“But I found I could barely focus on them,” I said. “It’s always that way – when you have your heart’s desire – when you see something you’ve lived to see. I was looking at those old handwritten scores and paintings, and pouring myself into them, and nothing came back: it was just a chill, dead suite of rooms, full of objects that had no strength in them, no presence for my eyes. The only thing that I remember from that day in any detail is the story of the Esterhazy family, and the last prince, Paul, who chose Hungarian citizenship and fell in love with Melinda Ottrubay, the prima ballerina assoluta of the Budapest ballet.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“Of course she was – she was a woman of unearthly beauty – it wouldn’t be a proper story otherwise!”
“And what happened then?”
“Can’t you guess? He married her – but they were living in dark times. His estates in Hungary were taken over by the communists.” “They took his land!”
Cherandra stared at me, eyes wide with horror.
“That’s right. In fact, the way that governments in Central Europe behaved in those days might sound quite familiar to you. And then he was put on trial for high treason, and sentenced, and thrown into jail. But seven years later, there was an uprising, in Budapest. He was released; he left the country, with his wife, and emigrated to Switzerland: they lived together there for many years in exile, in Zurich – the place where I went to school, actually, when I was a boy.”
“And did you know them?”
“No – it’s quite a big place.”
“Oh,” said Cherandra, sounding disappointed. “I see.”
“There’s another twist. They loved each other very much, but they had no children: not one – so he was the last descendant of the line. He died in the same year, and almost in the same month, that the regime in Hungary began to disintegrate. He never saw the dawn he had waited for all through his life. There are pictures of him and the prima ballerina in the museum at Eisenstadt. They always look very composed and elegant, in fact they look like mirrors of nobility and beauty – and they never, ever smile.”
The last movement of the quartets came to an end; the sound of the gypsy suite, which leaves its listeners perched on the very edge of nightmare, hung between us for a second and fell away; then there was nothing but the muffled roar of the Landcruiser as we swept on. We crossed the last of the single-lane flood channels. I veered around an ore truck which was driving slowly and keeping almost on the centre-line.
“Oh, please,” I said, rhetorically, as we went by.
“Oh, please,” mimicked Cherandra, catching my voice with weird perfection.
“Are you copying whatever I say now?” I glanced at her. “That might be quite a stretch: there’s still a long run ahead.”
“Why did you come back?” she said then, very directly. “You were away a long time.”
The Wyndham T-junction was close ahead of us. I slowed, and puzzled over what to answer: to her, and to myself. Ahead, above the haze of bush-fire plumes, the mass of the Cockburn Ranges, grandest and loneliest of all the mountains in northen Australia, rose up in spurs and battlements to a pale blue sky.
“I could tell you several things,” I said, rather tentatively. I had the sense of discovering my thoughts even as I described them. “I could tell you I came back because I missed the country, and because I promised myself, when I was away, that I would drive alone across the Kimberley again. Or I could say that I heard several stories while I was in the Middle East – stories that linked up with here, and so I made myself a secret promise to go back to the places they were set in, because one has to answer those kinds of signals and calls in life – and life’s like music, anyway, it has its songs, and rhythms, and repetitions that one shouldn’t fight against. And I could tell you I missed the people I know, in Kununurra, and Broome, and Fitzroy, and that I wanted to see them: I’d been carrying them in my thoughts and wondering about my friendships with them all the time that I was away – and those things would be true. But there are other reasons that don’t really come with words: they’re more to do with dreams and feelings, underneath the surface of the mind. And beyond that, there’s the last reason, the one no one likes to talk about: I half believe, these days, that people who come to northern Australia come here because they’re lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they’re chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon, out in the faint, receding perspectives of the bush.”
“I see,” said Cherandra, in a very solemn voice.
“Shall we have some sound again?” I said, and I switched the radio on, and at once picked up the signal for Radio Waringarri in Kununurra.
