The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  “I wish you would tell me the story of the painting – and that journey.”

  “I don’t think you’d thank me,” I said. “It’s a fairly dark story.”

  “You believe we don’t have any dark stories, of grief and betrayal, here? We’re in the Garden of Gethsemane: that’s the reason why I want to know.”

  “It’s not exactly a Christian painting,” I tried.

  “Please!” said Sister Sophia, clasping her hands together tightly in annoyance.

  I began, in cautious fashion, with the familiar, despairing sense that the bush escapes all capture in the net of words. I tried to portray that stretch of desert: its look, its changes between dawn and dusk, the shifting moods that it conveys. Daisy herself, as well: how I first met her and heard her often talking of her country, and how the idea of making a brief trip back there took hold in her thoughts. It was early one dry season, after long months of planning and scheming, when at last I drove in to Fitz-roy, collected my friend Karen Dayman, who was still in those days the co-ordinator at the Mangkaja Arts Centre, and picked up Daisy and her companion for that journey, her fellow-artist Dolly Snell. We headed off at speed and made our way through station country, driving south, until the range systems of the backland loomed ahead. They were purple, and bare of vegetation: their cones and fluted cliffs rose sheer from the plain. We passed by broken windmills and the gaunt remains of abandoned stockyards: the sandhills and the yellow patterns of spinifex began to show. Daisy was singing to herself by now, and launching into long exchanges with Dolly in Walmajarri language: the two of them were side by side in the back seats, pointing eagerly out through the windows of the troop carrier at stray lizards or incautious bush turkeys – and it was only towards sunset, after we had crossed a set of stony desert watercourses, that the ladies at last fell quiet. There was a line of peaks, running westwards.

  “Lumbulumbu,” said Daisy, in a low voice.

  I glanced in the rear-view mirror, and saw her lovely face, and her eyes wet with tears. That night, we camped in the shadow of a low mesa. Karen and I walked slowly up its flank and watched the last traces of the sun fading from the sky, and she told me the story of the ranges, and something of what had happened there. Daisy’s beloved cousin-brother, Boxer Yancar, had been brought to that country often as a child by his family. Late one afternoon, the youngest children were swimming with their parents in the deep, shaded waterhole, when a party of white stockmen from a far-off station came riding up. The horsemen were moving along the creek line, suddenly there was shooting – it was an ambush, the sound of the bullets echoed between the rocks. Boxer ran to hide beside his grandmother; they crouched down together in the spinifex; before his eyes his father fell to the ground: the waterhole turned red with blood. The white men rode off again; there were bodies, dead and wounded, lying everywhere; one of the children had been thrown alive onto the fire.

  “That story made a great impact on Daisy,” said Karen. “Boxer Yancar, who only died recently, told me about those days often. He was a delightful man: I miss him very much.”

  I spent a sleepless night in my swag, tracking the stars in their motions, and the sweep of the Milky Way across the sky. At dawn, I saw Daisy sitting alone, cross-legged before the fire. I went over to her. We spoke about her memories of life as a girl at Cherrabun Station: the day she saw the Japanese bombers come over, low, during wartime; the time she started painting, on paper, at the school in Fitzroy Crossing; all the triumphs of her artistic life. The sun came up; the desert finches twittered; the crickets began their hum.

  “I just sit and think, when I paint,” said Daisy to me after a few moments. “In all my paintings, I’m thinking about Lumbu-lumbu, about these mountains – and when I paint them, it makes me happy, and sad at the same time, for the memory. And you can see now: I’m painting it the way it is – red, and the blue sky, and flowers, everywhere: purple, and pink – and the rocks, and the grass. Beautiful, good country – but it makes me sad at heart, to think of all the old people who were living there.”

  The hours stretched away; we drove on, further towards the desert, until I pulled up beside a creek bed that ran towards the ranges and asked Daisy if she wanted to go closer in: to visit the waterhole once again.

  “I see it always in my mind,” she said, and made a sign to drive on, and buried her head in her hands. “Keep going,” she said. “Keep going; I don’t need to walk in there.”

