The Body of the Land

On a sketchbook, the old man traces the outline of Australia, then fills it with a tight grid reminiscent of lobster-pot weaving. He sets down the pencil. With his hand, he mimes lifting the lattice, as if peeling back a sheet—and what he reveals is no longer a flat map, but a three-dimensional continent, a volume cradled in the palms of his hands. David Mowaljarlai, Ngarinyin elder and lawman of the Kimberley, peers over his scratched spectacles to make sure we’ve seen. The land is not a surface. It is a body.

English

The whole of Australia is Bandaiyan. The front we call wadi, the belly-section, because the continent is lying down flat on its back. It is just sticking out from the surface of the ocean.

English

All of Australia is Bandaiyan. The front, we call wadi, the belly section, because the continent lies flat on its back. It barely rises above the ocean’s surface.

This is no poetic image laid over the landscape. It is an anatomy. Mowaljarlai names the land’s regions as one names the parts of a body: the summit, in the north—Cape York, Arnhem Land, the Kimberley—is the head, ulangun; beneath the Gulf of Carpentaria lie the lungs; the ribs are the flanks, the section of the ribcage that crosses the continent above the navel; and the navel, the center, is Uluru. We think of Bandaiyan in those terms, as a human body—we conceive of Bandaiyan in those terms, as a human body. Geography is not a backdrop upon which beings alight: it is the very flesh of a single living being, and each of us is one of its organs.

Within this body, something propels life outward. Inside the body is Wunggud, the Snake. She grows all of nature on the outside of her body—inside the body dwells Wunggud, the Serpent; she brings forth all nature upon her surface. The continent, then, is not an inert container filled with separate beings: it is a body that clothes itself in life as skin does. And this body holds together through lines. The grid Mowaljarlai had drawn was no ornament: the squares are the territories of communities, with their languages and symbols, and the lines are the paths along which stories have traveled from one end of the land to the other. They are all interconnected, he says—all is bound together. A single body, threaded with nerves.

From this comes a word that startles in his mouth. On this body, he says, humans do not dwell as owners or spectators: they act as a single constituted body.

English

We think along these lines, but we know only Bandaiyan. On this we interact as a corporation. It is intact.

English

We think along these lines, but we know only Bandaiyan. Upon it, we interact as a constituted body. It remains intact.

The English word he uses, corporation, carries beneath it the Latin corpus, the body. Mowaljarlai himself subtitles his chapter Corpus Australis: the body of Australia. Yet between his usage and ours, the gap is absolute, and it must be marked before any comparison. For us, the “corporation,” the political “body,” is a metaphor: a social body, the body of the state, a way of speaking about the assembly of humans. The body remains an image; the land, meanwhile, remains a ground to be surveyed, bounded, and possessed. Mowaljarlai inverts the order. The body is not the metaphor—it is the land that has become one for us when we flattened it into a map. His corporation includes the rock, the serpent, all of nature; we are not its associated members, we are its organs.

That is why our way of seeing the continent strikes him, quite literally, as a loss of dimension. The map lays the land flat on paper and divides it into parcels; he lifts the paper and restores the land’s volume. Where we read an expanse—a resource, a territory, an environment that surrounds us—he reads a body from which there is no escape: one cannot be around what contains us.

And the body endures even without us. When confronted with regions where no one lives anymore, where nothing is passed down, Mowaljarlai brushes aside the objection with a single word.

The land remained, you can’t get away from that. It acts for the people and their imprint is still there—the land endured, there is no escaping it; it acts for the people, and their imprint remains. The body is intact: its life does not depend on our presence. Where we consider land alive only when inhabited, used, made productive—and empty, thus available, when it is not—Mowaljarlai holds that the land acts on its own, that the symbols remain inscribed in the earth even when it sinks beneath the sea. It is not our occupation that animates the body; it is the body that sustains us.

What remains is a question his drawing leaves open, unresolved for us. When we look at a map of our own country, do we see a surface to be shared—or the back of a breathing body, of which we are but one organ among others?