The Use of Bench Warrants in the War on Crime and Drugs by Alice Goffman

In 2007 Chuck and I went door to door and conducted a household survey of the ‘6^th St.’ neighborhood in Philadelphia. We interviewed 308 men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Of these young men, 144 reported that they had a warrant issued for their arrest because of either delinquencies with court fines and fees or failure to appear for a court date within the previous three years. For that same period, 119 men reported that they had been issued warrants for technical violations of their probation or parole (for example, drinking or breaking curfew).

According to contacts at the Philadelphia Warrant Unit, there were about eighty thousand open warrants in the city in the winter of 2010. A small portion of these warrants were for new criminal cases – so-called body warrants.  Most were bench warrants for missing court or for unpaid court fees, or technical warrants issued for violations of probation or parole.

Until the 1970s, the city’s efforts to round up people with outstanding warrants consisted of two men who sat at a desk in the evening and made calls to people on the warrant list, encouraging them to either come in  and get a new court date or get on a payment plan for their unpaid court fees. During the day, these same men transported prisoners. In the 1970s, as a special Warrant Unity was created in Philadelphia courts to actively pursue people with open warrants. Its new captain prided himself on improving and updating the unit’s tracking system, and getting these files on computer.

By the 1990s, every detective division in the Philadelphia Police Department had its own Warrant Unit. Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the US  Marshalls all run their own separate Warrant Units out of the Philadelphia force as well.

As the number of police officers and special units focused on rounding up people with warrants increased, the technology to locate and identify people with warrants improved. Computers were installed in police cars, and records of citizens’ legal histories and pending legal actions became synchronized – first across the city’s police force and then among police departments across the country. It became possible to run a person’s name for any kind of warrant, from any jurisdiction  in the country, almost instantly.

The number of arrests an officer or a unit makes had been a key indication of performance since at least the 1960s. When technology improved, taking people in on warrants became a ready way for police to show they were actively fighting crime. Those officers or units who cleared more warrants or arrested more people were informally rewarded; those who cleared or arrested fewer people were encouraged to catch up.

In interviews, Philadelphia police officers explained that when they were looking for a particular man, they access social security records, court records, hospital admissions records, electric and gas bills, and employment records. They visit a suspects usual haunts  (for example, his home, his workplace, and his street corner) at times he is likely to be there, and will threaten his family or friends with arrest if they don’t cooperate, particularly when they themselves have their own lower-level warrants, are on probation, or have a pending court case. In addition to these methods, the Warrant Units operating out of the Philadelphia Police Department use a sophisticated computer-mapping program that tracks people who have warrants, are on probation or parole, or have been released on bail. Officers round up these potential informants and threaten them with jail time if they don’t provide information about the person the police are looking for. A local FBI officer got inspired to develop the program after watching a documentary about the Stasi – the East German secret police. With another program, officers follow wanted people in real time by tracking their cell phones. .  .

6^th Street is not the poorest or the most dangerous neighborhood in the large Black section of Philadelphia of which it is a part – far from it. In interviews with police officers, I discovered that it was hardly a top priority of theirs, nor did they consider the neighborhood particularly dangerous or crime ridden. Residents in adjacent neighborhoods spoke of 6^th Street as quiet and peaceful – a neighborhood they would gladly move to if they ever had enough money.

Still, 6^th Street has not escaped three decades of punitive drug and crime policy. By 2002, police curfews had been established around the area for those under age eighteen, and police video cameras had been placed on major streets. In the first eighteen months that I spent in the neighborhood, at least once a day I watched police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search them, run their names for warrants, ask them to come in for questioning, or make an arrest. In the same eighteen month period, I watched the police break down doors, search houses, and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets. I noted bocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence –or, in police language, secured a crime scene– seventeen times. Fourteen times during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp-on or beast young men with their night sticks.

The problems of drugs and gun violence are real ones in the 6^th Street community, and the police who had come into the neighborhood are trying to solve them with the few powers that can be granted them: the powers of surveillance, intimidation and arrest. Their efforts do not seem to be stopping young men from attempting to earn money selling drugs or from getting into violent conflicts; whether they are helping to reduce overall crime rates is beyond the scope of this study.

