Collecting songs out of things: anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow's journey into the Australian outback to record vanishing Aboriginal songs and to document totemic ceremonies revealed the complex relationships between the sacred and the scientific in early 20th century Australia. (Essay).

The journeys T.G.H. Strehlow made during 1932 were foundational. They set him up for his further travels in 1933-34 and then again in 1935, by which time he had covered more than 7,000 miles, over half of them by camel and often only in the company of Tom Ljonga. They were gruelling, isolating journeys, demanding of body and mind feats of tenacity, stoicism and a great deal of applied intelligence. He was justly proud of them. The upshot was that he gathered the basis of his final collection of some 300 songs, which he listed systematically, and of at least 1,200 sacred objects, which he did not.

Already by 1934 he was able to write back to Norman Tindale, at the South Australian Museum:

Dear Tindale,

... During my two years stay in Central Australia I have collected an ample mass of material for the accurate delineation of the phonetic system of Aranda dialects, and also for a detailed recording of their grammatical structure. Over seventy full-length myths have been carefully noted down in phonetic script, and some 1250 double-lined verses of native chants have been recorded with full notes concerning their tempo and their metrical structure. It is anticipated that it will take a very considerable time to work out a clear and detailed account of the Aranda language from this supply of material--probably twelve months would not be an exaggerated estimate.

The surviving groups of Aranda are scattered over an area of many thousands of square miles in extent. As a result, a disproportionate amount of my time was spent travelling between haunts of these groups: in all 7158 miles had to be travelled, 3127 miles by train and car and 4031 on camel back.

By 1935, he calculated in another estimate, he had witnessed 166 totemic acts, which he also described as totemic ceremonies and complete totemic cycles, and he was telling Tindale that he had recently gathered enough legends and chants to fill about 350 pages of Oceania. As early as 1933 he was writing up the material for that prestigious journal of anthropology, publishing a seminal essay on an Aranda myth. In 1934 and 1935 he delivered three brilliantly lucid talks on mythology and tjurunga ownership which were to become his first important book, Aranda Traditions, published in 1947. His travels between 1932 and 1935 were the fire and clay from which he made himself--for himself, and for the crucial eyes of others. They were, finally, the basis of one of the great books of this country, upon which his reputation still rests, the monumental Songs of Central Australia.

`Sell the tjurunga'

As he travelled, his childhood dream of being stampeded to death by cattle recurred, and deeply unsettled his confidence in himself as a bushman. And there were other nightmares, which belonged to the Aboriginal people. At every mile along the way in these early journeys, Strehlow was conjuring those nightmares as he found himself collecting tjurunga--nightmares because, as he was to write, the tjurunga were the most treasured possessions. `The ancestor regards the tjurunga which he owns as a portion of his own being; and he is very anxious lest strangers should come and rob him of those symbols of his very essence of life.'

By virtue of his work in the language--his collection of myths and songs--Strehlow was inexorably involved with tjurunga. As he was to discover, the sacred chants were also referred to as tjurunga, as were some ceremonial headgear and ground-painting. The term covered much of what embodied the spiritual essence of Aranda being. To encounter tjurunga was to be face to face with the sacred. To receive, to collect, to solicit tjurunga was to be the recipient of gifts and trust, or, potentially, to be a sacrilegious thief--yet another white man come to plunder the culture. Everything depended, ultimately, on the moment of reception, the context of the gathering. In the metaphysical realm, tjurunga was the measure of relationship with the spiritual domain, just as, in earthly terms, contact with tjurunga was inseparable from relationship with their owners. The integrity and complexity of Strehlow's relationships with the Aranda hinge on this, on the evolving nature of his entanglement with the objects.

In Tom Ljonga Strehlow had an eager scout for tjurunga, and they were only three days out when Strehlow made his first appreciative note:

He [Tom] told me that W. of Burt's Well was a sacred cave guarded by atua ntjara [many men]; however, most men were now thinking of selling their tjurunga to the whites and giving up their old customs.

At Mrs Campbell's he made friends with a man guarding arknanauas--collections of tjurunga--at three places. `Somewhere near here, as I gathered,' Strehlow noted, but did not press the issue. Tom enabled him to meet the old men who mattered, and one of them, for a stick of tobacco, told them about his wandering honey ant ancestors and the track they travelled. Pleased, Strehlow wrote it down, but later Tom expressed his disgust at that story. The old man, Tom said, had told him a different version. `Many countries, many stories, many lies,' he exclaimed.

`Sell the tjurunga, I say, get rid of them. They won't make manna while they are lying in the caves; sell them to the whites and get some manna that way.'

