Timelapse

T

We arrived for our excursion at the worst time of day. It was noon when we parked the car, and the air was hot. The car-park, in addition, proved to be some distance from the rock paintings at Oberi. The green melaleucas burned against a cloudless sky.

Sweat trickled inside my clothes as we picked our way along the path of crumbling stone.  I saw that Mother’s face was flushed with blotchy red on cheeks and forehead.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

‘Look.’ She pointed ahead.

A rustling in the thin grass might have been a lizard or a snake. Then I saw little birds, miniature parakeets, scuttling through the undergrowth. We are on an adventure, after all, I thought. This might have been a walk on our own hill at Yarrambat, thousands of miles away, years ago.

We pressed on stolidly.

‘And there’s the Rainbow Serpent,’ Mother said some time later, pointing to a smooth rock face, and the first of the Aboriginal paintings.

‘How do you know?’

‘Of course it is, Tim.’

A notice-board informed us of other things. Paintings are widespread in this area, some dating from up to ten thousand years in age.

The walk required a steeper climb after that, over slabs of fallen rock. It would have been difficult for anyone, and the unprotected skin of Mother’s leg proved thin as paper.

‘Too old,’ she apologised, as pricklets of blood started from her scraped calf. She panted, and stared vacantly for a moment.

I cleaned the graze as best I could with some of our drinking water and a tissue.

‘There’s the Rainbow Serpent in that one,’ Mother said again, pointing to another painting up ahead.

‘No, not in that one.’

‘Of course it is, Tim.’

Then there were more paintings – so many we may have both felt overwhelmed. Some were easy to discern, others almost lost in the natural markings of the rock: lichen stains, or the splash of bird droppings, or the wearing of a tree branch with the wind. Newer paintings overlay the old, their orientations and relationships confused. Some were difficult to reach. There was no relief from the sun.

‘It might be easier to look at a book of reproductions,’ I complained. ‘And we could do with an account of what the paintings mean.’

We made out men and birds. We saw a thylacine, now extinct. I knew that. Reptiles and fish sometimes included the skeleton within. I made a joke to Mother about ‘old bones’.

‘Were these done by the Aborigines, Tim?’ she asked.

I should be used to Mother’s lapses by now, but this one caught me off guard. “Yes,’ I said carefully. ‘Careful where you step.’

Once she might have told me much about the paintings herself. She would have read up in advance. Now she had forgotten what we had come to see. Once she would have prepared meticulously, and I would have relied on her to tell me about what we were doing. She might have recounted the myths, and what was known of the artists’ intentions.

I exaggerated what she was once like, out of dismay perhaps? The heat was taking its toll on both of us. Yet I could not spare myself the awfulness of how she was becoming, like fingering a wound.

She’ll come good after a bit, I reminded myself. Her attention waxed and waned these days, though it had been worse lately. For the time being I ignored her, hovering at my elbow, and examined the paintings more intensely than before. I would get what I could from the occasion, I told myself. No longer bothered by discomforts, I tried to imagine what these pictures looked like to their ancient guardians over the centuries that had gone before. A sort of language declared itself by degrees, I thought, in the repeating patterns, the particular strangeness of the style, the recurring images. I saw a language foreign to us but familiar to this place.

I may be trying too hard, I thought, but only briefly. I was trying to conceive of ten thousand years passing, and people living out their span here, with these paintings an enduring aspect of their lives.

I spoke to Mother again. ‘We are looking across an enormous gulf of time,’ I told her.

‘Two little girls in blue, they called us,’ she replied, referring to herself as a child and to her friend Peggy who had lived next door.

The ceiling of one shallow cave teemed with the flying shapes of birds and fishes, captured in a net of intersecting lines. Each alone would have wielded slight effect, but the overall display of haphazard overlappings, of part obliteration, of resistance to obliteration, spoke to me, at any rate, of comings and goings, of reworkings, of reknowings.

Mother limped on our way back to the car. I continued to brood over my imaginings.

‘Enjoying yourself, Tim?’ she said.

‘Yes, I am. Sort of.’

‘I thought you’d like it.’

‘How’s that?’

“When I brought you on this holiday.’

‘Mother, it was me who brought you.’

‘No. Did you, Tim?’

I went round to the passenger side to unlock Mother’s door. I helped her in and did up her seat belt for her. The buckle was almost too hot to touch.

