Translations, an autoethnography: Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter

By Paul Carter

Translations is a personal history written at the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. Renowned postcolonial scholar, public artist and radio maker, UK-born Paul Carter documents and discusses a prodigiously varied and original trajectory of writing, sound installation and public space dramaturgy produced in Australia to present the phenomenon of contemporary migration in an entirely new light.

Migrant space-time, Carter argues, is not linear, but turbulent, vortical and opportunistic. Before-and-after narratives fail to capture the work of self-becoming and serve merely to perpetuate colonialist fantasies. The ‘mirror state’ relationship between England and Australia, its structurally symmetrical histories of land theft and internal colonisation, repress the appearance of new subjects and subject relations. Reflecting on collaborations with Aboriginal artists, Carter argues for a new definition of the stranger-host relationship predicated on recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty. Carter calls the creative practice that breaks the cycle of repeated invasion ‘dirty art’.

Translations is a passionately eloquent argument for reframing borders as crossing-places: framing less murderous exchange rates, symbolic literacy, creative courage and, above all, the emergence of a resilient migrant poetics will be essential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526158031

Book preview

Translations, an autoethnography

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography (ACE)

Series editors: Faye Ginsburg, Paul Henley, Andrew Irving and Sarah Pink

Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography provides a forum for authors and practitioners from across the digital humanities and social sciences to explore the rapidly developing opportunities offered by visual, acoustic and textual media for generating ethnographic understandings of social, cultural and political life. It addresses both established and experimental fields of visual anthropology, including film, photography, sensory and acoustic ethnography, ethnomusicology, graphic anthropology, digital media and other creative modes of representation. The series features works that engage in the theoretical and practical interrogation of the possibilities and constraints of audiovisual media in ethnographic research, while simultaneously offering a critical analysis of the cultural, political and historical contexts.

Previously published

Lorenzo Ferrarini and Nicola Scaldaferri, Sonic ethnography: Identity, heritage and creative research practice in Basilicata, southern Italy

Paul Henley, Beyond observation: A history of authorship in ethnographic film

David MacDougall, The looking machine: Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking

Christian Suhr, Descending with angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry – A film monograph

In association with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology

ffirs02-fig-5001.jpg

Translations, an autoethnography

Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter

Paul Carter

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Paul Carter 2021

The right of Paul Carter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5804 8 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Paul Carter

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of figures

List of maps

Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

1 Movement forms: migrant prehistory

2 Native informants: enigmas of communication

3 Walking the line: the endless arrival

4 Flow paths: topologies of coexistence

5 Dirty art: decolonising public space

6 The prodigal son: parables of return

7 Story lines: creative belonging

8 Silenced relations: migrant poetics

Postlude: human symbols, doubled identities

Works discussed

Index

Figures

1 Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Hinges 7, 2006 (Photo: the artists).

2 Paul Carter, composition and photograph (Source: Paul Carter, Absolute Rhythm, Works for Minor Radio, 2020, 131).

3 Paul Carter, Edmund Carter, Christopher Williams, Kelp, Hidden Histories exhibition, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool, Victoria, April–May 2014 (Photo: the artists; Sources: James Dawson, Australian Aborigines (1881), i–xlvii, lxxix–lxxxiv, City of Warrnambool Allotments Plan, 1922).

4 Ruark Lewis and Paul Carter, Raft, 1995 (Photo source: Art Gallery of New South Wales, accession number 75.2008).

5 Bharatam Dance Company, Jadi Jadian, The Malthouse, Melbourne, 25 September–4 October 1998 (Photo: Bharatam Dance Company).

6 Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, concept sketches and text treatments (Photo: Paul Carter).

7 Paul Carter and Ruark Lewis, Relay, detail of blue tier, Fig Grove, Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, New South Wales, 2000 (Photo: Paul Carter).

8 Material Thinking, Rival Channels, Brisbane 180, Ann Street, Brisbane, 2015 (Photo: Daisho).

9 i Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, 2015, figure 12; ii Material Thinking, ‘A New Body, Creative Template for Yagan Square’, figure 13; iii Yagan Square, south-west aspect, digital render, 2015 (Source: Lyons Architects, IPH, Aspect).

