Eternalised delight

At first glance this is a photograph of happiness - of people at play. Yet, I find it incredibly poignant.

Bondi Beach, Sydney 1890s. For more pictures see the State Library of NSW's Lost Sydney Facebook page

The little girl sixth from the bottom left has hoisted up her dress for a paddle and is thrilled and excited about her day at the beach. But it's all so long, long ago. The dunes are paved now. There are cafes and apartments and hotels, and there's been a Boer War, First World War, so much since. Which of these did her happiness live through?

In the same way I can stare for ages at that photograph of the two Arrernte women Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer took in Central Australia in 1901. It's reproduced here:   

 http://www.mabonativetitle.com/info/ArrenteWomenBaby.htm

Of course, I need to attach the customary warning that aboriginal people may see images of deceased relatives. But that only heightens my own sense of poignancy.

Somehow Spencer captured the exact moment of giggling. It 'sounds' from the frame. I can hear it as if I were wandering past these women today. But more than that. I think of Professor Spencer professing a Darwinian superiority about aboriginal people (and their prospects). It colours my attitude toward him. And yet, the 'Prof' was able to evince a photograph like this (the one of the Arrernte women) in the stuffy Victorian age.



If you liked this blog, others of mine touching on Central Australia are:


Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
@  http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/11/victory-over-death-and-despair-in.html

Ah, Nathanael - another note on The Tale of Frieda Keysser, 29 Nov 2012
@  http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/11/ah-nathanael-another-note-on-tale-of.html

Drowned man in dry creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 Aug 2012
@  http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/08/happy-new-year-drowned-man-in-dry-creek.html

Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
@ http://gordonkaltonwilliams.blogspot.com/2012/05/considering-land-of-altjira.html

Journey to Horseshoe Bend - ten years on

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the first performance of Journey to Horseshoe Bend. I republish this article from that time. Another article on the involvement of the Ntaria community and other black and white Territorians is on my website under Singing Chorales: Aranda Way

Broadening experiences in Central Australia

How well has classical music represented Central Australia over the years? John Antill obviously read Spencer and Gillen’s classic text, The Arunta before writing his ballet Corroboree, the young Peter Sculthorpe portrayed a ‘sunburnt country’ in his various tone poems. There’s one long note in Barry Conyngham’s opera Edward John Eyre which says heaps to me about horizon.

The musical work that Andrew Schultz and I have written for Symphony Australia and the Sydney Symphony is based on T.G.H. Strehlow’s 1969 novel Journey to Horseshoe Bend,  which tells of Strehlow’s mortally-ill father’s last journey down the dry bed of the Finke River, Central Australia in search of medical help in 1922. Pastor Strehlow examined his faith, as his son Theo (the young T.G.H. Strehlow) travelled behind his parents’ buggy, learning about the country from Aboriginal guides, pastoralists, cameleers and a host of other characters they met along the way.

Cover of the CD of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, released 2004. Photo of Horseshoe Bend: Paul Carter

 To create our musical version of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, the novel’s 220 pages may have been edited, but in developing this work over a four-year period we have had a broadening experience, not out of keeping with the ‘coming of age’ of young Theo in the book.

In the introduction to his monumental Songs of Central Australia, T.G.H. Strehlow acknowledged the old Aranda men who provided him with the words of the chants he had transcribed. Their birthdates stretched back as far as 1842, before McDouall Stuart’s epic crossing of this continent. Uniquely for an anthropological writer in the 1950s, and one occasionally remembered for the controversy over his handling of sensitive Aboriginal material, Strehlow credited his informants. It’s a nice point to bear in mind as I reflect on the broad community of support which has buttressed our creation of this work; of a large history against which we pitch our piece.

