by Barry Lopez
What most transfixes me in the penitentiary building, however, is not this poignant austerity but instead a set of photographic enlargements hanging in one of the corridors, portraits of former inmates: the defiant faces of the insane, the duplicitous gaze of the pedophile, the vapid stare of the murderer.
The images call forth in me neither compassion nor condemnation, only astonishment. My intention had been to ferret out salient details of prison life here, but the day is hardly half over and I am thinking I’ve already seen enough.
Whatever was decent in men and women in England in 1786, it was not sufficiently strong to condemn this idea when it came before Parliament and to terminate the experiment before it began.
The two of us head for the Model Prison and the museum and then proceed to the Broad Arrow Café for lunch and to look for a map. I could not anticipate how vividly details of this café would remain in my imagination in the weeks and years to come.
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MY FRIEND MARK TREDINNICK and I are following Annamaria Weldon, a woman from Malta, down the Old Coast Road, a hundred miles south of Perth on the west coast of Australia. We’re headed for Lake Clifton, one of the Yalgorup lakes, this one situated in the middle of a national park. We’re passing through an undulating landscape of sand dunes, of isolated stands of mallee forest and limestone outcrops, south of the city of Mandurah. The country hereabouts once belonged to Bindjareb Noongar people (or they to it). Some of them are still here, engaging chroniclers, articulate about the history and nature of their home landscape. They speak of it as you would a relative, a close companion or confidant, referencing a sphere of time inclusive of them and indistinguishable from this geography.
Annamaria, up ahead, has listened with the respect and curiosity of an ardent acolyte to the Bindjareb custodians of Noongar culture. She has tried out the templates of her own Mediterranean ideas on this land, and alongside that put in some twenty years of apprenticeship in the place, grappling with an epistemology different from her own, an Aboriginal way of knowing. The fulcrum of her imagining is the complex ways in which people are married to a place, whatever the tradition might be, whatever the place. And also her awareness of the threats to these marriages, from whatever quarter. Once she loved Malta, to the exclusion of all else I think. Now she is a student of Bindjareb love of place. She’s graceful, light on her feet, full of deep water, a person dedicated to something outside herself. Or so it appears to me.
I marvel at the way Annamaria and Mark pronounce “Bindjareb Noongar,” as easily as they might refer to “Italians”; and how they refer to other local cultural traditions as if they constituted a second subterranean culture, contiguous across Australia, from Anggamudi in the northeast to Wardandi in the Margaret River country, in the continent’s southwest, country toward which Mark and I are bound; from Wimambul in Kimberley, in the far north, to Tyerrernotepanner in Tasmania in the far south. An alternative tradition to the national Australian tradition.
A spur off the main highway takes us through a dying tuart forest. We move into thickets of swamp paperbark and peppermint willow, finally arriving at a spot where we park the cars. Annamaria leads us down a trail—there are a few acacias growing here, acquaintances I recall from Africa—and then there is Lake Clifton. We approach it on an elevated wooden boardwalk above a sedge flat that borders the water.
The summer sun is full upon us. The heat is terrific, but this apparition Annamaria has brought us to is so forceful, the discomfiting heat becomes incidental. The lake has the aura of an exalted being. Its presence is insistent, like that of a wolverine one has suddenly come upon, asleep in a forest clearing in North America. I cannot recall in the moment ever having seen a body of water as ethereal. It’s austere but benign, still as a mirror, its surface a color some painters call French gray, the reflection of a haze in the air above it.
In the beating heat and palpable stillness, the overpowering sight of the elongated lake, less than a mile across, undoes me. It’s bounded by greenish and gray-brown brush growing on long sand ridges that strike north and south. I identify the faint odor of rotting vegetation. For many minutes no one of the three of us says anything. A line of black swans passes by, bearing north over the water, and I become aware of voices piercing the silence suspended above the stillness—fairywrens. In the trees behind us. Southward along the lakeshore, red-necked avocets emerge from a deckled sheet of dunnish color at the water’s edge. Small clutches of hooded dotterel race the shore beyond them. Animated by the color of the sky sifted through a haze, the bowl of our space rounded by flocking birds and birdsong trembling in the heated air, all of this framed by earth-like colors, I grasp in its near fullness the lake Annamaria has brought us here to see.
A billion years or so after debris from a supernova started to coalesce into the rocky planet we now occupy, the possibility of lives like ours was set in motion by an as-yet-unidentified species of cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria oxygenated an atmosphere otherwise poisonous to the forms of life that were to come. A good guess, according to some, is that these bacteria built stony habitations for themselves in wet environments. Today these now abandoned habitations are called stromatolites. Stromatolites, which accrete in shallow waters in the same way coral reefs do, are related to structures called thrombolites. Together, these two structures set a benchmark in Precambrian time. It was modern-day thrombolites, still being built up by cyanobacteria in the near-shore waters of Lake Clifton, that Annamaria particularly wanted us to see.
