by Robert Drewe
This is like being in a heat mirage. She’s hurrying back across the yard. Too dizzying to look at him slanting now in the studio doorway, yearning towards her, all uncomfortable arms and legs and acute foreign angles. His red hair hastily re-combed. The sickly-sweet redness.
He blinks at her curt farewell. As she stamps back in the dust, she longs to draw her image back from the lens. The thought of him possessing it makes her shudder.
But before she gets carried away with primitive ideas of her soul being stolen from her, she considers—and this is somehow disconcerting, too—that it’s not exactly the most intimate or sophisticated of images.
The photograph, in fact, will be regarded at first as whimsical, if a little curious, and later become popular as a jolly and even patriotic picture-postcard: Woman Kissing Cockatoo.
During the water famine all winds from the south and west ceased to blow. Instead of faint evening intimations of cooling sea breezes, teasing hints from the Indian and Southern oceans, there was only the easterly wind, all day, day after day, surging out of the inland deserts to blister the skin, eyes and tongues of humans and animals and toss and whirl the heaps of loosened dryblowing dust into a vast red dust-cloud.
With each hot day the stench from the faeces and rubbish piling up in backyards and around the camps grew fiercer. And the accumulated human and animal filth encouraged more flies, as every bush or rock—any mound or declivity giving the slightest privacy—was used as a latrine. People grew sick and desperate.
During the water famine some miners bribed Aborigines with whisky or tobacco or trousers to find them water. Others tied them to trees in the sun and fed them salt meat until their thirst forced them to lead them to their tribal waterholes in the remote granite outcrops. These the miners drained or their animals made foul and muddy.
The desert Aborigines told a tale of their spirits discussing the best punishment for an oaf who had polluted their waterhole: ‘What do you wish for the one who muddied our water?’ ‘That he become a stutterer and never be able to speak a clear word.’ ‘And you?’ ‘That he always go about dumb with his mouth gaping.’ ‘And you, my brother?’ ‘That he never take a step without breaking wind.’ But for the leader of the salt-meat water thieves they retaliated with a symbolic spear in the throat.
During the water famine the dust storms came up with the sun and went down with the sun. A howling red wall all day long. Abandoned horses and camels lurched out of the dust storms, crazed and frothing with thirst, nightmarish beasts trampling campsites and charging any unprotected water.
During the water famine an expedition containing four British members of the Royal Society, three Aboriginal guides, a Chinese cook and four Afghan cameleers, dragging behind their camels two longboats once used for harpooning whales in King George’s Sound, disappeared into the eastern desert in search of a mythical inland sea.
During the water famine those miners who couldn’t afford the rising price of condensed water, much less fresh water transported expensively from the coast, cursed their dry throats and conjunctivitis, tore at their itchy eyes and died from thirst. Or went mad and ripped off their clothes and committed suicide. Or died of typhoid. Or died of suicide and typhoid, like one of the three young Hallstrom brothers owning a condenser plant cooking water out on the salt lakes, who all developed fever. Archie died there at the lakes, Byron disappeared, raving, into the west, and the third boy, Marius, suffering from sunstroke as well, was brought by friendly prospectors to the Sisters of the People.
This was after the chaos of the Siberia goldrush and there was no room for him. So, in Inez’s first month, the nurses took Marius Hallstrom into their own tent, into Inez’s corner, where Marius’s friends cared for him in shifts while the nurses were on duty. Inez could hardly disagree. To an untrained amateur nurse these Nightingale nurses with their historic and mythical traditions were as cool as the midnight condensation on a kidney dish.
On the third night the youth’s delirium subsided enough for Billy Cornwell, the exhausted friend on watching duty, to finally relax in sleep. Inez came off her own shift to find Billy snoring deeply, while on her own bed lay Marius Hallstrom, his throat sloping open to the windpipe and a scalpel in his dead fingers.
It was impossible to overestimate the mysterious maddening effect of the water famine. Prospectors routinely drank urine and animal blood and lake water so salty their kidneys collapsed. A wood-carter lost his reason and drank a pint of lime-green paint that had fallen off a wagon. A cyclist with only a mile to go to town drank his machine oil.