Since the 1980s, the War on Crime and the War on Drugs have taken millions of Black young men out of school, work and family life, sent them to jails and prisons, and returned them to society with felony convictions. Spending time in jail and prison means lower wages and gaps in employment. This time away comes in critical years in which other  young people are completing degrees and getting married. Laws in many states deny those with felony convictions the right to vote and the right to run for office, as well as access to many government jobs, public housing and other benefits. Black people with criminal records are so discriminated against in the labor market that the jobs for which they are legally permitted to apply are quite difficult to obtain. These restrictions and disadvantages affect not only the men moving through the prison system but their families and communities. So many Black men have been imprisoned and returned home with felony convictions that the prison now plays a central role in the production of unequal groups in US society, setting back the gains made in citizenship and socioeconomic position that Black people made during the Civil Rights Movement

Whatever their effect on crime, the sheer scope of policing and imprisonment in poor black neighborhoods is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring, not only for the young men who are their target but for their family members, partners and neighbors.

The Will to Fame by Alain de Botton

1.

Why do people want to become famous? It’s easy enough to mock celebrities, but where in the psyche does the will to fame spring from? Few of us ever become famous by accident or at little cost, so what is it that inspires the deep sacrifices that fame demands?

2.

At the heart of the desire for fame lies a touching, vulnerable and simple aspiration: a longing to be treated nicely. Whatever secondary impetus may be supplied by appetites for money, luxury, sex or power, it is really the wish for respect that drives the will to fame.

If this  hardly seems like a fuel powerful enough to propel a lifetime’s worth of the efforts that becoming and remaining famous require, we should never underestimate the negative stimulus provided by fame’s opposite, humiliation. We may come to want fame desperately because of just how searing is the pain of being overlooked, patronized, left alone in the corner, ordered to go to the end of the line, thought of as nobody or told to call back in a few weeks. The wish to be famous is a bid to have our dignity fully respected in a world where it almost certainly won’t be unless we are prepared to take extreme measures. We may be equal before the law and at the ballot box, but there is no guarantee of dignity in the treatment we receive at the office, in our social life or between the wheels of governmental or commercial bureaucracies. Especially in big cities, those centers of unkindness toward the ordinary, where life is unmediated by the beneficial influence of vast skies and huge horizons, respect is a scarce and tightly rationed commodity, and indifference is the norm. One would be well advised not to set foot in Manhattan or Los Angeles without having the ready a fairly snappy and impressive answer to the inevitable inquiry about what one does for a living.

3.

Fame allows celebrities to leverage kindness and respect others. A famous name alone can accomplish in an instant what its bearer might otherwise have had to beg for over the years with his or her whole personality. This saves a lot of time.

Other people have to be nice to be famous because they appear as emanations of the whole world, of the judgment of millions of their followers. Fame is power backed up by an unseen army of admirers. To refuse to laugh at a celebrity’s joke, or to express skepticism as to their talent, is to take on not just an individual but also the whole system that anointed them: the clever judges who gave them the prize, the legions of people who bought their album, the venerable magazines which put them on their covers, all of these are part of an invisible but highly effective force which the famous person can command whenever he or she meets someone at a party or has to deal with an official at a check-in desk. Fame staves off tendencies towards opportunistic meanness; it saves the famous person from being left at the mercy of strangers.

4.

But not everyone needs fame equally badly. The appetite for fame tends to depend on both what sort of childhood one had and what sort of society one lives inn.

In the early years of the archetypal famous person, there is – almost inevitably – rejection; there can’t be any kind of sustained longing for fame without it. One parent or the other had to have been uninterested, emotionally absent, more concerned with a sibling – or dead.  In the most desperate cases, where there is no question but that fame will become an obsession, the parent omitted to notice there child because they were themselves engaged in trying to become, or in consorting with those who already were, famous.

When attention and kindness most mattered, when they were defenseless and weak between the ages of zero and ten, when they had no sophisticated tools for attracting the love of others beyond their mere existence, the embryonically famous could not spontaneously convince a much-needed parent of their own importance, a slight catastrophic enough to shape the trajectory of an entire life. How invisible one was once made to feel determines how special and omnipresent one will later need to be.

