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The Songlines

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

In Alice Springs – a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.

His name was Arkady Volchok. He was an Australian citizen. He was thirty-three years old.

His father, Ivan Volchok, was a Cossack from a village near Rostov-on-Don, who, in 1942, was arrested and sent with a trainload of other Ostarbeiter to work in a German factory. One night, somewhere in the Ukraine, he jumped from the cattle-car into a field of sunflowers. Soldiers in grey uniforms hunted him up and down the long lines of sunflowers, but he gave them the slip. Somewhere else, lost between murdering armies, he met a girl from Kiev and married her. Together they drifted to a forgetful Adelaide suburb, where he rigged up a vodka still and fathered three sturdy sons.

The youngest of these was Arkady.

Nothing in Arkady's temperament predisposed him to live in the hugger-mugger of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or take a conventional job. He had a flattish face and a gentle smile, and he moved through the bright Australian spaces with the ease of his footloose forbears.

His hair was thick and straight, the colour of straw. His lips had cracked in the heat. He did not have the drawn-in lips of so many white Australians in the Outback; nor did he swallow his words. He rolled his r's in a very Russian way. Only when you came up close did you realise how big his bones were.

He had married, he told me, and had a daughter of six. Yet, preferring solitude to domestic chaos, he no longer lived with his wife. He had few possessions apart from a harpsichord and a shelf of books.

He was a tireless bushwalker. He thought nothing of setting out, with a water-flask and a few bites of food, for a hundred-mile walk along the Ranges. Then he would come home, out of the heat and light, and draw the curtains, and play the music of Buxtehude and Bach on the harpsichord. Their orderly progressions, he said, conformed to the contours of the Central Australian landscape.

Neither of Arkady's parents had ever read a book in English. He delighted them by winning a first-class honours degree, in history and philosophy, at Adelaide University. He made them sad when he went to work as a school-teacher, on an Aboriginal settlement in Walbiri country to the north of Alice Springs.

He liked the Aboriginals. He liked their grit and tenacity, and their artful ways of dealing with the white man. He had learnt, or half-learnt, a couple of their languages and had come away astonished by their intellectual vigour, their feats of memory and their capacity and will to survive. They were not, he insisted, a dying race – although they did need help, now and then, to get the government and mining companies off their backs.

It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.

Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path – birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes – and so singing the world into existence.

Arkady was so struck by the beauty of this concept that he began to take notes of everything he saw or heard, not for publication, but to satisfy his own curiosity. At first, the Walbiri Elders mistrusted him, and their answers to his questions were evasive. With time, once he had won their confidence, they invited him to witness their most secret ceremonies and encouraged him to learn their songs.

One year, an anthropologist from Canberra came to study Walbiri systems of land tenure: an envious academic who resented Arkady's friendship with the song-men, pumped him for information and promptly betrayed a secret he had promised to keep. Disgusted by the row that followed, the 'Russian' threw in his job and went abroad.

He saw the Buddhist temples of Java, sat with saddhus on the ghats of Benares, smoked hashish in Kabul and worked on a kibbutz. On the Acropolis in Athens there was a dusting of snow and only one other tourist: a Greek girl from Sydney.

They travelled through Italy, and slept together, and in Paris they agreed to get married.

Having been brought up in a country where there was 'nothing', Arkady had longed all his life to see the monuments of Western civilisation. He was in love. It was springtime. Europe should have been wonderful. It left him, to his disappointment, feeling flat.

Often, in Australia, he had had to defend the Aboriginals from people who dismissed them as drunken and incompetent savages; yet there were times, in the flyblown squalor of a Walbiri camp, when he suspected they might be right and that his vocation to help the blacks was either wilful self-indulgence or a waste of time.

Now, in a Europe of mindless materialism, his 'old men' seemed wiser and more thoughtful than ever. He went to a Qantas office and bought two tickets home. He was married, six weeks later in Sydney, and took his wife to live in Alice Springs.

She said she longed to live in the Centre. She said she loved it when she got there. After a single summer, in a tin-roofed house that heated like a furnace, they began to drift apart.

The Land Rights Act gave Aboriginal 'owners' the title to their country, providing it lay untenanted; and the job Arkady invented for himself was to interpret 'tribal law' into the language of the Law of The Crown.

No one knew better that the 'idyllic' days of hunting and gathering were over – if, indeed, they were ever that idyllic. What could be done for Aboriginals was to preserve their most essential liberty: the liberty to remain poor, or, as he phrased it more tactfully, the space in which to be poor if they wished to be poor.

