by Tim Cahill
Trezise was certain that Split Rock was not an isolated phenomenon. There were too many styles, too many centuries represented. His occupation as a pilot was ideal for preliminary surveys: If you were a passenger on one of the very informal airlines serving Cape York in, say, 1962, your plane would drop to treetop level and skirt a sandy ledge, circle back and do it again, just a little closer. In the cockpit Percy Trezise would be making little notes on his navigation chart.
Trezise turned out to be right. He and his family, notably sons Stephen and Matt, found scores of rock-art sites. The occupation debris at one site was carbon dated to 13,200 B.C. Others had to be more recent. The gold rush of 1873 led to a war of attrition between whites and aboriginals, and Percy Trezise found more than one depiction of a white man, probably dating from that era. One drawing shows a white man wearing boots, a rifle lying by his side. He is stretched out on his back, as in death, and birds are shown picking at the body. So there was an unbroken pictorial record of the culture—a record of thousands of years of human life.
Trezise has a pretty good idea of where the people came from: “I’m willing to bet that some form of early man arrived in Australia at least two hundred thousand years ago. Remember, this was during the Ice Age, when a lot of the water was concentrated in polar caps. There was more land, less water, and island hopping would have been easier. Back, let’s see, five hundred thousand years ago you had Homo erectus in Java. That isn’t so far away from here, and if some form of early man got to New Guinea, the next move would have been down into Cape York.”
“Books I read,” I said, “have man arriving in Australia about forty thousand years ago.”
“True. They’re sure of that. But more and more scientists are beginning to think that one hundred thousand years is a probable date, and some think two hundred thousand is possible. I think we’ll find rock art that can be dated to forty thousand years ago.”
Discovering the meaning of the figures painted on the sandstone walls proved more difficult than finding them. Trezise decided to take an early retirement, bought the Quinkan Hotel and Bar in Laura, and spent his time painting outback scenes, looking for more galleries, and talking to local aboriginal people. He became close friends with an aboriginal artist, Goobalathaldin, whose name means “waves standing up,” and who calls himself Dick Roughsey for the benefit of whites who can’t wrap their tongues around his native name.
Roughsey, a painter like Trezise, grew up in the bush and knew the legends and religion of his people. “That’s rare,” Trezise said. “Did you ask any of the aboriginals you met about the Dream Time?”
I told him that I had spoken to a couple of fellows, Legs and Freddy, at the Quinkan Bar a few nights ago. They worked as hands on the local ranches, and we talked about horses and cattle and rodeos. Legs wanted to know if I had ever met Charley Pride, whom he proclaimed “the best singer in the world.” As for the Dream Time, “It was a long time ago, in the olden times.”
Trezise nodded. “The culture is rapidly disappearing,” he said. “Luckily, Dick had a gregarious personality, and he was able to make friends with some of the old men around Laura. These were initiated men: They had the cicatrix scars on their chests, the missing front tooth, the pierced nasal septums. These fellows wouldn’t tell what they knew to the young men, but after a time they accepted Dick and me into their kinship system. And they agreed to tell us what they knew. We were to record it in the white man’s fashion so that it wouldn’t be lost forever.”
The old men showed Roughsey and Trezise the galleries they knew and explained the meaning of the figures. At night around the campfire Trezise taped the ancient legends. In 1969, he published Quinkan Country, largely a compendium of the myths. He and Dick Roughsey collaborated on a series of books, which are, in fact, nearly exact transcriptions of the old men’s tales: The creation of the world, the saga of Goorialla, the Giant Feathered Serpent, of Gaiya, the Devil Dog, and Joonging, the Flying Fox.
Walleroo Dreaming is a small gallery of rock art set on a plateau not far from Percy Trezise’s outback camp near Laura. There are a number of figures that appear to be catfish, crocodiles, and flying foxes. Off to one side, painted in white ocher on the roof of a small overhang, were the figures of an old woman and a giant dog. Not far from that, amid some other crudely drawn animals, was an equally crudely drawn woman lying face-down, with a long, snakelike object connected to the foot. Some distance from these figures, set off by itself, was a magnificent twelve-foot-long drawing of a walleroo. It could be distinguished from any other type of kangaroo by the length of the lower leg and by the peculiar tilt of the head. It was painted in rare white ocher, with an outline of red ocher, an impure iron ore mixed with water. Below the walleroo and off to the side were several sticklike human figures, and just under the belly was another human figure painted upside down.
