The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  So began an ordeal that can only be pieced together in the most broken fashion in the pages of the journal: an ordeal as fierce and jagged as any in the brief, tormented annals of Australian exploration, of which this trip, a camel trek undertaken in the age of the car, marks the final, bizarre flourish. The diary entries record only occasional scenes in the duel between the men: the effect is like watching lightning strikes fitfully illuminating a landscape through which one is passing at speed. Finlayson takes an immediate dislike to H., who has an “evil aspect” – tall, stoop-shouldered, black-haired, green-eyed, without teeth, with a prominent scar on one hand. And what, then, must H. have thought of Finlayson, with his own scars, and his academic brilliance and flood of words, and his one good eye, and mutilated hand? Were they not a pair, branded by their shared initial, marked down for rivalry? The two head out, with their camels and supporting cast of Aboriginal guides, through familiar country, past the Cleland Hills and Mount Solitary; they skirt Lake Amadeus and reach the Blood Range, and the desert oak groves that line the Docker River – but already Finlayson has wearied of his companion’s vain, vaunting self-obsession, his constant boasting and talking and wild fabrications. H. told Finlayson early on in their trip that he was Scottish and had come to Australia in the Victorian gold-rush years, but he was said to be a Spanish and a German speaker, and his past was distinctly chequered: “Though he was evidently familiar with a large part of eastern Australia, and was a master of all the bush arts, his time seems to have been spent largely in the Sydney underworld, and his anecdotes and talk were extraordinarily foul, and had a strong city cast.” Finlayson rode with his new companion, at first, at the tail of their camel-string; but soon he resolved to keep his distance, repulsed by the periodic, spasmodic rages to which H. was prone; struck surely, too, by the strange way H. and his abilities were the black match to his own. “He was all evil,” wrote Finlayson, “and long-forgotten ideas about people who sold themselves to the devil came back, without sense of their absurdity. There was a sense of driving power about the creature, partly a natural consequence of his egotism, but partly derived from his energy and resource and natural abilities, all of which were of a very high order.”

  It was with this travelling partner, who by this stage had confided an intimate knowledge of Lasseter’s lost gold reef, that Finlayson rode at last into the country of his dreams. The wind was hot, there were wild storms, the bush was thick with fruit and waving spinifex. They explored their way through the Rawlinsons; they found Circus Water, the Pass and Glen – but at this point, the tone of the undertaking suddenly shifts, as so often on bush journeys when one’s goals are too easily reached. The Aboriginal guides, deep in strange country, make their escape; H. vanishes from sight for days, then re-appears, full of stories about a mysterious quest he is engaged in, and mortuary caves far to the north, and great lakes in the desert, still unknown to the mapping eye. He is in the grip of a renewed obsession with Las-seter, who had died in the nearby ranges, close by Docker River, only a few years before. Grievances between the two men deepen. H. has by this time revealed his trump card: he is in fact, he says, none other than the famous “Sapphire Bill,” a writer for the Chronicle newspaper, and he plans to tell the unexpurgated story of the expedition – writing, on the frontier, being all. Finlayson, by this stage, regards his companion as mad, but with a “desperate and calculating madness.” How vulnerable he is. He sees himself without help, half-blind, one-armed. There is a confrontation, it is described in the merest dabs and sketch notes. Finlayson raises his gun: he is quickly, cunningly disarmed. It serves as a catharsis. Peace descends, if not brotherhood: reflection; a hint of remorse. The pair reach Tempe Downs, their starting point. Finlayson, by now, has heard the bush story about H. – that this bleak man, with all his understanding, his intimacy with the sand dunes and the secret, far-off ranges, is in fact none other than the lost, crazed, dead Harold Lasseter in some strange reincarnated form. A ghost; a devil; a mirror of some common darkness? He turns over his trip to his chosen country in his mind, and edges towards the realisation that it was H. he had been seeking in the desert, and had been forced to confront. Not science, and knowledge, not the beauty of the landscape, but the chasms of humanity – and himself. He gives this thought brief houseroom before turning from it, definitively. There will be another completed line on the map of his expeditions, he declares, the journey is over, and his “little book” – The Red Centre, which is based in great part on the worked-up jottings of his diaries – will go out now with enough experience of the country to give the most carping of critics pause.

  And with that – one can almost feel his heart racing, as he fends away the dark, and nightmare – Finlayson resumes his scientific activities, and it is very noticeable that he makes no return to those ranges on collecting trips until the 1950s, when the frontier is closed and settled, when missions and reserves have divided up the landscape, and the desert is criss-crossed by networks of graded tracks. Nor, at any point in the hypnotic, image-glutted chapters of The Red Centre is there mention of his bleak, disquieting alter ego or their duel of wills, not a word – although the submerged trace of that encounter lingers, like a pause before a breath, for those who know the landscape, and its silences, and can feel the anguish hiding in the author’s voice.

