Recorded in Toronto in 1986, this reading from Bruce Chatwin’s bestselling book, The Songlines, shows us the mastery that Chatwin developed as he both remains in the background of his scenes but also takes charge of the narrative via a colourful, all-knowing character, Arkady the Russian, and his travels into the Australian bush and the territories of Aboriginals. This ability for Chatwin to be a silent observer by allowing characters who were experts to take the lead (purportedly based on real people Chatwin met in his travels) was what made Chatwin such a unique writer and his style (and this rhetorical construction) has been so widely influential and used by so many writers hence that it may not always be apparent how incredibly talented he was as a storyteller. What is apparent, though, is what a great reader he is of his own work and how he takes us on this journey where, by the end, real life kicking in again seems stark and far less comical than the world we inhabited alongside him, the characters in our own lives far less colourful than the author’s. This audio is used with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Bruce Chatwin; the recording is also used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
Note: given the current temporary closure of TPL due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made our best efforts to offer suggestions below for materials which are part our online collections (indicated) and available at home to anyone with a current Toronto Library card.
Read: Why are wait times on ebooks or audiobooks sometimes so long?
Works by Bruce Chatwin
Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989 (ebook)
On the Black Hill (ebook)
Utz (ebook)
Books About Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare
Anywhere Out of the World: the Work of Bruce Chatwin by Jonathan Chatwin
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, Edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare
Other Related Books or Materials
Bowie’s Bookshelf: the Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life (ebook)
Walking With Bruce Chatwin by Rory Stewart (about the importance and influence of The Songlines] (link opens a New York Review of Books article from June 2012)
Travel and Endless Talk Connected me to Details of Chatwin’s Songlines Missed (link opens an article from The Guardian from Oct 2017)
Bruce Chatwin, the Forgotten Travel-Writer is At-Last Being Remembered by Nicholas Shakespeare (link opens an article from The Oldie)
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA
Season 1, Episode 17
Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, the late Bruce Chatwin takes us on a trip through words and voices and images.
BRUCE CHATWIN [TEASER]: Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path, birds, animals, plants, rocks, water-holes, and so singing the world into existence. Arkady was so struck by the beauty of this concept that he began to take note of everything he saw or heard, not for publication, but to satisfy his own curiosity. At first, the Walbiri Elders had mistrusted him, and their answers to his questions were evasive. With time, once he had won their confidence, they invited him to witness their most secret ceremonies and encouraged him to learn their songs.
RANDY: Under normal circumstances – never mind living through a pandemic in various forms of confinement – I’d say in most cases I’d rather the late Bruce Chatwin visit a place and write about it, than go there and try to do it, myself. Great travel writing always depends on having a novelist’s eye and ear for the revealing moment, yes, but also, on far more than that. Great travel writing benefits from an outward-looking curiosity and openness, uncoupled from the novelist’s tyrannies of creating and resolving conflicts, winding and unwinding plots. Travel writers are more generous to the world and people they encounter than novelists, and Chatwin ranks as one of the most generous in the contemporary literature. Chatwin wrote novels, yes, but he made his mark on the literary public’s shared imagination, and remains remembered, for his travel writing. Indeed, he was so very good at it that a passing lament he once made in Paris — about wanting to buy one hundred copies of his favourite kind of travel and writing notebook when he learned its makers were shutting down — led to a multinational corporation making and marketing this same kind of journal, the Moleskine, with explicit reference to Chatwin and his work as inspiration. To this day, and very much helped along by Werner Herzog’s recent and ardently-made biographical documentary, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, Chatwin remains a figure of admiration and inspiration for well-read wanderlust types. Not that his writing has consistently aged well. In the reading you’re about to hear, you will likely, and rightly, marvel at the provoking elegance and gob-smacking concision of Chatwin’s evocations of time and place and people – in giving the back story, for instance, of a main figure in the selection, the Russian-Australian mapmaker Arkady, Chatwin moves from a world of “murdering armies” to “hugger mugger suburbia” with stunning and enviable ease. That said, his later, overly accented evocations of conversations with, and about, Aboriginal persons and their song-line approach to space and time, are hard to hear in their provoking ugliness. It’s impossible to imagine any serious and gifted, non-Indigenous travel writer working today, never mind Chatwin himself, going in for this kind of reportage and representation. Not that he’d have the chance. A nomad of sorts from the earliest age — his father was away at war in the 1940s, and he and his mother moved about the homes of relatives, trying to stay ahead of family tensions and poverty — Chatwin died young, at the age of 48.
