by Sue Woolfe
I woke when the sun was high. The house was silent. Daniel had had a shower and gone to work, I could tell because of the damp bathroom and the bowl and spoon drying in the washing-up rack on the sink. He was always considerately tidy. My note had gone.
It took me just a few minutes to walk to Dora’s house, rehearsing what I was to say. Everywhere was the blue smoke of cooking fires, with women cooking dampers in the ashes. Dora’s family, like everyone else, was gathered around their fire. She must’ve started earlier than most, because everyone was already eating. I waited at her gate. They all looked up, startled.
Dora came over.
I held out the recorder, complete with its recording.
‘The old song,’ I said slowly in Djemiranga, trying to get the grammar right, although I couldn’t use, and still didn’t know, the affix I’d come to record. ‘The song of the mother of Carmen.’
As I spoke, she corrected me. She was probably correcting my tenses, she might even be adding in the travel affix, because what I was saying must sound like the babble of an uncooperative child.
‘I want – you – to hold it,’ I managed. Annoyingly, I was crying. I dashed away tears. I switched to English.
‘The song is not white people’s business,’ I said.
We both looked down at the ground.
‘The university sent me to record it,’ I said, again in English, only English. ‘But whites haven’t been through your ceremonies. They don’t know Aboriginal ways. You hold it. You decide.’
She took it. Her pressure on my fingers was slight, a small caress. She nodded, turned away. I turned away.
‘Kate,’ she said.
I turned back.
‘Hold it,’ she said.
It came out of my mouth in Djemiranga. ‘Me? You want me to keep it? To take it back to the city?’
She indicated the desert of her country.
‘Stay here. Hold it.’
She’d spoken in English.
I took it from her, I broke the rules, I gazed at her.
‘Stay,’ she repeated. It seemed an order.
I thought of the day she cleaned our house, her cleaning of all those silent receptacles and arrangers and administrators of Western possessions, the cupboards, the filing cabinets, the shelving, the drawers, the wardrobes, the benches, even the ironing board. I thought of Tillie’s house, empty of furniture. Dora’s probably was, too.
‘You want me to be – a bank? A museum?’
But she’d already turned back to what was much more important: her family, and her country.
There was no film music then, no sign that said Destiny. All I was doing was making a path into the desert, as if I’d never walked there before. That day it was the colour of the earth that elated me; it changed as I walked between apricot – gold – orange – rust – russet – crimson – pink – mauve. These were the colours of my new life. In comparison, the grey mud of my river seemed alien and dismal. Oh, my river had gleamed with silver light, but why hadn’t I ever realised before how grey the earth was? I’d taken its greyness for granted; I’d assumed all earth was grey or black.
But a childhood in that Bay of Shadows had made me a person easily moved to tears over a landscape. Even now, my eyes glossed with tears over the particular bend of the white gum’s bough, and over the powdery yellow acacia blossoms that had fallen gently on the red sand. I wanted to go back and show them to Daniel, Daniel who I’d never deceive, would never have to deceive. But there would be time for that.
As I walked, it was as if I’d never seen beauty, this or any other. The desert and its people had reached into new chambers of my heart and pushed them wide open. I could almost hear the swinging open of the doors. As if I had to learn over and over how beautiful the world’s possibilities were, as if I hadn’t been concentrating hard enough before.
I sat for a minute, and then I lay down on the red earth and embraced it. When I got up, my sweaty skin, now faded of its bronze and only my ordinary skin, was dusted with red. I didn’t brush it off.
All this I started to tell you, all of this story.
But then I stopped talking to you, because I needed to drop into silence. The desert was singing to me.
Acknowledgements
Into this book have crept the thoughts and phrases of many favourite novelists; I can’t deny this, nor wish to. They have seeped into me, they’re part of who I am. Further, I want to thank all the people in the Northern Territory, black and white, who talked and sat and walked with me and took me hunting. Each in their own way patiently educated me in what became a pilgrimage; from the very beginning, for example, before I spent the better part of two years in the Territory, Alice Springs’s Craig San Roque took my breath away by telling me that I had to learn to sit in the dust and listen – not to him, but to the enigmas unfolding before me; that there are many ways to learn, that my inquisitions only yielded answers to my particular line of thought.
