The Nomadic Alternative – Page 169

the tracks if one knew they were there. To an outsider they were invisible, and today these untrodden paths pass through sheep-stations, cities, rocket ranges planted by white men. An Aboriginal could 'read' a track as he memorized a song. He knew each crag, totemic tree, river crossing, waterhole or bend in the way in due succession. He could find his way along the track even if he had never travelled that way before. The paths of the ancestors meandered from coast to coast through territories of people whose language and customs he could not necessarily understand.

Common traditions that had filtered down from the same ancestors "of the dreamtime" bound anyone born alongside this track to anyone else born beside the same axis. And these distantly related kinsmen were thus linked together into an unchanging pattern of trade which had existed since time immemorial - trade in boomerangs, spears, human hair belts, shields, opposum twine, eagle hawk feathers, pearl shell, axe blades, yellow ochre, white plaster, emu feathers - trade also in women, songs, myths and ideas. The mythical track of an ancestor served in practice as an invisible bush-telegraph network joining communities isolated from each other by hundreds of miles. If drought, disaster or disease forced one band from their traditional hunting ground, their kinsmen anywhere down the line would automatically offer them hospitality - even if they had never met." Similarly, the children of the Bushmen never have to work before they are fifteen or twenty. Visiting neighbours is an education in itself and all make leisurely trips away from home to strengthen future contacts abroad and sound out the marriage market.

The gipsies have developed the whole world as their home range. Therein lies their uniqueness. And, unknown to the settled proprietors, they carve up their hunting grounds by tacit agreement with other clans, just as poachers carve up the English countryside into spheres of influence and tramps adhere to fixed routes. Gipsies never defend themselves or their ephemeral territories, but dribble away the moment life becomes dangerous, fleeing the nights of long knives whenever these start to flash. Their compulsion to wander, Jan Yoors