Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Okay.’ I began to move off, but she wouldn’t let me go. She grabbed hold of my reins and frowned at me.

  ‘More than okay, Emily. I know you, you gotta promise!’

  ‘Yes Hazel.’ I looked her in the eyes. ‘Cave in the hills. Janapularti. We won’t go there, I promise.’

  I cantered off, and she followed—reluctantly at first, but by the time we reached the ant-bed building she was beside me, as curious as I was. We reined in our horses, dismounted and stood in front of the building. There was a dirty great padlock on the front door and bars on the windows, but round the back, where the roof had lifted slightly, the crumbling masonry gave us an easy entrance.

  We crawled through the wall and entered a dingy room shot through with bolts of light. One of them hit a calendar on the opposite wall: 1942.

  That explained the station’s hasty abandonment. Able-bodied men had other things on their mind that year. Debris from its former life was scattered about the building: charred utensils in the fireplace, green bottles, a broken table, a hand-made broom.

  We made our way into an adjoining room, this one fitted out with black steel bars: the cell. I touched a metal bunk, then felt an importunate hand upon my sleeve.

  ‘Emily, look!’ Her eyes were wide open.

  Up against the opposite wall, half-submerged in shadow and dirt, was a six-foot high bookcase.

  Full of books.

  I ran a hand across the leather spines, deciphered a few titles. ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ I read. ‘Poetical Works of Tennyson. Persuasion… The Ruby-something of Omar someone…Kenilworth. Lavengro.’

  The names meant nothing to us. And yet…

  We’d grown up on writing, Hazel and I. Our friendship had been suckled on the written word. She’d been five or so when Jack taught us to read: he said that having her company was the only way he could rope me into staying still for long enough. Once we had the basics, we devoured every scrap of writing on the place: newspapers and magazines, mail-order catalogues, missionary texts, National Geographics, Jack’s geology books, the sepia-coloured Australiana he read from time to time, a battered Henry Lawson. We enjoyed them all: they were like radio signals from a distant planet.

  But the collection in front of us was something else. We both felt it.

  They were the planet itself.

  I pulled out a fat red volume and blew away the dust. The book was worn, torn, water-marked, mottled with wasps’ nests and spider webs—but readable. We sat on a bunk by the window, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, arms around each other’s waists, and read from where it fell open:

  …You have seen Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears

  Were like a better way: those happy smilets,

  That play’d on her ripe lip, seem’d not to know

  What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,

  As pearls from diamonds dropp’d.

  Hazel and I looked at each other, astounded. I didn’t know what she made of it, but to me it seemed that the words floated up from the page and hovered in the air, before breaking up and drifting away in a trail of golden particles.

  The little ant-bed gaolhouse was our hideaway that summer, our enchanted cubby-house, our garden of words, our refuge from the rain-battered or sun-blasted afternoons.

  They were troubled times on Moonlight Downs. Tim Buchanan was in the Alice Springs Hospital, from which he would emerge only for his own funeral. The banks, who Jack reckoned had put him there, were looking to recover what they were owed. A succession of hard-nosed bastards came poking round the station, measuring rust and dust, going through the chaotic books, looking at us like buyers at a slave auction. It wasn’t that long ago that a station’s niggers were listed as assets, like so many head of cattle or miles of fencing.

  None of this touched Hazel and me. Not at first, anyway, so immersed were we in our discovery. We dusted and scrubbed the place furiously, decked it out with flowers, crystals and improvised furniture, struck up an acquaintance with the only other occupant, a bush rat named Jajju.

  And we read the bookcase from top to crumbling bottom.

  Exactly where the library had come from we never did discover—presumably it was the legacy of some eccentric constable or bookish missionary, left there when the station was abandoned in the forties.