___
[applause]
Bruce Chatwin (BC): I think I'll just start in, because the first chapter is sort of self-explanatory. “In Alice Springs, a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers, I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals. His name was Arkady Volchok. He was an Australian citizen. He was 33 years old. His father, Ivan Volchok, was a Cossack from a village near Rostov-on-Don, who, in 1942, was arrested and sent with a trainload of other Ostarbeiter to work in a German factory. One night, somewhere in the Ukraine, he jumped from the cattle-car into a field of sunflowers. Soldiers in grey uniforms hunted him up and down the long lines of sunflowers, but he gave them the slip. Somewhere else, lost between murdering armies, he met a girl from Kiev and married her. Together they drifted to a forgetful Adelaide suburb, where he'd rigged up a vodka still and fathered three sturdy sons. The youngest of these was Arkady.
BC: Nothing in Arkady's temperament predisposed him to live in the hugger-mugger of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or take a conventional job. He had a flattish face and a gentle smile, and he moved through the bright Australian spaces with the ease of his footloose forebears. His hair was thick and straight, the colour of straw. His lips had cracked in the heat. He did not have the drawn-in lips of so many white Australians in the Outback; nor did he swallow his words. He rolled his Rs in a very Russian way. Only when you came up close did you realize how big his bones were. He had married, he told me, and had a daughter of 6. Yet, preferring solitude to domestic chaos, he no longer lived with his wife. He had few possessions apart from a harpsichord and a shelf of books. He was a tireless bushwalker. He thought nothing of setting out, with a water flask and a few bites of food, for a 100-mile walk along the Ranges. Then he would come home, out of the heat and light, and draw the curtains, and play the music of Buxtehude and Bach on the harpsichord. Their orderly progressions, he said, conformed to the contours of the central Australian landscape.
BC: Neither of Arkady's parents had ever read a book in English. He delighted them by winning a first-class honours degree, in history and philosophy, at Adelaide University. He made them sad when he went to work as a schoolteacher, on an Aboriginal settlement in Walbiri country to the North of Alice Springs. He liked the Aboriginals. He liked their grit and tenacity, and their artful ways of dealing with the white man. He had learned, or half-learned, a couple of their languages and had come away astonished by their intellectual vigour, their feats of memory and their capacity and will to survive. They were not, he insisted, a dying race, although they did need help, now and then, to get the government and mining companies off their backs. It was during his time as a schoolteacher that Arkady learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.
BC: Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path, birds, animals, plants, rocks, water-holes, and so singing the world into existence. Arkady was so struck by the beauty of this concept that he began to take note of everything he saw or heard, not for publication, but to satisfy his own curiosity. At first, the Walbiri Elders had mistrusted him, and their answers to his questions were evasive. With time, once he had won their confidence, they invited him to witness their most secret ceremonies and encouraged him to learn their songs. One year, an anthropologist from Canberra came to study Walbiri systems of land tenure: An envious academic who resented Arkady's friendship with the song-men, pumped him for information and promptly betrayed a secret he had promised to keep. Disgusted by the row that followed, the Russian threw in his job and went abroad.
BC: He saw the Buddhist temples of Java, sat with saddhus on the ghats of Benares, smoked hashish in Kabul and worked on a kibbutz. On the Acropolis in Athens there was a dusting of snow and only one other tourist: A Greek girl from Sydney. They travelled through Italy, and slept together, and in Paris they agreed to get married. Having been brought up in a country where there was nothing, Arkady had longed all his life to see the monuments of Western civilization. He was in love. It was springtime. Europe should have been wonderful. It left him, to his disappointment, feeling flat. Often, in Australia, he had had to defend the Aboriginals from people who dismissed them as drunken and incompetent savages; yet there were times, in the flyblown squalor of a Walbiri camp, when he suspected they might be right and that his vocation to help the Blacks was either wilful self-indulgence or a waste of time. Now, in a Europe of mindless materialism, his old men seemed wiser and more thoughtful than ever. He went to a Qantas office and bought two tickets home. He was married, six weeks later in Sydney, and took his wife to live in Alice Springs.
BC: She said she longed to live in the Centre. She said she loved it when she got there. After a single summer, in a tin-roofed house that heated like a furnace, they began to drift apart. The Land Rights Act gave Aboriginal owners the title to their country, providing it lay untenanted; and the job that Arkady then invented for himself was to interpret tribal law into the law... Into the language of The Crown. I beg your pardon, into the language of The Law of The Crown. No one knew better that the idyllic days of hunting and gathering were over, if, indeed, they were ever that idyllic. What could be done for the Aboriginals was to preserve their most essential liberty: The liberty to remain poor, or, as he phrased it more tactfully, the space in which to be poor if they wished to be poor. Now that he lived alone he liked to spend most of his time out bush. When he did come to town, he worked from a disused newspaper shop-floor where rolls of old newsprint still clogged the presses and his sequence of aerial photos had spread, like a game of dominoes, over the shabby white walls. One sequence showed a 300 strip of country running roughly due north. This was the suggested route of the new Alice to Darwin railway.
