Daisy was leaning forward now: she was frowning; her hands were clenched.
“I know,” I said. “That story’s become famous. In fact I even saw one of your pictures of that country while I was away.”
I told her, in a few words, about my experiences in the Russian monastery: I described the church, and Sister Sophia, and the dreams and bitter fate of the grand duchess. Daisy nodded and gave some thought to this episode of foreign violence, and to the international dissemination of her work, then went on talking, very quietly, almost whispering, so I had to lean towards her. Eventually she adopted the expedient of murmuring into my ear, one hand to her lips, as though recounting a great secret. She was describing Boxer, her cousin-brother, at the waterhole: his fear, his flight, his feelings, all caught so vividly they sounded like her own: “Run away, get away, that’s what he was saying, that’s what he told me.”
She copied his voice; she mimed his boyish gestures – then she sighed. “That’s why I can’t leave that place. That’s why I always paint that place. Because my brother Boxer told me. I think of it, and the story, I can see it all the time, I’m looking at it in my mind.”
At last she leaned back. The scene switched to Cherrabun Station and her childhood; her brief schooldays, and then her move to Moola Bulla, the old native reserve, which lay in lush pastoral country just west of Halls Creek.
“I never knew you went there,” I said.
“You want to see me, what I looked like, when I was young?”
“Of course.”
“There’s a photo of me from there. It looks like my daughter.”
“Who took it?”
“Some old white man: it’s at Mangkaja right now. Karen has it on the wall beside her desk. And it was at Moola Bulla that I met my husband.”
Daisy smiled. The tale swirled on; then, with a sharp, savage motion of the hand, she brought it to an end.
“My husband’s gone. My daughter’s gone – I’m still here.”
She gazed straight ahead, and went on speaking, evenly: “For a long time, after I was sick, I stayed in Perth. Then, when I came back from hospital, I couldn’t do anything. I was crying all the time; my heart was broken. And I had three operations – look!”
She pulled the bandana round her neck to one side: there was a pale vertical line above her throat.
“And here,” – she pulled open her dress: operation scars, with stitch-marks running evenly along them, covered her chest. She took my hand again.
“I wish we could go back there once again, to Lumbulumbu – all together, just like before – me and Dolly, and Karen and you. Something about that place is calling me back. I haven’t been there for a long time now, and it’s calling me back there. I hear the voice.”
“And what does it say?”
Daisy turned, and rested her deep, liquid eyes on mine, and held my gaze: “It’s telling me – the same thing for everyone. There’s a place that calls, for everyone. We’ll all be laid out there, like sticks of firewood. You’ll hear the voice calling, one day, in your life: and it says the road is coming to an end.”
After some while, I drove back into town and called in again at Mangkaja. The familiar bush art-centre atmospherics had descended: the studio room was full. Old desert men in ancient hats were reclining in the tattered armchairs, watching grainy, hand-held footage of dances and ceremonies, while their wives sat close by and leafed through the piles of illustrated exhibition catalogues. Little knots of tourists ghosted about in their midst from time to time, smiling politely, examining the artworks in desultory, faintly embarrassed fashion. On the concrete veranda just outside the door, tiny children were at play, pushing prams about, giving occasional percussive howls. The phones were ringing out; the air conditioners wheezed in soporific rhythm. Karen was at her desk, surrounded by a throng of artists; a diary-book, its pages covered by neat hieroglyphs and complex arrowed messages, lay open before her. It was some hours before this human tide abated. I gained her attention.
“The photograph,” she said. “What photograph? There are hundreds of photos of artists, you know that. What’s come over you, anyway – you’ve become extremely visual since you went away. Why were you sending back that stream of picture files from the Middle East? Just because of the biblical associations?”
“Were they a success?” I asked her.
“Initially, of course, yes: people like to feel as if they’re in your thoughts – but after the first few hundred, I’d have to say I think the interest began to tail off. The ones that seemed popular were the images of deep desert country – I don’t think there was that much excitement about churches or mosques.”
I allowed this summary to sink in.
