The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘I killed it before it killed me!’

  ‘Feeding it would’ve been better.’

  ‘I’d rather feed the mob.’

  When I saw the sense of that, he added: ‘I’ve killed more dogs than I’ve patted.’ It was a boast, not a confession.

  ‘How can you wish death on anything!’

  He looked away.

  On the other side of the car graveyard there were several huge concrete tubs, like big washing tubs, and a huge metal structure that could once have been a shed.

  ‘Melancholy, isn’t it?’ he said, pleased to change the subject.

  Mould was already blackening the tubs, and weeds plotted to take them over. Little hills of red sand had blown against their sides and settled there. Grey birds swooped above us, whirring as they perched on the walls, heads tipped to watch for worms.

  He told me that it was the wreckage of a white’s multi-million dollar plan to cure kangaroo hides for overseas markets.

  ‘A job-creation scheme,’ he said.

  A crow flapped onto the wall, keeping its distance from the other birds, cawing at us to keep our distance too.

  Adrian had fallen silent, so I knew I was supposed to respond.

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘White people’s vision,’ he said. ‘City types. Not theirs. They hunt kangaroos to feed their families, not so they can send skins off to countries they’ve never been to.’

  He checked the rear-vision mirror and hurried on.

  ‘We’re here because a man mustn’t be alone with a woman he’s not married to. I needed to stop you before you race off making things even harder for me. For a start, the mob here don’t say hello.’

  I nodded as if I knew that, though I didn’t.

  ‘Or goodbye.’

  ‘So that was why no one greeted me in the troopie –’

  ‘They don’t make eye contact. Whites stare at them, they say. They find it rude. Uncouth. They have a word for uncouth.’

  ‘What’s the word?’

  He ignored the question. ‘Just glance up between sentences, and only once,’ he said. ‘Like this.’

  He hung his head but rolled his eyes skywards. It gave him a furtive look and despite myself, I burst out laughing. ‘You look like a burglar!’ I laughed.

  But then I knew why he downcast his eyes. He was attempting to copy them. To make them love him, as Daniel had said.

  He didn’t laugh.

  ‘And no handshakes. And don’t say thank you or please because they don’t. No small talk. Behave well, or he might tell you to leave. After all, you’re of no use to them.’

  ‘So this elder really is their ruler!’ I said.

  ‘They’re not like Native Americans. They’re not hierarchical. Don’t you know anything?’

  He started the troopie, and headed towards the purple house.

  Chapter 6

  E.E. Albert imagined a meeting like this, and I’d read about it so often I could recite it:

  In the man’s eyes I’d see his childhood in this scorching, inhospitable desert that he and his ancestors knew as home for perhaps 50,000 years: I’d see his youth as he learned its ways, assessing the seasons that in the city we barely notice; I’d see reflected in his eyes this red life-giving earth with its fat snakes and fleshy bush turkeys and fruit trees, its hidden waterholes, its honey and meat hidden deep in the trunks and roots of trees; I’d see the lean seasons when there were no lizards and snakes, when fruit died on the boughs, when waterholes dried up; I’d see in his face his years of considering and assessing the men of his tribe, their loyalty and bravery, I’d see the signs of someone who has absorbed secret and esoteric knowledge that explained and ritualised his world, the like of which a white man used to cities couldn’t know or dream of, I’d see how he had endured, even welcomed, ritualised pain to learn it; I’d see a lifetime of a ruler who’s had to find in himself fortitude and compassion and patience and endless bravery, decades of trying to persuade it into the men around him, and women too.

  We pulled up a short distance away from the house, which wasn’t purple at all, more a grubby mauve. Otherwise it was identical to all the other houses, a glass window broken and boarded by a bit of wood, the guttering sagging, a downpipe broken off, children’s handprints on the walls, and all ringed with rubbish that had blown against its cyclone-wire fence.

  ‘This one?’ I asked.

  Adrian didn’t bother to nod.

  This wasn’t the dwelling place of a ruler of the desert.

