Chapter 11: In Adnyamathana Country - 1

As arranged, Henry picked up Sam at eight. They headed north to North Terrace, east to Princes Highway and then north again.

“OK,” Sam said. “Can you take the time to explain what we’re doing?”

Henry laughed. “I could say we were driving to some aboriginal sites. But that’s not what you mean.”

“No. And I’d have to kill you.”

“Right. So, explain. We’ll have two sharp turns and then it’s a straight shot of about an hour to Port Wakefield.”

“Fine. Well, you spoke about some Swede and a lot of the Pacific islands and about rock art in various parts of the world. But I don’t understand what you want to get at.”

“Well, that Swede was in 1627. But just over a century before that, in 1521, Magellan and his ships reached the Pacific through the Straits in Tierra del Fuego. They sailed northwest, crossing the Equator on the 13 February. They reached Guam on the 6 March. Pigafetta, who kept a journal of the entire voyage, describes the ‘lateen sail’ used by the islanders who ‘entered the ships and stole everything they could lay hands on.’ So they called the Marianas, the Ladrones – ‘thief islands.’ They sailed on, and on 16 March reached Homonhon in the northwestern Philippines. From there they were guided to Cebu whence they sailed to Mactan where, on 27 April, Magellan was killed. Over a year later, a few members of the original crew made it back to Spain – 18 of the original 237.

“Anyway, the circumnavigation, together with the eastbound voyages of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English led to the Western discovery of the various islands and their inhabitants. But up to about 40 years ago – maybe a bit more – the exploration and colonization of the area from Sumatra in the west to Hawaii in the east, from New Zealand and Easter Island north to the Marianas was a mystery. There are all sorts of theories.

“Eighty-years ago, Thor Heyerdahl was convinced that the settlement of Easter Island had proceeded east to west and set out on his balsa raft from Peru to prove it. They ran aground on a reef in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia, in 1947. In 2014 a team from the Natural History Museum of Denmark analyzed the genomes of 27 native people from Rapa Nui and found that their DNA was on average 76 percent Polynesian, 8 percent Native American and 16 percent European. Analysis showed that though the European lineage could be explained by contact with white Europeans after the island was ‘discovered’ in 1722 by Dutch sailors, the South American component was much older, dating to between about 1280 and 1495, soon after the island was first colonized by Polynesians in around 1200.

“Now, the initial first settlement of the Hawaiian Islands was sometime between 1219 and 1266 AD, originating from earlier settlements first established in the Society Islands around 1025 to 1120 and in the Marquesas Islands sometime between 1100 and 1200. So we know that the westward fan seems to have reached its edge over 800 years ago.

“Am I making sense so far?”

“I think so.”

“Well, you know that your dad and I opened several boxes of objects from Guam and the other Marianas. And I went there and Sarah and I visited.”

“Right.”

“The original inhabitants of Guam are believed to be descendants of Austronesians who originated from SE Asia as early as 2000 BC, with linguistic and cultural similarities to Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. But the first people of the Northern Mariana Islands navigated there at some period between 4000 BC to 2000 BC. There are datable objects from at least 3500 years ago. And the Samoan islands were first settled some 3,500 years ago, as were Tonga and Fiji.

“Now, nearly 50 years ago, a bloke named Geoffrey Irwin at Auckland, began publishing papers about the prehistory of exploration and colonialization. After all, we knew then that the aborigines had been here in Australia for at least 40,000 years – and that’s been pushed back in the past 15 years to about 65,000 years ago. And I think we’re pretty much agreed that humans originated in Africa’s Rift Valley about 1.8 million years ago.”

“OK.”

“Well, those folks wandered north and into Asia Minor and up into Siberia and East Asia and down into India and southeast to Malaysia and Sumatra and New Guinea. And some of them wound up here. Another group of folks found their way west into Europe as far as Ireland and Scandinavia. And some from Siberia made their way to North America and eventually to South America, ten or twenty thousand years ago. And about the same time my ancestors got to Hawaii, some Scandinavians made it to Iceland.

“Now, here’s what got me. I saw the pictures from Altamira in Spain. The oldest paintings in the cave were executed around 36,000 years ago. The Bhimbetka rock shelters in India are about 30,000 years old. The cave of hands in Argentina is over 9,000 years old and may be 13,000. Gabarnmung in the Northern Territory has fish, crocodiles, people, and spiritual figures, mostly on the site’s ceilings. They’re at least 28,000 years old. And the Bradshaw rock art in the Kimberley – over a million paintings – is over 20,000 years old. Edwards dated one of the works at Olary at 22-24,000 years ago.

“Sam, people like you and me drew those, scratched those, held up their hands and silhouetted them in pigment. The hands in Argentina, in France, in India and in the Kimberley look like yours and mine. I want to track them.

“If archaeologists can track the development of ceramics, I can track stone-age art. Folks talk about two waves: the first which is the work of Australasia and Melanesia and the later of Polynesia and Micronesia. So ... I want to actually see some of the stuff.”

“Wow. Just wow. You must be a great lecturer. You just rattled that off.”

“I’ve twenty years on you. This what you will acquire over the next two decades. Anyway, recall what I owe to your grandfather and your parents. One day nearly 22 years ago, your father showed me a turtle very like those on cave walls in Guam. I recall expressing my interest in seeing the caves and the rock art.

“We’re nearly at Stirling North. We’ll get off onto Flinders Ranges Way there. We’ll stop to top up the fuel, use the loo, and have early lunch around Quorn or just past it.”

They did just that. When they were on their way again, Sam asked:

“Did you ever read Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art?”

Henry said he hadn’t.

“My mum was very big on him. She’d found all four volumes in a second-hand store. Apparently, Hauser, who was a Hungarian Marxist, argued that art – which began as flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract, and concerned with spiritual beings – became more realistic as societies become less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more bourgeois. I’m not sure I get the details or that I agree, but flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract and concerned with spiritual beings certainly works for Australian aboriginal art.”

“True. In fact, it’s interesting how much some of the figures from the Northern Territory look like those from southern France.”

“Hauser says, as I recall it, that the representation of the human figure in the ancient world begins and ends with ‘frontality’.”

“I see what he means, but I’m not certain I agree. Well, we’re getting near. I’ll get off to the left onto The Oaks Road, we’ll locate the car park and we’ll abandon this.” There was a “Road Closed” sign that Henry drove around.

It took about 20 minutes to walk the trail to the base of the main and largest cave. This cave hangs off the cliff and may be accessed by the steps leading to a viewing platform. But at the foot of the steps stood two young men.

“This is sacred ground. Go away!” one said.

“I was told that I might visit,” said Sam. “Where is your nungungi? I would speak with him.”

“He is not to be seen.”

“Then who gives you authority? You have no voice in the band. You speak with other man’s voice. I would speak with him.”

“I will go,” said the other. “What are you called?”

“I am Samuel. I speak with the voice of Bunjil. My father is Patrick, the carpet python.”