A frightened hunting ground: epic emotions and landholding in the Western reaches of Australia's Top End. (2024)

Human language and sweat have the capacity to upset a sentient countryside.

(Elizabeth Povinelli, 1993:45)

Sentient, adj. That feels or is capable of feeling; having thepower or function of sensation or of perception by the senses.

(Oxford English Dictionary, 1971)

L' ame est une substance, qu'a la propriete de sentir: lapropriete de sentir est la propriete radicale de toutes les affections& facultes de l' ame.'

(Francois Quesney, [1760] 1975)

In this essay I propose a theory of epic emotions. In the traditionof social anthropology, the general theory is advanced and then broughtbriefly to realisation through its application to an ethnographicinstance. That instance is found in the society and culture ofAboriginal peoples of the Western reaches of Australia's Top End.In this region of Aboriginal Australia, the proper expression of emotionbelongs to the duration of a socially recognised state of affairs ratherthan pertaining to the time-span of some person's allegedexperience of an inner state. Because it would take a book-length studyto establish the promoted theory with reference to the conspectus ofrecognised emotions in our designated region of Australia, the theory isillustrated with reference to a particular sub-set of regionallyrecognised emotions. These are emotions invoked in discourses that haveto do with the holding and the ownership of land.

THE THEORY OF EPIC EMOTIONS

The theory of epic emotions rests on the proposition that,everywhere and always, emotions of the elementary forms vest in socialscenes that are experienced as situations of ultimate reference(Gilsenan, 1973). Such scenes are constructed with reference to socialabsolutes so that their definition is emphatic to the extent that thecontraposition of distinct emotions that inform the action is clear-cut,frank and stark.

Epic emotions are constructed in situations characterised by thedominance of the scene:act ratio (Burke, 1969). Examples are elevationsand situations of social gain (including pay day wherever such days aretrue days of reckoning), risky engagements such as fights, ordeals,elections and trials (whether trial by combat or trials mounted byjudicial bodies). Then there are inaugurations, de-commissionings,funerals and executions, life crisis rituals and all the degradations.(1) Deep play is also to be counted -- as in Roy Campbell's(1941:70) couplet in which the bullfighter's apotheosis iscontained in an emotion. Ready to make, not the armed and final pass,but a pass of the middle passage (an elaborate and mocking Veronicaduring which he faces the bull without a sword), the matador assimilatesrisk and danger to his bearing. He stands:

Elate, with scarlet cape outspread,

Before a bull with lowered head.

Often, as with the bullfight, the culminating moment in situationsof ultimate reference is contained within the form that is the'focussed gathering' (Goffman, 1964).

In situations of ultimate reference, the mounting of relevantaction is governed by a requirement: that of total participation. This,in turn, implies both subordination of individuality and the relegationof conscientious objection. (Either the expression of deviantindividuality or the announcement of any conscientious objection to thedefining scene constitutes opposition and amounts to an attempt to breakfree from the constricting frame of epic compulsions.) Totalparticipation is then itself made manifest in the exhibition of apposite or appropriate emotions on the part of participants according to theirassigned roles as subject or object, actor or patient or, otherwise, asthe permitted or tolerated (but often essential) witness to theunfolding of the piece. Required stoicism also finds its place. There isintolerance of emotional expression in culturally specified situations.(In some places: 'Big boys just don't cry.') Again, thereare situations governed by solemnity provisions forbidding laughte r.

By invoking the notion of elementary forms, I signal my return toconversations with the works of Durkheim, Mauss and the authors of theAnnee Sociologique. There is also a happy coincidence of ethnographicsites. It was the Australian ethnography provided by Spencer and Gillenthat allowed Durkheim (1954) to propound his ideas concerning TheElementary Forms of the Religious Life, subtitled in the French editionas: Le Systeme Totemique en Australie. (2) While insisting on the socialrather than the biological or psychological origins and definition ofkey emotions, scholars of the Annee Sociologique generally related humanfeelings directly to institutions. In this, I do not follow their lead.I turn, instead, to social dynamics expressed in the style of Simmel whodiscovered the forms for social life in performances and social action.My aim is to show that those elementary forms that shape the emotionsare all programmes of activity, culturally given forms for adumbrationsof social process.

In an essay in which he calls for semiotic interpretation of'the human passions', Fred Myers (1988) provides an account of'The Logic of Anger' as this logic pertains to Pintupi who areAborigines of the Central Australian Desert. Myers's interpretationturns on the opposition of anger and compassion. He locates a dialecticof compassion and anger in a semantic field in which meaning isgenerated by and through the interplay of words and also through thoserelations between words that are established in the logic of eachlanguage. Once facts of ethnography have been presented, I shall arguethat contrapositions of emotions (such as grief and anger) are, indeed,to be empirically encountered as social realities. However, mine is anapproach in which counterposed emotions find their proper definition andexpression both through their integration into, and their containmentwithin, meaningful flows and systems of social action. The dialecticrelevant to a theory of epic emotions is, then, a processural dialectic. It is made evident when a subsequent state of emotion supersedes theemotion that (necessarily) preceded it. (3)

Let me illustrate by referring to Act 4, Scene 3, (lines 272-3) ofShakespeare's Macbeth. Here are words of exhortation and adviceaddressed to Macduff by Malcolm, who, for brevity's sake, is herebest characterised as Macduff's companion-at-arms.

Be this the whetstone of your sword:let grief convert to anger,blunt not the heart, enrage it.

Macduff has just had the news that his 'castle issurprised' and his 'wife and babes savagely slaughtered'by the usurper king Macbeth. Malcolm exhorts Macduff to put an end to mourning's inanition. He should get on with the urgencies thatproperly follow on the butchery of one's own. Macduff is encouragedto seek vengeance. Macbeth (referred to as the 'Scottishfiend') must die. Nor is Malcolm's brief advice bluntly given.It is wrapped in entendres that I shall have reason to consider lateron.

For present purposes, the italicised portion of Malcolm'sexhortation (the emphasis is supplied) provides an element of form:

Grief >>> Anger.

This particular conversion (or 'turning' as some versionsof the play have it) is a standard progression. Once the actor hasaccomplished the required and self-willed supersession, grief isrelegated to history; now anger informs his being. Then he, himself,becomes the very sword of vengeance; which is to say that he becomes theincarnation of that purpose. His dedication is absolute. (I indicate'total participation' as prescribed above.) If action bringsrequitement (in discharge of obligation), what follows on the anger ofvengeance is a quittance. This is release from the all-absorbingnecessity to avenge. Such release allows the actor to return fromrequired anger to contingency -- perhaps, to open a new chapter. Thus:

Grief >> Anger >> Quittance ('All passionspent.') >> Contingency

By 'Quittance' I mean to evoke a range of conventionalexpressions that denote 'finishing up' as the AboriginalEnglish of Northern Australia would have it.

Samson Agonistes is John Milton's long poem of blank versethat charts the course of the strong man of Israel who is betrayed andgiven over into the hands of the Philistines by Delilah, his wife, whocuts off Samson's hair while her man is sleeping. By God'ssecret treaty, Samson's hair was never to be cut. It follows thatSamson once he has been shorn must lose God's favour. Samson'sstrength thus leaves him, the lion becomes a lamb and the Philistineseasily take him prisoner.

For its finale, this story has a blinded Samson (his eyes have beenput out by torturers in the city of Gaza) standing in chains between thetwo pillars that support the roof of a mansion in which Philistines aregathered on the day of thanksgiving sacrifice to their god Dagon. Duringthe time of his captivity and torment, Samson's hair has regrown.His strength has returned along with sprouting hair (and his sillycaptors seem to be unaware of this recovery). Samson reaches out andpulls mightily on the supporting columns. These topple. The house fallsin upon itself, killing the Philistine nobility and crushing the hero todeath. (For us in proximate time, this implosion of a Philistinebuilding must have a quality of reverse symbolism; it relates to theimpact of 11th September, 2001, the day the West began to work to dealwith the consequences of terrorism, framing action in the epic termsthat exclude anything but the Presidential definition of reality givenin terms of feud, vengeance and crusade.)

To our prudent delight, we pupils in the eleventh grade (class of1955) discovered that, in the last line of Samson Agonistes, Milton(this paragon among Puritan poets) signals quittance as detumescence.After death and Delilah, it's not to be the deluge but: 'Allpassion spent.

What I have sketched is a progression, an arrangement thatconstitutes a primary string made up of serried moments. This is anelementary pattern (in the Durkheimian sense) for ordered successions,progressions, and superventions. There's a point to note. Anyparticular moment in a string can be characterised by use of anappropriate word of the emotions. In addition, the moment can be givencharacter by verbs of affectings (e.g. 'stricken,''enthused,' 'inflamed'), by words of purpose ormission, by labels for either ritual or operational stages, and byvarious other metonymies specific to the ages and the cultures of theirlife and definition. Thus we had before us the Elizabethan'turning' in which the now incensed (rather than stricken)warrior dedicates himself to revenge, inflames his heart and takes upsword and buckler in anger. He sets forth in all righteousness on thepath of vengeance. Macbeth's life-blood must stain the heather.Yet, given the context, 'He's after Macbeth' couldcompact it all. ( The hearer is left to fill out the picture, supplyingany missing terms by drawing these from the repository of culturallyfamiliar scenes and sequences.)

Further to be noted is that inexorable sequences often lendthemselves to representation as journey or progress (and pilgrimage isone sub-type of the progress). The last term in a completed stringsignifies destination, arrival, discharge, requitement, satisfaction,achievement, the nostos of Odysseus. The arsenal of military endings isalso relevant -defeat, victory (real or Pyrrhic), capture, retreat,relief of siege, triumph, truce, coup de grace, strategic withdrawal,disengagement, flight - 'Never have so many run from so few withless ado.' After the action, protagonists may be left to a single,dominant and lasting emotion as when: 'They lived happily everafter.'

Characterised by movement towards endings that are culminations,primary strings readily serve practical narratology, their moments oftenfeaturing as stages in the thematic development of story. It should alsobe clear that the moments in primary strings are linked serially andsequentially both by logic and by socially sanctioned entailment. Oncesome standard sequence is invoked and launched into action, there is apush towards completion. Joined in a string, moments are the orderedelements of a presage; they inform one another.

In the registers of noblesse oblige, a party who is offended orinsulted issues a challenge, demanding 'satisfaction'. Theintending duellist thus invokes the moment of destination in the veryact of throwing down the gauntlet. To stage a duel is to mount asequence which is fateful and open-ended. The same goes for theconsultation of oracles. In contrast, many a ritual has the character ofa rote progression towards a known and boringly inevitable conclusion.(Hence the English word 'tedium' derived from the endlesschanting of the 'Te Deum laudamas' [To God be praise], whichis a long, long psalm [number 106]. It gives unstinting praise to thetrue author of good things. The commander of a victorious Christian armywould commission monks to stage a rite of thanksgiving by processing fordays on end, intoning Te Deum after Te Deum after Te Deum. This rite putthe seal on victory. It made a victor victorious by the grace of God,transforming the outcome of battle into a deliverance.)

Given this mode of modelling, one can characterise the picaresque.In picaresque narrative, one moves arbitrarily from one completed stringor episode to the beginning of some unexpected other, there being noprojection of necessity that would serve to connect the previous episodeto its successor. In the brief terminology I am setting out (in abusiness that resembles a reminding of readers of things implicit in ourcanon rather than the presentation of true novelties), moments featureas necessary parts/phases of episodes whereas episodes must end indestinations (whether these be satisfactory or otherwise as in 'theattempt that failed' with its associated emotion of disappointedhope). A single episode can be represented by more than one primarystring: one couched in terms of the emotions, a parallel string in whichthe moments are ritual stages, a third string in which the scenicproperties of each moment give character to the progression that'sin train and so on. In ordinary speech, speakers are apt to shift andslide between the possible registers. The existence of parallel stringsor progressions is the condition that permits elegant variation indescriptions of enchained events.

Shakespeare's Malcolm might have chosen to pause for a whileand act the Comforter, allowing his companion-at-arms to continue as apatient stricken by grief, thereby prolonging Macduff's need forsupport and care. Comforter is to mourner as actor is to patient, theactive person to one made abject because given over to an emotion thatincapacitates. Grief, in this scenario, is a time-out emotion. ButMalcolm works by encouragement (putting courage back in -- a replacementtherapy for, as the anger goes in, the grief is expelled). (4) Malcolmis then able to deliver a warrior suitably enraged to a world of actionand sharp-edged obligation.

My general point is that Mourner: Comforter is an entity. Acoupling of patient/agent roles, Mourner: Comforter belongs to thetime-out moment of contained and public grieving. Also, note that asignificant combination of persons can feature in the process ofmourning. This is the joining together of a set of persons in grief (orsome other state of abjection) to yield 'a community ofsuffering' (Turner, 1958). And, as witnesses to poignant scenes,there are often those who are structurally indifferent.

The role pairs and role sets socially given as necessary to theacting out of scenes of ultimate reference are defined and distinguishedfrom one another with reference to:

(i) Presence or absence in the nominated persons of envelopingemotion states and

(ii) Ascriptions of agency, incapacity or indifference (the lastbeing realised as Simmel's tertius gaudens or 'enjoyingthird').

Epic emotions either incapacitate or they fix purpose. They callforth either the attempt to act with decision or the distressed appealissued out of helplessness by those whom emotion has beset and stricken.And, by convention, the appeal of the afflicted may be mute. Of itself,the situation must then speak to announce the plight of silent sufferersbrought into abjection. (5)

And why the epic in epic emotions? Because the 'primarystrings' lurk in all the oral and written literatures of activehuman recourse. Homer's Iliad is announced as the wrath ofAchilles. Then, the highs and lows of Homer Simpson's careerprogress from excess to excess (in picaresque succession), alwaysthreatening some total disaster. (Oh, yes, the farting: so it'sRabelaisian farce in which the direness of dire straights trembles onthe border that separates hilarity from pathos. 'Direstraights' means much the same thing as 'between a rock and ahard place' and these two nautical phrases have been imported intoeveryday English to become cliches that denote situations of ultimatereference.) The relationship between life experience and story-forms isa given of our social existence as, day by day, we present or representthe happenings in which we discover meaningful existence.

In analysis of epic emotions, one must have regard to three phasesin the work. Phase I is given over to consideration of social process asthe active deployment of the characteristic strings and moments germaneto signal events. Phase II is a consideration of ontology, the culturalconstruction of the ways of being of the experiential self. Phase III isreconciliation of social process and the more or less peculiarontologies discovered (during Phase II) through cultural analysis. Inall, social processes (infused with purpose) serve as basic carriers ontop of which ontologies ride piggyback. Yet the ethnographer does nothave slavishly to describe phases seriatim in a I-II-III progression. Asthe data in either their outlandishness or familiarity dictate, it couldat times be most effective, say, to write in media res. And now, beforeturning to exemplary demonstration, I have to say something aboutquantity and the elaboration of registers of the emotions. The fact isthat epic emotions (infused with gra vitas and socially compelling) arealways quite few in number. The emergence of a new one must (in socialand historical context) be hailed as an event indeed.