This annunciation, Lake Clifton itself, was so overwhelming that for many minutes I didn’t notice the thrombolites. These pale hummocks of “living stone” in the lake are believed to be about four thousand years old. They stretch away from us in the near-shore water in both directions, looking like a scatter of white mushrooms at or just below the surface of the water. The circumference of each mound expands by about a millimeter (one twenty-fifth of an inch) per year. The cyanobacteria that create them are photosynthesizers, and it’s the residue from that process, a secretion rich in calcium carbonate, that comprises the thrombolites. The surface of each one is marked by whorls and cracks, patterns so distinctive that Annamaria can point out the difference between one structure and another. To my uneducated eye they seem identical. The rise and fall of lake water during wet and dry seasons makes the thrombolite reef more or less visible to a visitor, according to the season. The water is clear, however, so even when they’re fully submerged, the thrombolites closest to the visitor are still readily apparent. A line of sunken white pillows at the beach’s edge.
This freshwater reef is the largest such reef in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Australian government has designated it as critically endangered. Its future existence is threatened by a complex combination of natural and Anthropocene forces, principally real estate development and global climate disturbance.
Annamaria describes for us what it is like to see the lake and the thrombolites in full moonlight. She describes her encounters here over time with ibis and white-faced herons, with banded stilts and tawny frogmouths (all these creatures are birds). And she says the southern boobook owls and Carnaby’s black-cockatoos that once lived here, along with several others, aren’t around anymore.
The Bindjareb call the thrombolites woggaal noorook, “eggs laid in the Dreamtime by the female creation serpent.” A prominent mentor embedded in their mythology, this serpent is difficult to imagine separately from the Bindjareb’s home geography. She is an instructor, they say, who illuminates for them the threshold between the inanimate and animate worlds.
Leaving the lake, I thank Annamaria for her “translator’s introduction” to the Yalgorup country. How wonderful to imagine making your way across all of Australia with respectful guides like her.
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MARK AND I SPEND a couple of days in the Margaret River country, around Yallingup on
the Indian Ocean, and then return to Perth to meet up with a few others—a landscape painter, a photographer, another American writer, and two escorts who will lead us on an overland trip north to the Pilbara, a district in the northwest corner of the state of Western Australia. Here we will find the scale and intensity of iron-ore mining staggering; commercial mining’s insistence on its justified (and legal) place in the countryside intimidating; and the industry’s burgeoning growth regarded as inevitable by local whites.
In the Pilbara, the depauperate, bewildered, and disrupted original residents—Wajarri and Banyjima, remnant Jaburrara from the Burrup Peninsula, and Kariyarra—explain the deracination that has overtaken them by saying, “Natural resource extraction happened to us.” The more informed and sympathetic among mining company executives will say that the injustices and lack of charity that affect Aboriginal people in the Pilbara are occasionally deplorable; but the world—especially China—is hungry for more steel. And the fly-in/fly-out (Caucasian) workforce, with their homes and families set up in Bali or Perth, the people who actually extract the ore and haul it away, will simply shrug off the collateral damage to local people. They offer us a rationale they consider irrefutable—their astounding wages. “The money’s really good,” they say.
On the drive up to Perth, in anticipation of what we would be seeing in the Pilbara, I asked Mark to talk about his idea that geography exerts a powerful and unacknowledged influence on the human psyche. He believes it frames and encourages certain behaviors, human activities, and social arrangements, so much so that one is justified in speaking of a moral geography, a geography that over time inaugurates a social ethic among the people wedded to that place. I know this idea is bound to come up when we reach the Pilbara, between us at least, so I want a little bit of a head start in a discussion about land-based morality and the implacable force of the mining industry.
Annamaria had said to me, when I told her that in the moment I first saw Lake Clifton I had the feeling of stepping into a dream, that an Australian painter named Tom Carment had said once that he painted trees because he was interested “in the emotional content of the light around them.” I’m strongly drawn to the intelligence behind this statement, and aware that some industrialists consider Carment’s sentiment daft, even socially disruptive.
Mark and I met the others at Perth Airport, the photographer Paul Parin, the painter Larry Mitchell, both from the suburbs of Perth, the American writer Bill Fox, an expert on land art, and our escorts, Mags Webster and Carolyn Karnovsky. Mags and Carolyn are employed by FORM, a small nonprofit investing its energies in the creative work of artists in the Pilbara. FORM sponsors photography, painting, and writing workshops for local people, indigenous and non-indigenous, in the belief that an effective way to reduce tension in the Pilbara, generated largely by the social changes large-scale mining has brought to the area, is to encourage creative expression. FORM operates an art gallery in Roebourne and is heavily involved in collaborations with a number of communities trying to find a way out of the pattern of social destruction that industrialization has wrought here. FORM’s earnest partner in this search for another way of living in the Pilbara is BHP Billiton Iron Ore, one of the world’s largest mining companies and a principal investor in industrial infrastructure in the Pilbara.
The flight from Perth takes us to the mining town of Paraburdoo, where we rent two four-wheel-drive vehicles and head north to Tom Price, a mining town just west of Karijini National Park. It’s late February, coming to the end of summer, but the temperatures here are well over 100° F every day, and the humidity, I learn, will continue to increase the farther north we go. The ore ports at Dampier and Port Hedland on the Indian Ocean are our final destinations.
