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Nothing stirred out there.
Guy stared again, in solitude and blissful silence, at the Nullarbor as it spread flatly to all horizons, defying an implacable sun. But his eyelids could not withstand the weight of the lunch, the beers, and the gentle straight-line rocking of his air-conditioned coupe.
He was sinking into oblivion when he saw the shadow. And the shadow of the shadow.
Two dark movements, a metre apart on the plain. Floating effortlessly, keeping pace with the speeding train. A dark shape dipped to the spinifex once, then soared upwards, displaying its full majesty. He followed the shape of the great V as it raised its wings in flight; and the shape of the small, solid inverted v behind, steering a feathered ship above the desert.
Guy was staring at a gliding Wedge-tailed Eagle, whose wingspan covered all Australia, from the Dreamtime to the 21st century. He stared at its great pinions, spreading far into the past, and briefly into the future. He found himself floating, with the eagle, on a moment of fused time; a moment he knew he would cherish forever.
He sensed something, somebody, behind him, in his compartment. He tried to ignore the presence. He tried to remain alone with his enfolded moment of time.
“You are looking at Waluwara.”
A deep voice pronounced the name like distant wing-beats on the wind.
Guy thought he discerned a powerful, squat figure in a dark cloak of feathers, framed against the closed door. The figure’s face was the colour of the charcoal horizon he had witnessed at dawn. The face was streaked with ochre, below a head of hair as silver as daybreak’s clouds.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
Guy could hear his voice rising, a note of irritation disguising his fear.
“I am Yelangbarra, of the Pitjantjatjara. Of late they call me Barry Young. Sometimes, Mister Young.” At the word ‘mister’, the intruder, strangely hunched, let white teeth flash sardonically under a dark, hooked nose.
And we Pitjantjatjara, the people of the Plain, call that fine bird ‘Waluwara’. He is named for the great Waluwara, the first of his kind who lived in the Dreamtime. He lived in the mountains between the deserts. He shared his camp up there above the deserts with his mate, Tukalili, the pink cockatoo. He shared it also with the crow-man named Kanga, and with Kanga’s mate.”
The deep voice shifted into harsh singsong:
“One day, when Waluwara came home from a long hunting flight across the Nullarbor, a fight broke out between the womenfolk, over the kill he had carried back in his great claws - a wombat, the size of a donkey. Even a giant wombat wasn’t big enough for the greedy women. As they fought, the men joined in. Tukalili, pretty pink mate of Waluwara, was killed. And so was the wife of the crow man. Kanga fled. But, filled with revenge, he crept back and killed Waluwara with his boomerang.
“The great eagle’s spirit soared into the sky, and his shape became imprinted in the night’s heavens. That is Waluwara’s soul. You call it the Southern Cross. And when you look at the night sky you will see also the vast black void in the brightest band of stars, which is the Eagle’s nest.”
Guy heard himself saying, despite himself: “Won’t you sit down, Mister Yengelbar.. er...Barry? Tell me, is that a legend of the Dreamtime? Are there more?”
There were many more, and later Guy found recorded in Sydney the precise tale he had just been told.
The figure did not move. “Mythology, Mr Cartwright, is the history of what you call ‘pre-history’. Your friend Brewster was wrong when he told you no-one could live in the middle of the Nullarbor without the support of this silly little railway track. We have lived here for 20,000 years and more. Our story is written on the wind - and pictured in the caves.”
Silence followed, and to break it Guy asked:“Do you have stories about the beginning of the Dreamtime? About coming to Australia?”
The big man rubbed his head against his raised shoulder and stared unblinking into the coupe’s panelling.
“There are many stories. One tale is of ‘the huge Wandjina, makers of thunder, rain and lightning,’ soaring over the sea to this land you now call Western Australia. The faces of the Wandjina are painted in the caves of what you call the Kimberleys.
“Another story is told by the Riratjingu people, claiming they are descended from the great Djankawu who came from the island of Baralku far across the sea. They believe their spirits always return there. Djankawu came in his canoe with two sisters, following the morning star. They walked millions of steps across this ancient land, following the rain clouds. When they wanted water they plunged a digging stick into the dust, and water bubbled up. Djankawu and his sisters gave us the names of all the creatures of the land. And they gave us our Law.”
“But what do you believe?”
“I believe all the legends are saying the same thing; telling the same truth. . . Now your scientists are learning of that truth, but no-one listens properly. I have come to tell you that modern science, like Dreamtime tales, denies the Euro-centric prejudice that we are just ‘cave people’ who have not progressed since the Stone Age.”
He shook his feathered cloak, and looked beyond Guy and the train window. His hooded eyes glared, unwinking, at the lowering sun, reflecting its yellow light.
“Until very recently, whenever you white people found evidence of civilisation in my land, you believed it must have belonged to the Egyptians, or to tribes from the Middle East. Even ancient Greeks, you proposed, may have colonised Australia! The blind ignorance of your literate, educated peoples is almost as bad as their vicious prejudice, and . . .”
Guy compulsively corrected the Birdman - or was he trying merely to placate?
“Let me assure you, such ideas are not peculiar to Australia. In Africa, every development from agriculture to the so-called ‘Zimbabwe Ruins’ have been ascribed to the mythical Prester John, or the ancient Egyptians, or little men from Mars.
The dark figure stayed silent a long moment.
“Perhaps I need not have made this visit. . . it drains much spiritual energy. . . but as I have travelled the journey, let me hurry you through some of the progress made by the first peoples of Australia - the so-called primitive, ‘stone-age people who failed to adapt or advance’.”
