DREAMING THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON WALK
by Pete Castle

(From F&F#48 Feb. 2004)

Last summer I re-read Alan Garner's novel Strandloper. I first read it a couple of years ago and it took me a while to get my head around it because of the abstract way in which some of it is written. Some pages are just disconnected sentences from different times, different places, different characters. This time, knowing the story, it was much easier.

For those who don't know it - it's about a Cheshire farmworker, William Buckley, who is transported off to Australia in the late 1700s mainly for the 'crime' of learning to read and upsetting the Squire. He escapes from the convict camp hoping to walk to China with the aid of a compass drawn on a piece of paper and is rescued from death by the Aborigines who believe him to be the reincarnation of one of their leaders. In time he becomes a powerful leader himself and lives with them for 30 years. Then he attempts to reconcile the blacks and the white settlers and is rewarded by being repatriated to England. There's much more to it than that, of course, and a lot of folklore and song included. It's based on a true event - William Buckley existed.

A lot of the story hinges on the idea of ‘Dreamtime’. Dreamtime is a remarkably difficult idea to grasp and works on many levels. I've not fully understood the concept and I haven't really tried, but reading this book pointed me in the right direction. On a superficial level it's the existential idea that if you don't know about it then it isn't there. So, to keep their territory in existence the tribe has to regularly walk it so that they know it well enough to dream about it. This is partly the simple, physical act of walking the land; but it also involves visiting special sites to tell the stories, dance the dances, remember the deeds which occured there. Also to look after the land, preserve the water holes, report landslips, unblock silted up creeks and so on. When the whole tribe goes walkabout then the tales, the dances, the rituals are passed on to the next generation.

Whilst on a stroll through some woods myself it suddenly struck me that what I was doing wasn't terribly different. I was revisiting places I'd been to before to remind myself of them, to see whether they'd changed, to refresh my memory and my 'soul'. To make that place real to me again.

The next stage of my 'revelation' was to realise that it wasn't just the Aborigines who 'went walkabout' - our people have always done it too but without giving it as much significance. In some places the old rituals of 'Beating the Bounds' of the parish still take place today. The congregation 'perambulate the perimeters' of their 'territory' to ensure its upkeep and to make sure that everyone remembers exactly where the boundary is. This is sometimes reinforced by beating children with nettles or 'bumping' them at certain important marker points - often old stones which were used for a similar processes in prehistoric times.

The family walk on a Sunday afternoon so beloved of the Victorian middle class, served the same purpose. It was usually one walk from a small number of 'favourites' and it visited a significant spot - a viewpoint, or picnic site. The walk gave Father the opportunity to reminisce. "That's the spot where your Mother and I met...." "That's where your Grandfather used to live...." "When I was a lad...." So the younger generation learned the places where the significant events of their family took place. Also larger events of more national significance, perhaps. "There was a battle in that field and a king with one arm defeated the heathen... It was in my great-granddad's days..." (It wasn't, it was a 1000 years ago but the memory has been preserved and so the battle and the land have been preserved too. It is a special place, not just any old field.)

This is storytelling on a small, human scale, but very significant storytelling with a real purpose. Perhaps we should all do more of it.

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