  So caught was I by this story – its pace, its unfolding, its unravelling – that it seemed quite natural, the morning after I had reached its end, when I woke before the dawn to find a storm front breaking against the MacDonnells – a storm so fierce, fast-moving and spasmodic that it could have come straight from Finlayson’s most overwrought and troubled pages. Thunder crashed and echoed from the peaks; lightning was flashing and striking in jagged patterns across the sky. Through my hotel window I could hear the wind blowing and see it tearing at the leaves of the nearby gum trees, gusting wildly then dropping momentarily away. I went outside, into the lee of the long, low hotel building. The flyscreens on the guest-room balconies shook and rattled; the shadows of the trees moved with a dreamlike, rippling rhythm. The storm drew nearer; daybreak came: the sun’s gleam hit the range tops. It touched the lowest layers of the clouds, from which rain plumes, stained pale pink, were now falling. They hung like curtains in the air, vanishing whenever lightning sheets lit up the landscape, then reappearing almost instantaneously, their drift and colour changing with each of these sudden re-animations, as though they were betraying brief discontinuities in the flow of time. Raindrops spattered in sudden surges, and stopped: thunder rolled again between the walls of the ranges. Then all fell quiet; the centre of the storm was passing overhead. I gazed up: its fluid shadows moved in silence. For some minutes, I watched, as the patterns wound and coiled above me. That sight summoned to the surface of my thoughts a memory fragment, a scene from a film I saw in childhood, a scene that struck me, in the darkened auditorium, with an intensity so sharp that, years on, it is one of the only instants from that time of my life I still preserve in my mind’s eye. It was the brief sequence in Ran, the Japanese version of the Lear story, when the director, Akira Kurosawa, cuts, and turns his camera upwards to the sky, where the cloud formations seen against the sunshine convey an image of fate and its obscure unfoldings: the king’s fate; the kingdom’s; the flow and indifference of time.

  After some while watching the clouds in their motions, and letting my thoughts run unguided, dwelling on themselves, until they had taken on a maze-like, wordless quality, I resolved to pay a call on my friend Mike Gillam, the photographer of the inland, a man whose life seems ruled and measured solely by gradations of light. I drove through town, past the bleak motels that form the centre of the desert art trade, past the lines of car yards and service stations, until I reached the highway turn-off at Hele Crescent. There, set back, was the Silver Bullet Café, with its forbidding, fortress-like entrance and its thick canopy of overarching pines. The lights were on in the low-slung side building, where Gillam, doubtless, was bent at his work desk, engaged i
n his painstaking tasks. I pulled up and looked around. I called out. Nothing. All the old totemic structures that marked out his property were still in place: the Ansett aircraft steps, the ancient gold-mining cyclone, the Blitz truck from Newhaven station, the decommissioned, blue-painted double-decker bus, the Silver Bullet caravans themselves.

  The perimeter defences, though, had been noticeably strengthened during my time away. For some minutes I probed here and there, trying various padlocks, searching for a way in, until I found an unguarded chink between an AUSCO container wall and a wire-mesh tangle, and edged through, expecting to find myself in familiar surrounds. I walked up beside the two Silver Bullet cabins, beneath the camouflage-cloth shade covers – but the gardens, which had been a bushland haven all through the time that I had known them, were quite transformed. New shapes met my eyes at every turn: curved steel rods, decorated car bonnets, ironwork sculptures and various wire-mesh animals had been interspersed amidst the grevilleas and the mallee trees, as if some second, purely metallic episode of creation had occurred there over the past year. I explored along the winding pathways. A pale, rose-coloured light was in the sky; the storm was to the north now; the thunder had ebbed away. I was just completing a circuit of the grounds when I spotted Gillam, standing at his veranda doorway in shadow, staring at me. He was wearing his standard uniform: dark work shirt, shorts, boots, an old Akubra pulled down almost over his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” he said in a voice of pure astonishment, as if only divine intervention could explain my presence there – and in truth, I reflected, it was an odd time to come calling and announce one’s return, although the atmospherics seemed well suited to the moment. There was a flash of lightning, just then, in the distance. It shimmered, and forked above the range line; it cast the country into false colours, and stabbed down to the ground.

  “Well, it’s a social call,” I said. “You are one of my closest friends in Central Australia, and I have been away for a while.”

  “Couldn’t you have rung in advance? I would have set aside some time. We might have been able to go on the long bush trip we always talk about.”

  “That’s something that’s been very much on my thoughts. In fact I was hoping we might go out together this time – out to the west. And I have called you. Maybe six, eight, times. I’ve left several messages. If you ever cleared your answering machine, or checked your emails, you’d find them.”

  “Good point,” said Gillam, reflectively, stroking his chin. “So what do you think of the exhibition? My whole life’s energy is in it. It’s called Scrapyard Magicians.”

  He gestured vaguely at the forest of wire and metal structures. We fell into an exchange of news. We went inside, past the main room full of bookshelves and desert paintings, to the narrow kitchen, where Gillam took up station at his wooden bench and embarked on an elaborate ritual of coffee preparation.

  “And you,” I asked, eventually. “As bleak as ever?”

  “Oh, on the contrary,” he said. “I don’t dignify despair with more than a fleeting second of my time. Everything may be dark in the Centre and Alice Springs, but on this block we’re full of light and hope. Take a look at this – it’s the catalogue.”