BC: The line, he told me, was going to be the last long stretch of track to be laid in Australia; and its chief engineer, a railway-man of the old school, had announced that it must also be the best. The engineer was close to retiring age and concerned for his posthumous reputation. He was especially concerned to avoid the kind of rumpus that broke out whenever a mining company moved its machinery into Aboriginal land. So, promising not to destroy a single one of their sacred sites, he had asked their representatives to supply him with a survey. Arkady's job was to identify the traditional landowners; to drive them over their old hunting grounds, even if these now belonged to a cattle company; and to get them to reveal which rock or soak or ghost-gum was the work of a Dreamtime hero. He had already mapped the 150-mile stretch from Alice to Middle Bore Station. He had a 150 to go. "I warned the engineer he was being a bit rash," he said. "But that's the way he wanted it." "Why rash?" I asked. "Well, if you look at it their way," he grinned, "The whole of bloody Australia's a sacred site." "Explain," I said. He was on the point of explaining when an Aboriginal girl came in with a stack of papers. She was a secretary, a pliant brown girl in a brown knitted dress.
BC: She smiled and said, "Hi, Ark!" but her smile fell away at the sight of a stranger. Arkady lowered his voice. He had warned me earlier how Aboriginals hate to hear white men discussing their business. "This is a Pom," he said to the secretary. "A Pom by the name of Bruce." The girl giggled, diffidently, dumped the papers on the desk, and dashed for the door. "Let's go and get a coffee," he said. So we went to a coffee shop on Todd Street.
BC: Arkady and I then go on an expedition to the country north of Alice Springs to take the old man to see whether or not the railway line was going to cut into their songs. On the way, he tells me about the way in which certain Aboriginal groups had to go through the nuclear fallout. And I indeed met an old man called... Well, not so old, called Yami Lester in Alice Springs, who actually described what it is like to have a nuclear fallout cloud coming towards you, when his family were out hunting. And we are also going to call on a man called Hanlon who was an old bushy living alone in a tin house.
BC: We forked right at the sign for Middle Bore and headed east along a dusty road that ran parallel to a rocky escarpment. The road rose and fell through a thicket of grey-leaved bushes, and there were pale hawks perching on fence posts. I beg your pardon. I started the wrong chapter. Help. Wait a second.
BC: He starts off looking in the sand, big one. An [chuckle].. Repetitions, unconscious. An hour or so later we passed the Glen Armond Pub, turned left off the tarmac, bumped along a dirt track, and stopped by a disused stockyard. Nearby, behind a screen of tamarisks, there was an old, unpainted tin bungalow, grey going over into rust, with a brick chimney standing up the middle. This was Hanlon's house. In the yard out front there were a stack of empty oil-drums and another stack of ex-Army surplus. At the back, under a squeaky wind-pump, there was a dead Chevrolet with silver-grass growing up through it. A faded poster, pasted to the front door, read 'Workers of the World Unite'. The door scraped open six inches. Hanlon was standing behind it. "Whatzamattawithya?" he crackled. "Never seen a man naked before? Come on in, boys!" For a man in his seventies, Hanlon looked in good shape. He was skinny and taut-muscled, with a short flat head and a craning neck. His hair was crew-cropped and white, and he would pat down the bristles with his hand. He had a broken nose, wore steel-framed spectacles, and spoke in a loud nasal voice. We sat and he stood.
BC: He stared earnestly at his privates, scratched his crotch and bragged about a lady pharmacist he'd tupped in Tennant Creek. "Not bad for 73!" he looked down at himself. "Serviceable knackers! Reasonable set of teeth! What more would an old man need?" "Nothing," said Arkady. "You're right," Hanlon smirked. He tied a towel round his tummy and got out three bottles of beer. I noticed that his right hand was withered. It was baking hot inside the house. The heat pressed down from the roof and our shirts were soaked with sweat. The outer room was an L-shaped corridor, with an old enamel bath up one end. Then came the kitchen, then a group of table and chairs. He showed us the clippings on his walls: A strike in Kalgoorlie, Lenin's skull, Uncle Joe's moustache, and pin-ups from Playboy. He had settled here, 30 years back, with the woman who had left him. He had sold off the land, and now lived on welfare. On the table there was a scarlet oilcloth, and a tabby cat licking off the plate. "Git, yer bastard!" He raised his fist and the cat flew off. "So what are you boys up to?" "Going up to Kaititj country," Arkady answered, "with Alan Nakumurra's Mob." "Survey, eh?" "Yes." "Sacred sites, eh?" "Yes." "Sacred bloody baloney! What those boys need is organization!"