What was the use of men hanging on to the sacred objects of their forefathers? As long as the tjurunga rested in their caves, men felt that they had to go on yearly walkabout in order to inspect the tjurunga, sing the sacred chants over them and rub them with red ochre, and after that sacred ceremonies had to be performed in honour of the ancestors whose tjurunga were resting in the caves. Surely it was better to get rid of these objects by selling them to the whites, and thus being free from all religious restrictions as whites were. The latter had plenty of food to eat and plenty of tea and sugar to drink. They had liquor, and considered no one except themselves, they feared neither God nor the devil. Why should not dark men reach the same level of emancipation?

Tom had, after all, been brought up on the mission and seemed to be mouthing a Lutheran rejection of pagan objects. His embrace of the white man's future set the terms of one aspect of Strehlow's relationship with the tjurunga: to a degree he was encouraged to feel, as had his father and Pastor Albrecht, that it was a step towards Aranda progress that he was receiving them. It was one thing to listen to Tom's modern view, quite another to be face to face with the tjurunga when men were parting with them. Further on near Barrow Creek they camped with a couple of old men, one of whom, an Ilpara man, lay half-conscious, by the fire, struggling for breath with a bad attack of the flu. `He was a mere skeleton and I was dragged up there to have a look at him and give him some medicine etc.' Strehlow noted:

Then I had to boil meat and make two dampers in the evening. Then Tom came back from the camp and told me how the men everywhere wanted to sell their tjurunga to the whites, and to settle down like white men: the only reason for their walkabout was their duty to protect the sacred caves. Now they would sell not newly manufactured tjurunga but the really old treasures made by the erilknibata, so that they could change their old ways of living. He complained about the bad whites nowadays who lorded it over the natives, took their wives away from them, and threatened the men with their rifles; this was only bluff, of course, but the men had no sense--etnaka etalerinja kaputala itja else they would report the matter to the police and the Protectors.

Men everywhere wanted to sell their tjurunga. The emphasis is Strehlow's. It seems to register a certain satisfaction in the fact, at least in so much as they had found what they had been looking for. The other feeling in this entire process is sadness, Strehlow's as well as Tom's. It was a miserable cultural situation they were in: old men selling up their sacred inheritance, sick old men neglected by their white protectors, men making false tjurunga, men joining the white man's world at gunpoint, their wives stolen, and white drunks bribing natives outside the church--the scenes seem to have fed Strehlow's melancholy sense of where he was and what he Was doing there.

Still, there was some peace to be had the next night, when everything had settled down and all you could hear was `the tinkle of camel bells, the chirping of crickets, the humming of a few beetles, and the distant croak of a mopoke ... There is not a breath of wind stirring in the trees'.

They met another Ilpara man, Old Urartja, a wizened man who had lived through many years of drought. He was very shaken up by his camel ride when Tom brought him into the camp. He sat down with Strehlow and kept forgetting the words of his myth story. `Tommy was annoyed that the story got all mixed up.' Strehlow had another go the next day, but when Urartja was `trembling every limb with emotion', the work had to stop.

It would be better, the old man said, they would be able to grasp the story more, if they could go to the place where the story belonged. They should go to the sacred cave and he would sing with the tjurunga which had the drawing on them.

We arrived at Urartja's cave just before sundown. It was among a pile of dark boulders which was linked by a thin line of rocks on a massive rockplate with a low complex of hills. There was a deep narrow cleft in the rockplate, and in the hollow, about seven or nine feet down, was a little black pool of water, into which a bushy dark green wild fig tree on the last side of the cliff might cast its shadow at noon. There had once sat a woman who owned a trantantja pole: this was represented by a bright stripe about an inch wide which was straight across the rock. The woman had been the sweetheart of the moon, who had here been united with her, and had then crept away to the west leaving the imprint of his fingers and his knee caps behind in the dark rockplate. She had kept the emblem of his manliness in token of their union. We gazed at the marks silently in the stillness of evening. The sun had set while Urartjara was speaking; and above the deep crimson and yellow of the western sky could be seen the pale sickle of the sinking new moon. `That was in the moon, who touched this rock', says Urartjara reverentially.

Eagerly he led the way to the cave where the tjurunga were resting. We climbed up some rocks, and then nimbly descended to another cleft. We waited expectantly ... The old man searched and searched in the gloom of the cleft. The tjurunga had vanished. A round reddish stone as big as a pear, and an ant-eaten broken piece of wood with some drawings, were all that remained in the cave of the Moon's Sweetheart.

