The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  “By whom?”

  “The Catholic bishop of the Kimberley in those days – an important figure. Don’t you know about him?”

  “I don’t think I do. Is that normal conduct, for a Catholic bishop, up here?”

  “Almost de rigueur, I imagine! Anyway, Bishop Jobst, who had won the Iron Cross in the war, was very handsome in those days. I’m sure he is still, in fact: he eventually left the church, and he’s just celebrated his eightieth birthday. I believe he lives with a woman now, somewhere in Cottesloe. We always knew it would be a busy weekend at Fossil when his plane flew over and came circling in to land. I remember one night, very late, looking up from a sofa and catching sight of the Bishop strolling into the main room, his cheeks stained red with the imprints of lipstick kisses, like something out of a cartoon – and that wasn’t in the least unusual. On one particular evening, with another admirer, I can still picture the most dramatic scene, being played out on the grand staircase, involving a large bottle of Dram buie …”

  Susan’s voice tailed evocatively away. We had driven the length of the Windjana back road; the wide landscape of the Leopolds stretched ahead. I gazed out at the even, hazy contours: those running peaks and green, unfolding valleys seemed like harbingers of an unmapped world. The turn on to the Gibb River Road loomed up before us. We took it and drove in silence, shaken by the pleasing drumbeat of the corrugations, until Susan picked up her thread.

  “Ah, Fossil,” she sighed, and gave a little laugh. “The Kimberley was a real collection of misfits back then.”

  “As opposed to now?”

  “Well, I’m the queen, now,” said Susan. “You’ve got to be careful what you say!”

  I remembered her special trick of concealing her intent in a wash of ironies, and phrasing her words to imply at the same time both their literal interpretation and the direct opposite. She paused, frowning, as a kind of punishment for my indiscretion, then finished off the tale.

  “Maxine died, of course. There was a huge funeral, with the MacDonald tartan very much in evidence. They buried her on the hill, next to the windmill, beside her husband’s grave. I realise now that I was up there in the Indian summer of her reign, and I loved it: it was like being in a theatre, on stage all the time. I lived fully – I had several wild affairs.”

  “So why did you leave: and why don’t you like Fitzroy?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like it, or care for it. It’s just that it’s so full of memories – like all the bush, which we always seem to pretend is empty. It’s not: it’s full of the past – both happy and sad at once. But Fitzroy, for me, is too confused and jumbled up, and all the different echoes are still present in my head.”

  I digested this for a while, until Susan asked me to reach back into the large travelling bag behind us, made of a soft grey leather, so smooth it looked like the hide of baby elephants.

  “You’ll find a little book in there,” she said. “Hard-covered: a book of stories. I just found it again, the other day, and brought it with me to read through. Pull it out.”

  I did so: it was a frail, slender thing, quarter-bound in burgundy leather, with faint gilt letters on its spine: The Drover’s Cook and Other Verses, by Tom Quilty. I leafed through: it was a selection of Kimberley ballads, rhyming gently, full of the usual rough whimsy and hard times. On the title page was a short inscription, and, in Susan’s neat, upright hand, her maiden name.

  “So,” I said, “what’s the story?”

  To my surprise, for a few moments Susan said nothing. She gave a little, distant smile: a smile at herself, I would have guessed, and at her own capacity for sentiment, and the way emotions and memories take their place in the passing run of life.

  “A sad one, of course,” she said at last. “Sad, but not because it had to do with romance – sad, because it was so long ago now, and fate still seems so hard. The bush was different in those days: people who come here now can’t have any idea just how lovely and how sweet the life once was.”

  “Before the revolution, in a way?”

  “Absolutely – of course everything had to change, and it did change. But I wonder if there weren’t many people, across the whole reach of the Kimberley, station people, Aborigines, drovers, labourers, who didn’t feel themselves happier back then.

