I’d
like you to meet Neddy. He’s a seven-year-old in my book of historical fiction,
Song of Australia. When the story
opens he’s out at night by himself.
Bare feet on cool ground, Neddy
watched the stars. So bright, so clean. He could hear them—happy, sharp, poking
his ears to make him sing with them. He opened his mouth, sang little notes
like hot sparks from a fireplace, sent them shooting into the sky. ‘Ting! Tong!
Ting-ting-tong!’
Neddy
relates to the world mainly through sound, and especially through music. That
same night, when he hears a public speaker address a meeting inside a hall, he
makes a judgement of the person accordingly.
Neddy stopped listening to that voice.
It was empty, dead, no music in it. It made him lonely. ‘Ting! Tong!’ He sang
softly to the stars and smiled when they all answered together. He had friends.
The
boy begins to pay attention again when he hears piano music coming from the
hall. He looks through the doorway.
A girl sat at the piano, older than
Neddy. He knew her. Sometimes in the front garden of a house near home, she
smiled and waved to him as he passed. Her long fair hair twisted into a rope
behind her shoulders. Someone in the house called her Elsie. Now her hair-rope
was pinned up on her head as she played the piano. Elsie’s music was nice, like
magpies he liked to sing with out in the bush. Neddy learnt a lot from magpies.
Both
Neddy and Elsie are lead characters in my story. Although she is highly
successful at school and he is the polar opposite, they are linked by their
gift for music. Yet they approach music quite differently. Elsie is trained in
classical pianoforte, but Neddy has had no training—not from a human anyway. He
embodies a way of being that our civilisation has largely forgotten—much to its
detriment, in my opinion. We have largely forgotten that we are creatures
evolved to live in song. Scientific research in recent years indicates that
human speech emerged from human song. Reflect on that: song enabled language. What
are the implications—in education, for example?
Our
civilisation demands that, of all the perceptual modalities available to us, we
use vision as the primary channel of awareness. The implicit dogma is that
vision is far superior to hearing, touch, smell, taste and kinaesthesia as a
means of cognition. In Song of Australia,
Neddy’s whole being is centred on hearing and sound, particularly that
organised sound which we call music. In fact he’s highly gifted with singing
ability, while finding literacy very difficult to acquire because it is taught
mainly through vision. Schooling in South Australia a hundred years ago (the
setting of my story) was only rarely modified to meet individual needs—unless
the student was deemed significantly lacking in intelligence, given an official
label like ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘moron’, and placed in a special class or
institution. Consider how he must have felt about his schooling: no wonder he
runs away to sit in the boughs of the big red gum and sing.
And
the magpies? Bear in mind these are Australian
magpies, quite different from species by the same name in other countries. They
are perhaps the best songsters in the avian world, with a vocal pitch-range of
four octaves, a voice with rich overtones (sometimes called ‘flute-like’), an
amazing repertoire of calls and a propensity for melodic invention. They can
even sing two-note chords! Some people have developed musical relationships
with these birds with specific whistle-calls that they answer. Magpies are
adept at mimicry: they have been known to learn to utter human words they hear
frequently in their territory.
The
best of the magpie music, in my experience, is heard in autumn. Breeding is
over, the fledgelings have taken to the air, and the bird seems to find leisure
time to just sing. Sometimes it’s a duo carolling: one takes the low part and
the other erupts into ascending harmony, reaches a climax and then … silence. A
few seconds later they begin again, repeating more or less the same phrases.
This may continue for ten minutes or more.
Even more enchanting is the warbling of a single magpie at night,
usually when the moon is bright. In this context the notes are not as high and
the volume also is much lower, too soft to be intended communication with other
birds. The magpie high in the gum tree seems to be singing alone for the pure
love of it, sometimes for over an hour.
[Listen to a variety of magpie song here.]
In
Song of Australia Neddy loves human
music but, for him, magpie song is the best. As suspicion, grief and hatred
sear the home-front during World War 1, for Neddy the music of magpies is the
epitome of beauty and truth.
No breeze stirred the leaves of the
old red gum where, cradled in the crook of a thick branch, Neddy sat waiting.
They would be here in a minute. The shadows in the little clearing below told
him that. This was always the time for the songs to start.
The big tree waited too. The tree
wanted to sing. He hummed for it, stroking the trunk. This old tree was always
his friend. Like a mother sometimes too. Teachers couldn’t boss him here.
Children couldn’t tease him. Tree looked after him. And the magpies.
Neddy stopped humming. Wings whooshed
around the trees up there. He stood up on the branch, took a big breath and
sang. Magpies joined in. Sometimes their voices were low and soft, sometimes
high and loud. They stopped and he sang again and they answered. This went on
and on, until the magpies swooped to the ground to feed.
He felt better now. Teachers and nasty
children had gone from his ears and his body tingled from singing. He sat again
on Old Tree’s branch. But down on the ground … Who? That girl—Elsie. She was down there, staring
up.
You can find Song of Australia on sale at your Amazon website