EMOTIONS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS

In a teasingly brief paper issued to encourage research on emotionsin Aboriginal studies, Les Hiatt (1978) remarked the fewness of wordsfor the emotions among the Gidgingali people of Northern Arnhem Land. Henoted also that the Gidgingali had 'no generic term meaningemotion' (Hiatt, 1978:186). Then he went on to consider the rangeof emotions an investigator might expect to encounter if ever apan-Australian and comparative study of the emotions in Aboriginalsocieties were to be mounted. This was to consider not human universals,but the generalities that might be yielded by an ethnographic survey.

Responding after intervening years to questions posed by Les Hiattin 1978, I have a four-fold answer to propose. With regard to statesthat we would group together as 'emotions,' the Aboriginalsocial formation is so constituted that it allows only:

(i) Those emotions that are evoked as governing emotions inparticipants whose beings are lent to situations of ultimate reference;

(ii) The state of comfort and being which is unfraught andunimpassioned existence ('Going good!' = O.K., nothing toremark.);

(iii) The business of 'feeling.' 'Feeling' is acode word of Aboriginal English that stands for moments of activeparticipation in which the person as totemite is engaged with Dreamingsor is in spiritual communion with another human being (also a totemite);

(iv) The positive (and often enduring) satisfaction experiencedafter some quittance, a moment when 'everything bin finishup'. (In some parts of Australia this is given metonymically asrepletion or satiation - the ending of hunger. Reference is made to afull stomach: gud binji [Aboriginal English] = good belly.) (6) Anyindividual's sense of self-worth is built on a personal history ofvital culminations.

Lexicons and ethnographic records broadly attest to the absence ofsecondary elaborations of the emotions in Aboriginal Australia. This isonly to be expected in social formations in which social order isgenerally maintained by recourse to fighting or vendetta or (moregenerally put) to 'self-help' and in which, furthermore,nearly all deaths of humans are attributed either to overt homicide orto the covert but lethal work of the sorcerer. Nearly always, a funeralentails the ritual disposal of a person who is held to have been done todeath. Always, people are compassed about by potential killers. Withinlocal communities, the demand system of Aboriginal extraction positsthat the creditor must work hard and loudly (and sometimes violently) toextort dues from a debtor. (Payday is an active occasion for publicsettlements, extractive routines and epic reckonings.) Rituals variouslyprescribe inflictions, ordeals, self-mortification and orchestratedmodulations of terror. By definition, each human approach to a DreamingPower is given as a risky business. Severe physical punishment may alsobe meted out in accordance with local tradition and convention. In suchconditions, each person lives but a short step away from witnessing orexperiencing some impending moment of ultimate recourse. These thingsnoted, a further elaboration of theory is implied -- this time aconsideration of the emotions in relation to the evolution of socialforms.

The civil emotions and sentiments (dulce et decorum est pro patriamori) have as the prerequisite for their emergence, the founding ofcivil order. Then, the emotions of conscience belong to tertiaryelaborations discovered in those inner-directed (and ontological)formations of the person constituted as a divided self. In Europeanhistory, emotions found yet further elaboration with the institution ofconfession. There was consequent provision of vocabularies to enumerate the passions of the tempted and sophisticate soul. (In this vein:'The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deedfor the wrong reason.' (7)

To bring preamble to a close, I add two proposals:

(i) In societies characterised by secondary and/or tertiaryelaborations of sentiment and emotions, locally recognised sets of epicemotions still retain their primacy. They remain the emotions ofultimate reference.

(ii) As emotions of radical contrapositions and ultimate destinies,the number and quality of epic emotions must always be geared (with someprecision) to the number and nature of the values that have activecurrency in social life. (8)

With further differentiation of values, which are then entered intospheres of exchange (Barth, 1981), there is an increase in thepossibilities for experience of type situations as situations ofultimate reference. Thus, in economies of honour, pride is constitutedas amour propre and can be put on the line (there are places wheredesperate honour may be lost without any possibility of retrieval).Plurality of religions introduces economies of competing gods togetherwith the accusation of heresy (whether voiced by some Jehovah or by thehuman prosecutor). Developed money economies allow the imagination ofinfinite possibilities of acquisition and conspicuous consumption. Afostered pathology is insatiable greed and the implanting of thoseanxieties attendant on fear of either bankruptcy or debt. Weber'sProtestant Ethic is equated with deferred rewards and the perfection ineach individual of a calling; with career anxiety instilled, the economyof the leisured self is imperilled and the life of easy social ity maygenerally be compromised by Puritanical abstainers-from-everything whobecome solitary even when surrounded by those supposedly near and dearto them; information industries, which value the sign over the signified... and so on and on.

PASSAGES UNDER AN ACT

The passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Actof 1976 (ALRA) ushered in the era of Aboriginal land claims inAustralia. By 1998, under the provisions of this Act, some 68 separateland claims had been adjudicated by Land Commissioners with the resultthat the ownership of more than 48% of the surface area of the NorthernTerritory was ceded to traditional Aboriginal owners (see Neate, 1998).A consequence is that Northern Australia has become the site for twoculturally distinct modalities of discursive practice given over to theconstitution and discussion of connection between Aboriginal people andland. On the one hand, there is the jural discourse in terms of whichAboriginal citizens of the Northern Territory may enter claims to berecognised as traditional owners of estates in tracts of previouslyunalienated Crown land. Over and against the legal words and phrases,there is the Aboriginal discourse concerning the indigenous inheritorsof responsibility for living countrysides. My f irst step is to considerprocesses of conversion that were instituted and made possible as aresult of the passing of the ALRA in 1976.

When a land claim is brought to successful completion, a doublemovement is achieved at law. In the first place, historicallydispossessed Aborigines enter into the jural process to becomeclaimants. Their claim is then heard before a Land Commissioner. If theclaim succeeds, claimants become recognised traditional owners whoseinterests are subsequently represented by a Land Trust set up for thepurpose. The land undergoes change also. Designated land isceremoniously made subject to claim and, if the claim succeeds, thatland is converted into Aboriginal freehold (9) to be held and managed bya newly created Land Trust on behalf of the traditional owners. Theparallel movements may be represented thus:

A. (i) Dispossessed Aborigines (ii) become claimants (iii) who areturned into traditional owners.

B. (i) Unalienated crown land (ii) made subject to claim (iii) isturned into Aboriginal freehold

Divided into three stages, each of the parallel movements conformswith the classic pattern of the rite of passage (van Gennep, 1960). (10)People made subject to a judicial process emerge transformed. Thesubject land likewise emerges as land endowed with a new identity atlaw.

With particular reference to the Darwin hinterland, I now go on toshow how the double process mapped above is, in fact, turned into afourfold process once Aboriginal constructions of reality are taken intothe accounting. As we shall see, Aboriginal constructions also yield thethree classic stages by which transformations are achieved. One willdeal, yet again, with the form of the rite of passage. However, thestates and conditions of either the person or the country that is madesubject to transformation may best be given, not in words drawn from thelaw, but in words of the emotions. Land moves progressively from onestate of emotional experience to its successor. And so it is withclaimants. The latter leave behind them the inanition of dispossession to enter into that phase of active struggle, which turns them intocrusaders: 'Everybody fighting for country'

PADDY HUDDLESTON'S WITNESSING

In 1985, under the provisions of The Aboriginal Lands Rights Act,the Wagiman people pressed to be recognised as traditional Aboriginalowners for land (11) on the upper reaches of the Daly River. In thecourse of the Wagiman claim, a man called Paddy Huddleston appeared togive evidence on behalf of his people. In the weighted words oftestimony, this witness twice averred that the owners of country werepeople of hurt feeling. He spoke also of a frightened hunting ground.

After searching through reams of court transcript in the Upper Dalyclaim, I found no further instance in which Paddy Huddleston or anyother Wagiman claimant spoke either of a group's shared feeling orof a land's distress. In its own context, the cited testimony isexceptional. In its rareness of rendition, Paddy Huddleston'stalking of hurt feeling and a frightened land is also true to thoseeveryday and out-of-court trends that pervade his people'srepresentations of their world. While words of the emotions are scarcein the Aboriginal lexicon, the use of the scarce words of emotion tendsto be reserved to the making of those pregnant statements that areuttered to transform the event of the day into a special occasion ofheightened significance. (12)

They (whitefellas) never been savvy this country before, they beenjust come in. Through.

(Nowadays) they waking this lotta things (that is, whiteAustralians are waking up to a lot of things), because we been littlebit learn to hold we country. And there (in these new times) they comeand see (that is, they apply to) all the traditional owners and (theynow make such applications) before they go through the country. Theywaking up.

We should have been wake up that (lot of whites) before to all wecountry. But they ripped all the Wagiman country. And that goes throughtraditional owners. They had feeling traditional owners when (thosepeople were) ripping their country. And we can see all this countryripped up.

While my granny used to been (a)live, we never used to see thissort of road like that. We used to just have a pad to go hunting. But he(the judge) can see this place, Wagiman country: all ripping out andchopping out now.

You can't get kangaroo anywhere now. You can see kangaroo herebefore: all the way (along) this road. Biggest lot! But you look --motor car up and down. You can't see one kangaroo standing in theroad, you like to have five or six mile, or more than that (before youwill see kangaroo). They frighten you(r) hunting ground. They chop himup proper, and making hard for all the Wagiman people and traditionalowners. They hurt traditional owners' feeling, going through theircountry: That's right Mum?

(In answer to her son's appeal, Paddy Huddleston's mothersilently signalled her assent.)

(Upper Daly Land Claim, Transcript of Video Evidence, p.86,punctuation and interpolations supplied.)

We have:

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

- Traditional owners (including Paddy Huddleston and his Mum).

- Them (the whitefellas who are choppers, rippers, road builders,riders in cars and so, in a chain of cumulative causation, the agentswho are responsible for the absence of kangaroo).

- A sentient hunting ground or living countryside.

- Kangaroo six miles away.

EMOTIONS

- Traditional owners' hurt feeling.

- The experience of ripping that 'goes right through' thetraditional owners (as totemites who experience sympathetic shock whentheir land is wounded).

- The 'making hard' that immediately translates as bothoppression and the suffering of the land's true owners. (Such'making hard' assonates with Dickensian Hard Times.)

- Fright of the hunting ground.

AWAKENINGS

- There has been a twofold shift in the savvy of whitefellas. Thatis, a shift in savoir dire together with a shift in savoir faire (askingbefore they come through and thereby licensing active through-passagethat is conditional on the showing of proper respect for country).

- An Aboriginal learning (how to hold country in post-colonialAustralia).

In brief attestation, Paddy Huddleston captures the facts of ascenic transformation and he captures those facts entire.

LANGUAGE AND STATES OF BEING

In the Englished text of Paddy Huddleston's pronouncements,the phonology of Aboriginal forms of speech has been modified. This workwas done by a transcription clerk who works in service of the court andthe result is that Paddy Huddleston's language is given the writtenappearance of a dialectic but, nonetheless, still English prose. Theproblem is that we have here to deal not with a dialect of English.Rather, we are made party to the testimony of a witness who draws on themodalities and registers in a North Australian version of anAboriginalised language that has, paradoxically, become a lingua francawhile functioning, at the same time, as a set of regionally encysted forms of speech that proclaim membership of their speakers in separate,local speech communities. Local forms of Aboriginal English are:'Same, but different really'.

In a Holi Biabul published in the Kriol of Roper River (a languagethat has much in common with Paddy Huddleston's), (13) the openingwords of the first chapter of Genesis are rendered as follows:

Orait, longtaim wen God bin stat meigimbat ebrijing, no enijing binsidan.

To adopt the mode of the court translator:

All right, longtime when God been start making everything allabout, not anything been sit down.

And the removal which distances Northern creoles from StandardAustralian English is a matter even more of sense than sound. Thederivations of Standard English and Aboriginal varieties, partake ofdistinct and differing world views.

The King James Bible has:

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2. The earth was without form, and void...

The 'no enijing bin sidan' of the Kriol Bible invokes thestyle and activities of those creator beings that populate theAboriginal Dreaming and bring all things into existence. A principle ofAboriginal ontology is that the essential being-ness of things is givenas an arrest of motion. Things are captured for what they are only whenthey have arrived at a destination -- where they are to be foundemplaced, inactive, 'quiet' and 'sitting down'. Theythen continue in that quietude of inanition that cancels thetransformatory potential of the travelling modes of either'walkabout' or 'running round'. Arrested things --like once-extruded outcrops of larval rock no longer lava -- are quietlybeing, not evanescent and adventurously becoming; not crucially facingup to this day's challenge. Hopefully, they are still 'goinggood'.

THE ART OF CIRCLE AND LINE

Alternations between movement and stasis condition the patterningof the Aboriginal art of the Centre and much of the bark painting ofEast Arnhem Land too. Thus: 'One of the key motifs in centralAustralian desert art is that of the circle and the line ... Nancy Munnrefers to the linked circle-line as the site-path motif ... GeoffreyBardon refers to it as the travelling sign, with the circles beingresting places' (Morphy, 1998:120). So, Munn uses scenic termswhile Bardon's are agentive. And it is Bardon who captures thesense that culminations in Aboriginal narrative are nearly always theexpression of an essential realisation. Strings of movement bring bothstoryteller and listener to the destination that yields an increment inthe understanding of the quiddity of that entity which story has broughtto its deposition in a station. That which has been realised and is nowrecumbent, is the product of its given history. Things of the knownfirmament are, then, repeatedly culminate. It follows that each sit edobject has an aetiology that is compacted into it. This last clutch ofwords entertains the capacity of emplaced things to re-evoke tellings --'pulling the story back out' like pulling on a ball of string.Note, too, that an essential and enduring quality of a culmination willbe its mood.

With arrival, there must either be a residual benefit or adiminution. People are said to 'go through' significant'times' or named events such as an initiation ceremony.Through-passage leaves them with an accretion of experience, good or badas the case may be. A man will thus look back on the fact of hiscompletion of initiation with enduring satisfaction; that is, with asatisfaction that is re-evoked in him whenever he has cause to rejoicein the fact that the ordeal, once over, justifies itself as grounds,qualification and potentiation for his adult performances.

Recourse to the Kriol bible may have yielded a brief sense ofphonology. It should also have provided a key to the modelling ofeventuality, the division of the world of experience into 'quiettimes' when 'nothing happening' and the times of markedexperience. The latter are the active times either of'problems' and 'troubles' or of joyous participationin explorations, holiday journeys, visits, ceremony, or the funcorroboree. The active times of happenings are times informed bysupervening emotion. Whether the emotion be fright or rejoicing or someother labelled state, each marked event takes the shape of the emotionthat informs it. (14) The principle can hold good because this is aculture in which one is always certain about endings -- the'finishing up' of business. Not only are there formal rites ofquittance, the 'finished happening' is defined either asclosed 'business' that has discharged its value (which may betaken and carried over into life), or as a finished-up problem thatfound destination in its resolution (discussed at length in Sansom,1980). There are, then, marked and culturally provided terminii tomoments for required emotion.

Back to Genesis. Concerned with endings and the business of'finishing up', we turn naturally to the sixth and last day ofactive creation. The King James Bible has a masculine God looking overhis brave new world, stage by completed stage; then He passes judgmenton His own handiwork. On the sixth day: 'God saw everything that Hehad made, and indeed it was very good' (Genesis, 1:32, King JamesBible). Seeing that nothing further needed fixing, God gave himselfleave to rest (thereby instituting the first Holiday).

