This happened a few weeks ago...

Sophie says, “I want you to hear this song”
and puts on a cassette.
An old man’s voice comes wobbling through,
a strong old voice, singing alone, no clapsticks
or instruments to support him, just his old voice
forging through the chatter around him
like someone parting the long grass.
He stops abruptly to scold the young people: “Shut up and listen!”
and without waiting for response or compliance he goes on.

He is singing in a language I don’t know, a language
not many people know, a language perhaps nobody still alive
knows as well as he does. He’s what’s known as
“one of the last speakers” of his dying language.
The song sounds sad to me, and beautiful. It goes on and on and
on. I think he might sing till the end of time.
Sophie turns off the tape and tells us about him.

They’d gotten funding for some “back to country” fieldtrips, one trip for each of the seven language groups in the community. They’d loaded up a few troopies with some old people and some young people and drove out bush.

The old man sat down at the camp fire and started talking and singing and just kept going all night. Young people came and went, listening for awhile, then leaving and returning. Meanwhile the old man just kept talking and singing. After everyone had fallen asleep around him, around the dying embers of the fire, the old man kept going. He had so much to say and not much time left.

I'm imagining.

The changes this man has seen around him in his lifetime would astound the young people if they could really see it all, but he’s not telling his life story. He’s telling about the land and the time-before-time and the ancestors and spirit world that infuse the land. He’s telling what needs to be done to keep the world alive. His urgency is not just because he’s old and the knowledge will die with him, but because it’s knowledge that is necessary to keep the world in balance, and clearly the need is even greater now than ever before. Quick! The world is dying, I am dying, just like this fire here is only glowing embers. There’s still time to breathe on those coals and coax them back to life; the earth desperately needs our breath.

I’m imagining.

I can just see him, this old man, sitting on the ground or maybe there’s a rock or a milkcrate someone’s brought along. He’s sitting and he’s talking and the children have all fallen asleep around him, his voice is drifting into their dreams. He can’t stop talking because he has so much to say and time is running out. He uses a mixture of languages, the words coming out without any prompting, just tumbling out in a long stream, sometimes it becomes a song and the songs are only in the language of his childhood, the language of the old people who are now spirits. He can feel them all around; they keep him talking.

Sometimes the language coming out is the language of the munanga, the language of his young adulthood working in stockcamps and stations. Sometimes he uses the language of his wife’s people, a language he would say he doesn’t know well but there’s nobody left who speaks it and there are certain things he learned from her and her family that he can only say in that language.

He goes on and on, his voice a thin stream of smoke rising up, diffusing over the country, drifting in the air. Unseen, it sticks in the hair and clothing of the sleeping youths. Later, back home, they’ll smell his voice, like smoke, and suddenly remember the campfire and the magical night when they dreamed those amazing dreams and felt whole.

Or so I imagine.