“And the irony in their circulation and return is not lost on me, you can be sure.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “eventually you could even integrate them with the artworks in the garden, like the pavilions at Sanssouci or Nymphenburg.”
“They’re part of the ensemble already! There are rhymes and echoes everywhere. Look at this iron goanna here on the air-con fan. It’s doubled by the live one that hangs out beneath the last Silver Bullet, at the far end beside the whitewood tree.”
“The sculpture’s not very lifelike,” I said. “Who made it?”
“My bulldozer driver friend, Simon Holding. He’s got real talent. You try making a lifelike lizard from wire, and scrap, and the expansion chamber from a motorbike exhaust. I think it’s a special thing.”
Gillam caressed the goanna’s tail, then stroked the wire curvature of its jaw.
“In fact,” he went on, “I think it’s perfect, and beautiful. How could you not fall in love with it?”
“I know they’re important to you,” I said. “After all, you once almost laid down your life for one.”
“Look, that’s a bit of a bush legend, actually,” said Gillam, becoming slightly flustered. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“So tell me the real story.”
“Isn’t it you who should be telling stories? After where you’ve been, and all the things you’ve seen.”
“Some things are best untold. Or the way to tell them best is not to tell them,” I countered. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Gillam, with a fast-vanishing air of reluctance, his manner shifting by degrees as he spoke, until his second identity, as reptile lover, consumed by fine points of anatomical detail, in thrall to species listing and field collecting, had emerged in all its sharp and urgent splendour. “Let’s be precise. In the first place, it wasn’t a lizard, it was a monitor – a perentie. A very big one: Varanus giganteus, a female.” He held up his hand and pointed: “You can still see the faintest scars, there, on my fingers, from the bite.”
I looked: I could make out pale, straight marks, lightly indented, on the skin.
“It must have been a while ago.”
“Oh, this was in ancient history! It all happened at the Arid Zone, the research centre, south of town. I used to work there, when I was still active in the mainstream scientific world. Here, of course, we very often have interrupted winters. The weather’s fitful: it has no consistency. So you very often find large peren-ties in this country, at that point in the yearly cycle, starving; it’s almost a matter of routine. A very big lizard, a heliotherm, which controls its body temperature, likes to emerge from its hiding place on a warm day, to lie in the sun. And that’s when a perentie is most vulnerable. They’ll come out and burn energy, but they’re unlikely to succeed in eating, so they end up in poor condition, just like the one I’m talking about. It was about five kilos, and almost two metres long – I found it in the scrub around the research buildings and brought it in. I kept it in my office.”
“So you were serving as a kind of wildlife sanctuary?”
“I was going to feed it up and then release it. We’d made a little progress; it was improving, I gave it a mouse, and then I went off to find it another – thawed out, but dead. Naturally, I had the smell of mice on my hands …”
“Never a good thing.”
“No, indeed – it lunged and snatched at my fingers. Now, by chance, all this was happening on Christmas break-up day at the lab. There was a party on; in fact it had been on for a while. I was trying to get on top of this emergency rescue; but everybody else was outside, pissing on. I had the giant perentie hanging off my fingers: I was trapped. I couldn’t even reach up to the telephone. Every time I tried to move, this thing would crunch its jaws and I’d feel a cold, bone-jarring sensation. There was blood pouring everywhere. I didn’t know quite what to do. After a while, I decided I’d have to move the perentie, manoeuvre it with me, centimetre by centimetre.”
Gillam dropped down to the surface of his veranda, at this point, and gave a demonstration.
“It was a slippery floor – it took me about half an hour to reach the doorway.”
At this, despite my best intentions, I burst out laughing.
“It wasn’t funny,” said Gillam, laughing himself.
“No, it’s a story of mythic grandeur – but it does have comic elements. And what then?”
“I made it to the lab’s long corridor, perentie attached, and waited, lying on the floor: it seemed like hours. Eventually, one of the chemists came back in. I was able to call out. He saw me. Then my vet friend Taffy came down, and with him he brought the director, who was fairly charged. They produced a container of chloroform and put it underneath the animal. It had no effect on the perentie – but fairly soon I was starting to be overcome by the fumes. Then the director pulled out a huge butcher’s knife with a yellow nylex handle.”
“He wanted to cut its head off?”