“So what is strongyloides?” inquired the announcer’s upbeat, smoky voice. “Listen up, brothers and sisters – because it could be you we’re talking about! It’s a parasitic worm, and you can catch it easily: it’s spread in droplets through the air. It affects the heart and decreases immunity, according to this health department handout that I’ve got in front of me. So if you’re set up with glandular fever at an early age, and you have this worm that can impact on your heart or kidneys, then you’ll have long-term damage! The good news is it’s easy to get rid of – one, two, three. But the bad news is there’s cross-infection all the time, because of the overcrowding – and dogs pick up the parasite when they eat human faeces …”
I turned the voice down.
“I’ve got that,” said Cherandra, proudly.
“Is it very overcrowded, in the house where you live?”
“Not really.”
“How many people, would you say: rough guess?”
She counted up on her fingers in methodical fashion, moving her lips silently: the counting went on for some while.
“Twenty-eight,” she announced eventually, in triumph. “Or sometimes I get to stay in my cousin’s house, with twenty-five.”
“Look,” I said, in some perplexity. “There! The Bastion: up ahead, and all the salt flats, and the cemeteries. Tide’s out.”
“The tide’s always out in Wyndham,” said Cherandra.
We drove in slowly, past the outlying blocks with their shade trees and shacks of corrugated iron, past the Six Mile houses. The airport came, and the race track, with its rails and furlong markers stretching away across the mud beds, dancing and wavering in the reflected dazzle of the sun. I pulled up at the little shopping centre, next to the giant concrete crocodile.
“Not here!” said Cherandra, shaking her head, as if unable to believe my stupidity.
“Keep going? To where? Old Wyndham? What’s there?”
“The Port Hotel, of course: that’s where everyone is, in daytime.” “But is it really the best place for you? You’re only a child.”
“I’m twelve years old! That’s grown up.”
“Maybe it is,” I said, “around here. And what did you actually want to come to Wyndham for?”
“A funeral – on Temptation Island.”
“Where?”
“Oombi.”
“You mean Oombulgarri, across the Gulf?”
“That’s what I said!”
“Why do they call it that: Temptation Island?”
“Oh – I don’t know,” said Cherandra, looking tactfully down at her knees.
We had crossed the last of the salt flats by now; I drove up the avenue of boabs, between the shuttered houses and old stores, and paused, engine running, opposite the car park of the Port Hotel. Loud music was blaring from the front bar. Beneath a shade awning, just past the side entrance, a handful of men were engaged in a drunken, desultory scuffle. They flailed their arms and clenched their fists, their gestures unfolding with an agonising slowness, as if the emotions within them had somehow produced an immobilising effect.
“Are you sure,” I began asking, “that this is really the ideal place for me to leave you?”
“There’s my cousin’s car,” cried out C
herandra, pointing to a crooked, antiquated trayback, which was caked in a thick coat of red dust and was missing a large part of its radiator grille and bullbar. I drove up to it, parked alongside and marvelled at the extent of the damage it had sustained.
“And is he,” I asked, still more sceptically, “the ideal carer?”
“Too many questions!” said Cherandra, and jumped out, and waved; then, much like some animal returning, after brief detention by research scientists, to its natural habitat, she scampered back in the direction of the hotel.
I glanced up and down the main street. It was mid-afternoon: the sun’s rays were burning down. Close by was a low-slung building, its little garden choked with discarded pieces of industrial equipment. I took shelter beneath its veranda. A discreet sign, laminated, peeling slightly, was on the door.
To make it easier, it declared, for you to understand our history, please look at our pictorial panels as you would a book. (Mystery novel addicts please refrain from peeking at the last page first!)