  “And that’s it?” said Sister Sophia. “That’s the story of the painted paradise – my promised land?”

  I felt her eyes resting on me: they were wide, and framed in the half-light in dramatic fashion by her jet-black veil. The church bell began ringing just then for the evening service. Its sound shook and trembled in the air.

  “I could tell you much more in the same vein,” I said. “A hundred other stories. Of course it doesn’t change the painting: and there are many people who like to think that life in the desert country, in those days, before the Europeans came, was a paradise: a hard paradise – and they believe it’s that time that Daisy is remembering in her art. But after I knew that story, I must say I found it more and more difficult to look at those paintings of hers and not remember what had happened, Sister – in that Eden you’re holding in your hands.”

  II

  Several months went by after these encounters in Jerusalem, but in my thoughts they stayed vivid, marked out as they were, against life’s haze and murk, by the bright, seductive gleam of coincidence. And it was at least in part at the prompting of these memories that I made plans, soon after I came back from the Middle East, to travel from Darwin to the Kimberley and see the Fitzroy River valley and my friends there once again. I took the Air North flight across to Broome one morning, then headed eastwards into the glare of the day. The familiar landmarks came and went: the river bridge at Willare, the roadhouse, the lone boab beside the Derby turn. I counted down the station sidetracks: Camballin and Ellendale, Quanbun and Noonkanbah. The road ahead had little traffic, and what there was came towards me in satisfying rhythm: caravans, ancient troop-carriers loaded with Aboriginal families, Greyhound buses, ore trucks wavering across the centreline. There was the way into Windjana, and the gorges, and Leopold Downs: the flanks of the Oscar Range began to glow before me in the afternoon sun. Throughout the last hour of that journey, I had the sense of brushing through a thick, resistant curtain, back into the landscape and the country, while a dreamlike, insubstantial tone now seemed to colour all my recollections of the year that I had spent away.

  It was twilight by the time I drew near to Fitzroy Crossing and made out its traces across the green plain. I picked out the water tower, the service stations on the edge of town, the lights and powerlines. I could just make out the old mission compound in the distance, and, close by, the sweep and jumble of houses at the community of Junjuwa. At last I pulled up at the supermarket car park: the door to the Mangkaja Arts Centre was open; the pale fluorescent strip lights were still on.

  At her desk, in her favourite attitude, staring into some unseen middle distance, was Karen Dayman, surrounded by the remains of a busy day of meetings. She glanced up at me distractedly: her expression, as always, was one of calm amazement, as though the mere texture of life in Fitzroy was cause enough for wonder at the world’s intricacy and depth – and, as always on seeing her after a long interval, I looked at her in admiration: how beautiful she still was; how little, in the decade I had known her, she had changed: and yet the marks of time, and the lash of the Fitzroy climate, the unyielding pressure of its build-up season, its scouring dry-season winds and fiery sun had all stamped their signs upon her: they were etched like a patina into her face, so that the nature of that face’s elegance had slowly altered: its beauty had become a commentary on the idea of beauty, it spoke of time, and fondness for the past, and an acceptance of its own end: those aspects completed it, and lent Karen a remote, unassailable quality, as if she was becoming increasingly immured within herself,
hemmed in by her mounting awareness of man’s fate. Many of these themes hovered in the margins of our conversation, once we had exchanged greetings and felt the shock of closeness that comes when friendships are picked up afresh.

  The talk ranged far and wide, and much of it was sparked by the paintings piled up in loose rolls on the trestle table next to her, or stretched out in various stages of progress on the floor. There had been illnesses among the artists; there had been deaths as well. Karen told me about the recent funeral of an old woman she had felt especially close to, and the thoughts that came to her over the succeeding days. It had become clear to her, she said, that the time was drawing close when she would have to leave Mang-kaja, which had been the heart and centre of her life, and that soon her oldest friends among the artists, who had sat with her for so long, cross-legged, painting, unfurling new worlds of thought and splendour before her eyes, would not be there. A new chapter lay ahead, of retrospect: she would be called on to record her experiences and paint in words the lives of the artists she loved most. Karen had already begun thinking, with some dread, about the monograph that she would have to write, devoted to the bestknown painter from the river country, Butcher Cherel Janangoo, whose health was failing – and to that end she had just made a visit to the nearby station, Fossil Downs, where Butcher had worked as a stockman many years before.