10 Paul Carter, ‘Waullu’, in Material Thinking, ‘Scarborough Edge, a Creative Template for the Scarborough Redevelopment Area’, 2015, 8.

11 Rachael Swain, Serge-Aimé Coulibaly and artists, Sugar, Merseyside Caribbean Centre, Liverpool, UK. June 2007 (Photo: Stalker Theatre Company).

12 Paul Carter and Edmund Carter, Involutes, 2011 (Photo: the artists).

13 Paul Carter, ‘Walking Crowd’, sketch for Passenger, September 2014 (Photo: Paul Carter).

14 Material Thinking, Passenger, Yagan Square, 2017 (Photo: Material Thinking).

15 Ramus and Material Thinking, The Pipes, Prahran Square, Melbourne, 2020 (Photo: Ramus).

Maps

1 Faringdon and district, Oxfordshire (pre-1974 Berkshire), UK.

2 Western District, Victoria, Australia.

Prelude: broken relations, migrant destiny

On the two hundredth anniversary of Australia's white colonisation, I scored a notable success. Responding to the complaint that the country had produced no great figures of original genius, I invented one. An architect of places we needed, Vincenzo Volentieri was a builder of bridges (metaphorically). Perhaps Sicilian, perhaps Indigenous, at one fell swoop he established the mestizaje tradition, whose want had inhibited our self-determination, and a new approach to home-making. Who could forget how the formulaic respectability of people in glass houses became in his mishearing mobile communities inhabiting grass houses? But Australians had forgotten, for reasons I explained in my memoir: looking elsewhere they had omitted to look where they were, a zone Vincenzo had called ‘The Originarium’.¹ The reaction to my hoax hero was surprisingly serious: concerned that they had overlooked him, historians contacted me for more details. All sorts of mésalliances were at play in this cultural joke, besides many overlooked clues, the most obvious of which was concealed in his name: Volentieri or, as any migrant quickly learns to say, Yes, willingly, volontariamente, as they accede to whatever task, mask or origin is assigned them. The nation's native informant, I was saying back what the nationalists longed to hear. Pretending to be someone else, I felt perhaps at home. As the name suggested, authenticity was to be pidginised, identity a function of echoic mimicry. Volentieri evoked the migrant's utopian hopefulness and metaphysical scepticism. Can fictions like this make a dent in what Jennifer Rutherford calls ‘the national myth’?² Or, like the migrant, must they inhabit an ‘as if’ state, permanently suspended in the mid-stride of becoming? Translations reports a personal history of creative encounters, mostly post-dating 1988, that have (most willingly) linked a revisiting of Australia's colonial past to a revisioning of a future place. Bizarrely ambitious, or lucidly naive, their explorations of language, in radio, public art, and dramaturgically extended to street and stage performance, are not art in the Bicentennial genius mode: they are channellings of the migrant experience, poetic ethnography, whose theme is language itself, the enigma of translation – or, as we learned when a selection from Volentieri's Notebooks was published a few years later, the problem of ‘getting in’.