“Naturally, being a science bureaucrat – but I refused. I shouted at him, or tried to – but I was almost fainting, from the chloroform and from the pain. Everyone was there by that stage, watching, cheering; it was one of those scenes that gets out of control. In the end, logic prevailed: Taffy found a knife-sharpening tool and levered the perentie’s jaws apart. It took all his strength; the poor thing was terrified.”
“And that’s the end of the story?”
“Of that phase: my fingers were still locked into the top row of its teeth. I had to knock my hand out with a hammer blow. There was a trail of blood all the way down the corridor. Nerve repair took six months.”
“That was quite a sacrifice. Do you think the perentie was grateful?”
“There’s no reptile or snake – in fact no animal I wouldn’t do that for,” said Gillam.
“Because you love the world of animals more, in the end, than man?”
“Of course. They have truth, and simplicity: and what do we bring to the table? Murder, and scheming, and doubleness. That’s always been clear to me: that awareness has shaped the way I live.”
Nor, I knew, was Gillam exaggerating. I had heard tales of his exploits long ago, when he was a young nature photographer and had just come up from Victoria to Alice Springs. Early in his research career, he was put in charge of a wild-dog control experiment mounted by the pastoral industry with the help of scientists at Arid Zone: the campaign used new baits impregnated with 1080, a metabolic poison first identified by German military chemists in the course of World War II. But Gillam’s com mitment to the program was always in some doubt, and those doubts deepened in the hearts of his employers when they learned that he had a pet dingo on his block, a female of great poise and beauty, whom he doted on and took for long bush drives down the back tracks of the Centre and had even named “1080” – a choice that, it was eventually decided, might well be seen to mock the cause of wild-dog extermination in the country around Alice Springs. Gillam was moved on, to his true love, snakes, and snake portraiture, and many of his finest compositions can still be seen in a standard reference, the wall poster depicting the dangerous species of the North. The images were hard-won. There was one photo of a king brown, set on a dramatic red backdrop. Gillam had driven out to a distant claypan and was just attempting to pacify the snake, which was, like all king browns, nervous, unpredictable and highly strung. It struck at him through the canvas bag and deposited a near-lethal charge of venom into his hand – as did a western brown which he was photographing soon afterwards, during a fauna survey close to town.
“You can find it around here in seven patterns,” he had told me, with great eagerness, at that point in his narration of these disasters. “Seven – within twenty-five kilometres. Now that’s a high level of polymorphism! And the venom has a peculiar edge.”
“Is there any significant species of Australian snake that hasn’t turned on you?” I asked. “How many snake-bite recoveries do you think your organism has left?”
“To be truth
ful,” said Gillam, “the last time I had anti-venene I developed a fairly severe allergic reaction. It may be that my snake-handling days are done. But that’s not true for you, though. There’s a world of possibilities.”
At this, he brightened, as though lifted up on wings of grand surmise. “In fact,” he said, “the moment is drawing near when you should have a snake.”
At the time, I had brushed off this notion, but now I asked him about it again. What kind of snake had he been thinking of; what would he recommend? Gillam frowned, and adopted a sage expression. “There’s really only one choice,” he said at last. “For someone like you – with your mentality, and at your stage in life. An elapid would be a bad idea.”
“A what? And what is my mentality, anyway?”
“Elapids are venomous: very self-contained, and full of grace. You’d be too fascinated by them, though, and too mesmerised. What you need is a snake with a certain inner tranquillity. I’d recommend a python: a carpet snake, for instance. They have the most magnificent markings, and an ease about them, and a charm, especially when they’re young. Or maybe a Children’s Python.”
“But I’m not a child.”
“They’re not for children: they just carry the name of a Dr Children. They’re gentle and good-natured, and they like to sit quietly on your lap, and all they do is hiss softly every three hours or so. They’d fit in with your lifestyle as well; they’re completely nocturnal.”
“I can’t imagine how I’ve managed to survive without one until now. And what would be the best way to go about finding such a creature?”
“That’s easy. They’re all over the north Australian bush: anywhere from the Pilbara to the Gulf. They’re particularly fond of eating microbats, and so you very often come across them lurking in caves, hanging from stalactites and waiting to snatch their prey out of the air. You could go on a python-hunting expedition into some country with good cave systems: the VRD, perhaps, or the stone plateaus of western Arnhem Land – although I suppose it might be advisable to stay within the law and buy one that’s been raised in captivity from a pet shop instead. Under different circumstances, if I was still engaged in that world, I’m sure I could have come up with something – but my thoughts are elsewhere now.”