  All the old cattle empires were still in place, although they were beginning to crack apart. The Emanuels still had several of the great stations of the Fitzroy Valley – Cherrabun, and Gogo, and even Christmas Creek – and my friend Vic Jones was the man in charge of Gogo. We were very close, he and I: real soul mates. I spent a lot of time with him in Fitzroy – until the day, in July 1971, when he decided that his life was over. He was going blind: the darkness was coming over him. He used to tell me that he’d be useless when he could no longer tell a good bullock from the top rail. The Emanuels knew all about it: they offered him a desk job at the head office, in Perth, but that would never do for him. He decided he would only leave the Kimberley feet first. And that was what he did. It was the race day at Fitzroy Crossing.”

  “A lot of things happen to you on race days,” I put in.

  “Do you want me to tell you the story?”

  I apologised, and Susan frowned and took a few sharp bends in silence, before continuing in a quiet, collected voice.

  “I still remember the moment when he produced that book: he handed it to me, in a very courtly way. We were having a drink together, in the back bar of the Crossing Inn. There was a lot of fond talk, and banter about me saving the first dance that evening for him: and then he went back to Gogo, and took a Luger from his pocket, and shot himself through the head, right at the front gate. He loved me – I loved him. I enjoyed spending time with him.”

  There was a pause in the conversation: the entrances to Gibb River and Mount Elizabeth went by; I stared out, into the curtain of fan palms and bloodwoods, and the play of sunshine on the parched, yellow stands of cane grass.

  “I worked out later,” said Susan, “that I was the last person he’d spoken to. He said, ‘Don’t wait for me for that dance, I might be late’ – and then off he went.”

  I glanced down at the book in my hands.

  “This book is published,” I read out loud, “to assist the Australian Inland Mission.”

  “I’ve become quite interested in publishing, myself, actually,” said Susan.

  “It doesn’t sound as though you’d have too much trouble finding enough material for your memoirs.”

  “Not to publish anything by me! No – I’ve made a promise to Father Sanz, at Kalumburu, to print his autobiography before he dies.”

  I was startled to hear that name: I felt the memory-chime again.

  “I had no idea he was still alive,” I said.

  “Very much so,” said Susan. “He’s a force of nature. He’s full of spark and energy: he’s just invented an anti-snoring device, made out of tyre rubber. He’s ninety-four years old now. He left the mission in the early 1980s, when the state government took over the running of the community from the monks. He moved down to the Benedictine monastery at New Norcia – but early this year, he told the abbot there that he was drawing to the close of his life, and he wanted permission to go back to the place he loved most on earth. I’ve come to know him well. I go up to Kalumburu quite often these days. I like to keep an eye on things there.”

  “Well, it’s natural – after all, you’re almost neighbours. It’s only 250 kilometres away from where you live, across the wildest country in north Australia, up a famously awful, stony plateau track, with nothing else to tempt you at the end of the road.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Susan. “And I’m glad we’ve got onto Kalumburu: it’s at about this point on the journey, with a few hours still to go, that I mentally convert to Catholicism.”

  “I hadn’t realised confessional allegiance could be a matter of geography.”

  “It is for me – I think one should always be pragmatic about questions of fa
ith. There’s just no point in going to Kalumburu without attending evening mass. It’s an experience everyone should have at least once in their life. You’re in luck – we’ll be there in time tonight.”

  “Wasn’t that the Drysdale crossing back there – that green underworld of river gums, and white sand, with all the kingfishers, and pelicans, and brolgas?” The river was lost already in the dust trail. I craned my head back; we swept on.

  “It was,” said Susan, staring ahead with the fixed gaze that comes over all long-distance drivers. “But there’s not really any time for worship of the natural kingdom: you can do all that kind of thing at the mission, on the King Edward Lagoon. Perhaps I should give you a quick run-down on what we’re driving into. I suppose it’s for the best if you realise in advance that everyone in Kalumburu is slightly cracked.”

  “Everyone?

