The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  That afternoon, as I drove out to the museum past the ruined wartime observation posts, I was alone: there were no cars moving; no figures headed down the walking paths. The tide was at its peak; the fringing mangroves were half-submerged; they edged off into the waves and gave the impression that the whole wide floor of the harbour channel was covered by their thick, leafy carpet and no more than a minor seismic shift would be needed to expose a soft, green landscape to human view. This hint of concealed vistas was only intensified by the shimmer of the heat haze, and the movement of the cloud formations. Thin, mist-like streamers were hanging low over the bay, and between them, as if through the bars of a cage, a storm front could be made out at a great distance, almost on the horizon’s line: rain veils were tumbling from its base, only to blur and evaporate before they struck the ground, while far above, the summit of the cloud’s dark anvil seethed and slowly mounted higher, hiding the sun, casting a deep, dramatic shadow across the Point and its surrounding waters.

  That sombre sky seemed to be prolonged inside the museum itself, which was so faintly illuminated that I needed several minutes to get my bearings. Its rooms were small and tightly filled with glass cases devoted to an eclectic range of topics: swords and their manufacture, the general history of mechanised warfare, the Australian government’s gun buy-back scheme. Only gradually, as I walked back and forth between these little exhibitions, trying to find their thread, did it became clear to me that there was nothing to bind them together: the museum was a dispersed affair, a thing of spaces and gaps, of relations between various components of testimony and evidence. Indeed its chief displays were well concealed in a handful of dispersed bunkers and outhouses, connected by intersecting walkways, and beyond these lay a parkland, almost a belt of rainforest, where a selection of guns, tanks, trucks and fragments of wrecked aircraft had been carefully laid out. After some minutes walking amidst these relics, I found my way into a low-roofed shed of corrugated iron, where a soundtrack, distorted by some malfunction in the speaker system, was playing, but the words being spoken were so faint as to be beyond decipherment: all that could be made out was a distant whisper, much like a soft wind, rising and falling in a constant rhythm.

  Upon one wall a selection of laminated photographs had been hung: they depicted scenes from the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942: shattered buildings, ships ablaze in the harbour, the twisted wreckage of Stokes Hill wharf, its rails and spars shaped into sinuous patterns by the glinting light. Alongside these photographs, a few printed panels, mottled and discoloured by prolonged exposure to the humid air, gave a brief account of the city’s wartime experiences. This narrative, devoid of sentiment and jumping abruptly between points of view, caught, in its staccato style, all the shocking speed of the initial Japanese attack and the scale of the devastation unleashed.

  It was still early morning, it began, when the seventeen heavy bombers in the first wave descended upon their target. Below them, the gunners at the main defensive battery in the heart of the city came rushing, some half-clothed, some naked, from their quarters, and took aim, staring into the dazzle of the sky. From above, though, for the pilots, the view was clear: the town was neatly ringed and marked by flashes as their bombers drew slowly nearer, quite untouched by the anti-aircraft fire. Only at the last moment did the defenders, down at ground level, hear a rising, whistling noise, much like the sound effects on a wartime newsreel – and then a dreadful blast, as the first bombs detonated among buildings along the foreshore. Wreckage was thrown in all directions, walls tumbled in: dust and smoke began to rise into the windless air.

  In the other panels of this informal narration, arranged seemingly without regard for chronological sequence, so that to read them was to become disoriented in one’s turn, the consequences of the raid, which lasted for a mere fifty minutes, were described: the losses of Australian and American aircraft, the destruction of the RAAF station, the casualties, the reduction of the low stone buildings along the waterfront to piles of rubble. Beside the wharf, a passenger ship, the Neptuna, which was laden with explosives and depth charges, had been hit and set on fire; flames were also rising from the fuel oil that had spilled out from the hulls of damaged vessels and spread across the surface of the harbour.