But it went beyond the simple lack of life-giving drinking fluid. The lives of the Europeans were made strangely incomplete. Suddenly the hotels’ billiard rooms were thronged with players day and night, men queuing in the street who had previously never held a cue, men attracted to billiards because the baize was the only greensward they would see.
Without their unconscious but eternal watery rituals for banishing the spectres of death, cooling passion and killing the phantoms of the night, their souls seemed wounded and deficient.
During the water famine the numbers of typhoid cases doubled, quadrupled, became a flood. With the stunned, guilty demeanour that came from officiating at funeral after funeral of men younger than themselves, Felix Locke and the clergymen were conducting mass burials every day.
But while prospectors could pick up gold nuggets shaped like angels and eagles and elephants just lying on the ground, they could forget funerals. While gold could be shaken from the dust or crushed out of the quartz in batteries and mills rumbling day and night, while two incredibly rich mines—the Londonderry and the Wealth of Nations—had fired the financial world’s imagination, the mining world could ignore typhoid fever.
The editor of the Goldfields’ Gazette, Walter Ravine, warned against this fatalistic attitude. His editorials tried to stir the community out of its apathy. ‘Typhoid is not the will of God,’ he thundered. ‘When men refuse to recognise the ordinary rules of health and cleanliness, and endanger the lives of their comrades, it is unjust to lay the consequences to Providence.’ A week after his last Gazette editorial hit the street, Ravine was dead of typhoid.
The water famine was another matter. The miners agitated for the government to solve the water problem. As optimistic diggers themselves, they couldn’t see past drilling. The Government geologists insisted the terrain was unsuitable, the watertable unstable, the water unpotable. The miners were impatient. The Goldfields Water Scheme, C.Y. O’Connor’s ingenious plan to pump water from the coast, was still languishing on the drawing board. Progress was the thing. Why not bore deeper for better artesian water with the new diamond drills?
Political pressure brought a new drilling contractor, Lorenzo Foss, with his heroic mien and a moustache to match, who managed to strike bore water ten miles outside town. Wild cheering greeted the first Foss water-buckets to come up, and then a roaring cacophony as the bullock teams and horses and camels charged them and tipped them over. The mining warden, Joe Finnucane, yelled so hard trying to maintain order that he burst a blood vessel in his eye. Cursing teamsters struggled in the dust to drag back their thirsty animals. When they finally regained control of the supplies, the water was found to be undrinkable.
On the causes of typhoid, even Europe’s foremost scientists were said to be confused and divided. Polluted milk, said one theory from abroad. (There were no cows for a hundred miles of the goldfields!) Infected urine, said another. Bacteria-laden air, said others. British doctors in India, more imaginatively, put the occurrence of typhoid down to the breaking of virgin soil.
A not too dissimilar view was expressed by the goldfields’ Catholic priest, Father Godfrey l’Estrange, who blamed the ‘animal vitality’ and ‘licentious behaviour’ of typhoid’s youthful victims. ‘It is no coincidence,’ said God-the-Odd, as he was immediately nicknamed, ‘that young men lose their innocence and their health together when they come to this place.’ The Miners’ Daily, on the othe
r hand, blamed the new green wallpaper in the post office. Hadn’t the post office staff all succumbed to typhoid? The new wallpaper, which had originated in China, must be infectious.
As for the best treatment, the cold-bath cure—a four-hourly immersion on a stretcher in a bath of cold water—was the medical favourite. But impossible in the circumstances. Massage was suggested as an alternative. Press advertisements claimed that a bottle of Clement’s Tonic would revive even a severe case of typhoid. Many took tincture of opium as a painkiller, and Bile Beans, Doan’s Ointment and Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. But the popular miners’ remedies were whisky, quinine and raw onions, which accounted for the violent breath of most patients brought to Matron Shand’s hospital. To the Sisters of the People, savage onion-breath came to mean typhoid.
Support for the infected-air theory came from the eminent Perth surgeon and physician Dr C. Hector Mann, in an article in the Australasian Medical Gazette.
