THE SONG MASTER

by Di Morrissey

  He turned and strode off towards the house.

  ‘You’re going off half cocked, Jackson,’ shouted Barwon angrily to his back.

  ‘Leave it, Barwon,’ warned Mick.

  Norma Jackson was embarrassed. She took a couple of steps after her husband, then returned to the group. ‘I’m sorry. Giles is under a lot of strain. You know things haven’t been going too well financially, and all this land claim stuff, extinguishment, sacred sites and so on, hasn’t made it any easier for him.’

  ‘It must be a hard life for you, too,’ said Susan sympathetically, and joined her to put glasses and the jug on the tray as the others moved towards the van. She knew instinctively that Norma would have been dominated all her married life by her husband, but now, maybe for the first time, she felt this woman was getting the courage to disagree with him.

  ‘Don’t blame him, that’s just how he is. We’ve had to put up with a lot. Getting this place was his dream and it’s been nothing but a nightmare at times. The thought we could lose this place either financially or worse still, to the natives, keeps him awake at night.’ She was torn between loyalty to her husband, and embarrassment at his rudeness and anger, and she could sense what he was not prepared to see, that there could be another path open to them. ‘I’d like to hear more about what this ancient site really means. Perhaps later, when you know more.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Susan. ‘We’ll get Esme to keep you up to date. There will be a lot of people wanting to come here now, so perhaps if you could talk to your husband, explain . . .’

  ‘NORMA . . .’ Jackson shouted to his wife and she hastily rose.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said as she hurried back to the house.

  ‘Poor woman, fancy being married to that redneck,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Just because he doesn’t want to lose his property, and doesn’t fully appreciate all this cultural stuff, doesn’t make him a redneck,’ said Shareen.

  ‘You going after his vote, eh?’ said Barwon, and Susan put a restraining hand on his arm.

  Shareen looked at the modest, slightly rundown homestead as she settled back in the van. It was a battler’s homestead, no doubt about it. But a birthplace of hopes, just like so many other properties had been over the decades. Some succeeded, some failed, but they all made a contribution to what she saw as the greatness of Australia, its character as well as its wealth. There were qualities of the old pioneers about Giles Jackson and others like him. They had to be tough. Something these city trendies wouldn’t recognise. One thing that was worrying her, though, was something that she had never really been conscious of before. The sincerity of Ardjani and the other elders could not be denied. She still didn’t agree with everything he was saying. The fact that he was there at all, continuing to fight for his people, and custodian of so much, that he had survived with all this intact right into the 1990s, was nagging at her previous convictions.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ shouted Giles Jackson when his wife came in carrying a tray of glasses.

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’

  ‘Staying behind making small talk with that bloody lot. The glasses could have waited. You’re on my side, remember. My side.’

  Norma put the tray down on the sink and began to rinse the glasses.

  ‘They’re threatening our future. You know that, don’t you? Bastards. Fuck sacred sites and extinguishment forever,’ he shouted and stomped up and down the kitchen.

  ‘Maybe they have a point, Giles, about the value of the sites, the World Heritage values and so on. Look at Kakadu, Uluru . . . they’re billion-dollar tourist places now. God, Giles, we seem to have a cultural museum in our backyard.’

  Jackson stamped over to the sink, grabbed his wife by the shoulders and spun her around. ‘Listen, and don’t miss a word. Don’t side with the blacks . . . on anything, right? Give them nothing, right? This is not their land. It’s ours, right? What’s on it is ours, right? The banks don’t lend money with sacred sites as security. It’s the lease and our ownership that matters. We’ve all got to stick together on this.’ He shook her vigorously. ‘Stick together, right? Now I’ve got to make a phone call.’

  The archaeological camp was little more than half a dozen tents and a big blue tarpaulin shelter over a cooking area with a scatter of chairs and a table on trestles.

