Arkady called.

  ‘Get him some bush-bananas,’ she shouted back. ‘He don’t know bush-bananas.’ But the bananas, when we got to them, had shrivelled up to nothing.

  Another time, she and Topsy tried to run down a goanna, but the reptile was far too quick for them. At last, she found a plant of ripe solanum berries and showered them on me in handfuls. They looked and tasted like unripe cherry-tomatoes. I ate some to please her and she said, ‘There you are, dearie,’ and reached out her chubby hand and stroked my cheek.

  When anything in the landscape even half-resembled a ‘feature’ Arkady would brake and ask Old Alan, ‘What’s that one?’ or, ‘Is this country clear?’

  Alan glared from the window at his ‘domain’.

  Around noon, we came to a clump of eucalyptus: the only patch of green in sight. Nearby there was an outcrop of sandstone, about twenty feet long and scarcely visible above the surface. It had shown up on the aerial survey, and was one of three identical outcrops lying in line along the ridge.

  Arkady told Alan that the engineer might want to quarry this rock for ballast. He might want to blast it with dynamite.

  ‘How about that, old man?’ he asked.

  Alan said nothing.

  ‘No story here? Or nothing?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘So the country’s clear, then?’

  ‘No,’ Alan took a deep sigh. ‘The Babies.’

  ‘Whose babies?’

  ‘Babies,’ he said – and in the same weary voice, he began to tell the story of the Babies.

  In the Dreamtime, the Bandicoot Man, Akuka, and his brother were hunting along this ridge. Because it was the dry season, they were terribly hungry and thirsty. Every bird and animal had fled. The trees were stripped of leaves and bushfires swept across the country.

  The hunters searched everywhere for an animal to kill until, almost at his final gasp, Akuka saw a bandicoot bolting for its burrow. His brother warned him not to kill it, for to kill one’s own kind was taboo. Akuka ignored the warning.

  He dug the bandicoot from the burrow, speared it, skinned and ate it, and immediately felt cramps in his stomach. His stomach swelled and swelled, and then it burst, and a throng of Babies spewed forth and started crying for water.

  Dying of thirst, the Babies travelled north up to Singleton, and south back to Taylor Creek, where the dam now is. They found the soakage, but drank up all the water and returned to the three rocky outcrops. The rocks were the Babies, huddled together as they lay down to die – although, as it happened, they did not die yet.

  Their uncle, Akuka’s brother, heard their cries and called on his western neighbours to make rain. The rain blew in from the west (the grey expanse of mulga was the thunderstorm metamorphosed into trees). The Babies turned on their tracks and wandered south again. While crossing a creek not far from Lizard Rock, they fell into the floodwaters and ‘melted’.

  The name of the place where the Babies ‘went back’ was Akwerkepentye, which means ‘far-travelling children’.

  When Alan came to the end of the story, Arkady said softly, ‘Don’t worry, old man. It’ll be all right. Nobody’s going to touch the Babies.’

  Alan shook his head despairingly.

  ‘Are you happy then?’ asked Arkady.

  No. He wasn’t happy. Nothing about this wicked railway was going to make him happy: but at least the Babies might be safe.

  We moved ahead.

  ‘Australia’, Arkady said slowly, ‘is the country of lost children.’

  Another hour and we reached the northern boundary of Middle Bore Station. We now had one spare tyre for the Land Cruiser: so rather than risk returning the way we’d come, we decided to make a detour. There was an old dirt road which went east and then south and came out behind Alan’s settlement. On the last lap we ran in with the railway people.

  They were clearing the country along the proposed line of track. Their earth-movers had cut a sweep through the mulga, and a strip of churned-up soil about a hundred yards wide now stretched away into the distance.

  The old men looked miserably at the stacks of broken trees.

  We stopped to talk to a black-bearded titan. He was more than seven feet tall and might have been made of bronze. Stripped to the waist, in a straw hat and stubbies, he was driving in marker-posts with a hammer. He was off, in an hour or two, to Adelaide on leave. ‘Oh boy,’ he said. ‘Am I ever glad to get out of here?’