“Perhaps,” said Karen, “you’re talking about the Tindale photo? I thought you’d seen it before.”
“Tindale the anthropologist? I didn’t realise he was a photographer.” “Tindale was everything: not just a photographer, but a code breaker, a map maker, a butterfly collector. He even lost an eye to photography, when there was a gas explosion while he was helping his father take pictures: that was what decided him against becoming a professional entomologist. It would be hard, really, don’t you imagine, to specialise in little flying insects when you’re half blind. But he loved cameras: right from the start, he photographed and classified all his informants, and he drew up detailed genealogical records. They’ve become quite well known now in the Kimberley: people consult them all the time. He must have been travelling though this country just after the end of the war, when Daisy was taken away from Cherrabun and moved over to the reserve at Moola Bulla.”
Karen reached down into one of her desk’s drawers, produced a file and leafed through it. She found the picture; her eyes softened. “Wasn’t she beautiful,” she murmured dreamily, almost to herself.
“She still is,” I said. “Beauty doesn’t die. Sometimes it doesn’t even fade: it simply changes in state.”
“Yes, I know that proposition’s become very important to you, over the years. But why? Are you hanging on to the only good thing you see in the world? Are you turning into an aesthete, or something? Of course beauty fades: it’s a human attribute: it lives in time, and in time it tarnishes and dies. Let me tell you about it!”
As she delivered this little sally, Karen gave me a particularly swan-like, sidelong glance. I felt we were getting into contentious terrain. I stretched out a hand; she passed across the file.
The image it contained was black and white, printed on fine photographic paper with a glossy sheen. Daisy was posed, almost in the style of a prisoner, eyes staring straight ahead. She was sitting, wearing a black and white striped mission dress, her black hair neatly combed to one side, her thin arms held before her, her hands wrung together between her knees. Her face had its familiar, ethereal perfection. Her expression, though, was the striking thing: it was hurt, and candid; self-contained, and trusting; troubled, and abashed. In it lay all the grace and sweetness of the desert world, revealed, spread out before the viewing eye – and the gaze of the camera, even decades after it had fallen on her, still held the force and potency of gunshot, anatomising, pulverising all it saw.
I spent the next days on the road alone, in an attempt to leach away the more disquieting memories of my Middle Eastern sojourn and fill myself with the desert’s sights and sounds. I drove out on the highway to Halls Creek, then south, on the broad track that leads to Billiluna and Balgo, through subtle, elusive hill country which seems to merge in fine gradations into the horizon and the sky. During the long, humid afternoons, I would pull up and rest for hours in the shade of old station buildings, or explore the workings of abandoned mines. When darkness fell, the gleam from the moon and stars picked out the blood-woods and the stands of burnt grevillea in the landscape and gave them the air of armies invading by the stealth of night. One morning, early, I came upon a side road that leads down a corridor between sand dunes towards Mount Bannerman – a track so faint one’s eye loses
it for kilometres at a stretch, until driving becomes an exercise of pure imagination and it almost seems as though the best efforts of one’s will are necessary to conjure the path back into life. After some days in that landscape of sandstone bluffs and salt lakes, trying to align my thoughts with the country and its chords and echoes, I retraced my steps. I camped at Carranya ruins, and walked, late in the afternoon, across to the meteorite crater at Wolfe Creek, and watched the sun setting on its jagged rim, its rays blazing fiery red, in much the way that it might set on the last day of time. When, exhausted, half-starved, I completed this bush escapade and turned back onto the bitumen of the Great Northern Highway, it was mid-evening. I sped back to Fitzroy, and, on the whim of the moment, checked into the Lodge just outside town – a curiously designed hotel, elevated, built almost entirely on a structure of steel girders, with the result that even at the best of times it seems to be swaying gently, as though its elevation had set it out of true with the motions of the earth below. The main channel of the river runs to one side, flanked by tall, spreading gums, while to the east, beyond the caravan bays and powered camping sites, the country of Fossil Downs stretches away.