  It was an odd, eclectic assortment. Many of the books were impenetrably outdated: long-winded stories about sermonising soldiers and war-like priests, Rotarian morality tales and Edwardian romances in which blokes with names like Horace and Headingley ripped their ladies’ bodices in the manner of a Sicilian mail-sorter opening a suspicious envelope. But upon those crumbling shelves we found what I later realised was most of the great poetry and prose of the English language—Milton, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Austen, Tennyson—as well as a set of beautifully illustrated geological texts and old mining manuals. It was here that I came across my Gouging the Witwatersrand.

  Hazel and I would lie on a swag, bodies entwined, sometimes reading from the same book, sharing discoveries, fragments, following tracks and trails. Our styles were different. I was always more fluent than she was, and read things from beginning to end. Hazel’s approach was more visceral: often I would read to her out loud, and she’d latch onto images and phrases, roll them around her mouth, delighting in their colour and texture.

  ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold,’ she’d say, her eyes full of wonder.

  ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners…

  ‘His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

  I was shaken out of my reverie when the Toyota rounded a bend and scattered a mob of kangaroos. Hazel looked up as the biggest of them made a scrabbling escape via the bonnet. The mulga thickened; splinters and wheels of light spun through the branches that scraped against the windscreen.

  She was still quietly working away at the wooden snake. I glanced at the carving and did a double take: its head bore a distinct resemblance to that of Earl Marsh.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised: Hazel had always had a gift that way. As a kid she was rarely without a pencil or piece of charcoal. Many was the time I’d seen her capture the kinetic energy of a galloping horse or a bushfire on the horizon with a few deft strokes on a piece of wood.

  Perhaps it was the carving in her hands, perhaps it was our proximity to our little hideaway, but Hazel seemed to be regaining something of her equilibrium. As we drove into the gaolhouse clearing she studied the snake for a moment, looked into its eyes— then threw it out the window.

  A devil, a dove, an avalanche

  THE POLICE station seemed more or less as I remembered it, which was another surprise. Given the general disintegration that was happening everywhere else in our lives, I’d expected it to be white-ant shit and silt by now. The veranda was looking a bit wonky, but the red earth walls were still standing, the tin roof was more or less intact. They built them to last in those days. I even spotted a bush rat scuttling for cover as we went in.

  ‘Surely that isn’t Jajju?’

  Hazel smiled. ‘His family.’

  She lit a lantern.

  Signs of recent occupation appeared in the sphere of yellow light: a swag on the floor, cooking equipment on the hearth, pannikins and billies, paint pots, pint pots. The décor was all Hazel: feathers and flowers, bottles, eggs, a row of rocks and fossils on the window ledge.

  And, surprisingly, paintings. Some on the sides of packing boxes, some on sheets of metal or paper.

  It took a moment or two for that to sink in, but when it did, it hit me like a bird of prey.

  ‘Jesus, Hazel, these are yours?’

  ‘Yuwayi.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like them.’

  And I hadn’t. Especially the ones on paper: there were eight or nine of them, tacked onto pieces of wood and leaning against a wall. I took a closer look and saw that she’d painted over—or into—a set of old maps. Geological maps, magnetometer surveys, your standard one to two-fifty thous. God kn
ows where she’d found them, but the result was an evocation of country that somehow captured the sense of the word from both an Aboriginal and a European perspective.

  I picked up the painting closest to me: it was an intricately patterned pool of black and white feathers and wings in a fringe of silver. There was something almost Chinese about it.

  ‘This is gorgeous. What’s it about?’ I asked her.

  ‘Mudlark dreamin.’

  ‘And the purple one?’ A simpler design, this: swathes of indigo and crimson through a field of mauve.

  ‘That Laughing Boy story. You remember?’

  ‘Vaguely. And what about the one next to it?’

  ‘Zebra finch.’ A galaxy of grasses—windmill, woollybutt, kerosene—with a flash of lightning through its axis.

  What I took to be the work in progress was parked on the seat of a chair in the centre of the room, simmering in the last rays of the sun that levelled through the skylight. It was one of the maps, tacked onto a slab of wood. I picked it up and examined it. The painting was earth-coloured, ochre washed, with wings and wheels and white flowers. But shot with the odd bolt of blue-grey, like the blurred image of a diving bird.

