Flying Hero Class (12 page)

McCloud and Pauline had seen the casual corroborees Northern Territory Aborigines, brought in from the reservation by bus, performed in Alice Springs and Katherine; the dancing of mere tales, of fables fit for children. In those events a kind of justifiable kidding of the callow, suburban travelers was in progress. Just to drive home the point that nothing of heavy worth was being given away, the dancers asked men and women up on the stage or out into the clearing at the end of the show and provoked them, against the mocking background music of the
didj
, to weave about clumsily, manically, painfully.

There was none of that jokiness about the Barramatjara dancers McCloud first saw in the Sydney dark. You felt rightly or wrongly that you were being admitted to serious and even dangerous transmutations. McCloud's children were spellbound by the hairsbreadth nature of what was happening. Would these men return from being emu or wallaby? And then—five minutes later—would they come back from the rim of incarnation as the cassowary? They were playing all the time at that gate between humankind and the rest of nature, the gate which most people had felt bound to close shut so that the city and the steam train, the automobile and the jet, the computer and the garbage compactor, could occur. The dancers sucked and weaved you toward the door of loss and bade fair to drag you through it. They let you off that experience only after you had suffered delicious shock and exaltation.

The evening McCloud first saw the dancers left him in a state very close to literal enchantment. He felt that a door in the face of his own continent had been opened, and that he had glimpsed through it a garden of unsuspected wonders. He talked a magazine editor into letting him travel to Baruda to see the dancers in their homes and to write something about them. They were by now famous throughout the nation—although Bluey had been famous in his own right for the past ten years. Like Bluey, the others had calmly, almost negligently, let themselves now be persuaded to sign on with various film agents.

So when he first met the Barramatjara it was as someone who had come to inquire about their fame and write something about it.

McCloud landed at Baruda in a light aircraft one late afternoon. Heeled over in the passenger seat during the approach, he had seen red dust, a thread of empty river with desert oaks and eucalypts growing in it, and hills built of fragments of rock. Stones bounced the sun so sharply into your eyes that you would have sworn—wrongly—that it had recently rained and that every surface was glossy with water.

Bluey Kannata was away at the time, acting in what the other dancers called “some picture.” McCloud met, though, with the others—Whitey Wappitji, Paul Mungina the
didj
player, Philip Puduma, and Tom Gullagara—beneath the brush shelter outside the settlement store.

McCloud found Tom Gullagara, with his modest beer gut and his huge-buckled cowboy belt, the frankest of the four of them. Tom nodded toward some old men on the fringe of the camp. “Those old fellers keep an eye on us, case we give away something secret. They don't want us painting much, dancing anything too secret. Some of them come all the way from Easter Creek to check up on us, whether we give too much away to visitors.”

Then Whitey said, “If you want to get something serious back from people, you've got to give something serious out.”

The troupe told him they'd paint him a design on canvas laid out on the sand the next morning. Instead of the old dyes, which were so hard to make, they would use acrylics mixed with water. They would paint one of the sober Whitey Wappitji's designs, one that was
owned
by him.

“It's going to be that marsupial rat dreaming from Mount Dinkat,” said Whitey, sitting very upright on his haunches and speaking with half-closed eyes. “He's my dreaming, that feller. He's no rat. It's bad business to call him a rat. He's Tutinjinga. That's his real name. He's come across from Haast's Bluff, an awful long way, and he gets into the lizard-women round there at Mount Dinkat. You can see the lizard-women still lying down, five miles out there. You can find their eggs out there. Just five miles out on the Hall's Creek road there.”

The next morning, after he had spent a fitful night in the empty labor ward of the Baruda clinic, McCloud watched the four of them set to, sitting on rugs around the margin of the canvas set on a flat, granular patch of earth and painting as if for a performance.

Though this design was a dreaming which lean Whitey claimed to own more than the others did, the other three men also seemed to have some relative ownership and to be confident in what they did. The main pattern, as left behind by the hero marsupial rat when he violated the blood laws with the lizard-women, was blocked out with a blackened stick by Whitey. For he was the one who had received it directly from an uncle and also—according to what Cowboy Tom Gullagara would say later—had it confirmed in a dream by this being, Tutinjinga himself.

