by Tim Winton
On a continent where native mammal extinctions are rivalled only by extinctions of indigenous languages and cultures, the fragile persistence of the people of the Wandjina is something to treasure and to celebrate. Indeed, Kimberley rock art has garnered passionate and influential non-indigenous enthusiasts. But although many are keen to preserve what they view as artifacts of antiquity, they’re far less passionate about the sacred power and ongoing cultural role these sites retain for living people, fellow citizens whose existence only makes sense because of them and whose health and wellbeing depend upon contact with and attention to them. Too few rock art enthusiasts and specialists in the academy value the custodians of these sites beyond their initial use as guides and ‘informants’. The cultural expertise of traditional owners continues to be scandalously undervalued.8 Wealthy lessees of cattle stations where much of this art is situated, many of whom were introduced to it through the Bush University of the Ngarinyin, and who later formed a foundation for its protection, have in recent years been accused of restricting access to the rock art on their leases to an exclusive social set. That is to say, they make a trophy of another people’s living culture. In the wake of Native Title deliberations, there are regular reports of traditional owners being barred entry to these sites.9 The implication is clear enough: the paintings are more precious than the people who make them. Perhaps another instance where the colonial past has not been shaken off.
Since those early years of my apprenticeship, the effect of the power of place on the behaviour and aspirations of the people around me has been my underlying and ongoing concern. Others had been there before me, of course. In Voss, Patrick White’s expeditionary hero ventures out into the hinterland to conquer distance. He aims to master country and fill its apparent emptiness by his sheer presence, with his ego and his sense of European destiny. In the end he’s swallowed operatically by desert, a victim of his own ignorance. Voss was a turning point for me, a sign of what might be possible in writing poetically about figures in landscape. But closer to home, Randolph Stow was the greater influence. I came upon The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea as a schoolboy and loved it, but Tourmaline and To the Islands were books that excited me the way few novels have, before or since. Stow was a native of Geraldton, my mother’s hometown. When I was eighteen it was barely conceivable that a genius such as this might spring from a rough old midwest town like the one I knew and where my cousins lived. Even though they sprang from an earlier era – like my parents, Stow was born in the 1930s – his novels were the first in which I recognized my own land and people without having to translate and accommodate as I read. White and Stow were both sons of the squattocracy but Stow reached an intimacy with the natural world that the more celebrated laureate never could.
Heriot, the raging apostate pilgrim of To the Islands, has long been a teacher, protector and controller at his far-flung mission. His aims are in keeping with those of the racist mid-century government and he fears change – fresh policy directions and a new sense of agency amongst the tribal people for whom he is accountable. And Heriot, of course, goes to pieces. On the face of it, his trajectory is not unlike Voss’s. An angry failure, perhaps even a murderer, he journeys out into the remotest bush in what looks like an act of self-destruction. But the teacher finds himself brutally taught, strangely protected and militantly controlled by the country he blunders through. At the end he relinquishes the idea of an object. He surrenders to immensity and merges with the landscape, turning a European failure to arrive into a tragic antipodean acceptance, even an apotheosis. To me it’s a visionary work. Stow is still the marker for me, the distant knoll by which I take my bearings. Whether writing of the ghost-ridden midwest of his youth, the febrile Trobriand Islands of his years as a patrol officer or the enchanted landscape of his long, self-imposed exile in Suffolk, he was sensitive to landscape in a way few other prose writers, of any country, have been. For years I mourned his lingering late-life silence. But now I wonder if such a reticence wasn’t inevitable. While he seemed to feel the country of his birth as if he wore it, the nation-state he left behind pushed on as if the frontier ethos were all the inspiration a people could desire. More and more, it must have seemed that he was speaking a different language.