We present Journey to Horseshoe Bend as a cantata, that form of unstaged mini-opera which the Lutheran J.S. Bach used to reflect the scriptural message in Sunday services at St.Thomas Church Leipzig where he served in the 1720s. Why? Early in the novel Pastor Strehlow is brought from his house at Hermannsburg Mission (now called Ntaria) for the last time. As he is lifted into the buggy the mission people gather round and sing Kaarrerrai worlamparinyai, Pastor Strehlow’s translation of Wachet auf, the great Lutheran hymn set by Bach and used by him in Cantata 140. But by presenting the work as a cantata we pay homage to the Lutheran background of people out at Ntaria – a Lutheranism held in tandem with traditional belief – as well as our own Europeanness. We employ an effective medium for a story which in many respects is as deep and as anguished as a Passion. Our version of Journey to Horseshoe Bend is cast in eight scenes, broken up into arias, duets, choruses. Andrew’s orchestral layout reflects the 275–kilometre river valley through which the party travels. Winds and brass on either side of a central pool of strings and other instruments, resemble a river gorge, but you could also regard the layout as similar to the chancel of a church. Andrew even borrowed a refrain from the Ntaria Lutheran service – the words Kaartai, nurnanha wurlathanai (Lord, hear our prayer) - to frame Pastor Carl’s death.

I make use of a narrator, as well as another actor, to tell the story, and this is outside the cantata tradition. But our purpose is to create a bond with a broader audience beyond the normal concert-going public, the sort of people to whom and for whom the story of Journey to Horseshoe Bend is meant to speak. I make use also of the three languages of the region as well as the dialectical differences between Western Arrarnta, Southern Arrernte, and Eastern Arrernte (and even the orthographical differences between the different dialects of Arrernte; the differences are unsettled - until the 20th century, Arrernte was an oral language). Travelling through the Brittania Sandhills one of those nights in 1922, young Theo was rebuked by his guide Njitiaka for using the Western Arrarnta word for moon in Southern Arrernte country. In an exchange which echoed this episode in the novel, Alice Springs resident Doug Abbott, chided me for casting his great-grandfather’s dialogue in the Eastern Arrernte I had reconstructed from a dictionary: ‘That old bloke would turn in his grave [if you had him talking in anything other than Southern Arrernte.],’ he said. Casting a story of Central Australia in cantata form, replete with narration and Aranda interjections (to use the Strehlows’ spelling), acknowledges the hybrid forms that are a mark of post-contact Aranda life. Aranda people out at Ntaria practise Two Ways, a blend of Aranda and European traditions

T.G.H. Strehlow began Journey to Horseshoe Bend in May 1966 while recovering from peritonitis. It was published at a time of crisis in his life. Strehlow’s novel has been described as an attempt to posit himself as central in Aranda life, particularly at a time when a rising generation of Aboriginal activists rebelled against a white man who spoke of their ceremonial life for them. The book tells stories of the Altjira, translated imperfectly for the past century as ‘the Dreamtime’, while recounting stories of Pastor Carl Strehlow’s struggles with God. We get a sense of the eternal mythology underpinning the landscape but also details of the pastoral history of the region; the sequence of ownership of Henbury Station, for example; or how Gus Elliott, owner of Horseshoe Bend hotel, where Pastor Strehlow died, first attempted to run cattle at Glen Helen but moved into an area where he would not face so much resistance from the original inhabitants. Working on this piece, helicoptering over its terrain, Andrew and I are possibly the first composer and librettist in Australian musical history to be asked to avoid disturbing a cattle muster while doing our research.

T.G.H. Strehlow does not favour one strand – black or white – as more relevant than the other in his book. My libretto juxtaposes and perhaps prioritises elements for the sake of dramatic vividness, and space. But ours is still a story of reconciliation. Andrew sets Strehlow’s translation of the Song of Mborawatna to a chorale fugue at the end. The point is not ‘neither-nor’, nor ‘yes, but’ but ‘both-and’. We’re embracing the life of the country, like Strehlow, in all its historical and mythical currents, cross-currents and substrata.

Journey to Horseshoe Bend, the novel, is out of print and hard to find these days. When I began work on this project it was as if T.G.H. Strehlow had disappeared from the face of literary Australia. I often went into second-hand bookshops looking for the title, only to find myself spelling ‘Strehlow’. Once upon a time governments turned to only three white men for ‘technical advice’ when making ‘aboriginal policy’: A.P. Elkin, W.E.H. Stanner and T.G.H. Strehlow. It was as if, in spite of the incredible controversy in 1978, when Strehlow’s photographs of secret ceremonies turned up in the German photo-magazine Stern, Strehlow had ‘disappeared from the map.’ Of course he was not forgotten in Central Australia. People remember not only that ‘he shouldn’t have sold those pictures’ but still confirm family relationships that Strehlow recorded on genealogies drawn up with devotion and a Teutonic thoroughness.