  Under a bough shelter covered by another tarpaulin were two tables piled with clipboards, artefacts, rocks, small boxes and plastic bags filled with samples – soil, ochre, ashes. The three researchers, two men and a woman, left their work to greet the new arrivals. While lunch was being organised, Michael de Witt laid out a selection of small stones, quartz and sandstone fragments – the biggest the size of a teaspoon – bits of charcoal and ochre, a sharpened bone. ‘These are samples that show evidence of human manufacture and are taken from various depths at the excavation site, which are linked to corresponding dates at different levels. This one,’ he pointed to a small stone, ‘is a fragment of engraved sandstone which was found at a level that thermoluninescence dates at 118,000 years. And a stone tool and red ochre has been dated from 58,000 to 75,000 years.’

  Susan peered closely at the array of very ordinary looking flakes and pebbles on the table. ‘That sounds incredible. Are you sure? How can you prove this?’

  Esme chuckled. ‘That’s the 64,000 dollar question, Susan dear. Until we get back into the laboratory and more tests are done, we can’t make conclusive claims. But the indications are very encouraging.’

  ‘How is the scientific community going to react?’ asked Mick.

  Professor de Witt shrugged. ‘Some with enthusiasm, some with doubt, others will be jealous and some will try to discredit us. There’ll be blood on the lab floor before the day is done. Though actually we could be talking a year or more. Even longer if one wants to get into disproving the evolutionary out-of-Africa theory. How could Homo sapiens be in Australia 175,000 years ago, if they weren’t supposed to have left Africa until 100,000 years ago?’

  ‘I’ve always leaned towards the theory human evolution happened everywhere, in various regions, as part of a whole,’ said Alistair.

  The group stared in silence at the tiny remnants that possibly held the key to this mind-boggling assumption.

  Susan noticed that Ardjani had taken little interest in the proceedings. ‘What do you think, Ardjani?’

  The scientists, academics and visitors waited as he slowly tilted his hat to the back of his head, scratched a forelock and gave a slow broad smile. ‘This not news to me. Like I keep saying, we been here since creation time.’

  The group trailed from the campsite through flat scrubland dotted with spinifex. In the distance, the ridges of an ancient coral reef jutted into the ocean blue sky, the limestone faces etched by centuries of weather. ‘How old are those hills?’ asked Susan pointing to the skyline.

  ‘Three, four hundred million years,’ said de Witt. ‘Pushed up from the sea floor by some great force. Makes one feel pretty insignificant, eh? That’s one thing about my job, time tends to have a different meaning.’

  ‘What he means is, he’s always late!’ teased Esme.

  ‘There it is.’ De Witt pointed to a massive boulder, the size of a large round house, dropped onto open country, smaller rocks around it, the spidery shadow of a spindly tree tracing lines on its rusty orange face. Ropes on steel posts sectioned off areas of the excavation site, while to one side the overhanging rock formed a small shelter over sandy soil. It looked very ordinary, and Mick spoke for the group when he commented, ‘Well, I would’ve walked right past this. Doesn’t look like an archaeological milestone.’

  ‘Come closer, dear friends.’ Esme hitched up her skirt and took them to the overhang and pointed at its surface. ‘There, see the circles gouged and dimpled into the rock. Cupules. There may be older art in India but it hasn’t been securely dated and is not as widespread. That’s what first alerted us. They’re symbolic of something.’

&nb
sp; ‘What do you think they mean, Ardjani?’ asked Susan.

  ‘Maybe animal, food and water maps, messages, ceremonies. Some old people tell me in ceremony you bang rock on the rock to make dust. The rock dust is part of the energy of the ancestor totem inside the rock. That way you increase the power of the food source, like fertilisation.’ He ran his hand over the cupules. ‘They’re here for a special reason. Not an accident.’

  Susan held up two fingers to a cupule, the size of a golf ball, closed her eyes and tried to imagine the human being who had patiently gouged it or banged stone on stone so long ago. ‘Andrew, just think about it. The whole concept, it’s fantastic’

  Andrew studied the cupules. He’d poked around the sacred sites on Yandoo ever since he was a kid, but the feelings he got from this site were new and different, and impossible to deny.