I was so young when I first began publishing fiction that for a long while I felt I had no peers. All I mean by that is I’d gotten a head start on my own generation and for a decade or so, before writers my age like Gillian Mears and Richard Flanagan and others came along, I felt a little isolated. So, with characteristic cheek, I privately claimed Stow as a peer. After all, he’d begun writing and publishing when startlingly young, and he was, at least in his youth, a local. I never met the man. But he was good company. I will always be in his shadow.
VII
Northam, 1995
Spread below us, the land is flat and golden, all its undulations etched into shadow. Wheat stubble is sectioned into orderly rectangles. Sheep pads spider away from dams and troughs. From above, the windmills are barely visible. Rare clumps of trees stand in vivid contrast to the bleached summer pastures. When sheep move, as hot milk spilt across a tawny cloth, dust rises like steam in their wake.
The little plane vibrates. Despite myself, I stare distractedly at the pilot’s long, painted nails and the way her pewter shoes shuffle the pedals. Who was I expecting to fly this thing, Tony Bonner from Skippy? I should be ashamed of myself. Though I’m slightly bilious, if that counts as suitable mortification.
We shudder through an updraught and Richard Woldendorp, the laureate of Australian aerial photography, reaches forward and taps the pilot on the shoulder. Without even a nod she tips the plane to starboard and Richard opens his window. Hot wind rips through his thin scurf of hair. He thumbs his specs back and hefts his big lens through the gap. As we turn circles across the dusty paddocks, he hangs half out of the window, this portly man in his late sixties, and clacks away until he’s satisfied. Few can have put in as many flying hours in the cause of art.
Born in Utrecht in 1927, Woldendorp arrived in Australia in 1950 and has been compulsively shooting landscape from the air for half a century. He says that it’s from here, in the sky, that he most experiences ‘a sense of wonderment of a world so complex, varied and beautiful’. After fifty years you’d expect him to be hard to please, but even this depleted pastoral landscape brings out an impish excitement in him. He’s fascinated by the way the landforms below seem to mimic the patterns and shapes of so many creatures and objects you encounter at ground level. At first glance his photographs can look like abstract-expressionist paintings. I’ve seen the double-takes they produce in corporate lobbies, airport lounges and museums across the country.
We drop and lurch and yaw. He aims and bangs away again and my gut begins to stir. It’s not comfortable watching the man work, but it’s an honour all the same.
When we even out again I feel the first cold sweats, but Richard reloads, waits. We bank out over a dam and as the sun catches its surface it flashes silver, hard and bright as an accusation. I glance back at Richard. He gives a boyish gap-toothed grin, a thumbs-up. I wish he hadn’t told me on the drive out about the forced landing on the saltpan at Lake Eyre, or wherever it was. But I return the gesture as if I’m perfectly at home.
The downward view
I was twenty-one before I flew in an aeroplane. Still at university and halfway through a second novel, I was travelling to Sydney to collect a prize for the one I’d written a year before. And it was startling, seeing the country from the air for the first time. How flat the hilly jarrah forests were from above, how relentless the bitumen highway heading east. The wheatbelt looked so organized and geometrical and even the remnant woodlands at its edges were as rigidly defined as carpet cuttings. But none of that imposed order could resist the meandering loops and dints of the salt that was beginning to encroach on agriculture. The wheatland looked like a hard-worn shirt rimed with fractals of dried sweat. Soon the familiar Southern Ocean fell into v
iew near Esperance. A road trip of ten hours reduced to minutes. So often a maelstrom at the surface and a killing field below it, the sea looked as safe and baby-blue as an infant’s blanket. Out along the Bight in South Australia, surf foamed and boiled against the Bunda Cliffs. I’d stood down there as a kid and heard the hellish roar, but from an altitude of ten thousand metres the spectacle was silent and tame and the vicious whitecaps off Port Lincoln, where tuna boats toiled in a rugged chop, looked about as menacing as dandruff.
