The Book of Science and Antiquities Read online

  “They could talk all right, believe me,” reiterated Jorgensen, like a grandchild defending the grandparents from charges of incoherence or stupidity.

  I was a man holding a camera and aged almost seventy when he said this, and it was a matter of wonderment to me to hear such a claim. At this stage of history Learned Man and Learned Woman were still waiting, on museum shelves, by permission of the elders for the time being, between layers of expectation and indifference, and always with the expectation they would come home in the end.

  At the time of the second documentary, Jorgensen still considered all the other manifestations of ancient civilization, whether mummified or present in identifiable bone or flesh fragments, as mere contestants, with Learned Man supreme upon his tower of age. For he, Peter Jorgensen, had confronted the most ancient of the ancient, something almost too good for a display case; something, he argued, worthy—if the elders permitted it when they brought Learned home—of a cenotaph, a world focus; a place of interpretation, wonder, reconciliation, and pilgrimage.

  Indeed, Jorgensen believed that the three language groups whose country converges on Lake Learned were waiting courteously for a management plan to be made final for Learned’s return to his dry ghost of a lake. And if they wanted Learned Man to be reburied secretly in the Lake Learned lunette, and the reburial site to remain secret from the world, they were entitled to do that. “A treasure greater than Ramses waits on the shelf at the National Museum!” Jorgensen said as he expatiated on his concept. “And the traditional owners certainly know it. But because we, the others, are only dimly interested, just to protect him from the indignity of shelf life the elders might give up on us and bury him secretly. And I wouldn’t bloody blame them.”

  But he believed they wanted more than that. So that was also part of the business of the second documentary, as well as the idea that Learned could heal the country’s history.

  “What’s been our predominant attitude?” Jorgensen would say with genuine pain in his eyes. “Disrespect. Worse than gunpowder. In fact, the two are connected. At every turn, we disrespected the old people. We called the country ‘No-Man’s-Land,’ terra nullius. And that was the legal fiction that allowed us to take a continent. And when they claimed land, we laughed, and when the court overturned terra nullius and decided the country was really theirs, we went stark bloody crazy, as if we had been invaded.”

  But Learned was Jorgensen’s cure. “He’ll calm our souls, teach us respect a busload at a time. Learned Man will heal us. He’ll undermine our contempt. He’ll alter the history we carry in our heads.”

  Learned Man, manifested, would be a memorial too, for all his children who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were killed for persisting in the belief that the land was theirs—for the thousands of Aboriginals who had died by high-muzzle velocity rifles while defending or standing on their country. Learned Man, with the mass and majesty of his years, could also carry their commemoration. And though my dreams were not as invaded by Learned Man as Jorgensen’s, I too listened to the elders’ idea that, as one of them, Clarence Millet, put it, “Learned Man went out in the world to let whites learn something very big.” And this would be best appreciated if his country became a place of visitation for all of us, run by the elders, by their permission. This was a version no one in government had ever offered the elders. Jorgensen was determined that one day someone in power would.

  Meanwhile, Jorgensen and I began years of letter-writing to politicians of every stripe to support Learned Man’s children in their quest for the return of Learned Man to his original home, and to do it with whatever seriousness of purpose they allowed.

  * * *

  Another thing about Learned Man. His teeth were worn but in decent condition, so his missing upper incisor seemed something ritual, as it was in later Aboriginals.

  With his good, if worn, teeth, he ate the flesh of the giant fauna of his day, and the flesh of what we call Murray cod, as well as the varieties of shellfish and wild poultry.

  He was a man who lived on the lunette of the lake a little like a householder, and who traveled for the same reasons we do: romance and education, pilgrimage and trade.

  O My Hero

  O MY HERO, I devote this account of my latter days to you, so that you understand how well I love you and love the earth, and know my duty to them, to all the Heroes, to all the beasts and to all the people.