  ‘Who’d have guessed something as insignificant looking could be so important? I’m wondering what we have on Yandoo. No one’s ever bothered to check it out.’

  ‘Although it’s not as spectacular as the rock art paintings, a site like this would be a definite tourist attraction because of its significance,’ said Mick.

  ‘So how far away is the mine?’ asked Alistair.

  ‘Just a few kilometres away,’ said Esme. ‘Needless to say, if the exploration turns up a jackpot, they’ll be wanting to mine on a large scale, probably open cut. The threat to the site is obvious.’

  ‘Maybe you should publicise your hypothesis now, put them on the back foot,’ suggested Mick.

  ‘It could make the mine people work faster, stake out more territory closer to here if they’re alert to what’s going on,’ said Esme.

  ‘You can bet Giles Jackson has already been on the blower to the mining company,’ said Beth.

  ‘I think telling the media of the possible implications of this site would be valuable. It’s another warning flag for those who want to totally extinguish native title claims and rights,’ said Alistair.

  ‘We’ve made a video as we’ve gone along, as well as photographing and cataloguing each step and find,’ said de Witt enthusiastically.

  Alan made a couple of points that he felt were of major importance. ‘This is on traditional Barradja land, whatever Giles Jackson thinks his lease says. And where does this sit with Rowena and her copyright contract on Barradja culture?’

  ‘Absolute nonsense!’ declared Esme dismissively. ‘That woman doesn’t have all her paddles in the water, if you ask me. Definitely off course.’

  Alistair enjoyed Esme’s turn of phrase but urged caution. ‘It’s not quite so simple. The piece of paper still exists, signed by Ardjani and the elders.’ He turned to Ardjani.

  Ardjani was calm. ‘No worries. I already speak with her.’

  His enigmatic reply raised a few questioning eyebrows.

  ‘My goodness, if there’s a potential legal threat here it better be sorted out quickly.’ Esme looked annoyed. ‘There’s a lot at stake – museum and government funding, academic prestige, national rights. We don’t want foreigners making claims on this find. Absolutely absurd.’

  Becoming an active player in politics was certainly a steep learning curve, thought Shareen, as she quietly listened to the enthusiastic exchanges and pondered on the significance of the so-called historic find. Not exactly the sort of thing she ever imagined could be part of the political game. Shareen picked up a handful of sieved dirt and ash beside the dig, letting it filter slowly through her fingers. She tried to translate it into votes, but the issues were too complex, too fresh for that sort of assessment. What would Pauline Hanson have made of this, she wondered.

  ‘This could be a hot potato, politically,’ she interjected. ‘Seems to me that, whichever way you look at it, someone is going to be asking Canberra for a big handout, and it will be seen as more money going into the never-never land of Aboriginal funding. A lot of voters are fed up with that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, for Chrissake, Shareen, stop talking like a politician,’ exclaimed Esme, angry and frustrated. ‘What we have here is a world event that changes the perception of history. You’re talking about destroying the equivalent of the Dead Sea scrolls, the original stone tablets of Moses. This could be the key to the evolution of man.’

  ‘Maybe some people don’t accept all this. What about all the people who believe that God created the world?’ asked Shareen.

  Ardjani was unfazed. ‘Every culture has creation story that is similar. Our land, our laws are Barradja bible, we believe in laws of nature, of ceremony, of creation Dreaming time. We know who we are and how we have to lead our lives. That is how we survive the same way since creation. We know this inside us. Our children learn this every day by listening, watching and by ceremony – singing, dancing, painting.’ He leaned towards Shareen. ‘How your boys living? Where they going in their lives?’

  Shareen kept quiet. She privately despaired about her two sons, one was rebellious and ran dangerously close to the law. The other was a procrastinator, he was lazy and looked for the easy way out rather than make any effort himself.

  ‘They good boys? You proud of them?’ persisted Ardjani.

  ‘They have their problems, like all kids,’ she muttered.

  ‘Where their daddy? Where their uncles?’

  ‘I’m divorced.’

  ‘All boys need men. They need wise men to guide them.’