Seeing the land from the air will probably always be strange, but then it’s a relatively new perspective for humans. And it still seems an outrageous privilege. Altitude transforms landscape entirely. From up there, as landforms and vegetation groups overlap and dissolve into one another, you see the geological and hydrological connections that go to make a place. Relieved of human and terrestrial limitations you glimpse vast distances in a single moment. You’re suddenly angelic, safe from the land and its carnal logic. How puny trees are at altitude when at ground level they humble and impress as colonies and sanctuaries, as monuments to life. From the air they can be reduced to texture, or mere territory like the abstract stuff of maps. Rendered thus, country looks so much more expendable, so open and welcoming of extraction. A forest looks so loggable and a red range so exploitable. The aerial perspective doesn’t always reveal intrinsic beauty.
Indeed, for a long time the aerial perspective has been a vital tool of commodification, a means of turning land into money. The iron barons of the Pilbara love to recount the flights that supposedly sparked their fortunes. Some, as in Lang Hancock’s oft-told account, have begun to sound a little too mythical to be taken literally, but unquestionably there were mesas and canyons in the Pilbara that were doomed the moment men like him buzzed over them in Cessnas. Within a generation the same process familiar to coastal Australia was under way, only at greater speed and intensity as landforms, ecosystems and sacred places were transformed into mere ore deposits. As Hancock is quoted as saying, ‘Nothing should be sacred from mining, whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s or anyone else’s.’10 The man who suggested the government should ‘dope up’ the water supplied to Aborigines so as to render them sterile was in no doubt about what this country signified and who it rightfully belonged to. He made his fortune from dirt but he saw the land from on high, which is a polite way of saying his perspective on the living world and his fellow humans was resolutely downward.
Sometimes it pays to be sceptical of the aerial view. From a sufficient height, Uluru itself can look no more remarkable than a stale school bun. In the far northern Kimberley I have emerged from coastal country so rugged and difficult that cars are useless and traversing it on foot is gruelling, if not impossible, and yet the moment the seaplane lifts you away from the beach or the chopper plucks you off the ridge, the same terrain looks pretty, harmless, inviting. Within seconds you’ve gone from earthbound defeat to celestial transcendence and the higher you fly, the less human your view.
Buzzing low, as Woldendorp does, at least you’re close enough for trees to remain trees. Jump-ups and gorges retain their three-dimensional reality. At such a modest altitude you feel more birdlike and less disembodied and you see accordingly. The smoke of bushfires fills the cockpit. The heat of all those stones still reaches you. The terrain is not so distant as to become wallpaper. As the biologist Charles Birch would say, things remain subjects, not objects.
From just above the treetops the skin of the land looks creaturely, like the hide of a crocodile, the pelt of a kangaroo, the feathers of corellas, the bark of boabs. It’s organic; its life is still legible. Where wind and water have flayed the soil for aeons, you see the country’s bones. The continent is so beaten down it looks threadbare, but obdurate too, long-suffering in its great age, hanging on despite every natural and human force laying siege to it. Where it seems defeated from the air it’s often holding out at ground level. Crossing country that shows no sign of rain you come upon a cataract. In niches and hidden gullies of fire-blackened mesas and ridges there are sudden patches of rainforest seething with birds.
But there’s no doubting the utility of the aerial perspective, especially on a continent as large and relatively unpeopled as ours, where down at the surface the larger ecosystems are hard to take in as anything but abstractions. A reef or river system or a savannah is both immense and immensely complex in its constituent parts, and without overflying something so enormous it’s hard to conceptualize. Sometimes there’s nothing like seeing things in one seraphic sweep. Flying above the vast shallows of Shark Bay, for instance, with their dazzling, mottled meadows of seagrass, is to quickly feel an outlandish notion become manifest. So, you soon think, that’s what fourteen thousand square kilometres of estuary looks like. One small section, the Wooramel Seagrass Bank, is the largest structure of its kind in the world. In a few moments you see why Shark Bay was classified as a World Heritage area.