  I ran my eyes down the right-hand side, where the legend of the original map was a poem in itself:

  Whippet Sandstone

  Red Hills Granite

  Greenstone

  Greywacke

  Porphyry

  Tuff

  Micaceous Quartzite

  Under the legend were some scribbled additions: ‘anorthositic norite, dunite, limonite’. I liked the way Hazel had left the handwritten notes uncovered. They conjured up an image of some grizzled gouger in stubbies and steel-caps, a dirty pencil in his fat fingers, scratching his hopes and observations onto the map. God knows how many times I’d seen my father doing exactly that.

  So deftly had the arrows been incorporated into Hazel’s design that they looked like the tracks of some ancestral being.

  ‘This is so amazing, Hazel. What is it?’

  She came up beside me, her bare feet padding over cool stone.

  ‘Don’t you recognise it?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Diamond dove,’ she whispered.

  Diamond dove. Again. The dreaming and its multitudinous manifestations—people and places, creatures, songs—was beginning to emerge as the motif of my return to Moonlight.

  That was when it struck me: the connection between these paintings. ‘My god,’ I said. ‘This is a series. You’re painting…’

  She nodded. ‘A portrait of my father,’ she said softly.

  I hugged her. ‘No wonder they’re so beautiful,’ I whispered, but, even as I said it, I was wondering what the story depicted in the painting had to do with the argument between Lincoln and Blakie, and how it was connected to his murder. I was curious, but unsure of how to broach the topic without resurrecting painful memories.

  I chose instead to probe around the edges. ‘Diamond dove… Which site have you painted? I know it’s got a few of them.’

  ‘Main one,’ she explained. ‘Where it travels out through Karlujurru. You remember the story?’

  ‘Remind me.’ Sometimes it seemed that every puddle of a creek or crack in the ground had a tale to tell. I’d heard dozens of them from Lincoln. This one, I remembered, was something about the creation of the Tom Bowlers.

  ‘The one about the av’lanche.’

  ‘The avalanche?’

  ‘Yuwayi. That kupulumamu—you know? white devil—was attackin her out near Jalyukurru Hill.’ She ran a finger across the painting, tracing one of the blue bolts. ‘That dove, she flew up and round so fast she made a whirlwind, bring down the mountain, kill the devil with a landslide. You can see it here, the broken bones…’

  She touched what looked like crushed spinifex, embedded in thick, green paint.

  ‘The blood…’ A blot of ochre. ‘The fallen rock…’ The brush strokes here seemed to have been mixed with crushed crystal.

  I stood back and studied the painting. I could make out neither devil, dove nor avalanche, but there were all sorts of other things going on, a cross-hatching of tradition and change.

  ‘It’s a really unusual painting,’ I said.

  ‘Unusual?’

  ‘Alive. Makes you feel like you’re moving across the country yourself, you know? Like looking at a 3-D film.’

  ‘Never seen a 3-D film.’

  ‘Or watching the old ladies dancing at sunset; the way the light moves through the dust around their feet. I didn’t even know you could paint, Haze. Where did you learn?’

  ‘Lady teacher come up from Papunya, year or two ago.’ Papunya, a sprawling community north-west of Alice Springs. The birthplace of the contemporary desert art movement. ‘Give us a few brushes, taught us how to use em. I been muckin around on me own since then.’

  ‘Mucking around?’ She’d been doing a lot more than that.

  ‘I mainly work out here,’ she said, glancing around the room. ‘The peace, helps me see what I’m doin.’

  I put the painting back against the chair, then glanced out the window. The copperburr bushes were a fiery filigree of seeds and leaves, the wiregrass was shedding scintillas of light.

  So absorbed had I been in the paintings that I hadn’t thought to ask the obvious question.

  ‘Hazel—the books, what happened to them?’

  ‘I was wonderin when you’d ask. They’re there…’ She nodded at the fireplace. ‘What’s left of em.’