Now that he lived alone he liked to spend most of his time 'out bush'. When he did come to town, he worked from a disused newspaper shop-floor where rolls of old newsprint still clogged the presses and his sequences of aerial photos had spread, like a game of dominoes, over the shabby white walls.

One sequence showed a three-hundred-mile strip of country running roughly due north. This was the suggested route of a new Alice to Darwin railway.

The line, he told me, was going to be the last long stretch of track to be laid in Australia; and its chief engineer, a railwayman of the old school, had announced that it must also be the best.

The engineer was close to retiring age and concerned for his posthumous reputation. He was especially concerned to avoid the kind of rumpus that broke out whenever a mining company moved its machinery into Aboriginal land. So, promising not to destroy a single one of their sacred sites, he had asked their representatives to supply him with a survey.

Arkady's job was to identify the 'traditional landowners'; to drive them over their old hunting grounds, even if these now belonged to a cattle company; and to get them to reveal which rock or soak or ghost-gum was the work of a Dreamtime hero.

He had already mapped the 150-mile stretch from Alice to Middle Bore Station. He had a hundred and fifty to go.

'I warned the engineer he was being a bit rash,' he said. 'But that's the way he wanted it.'

'Why rash?' I asked.

'Well, if you look at it their way,' he grinned, 'the whole of bloody Australia's a sacred site.'

'Explain,' I said.

He was on the point of explaining when an Aboriginal girl came in with a stack of papers. She was a secretary, a pliant brown girl in a brown knitted dress. She smiled and said, 'Hi, Ark!' but her smile fell away at the sight of a stranger.

Arkady lowered his voice. He had warned me earlier how Aboriginals hate to hear white men discussing their 'business'.

'This is a Pom,' he said to the secretary. 'A Pom by the name of Bruce.'

The girl giggled, diffidently, dumped the papers on the desk, and dashed for the door.

'Let's go and get a coffee,' he said.

So we went to a coffee-shop on Todd Street.

In my childhood I never heard the word 'Australia' without calling to mind the fumes of the eucalyptus inhaler and an incessant red country populated by sheep.

My father loved to tell, and we to hear, the story of the Australian sheep-millionaire who strolled into a Rolls-Royce showroom in London; scorned all the smaller models; chose an enormous limousine with a plate-glass panel between the chauffeur and passengers, and added, cockily, as he counted out the cash, 'That'll stop the sheep from breathing down my neck.'

I also knew, from my great-aunt Ruth, that Australia was the country of the Upside-downers. A hole, bored straight through the earth from England, would burst out under their feet.

'Why don't they fall off?' I asked.

'Gravity,' she whispered.

She had in her library a book about the continent, and I would gaze in wonder at pictures of the koala and kookaburra, the platypus and Tasmanian bush-devil, Old Man Kangaroo and Yellow Dog Dingo, and Sydney Harbour Bridge.

But the picture I liked best showed an Aboriginal family on the move. They were lean, angular people and they went about naked. Their skin was very black, not the glitterblack of negroes but matt black, as if the sun had sucked away all possibility of reflection. The man had a long forked beard and carried a spear or two, and a spear-thrower. The woman carried a dilly-bag and a baby at her breast. A small boy strolled beside her – I identified myself with him.

I remember the fantastic homelessness of my first five years. My father was in the Navy, at sea. My mother and I would shuttle back and forth, on the railways of wartime England, on visits to family and friends.

All the frenzied agitation of the times communicated itself to me: the hiss of steam on a fogbound station; the double clu-unk of carriage doors closing; the drone of aircraft, the searchlights, the sirens; the sound of a mouth-organ along a platform of sleeping soldiers.

Home, if we had one, was a solid black suitcase called the Rev-Robe, in which there was a corner for my clothes and my Mickey Mouse gasmask. I knew that, once the bombs began to fall, I could curl up inside the Rev-Robe, and be safe.

Sometimes, I would stay for months with my two great-aunts, in their terrace house behind the church in Stratford-on-Avon. They were old maids.

Aunt Katie was a painter and had travelled. In Paris she had been to a very louche party at the studio of Mr Kees van Dongen. On Capri she had seen the bowler hat of a Mr Ulyanov that used to bob along the Piccola Marina.

Aunt Ruth had travelled only once in her life, to Flanders, to lay a wreath on a loved one's grave. She had a simple, trusting nature. Her cheeks were pale rose-pink and she could blush as sweetly and innocently as a young girl. She was very deaf, and I would have to yell into her deaf-aid, which looked like a portable radio. At her bedside she kept a photograph of her favourite nephew, my father, gazing calmly from under the patent peak of his naval officer's cap.