“On environmental sculptures and landscape design?”
“On physical breakdown – and financial collapse: and caterpillars, too, of course. Caterpillars, more and more.”
“In keeping with the spirit of place.”
“It’s true Alice Springs is very rich in caterpillar stories and ceremonial sites: old battlefields, egg and cocoon rock formations, even dance grounds created by their movements. That’s the officially accepted, public side of things. But I find I’m very much in tune with them, and I see them in the country everywhere. These rock slabs, they remind me of the caterpillars in traditional Aranda storytelling, and that projecting rock there is leading them all back towards the sacred hill. And you see the winding markers I’ve put in along the boundaries of the pathways?”
“I was wondering about them.”
“I always tell the children who come here that they’re like the lines of processional caterpillars, those lovely creatures that writhe through every inch of the landscape.”
“But what are they really?” I asked, bending down and touching one of them. “They feel like brushes. Did you have them specially made?”
“They are brushes, from the street-sweeping machines the town council runs.”
“And at last they’ve finished their sad imprisonment in daily life, and come to the Silver Bullet and discovered their true totemic identity and purpose in the world?”
“Something like that. Like all of us. You too, maybe. What brought you back? I thought you’d slipped the leash and broken free.” Gillam was speaking quietly, with focus, now. “Central Australia’s not for everyone,” he went on. “Nor the North. What do you think you have here, or need?”
I listened and let those words of his surround me. The question hung between us. He looked across.
“Somewhere to come back to,” I said. “Unwritten country – but much more than that. I’m not sure that I have an easy answer.”
“Of course you don’t. There aren’t the words. It’s not an easy question. Do you think I’m not dancing on that knife edge? Do you think I haven’t been, all through my life here? Chasing meaning. Pursuing shadows. Everyone who’s alive here is. I gave up on words years ago: that’s when I started making this garden. I was thirty-nine – I’d had a gutful of trying to communicate with people who wouldn’t hear and had no time to see. It was time to articulate something physical, something that even the blind could get. I wanted to re-awaken people; to make them feel the life and pulse of where we are. I’ve made this my everything, now.”
“Hele Crescent? I always thought of you as someone who was most alive in the deepest deserts.”
“I spent years there, looking, making images – and I don’t even know what I came back with. Have you ever been inside the gallery? In the officers’ mess? No? Perhaps it’s time.”
He led the way across to the corrugated-iron building, running through the finer points of its façade as he went: the World War II shade netting; the wire-sculpted worm ouroboros; the vintage signs from the demolished newsagent in town.
“Take a look,” he said, and held open the door.
Inside, in austere display, hung a selection of Gillam’s most famous photographs: photographs that had been printed in books by the thousand, and exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Photographs close-up and panoramic, ground-level and aerial: desert oaks in slant light; twisted white gums; Lake Amadeus salt pans; the red curve of the MacDonnells. One image above all drew my eye: it showed a dark, flayed shape, stretched out on the ground, before a landscape void.
“Where’s that?” I asked him.
“It’s gibber country, down near the South Australian border,” said Gillam, almost whispering, standing close beside me.
“It’s beautiful! And what’s that shape?”
“The carcass of a dingo. Can’t you tell? It’s been shot through the hips and scalped. That’s the reality of life, out in those rangelands.” “That’s what you were closing in on all the time?”
“That’s why I lock this place up. It doesn’t serve me well to open up the door. You always get a headache from the things you want to take pictures of. You bring back images – but they’re faint ghosts of the things you see in your mind’s eye. The world’s full of photographs that mean nothing – that just show what there is.”
“And that’s why you don’t go out into the bush any more?”
“It’s not that simple. But I won’t come with you – even though I want to, more than anything; even though travelling in that country is what I was always designing and shaping myself for.”
“Because you’ve been there one too many times? Because there’s a beauty and a grace in renunciation?”
“Because the way to pay tribute to a place is not always to go there and wear it down, and capture it, and make pictures of it, and describe it.”
“Everything’s the road to silence, you mean?”
“I thought you knew that! But there is someone who’ll go out with you: in fact he’s been expecting you. I saw him just the other day. The black cockatoo: your botanical friend, Peter Latz.”
“Latz! I’ve rung him as well, hundreds of times, since I’ve been back – and left him messages. No reply.”
