The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘Some talk of a blockage,’ said the barman sententiously. ‘Usually means one thing.’

  There was a pay-phone on the bar. Arkady put through a call to the hospital. The nurse on duty said Hanlon was comfortable, and asleep.

  ‘So what’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘She wouldn’t say.’

  The bar itself was made up of disused wooden railway-sleepers and above it hung a notice: ALL LIQUOR MUST BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES.

  I looked at a picture on the wall. It was an artist’s impression, in watercolour, of the proposed Glen Armond Memorial Dingo Complex. The word ‘memorial’ referred to the dingo which either ate, or did not eat, the infant Azaria Chamberlain. The plans called for a fibreglass dingo about sixty feet high, with a spiral staircase up its forelegs and a dark-red restaurant inside its belly.

  ‘Incredible,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Arkady. ‘Humorous.’

  The night bus to Darwin drew up outside, and the bar filled up with passengers. There were Germans, Japanese, a pink-kneed Englishman and the usual cast of Territorians. They ate pie and ice-cream, drank, went outside to piss, and came back to drink again. The stopover lasted fifteen minutes. Then the driver called and they all trooped out, leaving the bar to its core of regulars.

  At the far end of the room, a fat Lebanese was playing pool with a gaunt, fair-haired young man who had one wall-eye and was trying to explain, in a stutter, how Aboriginal kinship systems were ‘so . . . so . . . co-com . . . fu . . . fuckin’-plex’. At the bar, a big man with a purple birthmark on his neck was methodically swilling Scotches through his rotted teeth, and talking to the police patrolman whom we had met the day before at Burnt Flat.

  He had changed into jeans, a gold neck-chain and a clean white singlet. Out of uniform, he appeared to have shrunk. His arms were thin and white above the line of his shirt cuffs. His Alsatian lay very still, leashed to the bar-stool, eyeing some Aboriginals, its ears pricked up and tongue extended.

  The policeman turned to me, ‘So what’ll it be?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘What are you drinking?’

  ‘Scotch and soda,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Ice.’

  ‘So you’re a writer, eh?’

  ‘News gets around.’

  ‘What kind of writing?’

  ‘Books,’ I said.

  ‘Published?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Science fiction?’

  ‘NO!’

  ‘Ever write a best-seller?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I’m thinking of writing a best-seller myself.’

  ‘Good on you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I hear.’

  ‘I certainly would.’

  ‘Unbelievable stories,’ he said in his thin, petulant voice. ‘It’s all there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my head.’

  ‘The great thing’s to get it on to paper.’

  ‘I got a great title.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You want me to tell you?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He dropped his jaw and gaped at me, ‘You must be joking, mate. You think I’d give away my title. You might use it! That title’s worth money.’

  ‘Then you should hang on to it.’

  ‘A title’, he said, with great feeling, ‘can make or break a book.’

  Think of Ed McBain! Killer’s Pay-Off! Think of Shark City! Or Eden’s Burning! Think of The Day of the Dog! Great titles. The cash value of his title he estimated at 50,000 US dollars. With a title like that, you could make a great movie. Even without the book!

  ‘Even without the story?’ I suggested.

  ‘Could do,’ he nodded.

  Titles changed hands for millions, he said, in the United States. Not that he was going to sell off his title to a movie company. The title and the story belonged together.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t want to part them.’

  ‘You shouldn’t.’

  ‘Maybe we could collaborate?’ he said.

  He visualised an artistic and business partnership. He would provide the title and the story. I would write the book because he, as a policeman, did not have the leisure for writing.

  ‘Writing takes time,’ I agreed.

  ‘Would you be interested?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked disappointed. He was not prepared, yet, to tell me the title, but to whet my appetite he proposed to let me in on the plot. The plot of this unbelievable story began with an Aboriginal being flattened by a road-train.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I better tell you,’ he said.

  He moistened his lips. He had come to a big decision.

  ‘Body Bag,’ he said.

  ‘Body Bag?’

  He closed his eyes and smiled.

  ‘I never told anyone before,’ he said.

  ‘But Body Bag?’

  ‘The bag you put the body in. I told you the story starts with a dead coon on the highway.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘You like it?’ he asked, anxiously.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean the title.’

  ‘I know you mean the title.’

  I turned to the man with the purple birthmark, who was sitting on my left. He had been stationed in England, during the war, near Leicester. He had fought in France and then married a girl from Leicester. The wife came to live in Australia, but went back with their child, to Leicester.

  He had heard we were surveying sacred sites.

  ‘Know the best thing to do with a sacred site?’ he drawled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dynamite!’

  He grinned and raised his glass to the Aboriginals. The birthmark oscillated as he drank.

  One of the Aboriginals, a very thin hill-billy type with a frenzy of matted hair, leaned both elbows on the counter, and listened.

  ‘Sacred sites!’ the big man leered. ‘If all what them says was sacred sites, there’d be three hundred bloody billion sacred sites in Australia.’

  ‘Not far wrong, mate!’ called the thin Aboriginal.

  Over on my right I could hear Arkady talking to the policeman. They had both lived in Adelaide, in the suburb of St Peters. They had gone to the same school. They’d had the same maths master, but the policeman was five years older.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ said Arkady.

