The Power of the Song - Part 2

A recurrent theme in a lot of the poetry I wrote during the years I lived at Papunya had to do with the cultural dislocation I often felt. In a place as isolated as Papunya it is often difficult to sustain one's enthusiasm toward one's own cultural heritage. There were, in fact, some whites who carried this lack of enthusiasm to an extreme - or maybe they never had it to begin with. In their need to embrace all things Aboriginal they would indiscriminately deride, criticise and undervalue almost everything European - a case of doing away with the baby as well as the bathwater. The logic went something like this: Aboriginal culture is 40,000 years old, therefore Shakespeare sucks. One should not have to apologise for Shakespeare because his plays are only 400 years old. At any rate, it seemed that those who despised, or pretended to despise, their own culture were the same ones who had the most tenuous links to the culture they had adopted.

The two cultures did, however, produce a curious mix - and one could be excused for experiencing confusion at times. The signs and symbols of white culture, the stuff us whitefellas had grown up with, took on other dimensions, meant something entirely different, were distorted or altered entirely in the context of an Aboriginal world. Two poems may serve to illustrate this:

You Know Magic Man?

the magician who claimed
TV, stage and fame
complained
'the road to Papunya
killed me act.'
- two hundred miles of
dirt and sand
th rabbits died
from th heat

that night
he pulled sorpses out of hats.

And

Sorry Business

(A B C D E F G)

He was attacked with a shovel spear.
They had been drinking.

(Answer Yes or No) Hot day.
Everyone had been drinking.

(Complete the sequence: 8, 10, 11, 13...)

The card game collapsed.
The wound was packed with ash.

(One out of twenty)

The women struck their heads with billy cans.

(Good boy!)

Blood trickled onto print dresses.
Willie Tjapananka is dead.

In the school, behind the fence,
the staff discusses
the problem of attendance.

The various juxtapositions of meaning produced by the mix of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal culture were a constant source of fascination. Life in the settlement swung between extremes - from the absurd to the deadly serious. But perhaps it only seemed this way because I invariably looked at it from the point of view of a poet. Few people, for example, found as much humour as I did in the postage stamp of lawn the whitefella next door had slaved over. On Sunday afternoons he'd come out in his swimming trunks and t-shirt, spread out his beach blanket - almost as large as the grassy patch - and sunbake.

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