The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Vision

  I

  A FEW DAYS AFTER LEAVING Wyndham, I set off on a trip to Central Australia, in part to attend a native-title handover in the community of Mantamaru, in part because of an enduring, elusive sense of connection to that stretch of country. For ever since I started frequenting the Centre I have felt that there are certain sites in Alice Springs, and in the ranges reaching westwards, which play some concealed role in the unfolding of my life – and so much had this conviction strengthened in me over the year of my absence that I was almost living in that landscape in my mind during my last months away. I felt caught up, wherever I was, with the desert world, I haunted Alice Springs: it was part of me, like some perfect simulacrum carried in my head. Often the idea came to me that I should abstract myself from my hotel room in Beirut or Baghdad and travel in a sweeping instant, across oceans and continents, towards the red line of the MacDonnell Ranges, to the peak of Mount Gillen and down, until I was beside the banks of the Todd River, or in the shaded gardens of the Silver Bullet, beneath the grevilleas and the cypress pines. It would be still and calm there, the kites would be circling, and the zebra finches calling; I would fall into conversations with men and women whose company I felt myself deprived of, as surely as a patient knows himself deprived of some life-preserving medicine – and this imagined sense of closeness was enough to breed a distinct apprehension about what I might find on my return.

  It was sunset when I arrived on the late flight from Darwin: the jet came gliding in through banks of cloud. I stared down through the aircraft window at the street grid spread out beneath me; the redness of the glow on the ground looked like a coat of fire. Early next morning, as my first port of call, I paid a visit to the Panorama Guth, an unusual structure on Hartley Street, set back, with a crenellated, white-painted central tower, which gave it the air of a hieratic temple, though it was designed by its creator, the Dutch artist Henk Guth, to serve as a tourist attraction and as a repository for his own renditions of the desert landscape.

  Guth was born in 1921 in the city of Arnhem, on the lower Rhine. His training as an art student was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of his country. For some months he was active in the Resistance and worked in a little studio near the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Guth was a gifted draughtsman. This skill was put to practical use: he specialised in removing the incriminating yellow stars from the identity papers of Dutch Jews threatened with deportation to the death camps of Eastern Europe – but he was himself detained in the course of a Gestapo sweep, jailed for half a year and then dispatched to a concentration camp in the north of Holland, near the German frontier. Very probably this was the transit camp at Westerbork, a place of great sufferings, though Guth was always reluctant to discuss in any detail this episode of his life, his experiences there and his subsequent escape. During the lengthy oral history interviews he submitted to with questioners from the Territory Archives, he skates quickly over those months and turns instead to his days in hiding, a time of pure adventure, when he lived in the underground alongside French, Belgian and Dutch partisans.

  After the war was over, Guth dedicated himself once more to painting, and above all to the study of the Dutch masters: he spent his summers travelling in Switzerland, where he became convinced that the landscape artist’s true task and challenge lay in catching the look of light, in recording the exact colour, the depth and variation of the sky. In 1960, driven by a desire for fresh horizons, he emigrated to Melbourne and tried there, for several years, to build a new life for himself. He worked as a house painter and as a teacher of deaf and dumb children; he explored his way around the Western District of Victoria; he held exhibitions of his Dutch landscapes, with moderate success.

  He was on the verge of returning to Europe when he made a visit to the Centre, thinking that he should at least see the heart of the continent before leaving it for good. For a week, he stayed in Alice Springs, which in those days was a remote township with an air of pronounced isolation about it; then he drove west, on the station road skirting the line of the MacDonnell Range. By chance, Guth arrived at the entrance to Ormiston Gorge round sunset, when the light picks out the finest variations in the colours of the rocks. On the horizon loomed the mauve silhouette of Mount Sonder; before him were slant shadows and shining, white-barked gums. He had fallen on a stretch of country that combined the remote grace of alpine peaks with the textures of the woods in Gelderland, round Arnhem, where his childhood years were spent. Guth felt himself reached, and summoned: he saw, in that darkening sunset gleam, the pattern of his future stretching ahead. At once he moved to Alice Springs and set up a studio, which gradually became a gallery not just of his own canvases, but of Aboriginal artefacts, entrusted to his care by Aranda men he came to know. After several years, the idea formed in him that he should create a monument to the landscape of the Centre and the desert peaks, which were still, in those days, far beyond the reach of most visitors to Alice Springs. Guth decided to paint a panorama, along the lines of the famous Panorama Mesdag in the Hague – an enormous cylindrical painting by the late nineteenth-century marine artist Hendrik Mesdag, which records with the utmost accuracy the streets and coastal dunes of Scheve-ningen on the Dutch coast. But many early visitors to Guth’s panorama were reminded instead of the Waterloo monument, a work of similar design and proportions, intended to memorialise the battle that decided, for several decades, the fate of Europe – and in the days when I first discovered the Panorama Guth and began visiting it regularly, drawn by its quiet and air of artifice, I found myself receptive to a note of melancholy that seemed to lurk within it: a mood of grief and remembrance, which I assumed by instinct, even before I knew anything of its creator’s biography, must be bound up with some experience of ordeal and loss.

