The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘It’s a cultural relationship,’ she said, from up the back of the room. ‘By skin rules, this little girl must look after the other little girl always, as if she’s her mother. Isn’t that right, Libby?’

  Libby looked away, embarrassed perhaps.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kana to the child. ‘I didn’t understand.’

  There seemed a hiatus. I waited for Beth to formally greet or at least introduce the ladies, but all she did was write.

  So I spoke.

  ‘I’ve brought Vanessa who studies plants and how they were used in the old days, and you all know Rosa, Dawnie, Mary and Fanny.’

  I paused, wondering what was appropriate to do next. I didn’t want to make the women feel uneasy, but I did want them to feel honoured, if only in a white way.

  ‘Please welcome them.’

  I began to clap and the little children joined in, enjoying themselves making such a noise, and getting carried away with giggles, and then the watchers at the windows broke their silence and applauded too, laughing and cheering and stamping. There was a ragged roar of applause. Inside the room, the little children had to be shushed. Slowly, the watchers outside subsided.

  I didn’t suggest the children in the room say hello, partly because that might make the ladies feel uneasy because saying hello was such a white convention. Besides, they might well have been in their company all morning. They might have just now eaten lunch together.

  Kana asked Vanessa what she’d been doing with the ladies. But before Vanessa could open her mouth, Beth strode to the door, threw it open, and glared out at the children. By now, there would’ve been at least three hundred on the verandahs – perhaps all the children on the settlement.

  ‘You’re being too noisy. I will not be insulted like this,’ she roared. ‘This is meant to be a place of learning. You’re trespassing in a place of education with intent to create a public nuisance.’

  Some older boys at the back sniggered. ‘Loser!’ I heard one call, but he was hushed by the others.

  ‘I thought we’re supposed to be here,’ another, more irrepressible boy called, and the young girls around him laughed.

  That was enough for Beth.

  ‘Get out,’ she yelled. ‘All of you. Or –’ her voice rose to a shriek, ‘I’ll get the police.’

  At the word ‘police’, everyone understood. There was a collective indrawn breath from the children both on the verandahs, and in the room. Two little girls cried out and, hand in hand, jumped out of their chairs and flew out of the room, almost knocking Beth over, yelling to their relatives in Djemiranga. I heard the colourful Djemiranga word for ‘police’, which I’d remembered because it described the metallic numbers on official shirts.

  ‘Sit down,’ Beth hurled at the little girls, pointing to the room with a long outstretched finger in case they misunderstood. They returned, their eyes out on stalks, one hiccupping in her sobs. The nearest watchers on the verandahs turned and walked off, then more children filed after them, then more, and then they were all thronging over the schoolyard and out to the gates, where a few teenage boys hovered. Craig appeared at his door, holding his phone menacingly as if he was at that very moment calling the police, and the last of the children melted away.

  Beth slammed the door.

  ‘How dare you!’ she shouted at me. ‘We could’ve had a riot! Begin,’ she ordered Vanessa, as if Vanessa too was a naughty child.

  So Vanessa explained what we’d been shown about the old ways of making flour for damper, and Rosa translated it into Djemiranga, adding on the way a great deal more detail about plants and their multitude of names and how each one used to be prepared. The children listened intently, even, I thought, proudly, with shining eyes and smiles. On the other hand, Beth didn’t seem to listen at all. She was still busy with little pieces of paper. Then she looked up at me, oblivious to all but her thoughts, and spoke across Rosa’s Djemiranga.

  ‘You teach the next lesson, parts of the body. In their language,’ she ordered.

  This was going from bad to worse. I had to try to stop it.

  I left my seat, walked around the outside of the desks and, once I stood near her, I whispered.

  ‘I can’t speak Djemiranga. I’ll mispronounce the words. We need Libby to do this.’

  ‘You should do it,’ she answered. ‘You’re supposed to be the linguist.’

  Just then, the door burst open, and Craig walked in. He held up his hand for silence, and his hand was obeyed.

  ‘Good afternoon, children,’ he said. The children stood. His eyes moved around the faces. He didn’t look at all pleased to see so many children. He still gave no greeting to the ladies.