Andrew and I are responsible for the artistic decisions involved in making a musical version of this novel: telling the story in 1^st person, rather than Strehlow’s more impersonal 3^rd person; having Njitiaka actually speak in Aranda. Andrew decided the orchestral layout, musical language, orchestration, and musical weighting for each section. We’ve no doubt cut out someone’s favourite bit. But in making this version of Journey to Horseshoe Bend we have consulted widely, drawing upon the family lore and reminiscence of people still living in the Centre. Much of T.G.H. Strehlow’s material – manuscripts, objects given to him by the old men - is now housed in the Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs. I would have rung the Centre’s Brett Galt-Smith and Shane Hersey several times a week over the past four years. Andrew, the Sydney Symphony’s Alexandra Cameron and I have all been out to Hermannsburg; Symphony Australia has made sure we could fly and drive the length of the journey to Carl Strehlow’s grave. We gained a greater sense of the reality of the story by meeting descendants of characters in the novel, and seeing the pride for example with which Kunmanara Breaden, current chairman of the Central Lands Council, told of his grandfather Johnson showing Theo over Idracowra station on the fifth day of the journey. In the cantata, this is represented by Theo singing Andrew’s evocative ditty of what he sees: harnesses, bridles, hobble straps, while his father heaves through a text wrought with the question of suffering as described in Job. We didn’t have the time and ‘space’ however to show Theo embarrassing the agnostic station people by saying grace out loud on the Sunday, but Mrs Murphy at Idracowra showed us the still–extant blockhouse where he said it.

This work was not conceived by a lonely isolate starving in a garret. Part of my confidence in this work lies in the level of consultation and immersion in Territorian experience we have undergone with the assistance of a large number of people, and which echoes, however faintly, the original encounters of the Strehlows’ trip. If we’re to pay homage to all the people who helped in the creation of this work, we end up with a web of relationships that is not as complex as the genealogies prepared by T.G.H. Strehlow and still consulted by Aboriginal families 25 years after his death. But which has contributed to a work which we think speaks profoundly to an audience wider than the usual cognoscenti.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2003

This article first appeared in The Australian Financial Review, May 2003

Other blogs of mine on Central Australia are:

Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012

Carving up the pie

I'm often fascinated by the 'taxonomical' categories that take us beyond the rational divisions of life.

I thought of this again when we visited the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Sunday.

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/francis-bacon/

You saw Bacon returning time and again to similar themes - Crucifixion, nailing, meat, carcasses, flesh, crumpling (as in crumpled paper)...

In Singing the Land, Signing the Land, a book brought out some years ago by Helen Chambers with the Yolngu community at Yirrkala and David Wade Chambers, the authors pointed out the way varying divisions of life prove the fictional 'constructedness' of our worlds.

 http://singing.indigenousknowledge.org

The Dyirbal people of Queensland, they mentioned, have a category that includes men, kangaroos, most snakes, storms, rainbows and boomerangs, and another which includes women, fire and dangerous things. There are aboriginal people who would disparage our categorization of emus as birds; emus don't fly. How can we even think of dividing up the world this way?

I wonder what the categories of my blogs might say about me - Central Australia, Sydney scenery, Aranda culture, AFL football, Washington, Jefferson, Wagner opera, Philippa Duke Schuyler, Inner West vignettes...

The closest I have to a photo of Gap Road. This is actually Stott Terrace, which crosses. Gap Road runs perpendicularly to this towards the gap in the ranges on the left of the picture.

And what creates these fusions. For example, I have a strong memory dating from 1983 of sitting in my friends the Christians' house in Gap Road Alice Springs; we all ate Toblerone, drank Earl Gray and listened to Side 4 of Solti's recording of Mahler's Eighth Symphony (the bit beginning with René Kollo singing, 'Blicket auf zum Retterblick (Look up to the redeeming sight...)'

love the use of the fish-eye lens to capture the whole cast of Mahler's 'Symphony of a Thousand'

Mahler's Eighth, with its texts of Veni creator Spiritus and the last scene from Goethe's Faust has nothing to do with quickly-melting chocolate, steaming tea and Alice Springs on sweaty summer nights, but its last half hour is forever wedded to these memories of mine.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012

Conocotarius, George Washington - eventually

I don't live in Central Australia and haven't since the 1980s. It's been an important strand in my life though, given expression partly in our piece, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. And I guess I think of Central Australia every day. I see myself there. When I am there, visiting in person, I can still see the landscape in vivid detail when I shut my eyes of a night. It's as if it imprints itself on the inside of my eyelids. I sometimes wonder whether it's to do with the power of Central Australia's colours - yellow spinifex growing in red soil, the oranges and purples, the vapoury blue of distant peaks. Aldous Huxley once advanced a theory that stained glass is used in churches because bright colours penetrate deep into our spirit.
 