³

Willingly could be the secret signature of these creative encounters. Early colonial accounts of Aboriginal languages often include ‘promiscuous sentences’ – phrases that are unattached to any identifiable context or conversation and on this account readily recruited to new contexts and applications. In my experience, the migrant artist's encounters are similarly promiscuous. It would be difficult to stratify the different genres in which I have played: radio art did not yield to typographical engravings in public places; writing and directing performance works in and outside the theatre did not lay the foundations of a later discovery of my true metier in cross-cultural urban design. A critic once described my interests as polyhedral, referring to the coexistence of different facets. But the explanation of this is sociological as much as psychological – most of the creative encounters discussed in Translations emerge from encounters in a human sense; they have been responses to invitations extended to me by artists (architects, composers, dancers, directors) secure in their own disciplinary formation but disposed to extend the boundaries of historical outreach or cultural expression. In a way, works like The Calling to Come (sound installation) or Passenger (sculptural ensemble) are mirrors to a desire that my collaborators could recognise but not realise – the migrant artist as the secret sharer in the twinned historical traumas of silencing and forgetting. At any rate, when I was writing Translations, I found I was navigating generically diverse islands of activity rather as one might sail through an archipelago. In the archipelago, I had written in a recently published book, there are no islands, and the islands are numberless. The crossings narrated in Translations fit this description: to judge from my diaries, no work has ever emerged in isolation – it has been a coalescence of promiscuous thoughts, dreams and images, some of whose other offcuts have migrated to other places; in the passage between different cultural performances, the only constant has been the horizon; as regards the relationship between different parts of the archipelago, the effect of parallax means that it keeps changing.

One object of Translations is to give a positive twist to self-division – I characterise the migrant as a half person in search of a host, but also attribute a formative value to the journey, which, understood archipelagically, is endless, scaleless and infinitely divisible. Viewed as an attitude towards change, a willingness to adopt different personae, the journey stretches out in all directions but especially back and forth; if distancing is a prerequisite of understanding, the antipodal relationship between England and Australia creates the strongest hermeneutical tool for placing migration in an historical perspective. There is personal chance: in the first chapter, a surprising ‘discovery’ is made of an Australia inside England – the estate where I used to birdwatch turning out to be the picturesque wish-fulfilment of an Australian entrepreneur. But beyond and behind that, clustered on the larger horizon with industrialisation, land enclosure and their colonial corollaries, migration turns out to have been ancestral – a fact I subsequently trace in the inner migrations (spiritual as much as spatial) of Yorkshire and Berkshire forebears. The double journey described in this chapter finds its own double in a later chapter where, in the guise of the Prodigal Son, I go home.

Giving the exilic experience of self-becoming at that place (however incomplete or deferred) an existential value, my Vincenzo look-alike wonders how a culture of land theft can moralise about miscegenation. Take the Uffington White Horse, the late Bronze Age hill figure, familiar to me from earliest childhood: annexed to the mytho-historical fortunes of Saint George (yes, the hill has a dragon), King Arthur and King Alfred, its ‘matter’, the ‘whole res of which the poet is himself a part’ (as David Jones puts it) consists of invasions – yet any acknowledgement of this is missing.⁴ This Brexit self-blinding was foreseen in my radio work The Native Informant and, in a series of photomontages made with my son, I later translated limbs of the hill figure to public spaces in Australia where I had created ground patterns of my own. Coming back is twinned with bereavement and rebirth, and in a positive twist, the totemic aspect of the White Horse emerges.

A migrant ethnography of the creative encounter begins in the vicissitudes of welcome – in the opening to the other mirrored in the host's invitation. But, dependent on the charity of strangers, acculturation and socialisation through these channels proceed precariously. In my experience, actual hosts are shadowed by historical hosts, avatars of an original act of recognition or translation missing in the national self-narration. For a time in Australia I lived as much in the foreign country of the past as I did in the equally unceded ground of the present: figures like William Light, responsible for Adelaide's distinctive urban design (1836), James Dawson, amateur ethnolinguist and co-author of Australian Aborigines (1881) and T.G.H. Strehlow, whose interwar studies of Arrernte culture led to the monumental Songs of Central Australia (1971), a manifesto for a bicultural Australian literature (Vincenzo would have approved) shadowed me. My relationship with these father figures was, it seemed, anti-Oedipal, a reflection of my growing conviction that the Sophoclean tragedy made much better sense as an allegory of migration. Studying these figures was ancestral homework; they fitted me out with a genealogy not my own but whose voices (in a kind of creative family romance) endowed me with the authority to speak. Coming after them, I positioned myself as a tracker. In the Adelaide multimedia performance, Light (1996) this worked out rather literally; in Raft, from the same time, Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend, a mythologised narration of his father's last journey, inspired a gallery installation (yet even there the sound of my footsteps recorded at Horseshoe Bend was audible). The relationship with Dawson was more intimate, persistent, frustrating and aggressive: unable at first to look past the enigmas of the Gundidjmara and Djab Wurrung wordlists he and his daughter collected in south-Western Victoria, I wrapped his practical humanism in a cloud of poetic free association. To free him from this imaginative levy, I had at last to track him back to his family roots in Scotland, a return journey that repatriated him to the historical congregation forming my own past; then I could see that I walked in an older migrant's footsteps whose legacy was a transcript of encounters broken off rather than finished, a personal account of voices on the edge of echo eventually withdrawn into silence.