  ‘Sit down. Proceed, Beth.’ He sat and waited.

  ‘We’re doing parts of the body,’ Beth told Craig. ‘I’ve written parts of the body on these slips of paper. Our visitor, Kate, has agreed to be my assistant.’

  Craig nodded approval and she shoved the little cards into my hand.

  ‘Kate, you read the words,’ she insisted loudly.

  I looked at the first word, Kapuju.

  I held up the card.

  ‘Can anyone read this? Libby, can you help me?’

  ‘Ask me,’ said Beth to me. She smiled at Craig. ‘I’ve worked with Indigenous people for ten years, as you know.’

  She read the word. It wasn’t a sound I’d heard, but what would I know?

  ‘Say it after me,’ she told the class.

  The children looked at her blankly.

  ‘Can’t anyone read it?’

  She pushed at my arm so I was holding the card higher.

  Still silence from the children.

  ‘You’re probably mispronouncing it,’ said Vanessa to Beth. ‘They clearly think you’re speaking a language other than Djemiranga, perhaps some sort of English they haven’t heard before.’

  ‘Of course I’m not speaking English!’ cried Beth. ‘I’m speaking Djemiranga.’

  ‘But it probably doesn’t sound like Djemiranga,’ I explained, encouraged by Vanessa. I was turning out to be such a coward in front of Beth and Craig that I needed Vanessa’s strength. ‘I can hear sounds in it that aren’t Djemiranga sounds. For a start,’ I told Beth, ‘their “u” sound isn’t the same sound as the English “u”.’

  ‘What does the word mean?’ asked Vanessa, turning to Libby.

  Libby whispered it to her, so she wouldn’t shame Beth publicly, and Vanessa left her seat and came to sit up the front, near Beth.

  ‘Point to your arm,’ she suggested quietly to Beth. ‘Ask them for their word for “arm”, and then show them the word you’ve written down.’

  ‘That’s not how they’re to learn,’ said Beth. ‘They have to say it after me.’

  She read it again, again mispronouncing it.

  The faces of the children were closed. Are they laughing to themselves the way we did when someone can’t get their tongue around our native language, or were they thinking: Here’s another bit of white craziness? But they were polite children, and familiar with this sort of misunderstanding when their parents dealt with whites.

  I was still holding up the card. It was my turn to try to rescue the situation.

  ‘Libby – please tell me how to pronounce this word.’ I felt that as a visitor, it was my right to invite her to speak.

  Libby roused herself and said the word, and I repeated it. She nodded. There was a murmur from the children, so I knew that they recognised the sound.

  I said to the class: ‘Is kapuju –’ I pointed to my leg and shook it high, my skirt flouncing, ‘this?’

  Suddenly the atmosphere changed, and everyone was laughing.

  I pointed to my ear, sticking it out at an odd angle, clowning. ‘This?’

  More gales of laughter.

  I pointed to my eye, walking around grotesquely, like a mad thing escaped from a pantomime production of King Lear: ‘This?’

  More laughter. Now, to my relief, the ladies were laughing, even
crying with laughter. Craig and Beth were the only ones not laughing. One of the children hurtled out to rescue me and pulled at my arm.

  ‘Arm! Arm!’

  ‘This is getting out of hand,’ called Craig to the class, but not to Beth. Everyone ignored him.

  I tried to say kapuju again, but after all the laughter, I’d forgotten the sound of the ‘u’. A little girl trained me to say it more accurately, while the laughter waned.

  Now I held up the cards, one by one, each with their Djemiranga word and asked Libby to read it, and the children pointed to my body – my hand, my leg, my nose. Then I drew a stick figure of a large doll on the board and stuck on it the words on their little slips of paper with Blu tack that Kana handed me, carefully not meeting my eye.

  ‘I’m sorry about this chaos,’ Beth said loudly to Craig.

  ‘It’s a difficult situation,’ he said. ‘As always.’

  Beth rose from her desk.

  ‘Libby,’ she demanded, in her most cutting voice: ‘Which part of the arm is kapuju?’

  She still mispronounced it.

  Libby said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ demanded Beth.

  ‘Look, perhaps the children would like to tell us –’ began Vanessa.

