Glenn Morrison - Songlines and Fault Lines: Epic Walks of the Red Centre

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2017

Text Glenn Morrison, 2017

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2017

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by John Canty

Typeset by Megan Ellis

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Morrison, Glenn Andrew, author.

Songlines and fault lines/Glenn Morrison.

9780522870985 (paperback)

9780522870992 (ebook)

Includes index

Travellers writings, Australian.

Aboriginal AustraliansNorthern TerritoryAlice Springs (NT)Social life and customs.

Central AustraliaIn literature.

Alice Springs Region (NT)Description and travel.

Alice Springs Region (NT)History.

For Ian and Willa

Almost it was as if my steps had strayed

Into some strange old land or unknown isle,

Where time itself, with drowsy hand had stayed

The shadow on the dial

Ernest Favenc

My eyes were in my feet, observed the novelist and poet Nan Shepherd beautifully in 1945, reflecting on forty years spent wandering the Cairngorm mountains of north-east Scotland. For Shepherd, walking was a means of knowing, not in the weak sense of getting to know a place, but rather in the full, fierce sense of knowledge being grown along the way via movement on footof knowledge as subtly site-specific and motion-sensitive.

Glenn Morrisons eyes have been in his feet for decades now, and in this remarkable book he walks his way at once into the landscapes of Central Australia and into their contested histories. What the mountains were to Shepherd, so the desert is to Morrison: a place wherein Shepherds phraseyou can slowly find your way in, without ever believing yourself to have arrived at a vantage point of total vision.

Landscapes are layeredly complex, and they require layered and complex forms of address. Over six chapters, Morrison builds up a geological structure of porous strata, whereby each succeeding chapter is percolated by its predecessors. Patterns emerge, preoccupations echo, reverberate and modify one another: home and frontier; footstepping and path-following; blindness and insight; pace and rhythm; wires, lines and bees; and the prejudice often exercised against flat landscapes in generaland the Red Centre in particularas a kind of terra nullius or void-space.

Morrisons writing restores the deserts intricacies. This, to my mind, is one of the political activities of good place-writing: to resist sly smoothings-out and easy emptyings, to represent all landscapes as entangled and ruptured. Yes, the desert is awesome in its scale and austerity, so much so that it has been repeatedly seen as exo-planetary and alien. But it has also long been a home to Aboriginal peoplesas well as to an extraordinary array of non-human life. Fantasies of the desert as an otherworldly realm or as a self-similar wasteland are prime examples of the durable wilderness delusion. This is, of course, a terrain densely criss-crossed with print-trailsmany of which Morrison has followed both through the landscape and through the archive.

Among the several qualities I admire in this book is its alertness to song as well as to fault. It can be easy when dealing with histories so grotesquely traumatic as the Falconio murder or the settler massacres of Aboriginals to exclude as improper any response of wonder. How can one legitimately experience beauty or amazement in a landscape where so much darkness has seethed? But to disallow the possibility of what might be called the grace of place is to crush another kind of life from it. Morrison is as politically sensitive a companion as one could wish on these paths, but he is also alert to the invigorations of rough rock under hand or sun on skinand to the dreams as well as the horrors that the desert has incited.

Walking is both our oldest means of motion, and a cutting-edge contemporary technology. Ecologists, for instance, still rely on what is called the foot transect as a means of gathering data in a landscape; archaeologists refer memorably to ground-truthing as a way of authenticating data gathered by remote-sensing instruments. For many writers and artists too, walking remains creatively and philosophically indispensable. Songlines and Fault Lines superbly re-proves this, for this is a book that could not have been written by sitting still.

Robert Macfarlane, March 2017

Visiting Mparntwe that first time in 1998 was like coming home. Doubtless you know the town by its European name: Alice Springs, capital of the Australian Outback, heart of the Red Centre. That was all I knew. But that would change.

Shrugging off my bags at a motel room, I stepped outside to views of the MacDonnell Ranges and breathed the not-so-dry desert air. It was October. Daytime temperatures hadnt climbed to the sizzling heights of summer and conditions were pleasant. Rain had fallen that morning, and the air was heavy with a fragrance like fresh-turned soil, sweet and somehow closer than Id imagined. There was a breeze.

A six-week contract lay ahead with a touring band booked for the opening of a new Irish-themed nightclub. We were due to appear that evening to coincide with the start of the Masters Games, a biennial sporting event for over thirty-somethings. Six thousand would-be athletes and other visitors had followed us into town: Sport with a twist of lemon, I would dub it for a magazine piece due the next week. Even so, and despite a list of urgent must-dos, my first urge was to go walking.

The object of my peripatetic desire was the bare rock hills dominating the view from my balcony. They were part of a much longer main range, a jagged spine of geological chaos bisecting the town from east to west that had been easily visible from the plane coming in. Its tumbled rocks were calling me, or so I imagined. The fact remains, even nowadays, I dont feel comfortable in a place until Ive walked it. Later that afternoon, scraping and huffing to the top of a giant slab of granite and quartzite that was a great deal steeper than it lookedeventually someone told me it was called the Heavitree RangeI wondered why on earth a working-class white man from Sydney might get such an inexplicable sense of homecoming. Seemed to me Aboriginal people had walked these hills for generations. Surely it was their home?

The feelings of home stayed with me. In 2001, tired of the city and its traffic jams, my fianc and I packed a Hilux utility and drove from the coast to the centre of Australia. I took a job as a reporter with the local newspaper and she started a business in massage and yoga. With surprising swiftness for a couple used to the bright lights, we settled right in. Over time, my responsibilities at the newspaper grew, as did the inevitable stresses of raising a family. Sometimes, fit to burst, I did what I have always done and took to the hills for a tonic of wildness. Most of all I wanted room to breathe, and in the deserts of Central Australia, finally, there was enough. Time not to have to think, so much as feel my feet drum against bare rock, quadriceps quiver at the base of a scree slope, the desert broil against my skin. The space to ponder my relationship with the Australian landscape, which had puzzled me since roaming the sandstone banks of the Georges River in Sydneys south-west as a boy. In the deserts of the Centre, any similarly intimate relationship seemed implausible. And yet I felt something physically tangiblegeographers call it the