But it's also the languages I miss. In Sydney I'm not regularly hearing Aranda, the language of the area around Alice Springs and Hermannsburg (Ntaria) and Horseshoe Bend. I don't hear those four or so languages you might hear as you walk down the street in Alice Springs. As an exercise to keep in touch I often rewrite the different orthographies.

As an oral language Aranda, or Arrernte, has been written several ways in the past 100 or so years. When Spencer and Gillen were doing their researches at the remote Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1890s they wrote down what they heard by ear.

The Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1880s. Public domain

No linguists, they had no system for transcribing the words. And I found myself the other night rewriting sentences they'd quoted in 1899's Native Tribes of Central Australia into the more modern Eastern Arrernte script devised by the Institute for Aboriginal Development in the 1980s.

Arakutja wunka oknirra unta munja aritchika [Spencer and Gillen's translation: Plenty of young women, you look and go quickly.]

became

Arrweketye awenke akngerre unte mwenye aretyeke.

I've often found writing in different orthographies a good method for working out how unheard languages might sound. I like to think that since I know a bit of Pitjantjatjara, from northern South Australia, not far (relatively speaking) from Alice Springs, I might have a clue to how languages even further south, like Kaurna the Adelaide language, may have sounded when it was in regular use. I would imagine that all the Central and South Australian languages, those in the central strip extending even to the southern coast, emphasised the first syllable, since that is a common feature of languages around Australia (either first syllable or first syllable after a consonant).

I think you can play this comparison game with American languages. If you look to the US and compare 'Cherokee' with an alternative, preferred spelling 'Tsalagi' (first spelt as 'Chalaque' in De Soto's Portuguese narrative of 1557), you can imagine that originally the 'ch' of Cherokee was more 'hissy' like a 'ts', the 'r' was further back in the throat where 'l' sits, and the 'k' and the 'g' were not very distuinguishable.

My favourite example of this however, is the word: 'hanadahguyas'.

To this day, the Iroquois people of the US northeast address the president of the United States as Hanadahguyus. It means 'town destroyer'. When the Iroquois invited Bill Clinton to the 200th anniversary celebrations of the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1994, the letter to him was addressed to Hanadahguyus, President Bill Clinton, 'hanadahguyas' being a title that has been given to all 44 presidents because it was first given to Washington.

In 1753 young George Washington, then a colonel in the British Virginia militia, ventured into the Ohio country. He met the Seneca chief Tanacharison, or The Half-King. Tanacharison addressed Washington by the name the tribe had given Washington's grandfather. Washington wrote the word as 'Conocotarius'. They had given John Washington this name because he destroyed their villages. But 'conocotarius' doesn't look anything like 'hanadahguyus'. Could it  really be the same word? Well perhaps, if the initial 'c' in 'Conocotarius' is rasping like the 'ch' in the German 'hoch', and the 't' is between a 't' and a 'd', as in many languages. 'The 'r' might have been an indeterminable liquid, easily a 'y'. I can't explain the 'd' where 'Conocotarious has a second 'c'.

But if both words really do mean 'town destroyer' and they're just different ways of writing it, what I most like about the way Washington wrote it is that he gave it a Roman shape. 'Hanadahguyus' doesn't look like the name of a Roman hero. Conocotarius does. Was young Washington, in 1753, already monumentalising himself?

Houdon's statue of Washington in the Virginia State Capitol. Lifesize, it has been placed way above us by the pedestal.

Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere"

I didn't get up to White Plains when in New York. I really should have. I've long loved Percy Grainger's music - in many respects he was and still is Australia's premier classical composer - and White Plains is where he spent the second half of his life (1921-61). There are places in New York he would have frequented of course. NYU is where he made that intriguing statement about Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington being the greatest composers.

