A Single Tree Page 18
Now it was thick and long, but dry as tinder. It needed only a flash of lightning to set the country aflame for hundreds of miles. This happened a few days before my arrival, and the fire was still raging.
The unfortunate animals ringed on all sides by fire, died by the thousand. When the fire passed, leaving only the charred remains of vegetation, many sheep were standing, still alive, with their thick wool gradually smouldering away. It was a pitiful sight, as they stood with their eyes closed, waiting for merciful death.
The kangaroos, blinded and burned black, stumbled and rolled, as they moved aimlessly over the blackened earth. The horses maddened by fear and pain, did not have the lingering death of the other animals. They crashed into gullies and fences, and many of them broke their necks. The valuable stud horses and polo ponies, in their especially reserved paddock, all lost their lives in the flaming horror let loose amongst them. A fire is truly a terrible enemy . . .
Joe and I became firm friends, and he told me many stories of the past. He also passed on to me, some of Nature’s weather signs. These aboriginal observations, according to the inlanders, are infallible.
According to Joe, the birds would meet high in the trees or on high ground, well above flood level, if much rain were to follow. Similarly, swallows and other birds nesting low in the mudbanks of the river channels, were a sure sign of drought. The instincts of the birds, warned them of the height of the next flood levels.
Wild ducks, usually nesting along the river banks, would, before a heavy flood, build their nests up to seven miles from the channels. As infallible were their instincts that the floodwaters would be a few yards from the nests, when the ducklings were ready to swim.
The flood bird, similarly, was regarded as an infallible sign of approaching floods. Inlanders, hearing its harsh cry, would expect water in the channels within a short time. Though there may be no rain in the district, the flood bird, travelling from the head of the river, would screech its warning of the approaching floodwaters.
From City to the Sandhills of Birdsville,
Copyright Publishing, Brisbane, 1994
Herald Sun
2007
Traffic accidents and preventable conditions such as coronary heart disease are being blamed for death rates in the bush being 10 per cent higher than in cities.
A report, to be released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, found mortality rates in the most remote areas of Australia were up to 70 per cent higher than in major cities.
In Victoria in 2001, there were 497 more deaths in regional and remote areas than there would have been if city death rates applied.
Study author Sally Bullock said the higher mortality rates were concentrated in people aged under 65. “Interestingly, the analysis shows people over age 65 who live in remote areas have lower death rates than their counterparts in major cities,” she said.
In regional areas, traffic accidents were responsible for 18 per cent of deaths above major city rates, coronary heart disease for 13 per cent and suicide for 9 per cent.
The report noted that long travel distances, higher speeds and animals on the road increased the risk of fatal car accidents in the country.
Higher rates of smoking and excessive alcohol consumption, and lack of access to health services, were also listed as possible reasons why people in the country tended to die younger. The report said types of jobs available in the bush could also be responsible for higher death rates.
“Many occupations in regional and remote areas (e.g. mining, transport, forestry, commercial fishing and farming) entail higher levels of risk than other occupations,” it said.
Men in regional areas were 15–30 per cent more likely to die than men in major cities.
Death rates for women in regional areas were 10–25 per cent higher than the city rate.
Mortality rates in remote areas were pushed up by indigenous Australians, who tended to have poorer health than the rest of the population.
More than 55 per cent of people in very remote areas are among the most disadvantaged in Australia, compared with 20 per cent in cities.
‘More die younger in bush’, Herald Sun, 18 December, 2007
Barry Hill
2002
If Aranda was the black circle, Strehlow claimed to have located the dot at its centre, which was the secret name of the ancestor being, of which the song sang, and whose name lay cunningly concealed in the line of the song.
His word for that concealment was masking. The notion of the mask he hit upon by reference to the Personae of ancient Greek theatre, which were worn by actors playing the parts of the Gods. They were masked to disguise the realism of ordinary life, and their particular personalities, all the better to accentuate the impersonal presence of the divine. The mask had another function: its mouthpiece accentuated what was spoken, or sung, creating for the voice a clarity and resonance. Thus the optic and the acoustic function together projected supernatural presence – divine expressiveness, and divine speech, all on the principle of impersonation.
And so, Strehlow thought, Aranda men did in their ceremonies; they ‘were interested in watching not human actors, but living impersonations of supernatural being.’ With faces and bodies painted up, their personal bodies masked by totemic designs, their heads transporting elaborate and sacred headgear that belonged to no one but their ancestors, they would, once launched into performance, cease to utter any ordinary speech and be speaking only ‘divine’ words, those first spoken by the ancestor being on the ceremonial ground.