Several days with Percy Trezise, with his books, with other books, had supplied me with just enough knowledge to dream. “The Dream Time,” Trezise told me, “flows like a river through the past and the present and the future.” In one of its meanings the Dream Time is that ancient time when ancestral beings created the earth and set down the laws.
These would be the first stories a child learned. Probably the man who painted Giant Walleroo—it was almost certainly a man, for women were not allowed to know the secrets of sacred dreaming—lived four to five thousand years ago, and the creation myth he learned was that of Goorialla, the Giant Feathered Serpent.
I dream the artist as a child, with other children, sitting under a figure of the Serpent at another gallery. An old man is telling them the tale:
In the beginning of the Dream Time all the land was flat, and there were only people. Then Goorialla, the Giant Feathered Serpent, traveled up from the south, and from his droppings he made that mountain you see over there. And his belly dug out the river you see below. Goorialla stopped atop his mountain, and he listened to the four winds for the voices of his people.
When he finally found them, they were having a great bora, and Goorialla hid and watched them dance. Finally he came out, saying, “You are not dancing properly.” And he showed them how to make a headdress of beeswax and white cockatoo feathers, how to make arm bands of pandamus palm leaves, how to make pearl-shell pendants that hung from yellow grass stems. All the people—the flying-fox people and the walleroo people, the dingo people and the emu people—rejoiced in the new knowledge, and there was a great bora.
When the dance was over, all the people went into their humpies to sleep, but two young blue mountain parrot boys, the Bil-Bil brothers, had no place to sleep. They went to Emu Woman, but she had too many children. Finally they went to Goorialla, who said, “Wait, I must make my humpy bigger.” He opened his mouth so that the top of it was the ceiling and the bottom was the floor, and he said, “Come in now.” The two boys went in and were swallowed.
In the night Goorialla began to worry about what the people would do when they found the boys missing; so he went to the only mountain in the world, the biggest mountain there ever was, with great, sheer cliffs on all sides.
The people tracked Goorialla and tried to climb the cliffs, but only two tree goannas, the Wangoo men, could scale the cliff. They made two sharp quartz knives and told the people, “When we do what we are going to do, Goorialla will be very angry. Go and change into birds and animals so he can’t find you.” The Wangoo men climbed the cliffs, and they cut Goorialla from both sides, neck to tail. The two Bil-Bil boys had changed into blue mountain parrots, and they flew away.
Now a cold wind sprang up; it blew through the empty ribs of Goorialla, waking him. When he saw that he was cut and his dinner was stolen, he thrashed about in fury and agony, and he tore up the great mountain and hurled pieces all over the country. The pieces make up the hills and mountains as we know them today, and all the birds and animals are our relatives. We are descended from the walleroo.
The artist believed in the literal truth of this story, b
elieved that he was related to all living things. He lived with perhaps forty people, all intricately connected by kinship ties. It was a hunting and gathering society, and the walleroo people were nomads in a harsh land. Cooperation was essential for life; religion was even more important.
Percy Trezise traveled the world studying rock art on a Churchill Grant, and he believes the most spiritual work comes out of the harshest land. “I think the work of Australian aboriginal people and of African Bushmen is more religious than, say, the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, which seem to me to be mostly concerned with hunting magic.”
I dream the artist as a child, enjoying the myth of the creation of the dingo:
Old Eelgin, the Grasshopper Woman, had a giant dog who hunted men and brought them to her to eat. One day she set the dog on two butcher bird boys, the Chookoo-Chookoo brothers. The brothers fled, and the dog could be heard howling for miles away, and his galloping gait sounded like the roll of thunder. Old Eelgin hobbled along behind, urging the Devil Dog on.
