Those words, spoken with such emphasis, like some curse or blessing, stayed with me while I headed into town. On impulse, as I turned off the highway, I decided the time was right for me to pay a call on the writer Andrew McMillan, whom I had not seen since my return.
Our friendship, which had endured many separations and rediscoveries, had come to seem almost a brotherhood to me, if a brotherhood of an unusual kind. I was first thrown together with him in the murky backstreets of Darlinghurst. Even then I was conscious of the similarities between us, rather than the familiar, complementary differences that lie at the heart of more conventional friendships. We shared emotions, thoughts, tastes, enthusiasms – but more than that, I often had the sense that I knew the tone of his mind, and could form a picture of what it felt like to be him. This made his company seem at times superfluous, or even oppressive, and I could read a similar reaction to my presence in his eyes. But if being with him was at times disquieting, how much more so was his way with his words: his similes, chosen almost without regard for logic, his grainy colloquial transcriptions, his jump-cuts, his wildly overtoppling descriptive passages, which run on in diminishing sub-clause chains until the initial subject of his attention has been almost wholly obscured. I remembered my feelings of astonishment on first encountering his youthful articles in music magazines, devoted to the east-coast groups he spent his time with in those days – The Saints and Radio Birdman, both of them marked out by a pure anarchy that defines their retrospective fame. And it must have been his experiences in these years of freelance apprenticeship upon ancient typewriters that led him, long afterwards in Darwin, to set up a music group of his own – 4th Estate, a shifting constellation of journalists, who perform their tunes on miked-up Remingtons and Smith Coronas – instruments that seem to their audiences like artefacts from another world.
Often, as the years passed, I would lose touch with Andrew, only to come across him in the most unexpected places; but even with the episodic quality of our friendship and his penchant for abrupt geographic shifts so firmly established, I was a little startled one day, on return from a spell of foreign corresponding in the Balkans, to hear his voice, soft and hesitant as ever, down a crackling long-distance line. He told me, with an unmistakeable note of pride, that he was in Darwin, a new home he had reached after extravagant adventures documenting an outback tour by Midnight Oil. How curious I was to see him there, beneath the palms and stringy-barks! Some months later, I embarked on a journey of my own through tropical Australia, and came to Darwin, and found him in his murky lair. After days of prevarications, I was able to entice him out; we set off on a road trip to the Cobourg Peninsula, where I was keen to see the ruins of the British outpost at Port Essington. It was the cool, idyllic dry season. For several nights, we slept in our swags beneath the stars, and from those initial conversations I began to form some picture of the changes in Andrew’s life. He regarded himself as a contemporary historian now, but a historian devoted to the fugitive details that conventional history neglects – the grain of the voice, the weight of feeling that hides inside words, the fleeting dreams that reports and documents can never catch.
One evening, at a camp poised on the bauxite cliffs above Victoria Harbour, Andrew offered to read me a handful of passages from the manuscript he was just then bringing to completion – a book which had ramified so uncontrollably that it was turning into several distinct projects.
“What’s it going to be called?” I asked.
“An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land,” he said. “But of course there’s going to have to be a separate volume about the lives and memories of the crew members on the flying boats that were stationed in the Top End during World War II. That’s going to be my Catalina Dreaming.”
“Good titles,” I murmured, and settled back, and let the flow of words transport me. The Guide he read to me that night was not merely drenched with the feel and look of our surrounds: it had become one with its subjects. Its words reached out to the sun setting in the green bay before us, and the mauve sky on the far horizon; its paragraphs and pages roamed in the tall stringy-barks swaying above our heads. Andrew read on, for hours, unfurling his creation in a loving, protective voice, until the stars were bright, and the little kangaroo mice came out to peer at us by the light of our campfire – and I knew then that my friend’s life was at its peak, and that the memory of the time when he composed with such freedom and fluency would haunt him in the years to come.
