The aborigines in Australia have been following "dreaming tracks" or "songlines" for 40,000 years, criss-crossing their homeland by foot. This tradition passes their history and culture from one generation to the next, despite the predations of missionaries who would "civilize" them. This resonates with life here in America.
I'm revisiting old books and films that helped shape my outlook decades ago. "Walkabout" is one of those films (based on a novel); it presents 16-year-old Jenny Agutter as a white girl lost in the outback with her little brother and David Gulpilil a 17-year-old Aborigine boy who guides them to safety.
It's a gentle and fierce romantic tragedy that touches me today as it did when I first saw it in 1971.
***
One way to experience this current period, when so many of us are staying quiet rather than actively casting about, as we are accustomed to do, is to allow the line between imagination and reality to blur. A warning label: Western medicine labels this state a borderline personality disorder.
So it is both a safe and dangerous place to go.
As is much of our great art, which probes this very blurring in novels, paintings, songs, and films.
When I rise I covet being lost in the rhythm of the departing night before it gets stolen away. Soon enough, dreamtime will inevitably merge into daytime.
Ironically, I spent an extended career in the world of setting reality straight, investigating how things appeared to be and communicating how they actually were. That was concrete work, based in a consensual construct, an agreement to interpret evidence according to set norms and standards.
Honesty is an entirely different matter. Staying within the strict boundaries of reality as opposed to the feathery borderlines of songlines is not always an option.
In an interview two years ago, Jenny Agutter talked about her experience as that 16-year-old girl in Walkabout. She shared her emotional journey from the age of fourteen, when she was chosen for the part, and the age of sixteen, when she actually played the role.
She talked about what was gained and what was lost for her in the process, how her innocence slipped away to let adulthood take its place. But she also did not claim that you can never go back.
***
It was an Australian kind of day. It was hot, utterly dry. A deep silence settled over the area. Sitting in the backyard, feeling the sun, I fell into a drowsy state. Betsy, the dog, tried to rouse me by placing a piece of wood, then a stone, on my lap. She wanted me to throw them for her to retrieve.
I often will do this but yesterday no; I didn't feel like returning to anything that concrete. My daughter came to my rescue by taking the dog inside and talking to me about writing. She also is a journalist plus she published her first novel, set in Chile, last year.
"Dad, you're retired now. You can write whatever you want to write."
It was my turn to cook dinner for our group of seven refugees. I boiled two packages of pasta, and cooked two pounds of meat sauce in onions, garlic and fresh parsley. There was olive oil involved. I had thought it would take me 45 minutes but in fact it took over two hours.
At around the 45-minute mark, my granddaughters emerged and pronounced, mostly to themselves, "We're ready for dinner but it's not ready for us."
***
As the sun went down, I returned to Australia by revisiting a 1956 film adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel, "A Town Like Alice," which recounts the ordeal of a group of British women and children as they were marched back and forth across the Malay peninsula by their Japanese captors during World Way II. An Australian man proves to be their savior and the lead actress falls in love with him.
This film is in black and white, and except for some poor depictions of the supposed frivolity of the children under such circumstances, with comically inappropriate music, it conveys that same dreamscape as Walkabout, i.e., life and death under a searing sun. The novel actually goes much further than the film, with the woman moving to a remote outpost near Alice Springs after the war to reunite with the man and start a new life.
But that is about love, perhaps a topic better left for another day. The sun is rising; I really must go.
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