The brothers came to a canyon, and one climbed one side and the other stood across from him. They sharpened their spears and waited for Gaiya, the Devil Dog.
“There he is,” shouted the younger boy, but the older said, “No, that is only his tongue.”
“There he is.”
“That is only his nose.”
When the giant dogs shoulders appeared, the boys threw spear after spear, and when Gaiya was dead, they butchered him and called the people together for a great feast. They kept the tail because the spirit lived there, and they sent it back to Old Eelgin, who was still hobbling behind. When the spirit reached the Grasshopper Woman, he was so angry at her that he bit off the end of her nose.
Meanwhile, Woodbarl, the White Cloud, asked for the bones of the Devil Dog. He took them to the top of a mountain and made two small dingoes from them, one male and one female. He breathed into their mouths, and they came alive, and Woodbarl said, “You will not eat people anymore. From now on you will be afraid of people.”
The child loved the story, loved it for the drama of the telling: all the howling, the thunder, the suspense of the wait for the Devil Dog. But Percy loved it more for its neatness, for the way it explained why dingoes fear men, why grasshoppers have flat noses and butcher birds have long beaks, like spears.
The story was told at the small cave in the Place of Walleroo Dreaming. There were other story sites, some of them as simple as a cottonwood tree.
The Cottonwood is the son of Woodbarl, the White Cloud, but it is not his first son. Woodbarl loved the daughter of Turramulli, the Thunderstorm, who allowed no one near her. Woodbarl fashioned a spear and threw it through the thighs of Turramulli, who jumped up in agony and chased Woodbarl to the eastern cave, where he lived. Woodbarl’s son was killed by a lightning bolt hurled by Turramulli, and after Woodbarl buried his son and cut his head and shoulders in sorrow, he went to the Cottonwood Tree and sang, “Shoo, uhna gundawooly, shoo.” He sang until the Cottonwood Tree became his new son:
Now the cottonwood tree has yellow flowers, which represent the lightning of Turramulli, and when the seed pods burst open, they show the white cloud of Woodbarl. This is the beginning of the rainy season, when the thunderstorm chases the small white clouds over the land: a handy bit of knowledge to have in a place like Cape York, where the onset of the rainy season means an immediate search for high ground.
Dream the artist as a twelve-year-old boy: For days there has been yelling and screaming, his mother insisting he is too young, his father agreeing, but his mother’s brother is boss in the matter, and one night the artist is wakened roughly and taken to a new site by several of the older men. Dream his terror as they pull back his lips and an old man pushes up the boy’s gums with a sharpened thumbnail. A stick of iron wood is placed against a front tooth. There is a jolt, and the tooth is gone. Concentric circles are cut in his chest with sharp knives; his nasal septum is pierced with a thumbnail, as are his ears.
After that terrible night the boy and perhaps four or five others spend three months in isolation and enforced silence. The older men explain the sign language used in hunting, and they show the tracks of various animals engraved on rock. In the end there is a crawl through the caves—the tall, thin spirit figures, quinkans, staring down from the walls—representing death and the heaven called Woolunda.
The boys emerge from the cave as newly initiated men, and they are told the sacred names of the animals, the names used only in the most important ritual of the year. It is a time just after the rainy season, when the world is green, the trees heavy with fruit, and the young animals newly born. The men leave camp in the middle of the night and walk through the dewy grass to the Place of Walleroo Dreaming. They sit for a time, just under the Great Walleroo, When the false dawn begins to glimmer in the east—this is the time of dreaming, when magic is on the land—the ritual begins. It is quickly done, for when the sun rises, it burns away the magic like dew.
One of the men pounds a heavy club on the ground, screaming. The others chant the scared name of Walleroo, and they call on Walleroo Dreaming to wake and send his children onto the land. Each man performs a dance: walleroo mating, walleroo feeding, walleroo giving birth. Walleroo Dreaming is wakened by the shouts, and he sees the dance of mating, of feeding, of giving birth; and the new walleroo are set loose on the earth, for the Place of Walleroo Dreaming encompasses all the walleroo ever born and ever to be born. Only the walleroo people can call forth the new walleroo each year.