  ‘Don’t be uncouth this time,’ muttered Adrian.

  I repeated to myself the rules: no eye contact, no greetings, no handshake, and no small talk. I dared to glance up for a second. There was a black man in a cowboy shirt, sitting in a chair on his sunny but dusty front verandah. Although we were approaching his court, Adrian couldn’t repress himself. He dive-bombed himself out of the troopie, but paused ostentatiously at the gate; I imagined he was trying to pause like the young Skeleton used to do. I cast down my eyes and began walking, examining minutely the grains of red dirt in the yard all made into sunlit mounds and shadowy valleys by the trampling of many bare-footed visitors, as if all I’d come for was to examine red dirt. The gate’s hinges were off and it wouldn’t open, but Adrian unhesitatingly squeezed instead through a narrow gap in the fence as if that was the most natural way to approach a ruler, and I followed. Three dogs scrambled into my limited view, better fed than the ones who tried to attack me, their backs sleek and furred. They didn’t bark, but they escorted me towards the verandah, two behind and one leading, as if they’ve been trained to do this. It was a short yard but it seemed a long walk.

  I was doing this for E.E. Albert. No eye contact, no greetings, no handshake. But I couldn’t help peeking again to see that the elder had risen courteously out of his chair at my approach. I stopped short of his verandah, in case going further would be considered uncouth.

  For the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours, I wished I’d been E.E. Albert’s best student, not her worst.

  ‘This is Kate, the city woman I told you about, who’s come to work with Collin Collins,’ Adrian’s voice was saying beyond my downcast eyes. ‘She’s learning language but she can’t speak it yet.’

  I felt like a short child with the adults talking above me. I kept saying to myself: no eye contact, no greetings, no handshake. I saw black bare feet near mine. Then a black, outstretched hand came into my limited field of vision. What should I do? I could do nothing else than reach out and shake it, though this was prohibited, but I made my eyes see only his hand.

  He kept shaking my hand. Shaking and shaking. There comes a moment in a long handshake when your gaze simply has to travel up the hand of the person you’re shaking, up his forearm, up his elbow, up his shoulder, onto his face.

  In front of me was an old but erect man, slender, tall and powerful, with square, broad shoulders and a handsome, chiselled face. In that moment I remembered the photos in E.E. Albert’s book, which I’d come later to realise were well-known photos of statuesque, slender Aboriginal men and women, the women often standing with a shield horizontal on their heads, the men often standing on a rock, surveying the distance, with one foot propped on the knee of the other leg.

  My brain was hammering: Wait till I tell her about this! In his eyes, I’d tell her, I saw his magnificence, his charisma, his patience, his bravery.

  But that wasn’t true: all I saw was a reflection of me, puny and sweating, and behind me a yard of rippling dust, with rubbish blown against a wire fence. I downcast my eyes.

  Then he spoke in English. ‘You are learning language.’

  I almost jumped at his voice. It wasn’t a question. There was no rising inflection.

  ‘Welcome to my country,’ he said.

  I looked up again, astonished.

  His eyes gripped mine.

  I decided, despite Adrian, to gaze back.

  He had the s
ort of gaze, I’d tell her, that makes you feel you have to pass a moral test. In that way, I’d be able to truthfully corroborate her fantasy – I wanted so much to corroborate it.

  I felt muted, inarticulate, how I wished I could pass his test, how I wished I knew some of his language.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all that I found to say, smiling back.

  Then I found something else to say: ‘Your land is beautiful.’

  I blushed that I’d uttered small talk, Adrian would be embarrassed and appalled, but Skeleton kept gazing and smiling. And then there came a further shock.

  ‘Thank you,’ he returned.

  Adrian’s feet were crunching on the ground, perhaps in irritation. Ordinariness came back to me.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said to the elder, as I wasn’t supposed to.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, as he wasn’t supposed to.

  Then I cast down my eyes, turned, and walked back across his red and furrowed yard, so overwrought I was almost sleepwalking. I wondered if he could tell from my body how deeply I’d fallen under his spell. E.E. Albert had been right, after all. He would’ve seen many people fall under his spell, male and female, white and black.