The question of family is at the heart of the migrant condition, emerging critically in the discovery of a lost relation. Alongside the positive crowd of history there walks a shadow file of lost subjects – prodigal sons, if you like, who did not fit in, who did not come back and who had to be forgotten because they did not conform to the fictional pattern of triumph over trials. My own passage in Australia has been haunted by these feisty but forlorn orphans of empire, in whose disappearance from the official record I have discerned analogies with the migrant who consciously plunges out of sight to be reborn Pythagoras-like, in another country, in another port. Figures like the Adelaide Plains Kaurna woman Kalloongoo, discussed in the final chapter, are not necessarily abjected by the doorkeepers of legitimate descent – they may get recognition in the most surprising ways – as when generations after her death a unique record of Kalloongoo speaking her language was found secreted in a list of Tasmanian Aboriginal words. The problem is that these characters – and my sound installation for the Museum of Sydney is populated entirely by their type – rebel against getting back in the right way: they refuse the second conversion that happens when, reclassified as anomalies, they are adopted (in a second silencing) by a late revisionist history. The point was that they came to life in the to-and-fro of discourse, as actors deploying an echoic mimicry of their own. This, my spoof memoir contended, was Vincenzo's position: ‘Every time we set out on a journey conscious of its beginning in a word, its ending in the experience of a road truly travelled, as if for the first time, we owe our sensation of being at home on the move to Volentieri's vision.’ ⁵ Here, first of all, a migrant poetics is a way of talking back differently: interpellated by the noise of society, the list of eccentrics accumulating at the margins improvise new families of association. In another context, I characterised the peculiar gift of the artwork as an act of material thinking, the transmutation of ‘rubbish’ into something oddly affecting because the strangeness of its parts has been reconciled. Likewise with the discourse of those ‘named in the margin’: the poetry is in the recycling of what is to hand. In sifting syllables caught on the street, passed down lines (waiting in queues), retained from broadcasts in foreign languages, a new poetic community begins to coalesce, oddly informative and disturbing.

Talking about the recuperation of rubbish does not exclude the possibility that some forms of expression resist aesthetic elevation and absorption into the koine of cultural production. In fact, the historical and ethnographic category of ‘lost subjects’ – to which in an act of retrospective affiliation I annex contemporary migrant artists – has its counterpart in what I call ‘dirty art’, the class of creative encounters discussed in Translations that pass unnoticed and anonymous where the cultural custodians come and go. The ‘creative templates’ I have written and drawn for urban redevelopment projects fall into this category: they are story networks plotted in place that contain, fractally as it were, a creative pattern reproducible across scales. Descriptive, rather than prescriptive, they foreground topological features that could conceivably lead through doorways to new arrangements (environmental, social, political). Ironically, these professional reports cast into the most sceptical of quarters contain the most ambitious poetic claims, proving that urban designers could usefully translate Blake's dictum, a world in a grain of sand, infinity in the palm of your hand, into a practice of place-marking. Approaching places where Waugul, the Rainbow Serpent creator figure lives, Noongar people throw a handful of sand on the water and await the place spirit's reaction. That is at one scale. At another, in a story we alluded to in the Tjunta Trail, an interpretation track beside the surf beach at Scarborough (Western Australia), constructed on the recommendation of my ‘creative template’, Waugul is linked to the stars – for her collection of lost children (the motivation is ambiguous), Tjunta, the Charnok Woman, and companion of Waugul as he travels north creating lakes, turns back ‘leaving a trail of stone behind her leading to the largest stone (Kartakitch), Wave Rock, where she stepped onto the stone and was lifted into the sky. Her hair is the Milky Way and the stars in the sky represent those children she collected.’ ⁶ Dirty art is not sullied art; it is art that refuses to detach itself from the always contested business of world-making; like the portable cases made by caddisfly larvae, dramaturgical designs such as these incorporate the grains of sand picked up along the way externally, fusing the self-protection proper to precarity to a repatterning of relations that implicates the host.

