The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  We spoke often of that book, and the ideas it set in mind are with me still: they became the foundation of a friendship which has much in common with the desert that lies, for Latz, at the heart of everything. It is austere, and close; reticent, yet undisguised; it is the antithesis of friendship in the modern, maintained and nurtured manner, just as the life cycle of an inland plant holds up a mocking mirror to the patterns of the coast. It lies hidden, dormant, seeming dead – until the slightest climatic signal: then it buds, blooms, seeds and dominates all round it in its lavish growth – and so things often seem with desert men like Latz. Months flow by, and I hear nothing of him, he is distant from my thoughts, and I am surely far from his, until the Centre, that stage where all must cross, begins to play its part, our paths draw together once more, and I find him, like a guardian being, standing at some inflection point in life, as that morning when I turned into his driveway – it was no more, in fact, than a faint track line, a suggestion in the soil – and saw him waiting, an expectant air about him. I jumped out. How like a familiar scarecrow he seemed then, in his drab, loose bush clothes, with his full beard and long grey hair blowing in the breeze! How angular, with his head tilted slightly to one side and a shoulder hunched: how like, in fact, his totemic bird, the black cockatoo of the inland, which pauses in just such fashion before it begins its stately flight.

  I called out a greeting. He stared at me, appraisingly.

  “You look like you haven’t been handling life too well,” he said. “In fact, you look half dead.”

  I let this go, and explained the circumstances of the visit: return; the Centre; Finlayson; the storm’s enticement, the landscape’s call.

  “Of course,” said Latz. “And I’ve been waiting for you. There’s somewhere I’ve been meaning to take you.”

  “Docker River,” I hazarded. “Mount Destruction. The Blood Range?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Latz. “At least not too high. I’ve got the mutton curry ready – I’ll just get my swag.”

  An hour later, we were far down the dirt road that runs past Mount Ooraminna into the dunes and outcrops south-east of Alice Springs – a road that keeps, like many bush tracks, an undevi ating setting, fixed in its progress to the horizon, so that passage through undulating country, with that red-dust arrow rising up and down before one, brings a kind of sand-sickness to the mind. I lay back: the corrugations jarred; there was the turn in to the rock carvings at Ewaninga; there was the Deep Well homestead entrance road.

  “Where are we actually headed?” I asked. “Is it a mystery?”

  Latz gave a saturnine nod. “Somewhere that’s right,” he said, after a few moments. “Right for talk, after so long. There’s a waterhole, and peaks, and desert oaks to camp by. It’s somewhere it’s quite safe to take you.”

  “Safe for you?”

  “For you. You’ll see: it’s close up, don’t worry – just down this track.”

  “Your own country?”

  “In a sense – it’s soft, and peaceful: many conversations have unfolded there; the landscape’s got used to that.”

  “And there are things on your mind?”

  “On yours.”

  And Latz, of course, was right in everything he said. We set up camp, we walked, we went deep into the ravine that cuts through the sandstone of the range. Our memories came out, our thoughts fell into place; and I found it hard, after these first exchanges, which lasted through the hot time of the day, to be sure quite where my own experiences, which I had recounted to him in the most punctilious detail, stopped, and his began. It was as if we had been discussing dreams, instead of facts: the moment they had been sketched out and given depth, the episodes became diaphanous, and drifted, and began to vanish from my thoughts. We walked on, through the gorges, along the broken ridge line, down; he led the way, in steep, winding transects. We reached the desert-oak grove: there was the scatter of our camp. I was dazed: from speech, and from listening. My ideas would form, come to the very brink of words, then take on a weightless, transparent quality and dissolve upon my lips. Latz had dropped into a silence of his own. The sun sank in the sky; the range line glowed; the twilight fell.

  “I know you think it’s beautiful, don’t you?” he said, rather heavily, into the void – then, before I could answer, swept on. “And it is: a beautiful landscape – beautiful, and destroyed. There’s almost nothing left; it’s a skeleton; it’s been picked bare. No: don’t say anything. I’ll tell you.”