  ‘So why do you bother with them?’ The policeman jerked his thumb at the Aboriginals.

  ‘Because I like them.’

  ‘And I like them,’ he said. ‘I like them! I like to do what’s right by them. But they’re different.’

  ‘In what way different?’

  The policeman moistened his lips again, and sucked the air between his teeth.

  ‘Made differently,’ he said at last. ‘They’ve got different urinary tracts to the white man. Different waterworks! That’s why they can’t hold their booze!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s been proved,’ said the policeman. ‘Scientifically.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  The fact was, he went on, there should be two different drinking laws: one for whites and one for blacks.

  ‘You think so?’ said Arkady.

  ‘Penalise a man for having better waterworks?’ said the policeman, his voice lifting in indignation. ‘It’s unfair. It’s unconstitutional.’

  The Alsatian whined, and he patted it on the head.

  From having different waterworks was an easy step to having different grey-matter. An Aboriginal brain, he said, was different to that of Caucasians. The frontal lobes were flatter.

  Arkady narrowed his eyes to a pair of Tatar slits. He was now quite nettled.

  ‘I like them,’ the policeman repeated. ‘I never said I didn’t like them. But they�
�re like children. They’ve got a childish mentality.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘They’re incapable of progress,’ he said. ‘And that’s what’s wrong with you Land Rights people. You’re standing in the way of progress. You’re helping them destroy white Australia.’

  ‘Let me buy you a drink?’ I interrupted.

  ‘No, thanks,’ the policeman snapped. His face was working wrathfully. His fingernails, I noticed, were bitten to the quick.

  Arkady waited a moment or two, until he’d got control of his temper, and then began to explain, slowly and reasonably, how the surest way of judging a man’s intelligence was his ability to handle words.

  Many Aboriginals, he said, by our standards would rank as linguistic geniuses. The difference was one of outlook. The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future. The Aboriginals put all their mental energies into keeping the world the way it was. In what way was that inferior?

  The policeman’s mouth shot downwards.

  ‘You’re not Australian,’ he said to Arkady.

  ‘I bloody am Australian.’

  ‘No, you’re not. I can tell you’re not Australian.’

  ‘I was born in Australia.’

  ‘That doesn’t make you Australian,’ he taunted. ‘My people have lived in Australia for five generations. So where was your father born?’

  Arkady paused and, with quiet dignity, answered, ‘My father was born in Russia.’

  ‘Hey!’ the policeman tightened his forelip and turned to the big man. ‘What did I tell you, Bert? A Pom and a Com!’

  25

  THE CLOUDS CAME up in the night and the morning was overcast and muggy. We had bacon and eggs for breakfast in the bar of the motel. The owner’s wife made us sandwiches for a picnic, and gave us ice for the ‘Eski’. Arkady again called the hospital.

  ‘They still won’t say what’s wrong,’ he said as he hung up. ‘I think it’s bad.’

  We debated whether to go back to Alice, but there was nothing we could do, so we decided to press on to Cullen. Arkady spread the map over the table. The drive, he calculated, would take two days. We’d cut across country and spend the night at Popanji, and then go on to Cullen.

  The woman drinking coffee at the next banquette overheard us and asked, apologetically, if by any chance we were going past Lombardy Downs.

  Arkady glanced at the map.

  ‘It’s on the way,’ he said. ‘Can we give you a lift?’

  ‘Oh no!’ the woman cringed. ‘No. No. I don’t want to go there. I wondered if you’d take something for me. A letter.’

  She was an awkward, frayed young woman with lacklustre hair and unswerving amber eyes. She enunciated her syllables in a ladylike fashion, and wore a fawn-coloured dress with long sleeves.

  ‘I’ve got it written,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t mind, would you? I’ll go and fetch it if you –’

  ‘Of course, we’ll take it,’ said Arkady.

  She ran off and came running back, out of breath, with the letter. She pushed it away from her, vehemently, on to the table. Then she began to finger a tiny gold crucifix around her neck.

  ‘It’s for Bill Muldoon,’ she said, staring dully at the name on the envelope. ‘He’s station-manager at Lombardy. He’s my husband. Ask anyone to give it him. But if you see him . . . if he asks you if you’ve seen me . . . tell him I’m well.’

  She looked frail and miserable and sick.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We will.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said in a constricted voice, and sat down to finish her coffee.

  We drove for three hours across a featureless plain. Showers had fallen in the night and laid the dust on the road. We saw some emus a long way off. The wind was rising. We saw something swinging from a solitary tree. It was a huge knitted teddy bear, with royal blue trousers and a scarlet cap. Someone had slashed it at the neck, and the kapok stuffing was spilling out. On the ground, there was a cross made from twigs, rubbed with ochre and its arms lashed together with hair-string.

  I picked up the cross and held it out to Arkady.

  ‘Aboriginal business,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.’

  I dropped it and got back into my seat. Up ahead, the sky was darkening.

  ‘It could be’, said Arkady, ‘that we’re in for a storm.’

  We turned off at the sign marked Lombardy Downs. After a mile or so the track skirted round the end of a runway. An orange windsock blew horizontally in the whirring wind, and there was a light aircraft in the distance.