  ‘Well I don’t have any man around to do that.’ Shareen’s voice was terse but beneath it Ardjani heard the wavering note of a mother’s confusion and loneliness at the distance between her and her sons.

  ‘You want your boys come here? Learn with us?’

  Shareen was shocked by the suggestion. She tried to imagine her older son – the rap music fan, king of the video games, fashion stud – and the younger son – pernickety about what he ate, a late-rising couch potato, and always feeling unwell when hard work called – camped with the Barradja. ‘I don’t think they’d fit in up here.’

  A slight smile curved at Ardjani’s full lips. ‘Did you ever think you’d be up here, getting sugarbag, digging yams, doing women’s business, eh? And feeling all right? You feel all right here, with us Barradja?’

  The question had a deeper meaning and she knew it. Initially she’d come as a face-saving exercise, to silence her critics and give her arguments about Aborigines more authority, by saying she had lived amongst them. Now it seemed impossible to lie to Ardjani. His look was always so penetrating – reaching right into her mind. She gazed back at him, and met those eyes that glowed in dark hollows, giving a softness to the lingering smile.

  ‘Yes, I feel . . . all right. I’m surprised.’ She’d make no further admission, but she didn’t need to.

  Satisfied, Ardjani went and peered down the roped-off shaft.

  Susan saw Barwon now sitting apart from everyone and she sat beside him. ‘You okay? I know it must be hard.’

  ‘It’s not just . . . the baby . . . Lisa . . . it’s everything. I just feel I’ve totally fucked up my life. And I don’t need people like Jackson reminding me.’

  ‘Barwon, a lot of people care for you. Beth’s been onto the Child Care Agency to tell them we’ve found the baby’s father, and Ardjani’s doing his best to trace your mother’s people . . . we’ll help you all we can.’

  ‘Thanks, Susan. But I have to sort out my life myself, too.’

  She caught Andrew’s eye and he sauntered over to join them. ‘How’s it going, mate?’

  Barwon shrugged. ‘So so.’

  ‘Susan, I’d like to have a quick look around that mine. Suss out a few things. Esme said I could borrow the truck. Barwon, could you find it from here? Would you take us?’

  ‘Sure, I won’t be that welcome but I can hang back out of the way. Why not?’ He gave another listless shrug.

  ‘I’ll tell Beth we’ll be back in time to leave.’ Susan rested her hand on Andrew’s shoulder, glad of his support.

  Barwon drove to the mining exploration site, deep in th
ought. He was still smarting about Jackson’s comments, his resistance to the Barradja and his one-eyed attitude to their culture. The man irritated him. Giles Jackson was not unlike the blustering, bullying Brother he’d first encountered at the mission when he’d been taken from his mother’s home.

  Beside him, Susan and Andrew were discussing the implications of the Birrimitji findings. ‘There must be some kind of law relating to sites of significant cultural heritage so the scientists can slap a protection order on it,’ said Andrew. ‘That would stop the mining close to it.’

  ‘Jackson won’t like that,’ said Barwon, coming out of his reverie.

  Andrew looked at him, thinking how the very name Giles Jackson provoked Barwon. ‘It’s a tough one, all right. I can sympathise. He can see his cattle business going down the tube, then comes a chance to get a stake in what might be a profitable mining venture on the place. Then some little holes in a bloody rock blow the whole thing apart!’

  ‘Andrew!’ exclaimed Susan. ‘That’s a crude way of putting it.’

  ‘It’s how Giles Jackson would see it.’

  ‘And what about people like your father? What would he do?’

  Andrew skirted the issue. ‘He’d stick to his cattle. He’s a real cattleman, not an amateur like Giles Jackson.’

  ‘Well for what it’s worth, you know what I think?’ Barwon concentrated on weaving the vehicle through the grassy, stone-strewn country before answering his own question. ‘I think Mick’s idea to buy Boulder Downs lock, stock and barrel is the way to go. Forget all the legal Native Title claims, waiting for government departments to approve things. Piss Giles Jackson off. All he wants is money and a way to save face.’