*
That obscure region, with its desert oaks and bloodwoods, and its abrupt hills which rise like island archipelagos in a red sea of sand dunes and loom on the horizon, mauve from distance, had been often in my thoughts over my year away, for when I left, I chose, almost at random, one book to take with me: one book as a talisman and emblem, a mirror of the Australian landscape, and a prism for my dreams. It was my companion on scores of journeys, I sank myself in its pages nightly, I could recite its climactic passages almost by heart, I came to know it as intimately as any text I studied in my schooldays. The Red Centre is a short, rhapsodic account of the deserts and the rangelands west of Alice Springs, written in the 1930s by a naturalist, H.H. Finlayson, and largely cast as the narrative of the author’s quest for small, endangered marsupials, chief among them the engaging rat-kangaroo of the desert plains, Caloprymnus campestris, now long extinct. Finlayson, about whom I knew, at that time, next to nothing, was clearly an individual of romantic sensibilities, whose dreamy cast of mind was barely held in check by a fierce devotion to the task of biological surveying and sample collecting.
The Red Centre shows all the signs of having been thrown off in a few short spells of inspiration: it soars and swoops, it is both succinct and open-ended, its ideas and intuitions shimmer into being like mirages on the page, only to dissipate and vanish in the onrushing stream of species descriptions and desert anecdotes. Much about its presentation is misleading: a surface tone of gentle humour serves to hide its deeper mood of wonderment and free-floating melancholy; it is divided into sections, yet its chapters bleed into each other; it makes liberal use of black and white photographs, which at first seem well chosen to illustrate the author’s arguments, but which soon reveal themselves as evocations of landscape, as linked studies in pattern, shape and light. Finlayson begins his narrative with dour pages of historical background and reflections on method, before his true subject makes its first appearance. Metaphors of disruption and imbalance at once invade his thinking: his language, which has been, until this point, smooth and tranquil, takes on a dark, prophetic tone.
The old Australia, he declares, is passing: the landscape is beset on all sides by forces that are reducing it to a scatter of semi-artificial environments, mere islands in which the original plan is lost. They are no more, in fact, than fragments of the initial country, frail shards whose fate no man may predict. If there is authentic terrain to be found, it lies in the far deserts, and above all in the mountain chains, which are the goal of all his travels, and the constant focus of his words. Finlayson scarcely hides his scorn for the flat, wrecked pastoral runs surrounding Alice Springs, he yearns for remoter country: the Petermanns and the Musgrave Ranges. He lingers on their look, he dwells constantly on the causes of their beauty in his eyes: “In spite of their insignificant dimensions they are curiously impressive; and the first sight of a blue line of distant hills breaking the horizon of scrub is seldom without a pleasurable thrill.” This, he decides, is in great part because these mountain chains are refuges, shelters from the harsh, oppressive flats of sand and spinifex, and because each of them has its own special character: the Everards with their bare smooth domes and rock slides; the George Gill range, all canyon gorges and smooth rock basins; the Rawlinsons, where quartz screes lie like a mantle of hail beneath the dark mulga surrounds. There is one destination, though, that most draws him, and he returns there in a haze of exaltation: Ernabella, in Glen Ferdi-nand, where the peaks, after seasons of heavy rain, are covered in bright green waving grasses – and even today, when a large Pitjantjatjara community fills the valley, and its houses straggle along the creek line, there is still a sharp splendour to the landscape, and the soft hills form a striking contrast with the straight church tower raised in mission times.
Finlayson loved to lose himself in memories of country, to summon up the texture of particular places in his mind. There is an almost painful immediacy in his descriptions, yet he seems to be writing of a world already gone. Though The Red Centre was composed soon after his survey trips into the far western deserts, and they were then largely intact, the book reads as a retrospect: it is steeped in an awareness of time’s passage, its words vanish from one’s reach. Finlayson had absorbed a mood and spirit from the landscape: the ranges seemed to him aloof from the country surrounding them. “They look out,” he writes, “over a world which has seen great changes, in which they have had no part. To walk alone into their gorges by moonlight; to look into the clear depths of their splendid pools when the noon sun flares on the rocks and the world is unbelievably still; or to listen to the dawn wind singing in the pines on their tops brings always the same suggestion: a sense of things about them once familiar, but now long forgotten; a haunting nostalgia that will not be shaken off.”
Even today, such passages, with their air of internal storms first mastered then projected outwards, leave me without bearings. But in the months when I was turning to them and reading through them late at night, in the back rooms of small hotels in the Syrian desert, or in the highway hostels of southern Turkey on the road into Kurdistan, they took on the force of spells, or incantations. How much more strongly then did Finlayson’s sense of things ending, collapsing, changing ineluctably from one state to their next strike home! In the pages of The Red Centre I came to hear a distant whisper speaking to me, murmuring that life is never what we see, and even we ourselves are not what we believe. I found a logic to Finlayson’s word pictures; his voice always seemed with me, like a secret companion – and the suspicion that he had somehow remained by my side all through my travels came back to me strongly later that same day in Alice Springs.