  I am thinking pleasantly of the wrestling that comes at the start of the cold season, when we occupy equal days of moon and sun, the days when the half of everything yearns for the half of everything else, when ice sings to light, and when there should be efforts made at wholeness. So we come to the equal day-night wrestling, and its banquet. First off, on our side of the camp we have already had seven sets of wrestlers face each other, skin group contesting with skin group, all splendid boys. That’s the thing about these young men, they don’t know they are perfect. Initiated into adulthood this winter, they have the dewiness of their new knowledge, and they’ll try anything, and don’t even know they shouldn’t. That’s how we come to my sister’s son, one of the Short-Faced Bounder people to which I belong—the lovely people, lovely at least to each other, the smilers and singers and lovers of the tall Bounder.

  My sister’s son is in some ways a hard young man to watch. He is rather like my Son Unnameable, though a little shorter. My nephew has fought the young men of the four clans who make up our side of the people, is the champion of our half. Indeed, he’s rangy and quick like my sister’s husband used to be before a curse struck him speechless and brought him down. And oh, but he is as well set as anyone living, except for one old wound in his calf that has weakened the tendon. Yet we are all pleased to have our half of the people’s wrestling spirits in Redder’s hands.

  He is a young man just short of marriage whose beloved, as far as we know, is still the Lake country itself. A wrestler should have a wide zeal for life and all companionship, and not as yet for any particular woman. A woman is going to follow in a visible way soon, I would say, particularly now that women from the other four clans will get such a good look at him today. After the wrestling and the celebration meal, girls will dance for the wrestlers and console them for all the tearing of flesh and hair-pulling and strained sinew. But before the banquet, and first, he must contest for our half of our world, to make a claim of enduring strength for us and, my Hero, for you, and so to mediate an evenness and completeness for all the Lake peoples.

  I love wrestling as much as I love any sport. Clearly now I am set aside for other tasks, and my shoulder is home to a recent and painful constriction that would inhibit reaching for a ball, the great bladder of the dome nose. But I, being of taller form and more solid than my nephew, used to wrestle at this time of the year on the edge of this same shore. I used to strive to reconcile the earth’s halves to each other by reconciling my opponents’ backs to the dust, and having them in turn reconcile mine. It was easy then. In other words, I had a few victories, which meant I was given commensurate duties, since the rule is there should be time for enjoyment, but not a lot for vanity. A young man is flattered when it happens. He does not understand in full that the world is a world of kindly obligation. Without the obligations, no man would know who he was.

  So, if you prevail you are given tasks. It’s the way we live in these latter days, since the Heroes left the earth to us. There was once an earlier playful time when men and women lived as heedlessly as children, but that couldn’t be sustained.

  In any case, as often at the end of the time of heat, the Lake’s shore has receded too far, and Redder is the sort of sprig designed by high influences to attract the wraiths with his contest, and restore things with a decent full pelt of replenishing rains.

  I am a man of great good fortune, and that is why I sing to you of these things. We are all a very lucky people, our crowd, as long as things go well and cycles are reliable, and our young wrestlers draw favor. Now, I admit we would wrestle anyhow,
but we have a command to do it from you, Our Brother of the Clouds, and from all the other Heroes.

  We know where this command came from: the great perentie who lost too many of his kin to ritual war and who chanted in grief to the Father of Heroes and had him appear as a giant, terrifying snake. And this great, fluent snake, of heavenly derivation and ancestral probity, said simply, “Watch the bounders!” And watching them, the lizard saw how those tall beasts fought, grooming, then chasing, engaging, sitting back on their tails and kicking at each other with powerful hind legs, causing the other’s fur to be gouged forth but then, at close quarters, taking each other in a head-grasp. And once a buck bounder was thrown to the ground, the victor adopted a casual pose, relenting of all vainglory, and the loser gave up and at once vacated the wrestling ground. And hence, wrestling rather than blood was recommended for all our people!