And so, I am tempted to think, it proved. A few months after that journey of ours into west Arnhem Land, the first edition of An Intruder’s Guide appeared – but Andrew had revised the text, in keeping with some self-concealing impulses of his own, and his publisher’s desires. The new version was shorn of the original’s transcendent scenes: scenes I still can call to mind, in which the landscape itself seemed to speak, and the boundary between the writer’s voice and the bush in its receding perspectives dissolved. Even without such passages, the Guide was sufficiently eccentric and perplexing to guarantee that it would be met with responses of hostility or indifference – and over the time since, utterly untroubled by dreams of worldly triumph, Andrew has devoted himself to higher things: the writing of a long, synoptic novel, somewhat in the style of Xavier Herbert, set in the remote gold-mining township of Pine Creek, and the pursuit of his experiments in musical performance with 4th Estate.
I turned in to Stuart Park, an enclave that has managed, despite the usual attempts at gentrification, to preserve much of its delightful shabbiness, with the result that it resembles an open-air museum, through which curious travellers cruise from time to time, marvelling at the proliferation of roundabouts and the rundown charm that Darwin’s older suburbs used to offer the passerby at every glance. Andrew’s house was an elevated structure with an improvised, louvre-windowed downstairs living space: the Bunker, inside which he had long barricaded himself against the wider world. Frogs were croaking in chorus; Torres Strait pigeons cooed lustily from the trees around the block; there were far-off rolls of thunder. It was Andrew’s soundtrack. I pushed through the surrounding palm-tree jungle, and from a distance caught sight of him, framed by the louvres, perched at his desk, feet up, pen poised in his hand like a paintbrush, his eyes staring into space. The Bunker’s decoration had changed little during my time away: on the walls there were the same laminated posters advertising 4th Estate concerts; the same detailed topographic maps of Arnhem Land. A motley collection of broken office chairs, some bent into gargoyle shapes, some missing arms or legs, had been lined up inside the front door. From the ceiling above Andrew’s work desk hung, suspended by an elaborate pulley system, his row of manuscripts in progress: their pages fluttered in the breeze generated by an enormous fan. I stepped in, past the little ornamental pond and its collection of geckos: they surveyed me, panting, with wide black eyes.
“The traveller returns,” said Andrew, in a faintly sardonic tone of voice, although I could hear in it a score of registers: pleasure, and its automatic undertow of regret; excitement, and its hidden companion, despondency; interest, and also indifference; sadness, too, at the passage of time, and the losses that had been piled upon us both and all our friends, in the year that had just passed. There was the desire to speak, the desire to keep silent; to reveal oneself, and to hide one’s inmost thoughts. All this lurked inside those first words of his – but within seconds we were both adrift, and far away, on a sea of tales and stories: his adventures that dry season in the obscure bush down near the Daly, his latest implausible literary schemes and projects, his multi-player Scrabble contests at Dinah Beach, the rhythmic rainfall patterns he could now detect in early build-up storms.
I laughed, and felt the magnetic pull of Darwin conversation, in all its mazy, branching, reduplicating charm. Themes and topics would appear and vanish, only to recombine in the most promiscuous fashion, sagas would be told repeatedly, in wholly inconsistent versions, while characters would weave in and out of narratives, and oft
en appear in person in mid-story and continue the telling of the drama in their own voice. At last there was a lull in the Bunker. The other visitors had gone. It was late at night by now: sheet lightning from the storms above Mandorah flashed and flickered in the sky.
“Do you still remember those early days,” I asked him, “when you’d just come to Darwin, and you were exploring your way by dinghy across the harbour?”