`Nothing, nothing,' murmured the old man. He suddenly looked old and broken. Perhaps some young native thief, or a wandering woman, or a white rogue had stolen them: Urartjara had not been here since last winter.

We clambered down in silence. In the fading light we could just see the drawings on the rocks about us--drawings that were allegedly made by supernatural hands. The broken down old man whispered something about these stones being [...] apparently they have the seeds of life from which he hoped that his declining race would spring up once more. A few yards away, at the edge of the pile, was a heap of old coals: these were all that remained of the watch fires of his [...], his dead forefathers before white men arrived to rape and plunder without hindrance. Now he and his younger brother were the only two old men of any importance remaining in this part of the country.

On the way back Tom spotted tracks leading to and from the cave.

An overwhelming feeling of hatred and disgust swept over me when I thought of the white man who had stolen from an old native even the last and most precious things that still remained to him. I could of course say nothing to either Tom or Urartja about my informants. It could do no good. There was no law in the country to protect these sacred caves; it was not the first plundered storehouse. The Horn Expedition which contained Sir Baldwin Spencer has similarly stolen from a cave in the far western Macdonnells and the young guide who had shown them these treasures was later on speared by his own relatives to atone for his crime. But it seemed incredible that on my first visit to a sacred cave I should be confronted with the inhumanity of men of my own race.

This account in `Land of Altjira', written and coloured in twenty-five years after the event, is powerful enough, and in keeping with the diary. But in the diary, in its spareness, it is even more poignant.

We ate tea in silence; and the old man wept quietly afterwards ... He was planning and planning, but knew his helplessness ...

I made some damper and Tom cooked two wallabies.

That was the meal for 8 June 1932. Strehlow was getting better at damper. It was his birthday as well: he had turned twenty-four.

Plunder

The plunder went a long way back, and Strehlow was right to name Baldwin Spencer as an early culprit. The Horn Scientific Expedition arrived in 1894 with the principal purpose of assembling all there was to know about the flora, fauna, and geography of the Centre. Their collecting came to include, under the lap of anthropological studies, the artefacts of the culture, the sacred objects becoming valuable on the white man's market.

Two members of the party, Charles Winnecke, explorer-surveyor, and Professor (Sir) Edward Stifling, anatomist, anthropologist and director of the South Australian Museum with a keen interest in Aboriginal `artefacts', heard about a major storehouse in a small cave east of Haasts Bluff. Before they could reach the place their guide took flight, but they pressed on to find sixty carved wooded boards and fifteen incised stones. They took all the sacred stones, and half the tjurunga, leaving in their place some steel axes and knives.

Baldwin Spencer was uneasy about such plunder. But Frank Gillen had already amassed over 100 tjurunga. Gillen was a friend of the Aborigines, but that did not prevent him recovering tjurunga buried with a dead man, or selling them to pay gambling debts. For several years after the expedition had returned south, Gillen, along with Mounted Constable Charles Cowle, who patrolled the area after the arrest of Willshire, shipped objects to the museum by the crate. In this `museological era' all had struck it lucky in objects; there was a bonanza for merchants of the sacred, and a golden age for scientists to mount desacralised things in glass cases for collectors.

Then, to their credit, they almost learnt a lesson. In 1897, Cowle wrote to Spencer that an old blackfellow had been killed for leading him to tjurunga. When Gillen heard this he wrote to Spencer:

This upset me terribly. I would not have had it happen for 100 [pounds sterling] and I am going to write to Cowle about the Churinga business, there must be no more ertatulnga robberies. I bitterly regret ever having countenanced such a thing and can only say that I did so when in ignorance of what they meant to the natives--to fully realise this one requires to go as I did a few weeks ago ... and watch them reverently handling their treasures.

By this time, Gillen was beginning to understand the place of the tjurunga in the culture. `Yes,' he wrote to Spencer, `the wandering of the totems is startlingly like the Children of Israel,' a remark that sported with the common analogy between ancient tribes. `In the end we are not looking for "mathematical exactitude"', Gillen went on, as if intuiting another modality of understanding. The Churinga came in, he thought, `to express the spiritual part of the alcheringa animal or man, the meaning of the term I take to be sacred--in the sense that the sacramental wafer is sacred to the Roman Catholic.' And later: `Sacred Churinga does not please me but I can offer no substitute for the word sacred'.

Gillen sought to constrain Cowle. The constable did not warm to the suggestion and sent another hundred objects to Spencer in 1900. Spencer chose to accept Cowl's reassurance that they were not stolen but bartered in some way for tobacco, flour or tea on the open market. Cowle told Spencer about his strategy: I am standing off a while ... by showing them I am not keen I will get the articles easier directly if they are worth securing.