Like Richard Woldendorp, I love to see nature echoing itself: the way longshore drift leaves a pattern of scalloping on beaches that replicates the shape and texture of the very shells that wash up on their shores. These recurrences appear in totally unrelated landscapes. The pointillism of spinifex on pindan plains is repeated in a different palette in dry sclerophyll forests; the pebble-dash maze of a gibber plain seen at roo-rousing altitude is repeated at a thousand feet over a coral reef, where each ‘stone’ is a lump the size of a Haulpak truck.
Many flyers make the false connection between aerial landscapes and Aboriginal paintings from the desert schools. Artists from Utopia, for instance, are not depicting aerial views at all, but they do repeat shapes, patterns and motifs that are everywhere in nature, some of which represent deep story, biological relationships and cultural information not easily available to those not born to the desert. Even so, it’s tantalizing that the most earthbound artists on the continent should appear to be seeing and painting the earth from the sky.
For the rest of us, Australia is probably most familiar from the air. Living in a country so vast, this is generally how we travel across it, how we gain any sense of scale and linkage, how we understand it, and quite literally how we govern it. But it’s a mistake to equate familiarity with intimacy. Commuting over plains, deserts, woodlands and ranges at ten thousand metres, we flatter ourselves when we assume we know what it is we’re seeing.
VIII
Mitchell Plateau, 1993
After a week’s barramundi fishing it’s time to get the plane out. I’m in dire need of a shower and so are my friends. My hair and clothes have gone mouldy. My legs are stippled with insect welts and my hands smart from a hundred tiny perforations from spines and hooks. To get to the airstrip up on the plateau we need to cross the gulf by boat and make it up the washed-out track by noon. At dawn I’m staring down the gulf toward the escarpment as I finish my coffee. The strip is only five kilometres away but it’ll take half a day to reach.
In the wet-season glass-off the boat ride is dreamy, almost surreal. The air is damp and warm. The hull’s glide feels frictionless, and glimpsed through the patches of rainforest above the mangroves, at the confluence of the Lawley and Mitchell rivers, the ramparts of the plateau are banded with horizontal layers of rosy bauxite that miners have been trying for a generation to exploit, against the wishes of traditional owners. The bluffs and approaches are striped with ephemeral waterfalls flashing silver in the early light.
From the dinghy we stagger up the pebble beach through a merciless welter of sandfleas. The boxy old short-wheelbase LandCruiser is there beneath its tarp. We fire it up and begin the long, arduous climb in low range. At this time of year, in the waning wet, the track is more or less a watercourse. The ascent is achingly slow and a little perilous. Against an axle-deep stream, at angles that don’t bear thinking about, the vehicle crawls across slimy rocks and logs that thud and grind against the diffs. Now and then, when the wheels lose traction, it yaws off the track and drifts free until we’re st
randed on the scree-slope. Then we step out gingerly to lever it back across in stages with the high-lift jack. It’s sweaty work and nerve-racking.
It takes a couple of hours to cover the first two kilometres. Then the track grows firmer and we actually make second gear. Eventually we reach level ground up on the plateau proper where everything is a mad profusion of growth, hot and wet, and the journey turns into a total inversion of the standard car ride. We pick up speed, trundling blindly through the head-high spear grass, between pandanus and livistona palms, still safely beyond the barrier of glass and steel, but soon the cab is too stuffy to bear and we roll down the windows and let come what may. The track is entirely obscured, the view literally ends at the bullbar, but we allow the front wheels to seek the unseen ruts and the vehicle more or less steers itself. As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragonflies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair, sucking the perspiration on our faces, catching in the gaps in our teeth. The air is soupy. The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea. Everything around us fizzes and swirls psychedelic on the wing. The country feels too warm, too thick, too wild and rich to be real. My skin prickles and crawls. The livid world folds away in my path like the sea before Moses. And then we’re through, pressing out onto the open swathe of slashed ground. The gravel strip is flat and neat, walled in by jungly green.