How to resist such an invitation? Inside, a set of old photographs and mementos from Wyndham’s days of prosperity had been arranged in a tight, compelling hang. Desks and tables were piled with reference volumes and heritage reports. One back room had been reserved for telephone switchboards and radio sets; the entrance hallway was decorated with carved shields, and nose pegs from camel trains, and a black cast-iron dingo trap. Perhaps those objects, with their antique aura, had removed me from the immediate present; perhaps the heat and stillness inside the building had gone some way to stupefying me: at any rate, it was not until I had done a quick circuit of the display that I noticed a man with long, elegant silvery hair, reading quietly in a small front office. He was smoking a roll-up cigarette, which was couched precariously inside a thin black cigarette holder. His pose was reflective. He looked up, then stared at me with quiet, measuring eyes. There was a silence, which lasted for almost a minute.
“That’s an interesting motorcycle you’ve got outside there,” I said, in desperation.
“Isn’t it,” he replied at once, with abrupt enthusiasm. “Isn’t it just! It’s an old Indian – before 1913, we think. We’re going to make a bit of a stand for it – and I want to make sure that wheel doesn’t keep falling off.”
“What is this place?” I asked.
“The Historical Society, of course. Haven’t you been here before?”
“Years ago,” I said.
“I thought so,” he replied. “I thought your face was familiar. I told myself I knew you.”
“And I remember you,” I said.
We shook hands, very ceremoniously, and although there was not the slightest further evidence brought forward to support this theory of a former encounter, we began speaking much more freely: of the society, its dreams, its goals, its prospects, the way ahead for Wyndham.
“Oh, this place is holding up like fury,” said my new acquaintance, almost shaking with excitement as he ran through the signs of the regional revival. “It’s the only viable port between Darwin and Broome, after all. And it’s cyclone-free: well, nearly. We’ve had the world’s second-largest cattle boat in here; the nickel’s going to be coming into port on road trains, and if they do bring in the iron ore, they’ll have to open up the old Durack Road. It’ll be like something out of Texas! That big warehouse on the block next door’s for sale, if you’re interested. It would be a good investment. A lot of people have seen the potential in Wyndham, you know. The Japanese had their eye on it.”
“That’s why they bombed it, presumably.”
“Yes – but they didn’t bomb the jetty: and they were very careful with the town. In fact I’m pretty sure, myself, that they sent out landing parties across the top of the Kimberley, just the way they did along the Gulf of Carpentaria.”
“True?”
“Never a truer word! We know one of their forward subs dropped off a shore team on the coastline, at Point Warrender, north of the Mitchell Plateau.”
“And what happened to them? They’re not in the history books.”
“No, that’s right – that landing party just disappeared. Although the monks at Kalumburu did notice that some of the locals had nice new knapsacks, but they all said they didn’t know anything.”
I allowed this startling reinterpretation of northern history to filter through my thoughts. I glanced at the man before me with increased curiosity. “Hot in here, isn’t it?” he said, wiping his forehead with his wrist.
“Pestilential.”
“We could talk about all this more,” he offered, “over a drink or two, if you like, in the back bar of the hotel.”
“You mean the one that has the old-timer buried underneath it?”
“The very one. It’s a good atmosphere in there. I just hope it doesn’t get too crowded. The town’s filling up – and I’ll be here, of course, the next two or three hundred years.”
“Are you sure?”
“For a certainty: that’s the length of time it takes for all evidence of corporeal life to vanish into the ground. If you’re doubtful about that, just take a drive out to the pioneer cemetery: the washaways have done their work, and the salt from the flats is leaching up and corroding everything that’s left there in the soil. You can see quite clearly what happens in a coffin, after a century or so.”
“I don’t know that’s really for me,” I said.
“Well, at least have a glance at our special display, about the meatworks. I’ve always thought that Wyndham was a kind of holy city – and the meatworks were the temple, or the sacred site. They were the heart of everything, in their day: the pulsing heart. It was industrialised extermination on the grand scale. I was watching one of those documentary programs on the TV last night: you know, Germany, World War II, all that. You could see the parallels. It’s just in that room over there, our exhibition. Take a look. I think you’ll find it bloody impressive!”