‘Only by wearing a cotton-wool respirator can the real danger be avoided,’ said Dr Mann, but he agreed that was difficult in the climate. So he recommended that all food should be overcooked and all water boiled. (The miners’ habit of adding whisky to all liquid as a preventative measure he dismissed as a fallacy.) Most importantly, he stressed, everyone should be supplied free with a bottle of disinfectant—concentrated solution of corrosive sublimate in hydrochloric acid, coloured with methylene blue—with directions for use.
The Mann view was challenged in the next issue of the Gazette by the acting health officer of the goldfields, Dr Jean-Pierre Malebranche. Dr Malebranche pointed out that because of constant water famine and the consequent high cost of water, the people had built wells and tanks to catch the rare rainwater. As the miners mostly lived in tents crowded together, with no sanitary provisions, the pollution of this catchment water was inevitable.
‘Round every clump of scrub in the hills,’ he wrote, ‘you see a collection of faecal deposits, and the drainage from these is collected by residents lower down. It is usual to see cesspits and wells lying side by side, forming, as it were, the two barrels of a gun.’
As Malebranche told Felix Locke over whiskies at the Prince of Wales, ‘It all boils down to the old saying: Don’t shit where you drink. Any poodle or cocker spaniel knows that.’
As Malebranche said to the prostitute Violette, in their own language, as she sponged him with eau de Cologne, in lieu of water, at Madame Rioux’s, ‘They have no legends here to cope with elemental things.’
He was thinking of the many rivers which had come into being through the urination of Gargantua. During his walks, the giant and his bladder had inundated the French countryside at random.
‘I refer to the white people, of course. I’ve heard that northeast of here the Aborigines construct votive rainbows over dead snakes to appease water gods.’
Violette made a dove-like noise in the roof of her mouth. She was humming, as always, and dabbing, and letting the old language wash over her.
Malebranche’s voice was low, the confiding murmur of the favoured customer. How satisfying he found it to speak French every Monday night. How pleased the girls were, too, to hear it spoken. It was like slowly slaking a great thirst. (Actually, he spoke French also on Thursday nights to Sono and little Oyoni and Yoko in the next street, but of course he was not understood.) It was his language for pleasure, and he was speaking now for the pleasure of hearing his language.
‘Did you know, Violette, that in times of drought in Transylvania virgins sit naked on a harrow and pray, and that the Tamil women of southern India tie frogs to winnowing fans? In Africa, of course, the sole purpose of twins’ existence in some tribes is to chant dirty songs to incite the rain god to ejaculation.’
This caused Violette to blink and titter, to pause in her sponging and humming and glance inquiringly at the doctor. But he spouted on contentedly.
‘And in the goldfields? It’s not just the drought which is affecting attitude. Absent in any British aesthetic celebration of water is a certain lightness of touch. Taking the waters lacks any romantic inspiration.’
Here he lapsed into a brief reverie of his student vacations on the Riviera, of sensual days in Menton and Antibes, where bathing and wine and girls and food and music and art had somehow come together by the Mediterranean.
Life, as he recalled it with a sigh here in a heatwave in a tin-walled goldminers’ brothel in the Antipodean desert, used to be like those fanciful and charming old French paintings of bathing-houses which invariably revealed a voyeur—with the connivance of the winsome female attendant—spying through a hole in the wall.
His words streamed around her. Violette was recalling the more recent past: the weekly bath nights she and Juliette and Madame Rioux had conducted before the water famine. From an article in The Ladies’ Doctor (‘in order to be naked without being seen, bathwater should always be clouded’) Madame Rioux had had the brainwave—once they stopped giggling—of clouding the tawny, rotten-egg-smelling bore water with powdered almond paste, when she could get it, or bran or flour or resin when she couldn’t. Dissolved beforehand in spirits of wine and then cast into the bath.
Violette missed those bath nights. In the relentless heat, with luck, she could spend half the night submerged. The men liked it, too, roaring out of the water stained with iron and looking and smelling like big silly biscuits. Macaroons begging to be eaten. After a gold strike, of course, the bath was French champagne.