Morning came. I woke in my hotel room from a run of broken dreams, and made my way in to the reception, a vast hall with the air of a military commissariat, dominated by masterpieces of Daisy Andrews that depict the red ranges and the white trees along the creeks at Cherrabun. The front desk was besieged by throngs of tourists clamouring for attention. I found an unoccupied corner of the breakfast room and watched my fellow guests eating through their meals of eggs and grilled sausages, and, after so many days in the silence of the landscape, hearing only the whispers and the secrets of the air, I contemplated once more the noise and sword-clash of human life. It was the transition: it was inevitable: it was as wrenching as every time. Just as I passed the order counter, I noticed that a lavishly framed historical panel had been hung since my last visit, alongside the collection of faded, glass-covered photographs from the early station days. This panel told, in distinctly heroic manner, the life story of Maxine Mac-Donald, the celebrated chatelaine of Fossil Downs.
Maxine was a glamorous air hostess, who married the heir to Fossil and transformed the station into the Versailles of the North, awash with parties, incidents and intrigues, and I had already heard several tales from those hectic days – but a passing knowledge of the Fossil saga was not enough to prepare me for this ornate feast of narrative. It began with the basics: “Born 27 January 1914” – but very quickly the author rose up to the heights, and it was hard not to wonder who this stylist of the Central Kimberley might be, so florid were the tropes of the account, so lush the profusion of its images. At times, it was terse, even sharp; at times, it lost itself in ambiguities. Its grammar was vague; it hinted at tragic depths; it struck, at several moments, a strange, off-key bush sublime. “It may take a few years,” the anonymous author mused at one point in his tale, “for us to understand the genius of Maxine” – although the significance of Fossil itself, as a “monument to courage, which had given hospitality to prince and pauper alike” was already plain. “Maxine’s love for that hot, sometimes drowned, sometimes burnt, seldom peaceful crust of earth is a part of her soul. A generation of youngsters, weaned from their homes in the south, started their careers on Fossil and fell under Maxine’s spell. She became their second mother, and taught them it was possible to live, to rear a family on such an unforgiving stage as the Kimberley, without becoming heartless stereotypes.” I read on, caught by the tale, right through its dewy version of the chatelaine’s ties with the Aborigines of Mudludja outcamp, until it reached its peroration, replete with the most alarming grace notes: “Maxine,” it ended, “endured half a century of Mother Nature’s wild objection to human presence on her Kimberley estate …”
These words, with their threatening rhythms, reverberating inside me, I took my seat beneath the grainy photographs of fencing teams and bogged bullock drays and consumed a plate of leaden eggs, and bacon that seemed coated with the concentrated salts of the Dead Sea, before heading off to check out and travel on, towards Kununurra and Turkey Creek.
“Hello, stranger!” came, at that instant, a voice, at once warm and piercing, from the far side of the Lodge’s entrance hall. A woman, keen-eyed, with blonde hair cut to shoulder length, wearing clothes of high bush chic, surrounded by an array of expensive suitcases, stood at the door. Susan Bradley, the mistress of Doongan Station, the queen of the Kimberley, a woman whose network of intimacies and friendships, of convolutions and connections, spanned every last inch of terrain from Broome to Kununurra, stared me up and down.
“You look awful,” she pronounced after a few moments. “That year away didn’t do you any good! Do you want to drive up with me to Kalumburu? I’m setting off right now.”
“I can’t think of anything I’d like to do more,” I said, catching at once the rhyme with Father Lamourette, and feeling exceptionally light-headed, as though a shape was declaring itself inside my life. “I’ll only be a second – I’ll just go and get my things.”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Susan.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, it is the remotest Aboriginal community in Australia, and I don’t know you all that well – I didn’t think you’d say yes. I’ll have to rearrange everything: it’s lucky I always expect the unexpected!”
She went outside, leaving me, with a faint directional nod to show that I should carry down her cases. Outside, parked in the driveway, was a lavishly accessorised Landcruiser, metallic grey, its roof glinting in the sun. She opened its rear door and began shifting a set of leather trunks and large picnic hampers about.
