Making the rounds

I wrote last week that I thought it was my last trip up the worn steps in the Trades Hall to the Pitjantjatjara group. Not quite. Six of us regulars met last night, in part to bid me farewell! Nice start for what’s looking to be a week of fond Melbourne farewells.

We “Trades Hall Mob” (as we’re known at Ngapartji HQ in Alice Springs) started with another convivial language- learning hour in the medical union seminar room back in a newer building behind the Trades Hall's grand facade. L, the woman whose day it was to conduct the class took us through the range of meanings of the all-important word tjukurpa, which, our dictionary told us, can mean story, law, what someone said, message, word… It is often translated as “dreaming,” though it has nothing to do with the oneiric. The idea (which I think she called word-bag) was to understand that a word has many meanings, one word has many words within it. This seemed to me a premature and potentially demoralizing lesson for people still barely able to string together three words, but she was right. We’re not going to become fluent, but to know the kind of resonance and breadth of reference which a few words bear gives us a sense of the richness and subtlety of the language on whose surface we stumble along. At the culture center at Uluru I knew almost none of the Pitjantjatjara words in the bilingual captions, but I knew enough to mouth my way through it and recognize it as language — word endings, sentence structure — and it felt terrific.

The highlight was singing, what’s become the most valuable part of our learning for me. (I often sing these songs as I walk, more audibly if I think there’s nobody else there!) B, a young artist from New Zealand who’s spent a few years with the Pitjantjatjara-speaking community at Ernabella in South Australia, taught us Pitjantjatjara words she’d heard to “Waltzing Matilda” (Nyanpi Matilda! Nyanpi Matilda! / Nyuntu Matilda nyanpi ngalula), and then we sang two songs we’d learned before as rounds: one to the melody of “Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree” and the other to “Frère Jacques.” I hadn’t sung a round in a long time and it’s a lovely thing, isn’t it? Magical, a vision (dare I say?) of good…

Finally we sang the always moving Land Rights Song, with a beautiful, somewhat mournful melody of its own I tried to write out a few weeks ago. (Each space is a beat, in 4:4.)

Kulilaya Kulilaya! EEE-E--- ---- EEE-E--- ----
Ngura nyangatja manta wiru EE EDC- CC DCA---
Nganampa tjamuku kamiku FFFG AAA- AGF-
Ngura iriti-nguru FE DCC CC-- -------- --------
Kulilaya! EEE-E---
Manta miilmiilpa-tjara --EE E-DCDC---
Tjukurpa alatjitu DDD- DCb(flat)A----
Nyaa-ku nyura kulintja wiya? C-CD C-A- AG--GGG

(Listen you all! / This place is good country. / [It’s] our grandfathers’ grandmothers’ / Place from long ago. / Listen you all! / This is sacred land. / Truly tjukurpa. / Why are you all not listening?) It gives us all goosebumps to sing. We didn’t talk about Prime Minister Howard’s “takeover” of Aboriginal communities — “let’s not go there” said our convener R wisely when I made some reference to it — but in singing this we might have been.

(By the way, voices of opposition and alarm are now coming louder and louder to Howard’s plan. Aboriginal leaders are insisting on consultation, health professionals are saying the plan is unimplementable, and some Aboriginal women are said to be fleeing towns in fear their children will be taken away. The governments of the states are not playing ball either; the leader of the state of South Australia said it was like sending troops in to “shock and awe” and then leave six months later claiming “mission accomplished.” I’m not sure why we didn’t hear these voices right away, but it’s a good thing to be hearing them now. Perhaps a truer national consensus on the gravity of the problems and the need for real solutions will emerge.)

And then we headed off up Lygon Street for an Italian dinner, crowned with Italian hot chocolate at the famous Brunetti’s. We’re an odd lot, we Trades Hall Mob—all women again now that I’m leaving (two art historians from Melbourne Uni, including a man, have come and gone again), people doing interesting social justicey things at the margins and interstices of health, education, the labor movement and art; two have daughters doing the same. I’m glad to have met them, and we’ll keep in touch. When I’m in Melbourne next I’ll look them up. I’ve a hunch they’ll still be there, meeting two or three Mondays a month except holidays, enjoying friendship with other people whose journeys have brought them to value some connection with Aboriginal language and people, a link in the growing web connecting Aboriginal and settler Australians and their cultures which will — must! — become more important to both communities in the coming years.

As for me, the New York correspondent: I heard in Alice that there was a chance that the Ngapartji Ngapartji show (whose Melbourne Festival performances are how we Trades Hall Mob learned about all this, including me) might at some point come to Lincoln Center. If so I’ll gather a group of students and we’ll greet them with the Land Rights Song. Maybe my own renewed sense of the power and life of the land and its traditional custodians here will have led me by then to learn more about the erstwhile owners of the island of Manhatto and even met some of their descendants.