BC: He flipped off the beer caps, then blew his nose into his hand and smeared the snot carefully on the underside of his chair. He caught me looking at him. He looked at me. He reminisced about his days at Kalgoorlie, as a paid-up Party member, before the Second World War. "Ask him!" he pointed at Arkady. "Ask the boy for my curriculum vitae!" He then pottered off into the inside room, where his bed was, and, after rummaging about among old newspapers, found a book with a dull red buckram binding. He sat down again, adjusted his spectacles and flattened his spine against the chair back. "And now," he announced, pretending to open the book at random, "Now we will read the Gospel according to Our Father Marx," forgive an old man's blasphemies, "For today." What the fuck is today? Thursday. Thought so! The date is immaterial. Page 256, and what do we have? What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, I.e. It does not belong to his essential being, that in his work he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. "Nothing like a few lines of Marx before food," he beamed, "For bracing the intellect and strengthening the digestion! Have you boys eaten?"
BC: "We have," said Arkady. "Well, you're eating here with me." "No, honestly, we can't." "You bloody can." "We'd be late." "Late? What's late and what's early? An important philosophical question!" "We'd be late for a lady called Marian." "Not a philosophical question!" Hanlon said. "Who the hell's Marian?" "Old friend of mine," Arkady said. "Works for the Land Council. She's gone to fetch the Kaititj women. We're meeting her at Middle Bore." "Marian! Maid Marian!" Hanlon smacked his lips. "Descending to Middle Bore with a train of fair damsels. I tell you they can wait. Go and get the steaks, boy!" "Only if it's quick, Jim," Arkady relented. "We've got an hour, and that's it." "Give me, give me, one hour, one hour with you.' Hanlon still possessed the relics of a passable baritone. He looked at me. "Don't you look at me like that! I've sung in choirs."
[laughter]
BC: Arkady went out to fetch the steaks from the car. "So you're a writer, eh?" Hanlon said to me. "Of sorts." "Ever do an honest day's work in your life?" [laughter] His blue eyes were watering. His eyeballs were suspended in nets of red wire. "Try to," I said. The withered hand shot forward. It was purplish and waxy. The little finger was off. He held the hand to my face, like a claw. "Know what this is?" he taunted. "A hand." "A working man's hand." "I've done farm work," I said. "And timber work." "Timber? Where?" "Scotland." "What kind of timber?" "Spruce, larch." "Very convincing! What kind of saw?" "Power-saw." "What make, you fool?" "Can't remember." "Very unconvincing," he said. "Doesn't sound right to me."
[laughter]
BC: Arkady pushed through the door with the steaks. There were drops of blood on the white plastic bag. Hanlon took the bag, opened it, and inhaled. "Ah! That's better!" he grinned. "Nice red meat for a change." He got up, lit the gas-ring, poured fat from an old paint can and laid out three steaks in the skillet. "Here you!" he called to me. "You come and talk to the cook." The fat began to splutter and he took a spatula to stop the meat from sticking.
BC: "So you're writing a book?" "Trying to," I said. "Why don't you write your book right here? You and me could have uplifting conversations." "We could," I said, hesitantly. "Ark!" Hanlon called, "Watch these steaks a minute, will you, boy? I'm going to show the bookie his billet. Here! You come here with me!" He dropped the towel to the floor, pulled on a pair of shorts and slipped his feet into thongs. I followed him into the sunlight. The wind had freshened and was kicking up clouds of red dust along the track. We went through the tamarisks to a creaking gum tree with a caravan underneath it. He opened the door. There was the smell of something dead. The windows were wrapped in spiders' webs. The bedding was stained and torn. Someone had spilled tomato sauce over the table-top, and the ants were swarming over it.
BC: "Nice little hidey-hole!" Hanlon said chirpily. "Reasonable rent! And yer could oil the tree if the creaking gets you down." "Very nice," I said. "But not quite nice enough, eh?" "I didn't say that." "But meant it," he hissed. "Of course, we could fumigate the place. Might fumigate you in the process!" He banged the door to, and stalked off back to the house. I hung about the yard for a while, and when I went in the steaks were done. Hanlon had fried six eggs and was ready to carve. "Serve His Lordship first!" he said to Arkady. He cut three hunks of bread and set a sauce bottle on the table. I waited for him to sit down. It was unbearably hot. I looked at the steak and at the egg yolks. Hanlon looked at me for what seemed a full minute and said, "Get your fucking fangs into that steak!"