  Men trapped at the end of the burning pier tried to save themselves by diving into the water below, but many of them were killed instantly by the heat of the blazing oil. Not long after the departure of the last Japanese bomber, just as the sound of its engine was fading from the air, the Neptuna blew up with an explosion that shook every house in town. The debris was hurled so high that several minutes later chunks of white-hot metal from the ship were still falling to earth. Planks and whole segments of the wooden decking descended on the foreshore and on the town; smaller fragments began raining on the ships still afloat in the outer harbour, many hundreds of yards away. One eyewitness, the correspondent Douglas Lockwood, whose life for years afterwards was dominated by his memory of that day, and his attempts to frame it in narrative, found himself particularly marked by the destruction of the Neptuna. He was driving along the Esplanade, attempting to gauge the extent of the damage, when he heard, or felt, the blast: he surmised at once that another wave of attacks had just begun; he stopped and ran for shelter, looking up as he did so: he saw a column of smoke and flames, dwarfing, as he says, all the other smouldering fires from burning ships and buildings that were throwing their shadows across the town, and though he endeavours, all through his reconstruction of the raid, to tell his story through the words and memories of others, his resolve, at this moment, breaks down, he permits himself a snatch of subjectivity: “I will never forget that on top of it all, rolling slowly over and over as though it was a dumb-bell tossed by a giant juggler, there was what I took to be, and now know to have been, Neptuna’s main mast.”

  I gazed at these images for several minutes with a distanced sadness, feeling myself ever more at one with them, and marvelling at the precise, indifferent breadth of vision time’s passage brings.

  Above all, I was transfixed by a single, blurry photograph of ships in the harbour, taken a short while before the moment of the first attack, showing the decks full of men standing, relaxed or scurrying back and forth with steady purpose, free from the faintest suspicion of what was drawing near. I, though, could see already on the glass surface of the water the fires that would engulf the wharves and slipways, and in place of the sleek warships and supply vessels, berthed or riding at anchor, a line of broken, half-submerged wrecks.

  With these pictures still shimmering before my eyes, I made my way through the grounds, down pathways so overgrown they resembled green tunnels, until I came to a metal stairway which led up to one of the pair of gun turrets that formed the heart of East Point’s defensive battery. From the firing platform, where a replica of the original nine-inch gun-barrel had been lovingly installed, the view looked out to sea, across green pastures. A few of the thoroughbreds from the riding club were grazing, moving with gentle steps beneath the shade of spreading trees; the cloud banks across the harbour now filled half the sky and had turned a dark grey: their smooth, curved flanks formed an odd rhyme with the weathered concrete of the gun emplacement, a structure that has taken on, with time, a distinctive, hieratic air, much like an altar dedicated to some absent deity.

  Many residents of Darwin regard this turret, and its twin which stands close by, as the most striking masterworks of architecture still to be found in northern Australia, though their tale testifies more to the futility than to the effectiveness of foresight and grand plans. During the mid-1930s, in response to regional tensions and the growing military power of Japan, the Australian government decided that the time had come to fortify Darwin, and above all to protect its oil depot. Accordingly, whole barrack buildings were transported across from Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, and set up anew on East Point. Along the cliffs, command bunkers and observation towers, ammunition magazines and trench networks were prepared, a
nd work began on a pair of large-calibre guns, capable of covering the entirety of Darwin Harbour and its approaches with their fire. The construction, though, advanced slowly, and when the Japanese attack came, the guns were far from finished. Nor, for all their precision, would they have served any purpose had they been complete. They had been intended to resist naval assault and establish a marine exclusion zone – but the Japanese fleet, in February 1942, was 400 kilometres away in the Timor Sea when its fighters swooped down on the gun batteries arrayed along the Darwin shore. The two nine- inch guns, which had cost the Commonwealth, in straitened times, a quarter of a million Australian pounds, were never fired in battle. They remained in lonely splendour on the Point, until they were sold off as scrap metal in 1959, to a Japanese company, Fujita Salvage, which had come to Darwin under contract to remove the sunken ships lying on the floor of the harbour, and, as an afterthought, offered 550 pounds for the pair.

