“I should set down on paper a résumé of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of all questions: the nature of human restlessness.”
— The Songlines
Even in captivity, Pintupi mothers, like good mothers everywhere, tell stories to their children about the origin of animals: How the Echidna got its spines . . . Why the Emu cannot fly . . . Why the Crow is glossy black . . And as Kipling illustrated the ‘Just So Stories’ with his own line drawings, so the Aboriginal mother makes drawings in the sand to illustrate the wanderings the Dreamtime heroes.
She tells her tale in a patter of staccato bursts and, at the same time, traces the Ancestor’s ‘footprints’ by running her first and second fingers, one after the other, in a double dotted line along the ground. She erases each scene with the palm of her hand and, finally, makes a circle with a line passing through it-something like a capital Q.
This marks the spot where the Ancestor, exhausted by the labours of Creation, has gone ‘back in’.