[laughter]
BC: We ate without speaking. Hanlon steadied his steak with his withered hand, and cut it into cubes with the good one. His knife had a serrated blade and a pair of curled-up prongs on the end of it. "Who the hell does he think he is?" he turned to Arkady. "Who asked him to poke his upper-snotty-class nose in here?" "You did," said Arkady. "Did I? Well, I made a mistake." "I'm not upper class," I said. "But a touch too classy for my little luncheon party! Luncheon! That's what they call it in Pongleterre! Luncheon with the Queen! What?" "Cut it out, Jim," Arkady said. He was very embarrassed. "None of it meant personally," said Hanlon. "That's something," I said. "It is," he agreed. "Tell him about Maralinga," said Arkady, in an effort to turn the conversation. "Tell him about the Cloud," the nuclear cloud. Hanlon raised his good hand and clicked his fingers like castanets.
BC: "The Cloud! Aye, aye, Sir! The Cloud! Her Majesty's Cloud. Sir Anthony-stuck-up-in-Eden's Cloud! Poor Sir Anthony! Wanted his Cloud so badly so he could say to the Rooskie in Geneva, 'Look, old boy, we also have the Cloud!' Forgetting, of course, that there are such things as variables in climate, even in Australia! Forgetting the wind might be blowing in the wrong direction! So he calls up Bob Menzies and says, 'Bob, I want my Cloud now! Today!' 'But the wind,' says Sir Bob. 'Don't you give me wind,' says Sir Anthony. 'I said now!' So they let off the device, how I love that word 'device'! And the Cloud, instead of sailing out to sea to contaminate the fishes, sailed inland to contaminate us where they lost it! Lost the bugger over Queensland! All so Sir Anthony could have a nice cosy Cloud talk with Comrade Nikita! 'Yes, Comrade, it's true. We do, too, have the Cloud. Not that my men over there didn't lose it for a while! Vaporized a few Abos on the way.'"
BC: "That's enough," said Arkady, firmly. Hanlon hung his head. "Aw, shit!" he said, and then prodded another steak cube and put it in his mouth. No one spoke until Hanlon burped and said, "Beg pardon!" He pushed his plate away. "Can't eat the bugger," he said. His face had turned putty-coloured. His hand was shaky. "Anything the matter?" asked Arkady. "I got a crook gut, Ark." "You should go to a doctor." "I been to a doctor. They want to cut me up, Ark."
BC: "I'm sorry," I said. "I won't let them cut me. That's right, isn't it?" "No," said Arkady. "Maybe you should go." "Well, maybe I will," he sniffed miserably. At the end of another five minutes Arkady got up and laid his arm protectively around the old man's shoulders. "Jim," he said in a soft voice, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid we've got to go. Can we take you anywhere?" "No," he said. "I'll stay." We made a move to go. "Stay a bit longer," Hanlon said. "No, really, we have to go." "I wish you boys'd stay a bit longer. We could have a good time." "We'll come again," I said. "Will you?" Hanlon held his breath. "When?" "Couple of days," said Arkady. "We'll be done by then. Then we're heading out to Cullen." "Sorry I flew at you," he said. His lip was quivering. "Always fly at Poms." "No worries," I said. It was hotter than ever outside, and the wind was dying. In the front paddock a wedge-tailed eagle was skimming down the line of the fence-posts. It was a lovely, gleaming, bronze-feathered bird and it sheered away when it saw us. I tried to shake Hanlon's hand. He was holding it over his abdomen. We got into the Land Cruiser. "You might have said thank you for the steaks," he called out after us. He was trying to resume his abrasive manner, but he looked scared. His cheeks were wet with tears. He turned his back. He could not bear to watch us going.
[applause]
BC: How we doing? Well, at some stage, we meet a policeman and then we'll meet him again in another chapter.
BC: At the Burnt Flat hotel, where we stopped for a tank of gasoline, a police patrolman was taking affidavits about a man found dead on the road. The victim, he told us, had been white, in his twenties and a derelict. Motorists had been sighting him on and off along the highway, for the past three days. "And he's a right mess now. We had to scrape him off the bitumen with a shovel. Truckie mistook him for a dead roo." The accident had happened at 5:00 in the morning but the body, what was left of it by the road-train, had been cold for about six hours. "Looks like somebody dumped him," said the policeman. He was being most officiously polite. His Adam's apple worked up and down the V of his khaki shirt. It was his duty, we would understand that, to ask a few questions. Run over a coon in Alice Springs and no one'd give it a thought. But a white man! "So where were you boys at 11:00 last night?" "The Alice," said Arkady in a flat voice. "Thank you very much," the officer touched his hat brim. "No need to trouble you further."
BC: We then meet the policeman a little later on in the pub. And we have had news that Hanlon has been taken sick.