Does this imply a degree of complacency, a certain satisfaction that the migrant, suspended axolotl-like in an immature state of development, can avoid the sticky landing place of colonial recapitulation? For myself, sovereignty will have to be internal as well as external: acknowledging the original land theft in Australia takes me back to its British prehistory, but it also looks forward to a transformation that incorporates a different view of being in place. Such a translation, however incomplete, cannot be divorced from the journey and its conduct. Translating one of his favourite lines from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as ‘Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought’, the poet Shelley commented that the words Sophocles used for ‘ways’ (hodous) and ‘wanderings’ (planois) prevented the line from being read metaphorically: ‘they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet; and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert, or roams from city to city – as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse was destined to wander, blind and asking charity’. And he added, ‘What a picture does this line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.’ ⁷ Romantic existentialism, no doubt, but, in its recognition that the road is not metaphorical, its traverse a balancing act of inner and outer landscapes, an accurate description of the migrant condition. But, writing from a Europe where the Indigenous gods had long died out or migrated to canvases and pedestals, Shelley did not think of the country talking back, its mythopoetic topography supporting his footsteps from underneath, the poetic logic of its spatial organisation compassionately, but not uncritically, reaching out. In Australia, I cannot say that this awareness of a prior and never-ending choreography carried in story is widespread. Perhaps this explains the touchiness of public discourse here, the white hosts feeling at their back nothing. In any case, unless the improvised creative encounters along the endless path are understood echoically, the valued thing in the external universe will remain hidden, and with it the real story.

Wandering in a wilderness is one myth: here is another, better sense of place. In Kulin myth from the Melbourne region, the creator deity and ancestral being, Bunjil, the Eaglehawk or Wedge-tailed Eagle, sees that ‘men and women were many and very bad’. Conjuring up storms and whirlwinds, he goes with his knife into the encampments and, as I paraphrased it in the words I arranged and sand-blasted into the surface of Federation Square, ‘cut this way, that way; and men, women, children, like worms writhing’. It was this second creation that produced space, the distribution of points that nourished all life. The worms turned into flakes of snow that the clouds carried ‘hither and thither over all the earth’. Bunjil ‘caused the pieces to drop in such places as he pleased. Thus were men and women scattered over the earth.’

⁸

So here was one story – that I repeatedly came back to as the external precedent for an inner reformation (as if what had gone before had to be torn up and reassembled in a migrant collage); but in Australian Aboriginal ontology, one story leads to another (journeys are the tissue culture of a spirit nervature that reconciles Being and Becoming, space and time). To extend his jurisdiction, Bunjil, the Great Ancestor Spirit, appointed the Bram-bram-bult brothers ‘to name the plants and animals and bring order to the world’. They did more than this, as the journeys of these and other ‘ancestral beings sculpted the landscape and created the land, animals, plants and people’.⁹ They were occupied with the north–south mountain ranges that the explorer Major Mitchell (whom I wrote about in The Road to Botany Bay, 1987) called ‘The Grampians’, now Gariwerd, where they caught up with the ferocious Emu Tchingal who, in his pursuit of Waa the Crow, ‘split the Gariwerd ranges with a ferocious kick, creating Victoria Gap’.¹⁰ Then, as punishment for her continuing violence, the brothers hurled three spears at Tchingal (they ‘are visible in the Southern Cross, while the brothers themselves are the two Pointers to the Southern Cross’) and another story journey began. The wounded Tchingal fled northwards, her blood formed the Wimmera River,¹¹ a path I unconsciously followed, reporting my experiences in The Sound In-Between (1992). Proceeding beyond the Wimmera, the Bram brothers spread out across the Mallee,¹² deep into Wergaia country, their subsequent adventures explaining the origin of ‘a range of places from the Lower Wimmera River to the south to Pine Plains in the north’,¹³ thereby creating the country I traversed years later and far more self-consciously in my book Ground Truthing (2010), an advance that was also a return, going back again to the enigmatic historical orphan ‘Jowley’, who first inspired What Is Your Name (1986).