There were others with even fewer scruples feverishly trading in objects. From the beginning, of course, settlers and prospectors and the men who worked on the Overland Telegraph line sold what they could get by way of tjurunga. One collector, the explorer and prospector R.T. Maurice, was a gleeful tjurunga hunter. Although he was `bound to secrecy not to tell Gillen', he wrote to Winnecke of his hopes of great success at Horseshoe Bend. For there was a big stone that `Mr Gillen' had not yet heard of, `the dream stone of all dream stones', said the hunter, who had become a romancer of stones. The trouble was: `it's such a weight and kept so carefully guarded--a bag of flour won't buy it'.

The Hermannsberg mission, founded in 1877, had been dealing in tjurunga from the beginning. Pastor Schulze had declared that `there was not a shred of evidence of a religious life among the people' but he went on to make vague references to `the festival plates of slate or wood secreted in caves, unseen by women and children'. The term secreted is expressive, and it was perfectly in accord with the registration of the Horn Expedition which reported the tjurunga as `objects of mystery and concealment'. What the natives secreted, with their pagan ways in their dark places, had to be cleared by the light and Pastor Strehlow was one of the most energetic at doing it. Since tjurunga were the touchstones of the Alcheringa over which the Good Word had to triumph, he confiscated them, sold them to the Frankfurt museum, and put the proceeds to better use for altar cloths and vestments for the chapel. Those not shipped to Germany went south to the museum in Adelaide (more than ninety by 1922). While Pastor Strehlow was on leave in Germany between 1910 and 1913, his stand-in Oscar Liebler gathered more than 2000 artefacts and sold them to British and German museums as well as to Adelaide. Liebler's awkward English account is also redolent with a sense of things `secreted': `As never the blacks show ceremonial tjurunga marks', he once observed, `to white strangers nor their wives, they only in dark nights secretly bring those specimen articles to us to sell it for money or large amounts of rations'. Liebler managed to observe, however, something that others had not: that the tjurunga did not so much belong to the Aranda men as the men belonged to the tjurunga.

The dark nights, the secret trade, the `secreting' that men did, whites around the backs of blacks, and blacks and whites together: these transactions had a long history before Strehlow came on the scene. Throughout this period of crude colonial impositions the atmosphere around them was Faustian, in that it dawned, one way or the other on all parties, that they were dealing in powerful significations of foreign knowledge, for good and bad. The earliest mission dealers with them indicated as much when he called them `wooden charms' and `festival plates'. Throughout the period they were variously called `sacred woods', `stone charms', `birth stones', `dream stones', `sacred emblems', and `soul stones'. The more scientific term, `native religious specimens', gave the clue to understandings that were most advanced by Gillen and Spencer, so that by 1927, all the insights developed in their letters could be expressed in the light of day in their two-volume The Arunta: `The loss of the Charring is the most significant evil that could befall any local group.'

Strehlow, who arrived only five years after this history of colonial entanglements, was unavoidably in the path of the objects. He could not get out of their way, so to speak. Clearly, he was no plunderer. He was full of the solicitude that came from already knowing, in his bones, many of the secrets. We might ask, not how he became such an avid collector, but how could he not have been? And since he was necessarily a collector, what `permutations of debt' belonged to the situations he solicited and found himself in?

Songs out of things

`After writing down the songs, they asked me for ...' and he named the sacred Aboriginal word for the grease to oil the objects:

They then took the tjurunga and rubbed them ... for the last time, chanting in a wailing tone that went right through me some of the verses I had noted down, one verse for each tjurunga ... They started off from high pitched notes and dropped down to a solemn chant in the middle of each verse. Then as the stone glistened in the blazing shine of the noonday sun, they dropped into the lowest note of the base register, where the voice ceases to vibrate, and only a few poor broken accents then melted away into the silence.

It was the silence--with its fullness of feeling--that moved Strehlow on another occasion the next year, when the men who had assembled to dance for him and to tell him their stories and songs, brought a load of tjurunga into the camp. Sign language fed the silence as a camp sheet was laid out. The men formed a half circle, moving their hands up and down--`palms up--in a pleading attitude, expressing longing for the tjurunga'.

