Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  The Jeffers poem that will stay with me after this reading, four long stanzas that will follow me for years, is “Apology for Bad Dreams.” In it Jeffers describes a scene he observed from a clifftop along the Northern California coast, near Big Sur. He watches while a man and his mother beat a horse the son has snubbed by its head to a tree with a length of barbed wire. He is whipping the horse bloody for its failure to do what his mother wants done. Beyond the couple, the sun is setting in banks of brilliant color over the tranquil Pacific. The horizon is a panorama of stupefying beauty. Later in the poem, Jeffers writes:

  It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spirit

  Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness

  For two days I crawl to the bathroom from my bed and back to the bed over the tile floor. When I am finally able, I call the museum. Richard has returned to Nariokotome, but Alan Walker would be glad to show me the skulls in the museum’s vaults.

  I am moving slowly the next morning when I leave the hotel to meet with Walker. The wet sidewalks along Moi Avenue are spangled with sunlight, and I feel the freshened air cool against my skin following a night rain. I watch flocks of Kenya sparrows scattering through the limbs of the frangipani and flame trees that flank the avenue, dense with morning traffic. The waves of chirping are like another kind of spangling.

  At the museum, Walker lines hominin skulls up on a dark velvet runner he’s spread across a trestle table, two robust australopithecines and a single gracile australopithecine. Walker handles the skulls with great care, as though they were works of Steuben glass. He handles them with respect and tenderness. (In camp with Richard, I recall, Walker was understated, the less inclined of the two men to speak. He seemed more open to possibilities that he’d not considered before.)

  After a long moment of silence, as though we were standing at an altar bearing relics instead of at a sideboard bearing fossils, Walker puts the tips of the fingers of one hand on the brow of the single gracile skull. His contact with the fossil bone is as delicate as the touch of a camel-hair brush. He has just been talking about the long path of the hominin, a reeling backward through millions of years to a time before H. ergaster, the first truly human species to use rudimentary utterances, some speculate, and coming forward in his commentary to H. sapiens. He is speculating about the emergence of human language, unknown to the australopithecines sitting before us, the seven thousand spoken languages of the nineteenth century—the four-toned Mandarin of the Chinese, 14th arrondissement French, verb-rich, noun-poor Navajo. He is describing the roots of vocalization in the development of hominin throats, minor changes taking place in the hyoid bones that support the tongue, which hominins would have used to shape tonal phrases of particularized meaning, which preceded the development of a full-blown spoken language—“phonemicized, syntactical, and infinitely open and productive,” as one linguist has written.

  In the beginning, before language and complex thinking, hominins pushed air up the trachea, shaping meaningful and comprehensible alarm calls and breeding calls. And then came something else, something that conveyed the meaning that melody can carry but which words can’t. These were tones strung together around emotion and thought, runs of sound like the trills and vibrato in birdsong. Hominins came to know one another as individuals in a new way. The level of cooperation possible between hominins expanded, by an order of magnitude.

  With his fingertips on the cranium of an australopithecine skull not much larger than a grapefruit, on the forward part of the vault where one day frontal lobes would rise up in Homo, he says, “Barry, I can’t prove this, but I believe we sang before we spoke.”

  Port Arthur to Botany Bay

  State of Tasmania

  Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean

  Southeastern Australia

  State of New South Wales

  Western Shore of the South Pacific

  43°09'16" S 147°52'02" E to 34°00'11" S 151°13'32" E

  My hands are slotted loosely in the pockets of my trousers. I’ve turned my head and tilted it so the sun’s rays fall full on my face while I gaze, squinting, across the expanse of a former prison grounds. It might be the face of someone hearing but not listening to a eulogy. Inwardly elsewhere. Neither I nor my companion, a poet from Hobart and a recent acquaintance, is paying much attention to the cricket match going on in front of us. It’s a pickup affair, being pursued on a greensward where picnickers stroll carrying paper plates of potato salad and fried chicken. The action on both sides—a white ball sailing over the head of a boy racing after it, another ball dismantling a wicket with a clatter—raises desultory cheers from the crowd, some of whom have their backs to the game. They’re gnawing breast and thigh meat off the bones, cracking down hard on buttons of resistant cartilage. Those sitting have settled their drinks securely between tufts of green grass to keep them upright. Some have paused with their mouths full to take in, like us, the bleak north wall of a burned-out hulk, a roofless three-story building across the way. They peruse with us its mute facade, perhaps imagining an angry face there at a barred window port, a figure emerging from the interior of one of the cells and glaring down indignantly from behind the twisted steel. Long ago someone took a sledgehammer to most of these windows, a furious, determined effort to dismantle, to render into rubble, what had happened here. Others, the ones who eventually prevailed, saw the commercial potential in preserving what remained of the penitentiary and its surrounding grounds, the parsonage and the cemetery, the watchtower at Scorpion Rock, and the guards’ former barracks (now the Frances Langford Tea Room).