The secret-sacred word was masked in two ways: acoustically and semantically. Acoustically because it could be disguised by the rhythm and measure of the song; and semantically because it could be subject to syllabic disguise – syllables might be added, vowels might be broken, speech accents eliminated. Sometimes the word itself might be an archaic word, long ago lost from ordinary speech, if indeed it had ever lived there; it was a ‘cryptic’ verse and, as the song unfolded couplet by couplet, the song might altogether sustain its secrecy as it thrummed across its mythic country.
Songs exalted under the ancient belief that there was power in naming, especially if those words were the names of supernatural beings: a conviction that moved the ancient Hebrew; who could not say the name of God, and the Egyptians, who gave their deities secret names, knowledge of which empowered the magicians as well as the sun god, Ra, and Isis the witch, ‘a woman mighty in words.’ Words had power over nature; they could create and they could destroy, and their utterance, their making, was the thing: as entities unto themselves they had power.
In Aranda life, terms for composing a verse doubled for naming: to make a verse was to ‘throw out a name,’ ‘call out a name’, ‘call out one’s own name’ – and so on, in a series that created a union between the ancestor who called out, and the song the performer would sing. The vitality of this concept, its energising power, the fecundity of grandiloquence, is caught by Strehlow:
According to the Aboriginal theory the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. Then he ‘named’ (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will. In each instance he not merely gave them a name, but also described them briefly within the narrow limits of his couplet. In this way a series of couplets, loosely associated by time, space, and story, was brought into being; and this series constituted the song that each ancestor left behind for the benefit of those human beings who were to be reincarnated from himself and from his own supernatural children.
Strehlow, irresistibly speaks of Adam: by giving names Adam is the Lord of creation.
In the Aranda performance the chants are lords; they have the names of the first
creative beings, they are known by those names themselves, and the only man who can sing them is the one with the knowledge – the deep, true, initiated knowledge, the inside knowledge of what the song is – he is the one who throws his name out, by singing the song out. And he is no actor who does this. He is the ancestor being himself resuscitated into the present by song. Revived, re-aroused, returned to the living present by song. Not brought back, for he was never departed, but called up out of the ground by feet dancing to song on the sacred ground.
The cryptic nature of the song, which throws the names up, takes the very idea of acting and hurls it from the ceremonial ground. Of course, these singers are men in performance; that is ordinary fact. But the performance itself is not representational. There is no one behind the mask of the totemic designs, just as there is no secret in the song, except to say the secret song is itself. There is ‘acting’ to the extent that there are better and worse dancers, expert and even more expert singers, and men of higher degree than others: and this is clear amongst performers, as it is in the lulls – informal, humorous, deceptively routine – between performances. Every man is in a way a double agent at all times, but again, no one is acting when they are in performance. Nor are they in roles, as ancestor beings. They are the beings, as much as one breath arises out of another breath. They are existing in the time it takes to be the supernatural beings of song, the original authors of song, the songs that are the names of themselves, sacredly, called out – as if, if it can be imagined, the names are nuclei, or seed syllables, as the Tibetans would say, of existence. On the dancing breath the song goes, being and song, song and being on the sacred ground. The essence of things called out, sparking by the fire. Life itself called out, up from the ground. Everything is in song: starlight, night, sun, blood, man, woman, spirit and more spirit.
Broken Song: T. G. H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession,
Knopf, Sydney, 2002
Ernestine Hill
1946
I arranged a 750-mile journey through Kimberley with a passing saddler and a mailman, and out from Derby, in the white blaze of tropic noontide, bounding merrily along on the front of a truck laden with station stores for the wet, we made straight into Eldorado. Behind us were the white roofs of the little town, before us the illimitable marshes, beaches of a dream sea.
Fifty yards ahead, and ever receding, the mirage began – great lakes blue-gleaming, rimmed afar with capes and bays that were the darker groves of the paper-barks, set here and there with a little island of downy trees, or the spread sails of a windmill, and all reflected in the infinite and dazzling blue, to beguile the senses and to cheat the soul. How often, on these lonely marshes, they find the few poor belongings, and all that is left of the wanderer who believed and followed.
Mirage, Nature’s day-dream, that lends the loveliness of seas remembered to parched grey plains of drought, that clothes the stark awfulness of hills bled white by the sun with the glory of tenderest colouring mirrored in shallow silver at their feet – waterholes that a thirsting man will never find, hills that recede and recede. Throughout Australia, in the salt lake or clay-pan country, where the sand-hills are bare ribs beneath a blazing sun, and where man and beast have lain down glad to die, there are the big green rivers, the rock-holes and the ripples, and the sweet tree-shadowed pools of delirium that led them on and on.
Everything is exaggerated in that unreal light. A goat from fifty yards away might be a camel, a camel a shed. A station homestead dwindles, as one approaches, to a humble tin shack. All men are giants, moving in a kind of crystallised slow motion. An Afghan teamster, until we were within ten yards of him, was a turbaned djinn of the Arabian Nights, twenty feet high, and away on the clay-pans we could see a ship upside down on the eastern horizon, stereoscopic in detail, so clear ghat there was no mistaking it, the “Centaur” from Singapore, loading cattle at the wharf at Derby 70 miles behind.