  It was already late afternoon when I left the museum enclosure and walked back, past the observation towers, gazing upwards as I went at the silent movement of the clouds. Another car had pulled up alongside mine. It was a red sports coupe – not, for that climate, the most conventional of choices. “GINA B” its personalised numberplate announced – and there, standing alone on the crest of the beachfront, where the low scrub gave out, was the United Nations translator Gina Baldassari, a woman I had met from time to time in the days before my departure, and had always admired, as much for her otherworldly manner as for the brilliance with which she went about her professional tasks. I knew something of her story, which was distinctive even by the standards of Darwin, a place where everyone seems to trail the ill-concealed shadow of their personal narrative. She had been born in Sydney, into a family of Venetian migrants, who moved to the Territory while she was still a child. Very early, her talent for languages had become clear. She outdistanced all her teachers, she lectured at the university, she shone as a bright star of local promise; but she had also discovered an aptitude for interpreting, and above all for simultaneous translation – and that skill became the pathway for her abrupt escape. She left the North without regret, travelled widely, and eventually found a post as an interpreter at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where she felt both appreciated and fulfilled – though thinking back, she confessed to me with a faint, regretful smile when she first told me the story of this passage of her life, she was quite unable to identify the features of that stilted, provincial milieu which had captivated her, or even to recall in any detail the adventures and liaisons that had consumed the years. And so time passed, without the friends of her youth in Darwin hearing a word of her or her doings, until one day she re-appeared in town, and, as often happens in such cases, her life fell smoothly back into its earlier contours. It soon seemed as if she had never left, and only if one studied her with the utmost care could one even begin to trace in her eyes a note of inward grief or pensiveness.

  There she stood, gazing out, and without thinking, as soon as I caught sight of her I called her name and took a few steps in her direction. She wheeled round, a look of anguish on her face – it was the look of someone who had been interrupted in the sweetest of reveries. I began apologising: she placed me in her mind; her expression changed.

  “Don’t ask!” she said. I could see there were tears running down her cheeks. She wiped them away, then clutched at a thin gold chain around her neck. “Don’t say anything! Don’t look at me that way. Do I pry into your private thoughts?”

  “No,” I said. “How could you? I was only thinking it’s been a long while since we saw each other.”

  “Did you just come out of that museum?”

  “Where else could I have come from?”

  “I hate the cult of war and death in this town these days: it’s spreading everywhere.”

  “It is? I’d have to say I’ve been finding it quite hard to track down any substantial traces of the wartime past.”

  “Just drive down the Stuart Highway,” she said. “What about all those World War II airstrips, which they used in the bombing raids up to New Guinea and the islands – have you taken a look at them recently? They’ve all been tidied up, and turned into heritage precincts. There’s even one where they have full-scale cut-out models of the aircraft that used to land there, parked in a little row beside the information bays, so the tourists can stop and relive the experience. Whenever I go past, I speed up, to avoid seeing them. Surely you understand that reaction?” She paused. “Where have you been, anyway? Are you still living here?”

  I told her the story behind my departure, and my return. Our talk wound on, without losing its allusive, slightly sparring edge, until there was a crack of thunder from the cloud front across the bay.

  “Perhaps the storm’s coming here,” I said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up! You obviously haven’t read the latest Weekly Tropical Climate Note.”

  “The what?”

  “Haven’t you ever come across the Climate Note? It’s the Bible in Darwin: it’s the key to everything. Anyone who belongs here checks it regularly. It’s put out by the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre.”

  I stared at her. She looked pityingly back.

  “Listen,” she said, after a few well-measured moments of silence, “forget the V-8 Supercars at Hidden Valley. Forget the Darwin Cup. If you’re really back here, if you’re here to stay, the Climate Note is the one true marker of locality – although there is the Tropical Diagnostic Statement as well, which comes out every month, but that’s really only for hardcore climate obsessives, and it’s just an expanded version of the Note.”