Here is an exact spatial history of creative encounters; these ‘Creation stories also served as a mechanism of wayfinding through the landscape’ ¹⁴ for me. And another translation begins when the existential journey is located inside the ‘creative template’ of the mythopoetic landscape and the care of those who, recognising that the present arrangement of things embodies the Law, await the original trespass to be confessed and repaired. I suppose we are a long way from deposing the tyrant Freud; yet isn't it obvious that, in promoting the Oedipus complex, he overlooked what was hidden from him on the surface? I mean his own journey in someone else's country. What could not be admitted, it seems, was his own ancestral migrancy. Freud thought modern audiences must find the original drama, ‘a curse or an oracle … fulfilled in spite of all the efforts of some innocent man’, unengaging. He created a modern (more appealing) allegory about repressed sexual desire. But Freud was a modern Swellfoot as his fear of the gap showed,¹⁵ and his fear of ‘paths and roads’, overcome by treating them metaphorically, repressed the prehistory of journeys undertaken because of the Abrahamic curse laid on his people. Neither Sophocles nor Freud refers to the origin of the curse on Oedipus – while guest of Pelops, king of Pisa (near Olympia), Laius had raped Pelops's son, Chrysippus. The curse Zeus lays on Laius and his son concerns the abuse of hospitality. Sophocles’s audience can be presumed to have known the tale; Freud disregards it as irrelevant to his case. One aspect of the curse is that it condemns a man to return to his origins: under the impression he is avoiding the curse, Oedipus leaves Corinth for Thebes, on the way encountering his birth-father, the Theban king, Laius, and killing him. As the sequel shows, there is no path out: against his will, Oedipus is enfolded in a repetition compulsion, a curse laid on him by Zeus to return to an earlier state of things.

It is notable that Oedipus does not rely on xenitia to get into Athens: instead of submitting himself to the protocols of hospitality, he relies on his skill in solving riddles. The drama of rights in a foreign country is also the drama of self-discovery; Oedipus is defined by the ambiguity of the statements made about him (their riddling room for doubt or misinterpretation) and by his persistence and skill in interpretation. These traits, the inversion of home and exile and the obscurity of meanings (origins), define Oedipus’s situation. The crimes against Laius and Jocasta can be defined non-sexually as products of exile and the concealment or forgetting of territorial and family ties: after all, the stranger can do and say miraculous things (as indeed Oedipus does at the conclusion of Oedipus at Colonus) and there is no way of verifying their truthfulness. One thing, though, is clear: in the host's recognition of the guest, a transference occurs. ‘Strange that I / Whom ye have led so long should lead you now’, the blind Oedipus remarks to Theseus in Athens where, protected from his Corinthian avengers by the laws of hospitality, he shows his host the place where, uniquely in his territory, future hostility can be defeated. The stranger becomes the host when his skill in finding a path through foreign country is recognised. In his blindness, he sees that he treads foreign soil; negotiating with the Furies, he at last finds a place that, in an echo of the gift given him, he can give back (a pledge of future security). The historical curse is broken when he disappears, and no one knows where he goes.

Notes

(All hyperlinked references were accessed between 1 January and 30 March 2021.)

1 The reference is to Paul Carter, ‘Grass Houses: Vincenzo Volentieri, a Bicentennial Memoir’, Living In A New Country, London: Faber & Faber, 1992, 149–158.

2 Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Pess, 2000.

