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My reason
for coming to Australia was to try to learn f or myself, and not from other men's books, what a Songline was - and how it worked. Obviously, I was not going to get to the heart of the matter, nor would I want to. I had asked a friend in Adelaide if she knew of an expert. She gave me Arkady's phone number. "Do you mind if I use my notebook?" I asked "Go ahead." I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band. "Nice notebook," he said. "I used to get them in Paris," I said. "But now they don't make them any more." "Paris?" he repeated, raising an eyebrow as if he'd never heard anything so pretentious. Then he winked and went on talking. […] For lunch we had beer and a salami sandwich. The beer made me sleepy, so I slept until four. When I woke, I started rearranging the caravan as a place to work in. There was a plyboard top which pulled out over the second bunk to make a desk. There was even a swiveling office chair. I put my pencils in a tumbler and my Swiss Army knife beside them. I unpacked some exercise pads and, with the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project, I made three neat stacks of my 'Paris' notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the |
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