The Kriol Bible treats godhead in its own way. There's not abusiness of measured judgment followed by decision. Rather, the reporthas it that a sensate Divinity experiences a post-prandial feeling:'Him bin gudbinji.' After creation, it's satiation.Whether or not Godly satiety is to be judged a theologically adequatetranslation is in no way to the point. As Ainsworth (1985) and Harris(1988) tell us, the Kriol bible was produced in conjunction with acommittee of Aboriginal consultants. One assumes it was their advicethat led to the envisioning of a God of Appetite who adventures onwardsagain and again to experience the satisfaction of good belly as theBaibul tale unfolds.

In Edmund Burke's system for analysis of tropes, the God whois given to see things as good is glossed onto the underlying ratioScene agent. The quality of the creation is an absolute that overshadowsthe spectator-assessor's estimation of creation's worth. TheKriol bible, however, has God entering into godhead's own delight.The terminus for creation is figured in an announcement of an epicemotion in which the Creator's very being is subsumed. That whichis good is taken away from created things. It is taken and put intoGod's belly. Bible translation thus produces an account of primarynarcissism for God admires his reflection in creation - the ultimate inego trip. (And, yet, the objective form is linguistically possible inKriol: That fella bin look and he bin see. All that thing he bin puttimlonga country really good!)

Read more of the Kriol bible to discover further triumphs of asyncretism that is built into the grammar that transfigures the God ofthe Judaic and Christian traditions. The most radical effect bears onChristian dogma. The supreme Christian moment--which is the Incarnation-- is re-located. It's John's Gospel (1:14), the fourth bookof the New Testament, that reports how 'the Word became flesh anddwelt amongst us' at the beginning of the Common Era and in theperson of Jesus. The Holi Baibul tells another story. An alimentary and,therefore, a carnal God, is seen to be at work from the sixth day ofcreation on. Insinuated into the Holi Baibul are the primary strings onwhich speakers of Roper River Kriol rely when giving form toeventuality. An implicit rule is this: whenever a felicitous outcome isreported, quittance is to be signalled by remarking how the happyarchitect of success ends up with gourmand's delight (which ischildhood's yummy tummy). (15)

TRANSFORMATIONS AND STATIONS OF PERSONS

In Paddy Huddleston's representations, Wagiman feature as apeople of two styles. 'Oldstyle Wagiman' (a local notion) werepassive witnesses to the desecration of their lands. The 'new-styleWagiman' are today's active parties in the land claim. Havingalready learnt 'little bit to hold' their country, Wagimanhave gone to court to secure possession. As I heard people aver inout-of-court talking, the Wagiman now have 'got that newturn-out'. And these are people who recognise the words'style' and 'turn-out' as alternatives. (16) Eitherof the two expressions signals an adopted stance -- a mode ofpresentation marked by its particular linguistic forms, its socialroutines (primary strings included) and its material trappings.

The ground thus prepared, I can say that Paddy Huddleston tells howthe historical hard times of infliction have been superseded by anew-style Wagiman turn-out. His evidence is therefore to be read as anessay on the conversion of his people's suffering into theassumption of collective initiative which Aboriginal claimants describeas: 'Everybody fighting for country'. There are antecedent andconsequent moments, together with an announcement to the effect that anincrement of knowledge has mediated the transformation of erstwhilesufferers into present-day claimants:

First moment

The country is ripped by people who savvy not its meaning. (EARTHis attacked by white-fellas and suffers inertly as patient.)

The HUNTING GROUND is frightened

KANGAROO become scarce because they have either been hunted away orhunted out.

WAGIMAN people are oppressed into abjection. (Denial of initiativeor agency to the people 'makes things hard'.)

Earth, Wagiman, and Hunting Ground: these three are objectified.Denied volition, all three experience distress. In distress, they do notcommunicate with one another. Instead, they suffer similarly butsingularly. The relationship between game and country is disjunct.

Second moment

'They come and see all the traditional owners ... We shouldhave been wake up that (lot) before to all we country.'

By implication, this reads: We have woken them up into awareness ofthe significance of our ownership of country for they now apply to us inorder to gain permission to come through.

The Flagged Announcement

We 'little bit learn to hold we country; they waking up'(to knowledge of country as a Wagiman holding).

I call this a 'flagged announcement' because it isprefaced by a rhetorical period. For Paddy Huddleston 'littlebit', in fact, means 'that whole lot'. In general,'little bit' is a miosis that is inserted apologetically intopolitical discourse as if to mollify gross pretension. It works toopposite effect. In this vein, a triumphant Minister of Finance wouldannounce that, in these hard times, he had been able 'littlebit' to cancel that National Debt. Again by implication, there hasbeen a reflexive and so a twofold shift in awareness. Whereas Wagimanhave truly now learnt to hold country, the erstwhile and freebootingchoppers of country are learning (more or less) to ask before theyventure to use it.

All this points to a conclusion. A transformation already more thanhalf-completed will reach its destination when asserted Wagimanownership of land has been legally ratified. After all, Paddy Huddlestonalready calls Wagiman the 'traditional owners'. In so doing,he employs not words of Aboriginal English, but the jural terminology ofthe Land Rights Act. Under its provisions, a judge is charged todiscover whether, in point of fact, 'traditional owners' fordesignated tracts of land actually survive and continue to exercise'primary spiritual responsibility' for that land. Apresumptive witness, Paddy Huddleston makes his declaration:'Traditional owners got hurt feeling' . (17) From the inertiaof their previous affliction, the new-style Wagiman have emerged infighting mode to pre-empt a judge's findings as they assert theirlanded possession.

'THAT RIGHT MUM?' -- WITNESSED AFFIRMATION OF THE WORD

Before Paddy Huddleston entered his evidence, the Wagiman as agrouping had acted together, agreeing to assume the fighting stance thatis announced in a group's profession of hurt feelings. And there ismore. Whenever hurt feelings are professed, there is also a preparedstory that 'gives reason' for the assumption of politicalemotion. When enunciated by an approved spokesperson and then'given' to an audience of relevant outsiders, that subtendingstory has the status of an agreed communique. Furthermore, the story isentered by a set of people who by and through their conjoint subscription to both the story and its verdictful conclusion in'the word', are people thereby conjoined to be made 'onecompany, one mob'.

Such a company has its genesis in response to a marked event -- theinjury detailed in the story. And those who join the company of theaggrieved are recruited to it one by one. Brought singly to the tale of'damage', persons who lend assent to it, endow the witnessingof the injured with the facticity of a truth which has been receivedseriatim by persons whose acts of judging it will have been individuallyvolunteered. There can always be some who walk away, declaring that thematter is not to be counted as their business. In local parlance,persons who withdraw are said to become 'private'. 'Thatnot my business. Me, I'm really a very private fella me. That thatbusiness bla (belonging to) them other fella, bla that Maxie mob.'

The company that consolidates around damage or injury is thus anelective mob. The profession of hurt feeling has as precondition justthis order of consolidation. One must note the risk. Those who bringalleged damage to wider attention may be left in unsupport havingrendered up a set of details which are left as details, that is, notedas 'sayings' but not 'heard' by members of theaudience to which they have been addressed. What is at issue has beenthe winning of support. And with support, with the consolidation of acompany, with conjoint subscription to a 'word', there is aresponse to injury or damage which can now be registered using words ofthe emotions. The profession of hurt feeling may then finally beannounced by a company of declared adherents, a group of people unitedin subscription both to the word and to their hearing of that story inwhich the foundation of today's word is found.

So far, my comments have been elaborations on provided text,locating hurt feeling in a progression which has suffering Wagiman atit* beginning and fighting Wagiman at its end (for, in their own way,Wagiman convert grief to anger.) I now venture beyond the cited text toconsider those wider traditions and practices that subtend the lexiconon which Paddy Huddleston as prime witness draws.

PERSONAL INJURY AND HURT FEELING

As an enunciated word, 'feeling' entered once and thenagain and again into my field notes as, over a period of weeks, Iregistered the repeated protestations of a single speaker. Big Maxiewould end rhetorical flights with a shouted announcement:

Just you lot listen. Me, I'm telling you, people here shouldhave hurt feeling!

Taken by the insistent usage, I asked about Big Maxie's choiceof words. In response, I was told that this was just Big Maxie'sway. I now know that the replies defined idiosyncrasy. But I took themfor answers which would have made Big Maxie's appeal to emotion anidiolectic quirk -- an unusual and wholly personal habit of speech

In those early days of learning, it seemed that Big Maxie was theonly person I knew who would attribute hurt feeling(s) to people of theDarwin fringe camp that served me as my base. (Nor had I yet caught upwith the fact that Aboriginal English 'feeling' is always inthe singular.) A deal of time passed before I was to hear people voice asocially considered, linguistically apposite and morally properdeclaration of hurt feeling. Then I discovered that, after all,'hurt feeling' was not only to be heard when Big Maxie madehis speeches.

For reasons that need not detain us, the Darwin camp of myattachment was at odds with people of a mission settlement in theSouthwest coastal zone. Some of the coastal people came up to town. Theyencountered members of our mob in the pub one night. These South-westernenemies then voiced abusive words, impugning women. When our lot leftthe pub at closing time, the opponents 'crowded' the home-bentparty. They compounded verbal injury by laying importunate hands onwomen of our group. Women of the drinking party brought a message backto camp: 'Themfella trying to abusim body. They saying anyfella cinabusim mibody'. Women of the Wallaby Cross encampment alleged that,before witnesses, they had been treated like prostitutes. They also saidthat they had 'bin take fright'.

When the camp woke up next day, there was a round of discussion.The pub-goers retold their several stories to the stay-at-homes,supporting one-another's assertions: 'That right, that right,wefella all bin witness for that.' Those who listened accepted thedetailed accounts of the delivery of insult-after-expletive-insult. Thewomen had 'bin take fright for (good) reason'. Indeed, therehad been abuse, the kind of abuse that did 'damage' not onlyto persons but also to 'that whole mob we got'.

Residents of the Wallaby Cross encampment took this damage to theirown selves and to their mob as well. With the damage of abuse taken intoaggregate possession, the people of the Wallaby Cross mob were set togive 'the word' which would define their current stance andstate.

That Mission mob bin abusim woman; wefella alabout got hurtfeeling.

Replacing the assorted plaints of individual victims, confirmedprotestations of damage are announced to signal fighting intent on thepart of those who own them.

On that night of insult, the home-bent party made up of both maleand female drinkers was inadequate to its own defence. In reporting backthe details, men left women to voice the facts, lending the silence ofshamefaced assent to female announcements of this reported item: theentire company had 'bin take fright'. Because the Fighting Menof our mob had been outnumbered, the situation of itself had assumed theshape of fright. And fright comes of the incapacity of unaided,unsupported selves to find recourse. When injury or damage is taken to acompany, the fright of unsupport becomes history. It yields to hurtfeeling. The profession of the 'company' emotion replaces itsprecursor -- an emotion that belongs, not to a company, but either to aset of outnumbered contenders or to the person wholly on his/her own.Fright, then, can admit gradations of horror. These come of two sources.There is, on the one hand, the threat inherent in the fearfulness of theinstigating thing or event, one's unsupport in face o f danger onthe other. And the paradigm of the last gradation of fear is reservednot to any brief confrontation with the taipan or the king brown snakes.Rather, it belongs to the person who is denied a company of recourse.The ultimately fearful are the socially bereft. In denial of supportfrom Countrymen, these are persons who for some hideous space of timehave been consigned; they are deliberately 'left' by allothers to 'walk lonely'. In all, political process achieves atranslation of injury and attendant fright into a mob's conjointand indignant affliction.

THE ENTAILMENT OF HURT FEELING

I was brought to understand that there is a conditional logic thatleads to the definition of hurt feeling. Hurt feeling is an emotion ofhigh entailment. Such an emotion is designed to 'carry with it as anecessary accompaniment or consequence' (Webster), both theconditions of its genesis and the socially prescribed course of actionwhich comes of owning it. Hurt feeling is thus owned in that peculiarsense which couples possession with public profession and appositeperformance.

Hurt feeling:

(i) Is professed by members of a group in recognition of the factthat some named person (or some set of identified persons) has(have), byword or deed, done 'damage' to some other person or set ofpersons, to sacra or to country, which 'damage' has then beentaken into possession by the group to be owned by all its members as thecause of the 'hurt feeling' in which group-members have allcome to share.

(ii) Is never individual property, but always a shared-in emotion;

(iii) Is ardent and overweening because assigned social priority(possession of hurt feeling calls for those who profess it to engage inconfrontation and work either to redress the damage or to avenge thatinjury which gave rise to group-felt hurt);

(iv) Is to be held in group possession until peace has beendeclared and 'that whole business finished up'. There is,then, a proper time-span for ownership of hurt feeling;

(v) Is an emotion whose profession establishes political stance;

(vi) Is quite rare in announcement because the profession of hurtfeeling amounts locally to a declaration either of war or, at least, thenecessity for negotiations towards the ending of hostilities betweenoffended parties and offender(s).

(vii) Functions to constitute a 'company' or'mob' of countrymen anew as the local grouping is reassertedas a grouping in and through the voiced subscription of its members todefined emotion.

(vii) A development of (vi) and (vii) above, hurt feeling canpresent the fear-inducing confrontation in which a whole mob of offendedparties faces an isolated offender who is bereft of support, having been'left' to 'walk lonely'.

Because each instance of ownership of hurt feeling must beconditioned by a history which begins with abuse or wrong and leads tovengeful assertion, it makes sense to characterise hurt feeling as anemotion of high entailment. Whether occasioned (rather than induced) bythe ripping and chopping of land, by abuse of women or the perpetration of some other wrong, hurt feeling comprehends that sense of injury whichis shared in by people whom the fact of damage has also made fightingmad.

Negotiated into profession, collective in ownership and signallingthe belligerence of group-intent, the owning of hurt feeling marks astate of being in which people come to share together by virtue of theirparticipation in groupings which are political sui generis. In all this,no political truth masquerades in the guise of professed emotion.Rather, hurt feelings are germane to the constitution of the politicalcontraposition that is signalled by the owning of emotion. Always theproduct of a history of relationships that has been made subject togroup-assessment, the sharing of entailed emotion is made a moment inthe political process itself. Hurt feelings are as much constituted as apolitical and group reality as their profession is denied to self-actingindividuals.

In the register of Standard English, 'hurt feelings'(plural) ordinarily stands for the offended sensibilities of one person.In its indication of plurality, the notion belongs to that discursivepractice in which it is allowed that a gamut of emotion can coursethrough a person's breast/heart/being. In the face of yourinconsideration or unkindness, I may experience pain, indignation,chagrin, shame, annoyance, bashfulness and more besides. Or I may simplysay that I'm 'feeling emotional', registering mysubjection to that internal 'riot of the feelings' in whichchagrin and the rest all combine confusingly within me. The 'hurtfeelings' of our Standard English stands for the all-at-onceactivation of a whole battery of dedicated little receptors. Our beingsbecome 'emotionally charged' -- which is to say, subject tothe simultaneous stimulation of lots of 'nerves'. Hurtfeelings are presented as a sort of ganglion overload.