Towards the end of the afternoon, after various visits and encounters, each one marked by the unease of return and all its restitching of broken ties, I called in at the Strehlow Centre, a curved, barn-like structure, several stories high, built from rammed earth, which stands at one corner of the cultural complex in the western part of town. In addition to the anthropologist’s papers and other closed collections, the building houses the Museum of Central Australia, or its visible portion: a handful of giant fossils, cases of rock samples, display panels of the usual kind. On my previous visits, the museum had been almost empty, but this time a guided tour of some description was underway, a curator was speaking, his voice reached me from the far corner of the gallery. I listened, and only after some minutes of vague interest did I realise that the story’s details were familiar and that I must be hearing a succinct account of the life and times of Finlayson, who was the subject of a new scientific exhibition – though it was nothing more elaborate than a display of his photographs and taxidermic specimens, since he was a long way from being a figure of renown. I drifted over and attached myself to the group of tourists.
“Those were certainly enlightened attitudes,” the expert was just saying, with a striking warmth and intent, “at least for the time. Finlayson made a strong impact on everyone who knew him. He was the Centre’s most significant mammal biologist – he was the last scientist to see the desert fauna before the wave of extinctions that swept through the region in the 1930s. Had he not made his great collecting journeys, we would have nothing. And this, you could say, is the pride and joy of our display.” Obediently, the group gathered close. Before us was a tiny, ungainly skeleton.
“Caloprymnus campestris,” said the man, in reverential voice.
“The desert rat-kangaroo. There are no more than 120 records all told of this animal. Very few people actually saw it – and anyone who’s read Finlayson’s account of how he found it will remember how he ran it down. His team chased it; it ran until it dropped dead. It gave its life for science.”
“It’s a wonder, really, there are any native animals left,” said one of the group.
“There aren’t that many,” said the man. “But look at this sample: it was almost worth it!”
I lingered and gazed at the rat-kangaroo’s skull: it had wide, deep eye cavities and frail strut
s like scaffolding within its jaw. Alongside it were the mottled pelts of other rare marsupials: bil-bies, bettongs, bandicoots. The tour moved away, and soon came to its end. Eventually the curator came up beside me and looked approvingly on.
“Lovely creatures, aren’t they?” he said. “It’s amazing he was able to collect anything at all.”
“Why?” I asked.
He cleared his throat and stroked his beard. “Do you want to know the story? Not the abbreviated version?”
“Put like that, who wouldn’t?”
The curator stepped back and fixed his eyes on mine with a rather alarming intensity.
“They called him H2F,” he began, dramatically. “Hedley Herbert Finlayson – he was a man of high degree …”
It was an unusual tale, made more striking by the building’s sudden emptiness and the sombre presence of the skeletons, whose skulls seemed all to be turned in our direction. Finlayson had been born in Adelaide, into a large family; his mother bore the lovely name Finette, and sang in opera; his father, Ebenezer, who began his career as a Murray River paddle-steamer crewman, rose to dizzying journalistic heights, becoming the finance editor of the Adelaide Register. Finlayson was a student of unusual gifts, fascinated by chemistry. At the age of eighteen, he embarked on a series of experiments involving explosive compounds of his own invention. He chose a warm morning in early May for an all-important test explosion, and travelled out to Glen Osmond, in the lee of the Adelaide Hills, at that time a remote spot. He was screwing in the percussion cap; it detonated prematurely: his left hand was shattered, the left side of his face was gravely damaged, he lost one eye, his hearing was impaired for the rest of his life. Such, said the curator, in solemn voice, was the condition in which Finlayson went out on his pioneering surveys of the western desert.
“You mean he was a wounded healer!” I interrupted.
“What?”
“Isn’t it obvious? He was half blind, and he saw more than others. He suffered, and came close to death, and he devoted himself to studying creatures that were themselves endangered and on the edge of extinction. He travelled into the remotest country, and he could read its pattern and look into its heart. Don’t you see? It all fits, perfectly. His weaknesses were what made him strong.”
“I don’t know I’d be applying some spiritual grid to Finlay-son,” said the curator. “He was very much a man of science. There’s a new book out: it’s like a biography, a life sketch, told through the diaries he kept during the time he was out here in the ’30s, making those expeditions by camel to the Petermanns and Musgraves. Do you know that country at all? Out where Docker River and Warakurna are today?”
“A little.”
“Everyone says they do, now. Everyone thinks they’ve seen the western deserts, if they’ve been out by Landcruiser and hurtled down the Great Central Road, and maybe stopped at the Docker campground overnight, or called in at Giles and seen the old grader used by Len Beadell’s construction team. But those diaries give you a sense of how things really were out there along the ranges, when the first scientific surveys and expeditions were going through. You’ll find the book easily. It’s got a very striking cover: it shows Finlayson looking almost like Errol Flynn. There’s a blurry photograph of him. His bad eye’s in shadow, he’s cradling a rifle on his shoulder, he’s wearing a fedora hat. It’s called A Truly Remarkable Man.”
“A mass appeal title, I’m sure!”
“It’s everywhere in town, don’t worry. Alice Springs is a very history-minded kind of place. As a book, though, it’s strong meat: it’s not for everyone. I don’t know too many bush stories that pack that kind of punch.”