Unfortunately, of course, achieving fame rarely corrects the early slight, for the real wish is not to impress through achievement (singing, sculpting, deal-making and so on), but to be loved simply for being. The moment of achieving fame is hence likely to be accompanied by feelings of hollowness, for it can’t in itself correct the humiliation that ignited the original wish for fame. The self-destructive behavior often seen in the famous is the confused articulation of anger at a pyrrhic victory, a desire to destroy an adulation of the many which has been unable to compensate for the neglect of a primary crucial few.

By contrast, the happily anonymous adult, who needs no acclaim and can be satisfied with a modest job, is the true person of privilege in this scenario, for he or she has luxuriated in one of the greatest gifts available to man: the sense of being central in the affections and care of a parental figure. A decade of parental love can give a person strength enough to cope with fifty years of insignificance. The only childhood properly deserving the epithet ‘privileged’ is the one in which the child’s emotional needs were adequately met.

This analysis has a side benefit of providing us with a litmus test for how good a job we may be doing parenting our own children: we have only to ask whether they have any wish whatsoever to become famous.

5.

  

The intensity of the desire for fame depends also the nature of one’s society. The more dignity and kindness are only given to a few, the stronger will be the urge to avoid being simply normal. Those who pin the blame for ‘celebrity culture’; at the door of the immoral young are hence missing the point. The real cause of celebrity culture isn’t narcissistic shallowness, it is a deficit of kindness. A society where everyone wants to be famous is also one where, for a variety of essentially political (in the broad sense) reasons, being ordinary has failed to deliver the degree of respect necessary to satisfy people’s natural appetite for dignity.

In so far as the modern world is celebrity-obsessed, we are living not so much in superficial times as in unkind ones. Fame has become a means to an end, the most direct route to a kind of respect that could otherwise have been won in different, less renown dependent ways – through kindness rather than magazine covers.

If we want to decrease the urge for fame, we should not begin by frowning upon or seeking to censor news about celebrities; we should start to think of ways of making kindness, patience and attention more widely available, especially to the young.

Crime Stories and Their Audiences by Colin Watson

Mysterious Press, 1971

‘It is more that fifteen years since Colin Watson’s Snobbery with Violence first appeared, a pioneer study using crime fiction, that most popular form of reading, to, in the author’s own words in his chapter on the thirties vogue for oriental villains ‘tell something about the way…people thought, what they feared and what they despised.’ There have been academic studies of popular fiction in much of this field since, chiefly American in origin, but none I think seriously supersedes this book and certainly none can be read with anything like as much ease and pleasure.’(Preface by H.R.F. Keating, 1986)’

‘that School of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.’- Alan Bennett

Charging commercial institutions with failure to educate public taste is an indulgence from which intellectuals will only be deterred when they grasp that a non-existent contract can neither be breeched or enforced. If commerce is to be indicted for anything, it can only be for commercialism, and whether that is a crime or not is a political question. Very few people who walked into the High Street from a library forty yeas ago with three or four thrillers and romances under their arm had the slightest misgivings about the freedom of choice they had just exercised. Even fewer would have been prepared for a moment to credit that the ‘good read to which they were looking forward was part of a process that debilitated taste, shrank discrimination and impoverished thought.

Despite the economic crisis, chronic unemployment and widespread misery in industrial areas, the mood of the people not immediately affected by these things was predominantly one of satisfaction. Gilt-edged Victorian and Edwardian optimism had taken a far less severe a knock from the murderous futility of the 1914-18 war than one might suppose. The middle class had suffered its share of casualties, of course, but it mourned them as it would have mourned bereavement by pneumonia or motor accident. Anger was hardly felt at all, and if there was little of the kind of pride which a nation-wide clutter of memorial masonry made pretence of witnessing, the ‘sacrifice’ by so many fathers and sons and brothers and uncles was accepted by most as having been a dutiful and responsible act. The Great Bore was over, the threat from foreigners had been remove for the moment, and the prospect visible from city suburb, commuters’ village and provincial township was one of secure continuance of the old order and its gradual enrichment by the innovations of progress.