The owners of tjurunga came up by name, and still not a word was said. Two of the men `crouched together, walked fearfully and hurriedly, like guilty criminals, and sankon their knees on the camp sheet, breathing heavily. They put their bundles down before them. Still silence'. Then one of them said in a low voice, `we have come without ... For we are old men who cannot sight game properly'. In turn the men touched their bundles, the old men before the young men. `Then all hugged it against their stomachs. Still tense silence.'

And then with some wailing the unwrapping began, the unwinding of the long string into a ball, and the bundles finding their owners again. `Thereupon the ... men broke out in ... song and the others into the song, singing in competition as the long strings were unravelled.'

Four lines of verse Strehlow wrote down on that occasion. The men translated the lines. The tjurunga had been laid out on the sheet, and the song was sung again.

This time he had fifty-four lines.

And the song went on, as, one tjurunga at a time, the men passed them to each other. `All these hugged them tightly against their stomachs without saying a word.'

The holding tight, the singing, the reverence and anxiety and mourning--how could these not penetrate the collector of the songs, who was receiving the words as a trustee, putting them down in his notebook as one would holy writ. Everyone of Strehlow's scared songs might be seen as such an acquisition: the result of deeply felt inscription at the font of Aboriginal belief--taken down on the ground, in the clearing, often near the sacred sites, words often given to him as the ancestor spirits themselves, embodied in their tjurunga, were handed over.

In his collecting of tjurunga, Strehlow was acting as a kind of undertaker, an embalmer of tjurunga. He was laying them to rest, as the men wanted him to do.

And yet if on the one hand he was helping put things to sleep, on the other he was bringing them to life, or at least handling life in death. For as he stowed the tjurunga away, he kept the notebook out.

Onto his dusty pages went a line of verse. Then another, making the couplet. Then, if the men were helping him the way he wanted, another couplet after that, and so on until he had the song--not all of it in one sitting, since some song cycles might take days to sing, and they would only be sung at that length in ceremony, but a good run of it, enough to interrogate his informant about its meaning, about the events of which he sang. Those events became in due course the myth that belonged to the song, and this would be set down in a fairly straightforward narrative prose, in Aranda, usually, a run of words on a foolscap page of the field diary that was to become, once he had filed it away, invaluable itself, also a sacred object of a kind.

The old men watched him do it. There is no record of what, he told them at the time, as he transcribed for the page what had hitherto only ever been sung. They must have known that the young man sitting with them with his writing tools was engaged in a respectful activity; and they would have seen that the value he put on their words, his struggle to get their exact meaning in order to write the sounds down, had for him some kind of cultural significance, even if it was not spelt out by the custodian of the literate culture. As he took things in, Strehlow may have been seen as an initiate, but it is hard to imagine his informants being able to imagine their songs in print many years after their deaths.

What was happening was momentous to anyone with a mind to the differences between cultures. An oral culture was being converted to a written one. After centuries of songs that had hitherto only travelled via the communal business of making music, mnemonic feats of great achievement, they were now being set down in words for private, solitary and relatively abstract contemplation. Once, Homer was entirely in the lap of the bards. Before writing, villagers sang songs that were different strands before they came together in Homer. At a certain point in ancient history, Homer was written down. The full significance of that point is still a source of philosophic and poetic speculation. Strehlow, like the first Greek scribes, was recording the components of native songs, not in order to create one song, as in Homer, but to set the record straight with regard to all the sacred songs of a territory. If ever a Homer was going to come out of the oral tradition of the Aranda, then Strehlow was his herald.

Yet the verses he had written as Torn sang them were only snatches of song. Not only that: they belonged to many different tjurunga, and therefore many different men scattered far and wide, men who might or might not be able or willing to sit down with him and deliver more of their sacred songs. How could he get to them all? How to get around the station owners who banned the old ceremonies? How to negotiate the crown land? The task ahead could seem insoluble. My nerves are not up to lasting this continual lonely travelling without companions, and with insufficient sleep and bad food ... Last night for e.g., I went to bed about 8.30 dead tired. Cattle came in on all sides to water at the soak near by. About 11.30 I wake up, when one of the bulls comes in with a loud voice. I think he is right at the back of me as I lie between the boxes; but I rise and see he is well in front and walking along to the soak steadily. I tell myself that I am as safe here as in my Adelaide bedroom, but I only go to sleep again with difficulty. Hardly had I done so, when it seems to me that I hear the voice of the bull coming steadily towards me, and only a few feet away. I try to get awake quickly--every limb seems tied up in a fatal torpor--I moan loudly in order to keep the beast away--I hear my own last half-dream moans.

This is an extract from Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, to be released in October. It is printed without the footnotes that accompany it in the book. Writers quoting from this piece should cite the book rather than this publication.