The men on my father's side of the family were either solid and sedentary citizens – lawyers, architects, antiquaries – or horizon-struck wanderers who had scattered their bones in every corner of the earth: Cousin Charlie in Patagonia; Uncle Victor in a Yukon gold camp; Uncle Robert in an oriental port; Uncle Desmond, of the long fair hair, who vanished without trace in Paris; Uncle Walter who died, chanting the suras of the Glorious Koran, in a hospital for holy men in Cairo.

Sometimes, I overheard my aunts discussing these blighted destinies; and Aunt Ruth would hug me, as if to forestall my following in their footsteps. Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as 'Xanadu' or 'Samarkand' or the 'wine-dark sea', I think she also felt the trouble of the 'wanderer in her soul'.

The house was full of cumbersome furniture inherited from the days of lofty ceilings and servants. In the drawing-room, there were William Morris curtains, a piano, a cabinet of porcelain and a canvas of cockle-pickers by Aunt Katie's friend A. E. Russell.

My own most treasured possession, at the time, was the conch shell called Mona, which my father had brought from the West Indies. I would ram my face against her sheeny pink vulva and listen to the sound of the surf.

One day, after Aunt Katie had shown me a print of Botticelli's Birth of Venus, I prayed and prayed that a beautiful blonde young lady would suddenly spew forth from Mona.

Aunt Ruth never scolded me except once, one evening in May 1944, when I pissed in the bathwater. I must be one of the last children anywhere to be menaced by the spectre of Bonaparte. 'If you ever do that again,' she cried, 'Boney will get you.'

I knew what Boney looked like from his porcelain statuette in the cabinet: black boots, white breeches, gilded buttons and a black bicorn hat. But the drawing Aunt Ruth drew for me – a version of one drawn for her, as a child, by her father's friend Lawrence Alma-Tadema – showed the furry bicorn only on a pair of spindly legs.

That night, and for weeks to come, I dreamed of meeting Boney on the pavement outside the vicarage. His two halves would open like a bivalve. Inside, there were rows of black fangs and a mass of wiry blue-black hair – into which I fell, and woke up screaming.

On Fridays, Aunt Ruth and I would walk to the parish church to make it ready for Sunday service. She would polish the brasses, sweep the choir stalls, replace the frontal and arrange fresh flowers on the altar – while I clambered into the pulpit or held imaginary conversations with Mr Shakespeare.

Mr Shakespeare would peer from his funerary monument on the north side of the chancel. He was a bald man, with upturned moustaches. His left hand rested on a scroll of paper, and his right hand held a quill.

I appointed myself the guardian and guide of his tomb, and charged G.I.s threepence a tour. The first lines of verse I learned by heart were the four lines engraved on his slab:

    Good frend, for Jesus sake, forbeare
    To digge the dust encloased here
    Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones
    And curst be he yt moves my bones.

Long afterwards, in Hungary, where I had gone to study the archaeology of nomads, I had the luck to witness the opening of a Hunnish 'princess's' grave. The girl lay on her back, on a bed of black soil, her brittle bones covered with a shower of gold plaques, while across her breast, with wings outspread, lay the skeleton of a golden eagle.

One of the excavators called to some peasant women who were haymaking in the field nearby. They dropped their rakes and clustered round the gravemouth, crossing themselves fumble-handedly, as if to say, 'Leave her. Leave her with her lover. Leave her alone with Zeus.'

'Curst be he ...' I seemed to hear Mr Shakespeare calling, and for the first time began to wonder if archaeology itself were not cursed.

Whenever the afternoon was fine in Stratford, Aunt Ruth and I – with her cocker-spaniel, Amber, straining at his leash – would go on what she said was Mr Shakespeare's favourite walk. We would set off from College Street, past the grain silo, past the foaming mill-race, across the Avon by footbridge, and follow the path to Weir Brake.

This was a hazel wood on a slope that tumbled into the river. In springtime, primroses and bluebells flowered there. In summer it was a tangle of nettles, brambles and purple loosestrife, with the muddy water eddying below.

My aunt assured me this was the spot where Mr Shakespeare came to 'tryst' with a young lady. It was the very bank whereon the wild thyme blew. But she never explained what a tryst was, and, no matter how hard I searched, there were neither thyme nor oxlips, although I did find a few nodding violets.

Much later, when I had read Mr Shakespeare's plays and did know what a tryst was, it struck me that Weir Brake was far too muddy and prickly for Titania and Bottom to settle on, but an excellent spot for Ophelia to take the plunge.

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Excerpted from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. Copyright © 1987 Bruce Chatwin. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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