The first is my own hand, full of shells from the beach of the Timor Sea at Darwin, most of them tiny sand dollars! They're so small I wanted to call them Sandpfennige - remember the tiny little one-Pfennig coins in Germany before conversion to the Euro? I didn't know there were sand dollars beyond the Pacific... Finding a sand dollar on our beach in Del Mar was always a thrill; it's been a long time since I've found one intact, and only once can I remember finding several. Finding all of these adorable little ones and the other shells (the photo doesn't really show the luminous blue of the shell at top left) took the sting out of not being able to swim: the water is full of killer box jellyfish until about this time of year and I wasn't taking chances, though I did wade.These are the hands of Vincent Forrester (Muntjani), an Arrernte man whose talk about medicinal plants at the Alice Springs Desert Center opened into an account of tjukurpa (dreamtime, ancestral law) stories.
I'd read many of the stories (not the secret ones of course) told about this landscape, and also knew that the tellings are often accompanied by drawings in the sand. But I had never seen it or, I realized, felt it. One of the essays I have students read discusses these tjukurpa tellings, and notes that (unlike other ritual events) they can open up in the middle of a conversation, by a mere smoothing out of the sand by the teller's hand; if there's an interruption, the sand is smoothed clean again, and the story resumed when there's time again.That's what it was like! And the effect is stunning. You get a sense that the stories exist in the earth, that they are constantly telling and retelling themselves like subterranean rivers which only occasionally surface, safeguarding the shape of the world whose formation they describe. Tjukurpa isn't about a dream world, and it's not about a bygone age of creation, but involves what one scholar calls "abiding events," creative events which are continuous and constantly new, creating and sustaining us and the world, even as our retellings help sustain them.
Vincent was telling us about the Seven Sisters, a constellation about which almost all Aboriginal peoples tell stories. The Sisters move through the land with two young boys, pursued by a magician who goes to lengths even Zeus didn't dare to try to seduce the women (without success, by the sound of it). In their wake emerges the landscape of mountain ranges, networks of water holes, etc. Vincent traced all sorts of shapes with his fingers, coiled and wavy lines, patterns of dots ... At one point drawing the outline of Australia around the whole.
One day the boys of the Seven Sisters, playing in a muddy waterhole and making mudpies, lose track of time. Before they know it, they've made a big pile, which turns to stone: it's Uluru. Our guide told us a version of this story as we saw the little pond next to the great monolith, but it seemed merely silly. Here, now, as Vincent's fingers raised mountains and hollowed out billabongs in the red sand, it was like being there as it actually happened. "You really need to be here to understand these stories," said a woman from Sydney gratefully. But I was at Uluru and didn't understand. Not until the living fingers of this extraordinary Alice Springs-born university-educated Vietnam veteran drew living songlines in (or is it from?!) the living land.
Can I tell you how exciting it is to be finally understanding (if even a little) things I've read about for years, and to feel the pulse (if only faintly) of a land I've sensed since the start has a continuing life beneath the shiny surface of its cities and the sprawl of its suburbs?