It was a phase hinted at in the brief, reticent first words of Catalina Dreaming, where Andrew describes, in yet another variant, the twisting paths of coincidence that lured him north. When he was a boy in the 1960s, as he writes, he was fascinated by the memory of wartime, and the aircraft that had flown in defence of Australia. He heard stories about them from his father, who served as an instructor and navigator on Beaufighters during the Pacific campaign, and the stories would multiply around the kitchen table, whenever old friends and colleagues of his father’s came round: and always the strangest, most vivid adventures were those of the flying-boat squadrons and their crews. Andrew was given a plastic scale model of a Catalina, which he treasured. He began building his own image of the aircraft. In his mind it became the emblem of endurance and perfection, it was lovely in its ungainliness, it could linger airborne for a full twenty-four hours, “crossing oceans and time zones and eras” and then land on water when it came home. These ideas from childhood had lodged in his memory, and when he first passed through Darwin in 1988, he promptly set about discovering the wartime city – a quest that led him to the eastern branches of the harbour, where a picturesque low island, surmounted by a scatter of gum trees, lies athwart the main channel. This island – little more, in truth, than a shifting sandbar – cast a spell over him: a spell that strengthened when he scanned the charts and learned its name. It was marked down as Catalina Island, and it guarded the entrance to the old flying-boat base. Andrew’s early passion was reignited: he hunted through the archives of the war memorial, reading all that he could find there, then moved north to delve at first hand into the tales of the Cat boats, and search through the rubble of the East Arm squadron base.
“In those days, before Darwin’s new wharf was laid in,” he writes, “you could poke around in the scrub and find amber beer bottles date-stamped 1944 and 1945. There were cement slabs, broken pipes, the outlines of long-neglected garden beds, corroding enamel plates and cups, blue enamel water canteens, bullet shells and clips” – and there are still a few remains of this vintage, lost amidst the remote reaches of the mangroves, though now the Catalina base boat ramp is the preserve of recreational fishermen, and the bleakness of the harbour at this point, close by the cranes and barriers of the modern container port, is almost too much for the heart to bear.
“Of course I remember them,” said Andrew, getting up, somewhat unsteadily, and emerging from behind his desk, where he had remained for the past several hours, immobile, much like a Mayan altar statue, cradling his ashtray as though it were a votive goblet. He wandered over to the corner of the room, where his talismanic childhood Catalina hung suspended from the ceiling, and gave it a little tap of encouragement: trailing cobwebs from its wings, the flying boat resumed its oscillating journey through the half-light of the Bunker’s furthest recess.
“And did you ever, back then, come across a black ship,” I asked. “A dark ship, that used to patrol the outer waters of the harbour?”
“What kind of black ship?”
“A ship with an air of miasma and foreboding about it. A ship that looks like the incarnation of death. Dark sides, dark sails, dark rigging, its funnel pouring out a thick smoke like ash …”
“Alright – I think I get the general picture. What a surprise it caught your eye! Maybe you’re talking about one of those contract dredgers they used to bring in from time to time. Did you see it close up?”
“Only from far away, for a few moments, at so great a distance at first, in fact, that it might have been one of those chimeras you sometimes think you glimpse in the storm haze, and give form to by yourself.”
“Maybe it was just a coastal lugger of some kind,” said Andrew, thoughtfully, and showing every sign of receding into one of his lengthy silent reveries.
“And were there luggers like that, on the Darwin run, when you used to travel out by sea to Arnhem Land?”
“You’re full of questions, aren’t you? I thought you would have learned by now: the North gives you all the things you need to know in its own good time.”
“What about the name Karel Kupka?” I tried, changing tack.
“Did you ever come across his trail, when you were out at Miling-imbi, or Yirrkala? Is he in the Intruder’s Guide?”
“You mean that collector?”
“The artist.”
“If you’re interested in him,” said Andrew, “maybe you should call in at the Catholic cathedral. When were you last there?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been there.”
“I’m shocked; I’m really shocked.”
“Because I’m not looking after the salvation of my soul?”
“No – because of the cathedral’s association with creative endeavour. It’s a temple of art and beauty. Have you really forgotten everything about Darwin’s artistic traditions? You’ve only been away twelve months.”