BC: The Barman of the motel at Glen Armond said that Hanlon had come in around 9:00 the night before and bragged of renting his caravan to an English literary gent. On the strength of this transaction, he put back five double Scotches, fell and banged his head on the floor. Expecting him to be sober by morning, they carried him to a room out back. There, in the early hours, a truckie heard him groaning and they found him, on the floor again, clutching his abdomen, with his shirt torn to ribbons. They called his mate, Frank Olson, who drove him down to Alice. He was on the operating table by 11:00.
BC: "Some talk of a blockage," said the barman sententiously. "Usually means one thing." There was a pay-phone on the bar. Arkady put through a call to the hospital. The nurse on duty said that Hanlon was comfortable, and asleep. "So what's the matter?" I asked. "She wouldn't say." The bar itself was made up of disused wooden railway-sleepers and above it hung a notice: All liquor must be consumed on the premises. I looked at a picture on the wall. It was an artist's impression, in watercolour, of the proposed Glen Armond Memorial Dingo Complex. The word memorial referred to the dingo which either ate, or did not eat, the infant Azaria Chamberlain. The plans called for a fibreglass dingo about 60 feet high, with a spiral staircase up its forelegs and a dark-red restaurant in the belly. "Incredible," [chuckle] I said. "No," said Arkady. "Humorous."
BC: The night bus to Darwin drew up outside, and the bar filled up with passengers. There were Germans, Japanese, a pink-kneed Englishman and the usual cast of Territorians. They ate pie and ice-cream, drank, went out to piss, and came back to drink again. The stopover lasted 15 minutes. Then the driver called and they all trooped out, leaving the bar to its core of regulars. At the far end of the room, a fat Lebanese was playing pool with a gaunt, fair-haired young man who had one wall-eye and was trying to explain, in a stutter, how Aboriginal kinship systems were "So com-fuckin-plex." At the bar, a big man with a purple birthmark on his neck was methodically swilling Scotches through his rotted teeth, and talking to the police patrolman whom we had met the day before at Burnt Flat. He had changed into jeans, a gold neck-chain and a clean white singlet. Out of uniform, he appeared to have shrunk. His arms were thin and white above the line of his shirt cuffs. His Alsatian lay very still, leashed to the bar-stool, eyeing some Aboriginals, its ears pricked up and tongue extended.
BC: The policeman turned to me, "So what'll it be?" I hesitated. "What are you drinking?" "Scotch and soda," I said. "Thank you." "Ice?" "Ice." "So you're a writer, eh?" "News gets around." "What kind of writing?" "Books," I said. "Published?" "Yes." "Science fiction?" "No!" "Ever write a best-seller?" "Never." "I'm thinking of writing a best-seller myself." "Good on you." "You wouldn't believe some of the stories I hear." "I certainly would."
BC: "Unbelievable," he said in his thin, petulant voice. "It's all there." "Where?" "In my head." "The great thing's to get it on to paper." "I got a great title." "Good." "You want me to tell you?" "If you like." He dropped his jaw and gaped at me, "You must be joking, mate. You think I'd give away my title. You might use it! That title's worth money." "Then you should hang on to it." "A title", he said, with great feeling, "Can make or break a book." Think of Ed McBain's 'Killer's Payoff'. Think of 'Shark City,' or 'Eden's Burning!' Think of 'The Day of the Dog.' Great titles. The cash value of his title he estimated at 50,000 US dollars. With a title like that, you could make a great movie, even without the book. [laughter] "Even without the story?" I suggested. "Could do," he nodded. Titles changed hands for millions, he said, in the United States. Not that he was going to sell off his title to a movie company. The title and the story belonged together. "No," he shook his head, thoughtfully. "I wouldn't want to part them." "You shouldn't." "Maybe we could collaborate?" he said.
[laughter]
BC: He visualized an artistic and business partnership. He would provide the title and the story. I would write the book because he, as a policeman, did not have the leisure for writing. "Writing takes time," I agreed. "Would you be interested?" "No." He looked disappointed. He was not prepared, yet, to tell me the title, but to whet my appetite he proposed to let me in on the plot. The plot of this unbelievable story began with an Aboriginal being flattened by a road-train. "And?" "I better tell you," he said. He moistened his lips. He had come to a big decision. "Body bag," he said. "Body bag?" He closed his eyes and smiled. "I never told anyone before." "Body bag?" "The bag you put the body in. I told you the story starts with a dead coon on the highway." "You did." "You like it?" he asked, anxiously. "No." "I mean the title." "I know you mean the title." I turned to the man with the purple birthmark, who was sitting on my left. He had been stationed in England, during the war, near Leicester. He had fought in France and then married a girl from Leicester. His wife came to live in Australia, but went back with their child, to Leicester. He had heard we were surveying sacred sites. "Know the best thing to do with a sacred site?" he drawled. "What?" "Dynamite!" He grinned, raised his glass to the Aboriginals. The birthmark oscillated as he drank.
