Indulkana Australia, 1976
Into the Looking Glass
In 1976 I was allowed entry to the Indulkana Aboriginal Reserve, (accent on the second syllable), several hundred miles of corrugated dirt road north of Adelaide, following my introduction the year before to Catherine Ellis. She had spent a lifetime with tribal communities as an ethnomusicologist, but turned more toward the social side as time went on. This was groundbreaking work. She came to SFU in 1975 from Australia after hearing one of Murray’s soundscape lectures, to develop a therapeutic sound environment for displaced (and sometimes schizophrenic) aboriginal interpreters. I was amazed by her stories, and the following year put all my savings into a flight to Adelaide and got a Canada Council travel grant for the rest.
A once in a lifetime experience.
I had no idea what I was getting into, but whatever plans I had, got tossed out the more I heard about aboriginal Inma and its pivotal role in the culture, especially after hearing bits of the Nyinyi epic . That’s a teeny little zebra finch to you and me, but the seemingly innocuous story in fact traces a several-hundred-miles-long song & pathline which is, after 75,000 years in Australia, now on the verge of extinction. The only reason I was allowed to record bits of it was that it was non-secret material which served as a teaching tool that Ms. Ellis and the Indulkana community were using to maintain the song (and its related social behavior) in the cultural memory.
Incredible, really. In all, I was learning how to slow down: a few days earlier at the reserve I had a couple of hours to spare before my next busy busy thing to do, and instead, did absolutely nothing – just lay down, looked up for hours at the eternally blue sky and realized that this day was the first day that ever dawned on earth. Hard to explain – this was not a poetic concept; it was real. Yes, there’s history, but ultimately there’s only now. (The clanking noise in the background is the windmill pumping water from a huge artesian well next to me).
And don’t expect to get much more than one thing done properly in any single day. One night in Adelaide I had a dream; it was a Big one. Fate calling again… All I remember is the word “metempsychosis”, which the dictionary says means ‘transmigration of the soul’. Whatever it meant, I felt everything I knew was really its opposite. Such as “primitive” is actually “advanced”. “Crazy” is actually “sane”. And as Janet used to say, “Life is only one day long.”
