Northern Aranda Traditions (Ted Strehlow)

Inspired by Will Self’s The Butt, I went in search of the controversial anthropologist Ted Strehlow. Melbourne Uni library had his major work, Songs of Central Australia, but you had to go in and read it on site, so I settled for Northern Aranda Traditions, published in 1947.

It seems to be quite fashionable to bash Strehlow. It does seem from various online biographies I have read that he went a little weird in his final years, but this book was written at the height of his abilities. He did the research in the 1930s but held off until his informants had all died before the book was published.

One of the difficulties about being a white Australian who is sympathetic to indigneous causes is the lack of information about what, exactly, Aboriginal culture consists of. It isn’t really surprising, given that so much of these cultures involves access rights to certain bits of knowledge or parts of stories, but you can feel a little in the dark about exactly what you are sympathising with.

A great struggle I have personally is the traditional owners’ requests not to visit certain places. As someone who feels intensely about the landscape it is hard to be told that there is only one way of interacting with a particular place - especially when that one way utterly excludes you. I can’t help feeling, secular person that I am, that it is crazy to expect everyone to interact with a particular place in exactly the same way. It is a bit like expecting everyone who visits the Sistine Chapel to be a devout Catholic, or everyone who sees the Taj Mahal to be an observant Muslim. Maybe they should be!

This book is obviously untouched by modern political considerations, for both good and bad. It is not so good if you’re interested in Northern Aranda women, for example, because they barely rate a mention except to point out that they are completely excluded from the religious life of the groups (although Strehlow was obviously writing without consulting any women, so it is perfectly possible they had their own initiations and special knowledge to pass on).. But as an explanation of exactly how things worked in a traditional Aboriginal society, among men who were older than contact with white settlers, it is very interesting.

It also underlined just how much has been lost. The complex initiation process is seen very much as a vetting process, to discover exactly who was worthy of access to the various secrets. If no one was deemed worthy, they weren’t passed on and died with their keepers.

Interestingly, according to this book, the traditionally inherited secret/sacred objects that represented totemic ancestors were seen as private property – the current ‘owner’ of these objects was apparently entitled to do as he pleased with them. This conflicts with a lot about what I had assumed about traditional Aboriginal culture – you do tend to assume everything must have been shared.

Strehlow also points out how unchanging the culture of the Northern Aranda was; how everything was so proscribed that there was really no room for technical or literary innovation whatsoever. He even referred to it as a ‘decadent’ culture, which surprised me a lot. We are so used to thinking of the unchanging nature of traditional indigenous culture as a strength - which it is - but of course an unchanging culture can also be an oppressive and hidebound and restrictive one.

The main feeling I got from the book, however, was just a sadness at the complexity and interestingness of what has been lost, all over Australia, over the last two centuries. Strehlow deserves all credit for insisting on the intricacy and significance of Aranda culture at a time when this was anything but fashionable.

The Butt (Will Self)

A lot of domestics are our place are caused by either Will Self or smoking.

My husband Will loves Will Self. I don’t love him so much as read him, which is a more intimate and long-term proposition. Reading an author means you end up in bed with him for hours, after all.

My husband Will also likes to smoke, which drives me insane. Our little chats titled Why Don’t You Just Give Up and Will Self isn’t a Novelist, He Just Writes Extended Conceits never end well. Usually they end with Will heading, affronted, out into the garden with a Will Self book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

You can imagine my delight in finding a Will Self book on the topic of smoking…

The Butt is yet another extended conceit, but with some special features that intrigued me. The flimsy premise is that an American tourist, Tom Brodzinski, chucks the butt of his final cigarette over the balcony of his holiday apartment, where it hits another man on the head. In a series of Kafkaesque repercussions, this means he ends up facing tribal justice and a charge of attempted murder.

Intriguing special feature number one: the book is about Australia. Other reviewers have claimed it is about ‘the colonial experience’ or ‘a combination of Iraq and Australia’. Nonsense: it is about Australia. Will Self is the king of the thinly disguised real; this was blatantly inspired by, and perhaps written on, a holiday to FNQ or NT. He isn’t capable of a genuine synthesis. It is about the weirdness of the traditional Aboriginal laws that try to coexist with the laws of Australia.