BC: One of the Aboriginals, a very thin hillbilly type with a frenzy of matted hair, leaned both elbows on the counter, and listened. "Sacred sites!" the man leered. "If all what them says was sacred sites, there'd be three hundred bloody billion sacred sites in Australia." "Not far wrong, mate!" calls the thin Aboriginal. Over on my right I could hear Arkady talking to the policeman. They had both lived in Adelaide, in the suburb of St Peters. They had gone to the same school. They'd had the same maths master, but the policeman was five years older. "It's a small world," he said. "It is," said Arkady. "So why do you bother with them?" The policeman jerked his thumb at the Aboriginals. "Because I like them." "And I like them," he said. "I like them! I like to do what's right by them. But they're different." "In what way different?" The policeman moistened his lips again, and sucked the air between his teeth. "Made differently," he said at last. "They've got different urinary tracts to the white man. Different waterworks! That's why they can't hold their booze!" "How do you know?" "It's been proved," said the policeman, "Scientifically." "Who by?" "I don't recall."
BC: The fact was, he went on, there should be two different drinking laws, one for whites and one for Blacks. "You think so?" said Arkady. "Penalize a white man for having better waterworks?" said the policeman, his voice lifting in indignation. "It's unfair. It's unconstitutional."' The Alsatian whined, and he patted it on the head. From having different waterworks was an easy step to having different grey-matter. An Aboriginal brain, he said, was different to that of Caucasians. The frontal lobes were flatter. Arkady narrowed his eyes to a pair of Tatar slits. He was now very nettled. "I like them," the policeman said. "I never said I didn't like them. But they're like children. They've got a childish mentality." "What makes you think so?" "They're incapable of progress. And that's what's wrong with you Land Rights people. You're standing in the way of progress. You're helping them destroy White Australia." "Let me buy you a drink." I interrupted. "No, thanks," the policeman snapped. His face was working wrathfully. His fingernails, I noted, were bitten to the quick.
BC: Arkady waited a moment or two, until he'd got control of his temper, and then he began to explain, slowly and reasonably, how the surest way of judging a man's intelligence was his ability to handle words. Many Aboriginals, he said, by our standards, would rank as linguistic geniuses. The difference was one of outlook. The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future. The Aboriginals put all their mental energies into keeping the world the way it was. In what way was that inferior? The policeman's mouth shot downwards. "You're not Australian," he said to Arkady. "I bloody am Australian." "No, you're not. I can tell you're not Australian." "I was born in Australia." "That doesn't make you Australian," he taunted. "My people have lived in Australia for five generations. So where was your father born?" Arkady paused and, with quiet dignity, answered, "My father was born in Russia." "Hey!" the policeman tightened his lip and turned to the big man. "What did I tell you, Bert? A Pom and a Com!"
[laughter]
[applause]
BC: We've only got time for one, two little bits more, actually. But there's a section of this book which is a sort of commonplace book in which there are various jottings and stories, quotations from other people's... Quotations which I've jotted down at one stage of my travels or another. And most of them have wandering or restlessness as their theme. I'm just gonna read one or two and then a short story. I'm at it. And so this is a section which is called 'From the Notebooks.'
BC: "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." Pascal, Pensées. "A study of the Great Malady; horror of one's home." Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes. The most convincing analysts of restlessness were often men who, for one reason or another, were immobilized: Pascal by stomach ailments and migraines, Baudelaire by drugs, St John of the Cross by the bars of his cell. There are French critics who would claim that Proust, the hermit of the cork-lined room, was the greatest of literary voyagers. "What is this strange madness?" Petrarch asked of his young secretary. "What is this mania for sleeping each night in a different bed?" "What am I doing here?" Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia.
[laughter]
BC: [uninteligable] Picós, Piauí, Brazil. Sleepless night in the Charm Hotel. The sleeping-sickness bug is endemic to this region, which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. At breakfast-time, the proprietor, instead of serving my eggs, thwacked his fly-swat on to my plate and removed a mottled brown insect by the wing. "Mata gente," he says gloomily. "It kills people."
BC: The stucco facade is painted a pale mint green with the words Charm Hotel in bold black letters. A leaking gutter pipe has washed away the letter C, so that it now reads...
[laughter]
BC: Djang, Cameroon. There are two hotels in Djang: The Hotel Windsor and, across the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor.