A DISCOVERED STRING

Though Paddy Huddleston was not brought to say it, Wagiman duringtheir time of nonresistance were people who could but 'sorryfor' their country. They lived through a space of time during whichthe regard of each Wagiman for land remained. But it lacked the vitalitythat is the wilful potentiation of one's being, the readying ofself to execute a redemptive act. Permitted emotion was individual, itsexpression limited to grief. With regard to country, Wagiman as agrouping were reduced to a grieving inanition. 'Poorfella mycountry.'

While a sorrowing would afflict Wagiman in those'old-style' times, hurt feeling belongs to their consolidatedand active engagement with the law. Furthermore, in local conceptions,their more recent profession of hurt feeling was wholly incompatiblewith the previous commitment of individual Wagiman to an unredemptivemourning for land that had been despoiled. In those'old-style' times, some Wagiman wept often for country. Therewere others who went about the business of living, unassailed by thenecessity to cry. Appalled by such disregard, those who wept discoveredfurther reason to sorrow on.

In the Wagiman case, emotions partake in an overall transformationin which the conjoint profession of hurt feelings supersedes the sorrowof the mourners. Wagiman as Wagiman are all turned to become fightersfor country. They then look forward to the satisfaction that will comeof winning for themselves the status of traditional owners(T.O's.). In my notation for strings:

Sorry for country >>> Hurt feeling >>> Being'satisfied' (18) in achievement (of T.O. status).

FROM SOCIAL PROCESS TO THE TOTEMISM OF TODAY

We have now to come to terms with the fright of the Wagiman huntingground. The task requires pure translation: the best possiblerepresentation of the relationship between T.O's. and the countryin which they participate through spirit. And the jural notions of'traditional owners' and 'Aboriginal freehold' areonly a sort of essential shorthand that allows for latter-day juralrecognition of those immemorial relationships by which an Aboriginalpeople successively partake of and participate in their countries. TheALRA does define traditional owners as 'a descent group of peoplewho have primary spiritual relationship for land and for sites on thatland' and adds that the owners should have the capacity 'toforage as of right' over claimed land. In the business oftranslation, the challenge that remains is to supply a proper renditionof the nature of country both in its selfhood and its connection withthose who partake in it.

Paddy Huddleston's Wagiman belong to the upper reaches of theDaly River. Launching an account of frontier and mission history alongthat river, Deborah Bird Rose (2000:215) writes that:

Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia have taught me toconsider country to be a conscious entity. Place is one kind ofembodiment of being, and the encounters of living things are recordedthere.

For present purposes, this formulation has part-right status. Itacknowledges the sapience of country to the extent that country isfigured as a registry of births, marriages, deaths and other events.Here, the analogue of country is either that of the librarian who keepsthe newspaper morgue or, otherwise (as befits mission history), that ofthe ledger kept by a recording angel. We face problems when ouringrained literacy is brought to oral cultures. The next temptationwould be to write that stories are 'inscribed' in thelandscape and that they wait there ready to be 'retrieved' bya storyteller who 'reads' the country (Rumsey, 1994:128). Andthe problem is compounded. The experience of most Aboriginal claimantsbypasses the inscription/retrieval of those who routinely deal withinformation systems. However, Aboriginal people (widely and generally)speak of 'reading country' as of rote. (19) Then there is thedifficulty with Aboriginal teachings regarding 'consciousness'-- surely a Cartesian and post-Car tesian construct and not a creatureof Aboriginal understandings?

Payne provides a statement that is important to present concerns.Writing about people in the remote northern region of South Australia,she shows that country itself may be brought to situations of ultimatereference. A site in country can die.

The maintenance of a site requires both physical caring -- forexample the rubbing of rocks or the clearing of debris--and theperformance of (ritual) items (20) aimed at caring for the spirit housedat it. Without these maintenance processes the site remains, but is saidto lose the spirit held within it. It is then said to die and all thosewho share physical features and spiritual connection with it are thenalso thought to die. Thus, to ensure the well being of life, sites mustbe cared for and rites performed to keep alive the dreaming powersentrapped within them. The responsibility to carry out this work fallson the shoulders of those who, firstly, have undergone the trainingnecessary to enable them to execute their duties effectively, and,secondly, have received, and continue to receive, public ratificationfor their execution of these duties (Payne, 1989:56).

The frightened country can lose that which inspirits it. With itsdesertion by kangaroo, Paddy Huddleston gave us an image of a Wagimanhunting ground already well on the way toward fossil being (myconcluding image assumes Darwin and is deliberately inept).

I want us to pick up and retain Payne's two gifts toethnographic understanding.

(1) The possibility of disinspiritment of country is real (my wordprocessor objects to the polysyllable with the angry, red underlining ofWord Me 2000). Disinspiritment is what happens if the relationshipbetween rightful inheritors and land is not sustained.

(2) Then there is the performative demand: through the generations,human guardians of country must come to knowledge of rite and myth andservice in the absence of which there can be no caring for the land.

But let us now look also at an author's expressiveprogression. In Payne's paragraph, spirit is first'housed,' then it's 'held' and, finally,'entrapped'. Housing, at least, is homely. 'Held'assonates with Paddy Huddleston's pronouncement and'holding' entertains the possible modulations of therelationship between a site and its owners. However, entrapment iscoercive, its introduction a transformation, the main trouble being thatthe word calls for identification of an agent who would do the trapping.

It is, then, against a background of difficulty that I bring thisessay to the good word for glossing realities of the Dreaming. Incrafting her study of transmigrations and the holding of land byimmigrant Aboriginal people on the Cox Peninsula near Darwin, ElizabethPovinelli (1993) discovered the mot juste in this matter. In her book weread of the 'sentient' landscape or countryside. As the OxfordEnglish Dictionary indicates, there are two sides to sentience. Becausethis is a word of both the perceiving and the feeling self (and alsobecause the cogito of philosophers of consciousness is left out of theequation), 'to be sentient' serves well. Landscapes andcountrysides are made sentient to the extent that ancestral spirits (21)remain emplaced within them.

THE LONELINESS OF THE EMPLACED DREAMING

Putting to rights and clearing up about a Dreaming site is like(and is likened to) the grooming of one person by another. The relevantacts are acts of service, expressions of conjoint closeness andacceptance that create the mutual intimacy that comes of an asymmetricalrelationship in which a custodian renders service and a Dreaming is madethe recipient of care.

Dreaming sites are visited on and off. Arrival of its custodians atan unkempt site is followed by rapid and urgent attentions in the nameof cosmetic improvement. At demanding sites, the required work may bemore than a clean-up: there can, for example, be re-construction ofdislodged elements in a stone arrangement, the removal of rampantregrowth, the touching up and repainting of figures on the wall of aDreaming shelter or the extensive and general restoration of thescorched site that has been ravaged by fire. The mood always puts me inmind of visiting granny in the nursing home -- a brisk exercise inneatening up, cleaning and provisioning accompanied by a commentary of:'Oh my goodness, just look at this!' The very survival of themore fragile sites depends on intermittent but reliable human attention.(Some sites in their largeness and solidity appear to be vulnerable onlyin geology's time frame. But even then there's thewhitefella's dynamite.) (22)

Payne (cited above) emphasised the mutual dependency of a Dreamingsite and its custodians. I want to remark a preternatural loneliness.Each Dreaming site is a station. Left at the place are the signs of aDreaming's arrival at some particular pass in its adventuring. Thesite thus stands for and memorialises a moment: here's the placeand time of Kangaroo's swollen testicl*; place of theMoon-man's frustration and turning aside once he discovered thatthe woman he wanted as a sexual partner was forbidden to him by the lawof exogamy. Along Dreaming tracks, the most poignant site is the finalstation, one of the sites of ending-up, as with the site on the reef outto sea onto which Kangaroo finally bounded and then 'went in,'stopping altogether in this location that story makes over into aresting place of final retirement. With finalities at the end ofDreaming progressions, the nearest thing to Aboriginal religion inChristian worship is to be found in the Stations of the Cross for, ineither case, passi on is mapped into a progress towards the sameeventuality -- termination of carnal presence followed by resurrectioninto eternal presence in spirit. And, for the human celebrant orbeholder, that's the pity and the marvel in it. The mystery is thatthe Divine participates in mortality and the Divine therefore allowsthat humans (who are mortal) may participate as spirit in immortalityalso.

Every time visitors go away from a Dreaming place, they'leave' that place and the Dreaming(s) emplaced in it. Thataspect of a Dreaming that is contained in a particular place has then toendure without additional company until physically re-visited orceremonially called up into being in sacred song or ritual enactment(cf. Wallace, 1977:130). (Otherwise, there's the uncertainpossibility that the emplaced Dreaming can manage to reach out and be'caught up' into the rhythms of a human sleeper's dream.)A feature of this religion born of nomadism is that emplaced Dreamingsare fated to a structured and required loneliness that is made theirlot. I noted earlier that people dread to be 'left' to'walk lonely'. (For Yirrkala peoples and to emphasise itsjural nature as a sanction, Nancy Williams (23) glosses 'walkinglonely' as the legally required state of 'temporary internalexile,' borrowing her terminology from Stalinist Russia). It is aparadox of religion that peoples who themselves avoid loneliness andcontrive to move around in convivial association with their fellows,celebrate spirits of Dreamings that, by constitutional emplacement, areconsigned to the interim and often long-lasting durations that separateone act of human visitation from the next. It's a recipe fordistress.

A general (and otherwise puzzling) characteristic of Dreamings isaccounted for as a product of structured loneliness. Because often leftalone and unsupported, Dreamings out of their solitude (or out ofexperience of the restricted spirit-company of their locale) are apt toover-react or become 'upset' even to the extent of going'wild'. Upset Dreamings act capriciously and for no(discernible) good reason. Dreamings that are roundly upset becomecharacters that are 'cranky' by nature. Such a Dreaming mayseem no longer to have the capacity to discriminate between rightful andwrongful approaches that humans make to the site in which it isemplaced. Cranky Dreamings can randomly lash out, doing immense andgratuitous damage. Understandably then, the potential for upset andcrankiness in Dreamings conditions all relationships between humans andthe Divine. Addressing any Dreaming at any time is an act fraught with'lotta risk, lotta danger'. And the really bad times are timeswhen a series of petulant and de structive acts issue forth and areattributed to some Dreaming which thereby shows that it has entered intocrankiness.

Dealing with 'upset' and 'cranky' statesattributed to Dreamings, one must register a reservation. These words donot stand unequivocally for derangement. They are words to be used by anobserver who can see no reason in some apparently ill-considered act (orseries of actions) perpetrated either by a person or a Power. However,one is not privy to all that contributes to another's motivations.An apparently cranky Dreaming may be responding to a history of insultor injury that is beyond one's ken. Unknown events could explaineither a person's or a Dreaming's seemingly untowardperformances. Separation from a sited Dreaming for considerable periodsis a structural condition. Its eternal consequence is that lots canhappen during those periods of time that the custodians of the Dreamingsite must spend elsewhere. Knowledge comes of shared experience whileignorance and incomprehension of the other can be the consequences oftime unshared. So while the words 'upset' and'cranky' are categorical attributions that come out ofobservation of the acts and the comportment of persons or Dreamings toposit untowardness of behaviour, they carry with them that in-builtreservation which is: 'Based on the information to hand...'Cranky Dreamings seemingly are so; what is certain is that these areDreamings whose apparently erratic acts are to be treated as signs of'that very danger'.

We have, in all this, derived a condition of Aboriginal religionpreviously only asserted or posited in ethnographies. The finding isthat structural loneliness experienced as isolation of being accountsfor potential 'upset,' the peculiar emotional susceptibilityof the emplaced Dreaming.

THE LIVING COUNTRYSIDE

Elizabeth Povinelli (1993:1) writes that: 'speech and sweat(of Aboriginal people) are seen to affect a sentient landscape'. Inthis vein, each living countryside responds to the people who enter ontoit, recognising the familiar presence and rejecting the outsider. Therelationship between person and countryside is refreshed and intensifiedas hunters and foragers quest over the land, winning provisions but alsocommunicating through each act of procurement with emplaced Dreamings inthe landscape. As they travel, people renew their individual reek in thememory of the land by 'chucking sweat' (Povinelli, 1993) inthe direction of those sites in which Dreaming power is concentrated.

My own work yields discussion of movement along those 'padsfor footwalking'. We have two words of Aboriginal English toconsider. 'Footwalk' is novel coinage whereas 'pad'is a word that has been rescued from that way-back era that precededeven 'that horse and buggy time'. Specialised into AboriginalEnglish, 'pad' together with 'footwalk' are wordsthat serve the usage that insists that barefoot pedestrianism (that, ofitself, grooves paths and keeps them clear) is communion with country.Because country is marked and modified by a walker's traversings,the moments of each walker's communion with country are given theirmemorial. They are: 'Put in(to) that country'. So, during theconduct of a dispute over the ownership of land, a protagonist repliesto challenge by 'singing out':

'My country that! Go look, you gonna findim. My footprinteverywhere!'

The verb 'to find' is often used in the sense of'discovering something from out of the Dreaming'. The designsof artists, the mimes of dancers, songs of the singers, tunes fordidgeridoo, designs for paintings, new words apposite to new realities,the names for children yet to be born: all these are found things thatcome of the Dreaming. Vintage footprints have long been invisible to thehuman eye. Yet they remain as traces in the memory of country.

'My footprint everywhere!' When time and time again, thespeaker has sedimented his relationship into traversed countryside, itfollows that his natural allies should be none other than the Dreamingsof the very country whose human ownership has been put at issue. Hespeaks out of the confidence of connection, his sureness grounded in hisconviction that the country itself knows him and still is happy (anduncranky) in its relationship with him. (24)

Now let us come to terms with a doubling. The'Featherfoot' features broadly in Aboriginal traditions as thecommissioned revenge-killer who puts on feather-soled shoes so that hemay search out his quarry without leaving tracks behind him. No humantracker will be able to follow up the movement of this man'straceless passage. However, the revenge killer is not only hiding hisidentity from people. He is also working to conceal the nature of hisbeing from the sentient country on which he walks. Country could alertlocal landholders to his malevolent presence. In all, the sole of thefoot is regarded as an organ of mediation communicating weight of personto resilience of country, touch of country to touch of person. Suchtactile giving and receiving results in a mutuality of understanding.Incrementally, persons come to knowledge of country and country toknowledge of persons. And such two-way exchanges qualify, step by step,as 'feeling'. Writing about Aboriginal people in SouthAustralia, Diane Bell rema rks that:

For Ngarrindjeri, paying attention to feelings is critical tostaying in touch with the land, and the feelings are grounded in theparticularities of kin and country. Thus when a person speaks of theirfeelings about a place being hurt, they are providing a reason whycertain practices (in relation to land) are injurious. (Bell, 1998:224,emphasis supplied)

The supposed ability of revenge killers to do their work withoutleaving signs can only increase the general sense of the world'srisks and dangers while intensifying the sense of personal vulnerabilityalso. Another fear is to be piled on top of these. There is a livelyconviction that innocent people are often punished for the wrongdoing ofothers. Extended to the judicial system, this yields the spectre ofspending years in prison 'doing another bloke's time'.That a crime was committed is conceded. However, the convicted personcontinues to protest innocence. Within the Aboriginal jurisdiction,there is the notion that the 'wrong man' (it's almostalways a man), may well have been put to death by an avenger who hasacted with efficiency but on the basis of a faulty divination of guilt.(Nor would I be so assertive had I not been witness to sessions ofdivination that were designed to discover the identity of a killer. Ihave also conducted prison interviews with a man who delivered up anitem of Aborigin al prison culture saying that that he, like all thoseother prisoners he chose to have as mates in jail, was one prisoneramong the many who were each and every one of them 'doing anotherman's time.') (25)

In Elizabeth Povinelli's (1993) book, a detailing of thedeposition and imprinting of personal histories in countryside fromgeneration to generation progressively unreels. All along, the face andbeing of country acts as a giant and complex receptor. And this receptoris particularly acute to those sensed things that proclaim thesingularity of persons. To begin with, there is the sound of theindividuating voice. Similarly distinguishing are the sweat, the bodyodour, the blood, the handprint, the buried umbilical cord,foot-pressure on ground, a person's hair in the wind and the tracesof singularity in each person's very own walking style. Povinellialso deals with the disinspiriting of a country of the Darwinhinterland. The people did not say that relict country was dead, butthat the Dreaming had 'gone inside' and was now sealed offfrom human reach. Povinelli, however, does not find reason to enlargefully on that aspect of 'sentient' that would cause a writerto treat countryside as an entity 'that feels or is capable offeeling'. For such an account, I turn from her ethnography toanother kind of writing.

