On the west coast, where the sun falls into the sea, the names are more exotic and the narrative of colonial exploration is more than a hundred and fifty years older. Dirk Hartog nailed his silver plate to a tree in 1616. Willem de Vlamingh, more than seventy years later, coasted from Rottnest Island up to Hartog’s landing site near Shark Bay, replacing the original plaque. In between came Frederick de Houtman, charting the constellations of the southern sky along the Dutch East India Company’s route between Europe in the north and the Spice Islands – as Indonesia was known – in the south.
In the days before the reliability of longitude, the smart navigational money was on tracking east from South Africa until the coast of New Holland – or Australia – appeared. Turn left at the place now called Kalbarri, the thinking went, and you could track north-west to Batavia (Jakarta).
But Frederick de Houtman found a suite of reefs between his vessel and the sea cliffs of Kalbarri in July 1619. He named them for a common seafaring phrase – abri voll olos: ‘keep your eyes open’. Hoping no one else would stumble on them as he had.
But here came Batavia, in the early hours of 4 June 1629.
I thought I saw the sea breaking on some shallows, said the ship’s lookout.
I thought you saw the moonlight on the water, said her skipper.
And the ship ran aground, her hull gouged.
Of the 316 people aboard, forty drowned. The rest made it to shore – even the panicky second-in-command, Jeronimus Cornelisz, who spent the last twenty-four hours of the ship’s life clinging to the bowsprit because he couldn’t swim. You know what happened next. There are novels and non-fiction books; there are operas; there are films.
The ship’s skipper, Ariaen Jacobsz, and its commandant or ‘upper merchant’, Francisco Pelsaert, slunk off under the cover of darkness with a subset of crew and passengers and the two small extant boats, first to search for water and then, failing that, to attempt the 3000-kilometre open-water sail to Indonesia to effect a rescue. In their absence – deemed treacherous by the abandoned survivors – command devolved onto that unstable apothecary, the ‘under merchant’ Cornelisz, a man who’d been planning mutiny well before the reefs of the Abrolhos appeared. He began separating the remaining passengers and crew; he began ordering them killed – more than a hundred of them were, and the skeletons of some were found, centuries later, in shallow graves. When Pelsaert returned – having been unable to locate the islands for a month, thanks to the dubious calculations of latitude and longitude taken by his now imprisoned skipper – Cornelisz was tried. He had one of his hands amputated – some reports say two – before he was hung alongside several other mutineers.
It’s a grisly tale, told and retold. Its first incarnation as a book was published in 1647 and became an immediate bestseller. But the recitative of its horror notwithstanding, perhaps some fates are worse. The abecedary of known shipwrecks encapsulates many hundreds of lives cut short – but what of the utterly lost, those ships whose fates aren’t known? As Simon Leys calculated in his own elegant essay on Batavia, of the ships that sailed to the East Indies, one in fifty never arrived. On the return voyage, the odds dipped to one in twenty. ‘Most of the lost ships,’ he wrote, ‘disappeared without a trace.’
‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ as the famous Joan Didion quote goes, and perhaps it’s our stories that keep us alive when we’re gone – a stab at immortality. If a story cannot be told – if its last teller disappears beneath the last wave with the crumbling bowsprit – then the shape of its narrative is necessarily upended, incomplete. Who knows what has happened or where? Someone has to survive; the longboat or the yawl has to make it back. Otherwise the story sinks, forgotten, into the ocean.
*
On the Abrolhos the moon rose out of the sea as bright and as orange as the sun. It was two fingers above the horizon by the time I reached the foreshore, swung up so fast and already apparently diminishing. Someone knew the trick of holding your thumb against its disc to undo the illusion that it rises large and begins to shrink, and we sat there, measuring the moon and measuring our misperceptions.
This demonstrable difference between how we see things and how they are was irresistible. We joked about it. We joked about the creepiness of this empty island with its empty huts. We joked about the ghosts we didn’t want to see – the worst of them just over there, 27 kilometres to the north, where Batavia went down. We talked, we told each other stories. We turned ourselves towards sleep.