  My companion is pointing away to the east, toward the remains of the prison church. He offers me some points of its history. While two prisoners were excavating its foundation, in December 1835, one of the convicts, he says, killed the other with a pickax. And it was also a convict, he tells me, one Henry Laing, who designed this building, capable of holding a thousand Christian prisoners for service on a Sunday morning. When construction was completed, however, the Church of England claimed the house of worship for its exclusive use. Catholic convicts objected so violently that extra guards had to be brought in to reestablish order and maintain it until an arrangement could be worked out. The decision the appointed committee made was to accommodate all Christian denominations at the same service.

  Roman Catholic prisoners who walked out during the first generic service were sentenced to thirty-six lashes each.

  The church was later destroyed in a fire, in February 1884.

  I’d asked the poet to bring me here to Port Arthur from Hobart so I could see this storied transportation prison, one of the best preserved of nearly three dozen such penal colonies built by the British across their empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These “convict dumping grounds” were meant to house that portion of the British citizenry the Crown had identified as “undesirable” for leading a life in the homeland. By the mid-eighteenth century, the population of these outcasts had grown too large to be warehoused in the carcasses of decommissioned ships—the “hulks,” moored in the Thames. Among those sent instead to Port Arthur was the Hobart poet’s great-great-grandfather, John Frimley, at the age of fifteen.

  The poet and I both consider Port Arthur a monument to the absolute power of an imperial state to purge itself of criminals, the mentally ill, political protesters, paupers—of anyone who posed a threat to the authority of the state or to its right to impose civil order.

  * * *

  —

  ON THIS PARTICULAR WARM AFTERNOON in the fall, the hundreds of visitors spread out across the former prison grounds appear to be enjoying themselves, to be at their ease wandering through the buildings, lolling on the grass. A group of Chinese travelers has just disembarked from a tour bus. Their guide is starting them off with a visit to the formal gardens. Shoppers in the Port A
rthur gift shop, housed in a building that was once the prison’s insane asylum, are considering souvenir trinkets and postcards. In the flogging yard nearby, two young women stand together motionless before a discolored post with a sheen to it. Finally they step away, looking somewhat relieved.

  The history of the criminals once housed here has been slightly jiggered for public consumption by the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, simplified and expurgated to not offend a modern sensibility. Many, perhaps most, of those picnicking on the cricket pitch believe that what happened here at Port Arthur was cruel, unjust, and unenlightened. Some, no doubt, are also inclined to regard most of the former convicts as the unfortunate victims of a misguided experiment in social engineering. Whatever iniquity might have characterized Port Arthur in the years it operated, I believe the consensus among visitors here today—as it might be among visitors to Choeung Ek, the killing field outside Phnom Penh—is that this extreme public violence toward people is no longer openly tolerated. Whatever its faults, civilization has advanced too far to allow it.

  The Port Arthur Historic Site has been laid out to edify and reassure the visitor, to isolate its evils in a distant time. It is not set up as a caution to the visitor, nor meant to suggest the existence in the world of inhuman criminal intent or of punitive governments, or to remind the visitor of contemporary governments who regard those who protest their actions as “an affront to the Crown,” which was the case with the Irish Ribbonists and members of the Young Ireland movement who were punished here.

  No connection is to be made at Port Arthur with Bashar al-Assad’s underground prisons in Damascus or of America’s off-site destinations for “terrorists.” Visitors to Port Arthur are meant to skate easily through and around all this darkness. Most are glad, one assumes, not to be forced to encounter any complexity or paradox here. They are, after all, many of them on holiday.

  The poet and I stand about near the pitch, both of us looking slightly out of place. We do not speak to each other, though each has much to say about the situation—about the scourging ground, where the grass growing close around the whipping posts is so lush; about the intimidating presence of the commandant’s perfectly restored house, with its spacious veranda, its carefully manicured grounds. Fitful breezes off the water of Mason Cove rustle the dry leaves of massive eucalypts shading the commandant’s quarters, and the rising hush of this breeze tempers the shouts of the cricket players and the applause of the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  MY COMPANION, Pete Hay, has been commissioned by the Tasmanian government to compose a long poem about Port Arthur, about the particulars of the experiments conducted here in penal discipline, the incidents of physical assault in the mining pits, the extent of sexual violence, the despair of adolescent victims of serial rape, and the furtive pickpockets, alert for any opportunity to advance their standing in the prison population at the expense of someone else.

  The poet is a generous man. He has reams of notes, folders filled with research, the raw material from which he will fashion his poem; but he readily offers me a few of the discoveries he’s made. The poet is not an artist obsessed with ownership. He does not hide the knowledge he’s acquired. He’s eager to share. I liked him right away. When I spoke to him over the phone from my home in Oregon and told him of my interest in the prison, he volunteered to drive me there from Hobart and to guide me through the site.

  From the picnic ground we walk off slowly to the southeast, away from the main compound. The poet says he has something to show me, a part of the penal colony closed to tourists but to which he has access because of his research needs, and because it is his intention to look squarely into the factors that complicate the history of this place.

