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Preface
Raft
is a work of translation, multiple
translation. At its heart lies a reference to the death voyage of the missionary
Carl Strehlow (himself a translator), from his holy place in the desert
at Hermannsburg to his end at the rough bush hotel at Horseshoe bend, 150
miles away. in his final agony, seated in an old armchair lashed to a wooden
dray, which had lurched along the Finke river bed through the October heat
of 1922, Strehlow knew that it was pointless to resist that particular
translation. He arranged fro each of the bushmen at his wake to receive
a bottle of whiskey and his remains were laid to rest in a coffin made
from whiskey packing cases.
Ruark Lewis's raft and word drawings, together
with Paul Carter's soundscape and writings that surround and contextualise
the total work, express two forms of translation. The first is literal,
concerning texts that reflect the lives of Strehlow and his son, the linguist
and Aboriginal classicist, TGH Strehlow. These include St Paul's
Acts
27
and 28 in Greek. Latin. German, English, Arrernte and Diyari (inscribed
on the raft itself), Lewis's disguised transcription paintings of translated
versions of Western Arrernte Rain Songs, and Carter's whispered rendering
of a translation of Rain Song of Mborwawatna.
The second form of translation is allusive
rather than literal, evocative rather than actual. It marks the blurred
boundaries between drought and rain, Carl Strehlow's secular agony and
sacred epiphany, Ted Strehlow's naive childhood and bitter adulthood, between
biblical, totemic and historical landscapes, mythical ancestors and their
present embodiment, Aboriginal and European realities. this translation
imparts resonance to those sacred worlds that shimmer over the surface
of this bizarre craft.
Entering the space of
Raft
, with
its 24,696 characters drawn in six languages, copy-perfect on to three
faces of 294 wooden beams, the principal first impression is not of a raft
at all, but of a mysterious printery. It is the muted background soundscape
of jangling harness and footsteps crunching into the sandy bed of the Finke
that conjures the doom-trek of 1922. Then
Raft
seems to move, transforming
from a medium for translation to an object that might transport words,
ideas. Lewis and Carter have retraced the steps leading to Raft's completion.
Each place finds its origins in
Journey to Horseshoe Bend
, TGH Strehlow's
half-forgotten autobiographical lament for his father and his own lost
childhood, written as an account of that tragic voyage nearly 50 years
later. I returned to my shabby copy, stamped `General Motors Holden Staff
Library Club' (borrowed a dozen times) and was struck by its literary power.
The thin, sad-faced boy had kept pace with his father's caravan as it struggled
through sand and heat, past frontier outposts and ancestral sites. His
father's grim prayers, the elegiac accounts of those Arrernte Dreamings
that intersect the Finke, banal histories of European pioneers, his mother's
solicitude, the drought-breaking rain - all merge in a fatalism evoking
the biblical, the Dreaming past. tapping the sources of that fatalism,
TGH Strehlow returned to Hermannsburg a decade later to filter his classical
knowledge through the skein of Arrernte songs. The result was Songs of
Central Australia, a work reflecting his insight that history and Dreaming
are not mutually exclusive. Each bleeds into the other.
-Philip Jones
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