  Guth’s painting style, if one can judge by the works he put on permanent display in the Panorama galleries, tended towards the soft and sentimental. He was a fluent portraitist; his desert vistas teemed with stagecraft and incident, with water, wind and gauzy light – but the exception was the Panorama itself, a vast, sombre affair, made up of thirty-three strips of Irish linen joined together by aluminium struts and hung from a circular rail in an elevated lantern, purpose-built to house the work. Guth engaged a friend of his from Holland, Frits Pieters, to help him paint the panorama. Pieters arrived in Alice Springs in February 1975, and the two men spent three months side by side, on wheeled scaffolding, at work in the summer heat, sketching in the topography of the landscape and laying down the undercoat. Guth then devoted three more months to the detail of the painting and the creation of its foreground – a sloping platform, covered in red sand and dry tufts of spinifex and designed to blend seamlessly into the lower reaches of the encircling canvas.

  The conception was simple: the visitor would ascend a spiral stair case to view the panorama, and country would surround him. There, spread out wherever one faced, was landscape, a softly curving wall of desert, in exact perspective, receding towards a horizon marked out by the great tors and ranges of the Centre. The eye would be drawn by the long, straight mesa of Mount Connor, then move towards the hazy outline of the Olgas and the flank of Ayers Rock, while at the opposite point of the panorama, behind two straight ghost gums, one could make out the sharp ridge of the MacDonnells and the landmarks near Alice Springs: Standley Chasm, Simpson’s Gap, the Old Telegraph Station. Dry riverbeds coursed through the painting in loose meanders, there were rock piles and dead branches; there was the hint of a run-down homestead, and a Southern Cross windmill in the distance; while close up were lines of coolibahs and ironwoods, and even a grove or two of distinctly unpersuasive desert oaks. It was a chapel dedicated to the landscape – and it was impossible: there was no one place from which a traveller could hope to see the peaks and gorges Guth had joined together: they were separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres of intervening range and sand plain. Nor was the painted country, for all the accuracy of the transcription, re
motely like the real landscape of the Centre. Guth used the palette of the old Dutch masters – deep, rich sepia earths, dark greens and wheat-sheaf yellows, which lent the scene the glow and lustre of a Ruysdael. Something of the tone of a Dutch work of the seventeenth century was conveyed by its brushstrokes as well: the sky was lightly clouded over, the mountains were tinged with haze, and one half expected a hay wagon pulled by straining cart horses to appear beside the riverbanks, dry though they were, or playful peasant boys to leap out from the golden undergrowth.