Guy listened, but he did not hear. He was aware of the urgent energy exuding from the figure standing above him. He was aware of the swaying train; of the flat land outside, and the infinite dome above. Sound and sight and feel merged into a heavy mass which pressed down on his brain and his eyes.
The thick-set head above him jerked sideways, the voice rose, and Guy suddenly felt, and now sharply heard, every syllable.
“After eons of time,” Yengelbarra was saying, “we learned to adapt and flourish here. We knew how many of us this motherland could feed. We knew she could provide space for all of Nature - and sustain as many as a third of a million people. We filled the land - and then your people came. They arrived in their state-of-the-art sailing ships, with their Chinese gunpowder, with all their knowledge and erudition, with their diseases and prejudices and greed. They brought charts, and books, and records and an inquistive desire to explore - and exploit - everything. Yet they failed to notice the obvious. . .”
His arms flapped against his sides in frustration.
“You English-speakers, pride yourselves on your “civilising influence”, carried on the back of trade and religion. Most of you still seem to believe that you introduced mining, and trade, and fashion, and weapons, and things like tobacco to Australia.
“You didn’t even know that - right here on this ‘unlivable’ Plain - men had been mining for twenty thousand years.
“You did not know that the boomerang, with the classic properties of all aerodynamic missles, was developed here in the Ice Age . . . You didn’t even know what aerodynamics was about - until thousands of years after the aboriginal people of Australia had used it.”
Yelangbarra stood up to stare out at the empty landscape.
“You English-speaking tribes have many things to teach us. You have given us formal education, which is God’s blessing. You have soared in the skies of technology . . . But you have taken it beyond your own comprehension. And you will not listen, or learn from others.
Guy found himself transfixed by a single, unblinking eye. The head turned, and the voice became flint as the Pitjantjatjara man grated, “In these last few years, just 200 short years, you have raped our delicately balanced land; you have murdered our people, you have corrupted and stunted what was supposed to grow in Man’s soul.”
The head turned towards the towering sky outside. “Look out there. Our watering places and our hunting grounds, our caves and our sacred sites go unattended. Our people are dying. . .
“Look out there. That’s where the subjects of Waluwara lived for tens of thousands of years. For at least three thousand years we hunted this Plain with our trained dogs. We hunted for food, as all life does, and we also used our dogs to hunt enemies, such as the Nullarbor tiger. They say there are still tigers out there - yes, even where you think nothing can live, nothing can hide.
“Look out there. You will not see my people. But you have seen a dingo. The dingo is a newcomer, like the English, except that we brought it here a thousand years before your God was supposed to have visited Earth. We brought the dingo from India, the son of a pariah bitch it is said. Or perhaps the dingo was bred from the yodelling New Guinea dog. It happened in the Dreamtime, and the full picture is blurred. But look out there. Look again for the dingo, because it runs ahead of our downfall. It runs wild, but it was once the symbol of our hearth. It was the object of our affection. When a grieving mother lost a child through lack of food, or when a woman was barren, she would carry a dingo pup wrapped around her waist. It was the binding for her heart. And it was also her blanket. The colder the night, the more dingoes - we would wrap around ourselves.
“Look out there after dark. It will be a chilly, three-dingo night tonight.”
He sat down at last, facing Guy’s back, waiting for him to absorb a duskier shade of the Nullabor outside his moving window. Guy turned as the sun dropped. There was still sufficient light to see the intruder’s face, square, strong, dark and young. . . below a crop of white hair.
“Barry. . . Yelangbarra... How old are you?”
“About a thousand years, I suppose. It’s not important. Nor is all that stuff we talked of about civilisation, and who did what first. I’m here because I wished to speak to you of the spirits of Australia. The spiritual values, you would say. Comparative values of differing cultures, both of them important because. . .”
There was a knock at the door.
“Don’t go,” Guy said, rising.
But he was gone.
NOTE: I must bring this chapter back, somehow, to those 20th century 'Aboriginal' writers in English - some of them honoured among the cultural plaques on a quay near Sydney Harbour.
* * *
Guy’s mind was ten thousand years away when the door of his compartment slid back. Half expecting a thousand-year-old Aboriginal tribesman, Guy swivelled to see the form of the Prof, red hair carefully slicked for once, filling the coupe entrance. There was amusement - mischief - in the eyes.
“Did I interrupt something?”
“Yes,” Guy said, and mumbled something in deep frustration.
“You look as if you’ve been sleeping too hard. I came to remind you of the sunset. There’s still some of it. Look out there.”
The Prof moved in, uninvited, forcing Guy to retreat in that small space, then sat down beside him. They stared at the Nullarbor. It was so flat they thought they could detect the curvature of the Earth in the endless, darkening horizon. Guy tried to concentrate on the mind-image of a dingo in the dusk. He tried to savour the silence, the stillness, as he watched the liquid light fading.
But there was a hand on his thigh. He moved closer to the window and, trying to ignore the hand burning the top of his leg, started to talk rapidly.
“I had a weird dream. . . There was an Abo in here, in traditional dress, lecturing me on the Dreamtime. . . facts, figures, myths, political debate. . . how does one collect all this strange stuff in one’s imaginings?”
Sam glanced quizzically at the books strewn on the compartment’s floor. “From those,” laughed the Prof, sliding a hand further up Guy’s leg.
“No Prof, I’m not into this. And I’m not ready for it.”
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