  On the mantelpiece lay three great ledgers with marbled covers and gold embossing, the kind used by station bookkeepers in the days of elegant hand-writing and Kalamazoo accounting.

  ‘That’s them?’

  ‘Have a look.’

  I pulled one down. Inside it, pressed like a flower, lay a sheet of tea-coloured, heavily creased paper on which I could make out a line of verse:

  When I consider how my light is spent ere half my days in this dark world and wide

  As I leafed my way through the pages familiar fragments and phrases emerged, like stars coming out of twilight:

  Methought I saw my late espoused saint…

  Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it

  There were dozens of them, usually a whole page but sometimes half a page, sometimes a tattered fragment, all of them carefully placed between the thick sheets of the old ledger.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You ever meet that Brick Sivvier, took over the station from Tim Buchanan?’

  ‘Saw him from a distance. Not enough of a distance, from what I can recall of old Prick.’

  She grinned. ‘Think him or ’is boys just turfed em out back. Place been used as a storage shed. Ringers used to camp out here, mighta read em, mighta smoked em, I dunno. Lot of em must have got washed away in the wet. I scouted around when we first come out here, coupla years ago. Found em in odd places. Fished a few out of the rocks over the waterhole.’

  I spent a minute or two leafing through the ledgers. There wasn’t much of our library left, but what had survived was fascinating in a strange, palimpsest sort of way, a collision of images and colour. As I turned the pages I felt like a swallow darting through a cathedral.

  I put the ledger back, went across to the window and touched the rocks on its ledge. Some I knew at a glance: I was Jack Tempest’s daughter, after all. In our house we read rocks the way city kids read cereal boxes. I recognised galena, phenocrysts of augite embedded in a chromite matrix, two crystals of hornblende, intergrown and rimming, gorgeous, criss-crossing sheets and books of phlogopite.

  Others didn’t yield their identities so easily. I picked one up and studied it, intrigued. I’d never seen anything quite like it. It was a hexagonal crystal, three centimetres long, with beautiful, tin-white terraces of growth and reflective cleavage planes. I was trying to work out what it was when I caught in its vitreous crystal surface a distorted image of Hazel coming up behind me.

  ‘This where you bee
n staying?’ I asked her, putting the crystal down.

  ‘Sometimes.’ Her voice was a low, sumptuous growl. ‘When I want a getaway. Just like we used to. Do a bit of paintin, maybe, a bit of thinkin.’

  ‘What do you think about?’ I asked, sensing that in bringing me here she’d taken an important step back towards the intimacy we once shared.

  ‘Oh, things that have gone. Things that’ll never go. You, sometimes…’ she added with a poignancy that cut like a butterfly knife: both ways.

  I put a hand to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry I left you, Haze. Sorry I never came back.’

  She studied me for a moment, smiled uncomfortably, then turned away, picked up some of the kindling that was lying on the hearth and put it in the fireplace.

  ‘Emmy,’ she looked up and said. ‘Let’s go for a swim?’

  ‘You’re full of surprises today.’

  ‘Down the rock-hole.’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant in the trees, but isn’t it getting a bit chilly?’

  ‘More better. We’ll make a fire.’

  Which we did, the kindling crackling up at the first match. I brought in the coffeepot, put it on the fire. We stepped out the back door.

  The sun had disappeared, but the bush was suffused with a salmon afterglow. We set off walking, then she walloped me on the arse and broke into a wild laugh and a wilder sprint. We bounced over the rocks like a couple of dingo pups, tearing off our clothing and a little of the gloom that had been enveloping us these last few weeks.

  Hazel reached the rock-hole first and dived in. I held back, watching her lissom body arc and slip through rings of black water. She reappeared, spray flying from her hair, breasts floating among flowers and gum leaves.

  ‘Whadderye waitin for?’ she laughed. She had a wonderfully wicked laugh, Hazel, a laugh that had been all too scarce of late. Her eyes were as darkly shimmering as the water. I hit the pool feet first, just about landed on top of her.