Whitey started the design at the center of the spread canvas, which was the size of a small room. He worked his way outward, brushing away any red dust with a switch of gum leaves as he backed from the center of the pattern.

“This isn't any deep secret version,” Tom Gullagara told McCloud. “This is serious. But it's the one a lot of relatives can look at. This is the one for the uninitiated fellers, but when you see it you get to be as good as a relative of ours, Frank. Just the same, this bloke here”—he nodded to the pattern Whitey was making—“he's not dangerous to anyone.”

Yet there were designs known to these men which
did
have a dangerous form. That was obvious. All the ancestors were capable of forms which blasted the unprepared. You got that idea of danger from the inherent threat and promise of the Barramatjara dancing.

The Christian Philip, Cowboy Tom, the
didj
trickster Paul, on their rugs around the outskirts of Whitey's canvas, began to apply paint—red, yellow, blue, black, but never emerald, since emerald never seemed to occur in the Barramatjara country—to this ritual depiction of the holy desert as made at Mount Dinkat by Whitey's old father and intimate ancestor, marsupial rat.

They leaned inward, advancing at last over the dried outer designs to complete the inner particulars of the tale. Sometimes one of them stopped to roll thin cigarettes or spit tobacco juice. The paint dried quickly in the heat. They worked the brushes with a nonchalant style.

The designs to do with the marsupial rat ritual at Mount Dinkat, a plug of stone visible away to the north and the venue for tricky Tutinjinga's seduction of the lizard-women, were a sort of pictorial code which you would need to be a Barramatjara to read. The conventions seemed to be that water and spirit places were circular, with concentric rings, like Dante's Inferno. In the open ground between circles, each of the troupe would place his own patterns of white dots. The spirits of the earth were at least as numerous as these dots.

The circles and lines and dots were not literal accountings of marsupial rat's great Mount Dinkat rut. But so sweetly did the designs connect that everything the Barramatjara painted had a satisfying assonance to it. They could have given lessons to Klee or a host of the Modernists. They were the only people who had been Modernist for fifty thousand years.

McCloud sat for a time near Philip Puduma, who did not chew or smoke. Philip was the oldest, perhaps forty-five years. He had taken off his stockman's hat, and sweat glimmered in his thinning hair and along that long, solemn jawline which typified the Barramatjara. He wore a crucifix around his neck.

A question which in some lights seemed crass occurred to McCloud. At length, in the interests of journalism, he asked it.

“This marsupial rat, what do you think of him, Philip? What I mean is, he goes up to Mount Dinkat and fornicates?”

“Oh, this is a good story,” murmured Philip lightly. “This one … it tells you not to interfere with women of the same blood. There's nothing wrong with this one. This one's like King David and Bathsheba, this feller.”

As the morning wore on, McCloud became a little embarrassed by the time they were spending on this demonstration just for him. Occasionally he thanked them. But they did not say, “It's no trouble!” Nor did they behave any differently than if they had been
performing
the painting in front of an audience of thousands.

Throughout the day, a number of older women with capacious sagging breasts, a block of stomach, high-boned hips, and delicate desert ankles would come up and joke with the painters in the Barramatjara tongue. A stone's throw away, under the shade of an enormous river gum, a breed of tree so skilled in spreading wide on a pittance of water, younger men and women sat on a rug playing gin rummy and a game called nine-up. Their laughter, like the conversations of the older women and the painters, sounded alien to McCloud and had that exciting quality of coming from an ancient throat: the first throat to clench in hilarity in all this great desert! So it seemed to the suburban aesthete McCloud, whose senses were being stretched by what he saw and heard in Baruda.

One young woman, full-lipped, round-headed, threw in her cards and stood up. She passed the dance troupe at their work, averting her eyes. McCloud saw how she shifted a wad of narcotic weed behind her teeth, around her pink mouth. Paul Mungina made a teasing noise with his own mouth, a sound like the
didj
at which he was the master.

“That there, that's Bluey Kannata's missus,” he said, breaking out of his normal reticence. “She never been to Sydney or Melbourne or New York like Bluey.” He made yet another, more jazzy
didj
noise. Without malice he said with a smile, “Bluey's got other girls there. Them disco girls.”