  Yesterday my brother-in-law Sandy brought in a butchered long-faced bounder his team had caught. It was seven arms high, a splendid buck, a creature to sing about. When I saw them carrying the butchered haunch—for no man can carry the unbutchered meat—I and all the people of our shoreline were reminded again that between the Lake and the earth, and the plains running away to our Morningside, we are beautifully provided for. Fish and perentie, roots and seeds and fruit, and the giant beings who provide the mercy of meat.

  So those who muttered during the hot months when the water was taken up and the Lake shore extended by spear-lengths upon spear-lengths upon further spear-lengths, are now pacified by the size of the reward of meat. The meat of the giant creature is being slowly cooked at the edge of the wrestling and game ground, at the place set aside for ovens. It lies covered with clay and is baking away in layers of aromatic leaves and the bark of the shred-tree. My wife, Girly, is there, a judge of how the cooking progresses and when it will be ready. Younger women—my daughter Shrill amongst them, a wonderful net maker, but today a helper to the older women—are cooking tubers and seed-bread in shallower fires on the side. And despite the onshore sunrise breeze, all the people can smell the slow-cooking flavors, as the older women earnestly plug the steam from the oven with hard clay slabs carried between sticks. Despite the onshore sunrise breeze, we can smell it all. The people are graced by this foretaste of the wrestling and the banquet.

  I have been sluggish today, but now I am awake. As I draw near the wrestling field, the wrestling council are there smoking the ground already, rendering it clean and dissuading mischievous spirits with stinging smoke and prohibitive songs. They do their feather-racer dance, advancing over the ground with the all-cleansing fumes rising around them and the smoldering branches in hand. This smoke too is an exciting promise of large events. The sun is full now above great tendrils of white cloud. No one is cursed today, though I feel small curses in my shoulder and slight traces of my early weariness. Everyone’s face seems lit. Women walk by me and my gaze is drawn by their passage to the fire, and the senior women, including Girly—a better talker than me—are chortling, and with plenty to say. These women have gone double foraging over the last few days in order to leave this morning free to servicing the oven.

  I see Girly’s large eyes swing and attach to me. She is an enchanter. Her eyes are deeper than the earth and promise to take a person to the outer edge of things. Sometimes when I sleep with her she releases me amongst unpredicted stars. That is her. This loud woman. How I like loud women, though they are loud in fury too, and when they bang at your ankles angrily with the digging stick that was given to women for the delving of earth and the punishment of men. It is better for a man not to carry scars on his ankles or other men will call him eagle-bitten. Some men carry the insult for phase upon phase of seasons. Always pecked by their eagle. “Haw, haw, haw!” cry the other men, who delight to see when a man’s scars are reopened by his woman. The eagle has been at him again.

  Girly is my second wife. My wife when I was young, She Unnameable, did not look at me in the way of Girly. A more placid soul with a slower smile, she would sit back on her haunches, her stick slack in her hand. No eagle. A less hungry, more companionable bird.

  My daughter Shrill, the weaver of nets, is now attending to yams in a side fire. I see her assiduous shoulders, well muscled by her work.

  * * *

  When I emerged from my mother’s womb, a visitor appeared where my mother and I lay wrapped in fur by a fire, and he bent down singing and found my small foot amongst the skins. Then, almost without my mother knowing, as if plucking a small root from the earth, he dislocated my little toe. I screamed of course and he departed, but no one tried to reset the little toe, since it was meant to suit me for some future office. My toe remains thus to this day. I have always been treated with respect by people who read my tracks and who know that in my human habiliments I am not simply a man with a malformed foot, but also one to be feared only when the law enters me. That dislocated toe was a message that I had been picked up as a weapon of the law and that I would be directed to protect it, that it will be still dislocated when I pass skywards and am laid in the dunes.