  I squeezed through the gap in the fence. His dogs, padding beside me to escort me out, paused, and returned to their master.

  ‘Adrian!’ His voice suddenly interrupted my reverie.

  Adrian, who’d led me out of the yard, swivelled, immediately all attention.

  ‘Too much rubbish in my yard.’

  Adrian looked around at the rubbish as if he hadn’t noticed it before.

  ‘That Bruce is lazy as well as cheeky! He doesn’t do his job. He’s no good! I’ll get his truck and drive round and personally pick it up.’

  I allowed myself to glance at Skeleton. I saw him struggling with intractable English, probably his fourth or fifth language.

  ‘No. Too much rubbish footprints!’

  Adrian was surprised into examining the ground, which was indeed pock-marked with footprints.

  ‘I can’t tell who’s been in my yard,’ explained Skeleton.

  Adrian didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘I’ll find you a rake. I’ll rake it myself,’ Adrian called to him.

  I followed Adrian to the troopie and opened my door, dreading a lecture about my disobedience. Adrian got into the driver’s seat silently. Only when the vinyl of the seats was burning into the backs of our legs did he speak.

  ‘He was showing that he knows white culture. From his stockman days. You did well,’ he said. ‘You played it by ear, and did well.’

  In my relief, I realised how little I knew Adrian.

  But I was hugely pleased because of his praise. I was reasoning: if I jump through all the hurdles as well as that, I’ll be out of here in no time.

  ‘So I’m allowed to stay?’

  ‘Only if I’m here. Skeleton and the mob here assume you’re my wife. A man is responsible for what his wife does.’

  I turned in alarm.

  ‘Your wife! Why would they think I’m your wife?’

  ‘Because you’re in my company. It’s the only way a woman is here. That’s what women here do. Be wives.’

  This roused me to fury.

  ‘I don’t think you’d know all about women here. Or what everyone single person here thinks,’ I cried.

  ‘All you know is what you’ve read in books,’ he said.

  He didn’t know what a taunt that was.

  A cloud was coming over my mind, like a cloud starting to blot out the stars in a night sky. It was covering my relief. It carried with it, in the way a coming storm stirs loose leaves in its path, a deep suspicion.

  ‘When you wrote to the university and asked for a woman to come, did you know she’d be staying in your house?’ I asked. ‘As if she was your wife?’

  He gunned the motor into action.

  ‘Introducing you has been a big concession to you. Now I must devote time to saving my own skin.’

  He was pulling up outside the house. I refused to get out. He reached over and pushed open my door. He said:

  ‘Of course you had to stay in my house. Housing for whites is limited. Now, get out, please.’

  I obeyed.

  ‘Don’t leave the house,’ he shouted after me.

  I made another cup of tea. I sat down at the kitchen table, I caught sight of my journal. Now the indentation of the dried-up biro was like a child’s secret message with only the dot at the end of the sentence showing: Today the children will lead me to the singer. I thought: if he’s sacked, it might be very difficult for me to come back. I must at least try to find the old lady right away. That’s my job. I must be able to say, At least I tried to find her. I couldn’t tell E.E. Albert that I couldn’t look for her for fear I’d displease my host.

  I had to stop appeasing everyone. I had to stop appeasing him.

  So I left the house for the second time that day, trying not to be timid, but nevertheless looking to right and left in case he was nearby – and I walked in the heat up the red road which was again empty of people except for the builder who was too busy hammering inside one of his houses to notice me, and past the dogs who were too busy quarrelling with each other, and past the rows of derelict houses – and I turned a corner and there was the hubbub of the community shop Adrian had mentioned, with family groups waiting quietly in the hot sun to go inside. No one noticed me or even looked around. Maybe all white people looked alike to them – just another pale face, another set of staring eyes. Or perhaps they were accomplished at taking information in without staring, I thought.