We drove off. The hawks wheeling in the air above the town receded; the plain stretched away. Once I had replied to, or parried, her first fusillade of questions, Susan speeded up a little and produced a pair of white cotton gloves. With elaborate, almost pantomime gestures, she put them on, lifting first one hand then the next from the wheel.
“They’re very formal for the Kimberley,” I said.
“You can never be too formal,” she replied, very firmly. “Civilisation, here, hangs by a thread. I must say I’m always pleased to see the back of Fitzroy Crossing.”
“It does feel as though it’s in a down phase just now,” I said, cautiously. “But there’s still a kind of vigour here and there, if you know where to look for it.”
“I know Fitzroy very well,” said Susan, with a touch of indignation. “Much better than you, I’d imagine.”
“How come?”
“I lived in Fitzroy for years – or rather with Maxine, at Fossil. I saw you reading that strange history placard they’ve just put up in the Lodge’s dining room. Do you want to hear the real version?”
Susan was a superb narrator – she gave herself fully to her performances. They were operatic, full of abrupt ascents and savage reversals of fortune – and even the most obscure detail, which seemed at first flung out as a pure piece of colour, would be braided into the denouement of the plot, and lend its particular frisson to the outcome – so much so that her listeners often longed for her to repeat a story she had told before, and when this happened, they were well placed to study the storyteller’s art and spot the zones of the narrative that were improvised and those that formed the core of her accounts.
“I’d love to hear it,” I said. “You know everyone talks about your stories.”
I settled back; she accelerated; the country flashed by.
When she was a very young woman, she began, she happened to go to the Perth Cup races one New Year’s Day: it was the event of the season. There she was introduced to Maxine MacDonald, who by then was widowed and was looking for a secretary to work with her at Fossil Downs. Susan, whose complex personality was still emerging from its chrysalis, had already worked in the North, at Brunette Downs Station on the Barkly Tableland; she volunteered at once for the job.
“I was pretty struck, I must confess,
by Maxine, back then,” said Susan, almost wistfully. “She was an unusual act. She would only have been about sixty, and she was very much the glamorous star: red hair, long red nails, bright eyes. She was a good-time woman, she loved life, and people. She lacked, perhaps, a certain style – she looked like a barmaid who’d made good.”
“Susan! I thought she was going to turn out to be your role model.”
“Only in some respects. She had the look, in fact, of a classy sort of madam. Of course she was my kind of person – when you were with her, you always had a wonderful time. I flew up the week after the races. I can still remember what I had on when I landed at Derby off the MMA plane from Hedland and Broome; it was a blazing, humid Kimberley day. I was wearing ultrafashionable yellow shoes and a long, white-buttoned shift dress – I’ve never felt so hot in all my life.”
At Fossil, Susan soon learned the routines of this new world. Maxine loved soirées and amusements; she surrounded herself with a tense, constantly maintained gaiety, and that atmosphere drew visitors from all around and made Fossil the core of the Fitzroy Valley’s close, somewhat incestuous social life.
“That house was the emblem of an era,” said Susan, “an era that was passing into history at quite a rate. Fossil was the model, and the gravitational centre as well. There was a permanent flux of minor royalty passing through. Maxine loved being the mistress of a million acres, the queen of all she surveyed. But the evenings she presided over were always eventful – she had a tendency to degenerate towards the end of the night, and that only made her more entertaining. In fact, sometimes the transformation would begin quite early: after I’d done the second weather schedule, she used to turn to me and say: ‘Susie, darling, it’s time for the lemon juice’ – we’d have a couple of gin and lemons, in crystal glasses with vine-leaf patterns, and then we’d go off and have a sleep in the green room, on purple-covered mattresses. It was a wonderful existence, like a succession of scenes from dreams: there were always impromptu parties, and Maxine would go upstairs to change into one of her kaftans. We could calibrate the scale of the coming excitement by the number of beauty spots she was wearing when she came down the stairs: one, two or three. There was a particularly turbulent phase, of course, when she was being courted by Bishop Jobst.”
The Red Highway Page 11