We know that we sleep differently to our ancestors (they often slept in two blocks a night, waking in between to eat, pray, love – even to burgle, brew beer, or pop out to see a neighbour). We know, too, that different cultures still sleep differently to each other today (from the famous southern European siesta to various African tribes where no one is ever told to sleep and where the boundaries between waking and sleeping are described as ‘very fluid’). So can different landscapes generate different experiences of sleeping? Can different landscapes generate different dreams?
Twice I skidded out of somnolence, jolting awake with a shock, like a step taken with no ground suddenly beneath it. The second time, I know I cried out too. The night was ringingly quiet and the sleep that finally arrived was tessellated so that I seemed to dream that I was awake when I knew I must have been dreaming and woke as exhausted as if I’d never closed my eyes.
I did dream of Francisco Pelsaert’s mother, dispossessed and punished via the decision that her son was partly culpable for the mess of Batavia because he had left his ship and sailed for rescue. I dreamt of walking into a depth of water that suddenly levelled out, shallow and only chest-deep – and I dreamt of walking across to Australia’s mainland through this flat and silvery rime. Batavia was reckoned to have a top speed of about 4.5 kilometres per hour; I could walk faster than that and reach Geraldton in ten hours, top speed.
And then I slept, deep, dreamless, as if I’d disappeared from my own imagination.
I woke, though, with the unsettling thought of Cornelisz’s amputated hands. Lying on my front, my left hand was gripping at the fingers of my right while the full weight of my body pressed onto both; they’d been numbed and dulled of all sensation. I managed not to cry out again – my roommate was still asleep.
Through the window the morning was the blank silver of the time before sunrise when the world hasn’t yet found its colour, and the gulls rose silently to hover on thermal streams, as if to regain their wings after a quiet night on the ground.
I shook the feeling back into my hands and sent the power-mad apothecary away. The sun shone a straight line across the water to the end of one of the jetties, just as the moon had the night before, and the real world seemed far off.
‘I had such a wonderful sleep,’ said my roommate, smiling and stretching towards the beginning of her day.
Hours later, as our plane rose up from the airstrip and cleared the land’s friable edge, my phone clicked back into range and immediately started to ring. I sent an automatic message – ‘can’t talk now’ – wishing I could shout instead, over the engine’s roar. ‘You’ll never guess where I am; you’ll never guess at the beauty I’m seeing.’
Keep your eyes open; tell something from this place.
*
Of course it’s a compulsion, the need to convert time and space into stories. A bunch of writers on a speckle of island, a limestone platform undercut by the movement of water so that it hovered like a tree on its trunk: we couched it in terms of longing to be marooned in a place like this; the fear of being marooned in a place like this; whether or not we saw a snake, a lizard, or a seal; whether we could ever have enough of the exhilaration of a land’s edge.
Days later, my plane home east still seemed determined to collude with the primacy of that famous and brutal accident as the story that defined this part of the world. The map of its flight path indicated each state capital, plus Darwin – and ‘Batavia, 1629’, with a small dot for the site of the wreck
, out there on the reefs.
But it hadn’t been Batavia and its souls who staked a claim on my imagination during my time offshore. What came to rest there were the truncated arcs of the 239 stories that seem to have disappeared entirely – further out, further down in the unplumbable depths of the Indian Ocean, beyond my millpond and its distant wall of waves. Not centuries ago, but on 8 March 2014, when MH370 disappeared off the face of the earth. Without the wreckage we expect from such impacts. Without the last-minute phone calls we expect from such moments. Without the careful lat/long pinpointing we expect from this century. Without an explanation to lament; without a fate.
This was the story that had found me, on the edge of those eyes-open islands at the edge of the world.
Further out, further west. Under the infinite vastness of all this blue.
Griffith Review
The Thirty-ninth Summer of DK Lillee
Christian Ryan
Lillee in crotch-high shorts, black-bearded and leonine, stands by the bonnet of a second-hand Toyota Land Cruiser, which is parked on a side street just off a highway somewhere mid-Australia in the middle of 1985. The hair is thick on his cheeks and chin, tufty on top of his head. Sunglasses balanced at seventy degrees do not hide the encroaching baldness. It is not long since he exited the first-class scene, and within weeks – it may have been days – of that newsflash he was dictating to his ghostwriter fragments of a paragraph that ended up reading, in part, ‘What I’ll be doing five years down the track is anyone’s guess … The only thing certain is that I won’t be playing cricket.’ Three years and seven months the promise held good. Then he was back, on a comeback, but before that, not wanting that, perhaps in some shadowy way sensing or foreseeing that, and trying to stave that off, he was here, nowhere, off the highway, beside the Toyota – not leaning on it, standing – with one arm in a slung-out embrace of his two young sons, the other curled round the tummy of his wife, Helen, whose own arm, the cushiony inner part of it, was locked snug into the cuddle, holding Lillee close.