Thus it was quite possible to be leading a comfortable existence in a pleasant residential area of Gloucester or Hereford and be genuinely unaware that less than fifty miles away in the Welsh valleys whole communities were living on a bare survival level. Kindly Londoners who would have been shocked by the spectacle of a child shivering with cold simply refused to believe stores of schools on Tyneside in which, summer and winter, nearly half the pupils sat barefoot in class. The stories were true, as were those of Durham shipyard towns where only one man in three had a job, and areas in Lancashire and Cumberland were malnutrition had hoisted the tuberculosis rate to between ten and twenty times that of the Home Counties. But distance – even a short distance – was a great insulator of conscience. So was the notion, inherited from the Victorian self-help school, that misfortune was somehow the consequence of fecklessness and therefore the unalterable lot of those who had allowed themselves to slip to the bottom of the pile. Yet another aid to the equanimity of the comfortably placed was the preoccupation of the Press with cheerful and trivial themes. With very few exceptions indeed newspapers were dedicated to the profitable Northcliffe slogan ‘give the public what it wants.’

What the public – the middle class, reading public – clearly did not want was disquieting dispatches from beyond the frontiers of its own experience. Circulation managers noted that too frequent reference to menacing political situations abroad depressed sales, as did ‘sordid’ stories of industrial depression at home. News selection and treatment were adjusted accordingly. The News Chronicle (formerly Dicken’s Daily News) was practically alone among national daily newspapers in consistently presenting foreign and home events with due regard to the realities of the situation. The readers of the rest were shown an Italy and Germany whose rulers, while not quite gentlemen, perhaps, were too busy building autobahns and getting trains to run on time for the entertainment of any aggressive intentions; a Russia of measureless malignance and cardboard tanks; a France consisting of the Promenade des Anglais, rude night clubs and the Maginot Line; and a motherland to which prosperity was slowly and surely returning while Mr. Baldwin tamped his pipe, Mr. MacDonald mixed his metaphors, and Gracie Fields led a crowd of happy, be-shawled mill girls in a chorus of ‘Sing As We Go.’

The euphoric conspiracy was not completely solid. Apart from the predictable fusillade from left-wing polemicists, there came protests from relatively respectable quarters. Wells warned and Shaw taunted. George Orwell’s dark prophesies frightened a few people. Hilaire Belloc declared England to be ‘done’ before he lapsed into since in order to contemplate the enormity of the demolition of Hanacker Mill. The intellectual poet, Auden and Isherwood, blistered the smug compatriots whose salvation they were to leave others to complete when the opted for America in 1939. A particularly unkind cut, coming as it did from the author of  The Good Companions, 1929’s top favorite among solid citizens, was delivered by J.B Priestly in 1934. His English Journey confirmed by personal testimony that there exited on a large scale places and conditions of unimaginable awfulness. Some library committees in the areas he described, persuaded that Mr. Priestly had been less than fair, declined to stock the book.

Outside the rotting industrial areas, developments favorable to the expansion of a ‘leisure’ literature continued steadily during the 1920s and 1930s…by the end of this period crime, adventure and romance fiction accounted for three-quarters of all novels published in the English language…..

Life of Nate Shaw

And durin of the pressure years, a union began to operate in this country, called the Sharecroppers Union – that was a nice name, I thought – and my first knowing about this union, this organization, that riot came off at Crane’s Ford in ‘31. I looked deep in that thing, too – I heard more than I seed and I taken that in consideration. And I knowed what was goin on was a turnabout on the southern man, white and colored, it was something unusual. And I heard about it being a organization for the poor class of people – that’s just what I wanted to get into, too; I wanted to know the secrets of it enough that I could become in the knowledge of it.

Now I heard talk about trucks comin into this country  deliverin guns to the colored people but I decided that was all talk, tryin to accuse the niggers of getting into something here that maybe they weren’t – and maybe they were. But didn’t no trucks haul no guns to nobody. Colored people hadn’t been armed for nothing; it told like that just to agitate the thing further. Of course, some of these colored folks in here had some good guns – you know a Winchester rifle is a pretty good gun itself.  But they didn’t have nothing above that that.  It weren’t nothing that nobody sent in here for them to use, just their own stuff.

Well, they killed a man up there, colored fellow; his name was Adam Cole. And they tell me – I didn’t see it but I heard lots about it and I never did here nothing about it that backed me off – Kurt Beall, the High Sheriff for Tukabahchee County, got shot in the stomach. He run up there to break up this meetin business amongst the colored people and someone in that crowd shot him.  That kind of broke him up from runnin in places like that.