  “And what are they about?”

  “Oh, monsoons, and other synoptic-scale events: but really they’re poetry, more than anything else. I know whole blocks of them by heart, because of course the forecast and the pattern doesn’t ever change that much.” She put on a studious, formal manner and began quoting, in a soft voice: “Early to mid-December saw enhanced tropical convection progress across the area, consistent with a weak Madden-Julian oscillation event, though it failed to culminate in anything more than a weak monsoon trough, which mostly remained north of the marine continent …”

  “What’s the marine continent?”

  “Who knows?” she said, impatiently. “That’s not the point.”

  There was a slight pause, as if we had come through some preliminary stage of re-acquaintance. Then, hesitantly at first, I began telling her something of my time away: how pictures of the North had been vivid in my thoughts; how I had lived through those days of absence as if I were reporting from a realm of dreams, and could see the world with the still, clear vision dreamers have.

  “And now,” she said, “back here, things aren’t so transparent, friends seem strangers to you, the places you used to know have changed, the light in the sky seems different, your memory’s too strong for where you are?”

  “That kind of thing.”

  “The pain of return,” she said, in a knowing way. “Would you like me to tell you something about what brought me back, and what keeps me here? It’s not the worst of stories.”

  And she began describing, in a distanced fashion, and in the calmest of voices, the hinge-points of her years away. She painted word portraits of glacial precision; she filled her tale with characters, she caught their styles, and looks, and ways of speaking: a whole realm danced before me: summits, negotiations, encounters across the bridge of language – and even as I realised that she was once more interpreting, compressing, conveying the essence of a drama, she brought her tale to its crescendo. It fell in the days of tense diplomacy before the invasion of Iraq, when a group of generals from the Pentagon had just arrived in Strasbourg, and she was drafted to translate for them – and perhaps it was the case, she said, that the intense repugnance that overcame her at the merest thought of war or conflict influenced her feelings as she steered her guests through the empty corridors of the parliament.

  I listened, caugh
t by the telling of the story, and quite unable to say where it might lead.

  “On those official visits,” she went on, “there was always a tour of the art collection, which, at that time, was mostly made up of pieces borrowed from regional museums. I can still picture the guests in their uniforms beside me, and how hemmed in by them I felt. I led them into the formal reception gallery beside the chamber – that was a part of the building I would never normally have gone near – and at once I came face to face with a painting: a small, rough Aboriginal bark painting. It was just a set of cross-hatched diamonds – nothing more. And yet it seemed to me so …”

  “Familiar?” I hazarded.

  “No – I mean yes, of course, familiar, but something more.

  Dear. Beloved. It struck me in the heart – although, like many people who grow up in the North, I’d never taken the slightest real interest in Aboriginal things. It said to me – I’m from your country; I am part of you; and you are part of me. I was very shaken. I hadn’t experienced anything like that from a work of art. I went back: I looked at the bark again and tried to make my mind a blank. And then I felt it very clearly: it was acting on me like a rhythm, like a pulse inside my head.”

  The next morning, she travelled out to the ethnography museum and made inquiries with the curators there. They told her that her bark came from Milingimbi Island, and that it formed part of a large, ill-researched collection, assembled decades before by Karel Kupka, a Czech exile in northern Arnhem Land.

  “Have you ever come across his trail?” she asked.

  Kupka was no more than a distant name to me then: I shook my head.

  “It might interest you to know about him,” she said. “I’ve always found him a very helpful guide. In fact, I became interested in Kupka’s story at once, from the first little things I picked up: what happened to him in Aboriginal Australia, the struggles he faced when he tried to take his collections back with him to Europe; and his experiences in his own country, too – but then, mid-way through his life, he seems to vanish: almost as if he dies inside – and I never came to discover the reason why, although I found him, in his voice, or at least his writings, the most captivating of men.”