‘Careful,’ I said again

I got in, fixed my own belt, and began to drive. I held the hot steering-wheel with my finger tips, waiting for the air-conditioning to take effect. We bounced over the rutted gravel surface then came round a corner and found ourselves hurtling towards a group of Aboriginal people, who scattered before us. They had been walking in the middle of the road.

Back at the Kakadu Motor Inn I chatted to the keeper of the souvenir and book shop. I had bought a guide to the rock-art, a soft-covered Archaeology of the Dreamtime.

‘Will this tell me,’ I asked him, ‘what the paintings mean to the Aborigines themselves?’

He looked a good-humoured man, though a bit large and restless for his line of work. ‘No,’ he said, to my surprise. ‘No way you can find that out.’

‘You’re joking. There must be,’ I said.

‘The Aborigines themselves won’t tell you,’ he said, ‘so how can a book?’

‘Yes, they will,’  I said. ‘We have only to ask them, and I’m sure their myths have been recorded by researchers. Their myths and the paintings must match each other somehow .’

‘A pictorial guide, you reckon?’

‘I think so.’

‘More likely the paintings are their myths,’ he said.

I did not know what he meant by that.

I came back to him later, having looked around the shop. ‘There must have been research done,’ I said again. ‘Haven’t some white people won the Aborigines’ trust?’

‘Nothing to do with trust, mate,’ he persisted. ‘There’s one white man had that for sure. Bill Hartley? You heard of him? He was a kind of honorary Abo in these parts a few years back, and he reckoned it was important to get all the stories from the old men, before it was too late, and to match the pictures to each one, as you say.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So he took a few of them around your Oberi Rock area, discussing each painting, writing it all down.’

He paused to sell postcards to another customer.

‘Then he went back with the same old fellows a few months later, just to check on the finer points, and, what do you know, the stories were all different.’

‘How come?’

‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘Maybe they mean something different every time you look.’

I found Mother examining bark paintings hung along the back wall of the shop. They looked a lot like the rock art, and I decided to buy one. The elongated shapes of lizards, and men, and native geese, overlaid one another in the same way, like fallen leaves, though the sharpness of the angles and clarity of the outlines gave out a more nervous energy.

I tackled the shop-keeper again as I was paying. ‘It says on the back that these are of Mimi and Namorodo spirits of the Gunwinngu tribe,’ I told him.

‘That’s what they tell the tourists,’ he grunted.

‘Like me. I’m a tourist and I’m your customer,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘So you are, mate. I must have forgotten.’ He smiled for the first time.

‘I like all the paintings,’ Mother said. ‘They are all lovely. So Australian.’

When we got outside we came face to face with a family of Aborigines bringing more paintings to the shop. They made their way awkwardly across the motel grounds, holding multiple slabs of bark tied together with long grass. I tried not to stare, but I was truly startled by their appearance. I have spent my life in Australia but, like many white people, have seen few full-blood Aborigines. The postage-stamp familiarity of their features surprised me. They were live people looking as old as the landscape. They turned their eyes away, and the man hurried past us lithely, despite the discomfort of our encounter. The woman and children shrank back, keeping close to one another. One small boy peeped up from beneath his heavy brows, only to withdraw his glance when I tried to smile at him. That was all. We exchanged no greetings.

Mother and I went for a swim next, in the motel pool. She was game for that, despite her years, and we were both refreshed. She must have been all right again, at that stage, and I was slightly elated by my purchases from the shop. I went down the water-slide, taking turns with boisterous children, and a young Scandinavian couple probably on their honeymoon, and one other man too drunk, as far as I could tell, to know what he was doing.

Later, back in our room, I told Mum she was a good old soul, and she said I was a good boy. I am fifty-two, and we both laughed at that.

‘It’s funny,’ I said, ’how this place does make me remember childhood in Yarrambat all those years ago. Were we more like the Aborigines ourselves then?’

‘We lived off the land, anyway.’

‘And loved the land better than we do now,’ I said, ‘didn’t we Mother?’