[laughter]
BC: He who does not travel does not know the value of men. Moorish Proverb. Miami, Florida. On the bus from Downtown to the Beach there was a lady in pink. She must have been 80, at least. She had bright pink hair with pink flowers in it, a matching pink dress, pink lips, pink nails, pink handbag, pink earrings, and, in her shopping bag, there were boxes of pink Kleenex. In the wedges of her clear plastic heels a pair of goldfish were lazily floating in formaldehyde. I was too intent on the goldfish to notice the midget in horn-rimmed glasses who was standing on the seat beside me. "Permit me to ask you, sir," he said in a squeaky voice, "which of the human qualities do you value the most?" "I haven't thought," I said. "I used to believe in empathy," he said, "but I have recently moved over to compassion." "I'm glad to hear it."
BC: "Permit me to ask you, sir. At which of the professions are you presently engaged?" "I'm studying to be an archaeologist." "You amaze me, sir. I'm in that line of country myself." He was a sewer-rat. His friends would lower him, with a metal-detector, into the main sewer beneath the hotels of Miami Beach. There, he would prospect for jewellery flushed, accidentally, down the toilets. "It is not, I can assure you, sir, an unrewarding occupation."
BC: This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window. I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. Baudelaire, 'Anywhere Out of this World'.
BC: "Internal burning, wandering fever," the Finnish, Kalevala. In 'The Descent of Man', Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south.
BC: Sydney Harbour. On the ferry back from Manly a little old lady heard me talking. "You're English, aren't you?" she said, in an English North Country accent. "I can tell you're English." "I am." "So am I!" She was wearing thick, steel-framed spectacles and a nice felt hat with a wisp of blue net above the brim. "Are you visiting Sydney?" I asked her. "Oh, Lord, love, no!" she said, "I've lived here since 1946. I came out to live with my son, but a very strange thing happened. By the time the ship got here, he'd died. Imagine! I'd given up my home in Doncaster, so I thought, well, I might as well stay! So I asked my second son to come out and live with me. So he came out, emigrated, and do you know what?" "No." "He died! [laughter] He had a heart attack, and died." "That's terrible," I said. "I had a third son," she went on. "He was my favourite, but he died in the war. Dunkirk, you know! He was very brave. Oh, I had a letter from his officer. Very brave, he was! He was on the deck covered in blazing oil and he threw himself into the sea. Oooh! He was a sheet of living flame!" "But that's terrible!" "But it's a lovely day," she said. "Isn't it a lovely day?"
BC: It was a bright sunny day with high white clouds and a breeze coming in off the ocean. Some yachts were beating out towards The Heads, and other yachts were running under spinnaker. The old ferry ran before the whitecaps, towards the Opera House and the Bridge. "And it's so lovely out at Manly!" she said. "I loved to go out to Manly with my son, before he died! But I haven't been for 20 years!" "But it's so near," I said. "But I haven't been out of the house for 16. I was blind, love! My eyes was covered with cataracts, and I couldn't see a thing. The eye surgeon said it was hopeless, so I sat there. Think of it! 16 years in the dark! Then along comes this nice social worker the other week and says, 'We'd better get those cataracts looked at.' And look at me now!"
[laughter]
BC: I looked through the spectacles at a pair of twinkling, that is the word for them, twinkling blue eyes. "They took me to hospital," she said, "and they cut out the cataracts! And isn't it lovely? I can see!" "Yes," I said. "It's wonderful!" "It's my first time out alone," she confided. "I didn't tell a soul. I said to myself at breakfast, 'It's a lovely day. I'll take the bus to Circular Quay, and go over on the ferry to Manly, just like we did in the old days.'" I had a fish lunch. Oh, it was lovely! She hunched her shoulders mischievously, and giggled. "How old would you say I was?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "Let me look at you. I'd say you were 80." "No. No. No," she laughed. "I'm 93, and I can see!"
[laughter]
[applause]
___
RANDY: Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield, England, in 1940, and after a peripatetic childhood and partial studies in Archaeology, at the University of Edinburgh, which had something to do with thinking he’d found part of a brontosaurus as a small boy, an experience he would later write about, Chatwin went to work at Sotheby’s in 1958. Despite enjoying success as a suddenly-expert appraiser of art, Chatwin left this work for journalism, which eventually led to a trip to South America that occasioned his first book, In Patagonia. He published many other works of travel writing that enjoyed critical and popular success, and also a novel, Utz, that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. Chatwin was married to Elizabeth Chanler, whom he met while working at Sotheby’s. She survived him at his death, in 1989, as did many friends in literature and film, including Salman Rushdie and Werner Herzog, who made the documentary Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, as a testament to the ongoing relevance and inspiring features of Chatwin’s life and work.
Thanks to the Estate of Bruce Chatwin for allowing us permission to use this audio, recorded in 1986 live and on stage at Harbourfront in downtown Toronto. And, as always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, and marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcasts series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.