“And keep her only to yourself, as long as you both shall live,” the Christian Philip murmured, not necessarily to anyone.

When the painting was finished, they let McCloud take some pictures of it and then drifted away to drink tea. Doing the thing, being empowered to do it, was what mattered to them. They did not seek to preserve it after the fact, and McCloud felt that it would be wrong, a gaffe of some kind, for him to remove it from where the painters had left it. Dogs and children wandered across the painting, and if any of the card players walked by it, they skirted it yet took no pains to avoid kicking dust across its surface. McCloud felt a desperation, like that of a man in a short story he had read, who had encountered in the sand of a beach where the tide was coming in a sketch made by Picasso. And who had sought to preserve it against the merciless pull of the moon.

The scholars called it “animism,” the religion, the cosmogony which informed the painting and the dance of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe. The name
animism
was applied also to the world system of Dayaks in Borneo and Comanches in Texas and the Nuba of the Sudan, so it seemed to McCloud to serve not to distinguish the Barramatjara, but to lump them in. However, as McCloud would learn both in Baruda and on tour, it did mean that their apparently empty earth teemed with spirits. A man and woman were not enough on their own to produce a quick child. It was the spirit which quickened the womb.

McCloud himself had been raised intermittently as a Presbyterian. There had been a lot of Presbyterians on the north shore of Sydney. Most of them, like McCloud's family, found it more a satisfying label than a satisfying faith. It told you who your friends and suitable neighbors were. You and they were not some unkempt and overbreeding crowd of Catholics or some flamboyantly decorative Jew. You and they were solid people. He knew that Pauline's parents, against all the evidence of flamboyant events which struck them in the midst of their lives, saw that same set of guarantees in their Presbyterian background. And spirits did not roam the orderly suburbs or challenge the orderly virtues of Caledonia Australis, where among the gum trees people felt no weight of ghosts and sent their children to well-maintained schools named Scots or Knox Grammar.

McCloud had been bored by religion before thirteen, tormented by it for a year or two thereafter, argumentative about it in an acned, smart-aleck way for a further year or two, and then indifferent. When he became an apostate—about the same time he drank his first schooner of beer—he believed he was doing it because the doctrines were irrational and beyond the belief of a reasonable fellow.

But irrationality—he saw through his experiences as a friend and associate of the Barramatjara—wasn't a problem anymore. It never had been for humans. Irrationality of the right kind—ordered by practice—was bread and meat to the spirit. The problem was finding the irrational system which fitted you; the satisfying faith.

The closest McCloud could come to that now was a sort of ancestor worship, a vague fabulous memory of McCloud immigration. Great-grandparents had left the rigors of what you might call lower-middle-class Clydeside life and for some reason taken the earth's longest option, all the way to the antipodes, known also as Sydney, Australia.

What was their impulse? Was it a heroic ignorance of the distances involved? Was it something more visionary? Whatever it was, he was sure it must have cast a light over his own undistinguished (except in one regard) suburban childhood; that it must cast a light now. The ancestral migration—of which he knew so little—was the dimension which redeemed his life, just as ancestral motion had made the Barramatjara world. He, he liked to imagine, was in his own sense an animist and a worshiper of forebears.

He had liked—maybe with a little vanity—to imagine that this was why he felt such fellow feeling for the Barramatjara Dance Troupe and their vigor as artists and dancers.

“I took bad to the grog,” the quiet Christian Philip Puduma had told McCloud as he dotted the spirits into the emblematic landscape he and the other members of the dance troupe were painting during McCloud's Baruda visit. “Them old Germans tell me my body is a temple, but I didn't believe 'em. I started to buy that awful stuff, rosehip and meths. I went to Alice and knew some real bad women in that riverbank there. It was about ten, twelve years back. Jesus himself come up to me in the river bed in Alice, and that Savior says to me, ‘Philip, why are you letting booze kill my temple?' Yet he wasn't against my ancestors, like old Freiniemer was. He just wanted me not to bugger myself up. That turned me round. I joined that Evangelical church, the one that started up in Hall's Creek, just for us blokes, just for my people. These days I never touch a drop. Not these days. I preach to the young fellers. I brought round lots of wild fellers in the other settlements, too. Not me. But the Lord.”