I remembered how a great throng of us had once gone on an outing up our hill. We had hurled ourselves into a wild run down again, through the untouched bush towards our farm. I remembered the feeling of abandonment to the steep slope, flying faster than I could normally run, my legs working automatically, compelled by the descent. I remembered my chest heaving, my feet thudding on the soft earth, and flinging myself from side to side to weave between the trees. Below lay the flat valley floor of fenced paddocks crosscut with rabbit runs, and home.

We had all left Yarrambat now, trapping ourselves in the bland complexities of city life. But we had not forgotten.

Mother and I went for our tea in the Kakadu Kafe. In the centre of the room glowed an octagonal aquarium large enough to hold twenty or thirty gliding barramundi, some half a meter in length, the colour of polished pewter in the green water. Wooden beams supported the tank, and between them the brightly lit panels flickered with the fishes’ movements, like television screens.

I got up from the table to look more closely. The clarity of the fishes’ outlines, and the detail and complexity of their markings, seemed to increase as I gazed. Something about the way the aquarium was lit emphasised the fact that the fishes lived and moved in three-dimensional space. Languidly they rose and fell, ancient creatures intertwining swim-paths, their fish-eyes revolving, their  mouths agape without words. Yet they were contained here. They turned abruptly as they neared the glass.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘I wish I could take one of these tanks home too.’

‘Fish!’ said Mother in mock disgust. Her face quivered in the ensuing pause.

I still watched the drifting, silver shapes.

‘They look like ghosts,’ she said.

‘They’re alive.’

‘They look like they are in their coffin.’

I realised then that they might be there to be eaten by the customers. We ordered something else.

As we waited for the food to be brought, we talked about Yarrambat again, and our hill, and the creek, and times before I was born.

‘Mary Keep and I …’ said Mother, naming another of her childhood friends . She mumbled as she continued.

I had heard the story before, anyway, many times. It had fascinated me when I was small to hear these repeated tales of my mother’s early life.

‘Two little girls in blue …’ she told me again.

But did she really picture that now, as she spoke? Seventy years had gone by of telling it. Did I really listen anew? Or only recall what I had imagined from her past descriptions? Did I remember my own memory of it more than hers? I saw the little girls in a backyard much as our backyard had been, though with a special look, perhaps, of being hers, a look of proper, old-fashioned family life.

‘… and that’s how I broke it,’ she said.

‘How you broke what, Mother?’

‘My wrist. don’t you remember?’

‘What?’ I knew she had broken her wrist only last year. I lost control of the situation after that, and we argued pointlessly. I still expected her to be able to sort out her jumbled thoughts.

‘You’re not worth talking to,’ I said.

‘Tim!’

‘You’re not worth being with.’

She would not look at me then. She pressed her lips together and stared past me.

‘We shouldn’t get like this,’ I said. ‘We’re both angry.’

‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of you.’

‘But I’m the one left, having to think for both of us.’

‘So I should just drop dead, should I?’

She would die soon, I knew. I felt ashamed too, thinking how well she had always treated me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Oh, go and look at your fish again!’

‘I said I’m sorry, Mother.’

‘Go and look at your fish, and leave me alone.’

Later, getting ready for bed, I pretended nothing had happened, though I felt upset. Even when she went to clean her teeth in the communal bathroom and did not return, I pretended everything was fine. I looked at my painting and my Dreamtime book, and felt annoyed again by the shop-keeper’s remarks. Eventually I realised she must be lost.

At first I tried to find her on my own, without success. I felt embarrassed having to get help.

‘You and the wife had a bit of a domestic, have we?’ the man on reception asked impertinently when I finally reported the problem to him.

I explained that I was talking about my mother, and that she was old.

‘So what’s she doing here if she’s not up to it?’ he said, just as rudely.

‘She still has the right!’ I was angry with him too, now.

He ignored my tone. ‘We’ll all have to look for her, then,’ he said.

And all the night staff did just that. They grumbled about it, but a dozen men relinquished their television watching, and the staff-room pool table, to make a torchlight search. Intersecting walkways connecting the various blocks of the Motor Inn, and adjacent caravan site, presented something of a maze by night. I just hoped Mother had stayed within the system. But she was not on any of the paths.

We found her in the Aboriginal camp. She must have walked through the bush to the dim light from their spirit lamps. She was sitting on the bare earth. An old man had his arm around her. In the other hand he held the bottle of beer he was drinking.

‘She all right, Mister,’ he said.

‘I’m all right, Tim,’ she said.