  In a soft, even voice, he then described to me a journey he had made some weeks before into remote corners of the desert: the Sir Frederick Range, the Ellis Range, the Wallace Hills. The names were still fresh in his mind, so closely had he traced their course upon the topographic maps. It was a belt of country I had always longed to see, around the community of Tjukurla, which lies at the western extremity of Lake Amadeus, surrounded by increase sites. For two weeks Latz had travelled through that landscape on foot, as a member of a scientific survey team, searching for signs of native fauna. They found nothing: the whole area was devastated. Rabbits, which were widely believed to be absent from the heartland of Australia, had survived, in this remote area, the onslaught of calicivirus. Indeed they were thriving, free from predators and isolated from infection’s taint by the sheer distance separating them from others of their kind: their loneliness had become their guarantee of life. All through the dune fields and the plains, and even along the salt lake’s barren shores, were vast, interlocking warren systems, deeply gouged, like subterranean castles, with wide, broad entrance tunnels, and radiating paths, and bastions looking out. Native animals, though, were less in evidence: there were no marsupials, large or small; nor did Latz see a single emu track on the wide salt-lake crust, where traces of a bird’s passage can linger for many years. The country wore a forbidding aspect: it had been scourged, almost in its entirety, by savage wildfires, which had penetrated beneath the surface and carbonised the upper layers of the soil. Where once there had been groves of coolibah and bloodwood along creek channels, bare plains now reached away. Beside the wells and waterholes there was not a single surviving quandong tree to be seen, not even a lone charred stump, although in the early years of Latz’s life these bush fruits had been common all through the ranges of the desert lands. From the air, on a more recent series of overflights, he had been able to take the measure not only of that stretch of country but of all the maze-like mountain chains, west to Warburton, east as far as Ernabella and Victory Downs. At that scale, and from that perspective, the Centre’s fate was clear to him: the whole region was gradually turning into a single, unbroken grassland, a wilderness of spinifex, occupied almost solely by large, disconsolate, near-starving camel herds. Among these creatures, he said, there was an unusual preponderance of males, with predictable results: they were in a state of almost constant rut and tension, duelling, and skirmishing, and tearing each other apart.

  “And that’s your magic desert,” finished Latz. “Your paradise!

  Still want to plunge back into it?”

  “There’s nothing else living there?”

  “Donkeys – plenty of them – but nothing that belongs.”

  “No dingos?”

  “Of course there are dingos. That goes without saying – there are always dingos. You’d need a nuclear explosion to get rid of them. Come to think of it, they tried that, didn’t they, at Mara-linga, and it didn’t work at all. Apart from them, though, nothing: the devastated, biblical plain. Sodom and Gomorrah!”

  “A bleak summation,” I said, rather enjoying the emergence of this vengeful strain from Latz’s Lutheran past.

  “It’s not bleak at all! That’s what romantics like you never get. Biology is change: the dance goes on. There’s no one correct, authorised way.”

  “And you don’t mind what’s happening? You don’t miss the old desert: the dunes and parklands full of bloodwoods, and vines, and coolibahs; and the old Aboriginal men in their camps, singing, rainmaki
ng and performing their ceremonies for months on end?”

  Latz gave an operatic sigh, doctored the camp-oven on the fire before us and handed me a tin plate heaped with his mutton curry.

  “Try some,” he commanded. “It’s got a kick. And you know very well there never was a golden age. There never was a past. If you look back into time in the desert, you run out of it right away. It was always newness. It’s always life coming into being, changing, shifting: plants, animals, people too. Almost everything the old anthropologists used to think of as the essence of Aboriginal-ity is new.”

  “Such as?”

  “The skin-group system. It’s just a cult, a fashion that was sweeping through the Centre when the colonisers came, and sowed their chaos, and froze it into place. You can see the appeal: it’s complicated and provides the basis for a lot of argument. People, especially outsiders, think it’s the heart of culture: it’s become a kind of social resistance mechanism, now. And there’s love magic, too. It’s very clear that’s a response to smallpox.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course. When the epidemic came through, late in the nineteenth century, there were deaths everywhere. The whole society of the Centre was wrecked. It was impossible to find the right marriage partners, among the nomadic groups in deep, hard desert country. The women turned naturally to incantations and magic spells to lure and trap their mates. What’s hidden, and absent, always seems to speak to desert people: concealed powers – uncaused causes. That’s why you like them, after all. So: how does it taste?”