DE PROFUNDIS: STORY ABOUT FEELING

My chosen Aboriginal guide to meaning is Big Bill Neidjie whosebook of exposition is an assisted publication called Story AboutFeeling, based on oral deposition and edited by (anthropologist) LukeTaylor. This pocket-sized paperback contains 171 pages of essential textsub-divided into 59 'stories'. The stories are articles offaith and are presented in stanzas of irregular length. There is norhyming. Not the form alone, but the intensity of passion together withthe breathless pace of the work, makes of it a canticle. (Pace ofattestation in Story About Feeling puts me in mind of FrancisThompson's [1922] Hound of Heaven running relentlessly in pursuitof the reluctant soul that plunges down 'the labyrinthine ways' of counter-religious argument.) (26)

Big Bill Neidjie proselytises. He works to extend participation inAboriginal Dreamings. He wants to endow those who visit his region withthe capacity to recognise the significance of the up-thrust of eartheven as they step off the tourist bus and put foot to ground in Kakadu.If only you've been readied for the moment, you'll discoverthat first footfall on a country is 'new feeling'. It'sthe tremor that signals the beginning of one's engagement with thesentience of new place. So, Story About Feeling can function as a neededand religious alternative to the prattle of the tourist guide whosespruik is grounded in a knowing ignorance: 'Just look at all thepaintings and see what they used to paint. It's all the things theyate. You've got to say this: Aboriginal people used to come tothese rocks to paint their menu.' (The last word, proclaiming thetotemism of things that are 'good to eat,' is uttered in acadence of triumph. Use of the past tense has relegated Aborigines ofKakadu to history, creating an absence.)

You listen my story and you will feel imBecause spirit e'll be with you.You cannot see but e'll be with you and with me. (p.115)

Big Bill Neidjie deals with a situation of ultimate reference. Hespeaks out of fright. 'We fright little bit we can stop himmining' (p. 81). 'E'll destroy our plants, tree, fish andmight be people ... That way I bit fright or scared' (p. 157). ThenBig Bill looks back to the ancestors who have passed away, leaving himbehind as one of the perilously few survivors who still commandknowledge of the Dreamings: 'That mob dead ... oh me ... Ifright.' His is a twofold dread. Big Bill fears (i) that countrymay be despoiled and (ii) that the new generation will be deaf to theDreaming stories. Without stories, his successors will live neitherhappily nor long because, without the knowledge that opens self tofeeling, a person cannot survive to continue in the land.

As I construe Bill Neidjie's work, the central andscene-setting exposition on social and religious realities is containedin the long story I characterise as: Parable of The Severed Head (pp.123-142). In Bill's cousin's tribe 'over on Ulbuside,' a father with four children, all old enough to go foraging,is eager to tell stories about feeling whenever the family settles aboutthe camp fire at night. There are two brothers. One brother always runsaway, dismissing stories: 'Ahh ... that only silly that'(p.127). The other brother always listens. Two grown daughters in thefamily join the truant male whenever the old man launches into story.The two women are outspoken. They say the stories are all worthlessbecause these tales cannot 'give them flavour' (p.128). Theboy who listens is put through nature's litanies. He learns to nameall things and all creatures. Then he receives the lore that tells ofthe properties of each named thing. Spirit is brought alongside him.Both inspirited and knowing, this boy always will find game.

The old man tries again to persuade the recalcitrant lad. Theboy's reply is an insult: 'You only telling us liar'(p.134). The women together with the boy of imprecations and refusalsthen go off heedlessly into the countryside. They disregard the old manwho predicts that they will get into trouble -- Might be crocodile! Inthe evening, the careless brother does not come home. The virtuousbrother wants to set out right away to search for his closestcountryman. Father is stern: not until morning or you'll get killedyourself! When morning comes, the boy sets Out to find his brother. Whathe discovers on the riverbank is a severed head with staring eyes.

Crocodile bin kill im.That head he brought im back.In the bank he left it.Crocodile he cutted his neck...And all that body e ate it.That old man he was know. (p. 137)

Meanwhile, the two women catch up with 'that short blokeWarrawarrarrayngumuwar' (p. 140). Because they haven'tlistened, they don't recognise this short spirit with the long namefor the devilish character he is. Before sunset, Warrawarrarrayngumuwarhas killed the sisters. The old man had prophesied misfortune. He feltthat the sisters would not see the end of day. (While a nocturnalpredator took the victim boy, his sisters were taken by a spirit of theday. If they'd all have gotten feeling, they'd all have hadthe guarantee that they would neither be smitten by creature of the daynor by any being that goes about by night. Feeling gives the kinds ofimmunity apposite both to darkness and to light.) (27)

The story ends only when The-Boy-who-Always-Listens goes to findhis reward. He finds flavour in nine varieties. First, of course,there's honey of stingless native bee; then there's green fatof sea turtle; richness of goose egg with its deep yellow yolk; goosemeat browned on the outside but, underneath, a succulent white; filesnake's round steaks that are neither fish nor fowl nor beef; thenfish and, after the ordinary fishes, that fish of fish, the barramundi.Finally, to round off the list, the long-necked turtle of fresh waters,this one both food and aphrodisiac. Whatever this boy puts on his wishlist, he then finds -- all because he listened and got feeling.

What's that noise going in the sky?Well e never go before ...sky.E never listen plane, chopper...You worry (for) country.Used to be beautiful, nice green.But now I just look treeWhere that bulldozer pull it out. (p. 151)

Big Bill Neidjie lives up against Ranger, the biggest open-pituranium mine in the world. The pit is next to Kakadu, a world heritagenational park. All about this country are wetlands subject to annualinundation. The mine has a tailings dam sited near a great river. Thereare bulldozers and the exploration choppers that fly about andthere's chopping down of trees. There's a lot to make oneworry for country.

Big Bill is concerned about contriving a future in which peoplewill have feeling and relate properly to country. He looks back to theinception of relations between indigenous Australians and the incomerswith regret. 'First go,' in the moment of first encounter, thewhite man 'he put chain' (p. 164). The police used to bringAborigines into town marching in single file, all strung together bytheir necks. Police practice was to detain the 'materialwitness' as well as the alleged perpetrator of a crime. Lookingback, Big Bill disapproves mightily. His answer is to make a joke forwhitefella and blackfella to consider when coming to terms with history:'Aborigine had chain in the neck (i.e. not pain in the neck) firstgo!' (ibid.). Big Bill's pun puts a laugh into the statementthat, in Aboriginal experience, whitefellas have been a right pain fromthe very start. Having made this point, Bill returns us to the presentby pointing to the persistence of 'rough' whitefella ways withfish. European fishers waste fish by leaving flesh, bone, scrapings andby-catch on the riverbank. They have no feeling for fish as a totemanimal deserving of respect. (28) With regard to miners, Big Bill saysthat people from the big corporations badger traditional owners tillthey wear them out. The miners win a forced consent and then get on withtheir ripping and bulldozing. Teachers and missionaries are, perhaps,the worst of all. They bring boys and girls to alternative realities;they're the ones who give young people grounds for asserting thatthe Dreaming stories are all 'liar'.

Whereas Povinelli emphasises sweat as the mediating body-productthat brings one to familiarity with Dreamings, Bill Neidjie speaks ofhair.

While you listen this story,E (the Dreaming) may be longside you and you feeling.You say ...'Oh! I bit fright. My hair is standing!' (p. 111)

That's frisson of the Dreaming.

Now consider this image. In the sacred 'ring place'(forbidden to women), a man is standing with a string of about a metrelength in hand. The string is fixed to a bullroarer and this string ismade of human hair that has been twisted strongly into form by awoman's manual labour, rolling string on thigh. The man sets theroarer whirling. It spins and twists through air. Even distanced peoplehear the instrument give voice to ebb and flow of sound as of a risingand falling gale. Here is special and magical concentration. Almostevery day, wind rinses through men's beards or pulls one'shead of hair gently against the scalp - that's feeling. But themystery of the bullroarer is that voluntaristic wind is moved by humanagency to sound its cadence at a human's behest. Out of thin air,the man calls up the honey-thickness of a whirlywind to move and soundabout him.

On those days that are very still, Big Bill Neidjie feels furthestfrom the Dreamings. He is then all but unable to recite the Dreamingstories. Whenever he tells stories, he likes to be in touch and feelspirit in its moving. He often speaks of string, string that connectspeople to the Dreamings. As I said before, string can be unwound like astory line that was rolled up in a sacred site. String functions inritual to join together and capture things that become tied into theenactment (e.g. Morphy, 1998). Power runs along the vital strings ofhair and people feel it running. Trees are important. One reason why isthis: trees answer so evidently to the wind's movements, feelingmore strongly than other things with their myriad leaves in the air andtheir hair roots stretching down, sensing the under-earth in whichlocated Dreamings finish up. The trees, Bill Neidjie says, 'arepumping'. Also, our blood is pumping. And we are topped with hair.

Story About Feeling is directed to an outside world. Out of thedepths of worry and concern, Big Bill Neidjie sends out his stories andpronouncements trying to convert a world so evidently at risk:'Maybe you only spoil it world or spoiling our eating' (p.85).You'll notice that Big Bill Neidjie's use of 'only'has everything in common with 'little bit'.

BILL NEIDJIE AND 'HEART CRACK'

In the country around Kakadu, a new and epic emotion has beenbrought into existence. The predicament Big Bill Neidjie describes isthe threat of discontinuity of 'culture'; that is, the failureof inter-generational transmission of knowledge and, hence, the death offeeling which comes not of blood nor of genes but of knowledge. Theprospect brings Big Bill Neidjie to 'heart crack' (p.95).

It's due to mission and to school that Bill Neidjie entersinto discourses of the heart. Yet he's heartfelt in his very ownway. 'Heart crack' may seem to be reminiscent of the'broken and the contrite heart the Lord will not despise'.(29) But in no way is it this. 'Heart crack' is BigBill's term for his response to perceived crisis. And there'ssomething about use of the term that I don't know. Back to BigMaxie: is 'heart crack' a term invented by the author of Storyabout Feeling or, otherwise, is it a word that the people of BigBill's speech community now have and hold in common? Either way,'heart crack' has ended up in print. There it functions as theterm for the traditionalist's despair at the threatened passing oftradition. In The Parable of the Severed Head, two women and one boydied. In Bill's cousin's tribe 'over on Ulbu side,'only one of the old man's four children could be brought to listenand (through listening) come into a due inheritance of flavours. (30)The message of this story is contained in a ratio. For the author ofStory about Feeling, the measure 1 / 4 is about the deafness of ageneration. Small wonder that it leads to 'heart crack'.

The arrival of 'heart crack' is consequent on alterationsin the calculus of value in Aboriginal communities in the Top End.Throughout the region, there is awareness of the death of Aboriginallanguages; there has been burial and 'putting down' of sacrathat once functioned as icons in ceremonies nobody now remembers; peopleof whole language-owning groups have died out; there are moribundgroupings represented by a few elderly and childless survivors; in somecommunities, young men refuse initiation; some of the Seers and Songmensay that they can no longer see or hear the Dreamings that used to visitthem. In some communities, local tradition runs strong. And the strongtraditions and languages can embrace and then absorb to themselvesmembers of populations who, in times past, would have rejoiced in theindependence and distinctness of their own tongues and stories andrituals and law. Within the field of inter-group relations, the culturalimperialism of demographically favoured groups is real. I am poi ntingnot only to loss of classic forms, but also to an uneven distribution ofgrowing and diminishing repertoires of traditional practice.

Outside agencies participate in the politics of culture. One of themost important culture-preserving events has been the decision in amulti-lingual community, that such-and-such a language will henceforthfeature locally as a language of instruction in school. A well-made andinformative film on the introduction of mother tongue education into theinitial years of schooling has the evocative title: Not to Lose you myLanguage. The title implies that an urgent recouping is in order. Butwhat of the local languages not thus chosen?

In this regional context, Aboriginal people have taken the word'culture' into their speech. In Story about Feeling, Big BillNeidjie invokes the word 'culture' many times. Sometimebetween that 'first go' when Aboriginal people 'gotchain' and the present era of uranium mining, Aboriginal people ofthe Top End entered into new awareness of 'culture' as themedium in which they lived and found their being. The Australian Northhas always been a place of many languages and, hence, of separatelinguistic identities. Often, a person's parents had primeallegiance to separate tongues. Children generally became bi-lingual andindividuals 'caught' further languages as their lives tookthem abroad. There would, historically, have been waxing and waning ofgroups. But now people envisage the possible loss and disappearance ofAboriginal culture and the continuance of the 'newgenerations' as ignorant children of 'mixing', of T.V.babble, rude rap, and the take-over of Aboriginal English or creoles.What's seen to be at stake is the survival of Aboriginal culture inthe face of all that would overcome it.

CROCODILE'S CONCESSION

We're left with a puzzle. Why did a crocodile render up thathead? The first step towards an answer is to recognise this Crocodilefor the prodigy that is a Dreaming Power incarnate. One manifestation ofa Dreaming is its incarnation in the most prodigious (and/or aged) localrepresentative of a totem species. It was a Dreaming Crocodile thatenacted a placement, siting severed head on riverbank. Big Bill suppliesthe reason for the act: Crocodile-of-the-Dreaming gave up the head tosignify that no crocodile can bear to look a human in the eye. This isto reassert the significance of feeling.

In human affairs, people demand preliminary eye contact (theeye-flash of consenting engagement) whenever they set about pronouncingon some matter. Crocodile cannot enter into the routines that conveyshared meanings that humans gain from one another by way of speech. Socrocodile returns eyes, tongue, mouth, lips, ears and voice box-theanatomy for the business of rendering and receiving messages inlanguage. Crocodile's delivery of the severed head is commentary:'Have back that in which we have no share.' Crocodile coulddevour the boy because this stubborn fellow in his arrogance (a knowing'deafness') had in no way tried to work through feeling and soenter into fellow-being with those spirits of the Dreaming that use nospoken words.

