Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘Wild,’ said Palomor.

  ‘Ramingining had its share of dangerous snakes as well. King browns, taipans: the taipans were always out at the barge landing road at night, and it wasn’t a great idea to get out of your car; they were quite aggressive. And there were green tree snakes, too; they came sliding on to the front verandah of our house to eat our beloved frogs. It was a harsh place: everything you loved was always dying in front of you.’

  I slipped away. There was Dyson—the man behind the show.

  ‘What are you doing with that dude?’ he said, suspiciously, pointing at Palomor.

  ‘Why? Some problem?’

  ‘He’s a lunatic. He came out to our bush camp with some walkers not so long ago; and he was going round at night with a torch picking up death adders and bringing them back in to photograph beside the fire: you’d have thought they were fashion models or something.’

  I explained. He frowned and glowered for a while, then brightened.

  ‘Come and meet the artist,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know him: Don Nakadilinj Namundja.’

  ‘Namundja?’

  He nodded, with a look of pride: it was a great name in the art circles of the North.

  ‘Any relation to the famous Namundjas—to Samuel? To Bob?’

  ‘Full brother—it’s a creative dynasty. And just look at the way he paints.’

  We were back with the others now, in front of the twining snake.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Palomor. ‘What species?’

  ‘You ought to know,’ said Dyson: ‘Snake man!’

  ‘Don’t hold back,’ I said.

  ‘The locals call it Nawaran, in the various dialects of Kunwinjku,’ Dyson then said, in a milder voice, becoming slightly professorial: ‘But what is it in fact? There are ambiguities. Western experts might well disagree. You can see the head is broad, yet delicate: and that tells us we have a python on our hands. But is it a children’s python, or an Oenpelli?’

  ‘An Oenpelli python,’ breathed Palomor: ‘How much I’d love to see one of them. How much I’d love to go there—see Oenpelli, and that country—over Cahills Crossing, and up in the plateau where the rock-art sites all are!’

  ‘The odd thing,’ Dyson went on, ‘is that people in West Arnhem Land use the same word for both snakes—even though to our eyes they look very different. The children’s python is minuscule, discreet and mid-grey; your Oenpelli is vast, and iridescent—all the colours of the rainbow—I’d say there’s no doubt it was the original Rainbow Serpent.’

  ‘And it’s exotic, and beautiful, and rare,’ finished Palomor, breaking in.

  ‘Not so rare,’ said Dyson: ‘You can find them, if you put your mind to it, out in the back country of the plateau. In fact there was one just the other day slithering around the Oenpelli community art centre, looking for mice: it met a dreadful fate.’

  Dyson began describing the show: its elements, its themes, how it came about—a twisting tale. He was at his base in Jabiru. There was a call one day from a remote outstation camp he knew well, high in the stone country: a painter had arrived, a traditional man; he needed materials. Dyson flew in. Namundja and he met; they worked together: bark paintings poured out, renditions of bush haunts and totemic creatures. They both felt they were on the verge of something new. After a few weeks of this collaboration, it seemed natural to them to make the long trip out to the Namundja clan estate.

  ‘Mankorlod,’ said Dyson. ‘The name alone was enough to evoke Eden for me! All the paintings I’d seen of it showed a lush, magic-seeming world. Don hadn’t been out there himself for more than thirty years. It was two hundred and fifty kilometres down back tracks. We set off: I could hardly wait. All the conversations we’d had in the months we’d known each other, and all their strange metaphysical overtones: they’d had their effect. I was imagining a place with cool streams, a rich monsoonal rainforest, palms, noisy fruit bats and birds, ringtail possums on the rock ledges, yam vines growing, pandanus, lilies on the sacred waters. How wonderful it would have been!’

  We were hanging on his words. He shook his head: ‘I suppose, after so many years working in the Top End, I should have known. Expect the unexpected. The tracks petered out almost to nothing. When we finally found the outstation, no one was there. It was dry, and hot. The ground was spiked with charred grasses from an old burn-off. There was a scatter of tin huts, a schoolhouse, a water tank, a repeater tower. No sign of any lush forest or magic spring—no running water. You don’t get to see what you dream quite that simply in Arnhem Land.’

  A slightly built Aboriginal man with keen eyes, short, greying hair and heavy forehead furrows had joined us.

  ‘The painter,’ said Namundja, with an air of great formality: ‘Me’—and laughed. He had been circling round the room. He paused. He turned to Palomor. ‘You like the Nawaran?’ He reached up one hand, and with the tips of its fingers stroked the python’s painted head.

  ‘Very much,’ said Palomor.

  ‘Come and see. I’ll show you him. At Oenpelli, if you want.’

  *

  The year just then beginning took its course. For much of it I was caught up, working on long-term projects overseas. Time went by before I came back to the North: the storm season had circled round again. The flight I took in was rough all the way, through thick banks of cloud: we were weaving; the descent began. At last I could see the shining turquoise water, and the silt flows being carried by the harbour tide. There were lightning fires on Cox Peninsula; there were rainbows hanging in the air. All was as it should be on the ground: humid, enervating, hot. Then, in the terminal, I heard a voice call my name, and I caught a sadness in its tone. I turned. It was Dyson, smiling an agonised smile.

  ‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose, from last month? No? I’m just on my way south again: my flight’s not leaving for an hour. I can give you the story, if you’ve got the time. It’s about death.’

  ‘Where better, then,’ I said, ‘than a departure lounge?’

  We found a table at the airport coffee shop; I settled back, and, surrounded by a slowly shifting amalgam of travellers, fretful airline staff and blue-uniformed cleaners, Dyson told his tale. It, too, began with a journey; it began fast, then abruptly the pace slowed: he lingered, he fell into reveries, he retold entire episodes from varied perspectives. It was an art story. There had been an exhibition arranged, long before: a year’s end event, in Sydney’s Kings Cross—a show to reveal Don Nakadilinj Namundja’s work to the wider world, and highlight the bark paintings of his elder brother, Bob Wanur, who was at that time gravely ill. Things diverged from the set plan early on. Instead of flying in a week before to Darwin, Namundja had gone off south, to the furthest reaches of the Arnhem plateau—to Bulman, his mother’s country: he had important duties there.

  ‘You don’t know that much about ceremony in Arnhem Land, do you?’ said Dyson.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It can be an involved affair: things are never what we might think they should be. Look at Don Nakadilinj, for instance: he comes across as low-key, wouldn’t you say? Just an average bush man who lives on outstations: friendly, doesn’t say much. But that’s not all he is. There’s another level.’

  Dyson leaned over: ‘He’s a man of law,’ he whispered, but with emphasis: ‘He’s at the centre of things we don’t even know—or we’re not supposed to know. He’s a different man at the ceremonies: he has knowledge, in all its layers. The anthropologists have told me; they’ve heard him describing the journey paths of the ancestral beings across the stone country in the finest detail: all that country we just fly over and regard as harsh and trackless and inaccessible—that’s his world. He’s got no house, but he’s always got a roof over his head when he arrives anywhere; he’s got no car, but he’s always travelling long distances; no wife, but scores of sons, daughters, nieces, nephews from his extended families. To our eyes he might seem simple: in that world, he’s a master. A master of suspense, as well. He was still out at t
he business camp in the bush the day before we were due to go south. He knew exactly what he was doing. He drove all the way back across the plateau, pushed through to Manmoyi outstation, caught a light plane from there to Jabiru and then in to Darwin to catch the Qantas flight. We travelled down together. I was as out of place as him. I hadn’t been to Sydney for years: I had no clue about all those tunnels and the dual carriageways they’ve put in between Mascot and Darlinghurst. How lost we were! It was late when at last we reached the gallery, dark: the paintings were hanging there. They looked like jewels, each one beautifully lit. There was a message waiting for us to ring Injalak Art Centre at Oenpelli. We called. They asked Don to come to the phone—and that’s how he heard the news that his brother had died. There he was, on his first visit south, in a strange bleached-white gallery cube, surrounded by the sacred paintings he and Wanur had made. He wept; he tried to sing—a mourning song; he broke down again. I remember that moment, very clearly: it began raining right then, outside; strong rain—it came lashing hard against the windows of the gallery.’

  Dyson paused: a handful of Arnhem Landers who had been exploring their way through the airport had caught the sense of his story; they settled quietly in the empty chairs at our table; a couple more stood to one side, also listening, saying nothing, nodding gravely from time to time as he spoke.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘It’s hard to capture things like this. I want to tell you, and I can’t. I want to give over every precious detail: I want to tell you how beautiful those days were—and I just have pale memory: not the reality, nothing like. I tried to write about it all, immediately afterwards: I even finished off a piece for the Jabiru Rag—you know, the little newspaper they print out at Jabiru. That brought some parts of what had happened into focus—but others just slipped from me: I was too close to it all. What I see clearly in my mind’s eye now is the opening night—when the crowds were gathered, and the time came for Don to speak. What would he say? What would the reaction be? I was worried for him—he’d been quiet, and full of sorrow, ever since we’d got the news.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He stepped forward. We had Murray Garde, the great expert on Kunwinjku languages, to translate—and now I think back, it was probably the only time an artist from West Arnhem Land has ever been understood by a southern audience. It was the most extraordinary speech: precise, thoughtful, full of pride and poise. As he was giving it, I realised it was a portrait of himself. Don told them how he’d been living with his brother, for years, in Oenpelli, and they’d been painting together, side by side: painting their identity—the same paintings that were all around us. Those works showed the things that meant the most to him: he belonged to them—they were his clan’s emblems, the badges of his being, the foundations of who he was. They were his brother’s, and they were a tribute to his brother; they were the sites in his country, and the creatures there: the snakes and possums and black wallaroo; the plants, as well, the sand palms and the lilies and bush plums—all the things that made him happy, even in the sadness that he felt. The audience was quiet. I could hear my breathing. I could hear the pulse of the blood in my ears. It was one of those moments of intensity: when you’re completely present, when you’re at one with yourself. That was what he did for us, that night. Then the applause came. He took all the hugs, and handshakes—it was over.’

  Dyson stopped. His listeners waited.