  “Do you know that place?” she asked me, and went on, rapidly, in a light voice, with the details of her story – but my thoughts, for a moment, lagged behind. Fossil, the Central Kimberley’s oldest and most celebrated station, stands just outside the modern site of Fitzroy, on a bluff close by the Margaret River’s broad and sandy bed. The gate into its grounds is marked by a stone pillar bearing the heraldic emblem of the MacDonalds, the family that established the land holding in the late nineteenth century’s pioneering days. The main house, which has the air of a country palace in the Veneto, is approached down an alley of boab trees, and is flanked on both sides by rows of out-buildings, all of them, including the grader shed, painted a delicate blush-pink. Like the other long-established homesteads of the Fitzroy Valley, Fossil is invisible from the highway and rarely seen by outside eyes: and yet its history is woven into that of Fitzroy Crossing, its mood and tone affect the town, it exhales a mingled breath of pride and sadness that seems to spread, like a hidden plume of radiation, following the winding channel of the river downstream, slowly, persistently, until it loses its definition in the muddy waters of King Sound.

  I listened, as Karen described her visit to the Fossil homestead and the lengthy research trip she had gone on to make with Butcher, out to Imanara, his birthplace, during the year that I had been away: the pair of them had travelled north-east from Fitzroy, down remote, half-remembered tracks, following what they could piece together of old ceremonial trails. During those days she had seen peaks and gorges she knew only from the paintings of her artists; she had penetrated deep into the back country of Bedford Downs and Tablelands, underneath the spine of the King Leopold Range. It had been a time of joy and fascination – but both she and Butcher had been unable to rid their thoughts of the secret purpose behind the expedition: they knew it was the last time that he would be strong enough to travel through that landscape and read its hidden features with his eyes.

  “And Daisy?” I asked.

  “The beauty queen? She’s been ill, too,” said Karen, almost vengefully. “In fact, you’re lucky to find her still alive. You know, if you go away, the worst thing tends to happen. You’ll find her down the road, at Junjuwa – or she still comes here, sometimes, in the mornings. It’s been a dark year or two for her: her husband passed away not long ago; and Elizabeth, her daughter, whom she loved very dearly, whom she saw, I used to feel, as a continuation of herself, and who looked so like her, died as well, and after that funeral Daisy mourned for a long time, very deeply. Then she fell ill herself. She’s quite weak now: she’s had a series of operations.”

  “For what?”

  “She’ll explain, I’m sure. She’s been back in Fitzroy a few weeks now. It’s been an interesting time: I find myself often thinking of the days, long ago, when she and I were down in Perth together and she was painting the sets for that production of Alcina – do you remember that?”

  “The opera? I suppose it was quite an appropriate choice for a Walmajarri set designer – all that love magic.”

  “Exactly – although I think Daisy was more interested by the idea of the enchanted island in the story – and she painted river scenes, rivers running through forests and through red range country, and it looked like the landscape round old Cherrabun Station to me. She dreamed a great deal then, and she used to tell me about her dreams – and these days that’s started happening again. Almost every time she comes in she has more dreams: great, arching dreams that take in everything: her family, the Broome supermarket and post office, the creation of the world. She had a dream, too, just around the time of her medical dramas, and it was so striking I made sure to remember it, even though I usually forget the details of hers at once, almost as if they’re my own.”

  “And what happened, in that dream?”