Without a word, I did as he advised, and after some searching, I noticed on the back wall a sequence of photographs, each one enclosed by an understated wooden frame. They were black and white, shot with strong contrast, and marked out by the most dramatic lighting effects. The compiler of the display had clearly intended to build up, through these multiple images, a portrait of daily life inside the meatworks, and simultaneously to describe, in the same brief visual narrative, the journey of an individual carcass, from the moment of its first arrival in the processing room until its transfer to the chilled hold of a waiting cargo ship. Each photograph showed men with frank, open faces, engaged in their distinctive tasks. In the first, two figures sat at a long wooden table, bent studiously over a pair of severed rib-cages, while behind them stretched a curtain of eviscerated torsos, gleaming white. The adjacent image caught three tall men, bare-armed and barefooted, their legs reflected in the wet flooring of the meatworks, as they manipulated whole, new-skinned carcasses, thrusting their hands deep into the haunches and chest cavities of the dead beasts. And in the most elaborate of these scenes, bathed by soft illumination, a team of workers moved amidst a forest of dangling bodies, each casting long shadows, which were in turn set off by the patterning of wire-mesh window frames. To one side of the men, an overseer, fully clothed, wearing a smart, broad-brimmed hat, stared on impassively, a hand resting beneath his chin. At several points this pictorial sequence was interrupted by supplementary notes, hand-written in neat, cursive script: Bullock approx. 450 kgs (990 lbs). Fronted out (insides removed) then onto splitting saw. Further for trimmers and finally, into chillers.
Beneath the photographic gallery, the history of the meat-works, which had been central for almost seven decades to the economy of Wyndham, was given in a series of fragmented cameos. These had been strung together and neatly typed up, somewhat in the guise of a formal report, complete with paragraphs and regular bullet points, although they were in fact subjective recollections of the most jagged kind, full of cinematic intensity. Some described the workers’ huts, with their hessian ro
ofing made from washed and opened salt bags; some recalled the moon’s gleam on the boning chamber’s walls of corrugated iron. There was, as these accounts made plain, a deep camaraderie among the workers, and a completeness to their life, which was amply matched by the thoroughness of the production cycle: for each bullock that entered the meatworks had a defined value, and every scrap of the carcasses was put to use. Even the horns and tail tips of the slain creatures were processed and bulk packaged: they went off by sea to the subcontinent, where they were transformed into brooms and suit buttons for the domestic trade.
But the days of this Kimberley Elysium were numbered: a deep downturn in the pastoral industry, coupled with the persistent growth of the export market for live cattle, brought about in mid-1985 a closure that had long been inevitable. Two years later, at an auction held on the site, much of the structure of the meatworks was dismantled and sold off. The production rooms, which had been cloaked for decades in darkness, were uncovered for all to pick over. The furniture and equipment was dispersed, and much of it found new life in the iron sheds and machine workshops that sprang up round Wyndham in those days.
For some while, I studied these images and documents, aware of the utter silence around me, until my eyes chanced on a little plaque, of brass or some similar dull metal, which was mounted on a wooden plinth and had been positioned so it was facing the wall. I leant down and turned it round. The surface was engraved with golden letters: its words paid tribute to the men who had laboured in the meatworks, from the first season in 1919 onwards, until the very end. In that period of time, the plaque recorded, with striking precision, the works processed 2,072,049 cattle.
“Remarkable, isn’t it?” The museum’s guardian had come up behind me: he was standing at my shoulder. “What men could do: what they achieved back then! Two million head of cattle: it sets one’s dreams in flight.”
My thoughts, though, had been stilled by that figure. It fell through me like a stone. I turned away, keen to seek the daylight, and quite unable to strike from my mind the images that were forming there: road trains, in their dusty livery, driving beneath the Bastion; a line of docile bullocks, stepping forward; blood, coursing through the mangroves, blood pouring in continuous flow from the meatworks drains.
The Red Highway Page 14