A friend had hand-selected the Toyota. Lillee tied a tent and mattresses to its roof. First night of his cricketing afterlife was in a motel bed. At Monkey Mia they camped on the sand with the sandflies, next to a lone tree. They put the tent up again in a caravan park at Halls Creek. To the south and east, inland, were salt lakes and sand dunes, accessible via tracks so faint they could have been constructed in Braille. North went the Lillees. Strangers would approach, say, ‘How you going, DK?’ so he shaved his head and facial hair, remaking himself hairless, nearly unrecognisable. Darwin was a place of pubs with easy-wash tiled floors where people with heady, twisted histories could come and find forgiveness, feelings of belonging, start fresh. The Lillees paused, drove on: 28,000 kilometres by his estimation, clapping eyes on half the circumference of Australia, down to Katherine, taking the Kakadu turn-off, up through Jabiru and along the Gulf of Carpentaria, near where the young naturalist David Attenborough fell into conversation with old Jack Mulholland of Borroloola decades earlier. Mulholland used to go out prospecting, be away three weeks, not much luck.
‘Isn’t that a bit disappointing?’ enquired the young naturalist.
‘Not at all … Money’s no good to you.’
‘It can make life comfortable and easy.’
‘Buy yerself a few luxury yachts? Drink it? Spend it on beautiful women? If I’ve learnt one thing in my life, it is that the measure of a man’s riches are the fewness of his wants.’
By night Lillee lit campfires. ‘Fire,’ he’d once said, painting his own childhood, ‘was a fascination for me.’ Following the tip of Queensland, they crossed Cape York: Weipa, Aurukun, Coen. On a bank of the Archer River he ran into Queensland’s fat police minister, Russ Hinze. This was a couple of years before the bribes accepted by the notorious ‘minister for everything’ were found to tally $4 million and he quit. Lillee sat himself down on Hinze’s side of the river, around Hinze’s fire, fixing himself a rum with coke and blowing on a didgeridoo while Hinze accompanied him on guitar. Lillee’s beard and moustache had grown back, bushy and black. Some regrowth was happening up top, too. But between where the beard ended and his receding hairline resumed was an inch-high gap. He was an alarming, hideous sight. ‘I have always felt myself to be alone, isolated’ – so went a diary entry of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, on penetrating this part of the world – ‘and the surroundings … reflect nothing whatever but my own voice, like an echo.’ Leichhardt, in Cape York, had childhood flashbacks at night. Lillee heard commitments calling out to him from the south: a wedding he had to go to, some possible business openings, the prospect of a trial column with a newspaper. Trip over. He vowed someday he’d return.
Lillee had mates whose cricketing afterlives stretched out safe and far as the eye could see in the Channel Nine commentary box. But Lillee, on TV, came across as sort of gauche. So he waveskied, in a wetsuit, and other times wearing dick stickers, tackling Perth’s beaches and the shark waters near Margaret River, the rumoured demon rider, seeking out the humongous waves, never hanging back, getting in close to the jagged rocks, which required bravery, admittedly a bravery he had a choice about, no one was pointing a paddle at his head, but it was a rung or two above the faux bravery of bowling fast in a cricket match. The stakes were lower, though. On the waves, it was just DK and the waves. Cricket had always felt like DK against the world.
There was a New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell, a candidate in his day for world’s greatest living reporter. For the last thirty-one years and six months of his career he went to the magazine’s office, stepped out of the lift, a typewriter’s clacks frequently discernible from the other side of the wall near the desk where he sat. He did not hand in a single piece.
What if there was an Australian Test team office where Lillee could go daily, shut the door behind him, draw an income, do the thing that was inside him and he was compelled to do, and no one ever had to see it?