It is the most important ritual of the year, and it must be performed properly, regularly, or the walleroo will vanish from the earth.
“The giant walleroo in that gallery,” Percy Trezise told me, “is a totem. That is one meaning for the word dreaming.”
The artist would have been the most talented man of all the walleroo people. At the campsite, near Walleroo Dreaming, anyone might paint on the wall. A man’s wife runs away with another man and he paints her face-down, with a snake eating her foot. It is a bit of crude and simple magic: Let her be bitten by a death adder and die in agony.
At the place of Walleroo Dreaming, the sacred site, all the figures are rich in magic, and the upside-down human figure under the belly of the beast is the most frightening of all. “I suspect that it is an inquest figure,” Trezise said. He told me a story that had happened recently. Over on Mornington Island, some of the older initiated men had a bitter falling out. Some of them got the clothes of another, something he had sweated in, and they “sang” the clothes. When the victim heard about it, he knew that the spirit figures, the quinkans, would steal his kidney fat while he slept and that he would vomit up any food he tried to eat. The man refused to eat—he knew it was useless—and died some time later. Of starvation.
“I remember,” Trezise said, “one of the old men telling me how he fought with a quinkan. He went on and on about this long fight they had, and I could see he really believed that it had happened. So I asked about the time, and where he was, and very slowly it came to me that he had dreamt this thing in his sleep. But he told me the story as if it had happened in real time.”
That is the third meaning of dreaming, and it implies a certain terrible suggestibility. A figure drawn upside down—like the one under Giant Walleroo—represents death. The fact that it is in the sacred place, under the totem animal, makes it a very powerful curse, a magic so strong as to be inevitable. Four or five thousand years ago, some enemy of the Walleroo people died—killed himself in one way or another—because of that figure on the rock wall.
I dream the artist angry, as all artists are: He is no mere smudge scribbler. He doesn’t concern himself with hunting-magic figures—“Hope I get a wallaby, hope I catch a fish”—he doesn’t bother with simpleminded love magic—“This’ll make her want me.” No. He is an artist, the custodian of Walleroo Dreaming. The man who spent five years collecting white ocher. Who has the largest collection of kangaroo-hair brushes, ever. Who argued ten years for t
he privilege of repainting the sacred figure. Who applied a talent no other man had to the work. Who produced the brightest, the best piece of sacred art anyone had ever seen. And the stupid, ungrateful, morally blind imbeciles go and paint an inquest figure under Walleroo Dreaming.
One component of the Artist Dreaming is anger; and the artist dies an angry man. He is buried with great honor, and a small kerosene tree is pulled up and stuck upside down on his grave, the main taproot pointing west to show his spirit the way to Woolunda. Big Uncle—everyone’s uncle—meets him there. The artist has the scars and the missing tooth that mark him as an initiated man, and he is allowed to enter Woolunda. All others must wander forever and drink maggoty water.
Big Uncle sets about his first task, which is to break all the artist’s bones so that he cannot run away. This is a curiously painless procedure, and the artist is relieved to be rid of the rigidity of his skeleton. The feast is spread out before him, and young girls from all over have come, hoping to be chosen as wife.
At the Place of Walleroo Dreaming, the artist’s protégé paints another stick figure just below and to the right of the Giant Walleroo. The artist smiles a secret smile. His soul is now secure in the Place of Walleroo Dreaming. Standing there in Woolunda—a tall, slender man, rippling with the lack of bones—he looks exactly like a spirit figure. He is a quinkan.
Percy Trezise and I were drinking beer just before sunset one day, and he said, “There are so few initiated men anymore. The rituals aren’t done properly, and they aren’t done regularly. I think we’re losing something very important.” It seemed to him that laws laid down by the ancestral beings concerning hunting were “the world’s first set of ecological principles.”
“They knew game was scarce and they knew how to conserve. Nowadays, you have the lumbering interests and the cattle ranches and the bauxite mines. You have all these people four-wheeling it up to Cape York. We’re losing the wallabies and the dingoes and the walleroo. I never see any emus, and the giant emu is extinct.”
