AR92. 27 April 2005.
Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Presented to the First Roundstone Conversation on Place and Story, Roundstone, Co. Galway, Ireland, 23-27 March 2005. Chapter 1 from Dreaming Time, Living Passion.

Awakening Dreams

by

Kevin Sharpe

Graduate College, Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University

10 Shirelake Close, Oxford OX1 1SN, United Kingdom
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com

‘Look over here!’ Christine shouted. I scrambled quickly.

We saw the lines. More-or-less parallel and usually in sets of two to four, some stretched for two feet, others no further than my thumb. Lines. Lines seemingly made by our ancestors, our ancestors over 20,000 years ago. They pawed the rocks, etching themselves into the structure of my brain. They still whisper over thirty years later, still impel me to seek what they mean.

I stood in the Upper Chamber of Koonalda Cave, South Australia, staring at fine lines on what we called the ‘Directional Stele.’ Positioned halfway along the path through the Upper Chamber, smoothly rounded and buried into the cave floor, this stone caught our lights and so helped us know where to go in the otherwise pitch-black. Our lamps showed six deeply cut, parallel lines – too definite to be part of the limestone’s structure, too ordered to be animal claw marks, showing the same style as the larger, humanly made lines on the walls elsewhere in the cave.

Enigmatic.

That’s a word I would hear about this sort of marking. I would hear it many, many times in the years ahead. To most people who speak of such lines, enigmatic means, ‘We haven’t the foggiest.’ To me, it means an enigma; like the machine during World War II that encoded the secret messages from the Nazi hierarchy to its troops and whose code the British eventually broke. Enigmas offer mysteries, puzzles to solve, a life’s work.

Red dust covered the lines. How many years of dust? Ten? A thousand? Ten thousand? Tens of thousands? My guess was the last. Christine blew at the dust. The top few grains rose in the air and fell away, but the rest stuck fast, like sap oozing from the rock, setting and sticking as a granular powder.

Christine and I quickly clambered over the boulder strewn floor to the edge of the Upper Chamber and yelled down to Sandor Gallus (Alexander Gallus as the Australians translated his name, or Dr. Gallus as we respectfully called him). He sat at his card table under his kerosene Tilley Lamp, detailing his excavation finds on paper; a fire-fly glow in a football stadium. He jumped up and soon appeared over the ramparts that marked the top of the 100-foot vertical slope to the Gallus Site. He concurred: these lines were important.

My wife, Christine, and I – whom Gallus tended to call Mr. Christine – had come to Koonalda that southern summer of 1973 at Gallus’s request, our first of two visits to the cave. Prehistoric Aborigines had run their fingers, stone flakes, and sticks over large areas at the end of the Upper Chamber of the cave. Gallus wanted us to document the markings and assigned Christine, an artist, to draw the lines and I, an amateur photographer, to create their definitive documentation. Both of us abandoned our tasks within the first few days. There was too much to discover.

Christine was probably the first modern person to notice the lines on the Directional Stele and to blow away the tens of millennia of dust that covered them. As she showed me, her eyes wandered to the stone behind. More lines. We reverently blew on the second stone and saw markings finer and more complex than those on the first. Another marked stone stood behind this, and yet another. We rushed from rock to rock to see their lines. Later, when the lines had become familiar, we investigated methodically. Going deeper, I even found marked stones in crevices beneath the boulder floor.

As the lines became clearer to us, and our eyes sharper in the beams of our lamps, we found artifacts accompanying the lines. A twisted piece of mallee root, charred at one end, sitting on a high stone: the remains of a torch, sprinkled with dust, resting in the same place it was left 20,000 years ago. Clusters of charred twigs sat in cup-like depressions: the remains of another kind of torch of twigs bound together, dipped in animal grease, and lit. I found the cranium of a giant kangaroo that would have stood 12 feet when alive. Under a loose, flat stone in the floor, I opened a curved stone ‘cache’ containing the interlocking puzzle pieces of vertebrae.

Who left those torches behind? Whose cache did I open? Moreover, who made the lines? What were they trying to say?

In that summer of 1973, I felt sure of myself. Perhaps I was mature for a 22 year-old. The thesis for my math doctorate lay on my university’s Graduate Officer’s desk, where it would sit for another 12 months before they’d accept it for examination. (Students straight from their undergraduate degrees – even those like me with the extra honors year tacked on – weren’t supposed to finish before three years.) Our days in Koonalda lay between worlds. Before it, La Trobe University in Melbourne. After it, Christine and I rushed back to catch a plane to the U.S. where I was to study theology at Princeton. Princeton orbited a world away from giant 12-foot kangaroos and the focused light of our lanterns.

But now we were in Koonalda Cave, looking at lines and bones.

Koonalda Cave lies in the Nullarbor Plain, a space of some 90,000 square miles almost completely devoid of trees, water, and animals. Despite a lack of resources, it hides riches in history, archaeology, mythology, and art. Aborigines wrestled with its barren expanse and 120° temperatures and came to terms with it tens of thousands of years ago. Europeans have traversed its arid expanse for only 200 years. Farmers have tried to tame it. Dreamers have tried to make it what it isn’t.

In 1493, a bull by Pope Alexander VI split the globe between the Spanish and Portuguese with a zone between the 129°E and 132°E lines to keep them apart. The neutral buffer between them became known as ‘No Man’s Land’ and, ironically, the Nullarbor falls almost completely between those imaginary lines. It took 300 years after the Pope’s decree for Europeans to see the Nullarbor and another 100 for them to agree with him. This is indeed no man’s land.

The Nullarbor in its openness, its hidden caverns, and its brutal landscape is now a home to only one thing: dreams. Dreams story into and onto it. Dreams provoke passions. Passions lead to dreams. Some people have dreamed the empty space above the Nullarbor – in the Aboriginal Dreamtime; others have dreamed the empty space on the Nullarbor – as a pastoralists’ haven; and some, like me, have dreamed the empty space below the Nullarbor – pondering the significance of our early ancestors’ lines. The land bears the imprint of all of our dreamings and passions.

In some places, it also bears the imprint of our nightmares. In a tent on the Nullarbor beside the Koonalda sinkhole, Christine and I would conceive our first two children, Peter and Keri, twins who died soon after their early births. In the night, I still see the marks of fingers drawn down the cave wall. I see my newborn daughter’s tiny, lifeless hand, raised to grasp.

I went to Koonalda twice, the first time at the beginning of 1973 and again at the beginning of 1976. The second visit I came fresh from the U.S. with my head full of the words of Hallam Movius, my archaeology professor at Harvard, and Alex Marshack, the developer of a new way to study lines like those in Koonalda, telling me what to do. I felt hopeful. Perhaps I could read the markings on the walls.

In between visits, at night in the U.S., I imagined myself back in the cave, my light shining on the marks in the rock, blowing ancient dust in my eyes. My vision started to form. From deep in the past, I could find the map to the future. Line by line.