He explored these ideas further, in a hazy set of free associations, and gradually, as he did so, I realised that there, lounging in the Bunker’s heat and dust, so late at night, with the geckos cavorting on the walls around me, and the lightning flashing through the leaves of palms and cycads, I had at last the sense of being back, of seeing once more the things I had carried in my mind: people, places, sights, sounds, all in their abrupt, familiar combinations. I told Andrew something of this, and described the impressions that had come over me when I first touched down and spent days exploring about me in the changed heart of the city: the sense that the world I had returned to was further from me than it had been during my absence; the unaccountable feeling that I was walking the streets on sufferance, and my entry ticket to that realm might be revoked at any instant by the vast armies of parking inspectors who now roamed the streets on their grey scooters, exuding enmity towards every spontaneous or free-living creature in sight. I was speaking in a low voice, and through all this, Andrew listened, a slight, sad smile appearing every now and then on his lips, before remarking that he barely recognised the city anymore, and there were days when he felt absent from the entire course of his existence, and even from the words he wrote – and very few things seemed fixed or solid in his world.
“At least you have the Bunker,” I said. “This is the real heart of Darwin for me: the core from which everything else spreads out, and draws its energy. Everything else could be razed, torn down, and the survival of the Bunker would be enough.”
“It’s strange you should say that, tonight of all nights.”
“Why?”
He rolled a cigarette, his movements slow and deliberate. I watched him, quite overcome by the procedure’s elegance, as if I had never seen it done before.
“It’s the end of the line for this place. I just found out. Development has come to Stuart Park at last. I have to leave. I’ve got three months, to move – to find somewhere else. Given the frequency of your visits, that probably means this is the last time you’ll see me here. I suppose I could go down the highway – to one of those little places that I love. To Larrimah or Pine Creek: it’s a different universe down there, it’s full of characters. And I like being there. I’ve spent months happily before now in the Pine Creek hotel – even if the tin roofs of the rooms do get a bit much in the wet season when the rains are falling continuously all through the night.”
For some minutes he continued speaking, agonising – but my thoughts had jumped: I saw blurry colours, bleeding into one another, as if in portent of some impending catastrophe. And then, in the depths of my mind, I made out afresh an image which I had glimpsed in a local gallery some days earlier, and which had seem
ed to me at once an emblem of the time: burning houses, adrift on high waves, beneath stormy skies. It was a well-known print, by the artist Therese Ritchie, whose work combines opposing elements in tension so sharp the eye pleads for release: and those flames, blazing in all their austere, cleansing beauty, twisted and seethed inside me through the silence of the night.
III
Several days went by, consumed in the upheavals of my return, before I worked up the resolve to cross the threshold of St Mary’s Star of the Sea, a building whose wide doors stand invitingly open all day long, so that the tall pews and lines of seats stretched down its nave and transepts can be surveyed during a brisk drive-past along Mitchell Street, and one can half-imagine one knows the place without even venturing inside. But on walking in I was surprised to find most of the wall-space around the entrance covered in children’s posters, recording highly coloured interpretations of heaven and hell. In little dispensers were folded leaflets discussing the charitable ambitions of the diocese and describing the various treasures sheltered in the cathedral’s chapels and the recesses set aside for prayer. I began a systematic survey of the building and advanced as far as the sanctuary, where I was inspecting the terrazzo stonework of the altar, while reading an account of the overwhelming industry that had gone into its creation: its giltwork was made from alluvial gold panned at the Arltunga mission, in the high ranges east of Alice Springs; the shimmer catching the sun’s rays came from pearl shell gathered up by divers on the shallow reef-beds of the Arafura Sea. The cathedral was quite empty – or so I thought, until I heard a soft sound close by me: it was a man’s breathing. I turned. There was a slight figure, with a lined face, clutching a white cane, wearing dark glasses, just behind me. His upper body was enfolded in a well-cut jacket several sizes too large: at his neck was a silk scarf.
The Red Highway Page 5