3 Paul Carter, ‘Getting In: From the Sayings of Vincenzo Volentieri’, The Sound In-Between, Voice, Space, Performance, Sydney: New Endeavour Press/University of New South Wales Press, 1992, 177–191.

4 David Jones, ‘Preface’, Anathemata, London: Faber & Faber, 1951, 20.

5 Carter, ‘Grass Houses: Vincenzo Volentieri, a Bicentennial Memoir’, 158.

6 ‘Charnok Woman’, www.joondalup.wa.gov.au//Files/Joondalup_Mooro_Boodjar_Brochure.pdf.

7 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 273. Oedipus Tyrannos, l.60. A passage from Shelley's notebooks preserved by Mary Shelley. Shelley's point is well made by the Loeb translation (‘And threaded many a maze of weary thought’).

8 The story is told in R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne: Government Printer, 1876, vol. 1, 427–428. Also Paul Carter, Mythform: The Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square, Melbourne, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2005, 50–51.

9 Greater Gariwerd Landscape Draft Management Plan, Melbourne: Parks Victoria, 2020. At https://s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/hdp.au.prod.app.vic-engage.files/6616/0499/1696/GGL_DMP_Plan_and_Maps_Low-Res.pdf, 23.

10 Aldo Massola, Bunjil's Cave, Myths, Legends and Superstitions of the Aborigines of South-East Australia, Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1968.

11 https://budjabudjacoop.org.au/about/gariwerdgrampians/.

12 Although in another story one of the brothers was killed and turned into Mount Abrupt at the northern end of Gariwerd.

13 Edward Ryan, ‘Blown to Witewitekalk: Placenames and Cultural Landscapes in North-west Victoria’, in L. Hercus, F. Hodges, J. Simpson (eds), The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia, Canberra: ANU Epress, 2009, 157–164, 159.

14 Greater Gariwerd Landscape Draft Management Plan, 23.

15 The argument from Freud's acknowledged agoraphobia is set out in Paul Carter, Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia, London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

1

Movement forms: migrant prehistory

The Australian poet, Robert Gray, has a poem called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ that opens with these lines:

Once, playing cricket, beneath a toast-dry hill,

I heard the bat crack, but watched a moment longer

A swallow, racing lightly, just above the ground. I was impressed by the way

The bird skimmed, fast as a cricket ball.

It was decided for me, within that instant,

Where my interests lay.

¹

When I first read these lines, I had to read them twice to make sense of them. I could not understand the decision Gray said he had made. I could recognise the similarity he saw between the flight of the swallow and the trajectory of the cricket ball (speeding perhaps towards him across the ground), but I failed to appreciate the deeper difference he detected in the apparent similarity: superficially similar flight paths hold for him entirely different associations. I am guessing that cricket was associated with the regimentation of school discipline. Where a tiny lapse of concentration – after the ball had been struck, watching the bird an instant longer – could be fatal to the team's fortunes (not to mention endangering personal safety), daydreaming was clearly discouraged. The swallow's zigzagging trajets, by comparison, were comparatively free to follow their own direction. These opening lines are not only about an autobiographical moment, they indicate a poetic direction. With great subtlety, Gray calls out the poetic figure of simile, suggesting that exact observation describes his ‘interests’ better. In that ‘instant’ Gray saw through the similarity to grasp an absolute difference. It is not clear whether two movement forms differ – a matter of physics and mechanics – or whether two associative universes collide. The difference is that the swallow is free to fly ‘fast as a cricket ball’, and converges at will, as it were, on a flight path (the skimming ball) dictated by convention and governed by predetermined laws of motion. While the ball may hit our daydreaming fielder, the swallow is the maestro of detour, never bumping into anything – ‘diving at us’, as Gray writes in another poem, ‘continuously’, but ‘planing off’. So cricket is left behind, the boredom of its ballistic theatre, the longueurs of those hot afternoons, replaced by a new kind of attention akin to Keats's ‘negative capability’ – a capacity for ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ defines the good birdwatcher, too.