Special feature number two: the book draws heavily on the story of Ted Strehlow, the anthropologist of the Arrernte people of Central Australia who was controversially made the final custodian of Arrernte traditional law by elders in the 1930s. Other reviewers (fools!) have imagined it is Kurtz from Heart of Darkness who is the mad anthropologist at the apex of the book. But that is just a reflex reference. The beating heart of the inspiration for this is blatantly TGH Strehlow. (You can read more about him here).

The nightmarish Australia of the book contains some insurance-derived badlands. ‘Tontine’ insurance is a policy under which the last living policyholder is entitled to a payout, causing the local tribes to indulge in an orgy of degenerate killings. This is how Strehlow came to ‘own’ the Arrernte traditions he wrote about: “In accordance with the Aranda rules of tjurunga inheritance, these traditions would be regarded as becoming my personal property after the deaths of their original owners.”

Will Self’s use of language is HOT. No one does flesh-crawling metaphors like Will Self. It is worth reading his books just for these gems – and I do.

His use of actual narrative and character, on the other hand, are RUBBISH. The only good novel he has written, in my opinion, is How the Dead Live. That one is good because, like all transcendent satire, it contains some humanity – it is about his relationship with his mother and other family members. A naff topic that makes for an awesome read.

The story of The Butt is stupidly long and exhausting. Many have remarked that The Butt’s description of a roadtrip through a hot featureless desert is similar to embarking on such a roadtrip oneself. Similarly, its description of a labyrinthine legal system is not unlike reading labyrinthine legalese for real. Neither are much fun. However, I was giving this book the benefit of the doubt until page 301, when it seems like Self just got bored and hastily scribbled the unsatisfactory – in fact downright irritating – ending.

My husband still smokes. We still argue about his smoking. We did manage to agree, however, that The Butt really lets itself down in the last 50 pages, coming to an incoherent and rather silly conclusion.

If this book was a person, it would be my husband Will, promising yet again to give up while sneaking up to the shop ‘to buy some milk’….In a nutshell: in a nightmare that looks a lot like Australia, a bumbling tourist chucks away the butt of his final cigarette and unwittingly becomes the butt of a series of hideous legal consequences.Planet 8 scores four chocolates with pretty wrappers that turn out to be slightk

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Doris Lessing)

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

I had always found this stanza from The Waste Land mysterious and evocative. In some ways it is only a more posh version of that cheap ‘Footprints’ poem that everyone’s aunt has on her refrigerator, but something about those lines just thrills me every time I read them. Who is the third who walks always beside you? Who is that on the other side of you? It made me think of the tales told by survivors of nature’s extremes: that when you are alone with death, you are not alone at all.

I went through a major ‘disasters in the cold’ phase a few years back. I read stories by people like Edmund Hillary and watched Touching the Void, about a rock climber who falls into an enormous crevice, just to see what it is like at the extremes of human experience, and for the thrill of wondering: What would I do? Could I shoot and eat my faithful husky dog? Could I eat my fellow plane passengers? In extremis, who would I be? I have never read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Scott’s disastrous Antarctic expeditions, which in part inspired Planet 8, but I think it would fit right into that category.

Planet 8 is easily the best thing I’ve read so far this year. It is simple, devestating and brilliant and made me realise afresh why Doris Lessing deserved to win the Nobel Prize for literature. I finished it two days ago and still I think about it every time I close my eyes. The story is ringing in my ears like a thunderclap.

I think for your own good, I won’t tell you about how the narrative of this book unfolds. If I told you, you might not read it. It is like a news story you can’t bear to watch because it is too sad. But the story is ultimately one which asks the same question that Elliot asked in those lines from The Waste Land: Are we all there is? Is anyone watching over us? How can we transcend ourselves?

Unlike Elliot, however, Lessing is bold enough to provide an answer.


If this book was a person, it would be a hot actor playing Captain Oates, the man who famously – and selflessly - left Scott’s tent saying: “I’m just going out. I may be some time.”

In a nutshell: a once fertile planet is beleaguered by a surprise Ice Age. International space organisation Canopus assures the population they will soon be relocated – but how long can they hold out?

Planet 8 scores an entire box of your favourite chocolates, plus an empty house, six hours of babysitting and a rainy day.