The Power of the Song - Part 1

I remember a late-night poetry reading at Sydney's Café Labsurd nearly twenty years ago. The usual after-hours crowd was there – mainly other poets, and their boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, as well as a few hangers-on. Nothing very memorable, except that on this particular occasion three old men from the desert – elders of the Pintupi tribe – were part of the audience.

It was the first time I'd read my poetry publicly in front of tribal people which, I confess, made me a little anxious since the stuff I was reading had been drawn from my experiences living in their "country". For four years I had lived and worked among the Pintupi, writing poetry about them and about me with them; trying to make some sense of my place in their world, exploring their world with my language. Now, here I was reading in front of a city audience, and wondering what these old men would think of it all.

They didn't say anything after I'd finished, but later, coming back from a piss, I bumped into Mick Namarrari, the quietest of the three. He stopped me, took hold of my arm and then, leaning very close, whispered in my ear: "When you were talking, I was happy."

To Mick’s way of thinking I had "told it true" – no parntu, no bullshit. Exact. He patted me on the shoulder, "Good ear". It was a great compliment. In the Western Desert, the verb kurlinu means both "to hear" and "to understand".

In the four years I lived at Papunya Settlement, in the Northern Territory, I learned something about the art of storytelling… and a way of writing poetry. For poetry, in a certain sense, is the most succinct form of the story, and some of the greatest storytellers in the world live in central Australia.

But at first I didn’t know if I would be able to write anything at all. I didn’t speak or understand the local language; I knew practically nothing about Pintupi concepts of land or how resources were distributed within the community; or even how the Pintupi had come to be living in a place like Papunya. Then there was the ceremonial life with its various social and economics structures; and traditional Aboriginal law as taught through the Tingarri song cycles. It was rich, formidable, and as complex as any culture I had ever experienced.

Consider the kinship system for example. Socially and ceremonially it determines a whole range of responsibilities and obligations understood by all members of the society. It describes a highly complicated system of social organization that not only assigns roles and relationships to each individual, but to combinations of relatives. Hence, two Tjapaltjarri men (brothers) will be called by the name nyinamparra if addressed by another Tjapaltjarri man; but if addressed by a man from the Tjakamarra sub-section group, they will be referred to as wanarrpirra.

If I was going to write poetry about the Pintupi, I knew I could not ignore their beliefs and values. I had to know something, feel something, about their way of life.

Even at the best of times, it is often difficult to know how to begin to write a poem. Barring moments of inspiration where the poem almost writes itself – at least to first-draft stage – the craft of poetry is a challenging affair. As anyone who has practiced the art of poetry will tell you, there is a very fine line between the prosaic and the overly-poetic. The problems of language are also compounded when you set out using English in an environment where English is not the first language, and where the entire value structure of European culture is peripheral, only vaguely apparent in the form of dole checks, grog, and four-wheel-drives.

Add to this the divergence between black and white lifestyles and expectations, between attitudes and beliefs, and it is easy for the would-be poet to regress into romantic notions of an exotic, noble race, or – at the other extreme – a naïve, quasi-political outrage at the results of white oppression. When poetry becomes a cat-o'-nine-tails in the hands of a self-flagellating poetic masochist, the poetry invariably misses the mark. At best, it is boring; at first it’s a lie.

So where do you start?

In the beginning, I started with the people – listening to them, watching them, asking questions, making my world as accessible as possible. During my first year in Papunya it was not uncommon to have fifteen or twenty people sitting around my lounge room (that’s a living room, in American English), all coming in for air-conditioning and tea. Some would sit quietly on the couch, or in chairs reading Phantom comics; others would come to listen to cassettes or to do their washing.

This was not the way I had lived anywhere else, but Papunya was unlike any other place I’d been… and I wanted to know these people, not so much because of a desire to write about them but because I wanted to learn.

The poem, "Wash Day" reflects this situation:

Monica and Victor come over to my place
to do their laundry
because there's nothing at their place.

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