  I still remember my first visit to the Panorama gallery, years ago, during one of my early explorations through the Centre, when I was just beginning to find my way around Alice Springs. I had been told about the building often, and I had often felt there was something disapproving in the voices of the old hands in town whenever it was mentioned or Henk Guth’s name came up. “Just look for the fake castle turret, if you really want to see it, and there’s a row of flags on the street outside as well: Australian, Territory and Dutch.” Three flagpoles – there they were, before a low-slung, white-painted building with a wide veranda shading its front. I went in. The entrance hallway, with its little reception counter and display of books and trinkets, was intensely air conditioned and quite deserted. I wandered through the first rooms, where Guth’s collection of works by Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg school was hanging, together with a number of his own desert landscapes. To one side, a recreation of the artist’s studio was being set up, with odd items Guth had amassed on his travels: coins, rare stamps, Dutch schoolbooks from his childhood days in Arnhem. One advanced into a narrow chamber, which led into a much larger gallery lined with tall, glass-fronted wooden cabinets, each illuminated by pairs of green-shaded lamps in Tiffany style. These cabinets, as I soon realised, were filled with a collection of archaeological curiosities, and with Aboriginal sacred stones and boards. I paused before each case in turn and gazed through the glass. A vague sense of trespass took shape inside me. I was seeing for the first time objects I had heard described in whispers, or had read about in the obscure footnotes of anthropological classics. There were headdresses made from the feathers of wedge-tailed eagles and black cockatoos, there were cords of hair once worn as armbands by avenging warriors; pearl-shell pendants for rainmaking, stones and wooden boards engraved with circles and arrowed lines – all the secrets of the desert, spread out before my eyes. My unease mounted. I felt on the edge of laughter: I was close to trembling. I tried to copy down in my notebook the texts of the neat, hand-written labels on the display-case shelves. At that instant a whirring noise came from behind me; there was a click, then the noise of a twangy guitar soundtrack.

  At sunset, Ayers Rock seems to glow with a light of its own, declared a voice in a velvety English accent, comically old-fashioned.

  A tourism video had sprung to life on a television screen placed in a position of honour at the centre of the gallery.

  “Is it loud enough for you?” asked a man, long-haired, with a fixed smile, standing in the doorway.

  I had been kneeling down before a cabinet which held flat, white stones with faint concentric patterns carved upon them. I was so close my breath had fogged the glass. I wiped it away.

  “Who are you?” I asked, and as I did so I knew the answer.

  “I am the artist,” he said in an even voice, not without a little touch of satisfaction, and brushed back his mane of silvery hair.

  In places like this, where the rainfall is slight, the oxides remain and build up, giving the desert its reddish colour, declared the voice-over sonorously.

  “It’s quite a collection,” I said, and listened to the echo of my words.

  “I am happy if you like it,” said Guth and spread his hands: “my Aboriginal museum.”

  He approached with small steps and inspected me through wide, lantern-like glasses. He began escorting me round, waving gently at the cabinets, describing the way the pieces in them had come to him. Sometimes he went into the most punctilious detail; sometimes he lost the thread of his narrative and hesitated, until his attention was drawn by another object in the display. His voice was soft; he had a light, lilting accent. He kept pace beside me and even guided me with his hand, touching my shoulder or elbow to orient me here and there.

  “You have seen, of course, the panorama?”

  I was still gazing round at the glass-fronted cabinets. The patterns of the stones remained like an afterimage in my field of vision. I found it hard to take in his words.

  “Not yet, I must confess.”

  “You should see it,” he insisted. “It’s the main attraction.”

  He gestured towards a spiral staircase, which led up into the lantern.

  “I liked the fortifications round the tower,” I said. “As if it was a castle.”

  “It is a castle,” he replied. “You should always defend what you love.”

  I climbed the staircase, moving in a circle above him, looking down into his face, until I was at the level of the great painting. Its wide sky seemed to shimmer in the bright daylight filtering in.

  “What does it remind you of?” asked Guth, who had come up behind me. Then he began pointing out the landmarks, one by one. “Mount Hermannsburg, Glen Helen, there – Mount Sonder, Ormiston Gorge. Ormiston,” he repeated, softly, “Ormiston – where the dingos howl.”

  “It reminds me,” I replied, “of a Dutch landscape, I’d have to say: Delft, Haarlem – or at least what I remember of them.”

  “I used to think it was a long way from Europe, here,” Guth then said. “I wanted to leave it behind, when I emigrated, when I discovered Central Australia. But you never leave the past – never forget – never remake yourself. I am still the man I was. And you?”

  He smiled, and that smile is how I remember him, and he too seems to have regarded that expression, puckish, full of confiding candour, as a kind of mirror into his heart, for he caught it in an engaging self-portrait, which shows him clasping a sheaf of fine paintbrushes in his hands and gazing steadfastly outwards at the world.