  “Everyone – it’s almost a condition of entry.”

  She ran through the list, in brisk, precise fashion. There was Father Anscar, the twelfth son of a twelfth son, a collector of spiritual memorabilia, a man of the most engaging personality, with a tinkling, upward-rising laugh and a habit, useful in Kalumburu, of looking on the bright side of life: although Anscar’s mood had been somewhat downcast recently, perhaps because of his near-total blindness, caused by the inroads the disease of lupus was making on his organism. There was Sister Scholastica, who had been in the Kimberley for five decades, and was closing in on her ninetieth birthday, and had lost almost all feeling in her legs, with the result that she now used a form of motorised quad-bike for transport about the mission compound, though this handicap had yet to stop her from pursuing her culinary endeavours, which often produced outbreaks of food poisoning and bitter protests from her colleagues. There was Brother John, of course, who was in regular communication with Our Lady, and who had been engaged in the most complex negotiations with Susan over his prayers for a white late ’90s-model Suzuki trayback to cart the mission rubbish – prayers which had been miraculously answered, due to Susan’s chance attendance at a Perth car yard.

  “You mean to say you bought him a Suzuki four-wheel-drive – just because he told you he needed one?”

  “As I said, it was a miracle – and now we’re in discussions over his wish for a dog to replace the old blue heeler, which succumbed to the attentions of a king brown. But Brother John’s still trying to determine Our Lady’s precise instructions on that front: breed, gender, so on. And naturally one always comes across the administrators, who arrive and depart with great regularity, because of the stresses of the life up there.”

  Susan’s portrait of this little realm had all the energy and adjectival profligacy of a Jacobean drama, and it was set, too, on a tight, constrained stage: the mission, in her telling, was a square of ordered space, fringed by lush, towering mango trees, jammed hard against the wider Aboriginal community of Kalumburu, which lapped against its low stone walls like a heaving ocean. Between the two was the narrowest of frontier strips, formed by a grassy reserve where the sacred grotto, topped by a statue of Our Lady of the Assumption, stood. The monks, on their devotional visits to this image of the Virgin, would patiently gather up the remains of half-smoked joints discarded in the grotto’s furthermost recesses and dispose of the used condoms they found, shaking their heads all the while, wondering at the new-found interest in balloons being displayed by the more youthful members of the congregation, and utterly perplexed by the ways of the teenage world. Beyond this buffer zone, the community proper began. It was the standard mix of run-down houses, front yards full of half-dismantled cars, and roadways leading nowhere, down which little groups of young women would drift with slow, tranquil strides. Susan’s friendships, though, were with the few surviving older inhabitants, who remembered the early mission days. Each time she drove up, she would call in on the artists Jack and Lily Karedada, produce a folding chair from her Landcruiser, sit beside them in the fetid room where they lay on their beds, and listen to their papery voices as they ran through the tribulations of their lives. But before anything, she liked to exchange greetings with Dolores Djinmora, a woman of preternatural grace and beauty, a mother of thirteen children, and a Christian of the most intense beliefs.

  “In fact,” said Susan, “she’s the co-author, with Father Sanz, of another book I’m publishing: an anthropological study of the Kalumburu people in the time before the mission came.”

  “It’s going to be the best-documented community in all Australia,” I said. “Maybe you should think of starting up a special imprint: Kalumburu University Press!”

  “That’s a splendid idea – but we might have to do something about the literacy levels first. Father Sanz is quite depressed about the educational picture: he talks about it in his memoirs.”

  “And what are they like?”

  “It’s not exactly a standard story of faith: there’s a lot about the Aboriginal politics of the Kimberley, and his arguments with the state government. He describes the wartime attack by the Japanese, and his adventures on the coastal supply luggers, and his days as a young postulant in Spain, when he ate raw mice and insects to prepare himself for his missionary tasks. There’s a big cast of animals, as well. Father Sanz wanted to start up a croc farm at Kalumburu: he kept a family of pet crocodiles and became very close to the dominant male: he used to pat it and stroke it every day. And he was keen on fantail pigeons: he liked to play musical pieces on the harmonium, accompanied by his favourite bird. The book’s structure presented some problems, though.”