In Story about Feeling, I see a parallel with Berndt's (1962)account of the Elcho Island 'adjustment movement' of 1957.Bemdt reports how men of Elcho Island (now Galiwin'ku) brought outtheir sacred icons and put them on public display to keep company with acrucifix in an outdoor sanctuary fronted by a preacher's lecternthat faced serried rows of forms arranged to seat all those who came tohear the ministry of the word. Elcho Islanders sought to combine andsynthesise two traditions of the sacred. They entertained a hope. Whitesinvited to services would be exposed to the power and feeling of theicons. A mystical synthesis would ensue. Triune Christian spirit wouldcommingle with Dreamings in the souls of participants during rites ofamalgamation. As Keen (1994:276) has it, there was an attempt 'toextend relationships of amity to whites through shared sacra'.

Through publication of his book, Big Bill Neidjie is also trying toeffect rapprochement. He works to achieve transference of Aboriginalreligiosity. His intention is to bring his unknowing readers to someappreciation of the vibrant channelling he knows as 'feeling'.The Elcho Island mob broke taboo by revealing icons celebrated in secretmen's business. But Big Bill is adamant: never will he say anythingabout concealed or 'inside' truths of men's ceremonyenacted at 'the ring place' (p. 101). Rather, in discussingrelations with the Divine, Big Bill has much in common with people ofthe Cox Peninsula as represented by Povinelli. He talks about quotidian religion. Concerned with day-to-day experience of wonders of the livingcreation (and their measured consideration before sleep at thefireside), Big Bill announces that feeling's found in each renewalof encounter with live things of the countryside. But to make sense ofany encounter, you have to know the right story ('Them people nostory. That way they get [fatal] accident' [p.120].) As for thefood quest, success comes Out of an educated appreciation of the spiritof one's prey. Diane Bell (1998:220) remarks that (in SouthAustralia) coming to knowledge through cultivation of feeling is apotential vouchsafed to all people, 'but not all develop thisaspect of their sentient selves' (emphasis supplied).

In the story of the severed head, crocodile acknowledges thebarrier that limits voiced conversation to exchanges between livinghuman beings. To bring the world to the channelling he calls'feeling,' Bill Neidjie recited to create a book thatresembles Dryden's Religio Laiici or the Religio Medici of Browne.Drawing as much on received tradition as on personal experience, Storyabout Feeling is an exemplary text. The document is 'framed'to attest its author's 'particular devotion' (Browne,[1643] 1886: 17). (31)

SENTIENCE AND BLUCHER'S BOOTS

'You know that olfella? Long one, gottim white hair, quietman, ceremony man, can't walkin right. They callim thatfellaBlucher for that boot.' One is brought to wonder: does ol Bluchertake his boots off when he climbs into his swag at night?

The retired Blucher still goes about in Stockman's gear. Andhis Stockman past is taken to his frame. Stand behind him and look tosee how years of riding have twisted Blucher's hip-joints and bowedhis legs to turn them into saddle-clamps, a specialisation of the bodythat has compromised his walk. In a pocket of Northern Australia, thename 'Blucher' evokes no tale of a Prussian general whobrought his cavalry to bear at Waterloo just in time to turn the battleand save the day for the British and for Wellington (another general andanother type of boot). Rather, 'Blucher' is metonym thatstands for everything a distinguished one-time Stockman has been and is.And see what's happened to the type of boot? It's called forits inheritor. 'Blucher boot? Thatta boot like that olfella Blucheralways puttin on.'

The Blucher story is brought to this accounting so that I can dealwith an alterity. Aboriginal discourse reaches towards summativeappreciation by way of cumulative attribution--the presentation of astring of traits followed by the privileging of one of these traitswhich then becomes badge-trait and sign for the distinguished set. (32)So it is with Blucher and his boots.

Again, Aboriginal discourse refines broad and inclusive categoriesby referring to realisations. This is to work by'for-instancing' -- a way of working that proceeds by pointingto happenings, to situations and to scenes. So I can tell stories togive character to three, five, ten sorts and kinds of fright. There wasthe time we came home from the pub and that Mission mob abused thewomen; time ol Paddy tangled with that Python Dreaming at Bury Springsand got all crippled up; time the Buffalo charged at Humpty Doo; timethey grabbed me for circumcision; time when that Cyclone Tracey comingup; time when that policeman Sergeant Murphy got me -- he charged me forduffing cattle though I had done nothing wrong and he gave me thetrifecta.

In its primary sense, 'trifecta' is a punter's termthat stands for predicting the outcomes of three different horse-raceswhen making a single bet. Applied to police practice,'trifecta' stands for a well-used combination of three add-oncharges. These are: resisting arrest, swearing at a police officer andaggravated assault (whacking no ordinary mortal). From a policestandpoint, the beauty of the 'trifecta' is that even if theaccused is found 'not guilty' on the cattle duffing (or otherprimary) charge, the circ*mstances of the arrest remain to be consideredby the magistrate. An accused can be sentenced not for doing anythingwrong in the first instance, but for vigorously (all too vigorously)protesting innocence. And, I must add, solely on the say-so of thepolice.

Primary charge plus 'trifecta' is a whitefella invention;furthermore, as add-on charge it's a four-bit string that has thecharacter of cumulative attribution so evident in Aboriginal discourse.But now we come to difference. Once upon a time, some policeman-puntermade the definitive connection between three-race betting and thethree-charge combo. While this policefella and metaphorical sense of'trifecta' now vests in Aboriginal English, the concept onlygot there by police transport. Aboriginal way, a speaker originallywould have been inclined to say: 'And that Sergeant bin give methat whole lotta charge like themfella always putting on.' (Again,Aboriginal customers at McDonalds cheerfully order 'thecombo'. Their native wit would give you: 'Themfella sellingthat hamburger, fries and big bottle lolly-water altogether for fivedollar.') My point is that 'sentient' is a whitefellaword like 'combo' and 'trifecta'. It stands for acombination of things and the connections between them; in short, for ac omplex. Such words carry discourse to levels of abstraction removedfrom primary characterisation. In a world where systematic and habitualabstractions are not routinely made, Aboriginal discourse deals withsentience in its distinct manifestations. (33)

There is 'jus watching'; then there's watching forwitness (attending to detail and providing running commentary) and thereis watching out (or special alertness). There is general 'lookinground' and the intensified form, a 'looking out for'which is active search or quest. There is 'peeping' whichmeans intruding on the privacy of others by giving ear to theirconfidences. There is 'hearing' which means taking inmessages, processing those messages and concurring in them. People saidto be 'deaf' are the socially autistic; such men or womenrefuse either to 'hear' or 'listen'. They won'tbe told but choose instead to live in space beyond reasonableness andoutside the moral law as did the three doomed characters in The Parableof the Severed Head. One learns quite a lot from smell (sniff the seatof the truck to discover who was last driver). Then there's'feeling' in all the ways advertised by Bill Neidjie. Afurther dimension to feeling is tuning in to others -- sensing where anabsent child now is; recei ving the waking premonition thatsomeone's about to walk into danger; sympathetic participation inthe actual sorrow or the let down of another (either the sorrow or thedisappointment of the other itself reaches out to embrace one; this isgiven as emotional jointure rather than empathy -- like being wreathedtogether in the emotion-smoke of a single camp fire). Finally,there's the capacity to dream and, through dreaming, to travel tofar-away country, to 'find' songs, designs and ceremonies orto he given intimations, premonitions, warnings and visions. To all thisadd experience of emotion attendant on perception. The resultingcompendium is sentience. Being sentient can, indeed, be recognised as'the property in which all the faculties and affections of the soulare rooted' (my translation of Francois Quesney [1760], cited inepigraph above).

DREAMINGS AND ELEGY

In Aboriginal belief, it's along the planes of sentience andcommunication that people are distanced both from Dreamings and from allthose living things that are not human. Essential themes in Dreaminghistories concern shifts that have transformed or altered the capacityof each being to communicate or sense or act. An important Daly Riverstory tells how Dog fails to make fire in order to cook a cheeky yam. Inhis moment of misdirection, Dog eats this dangerous vegetable raw andunprepared. Having used 'wrong wood' for firesticks,Dog's hands are turned into the swollen, big-blistered andun-dextrous paws that are dog feet. Dog no longer sweats but salivatesand caustic cheeky yam has done Dog's voice-box in to the extentthat Dog barks and howls and growls but no longer speaks. So much forthe deficit side. But Dog is fleet of foot, has acute powers of bothscent and hearing, has a weaponry of teeth, his hairs bristle expressively and he is credited with sight into the invisibilities ofthe Dreaming. Dogs can 'look that spirit' and so watch-dogsshould alert their owners whenever a spirit presence looms. Dogs speak alanguage on its own. Dog-language, the languages of each sort of bird,the bee-buzz tongue, bull-buffalo bellow and the answering lowing of thecow: these are tongues accessible only to those born to them.There's an After Babel (34) aspect to the Dreaming. Speciation brought with it linguistic differences that signal the hermetic separation of kinds of beings for all that long duration that succeedsthe era of first creation.

The Western Kimberley is famous for anthropomorphic Dreamingscalled Wanjinas. A Wanjina is associated with each Kimberley clan and ismanifest as a painting on a cave wall or rockface in the clan'sestate. The Wanjinas participate in a division of labour, each havingresponsibility for the increase of a particular species so that the workof all the Wanjinas taken together accounts for the yearly renewal ofthe world (Blundell, 1980). Capell (1972) has detailed the stories ofthe Wanjinas of the Ngarinyin clan by clan to show how each Wanjinastory finds its destination in the punch-line that brings adventure toits end: 'And the Wanjina turned into a painting.' In thepaintings, Wanjinas are manifest as great white Caspar-like figures withowl eyes and faces. Before they turned into paintings, Wanjinas spoke upand spoke out -- Capell's recorded stories register their reportedspeech. But Wanjinas of the rock walls (now become paintings) have nomouths. And this is a great mystery (Wise, 1985:80).

The mystery of the mouthless Wanjinas can be resolved to assist ustowards the appreciation of a generality of the Dreamings. WheneverDreamings 'finish up' and 'go inside' to becomeemplaced, they leave behind them the world of everyday communication andenter wholly into the word of feeling. Nor do they eat as do the humansor animals they leave behind them. They have no gusto, no satiation in'good belly'; they no longer seek for nor find'flavour'. If the Kimberley Wanjinas can stand forspeechlessness, certain of the anthropomorphic Dreamings painted in EastArnhemland can stand for the enlargement of desire. In these figures,penes are tree trunks while vagin*s are vast caves. Dreamingsconstitutionally are randy. Driven by desire, they can be very jealous.We have already noted their proneness to upset and rage.

Parable of the Severed Head, Dog's story, Wanjinas and thegenital Arnhemland paintings are to be taken together and made cumulateto yield a perception of the differences that separate people fromDreamings and Dreamings from people. Histories of the Dreaming beingsare dominated by a destiny principle, the principle of diminution. Inand through their transformations, Dreamings end up by experiencing aparticularisation into lesser and more limited being. Diminution is alsomade evident through the relativities that are evident when, species byspecies, one contemplates the particularities of talent (and relativedisadvantage) peculiar to each kind of non-Dreaming being. And wheredoes such contemplation lead?

J.R.R. Tolkien (1983) protested that the Anglo-Saxon, Norse andIcelandic sagas that were his special study, were not to be genericallyrepresented as tales of the heroic. He instructs his readers that,overall, the tone of these sagas is muted; the mood is elegiac. (Acentury before, this was also Tennyson's perception as he used aViking funeral to model the solemnities that bring his Morted'Arzlzur to its end.) So with the mood of Dreaming stories inAustralia. The origins of the differences that separate the sorts andkinds of beings, are historicised on the principle of diminution. Inthis world, Dreamings of passions unbridied, great power and thepetulance that is crankiness are diminished beings, bereft of speech. Inhuman experience, Dreamings often seem to be wantons acting out of theimmediacies of desire unmodified. And they are left to communicate withhumans through feeling which, as a two-way channelling, is far lesscertain than is speech.

To uncertainty, communication through feeling adds invidious discrimination. People do not all have equal access to the Dreamings.Rather, unequal access functions as a source of differential privilegeprojected politically into the hierocratic domination of Elders, CleverMen/Women, Seers, Songmen and the rest among the chosen. (35) The hightimes of the Dreamings ended with those finishings that each and alwayswere reductions. The legacies consequent on reduction then all add up toyield a speciated world inhabited by beings whose proclivities come oftheir own and particular woundings. (36) And so, in Tolkien's graveand measured sense (he deals with a whole literature), we in our turncome to deal with storied religiosity unendingly predicated in regret.Again, it's 'sorry' and 'poorfella my country'a tenor which is the product of all those stories that end up at thepoignant site where a diminished Dreaming is to be found resting.Resting, that is, until desire mounts again to make manifest the woundedand amoral incompleteness of a depleted being that must become possessedwholly by desire. Humans may marvel at the enormity of a Dreaming'swanton acts; they cannot also help but pity the desire-filled Dreamingin its throes ('Can't help himself, poor thing!').

As Dreamings all have chronically been bent or scarred or woundedand depleted, think again of that old and grey-haired Stockman Blucheras he walks on his bow legs towards mortality. Attend to Blucher'stracks in sand. The toes turn in and his sole is never flat for this isa man who must walk on the outside front edges of his feet. The stepsare short; the imprints are precise, for this is a walker who does notdrag his boots. These prints bespeak the controlled yet mincing totterthat is the Stockman's hard-got gait. In old Blucher's trackswe discover more than sign of unmistakable identity. Blucher'stracks signal diminution for they contain his medical history -- anaetiology of work-related injury and bodily deformation that makes oldBlucher 'crippled up'. A reading of old Blucher's tracksyields appreciation of his fatedness; so it partakes of elegy. And iselegy to be extended to all Stockmen of a receding generation; to allthe originals for the figures of the Aboriginal Stockman that Australianpa inters like Pro Hart have made the bent-leg cliches of their prolificoutback art?

There are two locations for pity (we're back with strings),the first linked to beginnings, the second to finalities. Pity for aperson in distress should provoke and call the generous (or dutiful)soul to act and render the saving service that may turn things round.Such pity, then, inaugurates. The pity of finalities is post hoccontemplation of some completed sequence of events whether located inlived experience or in story. Reflective pity is the post-catharticfamiliar of Aristotle's Poetics -- an after-Macbeth emotion. Butwith Tolkien as with the Dreamings, the 'elegiac' comes out ofthe compounding of many pitiful instances into a great and greatersorrowing about a range of most pitiful things that have been done andcannot be undone. In this vein and instance after instance, a governmentenquiry rendered to Australia the compounded stories of 'the StolenGenerations' of Aboriginal children who were taken away from theirparents by welfare authorities. The Aboriginal response was clearlyvoiced as t he call that each and every Australian should stand forthand 'Sorry'. Such sorrowing can be turned, can be taken onwardif proponents join together and, leaving the grieving behind them, thenenter together into a discourse of redemption.

RELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT

Total participation is a basic doctrine that refers to theconsequences of an individual's passage into engagement with theDivine. The point is that absorption into such engagement is sociallyincapacitating. One cannot, at one and the same time, attend to mundaneissues and commit self and being to spiritual encounter. A generalproblem is posed concerning time and the division that separates thesacred from the mundane. In a poem, Wordsworth (1984:281) sets out toevoke for his readers the nature of a 'holy time'. Heenvisages a sacred moment by resorting to an image of female embodiment.His 'holy time' is given as time: 'quiet as a nun,breathless with adoration'. I have then to raise the spectre ofevil. Here's the rude question that breaks frame: where in thisreligious portrait (painted, I believe, by Botticelli) is the armedguard who stands ready to fend off the intending rapist?

As their precondition, moments of religious absorption require asecurity system. Individuals who yield their selves (and souls) toreligious service need somebody (and preferably someone who is bound byduty) unfailingly:

(i) to watch their backs and

(ii) attend to the correctness of their performances as they busythemselves, making addresses to Divinity.

The more time people spend on ritual and religion, the greater theneed for permanent and instituted arrangements that would secure them intheir removal from the mundane for the time that they engage absorbinglywith spirit. In the Top End, the great ceremony called Kunapipi(Stanner's 'Punj') endures for periods of six weeks tothree months and the most religiously active of the regionalcongregations seek to stage this ceremony every year. Great ceremoniesapart, there are, as well, the unavoidable rituals attendant on death,the rituals exclusive to women and the conversational rites of everydayobservance. 'Looking after country' is also a businesspunctuated by acts and moments of religious dedication. In all, thereligiously active are given over to total participation time and timeand time again.

In many places in Australia, to ensure the physical survival andthe bodily well-being of persons during times of religious absorption,the moiety system divides the people of a region into 'owners'and 'helpers' in relation to both ceremony and land. Specialrights in estates of land vest in members of the patrilineal clan. Thosewho own country as 'father's country' and'father's father's country' are identified with thepatriclan estate and wear the 'mark' (or design) of thatestate painted on their bodies during ceremonies. Persons linked toestates by patrifiliation are the people who will feel in their ownbodies the ripping up of patrimonial country by the bulldozers -- theripping that 'goes right through them'. Theirs is the onus ifcountry is damaged or if sacred sites on country are made desecrate.

When people enter into rites which refer to the Dreamings of their'father country', they proceed at risk. Theirs is avulnerability and they are imperilled. If a 'wrong ceremonything' is done, the human guardians of ceremonial forms may put theculpable patrifiliate to death. Otherwise, angered Dreaming Powers mayavenge wrongs of ceremony. The persons held in thrall by the Dreamingsof their patriclan estate, are glossed into Aboriginal English as'owners' of that country and its rites. The'helpers' are persons whose ties extend to mother'sfather's country. Helpers are the people who work to see'owners' through dangerous ceremonial progressions. They alsopolice events, punishing any trespassers who do violence to thesusceptibilities of Dreamings. Working always to keep things'straight', the 'helpers' see to the preparation ofthe ceremony ground and it is they who paint the clan mark onto thebodies of clan members. They also fine 'owners' if sacrawithin the landscape come to harm. In sum, 'helpers' organiseceremonial while the 'owners' all 'go through'ceremony in engagement. At times, owners are the living objects uponwhich the Dreamings work; in other moments they are the beings in whichDreamings find embodiment and through which Dreamings are made known.

'Owners' of today's rites will, in their turn, actas 'helpers' in relation to the 'owners' of theirrespective mother countries. For the system to operate properly, themoieties must maintain exogamy. Also, the grand ceremonies must fallinto two categories to match the overall division of the population intothose on whom onus falls and those who are unfettered by ownership and,in all practicality, see things through.

Take these cultural assumptions to a reading of Macbeth and we haveMacduff as the grief-stricken owner of a trouble. One must then inferthat Malcolm is a man of the opposite moiety, the natural comforter. Hada brother of the bereaved Macduff appeared on stage, his also would bethe part of a primary mourner. Brothers have the same patriclan Dreamingand those who thus share in primary connection feel injury either toDreaming site or fellow totemite 'go through' them.

When either a totemite or a totem site suffers injury or death,people of primary connection should rally to repair 'hurtfeeling'. A moiety of those foregathered will 'sorry'.Those of the opposite moiety will rattle spears and vent anger. Thisdivision of emotional labour is well illustrated in Journey to theCrocodile Nest which is published both as a film and a written text.(37) The journey is that of a human spirit to be returned (post-mortem)to the Crocodile Dreaming. Text and film capture that moment in the riteof disposal when the congregation about the hollow log coffin falls intotwo sections, a division made up of those who manifestly grieve, whilethe other division is arrayed as a phalanx of warriors armed, prancing,angry and calling out for vengeance.

In sum, a division of emotional labour has its structure forrecruitment in the exogamous moieties that, quite obviously, wereinvented to structure such reciprocities of service. A principleunderlies the invention of moieties which are divisions that creatorDreamings put in place. Moieties were given their form to ensure thatthose who mourn shall be comforted, that the sick shall find succour,that deaths should be avenged and that all those who enter holy timesshall be provided with statutory guardians to watch their backs. In thelast analysis, the moieties, given of the Dreamings, are to be seen asan armature for recruiting persons to impact of emotion and forrecruiting persons also to abject emotion's complement, which isthe rendering of support to troubled souls for the time-span that isproper to the duration of today's particular distress. And wherethings are not organised on a categorical basis, there's a slidingdine from 'close up countrymen' to known others who, whilesignificant and know n, are not thus close. The division of labour isthen referred to an ontological distancing that distinguishes betweenthose gut-wrenched by distress and those whom social distance makessufficiently indifferent to the loss or infliction of the day.

THE DISALLOWANCE OF EMOTION

There is something left over in the business of accounting -- BigMaxie and his exceptional routines of speech. I have to explain thatthis man's repeated invocation of 'feeling' was no quirkof idiolect, but always an untoward appeal. Years and years have passedsince Big Maxie first entered my notebooks as a man who, unlike others,was wont to appeal to feeling. My appreciation of what he got up to inthose days is due to the benefit of hindsight. I have discovered that,in 1974, Big Maxie conducted his relationship with me on the basis of alie. Again and again, he 'gammoned' me and nobody was thengame to tell me that I was the unknowing victim of deceptions.

Big Maxie spoke (and still does speak) English that is'high'. I saw in him a potential interpreter -- not a meretranslator, but a man who might well offer up helpful exegesis. Hedeclined the part. His explanation was that his very facility in Englishcame of his distancing from Countrymen. He owed command of English to aStation Lady who let him 'run with' her own children when he,himself, was still a boy. He used to eat whitefella tucker and, atnight, he bedded down with his whitefella playmates in a fly-screened'sleep-out' on the veranda of the station manager'shouse.

Until his teenage years, Big Maxie (not then actually yet BigMaxie) spent all his time with the station-owner's kids. He becamea stranger to the 'blackfella' encampment in which his mother,father and younger siblings lived. Then he went on to work as a stationhand. By this time, he had taken the surname of the station manager forhis own. Having missed out on 'all that tribal business' as ayouth, he now held himself to be at a disadvantage. Claiming to knowless of ceremony and tradition than Aboriginal contemporaries, Big Maxiesaid that this was due to the fact that, in the past, he had gone'whitefella way'. He had been unwilling to participate eitherin 'ceremony business' or secular camp affairs 'In thatnative way, you know, like that Myall.' ('Myall' isfrontier English for an unreclaimed 'tribal' Aborigine wholives as a nomad in the bush.) But, Maxie added, the whitefellas were,in the end, to 'rubbish' him.

Big Maxie's patrons left the Territory. Without their specialsponsorship, he had no recourse but to rejoin his mother, his fivesiblings and the other people of the camps. By this time, BigMaxie's Aboriginal father was dead. Big Maxie married, as he said,'Aboriginal way' -- his Countrymen would say'Blackfella', not 'Aboriginal' -- and then he becamea local presence, moving between town camps and station camps of theDarwin region. General recognition of Big Maxie's fighting prowessattached the epithet of enlargement to his name. Not only did Big Maxieknow how to fight to effect; by general agreement, everyone alsorecognized that he never knew when to stop. Against odds of five or moreto one, Big Maxie would fight on till, as the legendary accounts allfinish up: 'They bin callim up that ambulance to pickimupthatfella.'

By 1974, Big Maxie was married and father to a clutch of kids. Hewas also given to 'running round'. (38) His frequent loveaffairs seemed always to end in trouble. And his fighting reputation ledirate husbands to attack him, not singly, but supported by 'backups'. Discharged from hospital, Big Maxie would return to his wifein the Darwin fringe camp, the evidence of a received bashing patent inbandages and facial scars. (Once he came back with his right arm inplaster.) He would then be fierce in representations. Displaying damage,he would appeal to feeling. He was asking the people of the encampmentto take his injuries to themselves. And this they would not do. Nor werethey frank about their refusals.

The problem was that Big Maxie's fighting comportmentthreatened everyone. He was a dubious Countryman. By birth and kinshipone of ours, Big Maxie posed repeated dilemmas. Nobody was willing todeny him as a Countryman. He was, after all, too strong and violent, toouseful as a potential fighting ally and -- besides -- too well connectedand, in his own way, too good a man: a member of a numerous family and aman with a rare reputation for providing for his own children. Amonglocals, he was acknowledged as top Stockman of his generation. Nor, inthe regard of his Countrymen, did Big Maxie's wife-beatingproclivities cancel his positive contributions. This order of violencewas neutered because he usually beat his wife after she had madederogatory and public comment on his philandering. And that's'own business', a domestic matter for a couple to resolvewithout recourse to outside intervention unless the wife has strong,bold and particularly supportive men among her kin who, furthermore, arewilling to t ake her troubles to themselves.

The outcome of such episodes was that Big Maxie would (as I nowwill put it) be 'gentled' out of town. He was encouraged toreturn to the cattle station that served him and his family asresidential base. The argument presented to Big Maxie was that our urbancamp had insufficient resources to cope: not enough Fighting Men to dobattle with all Big Maxie's enemies. In the openness of town, thosebent on vengeance could 'sneak up' anytime on the unsuspectingshopper. It would be better that Big Maxie left. Once he had left, BigMaxie would be consigned to membership of 'that Station mob.'His adventuring and alleged wrongdoing would then no more be counted asour camp's business. The Darwin campers thus worked to withdrawprotection from this too-fractious man but without telling him that hewas their Countryman no more. Nor was I purblind to the politics of allthe inflicted and threatened violence. What then I did not comprehendwas Big Maxie's special cry; his apparently unique and particularappeal to fee ling.

If anything I have so far written has made sense, the reader willappreciate the import of Big Maxie's calls. They were allpre-emptive. He was asking a mob to take the injuries consequent on hisphilandering to themselves. The mob would have been fool to do so. Butthe demand was entered by no ordinary man. I rather think that peoplewondered at me whenever I asked why Big Maxie spoke of feeling. If Icould not see for myself, who on local turf was going to spell thingsout and so expose the expediency of the nervous argument used over aperiod of days to persuade Big Maxie that station country was callinghim home? In this account, Big Maxie stands for the untoward appeal tofeeling. The response was disallowance of hurt feeling. Despite hisfighting presence, Big Maxie could never manage to rally a company tounite together with him in hurt feeling. Countrymen would not begathered up to requite the injuries to which Big Maxie's love lifemade him prone.

Essential to my charge against him of deception, is the fact thatBig Maxie is now to be numbered among those whom Elkin (1945)characterised as Aboriginal Men of High Degree. A leading man ofceremony, Big Maxie is now prominent as a teacher of the law. Those whoachieve this position ordinarily serve during their years of middlepassage as acolytes, learners and the evident followers of senior men ofceremony. Somehow, Big Maxie skipped apprenticeship. Quietly, hecontrived to listen and to learn without acknowledging debts tosponsoring seniors. He was, as he remains, never a man to admitsubordination on any count, even that of a law-receiver'spupillage. Yet this is not quite right. He always paid tribute to thatStation Lady who opened her kitchen to him, whose surname he still bearsand whose legacy is his competence in English that is 'high'.But then, as little Maxie, he always used to call her 'Mum'.

In general, professions of emotion are essayed more often than theyare allowed to pass as permitted utterance. There is active suppressionof any speaker who untowardly tries to make some emotion pertinent tothe definition of affairs in train. And the social particularity of theAboriginal construction and allowance of each recognised emotion isessential to the maintenance of a scheme of things in which act andemotion and person are related each one to the others in epic terms.

PROSPECT

The Abstract at the head of this essay is really the blurb for thebook on epic emotions that I never find time to write. I have stillsometime to show that all emotions in Aboriginal cultural conspectus areof the epic kind. I have yet to discuss the proliferation of emotions inother places, relating emergent forms to new currencies and values. Oneday I intend to compare Aboriginal ascriptions of covetousness with theconstruction of jealousy in the Hebrew Scriptures (especially in thewritings of the minor prophets) and thereby come to a properappreciation of the institution of marriage in Aboriginal tradition andcustom. I should do my proper duty and set the notions developed here inthe broader context of the anthropology of emotions.

With regard to analysis of the emotions in Aboriginal studies, Ican identity a brief series of works in which each contribution relatessomewhat to trends of analysis developed here. The series begins withCatherine Berndt's (1950) pioneering paper on 'Expressions ofgrief among Aboriginal women'. Catherine Berndt's contributionraises the issue of gender and emotion. She points to the leading partthat women play in mourning. Their expected and grief-stricken slashingsof head and body call out for a comforter's intervention lest theirself-woundings lead to death by loss of blood. To bloodied abandonmentin grief, I would add the public 'worry' by which women bringeither the absences of those they love, or their dread concerningpersonal futures to present attention; worrying for that kid that'saway visiting, worrying for what this or that person might have to facetomorrow. Sylvie Poirier (1996) brings dreams into focus and deals, inparticular, with the extent to which private emotional preoccupationscan through announcement of dreams be made relevant to the publicbusiness of the day. Vikki Burbank (1994) devotes a book to the anger offighting women while Marcia Langton (1988) treats female hurt, protestand anger expressed in diatribes of swearing as aspects of traditions ofdispute settlement. These considerations of emotion in situations ofpublic engagement all invite analysis of described emotion as moments instrings of consequential and epic progressions. I find it interestingthat the notions I develop in this essay have (within the Australiancontext) been most nearly foreshadowed in gendered studies (includingPovinelli, Bell and Payne, all cited above) in which attention is paidto women's expressive acts. More broadly, one may note that becausethe emotions we deal with are epic emotions, scenes of and for theirenactment will have been captured for anthropology to the extent thatthe ethnographer has attended to both actor and performances. Ananthropology of epic emotions requires the mod elling of those formsthat constitute events; equally essential is consideration of moments ofthe participating self.

While further applications of the theory of epic emotions toAboriginal ethnography are in prospect, the essentials of the theory areall stated in the introductory sections of this piece. In earlyparagraphs, I deliberately worked to set out a general theory withreference neither to any particular place nor to any designated peoplebut located, of course, in English. This resolve accounts (in part) formy literary allusions. The important thing is that the cited words andphrases have been taken from sources that are public and available. Withthe exception of Roy Campbell, I count them to be well known byEnglish-speakers of my generation. And when I venture a citation, I dointend (in the manner of the OED) to transport meaning from its contextof origin.