  ‘Come on, Libby, tell us if you know, where exactly is kapuju?’ repeated Beth. ‘Elbow? Wrist?’

  Still Libby said nothing.

  ‘You’re supposed to speak and read this language, so tell us.’

  There was a horrified silence. No one could speak. No one could move. The children, confused but sensing the atmosphere, looked between Beth and Libby, like an audience at a tense tennis match.

  Beth saw she’d gone too far.

  ‘I was joking,’ she told Craig, who inclined his head to show he understood.

  ‘It’s always difficult,’ he repeated.

  There was a deeper silence.

  Beth stood at the front of her desk, leaning on it, assuming a relaxed stance. ‘I’ve planned that we will play Simon Says,’ she announced. ‘Everyone. Including the elders.’

  ‘We’ll go,’ called Vanessa, but the ladies didn’t react. Perhaps in all the stress they didn’t understand her, and then it was too late.

  ‘Stand up, everyone. Except, of course, our headmaster.’

  The children looked around, scared, waiting for their elders to obey. The ladies looked at each other, and slowly rose to their feet. Only then did the children follow.

  ‘Simon says touch your kapuju,’ Beth roared, still mispronouncing it, so no one moved. A child dared to correct her. Everyone understood the child’s correction, and, touched their arms, though some of the children looked around at their friends to make sure it was an arm they should touch.

  ‘Simon says touch your –’ and she read out another part of the body from the little slips of paper on the board, but again it sounded like an English word, though one we’d never heard of.

  Before anyone could work out what she meant, she yelled at Vanessa: ‘You’re too slow! You’re out. Sit down!’

  Vanessa sat, lost for words.

  ‘Simon says touch your –’ again, Beth roared, nominating another body part. Again, she mispronounced the word. Again, no one understood.

  ‘You’re all out,’ she yelled at the elders.

  The women stayed standing.

  I roused myself. Somehow the horror of it had kept me spellbound.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her. ‘We will go now.’ I walked out of the room first, carefully avoiding Craig’s eyes, praying the ladies would follow me, praying that Beth wouldn’t rush out and grab hold of them, praying that nothing more shameful would happen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to each of them on the verandah as they emerged, one by one. I glimpsed Beth bursting into tears and Craig putting his arm around her heaving shoulders.

  The women walked away, their straight-backed, dignified walk.

  I didn’t have the heart to ask anyone about the singer.

  ‘How could the headmaster let his teacher behave like that?’ cried Vanessa as we drove away.

  ‘She was trying to get his love back,’ I said.

  We hadn’t time to talk further because Adrian and Mandy were at our gate at home when we pulled in.

  Adrian leaned in through Vanessa’s window.

  ‘Time for a cuppa before you go off to Alice? Mandy has asked me for something and you might be able to help. It’s something they want. I’ve boiled the kettle.’

  ‘I should’ve seen that situation coming,’ I said to Vanessa. ‘I was too distracted.’

  Vanessa smiled kindly. ‘Too hopeful.’

  We sat outside on the white plastic chairs that I wiped every morning, and that turned pink with dust by dinnertime. Adrian had made tea in the big blue teapot kept for visitors, and pretended to pour himself a cup. Because I was sitting next to him I could see that it was full of pineapple juice.

  I poured tea into the other cups. He’d remembered the pot but forgotten the milk and sugar, and I went inside to get them. I returned just as he was explaining to Vanessa that Mandy’s car had broken down and she couldn’t do the long drive to get the medicine plants her sick little granddaughter needed.

  ‘And she’s the gardener here,’ he added. ‘So I said that we could grow the medicine plant at the clinic. Not quickly of course,’ he added to Mandy. ‘It’d take time. But there’s plenty of ground. We could have a forest of them.’

  Vanessa turned to Mandy and quizzed her on the details of the plant; where it grew, what direction the land it grew on faced, at what time of the year they harvested it, and how many people needed it. She found out that all the settlement believed in its efficacy.