  “What kind?”

  “It had about eight different endings – but I think we’ve found a way of dealing with that: it has a kind of diminuendo conclusion now, like waves ebbing on a shoreline; fading away.”

  The sun had dropped down to the western horizon: its beams came slanting like a spotlight through the trees. We left the plateau country and began descending. Beneath us, between red cliffs, ran the King Edward River channel; its pools caught the sun, gleamed and curved into the distance and out of sight. Soon the corrugations deepened; the road branched and widened: it switched to bitumen, the scrub gave way, water tanks and the low roofs of houses appeared.

  “Kalumburu,” said Susan, proprietorially. “The end of the line.”

  We glided in, past a large police station. Off to one side was a floodlit basketball court; the stone buildings of the mission and its low walls lay ahead.

  “Familiar?” she asked. “What you were expecting?”

  I gazed out: a sweet, transfixing tone of longing stirred inside me. I had the sense of seeing once more a place I had known in some forgotten episode of childhood – or of watching a filmic adaptation of a much-loved book: snatches of Jerusalem and Lam-ourette’s descriptions came back to me, and I could see him once more, trying to paint the portrait of the mission and its country, his face assuming an expression of tense delight.

  “Aren’t all remote Aboriginal communities of a kind?” I said, carefully. “That tone of drama without purpose; of listlessness and expectancy without end?”

  “Of course,” said Susan. “But there are local variations. I sometimes like to think of Kalumburu as the best and the worst all jammed up tight together.”

  “How does it rate on the accommodation front? Five-star?”

  “They’ve got a small motel – for the contractors. In fact it’s more of an ATCO container set-up. I’m sure we’ll find you something there.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, I tend to stay in the guest quarters in the bishop’s house,” she replied, rather airily. At that moment, we passed a large painted sign: Kalumburu – Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Parish: May the Lord Preserve You. Susan turned into a gated driveway: “Look, there’s Father Anscar. I’m glad to see him up and active: he’s been knocked about by all his cortisone treatments. His Auntie Bridgie in Melbourne told him they could dry the blood of a horse.”

  She waved and drove slowly past a man with white hair and an even, slightly unfocuse
d expression in his eyes – but he paid no attention, perhaps unsurprisingly, because he was wearing a large pair of orange industrial ear muffs and was headed, in purposeful manner, towards a small tower at the far corner of the walled garden.

  “What on earth is he doing?” I asked.

  “He’s about to ring the bell for mass – perfect timing: we can go straight into church.”

  Susan pulled up before the low stone façade of the monastery’s main building. With an air of great ceremony, she gazed into the rear-view mirror and applied a fresh coat of lipstick. I glanced about and took in the surroundings, which had the air of a set from some radical operatic production in which opposites are provocatively combined. There, set in a smooth expanse of lawn, was the little church, and nearby stood the storerooms and outbuildings, each topped with a neat wrought-iron cross. Beyond them, along the bank of the river lagoon, vast raintrees towered upwards, and in their topmost branches white cockatoos were shrieking, and cavorting, and hurtling through the air. The front grounds were being watered by large, noisy sprinklers, which threw out sharp, scudding jets of water. Strewn about the gardens were decorative assemblages of bent, rusted metal and old saw-toothed wheels arranged in geometric shapes. In the distance a generator was humming; at the front gate, dogs scuffled and yelped like condemned souls being thrust down into the maw of hell.

  “Let’s go,” called Susan. “Mustn’t be late – think of our spiritual health!” She led the way, providing a running commentary, offering brief biographic sketches of the various individuals who crossed our path, in quite a loud voice, seemingly oblivious to their reactions.