A grim country in drought, and a devil’s grin to the man who thinks he can defy it. For it is an easy thing to die of thirst – too easy. A dozen do it every year at the end of the dry. Most of them are old hands, and heaven knows why, except that they follow the mirage. Generally ‘it is a ‘foot-walker,’ a bagman after a bender, a cook going back to his job.
He starts off from the pub cheerily enough, with the whole town to see him off. ‘Good luck for the thirty-six-mile dry!’ they shout, ‘and don’t forget, there’s water at Morgan’s Grave.’
He doesn’t like the sound of that, so he goes back for another bottle of beer to keep him company. The first mistake. Beer is thirsty stuff in the long run. Still, he knows the track.
He carries a water-bag, or it may be a gallon can. He fills up at the billabongs and the station tanks, and he meets friendly blacks, who show him the soaks and the springs, or how to wring it from a baobab tree. A couple of days and he leaves the course of the river behind. Across the spinifex ridges and the clay-pans the air is light and mirror-like. You get thirsty in that country.
He finds no water at the Broken Wagon-never seen it so low in his life-and at the Native Well the stuff is putrid, a bit of slimy mud. Bad luck! The bag is getting lighter. Still, it ought to last out, with care. A man gets drier when he knows he has little, and the air of the salt-pans is salt.
He turns off the track four miles or so, to a soak that a native showed him a couple of years ago. The blacks and the water are both long gone, and the soak as dry as a bone. Another mistake. That makes it a 44-mile dry.
The hours run on. Sip by sip the water-bag grows limper. The mirage is dancing before him, and the road runs straight into it, two slight ruts across the clay-pan. Queer how he misses it sometimes, and has a job to find it.
Paper-bark clump and clay-pan, paper-bark clump and clay-pan – an insanity of sameness. There used to be a windmill along this track – no, it was at Ooberguma, out the other way. His head is getting a bit light. He can’t remember.
Morgan’s Grave, they said. Stick to the road. Always make up a creek, not down it – or was it down a creek, not up it? Looks like a creek over there, where that bird is now, that deeper line of trees. This is mirage of course, but over there, that liquid greeny blue . . . hell of a word, liquid, to a thirsting man!
Subconsciously his feet strike the tangent, the tangent that will become the reeling circle of death. Across the claypan in the mirage dances tantalisingly on . . . fifty yards . . . not here, just over there . . . can’t you see it’s water, smell it’s water? He goes on his hands and knees and tries to sneak down on it. Still it recedes and recedes, till his eyes dance. He pulls his long hair and laughs, laughs at the cunning of it.
His own shadow, squat as an ape, leers back at him.
It is not long after that before the swollen lips begin to whisper. He licks the water-bag, bone-dry for hours. Horribly he licks his own salt sweat, and bits his lips for the blood.
Then he staggers back to the road and camps for a bit – but it is not the road. Another mistake, his last – he sets off across country to look for it. Now and again he stoops to dig, dig till his fingernails are gone, and the fingers bleeding.
The sun goes down and the moon comes up. He scarcely knows which is reeling above his head. The red dawn rises, like a blood-shot eye, on a world of emptiness, and a madman, naked and gibbering, with froth on his lips, circling foolishly on the plain.
Noon, and the mirage and nothing moving.
Ports of Sunset, Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne, 1946
Philip Hodgins
1988
Shooting the Dogs
There wasn’t much else we could do
that final day on the farm.
We couldn’t take them with us into town,
no-one round the district needed them
and the new people had their own.
It was one of those things.
You sometimes hear of dogs
who know they’re about to be put down
and who look up along the bar
rel of the rifle
into responsible eyes that never forget
that look and so on,
but our dogs didn’t seem to have a clue.
They only stopped for a short while
to look at the Bedford stacked with furniture
not hay
and then cleared off towards the swamp,
plunging through the thick paspalum
noses up, like speedboats.
They weren’t without their faults.
The young one liked to terrorize the chooks
and eat the eggs.
Whenever he started doing this
we’d let him have an egg full of chilli paste
and then the chooks would get some peace.
The old one’s weakness was rolling in dead sheep.
Sometimes after this he’d sit outside
the kitchen window at dinner time.
The stink would hit us all at once
and we’d grimace like the young dog
discovering what was in the egg.
But basically they were pretty good.
They worked well and added life to the place.
I called them back enthusiastically
and got the old one as he bounded up
and then the young one as he shot off
for his life.
I buried them behind the tool shed.
It was one of the last things I did before
we left.
Each time the gravel slid off the shovel
it sounded like something
trying to hang on by its nails.
New Selected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 2000
Clement Hodgkinson
1845