There was not. And, short of bedding down with the muck of the rest of them in a nine-to-five job that actually existed, the destiny awaiting Lillee was the unshirkable destiny of the slow-ageing ex-champ – tea and toast downstairs with, in Joe DiMaggio’s case, his widowed sister; blue bathrobe over thin pyjamas; a dawning day ahead of wheeling, cadging, trying to drum stuff up, too much daytime drinking, meetings with sycophants and second-rate opportunists skating on your reputation, golf, too many unasked-for wanderings down memory’s lane, enough that the lane constricts, narrows, becomes a tunnel. Destiny yeah, or nah. Maybe he could delay it.
The comeback began at a beachside Perth club team, Scarborough. Then when his own state wouldn’t pick him he temporarily upped sticks to Tasmania. He was slower, still sage-like, still hissy-fitting like the old DK, moderately successful and none of it prepared anyone for the shock twist of a sponsor’s rep in a kangaroo costume peering over DK’s bowling shoulder beside an artificial practice pitch at the County Ground nets.
Lillee was there on a Wednesday in May to pronounce himself present and fit to play four-fifths of a season with long-slumbering Northamptonshire. And he wasn’t content simply saying he was ripe for it, he wanted to show them. So they all, reporters and cameramen, trekked out after him to the nets, a place he first visited the day before when he whistled the wind through opening batsman Wayne Larkins for a solid hour to work off jet lag. The great DK Lillee was battling a chest cold, from the flight. He had on tracksuit pants. Also, he had on two sweaters. And beneath the sweaters he had on an indeterminate number of shirts, the top-layer shirt swaddled so high up his neck, past the throat, that it was unclear how many shirts he had on underneath it. There was a hint of some comb-over action. A few of the more questing reporters turned up – guys like Selvey, and Alan Lee – and inside, while the rain hit the panes, they bombarded him with why, why, why and DK could only list the why nots. All two of them. Not because he still had ambitions. Not for money.
Next day, same location, Northants were hosting Gloucest
ershire. Six hundred-odd spectators were in though all England wanted to see him. They watched the weather keep the players off until two, at which point Northants batted, so Lillee sat, an anticlimax. Early afternoon the following day he bowled his first three balls. His fourth, landing mid-pitch, smacked someone named Andy Stovold’s glove. His eighth was a shade slower and wider, tempting Stovold into driving at it. Coiling through the gap between Stovold’s flapping arms and the stumps went the ball, offcutter, bowled him, like clockwork, a very old clock and Lillee was tweezering back the clock’s hands to stop their ticking. That night while he slept was the day of the passing back home of Austin Robertson. Austin was a white-haired gentleman Lillee held deep down in his heart and the father of Lillee’s ghostwriter, also Austin, or ‘Ock’. Lillee credited Austin Sr with teaching him how to run. When Lillee ran to the crease next evening, second innings, every beat of the motion was familiar: pause, look up, abrupt tilt-forward of the chest, look down, then a rhythmic, speeding-up lope.
Six for 68 he took. He had on a thermal vest. A yorker got Bill Athey and Terry Alderman failed to hack away an offcutter, two of four men out bowled; bumpers, legcutters, outswingers were sighted. In Darlington for a one-dayer he bowled nine tight overs against Minor Counties. Eleven overs against Worcestershire were less tight but entrapped Ian Botham, out caught in the deep. Hitting the County Ground for Lillee’s second Championship match were Leicestershire. He’d played them before, on tour with Australia in 1972, when he secretly pouched a tennis ball tossed onto the field and instead of bowling the cricket ball Lillee went whang with the tennis ball, which was white. A perplexed and stunned Bob Massie fielding at fine leg thought Lillee, so slippery, had turned the ball white hot. Not today. Today balls were veering leg side, something to maybe mull over while catching breaths down by the long-leg boundary. An autograph-seeking vicar pressed his body against the fence. Lillee, oblivious to the vicar’s clamouring, kept his gaze fixed on the pitch. The vicar could not break it. A moment later the ball rolled Lillee’s way and he was chasing it in new boots with long spikes when he turned, slipped and heard a crack, which was the cracking of a bone in his right ankle, and every ligament was torn as well.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 33