I like to think Grainger went to my school, though. John Bird, in his biography of Grainger, says that if Grainger had any formal schooling at all it was probably at a state school in South Yarra (Melbourne). I went to South Yarra State School and the older building there was a Victorian-era building which might easily have been around when Grainger was a boy.

I do, also, know Albert Park Lake in Melbourne and was there recently.

Concreted now, it was a natural lagoon when Grainger boated here in the1880s and derived inspiration for his later Free Music experiments from the sight of the wave patterns made by his paddle. Grainger would have hated the fact that it's now concreted. He wrote from North Queensland once about a wild river that was being straightened and made navigable, despairing of the shrinking options in this world for real life and adventure; for the 'chap-who-wants-to-find-the-sagas-everywhere'.

But as I say, he was Australia's premier composer. I remember seeing a front page of The New York Times from 1922. 'GRAINGER'S MOTHER IS KILLED IN FALL' said one of the headlines. No first name, or further explanation. Everyone in New York, it seems, would have been expected to know who Grainger was.

Publicity photograph of Grainger from 1921. Public domain

I doubt if any Australian classical composer, even now, could be identified overseas as easily as that.

But 'Grainger's mother is killed in fall'? Makes me think about the dramatisations I've seen (and even conceived myself) of Grainger's life. They might show his eccentricities, like the way he would throw an egg over a house and run down the centre hallway to catch it on the other side or walked the 75 kms (46 miles) from Yarram to Sale between concerts. They might show him dressing up in his towelling clothes. Or they might tell of his London years when, admittedly, he wrote his best music... but no particular biographical arc is described (apart from the fact that the 'chap who wanted to find the sagas everywhere', who was titillated by Nibelungenlied descriptions of men being hewn to the waist by broadaxes, shipped off to the US rather than risk being conscripted for WWI - not much of an ending.)

But the dramatically compelling real story is how his mother became distraught when rumours of incest surfaced and ended up fallen from the upper storeys of a New York skyscraper. Jumped or fell? There was a chair next to the open window.

How about this for a dramatic shape? How Grainger is away on tour as usual (his daily and sometimes several-times-daily letters home to 'mumsy' being some of the most vivid descriptions of mid-20th century American life you'll find). Up to now, his girlfriends have always accepted that they play second fiddle to his mother's 'smother-love', but now 'E' decides that something is not right and she is jealous. She spreads rumours. Grainger, away on tour, can do nothing to assuage his mother's sense of rising panic. His effusive reassurances only make things worse. Signoffs like the one for the telegram which read: 'LONGING CLASP YOU IN MY ARMS' can hardly calm Rose Grainger's anxieties about making the right impression. And eventually she goes to visit Percy's agent and disappears out a window when Ms Sawyer steps out of the office for a moment.

(Percy and his mother's relationship certainly was strange, even if not incestuous. As John Bird says in his biography: 'Percy Grainger was mad. And he was made mad by a mother who never allowed him to grow up.' (I guess there is a place for stories about how he would throw an egg over a house...))

But to go on: Grainger gets the telegram telling him his mother has died after he has come offstage after playing with the Los Angeles Phil. He takes the long, painful train journey home to New York, tells 'E' he never wants to see her again (of course) and throws himself into his work.

Life is not fun however, and he still has to tour to earn an income. Turning around in a customs queue while coming back from New Zealand he sees Ella Viola-Strom and falls in love at first sight. She is his ideal of the Nordic beauty (the kind of beauty his mother brought him up to idealise?). He woos her. They wed at Hollywood Bowl before between 15,000-23,000 people after a performance that has included To a Nordic Princess. Despite comments to the contrary, Ella has already come to know of Percy's violent sexual preferences, his 'blue roses' as Grainger and Rose called them. In Malcolm Gillies' and David Pear's book, The All-Round Man, there is a letter Grainger wrote to Ella from Kansas City some months before the wedding describing how he saw a mother rain a 'sheaf of quick hand blows' on a little boy. 'Can you not,' he asked Ella, 'be sometimes suddenly masterfully cruel to me as that mother was to her child?....(when you are outoftheway-putout) make me strip & whip me thoroly?' And apparently she did.

