Being an unquestioning eldest son of a devout Lutheran family I went to boarding school in order to become a pastor. Then puberty hit and where once stood a dutiful son, now you see a rabble rousing miscreant, constantly challenging authority and destabilising the good order of the classroom. Faith was not enough. But that is a whole other story and I won’t tease you with the details here.

Year eight was a smorgasbord board of subjects. You could try a bit of everything and your make firm choices next year. I just went with the prescribed program, choice never really entered into it, I would do Latin, Greek maybe Ancient and Modern History the obligatory English and Maths I and one other. That’s what you do if you want to become a paster.

Others were doing Chemistry and Physics and Maths II, learning about the physical world which in my world view at the time was simply a temporary state that required some careful handling if you had any hope of getting through to the next level. Girls could do the ‘commercial’ course, Pitmans Short Hand and Typing, which could be useful for those whose families had small businesses.

‘Commercial’ was somewhat frowned upon by the more scholarly types who were doing history and geography. Some would even venture into the boys territory of the sciences, Chemistry and Physics, and in many cases were very good at it but it left them rather over qualified if they were to be wives of farmers and truck drivers. They could of course be teachers.

Then there was music as an option, beautiful church music, as you would expect remembering the contribution of music to Luther’s Reformation. During that time all the iconography and artistic expression in the German (Protestant) Church was removed and music sung in the vernacular replaced the Latin Mass.

But then at around the time my voice broke and weird, incomprehensible and uncontrollable things started happening in my body I recall over-hearing some older boys talking about ‘valency’ as it relates to chemistry. Let’s think of it as the combining power of atoms. Waiting for meals, in the dining room, on the way to chapel, this word kept cropping up. It was an arcane topic that many struggled to grasp and the boys who ‘got it’ commanded the attention of those who had not.

Here, I began to think, we may have stumbled upon an incontrovertible truth not referenced in either old or new testaments. My ignorance brought forth envy. It seemed that those destined to the ministry would follow the path of sound reason and logic, based on faith in the Bible, while those on other paths were free to follow more creative subjects like physics and chemistry. It may seem strange in this day and age but you must remember that these were the days when thorny problems like, ‘whether hats and gloves should be compulsory for women during church services’ were being hotly debated and contested. They were at the tip of the theological iceberg which at the time of the amalgamation of the two Lutheran Churches in Australia ironically resulted in more splinter groups than before.

I’m not sure why this idea of valency was so disturbing; could atoms really combine with other atoms in a variety of ways, not just one? Theologically, it felt unsafe. It suggested ‘choice’ was a fundamental principle not exclusive to erring humans navigating this vale of tears. ‘Choice’, if if that’s what it is, at an atomic level would have serious implications for free will and original sin that would have to be reworked. And all this at a time when so many resources were taken up with bringing forward the argument, based on the second law of thermodynamics no less, against evolution.

So you really can see that ‘valency’ is the nub at the very heart of my teenage existential crisis awash with uncontrollable hormones. The idea that a set limited number of atoms, that were then thought to be or close to being fundamental particles, could combine in different ways to form completely different substances, every substance in fact. Could this be a Trojan Horse to the Creation Story of Genesis about to do it’s devilish work while the masses are of defending against evolution?

The second idea , if you are willing to accept the first, is that atoms are able to have different energy states; a resting state and a specific number of excited states for any given atom that cause them to absorb and emit energy.
In contrast, stories can be thought of as being constant. Take the Bible, for instance, where the interpretation arrived at by learned men can be considered singular, reliable and irrefutable, so long as this idea of valency and similar heresies don’t take hold. That, dear reader, was a long time ago but not so long ago as the creations stories of the central desert, and all over Australia.

I now know that stories have valency. They connect forward and back, left and right, up and down, inner and outer. They connect trans-dimensionally, through and across time, metaphorically, literally and poetically. A dreaming story, can be rendered as a cartoon or as a children’s book on the one hand or you can hear them in their intended state, on country, evoked by actual places, refined as memory bites into songs and offering multi level interpretations in various contexts, the same story informing language, country, kinship and ceremony. They tell us how to understand the world, ourselves and our place in it, how the world works and what we should tell our kids. Stories link to other stories not only as a chain but also as a net that hold country and consciousness together.

So when I tell you about arriving at the place near Atatjara, the story will light up and with numerous connections if you think about it with both imaginative and rational mind together, prioritising one over the other as the context demands.

I once witnessed someone, who was struggling to resolve once and for all whether a particular dreaming ancestor was a human being or the animal they represent, ask the question, were they ‘this’ or were they ‘that’. No answer was given and I never did find out what happened to the person asking the question, but I recognised it as a ‘valency moment’, a valency of zero.

The country in front of us was traversed by two sisters, the kind of women you might see walking that country today. They are also dreaming ancestors whose digging for game, particularly water snakes, formed Tjawarapitja Creek. Trying to catch a big water snake whose tracks they had seen at the entrance of an underground tunnel system, they built a fire and fanned smoke through the burrows so they could see where they might flush him out. Smoke came out in many places, near Pimba over 700 km away, back at Piltarti the waterhole at the head of this songline in the Mann Ranges and at other places.

Two Brothers, their husbands or husbands to be depending on when you pick up the story, are in pursuit of them and want them to come back and stay at Piltarti. They travel though, not as men but transformed into Wanampi, carpet snake, water snake, forming the underground water courses and seapages that link and refill the rock holes as do the women the creeks. You can see what is going to happen, can’t you?

Think of this happening not a long time ago, but in the durative realm, the eternal now, the Dreaming. Trying to put it on a linear timeline is fraught. Time is not what what we think it is but an abstraction of consciousness. If you wanted the theory I’d have to go into Quantum Physics, a subject well beyond me. Alternatively you could listen on country to the wisdom of First Nations Peoples where even kids and teenagers follow the drift with fascination.

I took this short video clip on my phone after Witjiti, Murray and me decided on the spur of the moment to go find Keith and go down to Atatjara. Keith's Tjamu, Richard, who was one of the kids when we shot Two Brothers Walking segments at Piltarti came along too. It was about a six hour drive for Witjiti, Murray and me in all. Murray suggested we tidy ourselves up a bit when we do the proper picture.

Tags: APY Lands, Pitjantjatjara