I stayed in my hotel room over the following days, which were ones of intense heat and summer storm, and took up this implicit challenge. Soon I was immersed in the diaries and the book’s curiously episodic record of its subject’s career, compiled, after several years of dedicated sleuthing, by Don Tonkin, a historian based in Adelaide. Parts of the narrative related Tonkin’s quest, which required long months of outback travel in his subject’s footsteps. Since the book was only lightly glued together, and disintegrated almost immediately after purchase, I recomposed it into several piles of pages, divided by the regions of Finlayson’s adventures. These I arranged around me on the floor before the plate-glass window, and I ran through them one by one, looking out towards the f lank of the MacDonnells, where the clouds loomed and the rains poured down – and though I had expected to find myself caught up in landscape descriptions, or closely observed encounters with Aboriginal groups, of the kind that fill The Red Centre, I was struck, instead, by passages with very different themes. In early 1932, shortly after his rediscovery of Caloprymnus, Finlayson boarded the Old Ghan at Marree and set off on a trip north, making for Tempe Downs on the Palmer River, where he hoped to continue his collecting of rare marsupial specimens. As his diary entries recount, he falls in with a lively cast of characters: an amateur anthropologist, a newly transferred police constable, a sister from the Inland Mission at Abminga – but as the day draws on, the rising temperature quickly drowns out his social instincts. Finlayson was travelling at the height of a great heatwave, which devastated the wildlife of the Centre, and his account of what he was witnessing swiftly takes on a tone of horror. The temperature of the region stayed over 38 degrees for nearly two months, as records show. The dreadful blanket of the heat lay across the inland from Tarcoola, on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, as far east as the Gawler Ranges; it stretched north to Birdsville and Goyder’s Lagoon. When Finlayson at last crossed the Territory border and arrived at Rumbalara, in range country, he saw zebra finches and budgerigars in their hundreds massed in the shade of the shelter shed beside the line, or perched beneath the train carriages, or gasping on the rails: birds were dying all around him. He prepared a brief scientific note upon the phenomenon, in which his intense feeling for wildlife comes through.
“From Horseshoe Bend, Central Aus., Jan 10, 1932: it was 120 degrees F in the shade at 1 PM: the hottest day in the Centre for many years. At Rumbalara Siding, when the train pulled in at about 3.30 PM, the dining car and sleeper were invaded by scores of waxbills. They f luttered about, gasping with wide-open mouths. Many flew into the fans and were killed or maimed. Under the carriages and on the floor of the shelter shed were massed hundreds of birds in various stages of incapacitation, and scores were lying dead.”
The condition of these creatures was undoubtedly a true temperature effect, he was able to conclude, and had nothing to do with thirst, for the railway workers had put out several pans of water and only a handful of the birds were seen trying to drink.
They seemed incapable of the slightest movement: when the train pulled out, scores more birds were crushed where they were stretched out prostrate on the rails. That afternoon, there was a sharp storm. Finlayson walked out in the evening along the sandy bed of the Finke River, following the foot of the curved clay cliffs which rose high above him. Zebra finches were still dying on the cliff tops; their bodies rolled noiselessly down into the sand bed at his feet. Some weeks later, he was able to confirm that bird deaths on the same scale had been observed that month across the western desert wherever there was a European camp or presence: in the Basedow Range, at the Olgas and Ayers Rock. He travelled on, through red-sand country, by heavily laden truck, in the company of Gus Elliot, the portly, cigar-smoking hotelkeeper from Horseshoe Bend, and the pair of them eventually reached the sanctuary of Erldunda station, where a large aviary had been constructed for the survivors of the holocaust: it was filled with bright-coloured songbirds. Among them Finlayson noticed a few crimson chats, delicate creatures, black-faced, fine-beaked, which portend disaster in various story cycles of the desert lands.
Such signs, though, were quite hidden from him: his eyes were on the distant west. Like all writers in the Centre, he had fallen under the literary spell of his precursor, Ernest Giles, and he longed to travel through the mountain chains where the great explor
er had suffered, and nearly perished, six decades before. Finlayson made collecting trips through the nearer ranges over the next two summers; he befriended Pitjantjatjara people, and met frontier bushmen in their camps. He made solo probes by riding camel, and came within faint, distant view of his goal, the Schwerin Mural Crescent. He was almost stranded in remote bush on his return journey when his support team pulled back from their advance camp and left him to ride back to Ernabella alone. Through all these travails, his longing to reach the far country only endured and deepened. In the cool seasons he would retreat to Adelaide and his professional duties. In the first days of January 1935 he returned, ready for a last attempt on Giles’s country – the Rawlinson Range, and all the romantic campsites the explorer had made famous in the pages of Australia Twice Traversed – the Circus Water, with its tall surrounding cliffs; the Pass of the Abencerrages, Desolation Glen. Finlayson stopped first at the remote station of Tempe Downs, in the hope that its manager, the “dilapidated, obstinate and irritable” Bryan Bowman, would ride with him. But Bowman offered him instead a stranger, H., “who knew the west country.”
The Red Highway Page 16