  The man who owned the station owned an airline.

  The homestead was a sprawling white house set back among some stunted trees, but closer to the strip there was a smaller, brick-built house alongside an open hangar. In the hangar were housed the owner’s collection of vintage aeroplanes and cars. Parked beside a Tiger Moth were a Model ‘T’ Ford and a Rolls-Royce farm truck, its wooden sides painted brown with black trim.

  I told Arkady my father’s story about the Rolls-Royce and the sheep millionaire.

  ‘Not so far-fetched after all,’ I said.

  A blowsy woman appeared at the door in a green-spotted housecoat. Her blonde hair was up in curlers.

  ‘You boys looking for someone?’ she called out.

  ‘Bill Muldoon,’ I called back against the wind. ‘We’ve got a letter for him.’

  ‘Muldoon’s out,’ she said. ‘Come on in and I’ll make you a coffee.’

  We went into a messy kitchen. Arkady put the letter on the table, on the red-checked oilcloth cover, next to some women’s magazines. We sat down. An oil painting of Ayer’s Rock hung aslant on the wall. The woman glanced at the writing on the envelope and shrugged. She was the other woman.

  While the kettle boiled, she unwrapped a half-eaten candy bar, nibbled off an inch or so, wrapped it up again, and licked the chocolate off her lips.

  ‘God, I am bored!’ she said.

  The owner of the station, she told us, had flown up from Sydney for the weekend, so Muldoon was on call. She poured out our coffees and said again that she was bored.

  We were on the point of leaving when Muldoon came in – an athletic, red-faced man dressed from head to foot in black: black hat, boots, jeans and a black shirt open to the navel. He imagined we had come on business and shook our hands. The instant he saw the letter, he paled and clenched his jaw.

  ‘Get out of here,’ he said.

  We left.

  ‘Unfriendly,’ I said.

  ‘The pastoral ethic,’ said Arkady. ‘Same the world over.’

  Half an hour later we crossed a cattle-grid which marked the end of Lombardy Downs. We had narrowly missed a cloudburst and watched the chutes of rain slanting sideways towards a line of hills. We then joined the road from Alice to Popanji.

  The sides of the road were littered with abandoned cars, usually upside down, in heaps of broken glass. We stopped beside a rusty blue Ford with a black woman squatting beside it. The bonnet was open and a small boy, naked, stood sentinel on the roof.

  ‘What’s up?’ Arkady leaned from the window.

  ‘Plugs,’ said the woman. ‘Gone to get new plugs.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The Alice.’

  ‘How long’s he been gone?’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘You all right there?’

  ‘Yup,’ the woman sniffed.

  ‘You got water and everything?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You want a sandwich?’

  ‘Yup.’

  We gave the woman and boy three sandwiches. They grabbed them and ate them greedily.

  ‘You sure you’re all right, then?’ Arkady persisted.

  ‘Yup,’ the woman nodded.

  ‘We can take you back to Popanji.’

  She gave a grumpy shake of the head and waved us away.

  Around lunchti
me we crossed a creek with river-red-gums growing in its bed. It was a good place to picnic. We picked our way over waterworn boulders, and pools of stagnant yellow water with leaves afloat on the surface. The country to the west was grey and treeless, and cloud shadows were moving across it. There were no cattle, no fences, no wind-pumps: this country was too arid for grazing. We had left behind the cow shit: there were no more flies.

  As we walked up to one of the gum trees, a flock of black cockatoos flew out, squawking like rusty hinges, and settled on a dead gum up ahead. I took out my glasses and saw the flash of scarlet feathers glowing under their tails.

  We spread the picnic in the shade. The sandwiches were uneatable so we chucked them to the crows. But we had biscuits and cheese, olives and a can of sardines, and five cold beers between us.

  We talked politics, books and Russian books. He said how strange it was to feel oneself Russian in a country of Anglo-Saxon prejudice. Spend an evening in a roomful of Sydney ‘intellectuals’, and they’d all end up dissecting some obscure event within the first Penal Settlement.

  He looked around at the immense sweep of country.

  ‘Pity we didn’t get here first,’ he said.

  ‘We the Russians?’

  ‘Not only Russians,’ he shook his head. ‘Slavs, Hungarians, Germans even. Any people who could cope with wide horizons. Too much of this country went to islanders. They never understood it. They’re afraid of space.

  ‘We’, he added, ‘could have been proud of it. Loved it for what it was. I don’t think we’d have sold it off so easily.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why, in this country of untold resources, do Australians go on selling them off to foreigners?’

  ‘They’d sell off anything,’ he shrugged.

  He then changed the subject and asked if ever, on my travels, I’d been with a hunting people.

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘In Mauritania.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The western Sahara. They weren’t so much a hunting tribe as a hunting caste. They were called the Nemadi.’

  ‘And hunted?’

  ‘Oryx and addax antelopes,’ I said. ‘With dogs.’

  In the city of Walata, once a capital of the Almoravid Empire and now a jumble of blood-coloured courtyards, I spent three whole days pestering the Governor to allow me to meet the Nemadi.