  “There’s a boab tree,” said Karen, “just outside her house, and its seed came from the country around Lumbulumbu, where we went with her. And when she collapsed on the pavement in Perth, and fainted away, and was rushed to hospital, she went into a dream-state. She was aware of standing in the shade of that boab and looking up at its highest branches, but her daughter came to her and told her she couldn’t go yet, it wasn’t her time, she had to stay – and then there was a break in the dream’s flow, as if the scene had changed, and she saw her daughter once again, flying gently in the air and strewing the white flowers of the boab tree all over the country around Junjuwa. Isn’t that the most beautiful, haunting dream-story?”

  “If you have to have a near-death experience,” I said, “that’s probably the kind to have. And what did it mean?”

  “That’s just typical of you! It was a beautiful dream in itself – apart from the meaning. And that was the meaning!”

  “That life is precious?”

  “The meaning is the dream,” said Karen, ill-concealing her displeasure at this continued quest for literalism. “More and more, I feel desert people are put here to have our dreams for us, and tell them to us, and keep our hearts alive. And with every day that passes, I feel grateful to know them, and grateful to have lived with them so long.”

  When morning came, I drove out to the Crossing Inn and down a sidetrack to a lookout that catches the morning sun. I watched the water in the main channel, far below the sandy bank, churn by; cockatoos were shrieking in the white gums; an eagle wheeled overhead. For some while I stayed there, until the landscape’s scale and silence had emptied all my thoughts, and I was barely present to myself – and I remembered, as I drove on, the time when I was first making my way through that landscape, and abstract reveries of this kind would swoop down on me and last for hours and days on end. I swung back, past the Inn, down old short cuts, along the airstrip road, by schools and run-down houses, until I reached the rutted turn to Junjuwa. There, little had changed. Near the entrance to the community, a morning card game was in progress, under the branches of an exiguous shade-tree. I circled round and soon found Daisy, sitting alone, on a broken-backed chair on the concrete veranda of her house. She was wearing a black lace dress of extreme elegance and a black bandana around her neck; her face, framed by her long straight hair, was tranquil; her hands were resting on her knees.

  “My boy,” she said, softly, and made a sign to me to pull up a chair beside her.

  I glanced about: there was a large, half-wrecked hospital bed marooned in the front yard, and next door a couple of green plastic seats in advanced stages of disintegration. I selected one of these, brought it across and leaned back.

  “I was thinking to myself,” said Daisy, “when’s he going to come? He’s been away too long.”

  I began explaining
: she cut me off. “Too long,” she said, in a stricken voice, “too long, too long.”

  I felt the right time had come to proffer the dress I had bought as a present for her. It was purple-coloured, and decorated with large bluish tropical birds. Daisy glanced at it, nodded in seigneu-rial fashion and stowed it beside the bag at her feet.

  “What now?” she said, after a long, dramatic pause. “I’ve been dying,” she went on. “I died, and then came back.”

  “I heard,” I said, taking her hand, pressing it tight and feeling a stab of overwhelming sadness.

  Daisy looked at me – a wry, measuring look.

  “People go away too long,” she ventured, after a further silence.

  “And never come back.”

  “You look wonderful,” I said, in a vague bid to shift the subject.

  “I knew you were coming.”

  “You heard from Karen, at Mangkaja?”

  “No. I knew. That’s why I put this dress on.”

  “It’s fantastic. And the pink espadrilles, too.”

  Daisy glanced down at her long, stick-thin legs, and swung them out, and inspected her brand-new shoes.

  “I was a good-looking woman, once,” she said.

  “You still are. The best-looking woman in Fitzroy Crossing.

  You always will be. Karen and I call you the beauty queen.”

  Daisy, at this, smiled, and the air of inwardness that had mantled her since the beginning of the conversation dissipated. She began, in a low voice, talking about the bush and her childhood, and the youth of her parents, and the journey they had made, north, from the desert country of the Canning Stock Route, to rockholes with sonorous Walmajarri names, until they reached as far as Lumbulumbu.

  “And they were having their own ceremonies there, and everything; they killed bullocks at the waterhole, and then they waited there, for all the other people to come in. And that’s when the stockmen came to get them: they came from Christmas Creek, with guns – they were killing all the old people.”