And the white folks woke up and stretched themselves and commenced a runnin around meddlin with niggers about this organization. And it’s a close thing today. One old man – and he was as big a skunk as ever sneaked into the woods – old man Mac Sloane, come up to me one day- he didn’t come to my home, he met me on the outside – old man Mac Sloane come to me hot as a stove iron, “Nate, do you belong to that mess they carryin on in this country?”

I just cut him off short. I didn’t belong to it at that time, but I was eager to join and I was aimin to join, just hadn’t got the right opportunity.

“No, I don’t belong to nothin.”

Mac Sloane, white man, said, “You stay out of it. That damn thing will get you killed. You stay out of it. These niggers runnin around here carryin on some kind of meeting – you’d better stay out of it.”

I said to myself, ‘you a fool if you think you keep me from joining’. I went right on and joined it, just as quick as the next meetin come. Runnin around and given me orders – he suspected I might be the kind of man to belong to such and organization; put the finger on me before I ever joined. And he done just the thing to push me into it – gived me orders not to join. . . .

Had the meetins at our houses or anywhere we could have em where we could keep a look and a watch-out that nobody was comin in on us. Small meetings, sometimes there’d be a dozen, sometimes there’d be more, sometimes there’d be less- niggers was scared, niggers was scared, that’s telling the truth. White folks in this country didn’t allow niggers to have no organization, no secret meetins. They kept up with you and watched you, didn’t allow you to associate in a crowd, unless it was your family or your church.

It just worked in a way that the nigger wasn’t allowed to have nothing but church services and, O they liked to see you goin to church, too. Sometimes white people would come into the Negro church and set there and listen at the meetin. Of course, it weren’t nothin but a church service goin on. But if a nigger walked into a white church, he’d just be driven out, if they didn’t kill him. But if a Negro was a servant for white people, then they’d carry him to church with em, accept him to come in and take a seat on the back seat and listen at the white people. But if you was an independent Negro you’d better stay away from there. But if you was a white man’s dear flunky, doin what he said to do, or even on the woman’s side, if they was maids for the white people, well thought of, they’d take em out to their home churches, dupe em up in a way. They knowed they weren’t goin to cause no trouble –and if they did, they’d just been knocked out of the box and called in close question. But they never did act disorderly; just sit there and listen at the white folks’ meetin quiet as a lamb. And when the white folks would come in the colored churches, good God, the niggers would get busy given em first class seats – if there was any in that buildin the white folks got em. They was white people; they classed theirselves over the colored and the colored people  never did do nothing but dance to what the white people said and thought. White people was their bosses and their controllers and the colored people went along with it.

First thing the organization wanted for the colored people was the privilege to have an organization. That’s one of the best things they could ever fight for and get on foot. From my boy days comin along, ever since I been in  God’s world, I’ve never had no rights, no voice in nothing that the white man didn’t want me to have –even been cut out of education, book learnin, been deprived of that. How could I favor such rulins as have been the past?

Conditions has been outrageous every way that you can think against the colored race of people. Didn’t allow em to do this, didn’t allow em to do that, didn’t allow em to do the other. Knowin and comin into the knowledge of what was goin on and how it was goin on in the United States as far as I knowed, which was the state of Alabama as far as I knowed, Tukabahchee County – I knew that it was a weak time amongst the colored people. They couldn’t demand nothing; they were subject to lose what they had if they demanded any more.

Good God, there wasn’t but few privileges that we was allowed. If you was flesh and blood and human you tended to want to help and support your friends in the community, and male something of yourself – white folks didn’t allow you that privilege. But we had the privilege of workin for the white man – he who had the chance had better do it; get yourself together and get over yonder in Mr. So-and-so’s field or anywhere else he told you and do what he tell you to do.  And when pay time come he’d pay you what he wanted to, and in many cases it’d be less than what he’d pay a white man. And some work, like pickin cotton in the fields, white folks didn’t fill a basket – most of em. That was nigger’s work. And if a poor white man got out there and picked cotton, he wass picin cotton like a nigger. Colored man just been a dog for this country for years and years. White man didn’t ask you how you felt about what he wanted to do; he’s just go ahead and do it and you had to fall under his rulins. And bein in his home country, he been allowed to do as he please by the capital of the United States.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

‘So what’s the story of this place, old man?’