I also am deeply indebted to many scholars. David Moore and Susan Moore were among the first to explain to me the new world I was entering; I kept returning to them again and again for advice, and they were unstintingly generous and patient. My colleague Dr Michael Walsh, Honorary Associate in Linguistics of Sydney University, talked to me hundreds of times, and sent, at my request, fascinating papers that he’d published, or was about to publish. He kindly laboured over an early version of the manuscript. I also attribute to him, to Dr Joe Blythe, now of the Max Plank Institute for Linguistics, and to Dr Linda Barwick from the Conservatorium of Sydney University, the story of this novel. When I was despairing of the whole endeavour – by that time the manuscript was just a collection of sense impressions – they allowed me to accompany them on a fortnight’s field trip to Wadeye, on the west coast of the Northern Territory, where I watched Joe poring over a recorded fragment of the local language, syllable by syllable, Michael examining a hand-written collection of local words and their meaning compiled by a priest seventy years ago, and Linda recording local songs; because of this experience, as we bumped back on dusty roads to Darwin in the hired troopie, I mused aloud: ‘What if my heroine is sent to a remote community to record an ancient song known by only one old woman who’s on her deathbed – and my heroine can’t find her?’ Few stories arrive like that, flying in, fully-formed, through an open window.
I also drew on the knowledge of Associate Professor Claire Bowern, historical linguist in Australian Languages at Yale, who generously sent me precious material about women’s songs, and I followed the fieldwork of ethnoecologist Dr Fiona Walsh. I had hours of conversations with other scholars, including Ron Williams, Iain Davidson, Emeritus Professor of the University of New England, and Dr Diane Austin-Broos, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Sydney University who read an early draft and contributed pivotal ideas that became whole scenes.
Other readers of at least one of the dozen drafts of the manuscript include Libby Hathorn, Gordon Graham, Kathryn Heyman, Con Anemogiannis, Kiriaki Orfanos, Vidya Madabushi, Sarah Bedford, Gary Marshall, Jenni Ogden, linguist Sally Dixon, Susan and David Moore, Blair McFarland and Jenny Turner-Walker; many Alice Springs people took me into their homes and cooked me marvellous dinners and introduced me to their friends: again I must thank Susan and David Moore, Blair McFarland and Jenny Turner-Walker, Craig San Roque and Judith Pritchard, Cait Wait and the late Paul Quinlivan.
However, I must emphasise that after the help from these scholars, advisors and friends, I put aside all I’d learned in order to create this work. The people I’ve thanked are in no way responsible for what I’ve done with their assistance; all errors are entirely mine. I also must stress that no one in the Northern Territory or anyone I’ve ever met, or any government body, figures in this story, nor does the story reflect anything that anyone has done, or should have done. If anyone imagines themselves in these pages, they are flattering or denigrating themselves. This is not a factual account of ‘real life’ experiences. It’s a work of the imagination. I
observed and listened to thousands of stories and rumours and many dusty kilometres of gossip, and then I put it aside and told the story I wanted to tell. I made it all up. That’s my job; that’s what novelists do.
I must thank Sydney University for employing me as a teacher of creative writing during the seven years I took to write this work.
The manuscript was given a warm welcome by my publisher, HarperCollins, in particular by Jo Butler and Sue Brockoff, and became what you’ve read because of patient and always insightful editing by Linda Funnell. Jo Butler asked Josie Douglas of the Northern Territory to take on the responsibility of final cultural advisor.
As he’s done during the writing of my previous novels, Gordon Graham, my life partner, kept listening to all my fears and uncertainties, and urging me on.
About the Author
Sue Woolfe is the author of three novels, including the bestselling Leaning Towards Infinity, which won the Christina Stead Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Asia – Pacific Region, and was shortlisted for almost every other major Australian prize and for the Tiptree Award in the US. It has been translated into French, Italian and Dutch.
Sue has adapted both Leaning Towards Infinity and her first novel, Painted Woman, for ABC radio and for the stage. Her third novel, The Secret Cure, is currently being adapted as an opera.
Sue Woolfe teaches Creative Writing at Sydney University, and is the author of The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Novelist Looks at Neuroscience and Creativity and, with Kate Grenville, Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels were Written.
Other Books by Sue Woolfe
Painted Woman
Leaning Towards Infinity
The Secret Cure
Wild Minds (editor)
Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels were Written (with Kate Grenville)
The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Novelist Looks at Neuroscience and Creativity
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2012
This edition published in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Sue Woolfe 2012
The right of Sue Woolfe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights Act) 2000.
This work is copyright.
Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Woolfe, Sue.
The oldest song in the world / Sue Woolfe.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9499 1 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978 1 74309 514 0 (epub)
Aboriginal Australians – Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Jane Waterhouse, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Australian Desert © Nicole Périat, www.iconico.net;
all other images by shutterstock.com