  ‘It would be a very big undertaking,’ Vanessa said to all of us. ‘It’d cost a lot so we’d need to apply for a government grant, which I’m sure would be successful. All sorts of white people in town would need to be willing to help, to germinate seeds, to propagate them, to nurse them, to bring the fragile little nurslings out here, to plant them in orderly rows. And someone here would have to be willing to water the plants just as instructed, at first several times a day, then, when instructed, less often, for a couple of years, until they’re really established.’

  ‘I don’t have staff that could promise that,’ said Adrian. ‘Even if I offered, I’m not here every day.’

  ‘I don’t think a white should do it,’ she said.

  ‘Me,’ said Mandy. ‘This is our good plant.’

  ‘What about when you have to be away?’

  ‘My daughters. They are good daughters.’

  Vanessa said: ‘Is it OK, you doing this?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mandy.

  ‘OK with your people?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mandy.

  We all stared down at the table surface, trying to imagine what might be involved in her undertaking. No one knew, but we all knew not to ask. This was a part of their culture that wasn’t whites’ business.

  Vanessa asked Mandy to walk over the clinic land with her, to talk about where to grow the forest.

  ‘It’ll have to get the same sun, morning sun, afternoon sun or sun all day as it gets in its home.’

  Mandy mused on this.

  They both threw the dregs of their cups of tea on the dry ground beyond the verandah, the black woman and the white one. We all watched the arcs of the drops. They stood up together.

  ‘I’ll arrange it, the paperwork and all,’ Vanessa said to us. Adrian stood up too, and together they walked away.

  Chapter 19

  That evening just before dusk, I saw women streaming down the street and off into the desert.

  ‘It’s ceremony time,’ Adrian explained on a visit home. He had the fridge door open, and was gulping milk straight out of the carton.

  ‘I want to join them,’ I said. Perhaps I’d find the old woman.

  ‘This isn’t for tourists,’ said Adrian, slamming the fridge door. ‘They don’t want to be observed.’
/>
  I slumped at the kitchen table, where Daniel found me when he came home for a snack. He asked me what was wrong.

  ‘This is just the preliminary part of the ceremony,’ he told me. ‘They come back for a few hours then go out again. Dora will be coming back with them. Why don’t you invite her in for something to eat with her grandkids? Everyone’s always hungry. Then you could ask her to take you.’

  I threw my arms around him and kissed his cheek. With him, complicated issues seemed to untangle. I rummaged in the pantry and, entirely forgetting myself in my excitement, I opened a big tin of salmon. I unfroze bread, fried strips of bacon and boiled eggs, all the time watching through the kitchen window. I boiled the kettle and made tea in the big blue teapot, letting it draw because everyone seemed to like tea strong. Then I sat on the verandah and just as Daniel had said, before dark settled in, the women returned, in twos and threes and family groups.

  I ran and called to Dora and her grandchildren as they passed my gate.

  ‘Come in and have something to eat.’

  They devoured the bacon and eggs and bread but nibbled only politely at the salmon.

  ‘We don’t like the sea,’ one of the children explained.

  I’d already known that, but these things were so easy to forget.

  I wanted to ask permission to go with them but even over a pot of tea, I was tongue-tied. Adrian’s word ‘tourist’ seemed to brand me. But I didn’t want to observe them, I wanted to be with them, I wanted to be included.

  Daniel came back home from work and poured himself a cup of tea.

  ‘Could disintegrate a spoon,’ he said, checking the strength and grinning at me. ‘Are you going to the ceremony?’ he asked me in front of Dora.

  ‘I haven’t asked,’ I said. I was red with shame, that they might think of me as a tourist.

  ‘Kate wants to join you tonight,’ Daniel said to Dora in his easy way.

  ‘Bring a blanket,’ was all she said.

  And so it happened. Through the long dark evening, I stood with the women and children and watched the men dance. Dora stood beside me and ordered me when to watch, and when to turn my head. ‘Look that way,’ Dora ordered, turning my chin in the direction I must look. I instantly obeyed. It was very hard to see anything because they were black figures in a black night, so all I glimpsed was the gleam of feathers. I took her littlest grandson to give her a rest, and held him. He didn’t notice me, he didn’t look around. His little body was stiff with fascination. He’ll always remember this night, I thought, it’ll last him all his life, wherever he ends up living.