  That first visit, distant in time, was in my thoughts when I walked back into the panorama building and through its downstairs galleries, past the display cases with their freight of sacred objects, from which I was careful to avert my eyes – not merely out of some vague respect for their sacred resonance and the power they once held, but more from a conviction, which has gradually deepened in me, that things of beauty are best seen once, and never looked at again. The smaller exhibition rooms, with their walls full of watercolours, were closed off and plunged in shadow; the television which once played the tourist video had been taken away. I climbed the spiral staircase leading to the lantern and the panorama with a strong sense that I was repeating, in exact fashion, the movements I had made so long ago, and that I was rejoining a trajectory through the past. While I was standing in front of the panorama, examining its meticulously painted details, that appealing idea lingered, although the thought also crossed my mind that something more than a mere landscape might be needed to transport one effectively in time. How pale the sky before me was, like the blue of eggshell; how full of depth the ribbons of the cloud. I gazed into the distance of the horizon for some minutes, and only then noticed that I was staring at the low, sloping line of Ormiston Pound, where the gorge entrance cuts through the rock. Ormiston, I remembered, where the wild dogs howl. Guth had painted it as a faint, mauve blur, nearly obscured by a large, twisted corkwood tree in the panorama’s foreground. As I looked, new details of the landscape struck me: burnt trees; cloud shadow; a discontinuity, of line and colour, where two sheets of the canvas were joined. And have I truly been here before, I wondered, half-whispering. Is memory repetition; is there any part of me still the same as all those years ago? Why does the sky in its paleness remind me so much of Europe, and the cold, clear air above camps and battlefields? I turned and retraced my steps, down the spiral staircase, which now seemed to me like the stone steps inside castle towers, and went bac
k through the empty galleries until I reached the chill, over-air-conditioned entrance hall. An attendant was standing there, poised behind the counter desk, his hands resting on its surface, his eyes fixed on the street outside. He glanced at me with a faint air of irritation, as if I was interrupting him at some religious task.

  “They always make us wait,” he said eventually, in a resigned voice.

  “They do?”

  “The coach parties.”

  We began talking. I glanced over his shoulder at the row of half-filled shelves: the selection of booklets and items for sale were so dated they could have served, without the slightest modification, as a historical display.

  “There’s been a drop-off in our visitor numbers, of course,” the man went on. “There’s that many indigenous tours now, out into the ranges. People prefer going out and seeing for themselves, not just looking at pretty pictures. And Henk’s passing away, that put a shadow over things too there for a while.”

  “I didn’t realise,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It happens to the best of us. It was a while ago now. Did you know him at all? You might want to have a look in there: in that side room. He had a pretty interesting kind of life. It tells some of the story.”

  The studio gallery had been made into a little shrine. Guth’s self-portrait was on the easel: his palette and paint box were at its side. Near the door was an obituary notice, together with a selection of brief articles from the local newspapers, describing his funeral. I studied them, and lost myself in the quietness that print, with its formality, brings. Guth had developed a keen desire to be buried in the bush, rather than in the bleak, scorched cemetery of Alice Springs. This wish had preoccupied him so much that he negotiated an agreement to that effect, both with the traditional Aboriginal landowners of the West MacDonnells and the Northern Territory government’s Parks and Wildlife Service. His grave lies near the entrance to Ormiston Gorge, where the landscape first disclosed its splendour to his eyes. As with most features in the rangelands of the Centre, the gorge’s name, despite its soft and fitting cadence, is quite arbitrary: it is borrowed from an outer suburb of Brisbane, overlooking Moreton Bay, where Louis Hope, the seventh son of the Earl of Hopetoun and the father of the sugar industry in Queensland, lived. It was one of the pioneers of pastoral settlement in the MacDonnells, Richard Egerton Warburton, the son of the famous explorer, who bestowed the name on a creek line near his first homestead, with the thought that it might encourage Hope’s interest in the area. Warburton himself had long been open to the call of the inland: when he was still young, he had travelled in his father’s camel expedition, the first successful crossing of the western deserts, which left Alice Springs in 1873, and reached the Oakover River near Roebourne ten months later, after a journey of extreme privations. And so Henk Guth, who thought himself a latecomer, but who was in truth a pioneer, and who felt the depth of colour in the canyons and the gorges, and the fear and mystery that lurked inside them, and built a temple dedicated to them, linked himself, by this brief, unconscious relay of association, with the steps of the first explorers bound for the silent ranges of the west.