  He handed over a sheaf of photocopied paper with an elaborate survey drawing of the site on its cover. My eyes fell on one paragraph: it had a certain spring to it.

  Most of this year’s scrapyard magicians, it announced, make furniture or ornaments to challenge or hone their skills, to decorate their own homes; as an alternative pastime to shopping, watching television, or, perhaps, drinking to excess.

  “What do you think?”

  “Very distinctive. Maybe we should do a walk-through. In fact, a walk-through of the whole Silver Bullet. It’s a work of art itself, it always has been: the purest in all the Centre. I’ve always been curious about the ideas behind this place.”

  “Have you? You never asked before.”

  “Sometimes going away and coming back changes your slant on things.”

  “And what if those ideas were a secret?”

  “What’s the good of a secret nobody knows?”

  “Good point, again. But they’re not, of course. Everything about this place is a logical response to the landscape: every artwork, every found object; every curve in every path. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been re-engineered, and remade. See that table over there, beneath the shade nets?” He led me over and gestured grandly towards a low, rusted surface. “That’s a type of drum fan, from the mining industry. And you see that flange? Ross Engin eering machined it for me and dropped it in. The same for each object here. It’s all artifice: a temple of artifice. Everything that’s lost and cast aside in Central Australia comes back here for a second chance: whatever can be saved and given further life.”

  I pointed at the corrugated iron hulk beside us. “That shed, too?”

  “It’s not a shed: it’s a World War II officers’ mess. Very humble, simple, successful architecture. It was built here – but everything inside it has been brought to refuge. You see that heart, behind the wire – that red, inverted heart emblem, nearly as tall as you? That’s a thickly coded symbol! It came from the old Ford Plaza in the heart of Alice Springs: but that place’s design was copied from the Gold Coast, it was an exact copy of the Paradise Plaza, in fact – only on the Gold Coast version the hearts were green, and as the sole concession to the Red Centre the developers here changed them to red. When the ownership of the complex passed into different hands and they put up a new emblem, I felt it would be good to souvenir the heart. They had it hidden away in an underground car park somewhere. I sent an emissary out to get it.”

  “It wasn’t a job for you?”

  “I was pretty much on my last life by then with the authorities, on the civil-disobedience front.”

  “You were living dangerously!”

  “Actually, I’ve been contemplating my last moments quite a lot recently. There are several scenarios: something mundane, like being crushed by the Blitz truck, which almost happened the other day. Or just jumping off a skyscraper, falling and flying …”

  Something flashed by us.

  “Look,” said Gillam, with a surge of enthusiasm. “Is that a singing honeyeater? Aren’t they lovely? Just look at the paradise we live in. There’s more than a thousand species of plants within a hundred-kilometre radius of where we sit – and all the birds to go with them, too. And there – see? The babblers are back – over there, beside the corkwood: are they white-crowned? One of their more common names is ‘happy families,’ because they argue all the time.”

  I listened, rather swept away. The sky had cleared; light clouds were racing overhead. My heart beat fast.

  “It’s strong, isn’t it, this coffee?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Gillam nodded. “What was it you always used to quote?”

  “‘Black as the devil, hot as hell.’”

  “The only way to have it; strong, like life. And who actually said that?”

  “Talleyrand.”

  “A wise man.”

  “A survivor, anyway: and certainly a connoisseur.”

  “Of what?”

  “Wine, women, food, ironies, espionage; architecture, perhaps most of all. I wonder what he would have made of these …”

  I pointed at the two Silver Bullet cabins facing us. They shone and glistened, and the individual raindrops on their metal surfaces flashed and caught the glare.

  “Do you actually like them?”

  “They’re your trademark. Naturally I like them – but now I think of it, I realise I have no idea what they were made for, or where they came from. You see them in the bush, of course, here and there, in out-of-the-way places.”

  “They’re a very interesting response to a particular prob lem,” said Gillam, professorially. “The earliest are early ’60s. They were all built in Ballarat by Franklin Caravans, on special commission, after an education expert came back from a trip to the A
pache homelands in the States, quite convinced he’d found the answer to the schooling problems of remote Aboriginal settlements.”

  “And what was that?”

  “It’s been a recurring dream, hasn’t it, it’s true! There was a grand new idea: that we needed to build inspirational classrooms, and tow them out to remote places, where they could serve as beacons of civilisation. Maybe that’s why they were silver, to give a kind of lustre and allure. They built them on Bedford axles, 15 metres by 4.2. And they took them all out. The early truck drivers have great stories about towing them, and young Aboriginal initiates walking down the tracks in front of them chopping down the trees so they could get through. They’re classic desert ephemera. They were meant to last twenty years, at most. I think they’re beautiful things. We realised they were being trashed, right across the Centre. I’ve seen them with multiple spear holes stabbed through them: they’re just a thin, frail aluminium skin. Even in the late ’80s, you could get them pretty cheaply. I have four of them: that one there was a schoolroom, at Murray Downs; the one over there came from Willora, out of Ti-Tree; that one was a health clinic: it was brought back into town from Amaroo …”

  “And they’re your emblem of vanished grace and elegance?”