With regard to possible self-delusion concerning qualities ofemotions of the epic kind, I've never been so sure of my ownproposals. I could have uncovered the necessary illustrative material inHomer's Iliad or in the feud and controlled anger of the Bedouin orby comparing biblical times of the kings with those earlier times whenthere were no kings in Israel. An alternative project would be theexamination of the novels of Ernest Hemingway who liked to depictbullfights, agon and the pitting of Man against nature. It's myclaim that any of these would do as well. To deal with all of themtogether and in comparative perspective would be even better.

OF SAMENESS AND GREAT DIFFERENCE

The primary strings yielded by attending to Aboriginal discourseabout land are these four:

A. (i) Dispossessed Aborigines >>> (ii) become claimants>>> (iii) who are turned into traditional owners.

B. (i) Unalienated Crown land >>> (ii) made subject toclaim >>> (iii) is turned into Aboriginal freehold.

C. (i) People who sorry for country >>> (ii) profess'hurt feeling' >>> (iii) and end up satisfied asT.O.'s.

D. (i) A frightened hunting ground >>> (ii) is taken intocare and >>> (iii) returned to well-being.

When Paddy Huddleston said 'traditional owners got hurtfeeling,' he paired A (iii) with C (ii). Jural precision would havebeen in the pairing of A (ii) with C (ii). However, Paddy Huddlestonintended to do exactly what he did. To him, the ratification oftraditional ownership by all Wagiman was in the very mounting of theirclaim; therefore, he scorns to acknowledge the liminal time of dueprocess.

Parallel strings are yielded up as patterns for culturalregularities that inform action. And if we return to Malcolm andMacduff, we diagnose the hops and skips and jumps that are germane toShakespearian expression. Strings allow one to diagram the nature ofconceits.

'Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief convert toanger, blunt not the heart, enrage it.'

Swords are sharpened before bellicose encounter and the sorrowingMacduff must be taken out of grief and put into fighting mood. So far,so good. But then the notion of sharpening that which is unready forbattle is transferred outrageously to the mourner's heart. Oneneeds to attend somewhat to heart talk and excess.

Some condescending wit refers to the 'hydraulic theory'of the emotions (39) and a major characteristic of the hydraulic theoryis that it posits emptying and refilling. As one emotion is pumped out,its replacement pumps in because the relevant receptacle dislikesemptiness. In terms of the theory, there's always a'feeling' in situ, even if it's only the mild content of'going good'. The second law of the hydraulic theory is thatthe receptacle can only entertain one colour of emotion at a time; so wecan't have Violet, Slingsby and Lionel regarding sea creatures with'pity mingled with contempt'.

For much of the time, the hydraulic theory has the heart at itscentre as a pump. But hearts do not only fill and empty. They also throb more quickly in response to the beloved. They break, they are hardened('as in the wilderness'), they may be soft, they may go allout (as in 'full hearted'); unpretended emotion is heart-felt.The black heart! white heart contrast is not about emotion but aboutmoral disposition as is good-hearted. The Hebrew Scriptures deal with'circumcision of the heart', perhaps the most startling heartfigure of all time. And it's the King James Bible that made hearttalk the central discourse of the emotions in varieties of StandardEnglish.

Heart talk in English is often a figuring of one or other of theepic emotions. And further to it all, I propose that while people figureand dwell on experience of emotion, they only rarely envisage thereality of the progressions that I depict as strings. Like grammar,strings are real enough but belong generally to the implicit rules thatgovern performances. The stringing of epic emotions, as indicated in thefirst part of this essay, is encountered everywhere. Like rites ofpassage, primary strings are common to organised humanity. The generalproposition on which all else rests is that each culturally definedsituation of ultimate reference will have its set of strings that catchup epic emotions and point to endings -- surcease of pent emotion.

I want to end by remarking a great gulf of cultural difference. Irefer again to Shakespeare At the beginning of his History, Richard IIIis caught between two grand episodes in life. And he gives voice to thelong mood-of-the-times soliloquy that begins Act 1, Scene 1, (linel):

Now is the Winter of our discontent made glorious Summer by thissun of York and all our troubles in deep ocean buried...

That Richard deploys epic emotions is obvious. Fittingly, he dealswith a switching for an era of troubles has been superseded throughtheir happy resolution. And we are given the contrasting tenors ofpreceding and subsequent times by analogue with seasons.

I need now quickly to remark Richard's relation with Divinity.It's only because Richard's God is a visage vastly distancedin time and space from king and court that great liberties can be takenwith the language. Because Elizabethan drama has historically beenreleased to the freedoms of secularity, there's pathetic fallacyrampant.

When Divinity is close-up in country and inheres as a Dreaming inevery one of the known creations; when seasons are controlled byDreamings; when people sediment selves in country as they walk; whenDreamings and the right to represent them or to embody them are owned bylaw; when each person is a totemite, there's then a skein ofintimate and particular connections, string upon string, joining allthings and all persons in defined and particular relationship. Whenthings are all thus to be discovered ('found') in authenticplace, mighty twists of metaphor must wholly be ruled out. Any one ofthem would call for violent rearrangement of the firmament. Above all,this is a world of inter-related familiars that are contained in sitesand set along the paths where they belong. Here's no Elizabethanplaywright's universe of abstracted entities and cosmologicaldisjunctions. Rather, it's a world peopled somewhat as SaintFrancis has things in the Christian animism he invented. Knowing localidentities for what a nd who they are, one can reckon up and have to dowith that Brother Sun and Sister Moon and that Little Friend theApricot. (40)

POSTSCRIPT

The ABC broadcast the news of Big Bill Neidjie's death just asthis essay was going to press. Big Bill's relations have lifted theban that forbids all mention of the names of the dead. We can thereforesalute this elder, author and sage who worked to perfect his Kakadustories and make sure that they were 'exactly right'. Weshould sorrow in his passing.

NOTES

(1.) Garfinkel (1956).

(2.) After Durkheim's death in 1917, it was left to Mauss(Durkheim's surviving colleague, nephew and sometime collaborator)to write the essay of social determinations that was intended to snatchback studies of emotions from psychology, restoring their consideration(as outward and manifest states accorded social recognition) tosociology. Sadly, Mauss's (1923) late essay found no audience andrallied little response in France where, by 1920, Mauss had himselfbecome a lonely and almost anachronistic voice. He was bereft of ageneration of younger supporters because, almost without significantexception, the younger members of the Annee Sociologique had been killedin the carnage of the Western Front. In England, Radcliffe-Brown carriedDurkheimian interpretations forward. My characterisation of epicemotions has more than a little in common with RadcliffeBrown's([1922] 1948) consideration of grief in his study of the AndamanIslanders. Renato Rosaldo's outbursts (e.g. 1989) againstRadcliffe-Brown on grie f deserve detailed attention for his is anattempt to disallow the very capacity of epic emotions to framesituations and accord emotions to scenes. Rosaldo has it thatethnographic recognition of situationally constructed emotion is an acton the part of the western scholar that denies people of non-Westernsocieties the capacity individually to experience grief. The theory ofepic emotions would then be a form of Orientalism. Considerations ofspace do not allow the development of the polemic here.

(3.) There is a second sort of contraposition -- that betweenactors who situationally embody contrary emotions as they play outcomplementary or opposing roles.

(4.) The emptying and filling up visions of emotion which belong toEnglish usage have been referred to as aspects of the'hydraulic' theory of the emotions (cf. Myers, 1988) and isbriefly discussed in the conclusion to this piece.

(5.) 'The sick that do not speak' (Sansom, 1978) dealswith the abjection of the person discovered to be seriously ill anddocuments the proposition that Aboriginal people who experienceabjection lose the capacity to relate the history of their time oftravail. Histories of travail belong to those who work to rescue or healthe afflicted.

(6.) The 'good belly' of Aboriginal English aroundKatherine and the Roper River is direct translation from localAboriginal languages. Similarly, Berndt, Bemdt and Stanton (1993:287)write that Murray River peoples in South Australia locate 'thesource of all emotions' as miwi or 'soul substance'located in or behind the stomach. The people with whom I moved in theDarwin hinterland sited 'feeling' as overall but inner bodilysensation: 'Your body got feeling', 'Something wrong,your body tell you, that feeling', 'Feeling right through thatbody'.

(7.) This quotation is from T.S. Eliot's play Murder in theCathedral in which the words are given to Thomas a Beckett, Archbishopof Canterbury, who is contemplating the certainty that he will be put todeath. He fears that he will go to his death in pride of martyrdom,knowing that, post mortem, he will be canonised.

(8.) 'Active currency' is an essential term in thisexposition which has the expression of epic emotions integral to systemsof exchange of socially recognised values. See Sansom (1973).

(9.) Aboriginal freehold is a special form of tenure. A creature ofthe ALRA, it is distinguished from ordinary freehold in that the land,while freehold, is not alienable but is held in perpetuity for thebenefit of traditional owners, their heirs and successors.

(10.) There is also a form of progression for the 'try'that fails.

(11.) 'Owners for' rather than 'owners of' isnow standard usage in Land Claims matters. In this usage, there isacknowledgement of the order of relationship that is custodianship ofliving country.

(12.) 'When I heard miwi it was said rarely and withreverence. It is not a word that is bandied about in casualconversation' (Bell, 1998:218). Bell writes of the Ngarrindjeri ofSouth Australia for whom the word miwi designates the source of allfeelings, located in or behind the stomach.

(13.) Rhydwen (1993:160) discusses the mutual intelligibility ofRoper River and Daly River varieties of non-standard English noting alsothat speakers make much of certain lexical differences which serve asmarkers of regional identity: 'The differences appeared to beeither phonological or lexical, with lexical differences mainlyrestricted to ancestral language words.'

(14.) This formulation leaves point of view out of the accounting.An event has a public and hegemonic mood which is an aspect of scene;personal experience of an event is expected to vary according to thepart each person is called to play during the enactment.

(15.) One is aware that the Good News Bible also defies theoriginal Hebrew and represents a God of satisfaction. There areindications (e.g. the arrangement of text into paragraphs rather thanverses) that the Good News Bible served the creators of the Holi Baibulas base for their translation. This, however, does not destroy theobservation that God is given as a sensate persona of good bellythroughout the Holi Baibul in the Kriol version.

(16.) Actually, the word 'style' belongs more to Darwin,while the phrase 'turn out' is more often heard down at PineCreek and on the Daly River. But speakers of the North West region knowboth usages. In fact, how one labels 'style' is an index ofwhich local style one adheres to or has adopted.

(17.) Things have changed since the mid-1980s when Wagiman sued forland. Not only is 'traditional owner' now thoroughlynaturalised in Aboriginal English, people tend more and more to use theabbreviation: 'T.O.'

(18.) As I have registered previously (Sansom, 1980), being'satisfied' vests in the Aboriginal English of the Darwinhinterland as a standard term for expressing quittance and dischargeafter the completion of a ceremony.

(19.) The 'inscription/retrieval' metaphor is to be foundin the writings of both Povinelli (1993:33) and Rumsey (1994:128).

(20.) Payne's 'item' is the smallest unit for thefocus of a witness or performer in a rite. This unit belongs to a momentin the rite. Payne's 'moment' has aural, visual andtactile qualities which may be combined with reference to topography. Anitem has the form: A member (or the members) of a nominated east did acertain thing with reference to the place called X. 'Usually abreak in performance occurs to separate items' (Payne, 1989:44). Ingeneral, Payne's insightful, performance-centred analyses(represented in a line of distinguished publications) all fit well withmy consideration of 'strings'.

(21.) Morphy (1991) has educated us in the matter of ancestorsthrough publication of his Ancestral Connections, a work on the art ofEastern Arnhem Land. For Aboriginal people, proximate ancestors are thestill remembered dead who were known in life in human form. More distantancestors (about four generations removed from living adults) are theemplaced Dreamings of the countrysides.

(22.) With the broadening of possibilities for entering land claimsunder the Native Title Act, a question arises as to the extent to whichAboriginal custodians of sites can look after Dreamings by celebratingthem in rites performed at a distance, dispensing with acts ofvisitation.

(23.) Williams (1986).

(24.) While country should not reject human familiars, a countrythat is 'upset' or 'cranky' may, in excess ofemotion, nonetheless, harm those to whom, in all reason, it should grantimmunity.

(25.) The claimed status does not sit well with parole boards. Inthe interviews leading to consideration of the possibility of parole,the potential parolee should own up to wrongdoing and indicate that, hislesson learnt, he'll not offend again.

(26.) The devil in it is that pace and terseness could both beartefacts of work done by the editor. There are problems of attributionwhen dealing with assisted publications (see Sansom, 2001a). Luke Taylor(1989), editor of Story about Feeling, explains that the text is reducedto a third of the transcripts of the original oral renditions and thatthe arrangement of Big Bill's stories in their published sequenceis the editor's doing.

(27.) Towards the beginning of his book, this author divides birdsinto the like of the owl and the like of the geese, dividing the worldof darkness from the world of day. The divide is germane to his view ofthe cosmos.

(28.) I have discussed 'the plaint of riverbank andbeach' in some detail (Sansom, 2001b).

(29.) From Oscar Wilde's poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

(30.) The 'flavour' in Story about Feeling is that whichleads to yummy tummy as in the Kriol bible.

(31.) Like the Religio Medico of Sir Thomas Browne or the ReligioLaici of John Dryden, Bill Neidjie's Story about Feeling ispersonal testimony of lived experience of religion. He has the right tobroadcast this story because it is made of the cloth of his own life. Hediscovers a way of witnessing concerning that which is private tohimself and to his spirit. His only offence can be to himself astotemite.

(32.) Previously I have discussed these trends of representationwith reference to the ideas of Levy Bruhl (Sansom, 1980).

(33.) All this is of a piece with Hiatt's (1978:186)previously cited observation that the Gidgingali had 'no genericterm meaning emotion'.

(34.) Steiner, 1975.

(35.) I was close to a Songman and he explained that his songs werevouchsafed him by a spirit and that listening or talking to the spiritwas, for him, no different to listening or talking to a person. Thedifference is that, were they to be witness to the Songman's spokenconversation with his spirit-muse, those not favoured or chosen wouldonly hear the human Songman's part. The Songman would appear to betalking to thin air. Otherwise, they might witness the Songman'ssilent channeling. For the chosen, 'feeling' gives directaccess to the Dreamings and it is only by discovery of the fact thatordinary people neither hear nor see spirits that those chosen of theDreamings come to realise that they enjoy special privilege of Powers.Again, my data indicate that conversations between humans and theDreamings are always one on one. However, a set of people can togetherencounter a physical sign or manifestation from a Dreaming (Povinelli,1993; Sansom, 2001b).

(36.) I have dealt elsewhere with the significance of'woundings' for human life story (Sansom 2001a).

(37.) Morphy (1984).

(38.) I have previously discussed 'running round' underthe heading 'Moral Words for Movement' (Sansom, 1980).

(39.) Cited by Myers (1988) on the logic of anger.

(40.) Elsewhere (Sansom, 1996) I have sought to show why Aboriginalinsistence on metonomy rather than metaphor belongs to a totemicformation in which significata are given qualities and attributesbecause they are all animate and, therefore, have characters of theirown. Metaphor requires displacements and re-sitings that would not onlybe irreligious but would defy cultural canons and a priories.

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