  I peered inside the shop. It was a large space, with a checkout and cash register in the centre, and clothes, plastic furniture, toys, DVDs and TV sets for sale, as well as rows of tinned food and giant fridges full of drinks. But there were only a dozen people inside, while outside in the heat people waited, their arms limply at their sides unless they were holding children. I thought of the poverty-stricken houses I’d walked past and wondered if they didn’t have enough money to buy anything, I had some dollars in my pocket – should I go over and smilingly distribute them? Or would that incur Adrian’s wrath? Or perhaps they weren’t Westernised enough to know to go inside? I paused. Should I help out, should I stand at the shop doorway and wave them inside like a policeman? I rather fancied myself as a Person Who Knows About Shops.

  But for the first time, a little voice inside me cautioned, and reminded me of my mistakes so far, and I turned and walked on, downcasting my eyes. I rounded another fenced corner and, in my near-blinded state, almost fell over the hills and folds of what seemed to be a grey bulky blanket dropped on the ground – but the blanket let out a startled bray. It was a donkey sleeping in the sun. A donkey! Why was a donkey in the middle of the desert? Donkeys belong in farms! European farms! It clattered off towards the shop, moving like an elegant woman in high heels and a tight skirt hurrying for a bus. Then, suddenly, I was at a school gate, a dusty schoolyard with three separate wooden buildings in an ocean of red earth, and far off in a corner, two or three children were perched high up in a tree like goannas. I paused, a little shy of walking over to them, but that was exactly what a scholar must do, she must go to the people. But before I could become a scholar, a red-cheeked, balding white man in his thirties but already with a vast beer belly bouncing above tight blue jeans emerged from one of the wooden school-houses and crossed a shady verandah carrying a large, oddly shaped bundle, which he held away from his chest. Behind him strode a woman in black shorts, a black shirt and pink-blonde hair in a crew cut.

  They both noticed me.

  ‘See, one has come,’ I heard the woman say to him. ‘After all.’

  She seemed to be reassuring him.

  ‘You’re early,’ he called to me in a jolly way. ‘You can help scrape the hairs off.’

  I walked across the playground. Behind them was a door opening on to what seemed to be a staff room with computers and gleaming musical instruments.


  I put my hand out to shake the man’s hand – he had to shuffle his burden into his other arm – and then the woman’s. I told them my name.

  ‘Craig Harmond,’ he said. ‘Headmaster.’

  He didn’t introduce the woman, but she told me she was Beth Simmons, and – with a shy glance at him – the head teacher.

  I explained I was a linguist.

  ‘That’s OK,’ the man said cheerfully, as if I’d admitted to a wrongdoing that he would generously overlook. ‘Glad you accepted the invitation.’

  Scraping off hairs was woman’s work, they told me, but the women hadn’t turned up.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ said Beth. She seemed to be addressing us both, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to know. I felt I had to explain myself more fully.

  ‘I’ve come to work with Collins,’ I said. ‘You’d know him, of course.’

  ‘Collins the Bible-basher?’ Craig laughed.

  Beth laughed with him, and their laughter seemed to last for many seconds. I felt anxious for the man who was to be my saviour. I had to stand up for him in the midst of what seemed to be disregard for the only white here who’d learned Djemiranga.

  ‘I know he’s a missionary but that was why he lived here ten years and worked out their language,’ I said. ‘He’s a linguist of international renown. Apparently he found a manuscript dating back to 1840 out in the desert and –’

  ‘Worked out this language? Hah!’ said Craig. His laughter made his stomach bounce up and down, and his cheeks ballooned until they almost covered his eyes.

  ‘You speak it?’ I asked, delighted.

  ‘Anyone could,’ said Beth, glancing at him, as if she constantly checked what she said with him. ‘It’s just – what – a few hundred words?’

  He nodded. ‘That’d be overestimating it.’

  I struggled with disappointment. She had a thin, sharp nose and her hair leaped vertically out of her scalp in a crew cut that would be severe too if it were not for the way she’d dyed it baby pink with blonde highlights. Its tips curled forward, catching the light, rebellious in their prettiness.