I had originally planned to drive up to the north coast of Australia by myself. I wanted to visit a square-kilometer array of radio telescopes near Murchison, several hundred miles north of Perth, where astrophysicists have entered into an agreement with local Watjarri people to build a huge phalanx of deep-space probes on traditional land. This technology was intended to locate dark matter and dark energy in the universe, partly to better understand the evolutionary dynamics that create galaxies. I’d spoken with a professor of physics at the University of Western Australia involved in the project and now wanted to speak to the Wajarri Yamatji, to hear their views about the importance and meaning of the array of equipment they’d permitted to be erected on their land.
Unfortunately, construction of the array had been delayed. It is not far enough along at this point for me to follow up on these plans before joining up with the others in Perth. I decide to come back to Murchison the following year, when I can walk with the Aboriginal owners through the radio-antenna farm and listen to what they think of a search for dark matter. What would be their metaphor, their simulacrum to make sense of the scientist’s quest? What sort of “white-fella walkabout” did they think was in play here?
Midway between Paraburdoo and Perth was a second place I wanted to see, a remote draw in the Jack Hills that had no name. At that time it sheltered the oldest known fragments of Earth, tiny zircon crystals dated to 4.27 billion years ago, about 250 million years after the formation of the planet. Shortly after the existence of the site was announced in scientific journals in the mid-1980s I made arrangements to travel there, a plan that eventually came to fruition. Now, some twenty years after my first visit, I was curious to see how the geography of the place might have changed, whether people had by now built a road into the area, or whether the manager of the sheep station on which the site was located had put up a locked gate to keep the curious at bay.
Once in Perth, however, I shelved these plans, too, and opted to travel to Paraburdoo with everyone else, a decision that gave me the afternoon at Lake Clifton with Annamaria and Mark and, later, time in the Margaret River country with Mark, an Australian author and poet living in New South Wales, on the opposite coast.
The seven of us were up and gone from Tom Price before sunrise, driving unpaved roads that took us into the heart of Karijini, a landscape that looked as if it were still damp from the creation. Paul had been all through this country before, photographing, and Larry had seen a good bit of it as well. We descended into and climbed out of deep desert canyons, narrow fissures in a rolling plain that rose to imposing heights in the Hamersley Range to the north and west of us, a brilliant magenta shield, dotted with white-barked gum trees and clumps of golden-colored spinifex grass. The crystalline air was shot through with birdcalls, and flocks of white little corellas and pink galahs passed so closely over us we could hear the creak of ligaments in their wings.
We swam in still pools of cool water and in slow-moving rivers in the bottoms of several of the gorges, out of the direct rays of the sun but with the brightness of its incident light ricocheting off walls of two-billion-year-old rock, walls in every shade of purple one might catalog, from damson to heliotrope, from hyacinth to raisin, each purple changing hue as the hours passed and as the sun’s reflected rays became direct, creating a harsher light.
In one canyon we hiked into, we stopped for a while where a narrow river bar had formed and several river red gums and weeping paperbarks had taken root. Jeweled geckos ran the vertical walls on either side of the canyon, great slabs of incinerated blacks and bronzed purples. As I lay back on cool, sandy soil, a flock of about twenty zebra finches passed across the narrow strip of blue above the canyon, small, brightly colored passerines with large bills and barred tails, quick as a school of mackerel. They were gone before their wooting cries reached the floor of the canyon where we lay.
Up on the plain, in great reaches of hummocky grassland to either side of the red-orange dirt tracks on which we drove, termite mounds rose higher than the tallest of us stood. Red kangaroos and common wallaroos, suddenly alert as our trucks rolled to a stop, bounded away, drawing the eye to bare escarpment walls rising to the base of the Hamersley Range. The traditional
owners here are Banyjima, Yinhawangka, and Kurrama people. Their occupancy goes back more than 30,000 years. To an outlander, the countryside appears primordial; but it has been shaped by these peoples’ hunting and gathering strategies and by the fires they’ve deliberately set, pursuing their “fire-stick” style of farming.
Mags and Carolyn had wanted the five of us to see Karijini to establish a kind of baseline awareness of the country we would be traveling through, by comparison with which Karijini appears completely untouched. Leaving there, we swung north toward Dampier, situated at the far end of the Tom Price railway road, which parallels the tracks that convey the iron-ore trains out of the Hamersley Range toward the deep-water harbors at Dampier and Port Hedland. As we left the park—an open-pit iron-ore mine called Marandoo shares a boundary with Karijini on three of the mine’s four sides—the signs of human infrastructure quickly emerged from the otherwise apparently untenanted land. Fence lines, declaring exclusive ownership, and the many modern conduits for water, electricity, fuel, and information: power-line pylons, cellphone towers, and pipelines. Inscribed amid these was a maze of improved and primitive roads, from sealed bitumen two-lane highways to roads too dangerous, our maps warned, to attempt in a single vehicle. (In such spots a convoy is preferable, where mutual aid ensures some success, at least, in dealing with flash-flood washouts, drifting sand, and broken axles.) The maps also warned us away from areas closed to the public, abandoned mining towns like Wittenoom, where asbestos fibers still swirling in the air are too easily inhaled.