But how does Ella reconcile herself to all this? The boy Rose had created? What is the process? Surely she thinks about all those other Edwardian-era women back in London obliging his tastes. And how does she (does she?) come to equal his mother in his eyes? What does she think of his mother? It was easy to put a foot wrong if you didn't share his idolisation. What is the process? Because finally she does come to a way of living with it, of loving him, and nurturing his creativity although 'it was hell to be with him; hell to be without him'.

Here is something to explore dramatically but it's an exploration of relationships, not a biopic of a composer's life. Celebrating his music would not be the primary dramatic intention, except that when he 'throws himself into his work', you could bring in his musical achievements; reveal his futuristic Free Music experiments and compare them with his earlier, delightful folksong arrangements.

I suppose it's not to be wondered at that Australians looking to tell 'our stories' light on Grainger's worth as a composer. Grainger was basically a lovely musician, 'a whale of a pianist' (according to New York critic Harold C. Schonberg), musically open-hearted, breezy, refreshingly tolerant, especially for his age. He embraced and was inspired by all sorts of music from Raratongan part-song (long before the fad for World Music) to barbershop quartets (when no-one would have believed it would now be seeing a revival); I'm glad he got to hear (in 1909) Baldwin Spencer's wax cylinders of chants of the Aranda (who do live with their sagas everywhere and ever-present) and considered them 'more melodic than stupid remarks in music histories'. I'm glad he left behind a treasure trove of really beautiful folksong settings. But I do think there was some sort of disconnect between the grand epic life he believed he led and the miniatures he created. Wildness and violence in his music? A certain vigorous folk-fiddling kind of counterpoint, but inspired as much by Bach's Brandenburgs as by any rawness or brutal chill of down-and-dirty life. The gulf between what he wrote and what he thought he wrote provides perhaps another tragic dimension.

Australia's greatest composer? Still the one with broadest and longest-lasting appeal. But I'm trying to figure out what got me onto this. I supposed it was seeing colleagues at the end of the League of American Orchestras conference last week in Dallas heading home to New York, while I went on to Sydney, and thinking that Grainger is Australian classical music's most famous New Yorker. I reflected on his stature. And the fact that Americans are often surprised to learn he is not one of their own.

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2012
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 September 2012

Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira

I haven't been blogging lately, almost as though I've felt inhibited about commenting on events or things seen here in Australia. Yet there are constant eye-openers.

reproduced by courtesy Warren H. Williams

I met up with my mate, Warren Williams, down from Alice Springs a few weeks ago. He was here promoting his CD Winanjjara, his arrangement (orchestrations virtually) of traditional Warumungu Song, song material from the Tennant Creek area that he is entitled-to through his mother's father. One of Warren's geat-grandfathers, Hesekiel, was mentioned in Journey to Horseshoe Bend, the symphonic cantata Andrew Schultz and I wrote based on Ted Strehlow's novel. As usual, the conversation turned to the Arrernte worldview - who is related to whom, who can speak for what, whose country is whose...

I was reminded of this yesterday as I watched excerpts on YouTube from the Metropolitan Opera's Ring cycle. At the beginning of Act III of Siegfried, Wotan, king of the gods is now wandering the world. Still his voice is thunder (to borrow one of Homer's epithets for Wotan's Greek equivalent, Zeus). And in Robert Lepage's Met production, Wotan's staff actually flashes like lightning.

Warren told me that the great-grandfather of another great-grandfather, Johannes Ntjalka, was Kanjira, 'the thunder god'. I had read about Kanjira in Carl Strehlow's Die Aranda und Loritja-Stamme. 'But,' I said to Warren, 'you mean a reincarnation of Kanjira?' 'No', said Warren, 'the actual thunder god'. I was aware that people say that the Altjira (usually translated as Dreamtime) is maybe only a few generations back (or well, really, since I think of the 'altjira' as the eternally creative substratum of reality, it's ever-present). But commissioners in Aboriginal Land Claims have commented on their difficulty in working out sometimes whether a witness is citing a forebear or a mythological figure. Warren's information was a graphic example to me that Central Australia really is 'the land of Altjira', eternity, as Ted Strehlow once said.

And a graphic example to me also, that there really is a lot to comment on in Australia.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Opera in a land of Song, 20 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow’s The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012