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Not at all. There were other episodes, in those days: little scenes—and they were pure, and very telling, each in its own way: you know how rare deep experiences are in modern life. It was as if all this was a brief interval lifted out of time’s usual flow. We went on an excursion to the art gallery, and looked at all the Kunwinjku paintings there; they asked Don about the themes and elements there might be in the different works; he just ran his hands over their surfaces: you could see him singing the songs for the paintings underneath his breath; in fact, the barks seemed quite different when they were in his presence; it was as if they’d come alive for him.

  ‘We paid a visit to Ian Dunlop, that old film-maker who worked so long in Arnhem Land: he showed us a film of first contact on the Sepik River that he’d made in the 1960s. His house was full of art, and not just Aboriginal: there were Tucksons; there was a Picasso that Don quite liked; there was even a pair of ceremonial boomerangs for him to play.

  ‘We made other visits; and all these cameos seemed very strong events. I didn’t realise why at the time: perhaps now I do. Everywhere we went we were meeting men and women who knew Arnhem Land, and knew enough about its depths: they were linguists, art curators and collectors; they were all experts in the study of some aspect of the culture. For them, Don wasn’t just a small, quiet Aboriginal man of middle years: he was cloaked in grandeur and authority; he was like a prince, or king—and at each place we called in there was this sense of a formal mission under way. They responded to him. If he was excited, they were excited; if he was grieving, they grieved. He was like an amplifier. It became quite clear to me in those few days just how important he was for each one of them. It was as if they needed him in order to see, to have great thoughts, to speculate about man’s place in the world. And how was all that for me, I wondered. What was I doing on the frontier between two worlds? Have we borrowed and adopted traditional Aboriginal people and their culture because we have so little ourselves?’

  At this point, the Arnhem Landers listening gave little inscrutable smiles. Dyson saw, and smiled back.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ he went on, quietly: ‘You never know yourself. You don’t step back often enough to look. Though we spent long hours all through that week together just thinking, saying nothing. We were staying in a large house, in Glebe: it was the home of a pair of musicologists, Allan and Linda. They also understood the world of the Top End: they’d been working on the song traditions of the North for years. They filled the house with music, from all the cultures of the world: it was wonderful; you had no idea what was coming next. Sounds came floating through—Schubert symphonies, Bach cantatas, Arabic Café, Islamic pop—we were plunged into the flow of it; it was like a trance. We sipped tea all day long, the clean Sydney light poured in through the windows, and all the world’s bitter weight began to fall away. And there was one strange thing that happened in that week, too: it happened almost as soon as we reached the house—it was the same evening that we’d spoken to Oenpelli and heard the news. Do you want me to tell you? Do you have much time for meaningful coincidences?

  ‘Go on,’ I said: ‘Please.’

  ‘Our hosts had already assigned the bedrooms for our stay: they showed us round. They’d arranged things so Don and Murray would share, and sleep in one of the larger rooms, a kind of lounge, covered in lovely carpets from India and Afghanistan. We walked in: there on the window sill was a large mantis.’

  ‘The insect?’

  ‘A praying mantis. Don spotted it, and froze. “Marlindji,” he called out: he showed us all. “It’s because I’m here,” he said: “The Marlindji is showing itself to me here because my brother died last night.” I understood at once. The praying mantis is always in his paintings—it’s almost his favourite subject: it has a special place in the ceremonies for death in West Arnhem Land.’

  ‘How?’

  Dyson glanced up; the listeners around us had gone.

  ‘It’s seen as a skeletal being,’ he said: ‘It’s painted very deliberately on all the barks as a disarticulated creature: you can see its limbs and body parts, but they don’t fit, one to the next. The Marlindji is the being that oversees the funerals; it shows itself at times of death. And that all makes sense: it’s bound up with the burial practices—the hollow log funeral ceremony, when the bones of the deceased have been separated, and are placed in their coffin. The mantis is the guardian being at the threshold: between life and death; between the time of our presence in the body and our passage to another space. For Don, that momen
t when the Marlindji came to him was the sign—it was the confirmation of the news. He could see his brother lying in Oenpelli, dead.’

  ‘That’s a striking story,’ I said.

  ‘It was for all of us,’ said Dyson: ‘We were quiet. We felt the links between the natural kingdom and the world of man—and once you’ve seen that, once you’ve felt that tap on the shoulder, it’s hard not to feel it with you all the time.’

  *

  Weeks passed. That airport story, with its tone of mingled joy and sadness, stayed in my mind. The weather broke; the rains came. I resumed my Darwin life, as best I could. I made contact with Palomor: we arranged to meet up that afternoon, on the verandah of the Cool Spot, where one can sit and watch the harbour’s reach, the low shore, the red cliffs and the storm clouds stretching away. He appeared: jaunty, smiling, lithe.

  ‘Did you see the Troop Carrier?’ he began.

  ‘I saw that strange thing on the front.’

  ‘The high-capacity solar panel with storage cells. I just fitted it. It’s a game-changer.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Self-sufficiency, of course. You can run advanced electronics off it straight away, wherever you pull up—no matter how remote.’