  Thus I know, for instance, where the awful fluid from the dead man is stored, the fluid in which the long bone of maintenance and restoration and punishment must be steeped. But now, going to the wrestling ground in my normal clothing, the gracious fur and the leather clout, I am simply another fellow walking in the dunes, not on any other enterprise than to relate to the elements of the day and to my fellows. This seems a day appointed to mere breathing and no complex duty. The sanctifying smoke and the first rumor of the succulence of the bounder haunch suggest exactly that.

  The people of the clans are now gathering in from all sides. I love the ever-shriller chatter of the women, which is of a higher order even than the chatter of the birds but comes from the same source. The birds’ task is to sharpen the dusk to a point of sound, the pink-wings and the curved-beaks who are so strident and the loudmouthed honey-eaters and all the rest, of whom the rosy hook-beaks are the greatest honers of the point of their song. Meanwhile the task of women is to sharpen the day to a point, which they are doing now amidst the smell of meat and the cleansing smoke.

  I am grateful today for my kindly skins, the fur on my shoulders and chest and on my loins. My shoulder hurts, but I can walk as if it doesn’t. The dunes I climb are washed with red and yellow and gray and blue, and the sand pillars the wind makes stand up solid around us. I know they say, the people of the many clans, that I am as tall as one of those piles of formed clay and earth, and am sometimes to be mistaken for one. People tell me I take on that form though I am not aware that I do. I will not be suspected of it on a plain, joyful day like today.

  I see the man named Clawback walking with children skipping around him, three and three, and they’re laughing and he pretends to be a wily spirit, first ignoring them and then chasing them. The children skitter, arching their backs to avoid his grasping hands. Clawback is a teaser and a man with a quick tongue, likable to all, familiar to all. He is, however, also a violator of blood and, it seems, to be marked in the place of the law to die. He does not know that, nor do the children or the women at the fire under the warm influence of which many of them have slipped off their furs. Like every man besotted with a woman, Clawback believes his passions are not legible. He still thinks that his transgressions with a forbidden woman of the Earless Lizard clan are unknown. But they have been perceived and weighed upon by the aged men. Even some of the women at the fire might have discussed them. He does not know that the killing bone is meant to go down the base of his handsome laughing throat. Being who I am, of deformed foot, I know how much it is to be regretted that so often the great violators are the best loved of the people and the ones who light up the faces of people.

  There was a time on earth when people were so few and manners so unrestrained that the Heroes of heaven did not need to enact law as exactly as they have in this latter age. That world would have suited a playful sinner like Clawback. Yet, in the world as it is now, such
people vanish like clouds and are—afterwards—not spoken of.

  Soon it seems all the people are at the contest ground. I look away towards Morningside. There are pleasing banks of silver-green honey bush, waist-high, stretching off towards stands of river trees, red and gray and very high, which mark the course of the wandering streams that flow into our lake. I have not yet reached the contest ground myself when I see a party of men coming out of those far trees, as if they have just crossed the water, wading through the morning skin of ice on the surface. They are now walking in the long grass towards us. Though they are still so far off, a person might see they are carrying burdens, and weapons, both old and freshly acquired. I know at once it is Baldy’s party returning from their long mission to the Upper Waters. They have the look of men, even at this moment, perhaps especially now, who’ve been through many meetings and transactions off in that direction, of those who are weary but conscious of carrying news which will enlarge our world, even as they seek us again. The smell of the people’s meat on the breeze from the Lake draws Baldy and his men in towards their home.

  In the meantime, the wrestling matches are proclaimed to be ready to start by an old councillor, who seems unconscious to the approach of the party. As the champions of our clans draw closer, I can see they are cunningly marked in white clay. It is grand to see them—impeccable young men, delineated by the tension of their muscles, empowered by spirit paint and beside themselves with intent. The Otherside clan’s upholders are at the other end of the ground and are given leanness and spirit by their yellow clay. They have assumed some of the strength and everywhere-ness of ghosts. They clap their hands and in a yellow mist their spirits move.