At a time when a Zeiss lens is treasured, when fine lenses for microscopes, telescopes and wet plate photography are a popular acquisition for the leisured classes as well as the professionals who use them, the tiny creatures living in water have become not only visible, but almost common knowledge.
Malebranche has a first edition of Johann Eichhorn’s Natural History of the Smallest Aquatic Animals, published in 1781, which devotes itself to the invisible world and whose author ‘sought to know God in his smallest works as well as the glory of his vast heavenly bodies, the smallest showing just as distinctly the perfection of their creator’.
Like Eichhorn he seeks to know. But, unlike Eichhorn, he sees under his microscope lens … potential murderers.
He is listing and classifying the diverse microscopic creatures—the infusoria—in samples of salt water, condensed water, bore water and putrid faecal run-off water from diverse sources around the town. Yes, and even the rich broth of infusoria in surreptitious samples, taken before the water famine, of Madame Rioux’s brothel’s bathwater.
For him, like any seeker of knowledge, time ceases to exist under his lens. In a drop of water he, too, sees a world in which monsters seethe and pass, and whole dynasties rise and fall between the minutest crumbling joint of a decomposing gnat.
But, amazingly, Dr Malebranche is more or less alone in searching for the microbe, the creature, the infusorian animal, which is, perhaps, the typhoid.
Dr Malebranche arrives each dusk to cast a melancholy eye over the day’s admissions. Felix Locke comes by early each morning to pick up the bodies. In between is the Nightwatch of Delirium.
Matron Shand’s hospital: only the kitchen is a sheet-iron building. The wards and the nurses’ and matron’s tents are made of hessian, with doors at each end and no windows or floors, and a hessian fly over each tent. The typhoid patients lie on and under wet blankets—no sheets—on stretchers made of cornsacks tacked to a frame. More hessian. There are other beds, spring-mattress stretchers stacked outside in the yard, but the mattresses to go on the wire frames haven’t arrived. Like many other items they are on the road somewhere.
Hessian doesn’t muffle, much less contain, the sounds of delirium.
The mad twelve hours.
As the dusty purple sun sinks over the coast, over civilisation, the duty nursing assistant, Inez, lights a candle in a bottle as her duty lamp, places another candle in a hole scraped in the ground in the middle of each tent, and waits for the muttering to begin. For the poor typhoids (mo
re like vampires, like zombies) to come alive. To lurch up and begin their raving.
What is it about nightfall, she always wonders, that brings on such glistening madness, such glassy-eyed transformation of personality in the typhoid wards? The hallucinations and chattering teeth. The deafness to reason. Why is fever so touched by night? Can she blame the absence of light, the moon, the effect of flickering on a fevered brain? The distorted ghostly shadows thrown by her guttering candle as she moves from bed to bed?
What is it about night, too, that brings on suicide? The poor typhoids requiring not only constant care—two ounces of condensed milk and condensed water every two hours, and their coated mouths to be cleaned with glycerine and borax—but, at night, constant vigilance. To keep them and their ulcerated intestines as quiet as possible when all they crave is to be threshingly noisy and craftily self-destructive.
Bear down on them, tie them down, keep them living. Not like eighteen-year-old Marius Hallstrom. One minute sleeping like a humid baby in his rosy spots. The next, lying back happily with his throat open on her pillow.
And outside, only fifty yards away, nightfall brings on more ranting, more crazy noise. There, in the bar of the Prince of Wales, men are roaring wildly with health and money. Throwing it away, drinking, singing, gambling, fighting, flirting, shrugging off their real lives.
The delirium dies with the dawn. The hospital falls silent with exhaustion. At 6.30 a.m.—the early hour is meant to keep death from healthy people’s consciousness—the undertaker arrives to pick up the bodies.
The easterly wind introduces itself this morning with a whiff of stale beer and whisky from the pub. Then it slides over the stretchers and ruffles the damp hair—ginger, blond, black, brown, curly, straight—of the recently dead. As if to emphasise how boyish these poor typhoids are. And how perverse the disease. As if to remind the nurse and undertaker that it favours the young and robust.