“I think that’s his way of saying that he’s ready. You know he doesn’t have a good telephone manner. If you go out to his block on Ilparpa, you’ll find him waiting.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?”
“What’s wrong?” said Gillam, half smiling. “Don’t you think the conversation wound round the right way to its close?”
I drove out along the curving highway, past the showgrounds and the Old-Timers’ Home, hurtling by processions of town-camp dwellers on their
trudges back and forth, and gazing through the windscreen at their faces as I went. Almost always, these men and women, desert people marooned in Alice Springs, pay no attention to the Landcruisers and triple road trains passing at speed so close by them, they walk on, oblivious to the wind shock and the diesel fumes, they maintain their stately progress as if they were promenading amidst the parterres of some eighteenth-century ornamental garden – but on rare occasions, one of them may pause and scrutinise the traffic, examining each oncoming driver with a piercing stare, absorbing the tableau before him as though its utter incongruity were becoming evident for the first time. And just as I was slowing and turning by the level crossing, an old man, whose face seemed familiar to me from some community in the deep western desert, cast a look in my direction: a measuring, assessing look, shot through with grief and dismay. For a split second, I returned it. He made a swift gesture with the palm of his hand, which was open, moving it from the wrist in a little arc as if to suggest the endless mutability of things – then he was lost from my sight, the flank of the range loomed ahead. With this welcome to country fresh in my mind, I sped on, westwards, past the swamps and motorbike trails, past the rural mansions and the hobby farms, until the last of the bush blocks, thick with ironwoods and stately ghost gums, came into view: the kingdom ruled over by the Linnaeus of Central Australia, the rangy, gaunt-featured, convention-disdaining Peter Latz.
It was a decade ago when we first met: a time of intense intellectual ferment and literary productivity in Latz’s life, when he was just publishing his encyclopaedic monograph on Aboriginal plant use in the deserts, and refining his theories on the evolution of the landscape, the transformation of the inland from open forest into fire-raked plains, and the key role played in this upheaval by a single plant, the object of all his love and hate and urgent study – the carpet of the dune fields, the spiky, invasive Triodia pungens: spinifex. But even before our initial encounters, and my introduction to the wilder flights of his botanical enthusiasms, I had heard often of Latz and his exploits, so grand and so folkloric were the tales that clustered round him: the stories of his boyhood in the mission at Hermannsburg, where he had grown up among Aboriginal children, speaking Aranda and English as his joint mother tongues; the hard years he spent as a stock inspector in the Top End’s scrubland cattle stations; his times of glory, too, as a field researcher in the Centre, when he was the sole scientist who could see the landscape as it looked to desert people’s eyes. That vision had left its enduring trace, for Latz was a photographer, and exhibitions of his work were often held in Alice Springs – exhibitions that were admired, and widely seen, and even copied, although his pictures lacked entirely the candour and romantic sweep of his friend Gillam’s work. Latz was chasing different quarry: he preferred the art of illusion, he loved the camera’s capacity to trick the eye. His “desert abstracts” had the air of melting, panoramic vistas: broad, sluggish estuaries, mirages on the blue horizon, sand plains viewed from high altitude through hazy cloud. In fact they were all still lifes, riddling, deceptive close - ups of minuscule, fragmentary things: paint flakes on rusted car bodies; wood filaments beside old campfires, the bark pattern on a she-oak tree – and this procedure seemed to illustrate a particular way of conceiving the world: a tendency, which I later came to recognise as highly Latzian, to see life’s surface as fugitive, governed by hidden forces, concatenated at different levels, easy to misread. In those days he was still writing his short, elliptically structured masterpiece, A Flaming Desert – a work which mingles ecology and adventure narrative in the most intoxicating fashion: its detailed history of the desert in deep time is interspersed with puns and sharp one-liners and sweet memories of Aboriginal men of high degree. So disquieting were this manuscript’s conclusions about the role of fire, and man’s use of fire, in Australia’s past that it failed, in its first form, to find a publisher – nor, for years, did any of the revisions Latz drafted, though its ideas have, by now, become well known in scientific quarters. They circulate in dilute, domesticated variants, stripped of all their tension and explanatory force: indeed, by a progression quite characteristic of the modern academy, they have been gradually dissociated from Latz’s name and attached to new progenitors, and in that guise they form a part of the latest orthodoxy, a faint, disruptive murmur within the Solomonic temple of established desert science.
The Red Highway Page 18