I could not understand the distinction being made: while the difference was obvious – the cricket ball is a kind of ballistic missile, the swallow a genius of errancy, continually self-correcting – I was struck by the observation of a similarity, not a superficial one but a profound one, rooted, as I now see, in my own autobiographical ‘interests’. You see, unlike this great poet, I was an enthusiastic cricketer. (I was also an enthusiastic birdwatcher, but we will come to that.) The high profile roles in cricket are played by batsman and bowler but I preferred being in the field, positioned like my idol, Colin Bland, in the covers, ready to pounce on any drive into the forward offside field, with a decision and deftness intercepting the skimming ball and pirouetting, returning it as from the sling of my arm to the expectant wicket-keeper. Unlike those reluctant recruits to the cricket field who, blind to the tactics of attack and defence, see only the vacancy of the afternoon ahead (and who find scant comfort in the schoolmaster's sardonic ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’), I patrolled my ground like a hunter, alive to the smallest movement in my hinterland. I kept my fellow fielders and the bowler coming up to bowl in peripheral vision but concentrated on the minutest scrutiny of the batsman's body language as in mid-stride the bowler released the ball, and in the instant between delivery and arrival, the batsman made his decision. Walking in as the bowler approached, I played a game with space and time, narrowing the angle of possible flight paths, I also reduced the reflex time. Detecting the slightest deviation of line or preparatory change of stance, my own approach swayed left or right. These were the economies of anticipation. Until now nothing had happened but my sense of what could be had filled the air with possible lines of flight, populating the visible field with an invisible dome of possible paths. Transposed to the laws of chance (and the rules of cricket), I found nothing absurd about the proposition of a thousand angels standing on the point of a needle. To anticipate all the lines of flight, to hold that imagination of flight in the tense arrest of the reaction as ball was struck, was to gather into a single point all the filaments of the cobweb:

The body of the atmosphere is full of infinite pyramids composed of radiating straight lines (or rays of light), which are produced from the bodies of light and shade, existing in the air; and the further they are from the object which produces them the more acute they become, and although in their distribution they intersect and cross they never mingle together, but pass through all the surrounding air, independently diverging, spreading, and diffused.

²

If I had known this passage, I would instantly have recognised it, not as ‘a remarkable insight into the mechanism of light as it reflects off our surroundings’,³ but as a cricketer's perception of the Spielraum of the game where the base of the ‘pyramid’ is the curvilinear boundary of a quadrant of space and the apex is the eye (where the incoming lines are most acute); but most akin to the space of anticipation is Leonardo's generalisation that, if all the possible views of the same environment or ‘atmosphere’ are imagined, then the air is full of such pyramids or, in layperson's terms, while the ball could go anywhere, its flight path would always intersect and cross other ‘pyramids’ or fields of view. Leonardo's observation would also, had I been aware of Robert Gray's poem and the ‘decision’ it produced, have provided support for my sense of puzzlement; for, imagining the totality of lines of flight, Leonardo also describes the reason of the swallow's flightpath entirely composed of intersections and crossings dictated by the random distribution of flying insects, where the only rule is that, however dense the net they appear to project, they never ‘mingle together’, passages in-between always remaining open to be threaded. At this more fundamental level of random fluctuations and their geometry, the similarity between the ball and the bird skimming fast across the ground is greater than the difference.

Birds may be known by their songs, but also by their flight, and an artist influenced by one might naturally find inspiration in the other. The skittering intimacy of swallows quartering the grass was a lesson in opportunism; it conformed exactly to the possible line in Leibniz's thought experience able to join up a field of dots: harvesting insects randomly distributed through air, swallows cultivated a natural calculus. Other local species conceptualised the intervals of chance differently, their flight style reflecting an attitude to air: whether to drive through it resolutely fixed on a prescribed destination or whether to circle in Vichian ricorsi, climbing on invisible thermal involutes – that might be the question. In between the extremes, a variety of species, from woodpecker to goldfinch, practised what the bird books called switchback flight: alternately opening their wings in rapid beats and closing them in short glides –