Music is very important in this work, for instance, as Alexis Wright explains, one of her intentions ‘was to write the novel as though it was a very long melody made of different forms of music, mixed somehow with the voices of the Gulf’.536
In fact, the inhabitants of Desperance often hear the Gulf music, the Aboriginal inhabitants hear the voices of the ancestors of the land and many characters sing. Moreover, Carpentaria opens with a song ‘[A] NATION CHANTS, BUT WE
KNOW YOUR STORY ALREADY’537 and closes with a song to the country ‘[t]here was so much song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh as they walked hand in hand out of town, down the road, Westside, to home’.538 In this way, Carpentaria creates ‘new cycles of sacred songs or “songlines” in writing which map out country and allow for postcolonising walkabouts—
531 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 228. 532 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 231. 533 Renes, p. 115. 534 Renes, p. 115. 535 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 212. 536
Alexis Wright, “On Writing Carpentaria”, p. 9. 537
Wright, Carpentaria, p. 1. Capitals and Italics the author’s. 538
physical and spiritual journeys of re-encounter with and re-instatement of tribal land’.539 Indeed, singing the country is another Aboriginal way to relate with their own land:
[e]ach song, like each design or painting is part of a moment in a larger story. Songs make up a song series or a 'songline' which is a map of the country based on the travels of the Dreaming ancestors. To knowledgeable Aboriginal people, seeing a painting or a design will call to mind a song. Many senior painters sing as they paint the story of the song.540
This definition explains very clearly what many characters in Carpentaria do, especially Norm, Will, and Mozzie Fishman. They sing the country and listen to the voice of the country, their relationship with the land is mediated through music and songs, as it was traditionally before colonialism.
Songs are and were a form of expression of Aboriginal culture. They can be sacred or secular, and most of the time they were/are associated with ceremonies and rituals, and accompanied by dances. Dances and songs ‘were exchanged often at large ceremonial gatherings when many people gathered together and when trade goods were also exchanged’.541
In addition, no matter the kind of ceremony, usually
each song verse is brief but either it is repeated many times […] or variants using a finite corpus of song words are improvised by the singers […] and in most Aboriginal communities the language of the song is different from that of everyday discourse.542
During the ceremonies and rituals there was an expert or leader, woman or man, who was the holder of the songs, and very often his/her ‘inspiration for such compositions is often said to come to the singer in a dream-vision in which an ancestor or Dreamtime being gives him the idea for the new creation’.543
Traditionally, songs could have had multiple purposes and could have been of different and several kinds and genres; amongst these the songlines are interesting to understand the Aborigines relationship with land.
539
Renes, 116. 540
Australian Government Official Website, http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-indigenous- ceremony. (Accessed 15 June 2013).
541 Ibid. 542
Margaret Clunies Ross, “Australian Aboriginal Oral Tradition”, Oral Tradition, 1 (1986), p. 242. 543
According to Paul Sharrad, Norm, like the rest of the characters, needs to access ‘dreams, stars charts, songlines of the land for meaning and hope to be possible’.544 I rather believe that Norm cannot be enumerated amongst these characters because his singing the country, like his reading of the stars, are part of his nature, his Aboriginality. Norm can travel the sea because ‘[h]e has inherited his father’s memory of the sea’545
and he will pass it on to his son Will and nephew Bala; his hope resides in his memory, in his ability to pass on the stories about the land: his storytelling ‘constitutes indigenous law which describes indigenous social and cosmological relationships to land and sea, to ancestors, and those that pertain to the domain of social intercourse’.546
It is no coincidence that ‘[m]en such as Norm Phantom kept a library [...] full of stories of the old country stored in their heads [...] trading stories for other stories’.547 Norm listens to the spirit of the country, learns its story and tells it to his nephew or son; he never gets lost because he just needs to sing the country and he finds his root again:
[i]f he hoped to find his way back, he knew his hopeless task was to visualise and commit to memory the multitude of landmarks. An unfamiliar voice pointed out that these were the wrecked artefacts of an ancient past fossilised in parts of the sea where the likes of people living, who ought to leave well enough alone, should never have ventured. […] He heard the names of places in a harsh language which was both strange and uninviting.548
Norm and the land are one altogether; as he says, ‘[w]e are the flesh and blood of the sea and we are what the sea brings the land’,549
and his singing the country is the way he tries to restore the link with the land if he has in some way loosened the bond.
Will, the activist custodian of the land, heir of Norm’s “powers”, can hear the spirit’s voice of the land:
Will closed his eyes and saw the tremendous fury of the winds gathering up the seas, and clouds carrying the enormous fury of the winds gathering the seas, and clouds carrying enormous bodies of spiritual beings belonging to other worlds. Country people, old people, said it was the sound of the great spiritual ancestors roaring out of the dusty, polluted sea all of the time nowadays. Will believed this.550
544 Sharrad, p. 61. 545 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 15. 546
Brewster, “Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria”, p. 88. 547 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 548 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 227. 549 Wright, Carpentaria, pp. 28-9. 550 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 338.
Will is identified with the ‘most political, and subtle, embodiment of the Rainbow’551
because of his close relationship with the sea. However, on shore, when he gets lost he cannot find himself back again, he needs the help of an elder and, because he is alone and he has not spoken with his father for years, he does not have Norm’s support. In this moment, another father-figure intervenes: Joseph Midnight, his wife’s father and leader of the Eastside Aborigines, helps him out ‘unravelling a map to a Dreaming place he had never seen’.552
Thus, if Norm is able to find his way through the country thanks to the voice of the country itself, Will is not ready yet to go alone, even if he has gone through a process of initiation with Mozzie Fishman in a long trip through the country. Bala, in this sense, represents Will’s liberation because Will gets lost again looking for his son and wife, whereas Bala will remain with his grandfather and learn the Law, which Will will never wholly understand because of his distance from his father.
Mozzie takes Will and other people around the country because he wants to renew ‘the strength of the country’553
following the Dreamtime, ‘along the spiritual travelling road of the great ancestor’.554
It is important to stress that here, as in the case of Norm, it is memory that allows the relation between the country and its people, it’s people’s survival:
[t]he challenge was to be always on the move, following the old ones travelling their country to at least a thousand sites they knew by memory. It was a test of how good they knew the country before they were able to find old White Whiskers waiting for them. Every family had to know the story of the past. Know, to go about their separate ways, be reclaiming land from fighting long ago.555
Mozzie, together with Norm and Will, helps to maintain the custodianship of the land through storytelling and keeps a traditional relationship with land. Like Will who is able to become one element of nature (he “is a tree” when Joseph discovers him and helps him), Mozzie can do the same, actually he is the one who taught Will how to do it. Mozzie, unlike Norm, is a countryman and a water diviner so he could travel the country by sensing ‘the presence of water far underground
551
Frances Devis Glass, “A Politics of Dreamtime”, p. 397. 552 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 375. 553 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 127. 554 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 100. 555 Wright, Carpentaria, p. 27.
and, knew exactly where he was headed’.556
Will could have been the Clever557 Aborigine of Desperance, complete with Norm’s “sea powers” and Mozzie’s “country powers”, however, he represents the modern spirit of the land who needs to listen to his heart before singing the country and cannot always listen to the voices of the spirits. Nevertheless, he still is one of the most important holders of Aboriginal knowledge. These three Aborigines, Norm, Will, and Mozzie, are so important because they ‘maintain cultural practices and knowledges about these forces and about the land’.558