  We amble down a service road, enjoying the balmy March weather and exchanging views, like two people walking along the Malecón in Havana or the Marmara Denizi in Istanbul, where the aspect of an adjacent spacious sea encourages latitude in the conversation. I ask the poet who among Australian writers he most admires or enjoys, and he asks the same of me. Neither of us is looking for a critical appraisal. We’re feeling our way toward shared ground, so that our acquaintance might develop into a friendship.

  We continue on to a locked gate, to which the poet has the key. Beyond it we pass through a copse of gums to emerge on a deserted field. A few buildings once stood here, says the poet, adjacent to a cliff which plunges straight down to the sea, a hundred or so feet below. The view west from this point of land jutting into Carnarvon Bay is toward the town of Port Arthur, and to the penitentiary grounds at Mason Cove. To the east are the waters of the northernmost arm of Maingon Bay, the bay a part of the Tasman Sea. From there, only the open ocean imposes between here and the George V Coast of Antarctica, 1,635 miles away over the southern horizon.

  The poet begins his story. This is Point Puer, he says, the tip of a short peninsula that protects the prison compound from storms coming in off the Tasman Sea. And it is here, he says, that boys as young as eight, brought in on the transportation ships, served their time as adolescents inimical to the Crown or to the wealthier classes. The buildings here, set apart as they were, gave the boys some protection from pedophiles housed with the main prison population. The poet describes the general horrific atmosphere of sexual predation and debauchery at the prison. I stare at the ground. It’s covered with narrow leaves from the eucalypts, a carpet of fallen leaves, shed bark, and fallen seed capsules. I gaze out across the water at a ridge of mountains on a peninsula miles to the east. I nod stiffly, acknowledging the repugnance of the history, which the poet continues to present.

  The poet takes no pleasure in setting out the graphic details. His intention is to establish a context for what he now has to say: it was from these cliffs that some of the boys jumped to their deaths, hand in hand. Pursued through the labyrinth of buildings in the main prison compound during the day, cornered in closets and storage rooms where they were overpowered and raped by sexual psychopaths, hounded and beaten at night by their dormitory guards, who enforced the boys’ adherence to a regimen of prayer, penance, and physical labor, some chose death. They slipped away from the dormitory at night and leapt into the darkness masking the water below. Some surely must have jumped during the day, says the poet, perhaps on a March afternoon like this one, when the warm air, soft breeze, and sun-spangled water embodied feelings of relief for them, of salvation. Running for the cliff edge, hand in hand, they ignored their warders’ counsel to resist the temptation to end one’s life in this hellhole, and sailed into the air.

  With a gesture of my hand I stay the poet and walk away by myself to the clifftop, where I stand and watch the water below for a while and listen to the breeze in the eucalypts, the fondly remembered trees of my childhood. On the way back to where the poet waits, making notes, I pick up two dark eucalypt buttons and pocket them.

  We quit the peninsula and return to the main prison complex. I do not tell the poet I understand why the boys held hands. If the poet had suggested to me that the suicides were unwarranted, I might have spoken up; but he seems aware of the human capacity to inflict humiliation and pain, and also of the depth of suffering some are forced to endure. Whatever he might have recalled of the forms of harm he’s come across in his research at Port Arthur, he offers me only a bare outline of the story, and acts as though he might have compromised himself by saying only that much. His physical gestures speak of his own grief and compassion, so I feel great affection for him and admire his decency.

  We walk west along the sea-skirting road, past the commandant’s quarters and the site of the first prisoners’ barracks, to arrive at the flagellation yard, where Pete explains the procedure at this spot for any prisoner who broke the rules. Prisoners were secured to a triangle frame, arms straight overhead, hands tied at the apex, then the feet spread and tied. The customary lash was a flail, comprising nine lengths of knotted cord. The blows fell
across the bare back from neck to waist. The usual sentence of twenty to forty lashes left the victim unconscious and the back a jellied mass of pulverized flesh.

  * * *

  —

  I ASK PETE where we might get a map that shows the layout of the prison, one that might pinpoint where the original buildings once stood, and now that it’s a tourist destination, what changes have been made since the prison closed in 1877. He says we can get a map later, on the way out. Just now, however, he thinks we should continue on through the penitentiary complex, examine some of the cellblocks, and look at a few of the curated exhibits, including one featuring portraits of some of the more notorious prisoners. Just before we enter the old cell barracks, Pete points out the Broad Arrow Café on the far side of the cricket pitch. Later, he says, we’ll get a map there, as well as a bit of lunch. I can see Pete’s red Toyota Corona sitting by the café in the sunshine. Just beyond it is a yellow Volvo 244 with a surfboard strapped to the roof rack.

  To get a full sense of what was once in operation here, says Pete, we need to visit the penitentiary itself and then walk through the Model Prison, and then afterward take in the prison museum, in the old hospital. With that sequence now organized in my head, I step into the partially restored ruins of the penitentiary building, three floors of cells in which the most dangerous prisoners were confined. The cells denied prisoners open space and forced them to comply with the prison’s daily routine. Stepping in and out of them is like swimming in and out of sleeping compartments on a sunken ship, the rooms emptied now of the bodies of the drowned.