At the Focus

At the Focus Sean McMullen & Paul Collins Harry Cundiah pulls his big Kawasaki trailbike up a ridge and cuts the motor. The last rumbles of the engine echo through the gorge for a moment, then die. The silence is welcome, and he wipes the dust from his face. He is not wearing a helmet, for there are no traffic rules in such a remote part of the MacDonnel Ranges. The gorge is lurid red sandstone against a luminous blue sky reflected in utterly still water. Ghost gums and ironwoods grow near the water's edge, and further up the slopes are Cypress Pines and ancient cycads. Something ethereal yet tangible, something Harry Cundiah does not understand but accepts, has called him here. The White Man has gradually eroded the life his people enjoyed, but not that part of his ancestry that still resides within him. That can never wear away. Though he dresses in faded James Brown jeans and check Country Wear shirts, Harry still sings the old chants at the ancient sacred places. Sitting astride the Kawasaki, he listens to the faint clicks and clanks as the motor cools. His blood is pure aboriginal, his name means 'to walk about' in his ancestral tongue. Travelling as a White Man, dressed as a White Man, well educated by the White Man's standards, Harry is still very close to the land. Suddenly impatient with the bike, he dismounts and collects his backpack and guitar. He walks slowly, stiff and clumsy after the long ride. His boots kick up small powder-fine puffs of red dust as he leaves the ridge and makes his way down to the water. He brushes past green, poisonous cycads that are older than the White Man's rule. The gorge is scarred by time, dotted by huge boulders, and paved with sand and frost-shattered rocks. The place is remote, pure . . . but for how long? He must be there, dream there, while he can. He discards his backpack, and his hand brushes restlessly against the Yamaha acoustic guitar slung over his back. At the water's edge he stops. Its chill is like magic in this hot, arid place. Harry knows that his ancestors once danced the roles of rock wallabies. He can visualise the dancing, the seeking of that most special and sacred of places: the Focus. And he, too, dances through the lines of force, dances until he stumbles into the Focus. Until now he has been softly humming snatches of the old chants, but now something sucks the breath from him, and he falls silent. He is within the Focus itself. It is a short stretch of fine sand between two massive, rounded boulders. He hunkers down and pulls a small packet from his leather pouch. Inside are pituri leaves, an aboriginal narcotic. Mechanically he begins to chew on a leaf, grinding it to mulch, then sits in the soft sand and unslings his guitar. He begins again, humming an old aboriginal chant, and through a slight mist brought on by the pituri, sees animals that lived here long ago, Dreamtime animals. Wombats the size of cattle lumber past a wide lake where green crocodiles swim languidly, and kangaroos as tall as a White Man's house graze leaves from the trees. Harry smiles. He knows that the Focus will give these visions if one plucks at its force fields with an appropriate chant. He rests his right arm on the body of his guitar, plucks a few harmonics as he adjusts the tuning keys. After several staccato notes he strums an ancient chord containing every harmonic that is needed. He cannot know that he is producing standing waves in spacetime among the boulders of this sacred place. He begins to play a tune heard months before as he stood outside a hamburger shop in a now-forgotten country town. A tourist had driven up and left the car's cassette deck playing haunting music that at once enveloped and caressed Harry. He memorised it. Over the following weeks he adapted it for his guitar, created variations, decorated it until he could play around the tune for hours. This was no modern pop-tune of the White Man. This ballade was written by a king as he languished, imprisoned, in an enemy's castle. Nearly eight hundred years before, Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote Je