KCRW's Monthly Newsletter and Program Guide

DECEMBER 1991

Vol XII, No. 12

MEET AN ORIGINAL

"Two thousand million years of experience secreted in that escarpment, say archaeologists. A concept too vast to grasp. Perhaps here. Long before man, life began like the empty sky this landscape has no boundaries. And things in it, not previously seen, are familiar, like images long forgotten archetypal images found in child art, that of the Bushmen of South Africa, the Paleolithic cave art of Europe and recent paintings by Dubuffet, Miró, et al. Images that split the sequence of time - time without tense.” - Frank Hodgkinson’s Kakadu and the Arnhemlanders

The last time I wrote for this page I was inspired by Gauguin's journal "Noa Noa" and the search for the timeless in the modern world. In the spirit of this season and at the end of an extraordinary year of world change, I would like to share with you reflections that grew out of a trip to the rugged tropical bush country of Australia, the Top End of the Northern Territory.

The road from Adelaide to Darwin is only fifty years old. The railway line has been abandoned; there is nothing to ship. And yet - there is gold under the highway.

In fact, early in the century, the men digging the holes for the Overland Telegraph struck a rich deposit of gold. Lured by this brilliant beginning, the rush was on. By a peculiar quirk they had found the best at the beginning. In ten years time the boom was over.

The Top End is a promise unfulfilled, a siren who will not become a concubine.

There are two seasons here, both extreme, the Wet and the Dry. In the Wet everything is verdant, almost luminous. In January the grass is six to eight feet high; you can hear it growing. By September, burnt in the blazing winter sun, the grass is gone, the trees are leafless; the land is scrub.

Ranchers shipped out their cattle by the thousands to graze on the lush greens. The animals, bitten by ticks, died of disease. The Dry wasted the land.

Loggers cut down the pine trees before the termites finished them off. They built the first Darwin pier with the timber, planting the pilings deep in the harbor. The insects, ingrained in the wood, somehow survived in the waters and collapsed the pier.

Agronomists advised that the climate was right for rice. Farmers planted an exotic blend, brown, wild and fragrant. The magpie geese, extinct everywhere else in the world but here, ate the kernels, one by one.

The Northern Territory is wild, untamed, ancient. It goes back to the beginning, to a time before judgment. In its resistance to being captured, harnessed, ploughed and countrified, it reminds us of where we came from: of the past that still beats in us, of the the origin that we will one day return to at the end of life.

No matter how far we've come along the road of civilization, of culture and metropolis, it is all a dream. This majestic wilderness simply says, I am. Its harsh beauty needs no adornment. In the space of a year it destroys and resurrects itself, intemperate, unyielding and indifferent.

To enter the steep escarpment of the Aboriginal Arnhemlands you need special permission from the tribal eiders. Even in this wilderness that is barred to the outsider, only a chosen few go out to the holy places to perform the rituals that will keep the world from disaster.

Whatever it is that leads men to meditate. to chant mantras, to study Caballah, to turn to Mecca five times a day; whatever sustains belief, whatever sanctifies the word, the song. the dance, also animates the Aborigine. In his primeval forest he celebrates the spirit and upholds the world.

Here the amazing Jesus bird, so-called because he appears to walk on water, struts along the billabong. Here the egret, the heron, the ibis that is painted on Egyptian tombs, sip from huge soup tureens formed by the leaves of pink tulip-shaped lotus lilies. Small, brilliant blue kingfishers watch as sea eagles feed their young.

Here the Jabiru, the snake-necked, blue- green stork of Australia, plants his bright red feet in Yellow Water and fishes for baramundi. Here the freshwater fish are born as males and after five or six years change and become females.

Here the saltwater crocodile, thought to have survived substantially unchanged for 180 million years, grows to 17 feet, jumps from 1/2 to 2/3 its length, and attacks without provocation.

Here the velvet gecko crawls across the Rainbow Serpent painted on Obirr Rock centuries ago. Here dream, memory and waking life are experienced as one consciousness. The Dreamtime — perhaps the oldest surviving religion as well as the longest continuing tradition known to the history of art — is alive in this landscape.

Here the tree in the forest, Einstein's tree, makes a noise when it falls, whether or not there is anyone to hear it crash. Here is nature indifferent to human observation. Only the Aborigine can live inside it without trying to change it. The rest of us are meddlers, improvisors, achievers, all.

We think of man as rational, contemplative, inventive; this is the truth of our daily life. The canyons of our cities are testimony to human power, imagination and progress.

But this place, this KA-KA-DU, this magical incantation of cliff and boulder, of rocks adorned with kangaroos and gods, painted in stone on stone twenty thousand years ago and still visible! is a glimpse into the Northern Territory inside ourselves, the sacred space from which creation springs.

-Ruth Hirschman

General Manager