Alan gazed into the fire without twitching a muscle. The skin stretched taut over his cheekbones and shone. Then, almost imperceptibly, he tilted his head towards the man in blue, who got to his feet and began to mime (with words in pidgin thrown in) the travels of the Lizard Ancestor.

It was a song of how the lizard and his lovely young wife had walked from northern Australia to the Southern Sea, and of how a southerner had seduced his wife and sent him home with a substitute.

I don’t know what species of lizard he was supposed to be: whether he was a ‘jew-lizard’ or a ‘road-runner or one of those rumpled, angry-looking lizards with ruffs around their necks. All I do know is that the man in blue made the most lifelike lizard you could ever hope to imagine.

He was male and female, seducer and seduced. He was glutton, he was cuckold, he was weary traveller. He would claw his lizard-feet sideways, then freeze and cock his head.

He would lift his lower lid to cover his iris, and flick out his lizard-tongue. He puffed his neck into goiters of rage; and at last, when it was time for him to die, he writhed a giggled, his movements growing fainter and fainter like the Dying Swan’s.

Then his jaw locked, and that was the end.

The man in blue waved towards the hill and, with the triumphant cadence of someone who has told the best of all possible stories, shouted: ‘That . . .that is where he is!’

Arkady and I lit a hurricane lamp and sat on a couple of camping chairs, away from the fire. What we had witnessed, he said, was not of course the real Lizard song, but a ‘false front’, or sketch performed for strangers.  The real song would have named each waterhole the Lizard Man drank from, each tree he cut a spear from, each cave he slept in, covering the whole long distance of the way.

We sat mulling over this story of an antipodean Helen. The distance from here to Port Augusta, as the crow flew, was roughly 1,100 miles, about twice the distance, -so we calculated- from Troy to Ithaca. We tried to imagine an Odyssey with a verse for every twist and turn of the hero’s ten-year voyage.

I looked at the Milky Way and said ‘You might as well count the stars.’

Most tribes, Arkady went on, spoke the language of their immediate neighbor, so the difficulties of communication across a frontier did not exist. The mystery was how of a man of Tribe A, living up one end of a Songline, could hear a few bars sung by Tribe Q and, without knowing a word of Q’s language, would know exactly what land was being sung.

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Are you telling me that Old Alan here would know the songs for a country a thousand miles away?’

‘Most likely.’

‘Without ever having been there?’

‘Yes.’

One or two ethnomusicologists, he said, had been working on the problem. In the meantime, the best thing was to imagine a little experiment of our own.

Supposing we found, somewhere near Port Augusta a song-man who knew the Lizard song? Suppose we got him to sing his verses into a tape-recorder and the played the tape to Alan in Kaititj country?  The chances were he’d recognize the melody at once – just as we would the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ – but the meaning of the words would escape him.  All the same he’d listen very attentively to the melodic structure. He’d perhaps even ask us to replay a few bars. Then, suddenly, he’d find himself in sync and be able to sing his own words over the ‘nonsense.’

“His own words for country round Port Augusta?’

‘Yes,’ said Arkady.

‘Is that what really happens?’

‘It is.’

‘How the hell’s it done?’

No one, he said, could be sure. There were people who argued for telepathy. Aboriginals themselves told stories of their song-men whizzing up and down the line in trance. But there is another, more astonishing possibility.

Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnell escarpments you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’.

 Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. , One phrase would say, ‘Salt-pan’; another ‘Creek-bed’, ‘Spinifex’, ‘Sand-hill’, ‘Mulga-scrub’, ‘Rock-face’ and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge – and be able to calculate where, and how far along a Songline he was. ‘He’d be able’, said Arkady ‘to hear few bars and say, “This is Middle Bore” or  “That is Oodnadatta” – where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.

‘So a musical phrase, I said, ‘is a map reference?’

‘Music’, said Arkady, ‘is the memory bank for finding one’s way around the world.’

‘I shall need some time to digest that.

‘You’ve got all night,’ he smiled. ‘With the snakes!’

The fire was still blazing in the other camp and we heard a burble of women’s laughter.

‘Sleep well,’ he said.