2006
Old Tim Yilngayarri was the only person I’ve been lucky enough to meet who had actually been to the Sky country. This old man taught me with great patience. He had lived through events I can barely imagine: massacres, near slavery, and many other forms of cruelty. At the same time, he had been the top man for dogs and dingoes, their “Lawman” throughout the whole region. His stories about the Sky country are difficult to understand, not only because he and I struggled to communicate across language gaps but also because he speaks from experiences that I cannot fully imagine. I could not meet him halfway in conversation because I’d never been there. He describes Earth–Sky connections that are available only to a few people, and as he had been there, he brought back a report for the rest of us. He said that the Sky people had dropped a rope and taken him up to their country, where they gave him special powers. And when he looked back at Earth, he saw the fires of people’s camps looking like stars. Old Tim left it open to us to imagine the reverse: that to look at stars is to see the campfires of the Sky country.
The old man lost his power, and now no one in that area has had the experience of being taken out of this world and given power. It may be, as some suggest, that the connections are being lost. But not everywhere, not yet, and not as long as the stories are told and the songs are sung. Not while the Crocodile stars still shine and the symmetries of wind and stars beat out their steady rhythm.
As I learned when I left the Northern Hemisphere, the Star folk are most fully alive when they are connected with their Earthly countrymen. Happily, dogs, like Orion, seem to be everywhere. In her exquisite essay “Oyez à Beaumont”, Vicki Hearne reminds us of the moment in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone when the great hound Beaumont, gored by a boar, lies dying. The huntsman kills him in compassion: he “let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and to roll among the stars.”
In Australia the dogs are dingoes, and they run with the Seven Sisters, not with Orion. Women and dogs! I can’t help but feel happy about the protective mateship dogs offer us: how they chase guys who pester us, and bite the arms and legs of those who might harm us. Some Australian stories tell of how the crafty Sky hunter sent his penis underground to try to get to the Sisters, to ambush them from below, as it were. But the Sisters were not sitting on the ground, and they set their dingo mates on him, urging them to savage the unwelcome visitor. As Mark Twain would say, I will draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene.
Where the Seven Sisters go, dingo knowledge goes too. The star tells Old Tim’s people that the dingo pups are being born, and when the stars make another shift, they say that the pups have opened their eyes. The old people, all those long-gone generations of Aboriginal countrymen, would raid the dens and take some pups to eat and some to keep as companions.
They all lived together like that for some five thousand years.
Today, though, dingoes are under sustained attack by pastoralists who mistakenly believe that the use of 1080 poison (sodium fluoroacetate) will protect their vulnerable calves by diminishing the dingo population. In fact, recent research shows that poisoning disrupts the family structure of dingo packs and produces unsocialised rogue beasts who attack domesticated animals. In spite of scientific evidence, and in complete disregard of Indigenous people’s views on the use of poison, the war against dingoes goes on. It is quite possible that the pastoralists will win. Like the Assyrians of old, many pastoralists descend on their dingo enemies with the blood-thirsty desire to annihilate them by death and dispersal. And like Tiglath–Pileser, who piled up the heads of the defeated peoples “like heaps of grain”, some pastoralists display their spoils of war, hanging the dead bodies of dingoes from trees, fences, and signposts.
If they win, if all the dens and families are dispersed, and even the lone survivors are hunted down or left to die of heartbreak, the only dingoes left will be in captivity. Like wolves and some domestic dogs, as well as many humans, they howl with grief and with lust, but one of their other primary motivations is to locate and communicate with other members of the group. Their howling vocabulary is complex, and they sing out to their countrymen in harmonies that amplify the sound of their voices, telling each other who and where they are. I have heard the dingoes singing across the cliffs and gorges, across plains and deserts, and I cannot really comprehend that no matter how bright the night, or how sweet the air, there may come a day when we’ll never hear them sing like that, ever. Not to their sisters in the sky country, or to the hunters in the sky and on Earth, or for the love of their own kind, or in celebration of their own way of being in the world.
‘The Rivers of Babylon’ in Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia, Manoa
Vol. 18, No. 2, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2006