  The road had gone. Our vehicles crawled and slewed in the loose red dirt. Three times we had to get out and push. Arkady was whacked. I suggested we stop for a break. We turned aside into the sketchy shade of some trees. There were ant-hills everywhere, splashed with bird shit. He unpacked some food and drink, and rigged up the groundsheet as an awning.

  We had expected the old men, as always, to be hungry. But they all sat huddled together, moping, refusing either to eat or to talk: to judge from their expressions you would have said they were in pain.

  Marian and the ladies had parked under a different tree, and they, too, were silent and gloomy.

  A yellow bulldozer went by in a cloud of dust.

  Arkady lay down, covered his head with a towel, and started snoring. Using my leather rucksack as a pillow, I leaned back against a tree-trunk and leafed through Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  The story of Lykaeon’s transformation into a wolf took me back to a blustery spring day in Arkadia and seeing, in the limestone cap of Mount Lykaeon itself, an image of the crouching beast-king. I read of Hyacinth and Adonis; of Deucalion and the Flood; and how the ‘living things’ were created from the warm Nilotic ooze. And it struck me, from what I now knew of the Songlines, that the whole of Classical mythology might represent the relics of a gigantic ‘song-map’: that all the to-ing and fro-ing of gods and goddesses, the caves and sacred springs, the sphinxes and chimaeras, and all the men and women who became nightingales or ravens, echoes or narcissi, stones or stars – could all be interpreted in terms of totemic geography.

  I must have dozed off myself, for when I woke my face was covered with flies and Arkady was calling, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

  We got back to Middle Bore an hour before sunset. The Land Cruiser had hardly stopped moving before Alan and the man in blue opened their doors and walked away without a nod. Big Tom mumbled something about the railway being ‘bad’.

  Arkady looked crushed. ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘What’s the use?’

  He blamed himself for letting them see the earth-movers.

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘They were bound to see it one day.’

  ‘I’d rather not with me.’

  We freshened up under a hosepipe, and I revived our hearth of the day before. Marian joined us, sitting on a sawn-off tree stump and unravelling her tangle of hair. She then compared notes with Arkady. The women had told her of a Songline called ‘Two Dancing Women’, but it never touched the line of the railway.

  We looked up to see a procession of women and children on their way back from foraging. The babies swayed peacefully in the folds of their mothers’ dresses.

  ‘You never hear them cry,’ Marian said, ‘as long as the moth
er keeps moving.’

  She had touched, unwittingly, on one of my favourite topics. ‘And if babies can’t bear to lie still,’ I said, ‘how shall we settle down later?’

  She jumped to her feet. ‘Which reminds me, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now. I promised Gladys and Topsy they’d be home tonight.’

  ‘Can’t they stay here?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t we all spend the night here?’

  ‘You can,’ she said, playfully sticking out her tongue. ‘I can’t.’

  I looked at Arkady, who shrugged, as if to say, ‘When she gets an idea into her head, no power on earth’s going to stop her.’ Five minutes later, she had rounded up the women and, with a cheerful wave, was gone.

  ‘That woman’, I said, ‘is the Pied Piper.’

  ‘Dammit!’ said Arkady.

  He reminded me of our promise to look in on Frank Olson.

  At the station-house, a large woman with heat-ravaged skin came shuffling to the front door, peered through the fly-screen and opened up.

  ‘Frank’s gone down to Glen Armond,’ she said. ‘An emergency! Jim Hanlon’s taken sick!’

  ‘When was that?’ asked Arkady.

  ‘Last night,’ said the woman. ‘Collapsed in the pub.’

  ‘We should get the chaps and go,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I think we’d better go.’

  24

  THE BARMAN OF the motel at Glen Armond said that Hanlon had come in around nine the night before and bragged of renting his caravan to an English ‘literary gent’. On the strength of this transaction, he put back five double Scotches, fell and banged his head on the floor. Expecting him to be sober by morning, they carried him to a room out back. There, in the early hours, a truckie heard him groaning and they found him, on the floor again, clutching his abdomen, with his shirt torn to ribbons.

  They called his mate, Frank Olson, who drove him down to Alice. He was on the operating table by eleven.