  Latz peered at me in expectation by the campfire’s glow. I had been toying cautiously at the curry with my spoon all the while this disquisition, so drastic in its implications for the standard history of desert Australia, was unfolding. With some reluctance, I lifted a small sample of the stew towards my lips: its acrid fumes assailed me. In it went. The shard of mutton, with fragments of onion, sweet potato and other obscure legumes attached, passed down my throat, twisting, writhing like a living thing. It had been coated in various burning chilli marinades: they produced a napalm effect. I swallowed, and half choked.

  “Well?”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said, after a few seconds gasping and gulping in the air. “Magnificent. A lovely, unfolding, articulated kind of flavour. However did you do it?”

  “Look, I know it’s not that flash,” said Latz. “But when you’re on those long-haul trips, you have to go for heavy seasoning.”

  “To mask the taste of cellular breakdown in the meat?”

  “And combat any decay or bacterial activity triggered by all the thawings and refreezings along the way.”

  “That’s very encouraging.”

  “Only joking. Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate some bush food from a real desert trek.”

  “You actually kept this all the time since that trip out to Tjuk urla?”

  “Listen – this is luxury; this is the high life. We’re close to town, we’re camped beneath desert oaks, there’s wind in the air and stars in the sky. What more could you want? And by bush standards, I’m a fastidious gourmet. I’ll tell you how rugged things can get, food-wise. This is a true story.”

  He leaned forward, and had a last spoonful of curry, and rather over-demonstratively licked his lips.

  “The best kind,” I put in.

  “Are you interested in hearing it, or what? About a famous old bush character, Bryan Bowman.”

  “You mean the man Finlayson knew: the manager at Tempe Downs? That’s really time’s long hand reaching out.”

  “The very man,” said Latz. “In fact you could do worse than read him. He wrote a little memoir volume towards the end of his life: half of it’s fantasy, and half pure gold. He was pretty brisk in what he said about desert people, at least in public, but for thirty years he lived with an Aboriginal woman he’d met on Tempe when he was still young. He contracted syphilis, like most of the old pioneers: eventually he died of it. I saw him in hospital, in town, just two days before the end. He was a fantastic horseman and he lived very rough: three months would go by before he changed into a new set of clothes. He stayed up at Coniston, in an earth-floored home. Once he had a visitor, from Alice Springs, who came in just when old Bowman was having his feed: sausages, straight from the can. Perhaps the tertiary symptoms were kicking in by then. Anyway, he was pretty sick. He threw up: out came the sausages, all over the floor, amidst the dog and chicken shit. And he just stuffed the whole lot back into the can. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said, and ate them all again.”

  “The poetry of the outback,” I murmured.

  “I’m glad you’re not too shocked, said Latz, in a rather disappointed way.

  He fell quiet and glanced up. Above us, there was a faint, murmuring sound, like the echo from some impossibly distant shore. It strengthened.

  “Look.” He pointed: “See – there: bound for Jakarta, or Bangkok.” I craned my head back, in vain. Latz pointed once more overhead, and then I saw it: moving against the starfields, far beyond the point where its soundwave led the eye to search, an airliner’s flashing wing lights.

  “Qantas,” he said, in an expert tone of voice.

  “How do you know?”

  “Who else would bother to fly here? Over this endless desert, just to link the world to Melbourne – or Sydney, even worse!”

  “I’ve always found there’s something beautiful about these nocturnal overflights,” I said. “Watching the planes, lying in one’s swag long after the fire’s burned down, as they progress across the sky. I think of all the people sitting in that metal cylinder, staring at the movies, eating, drinking, trapped in their limbo, going over the triumphs and the failures in their lives – and maybe one in a hundred of them is gazing down through the window, at the blackness of the world below, and wondering what’s out there. Or looking at the little screen that’s supposed to show you where you are – and maybe there’s even a place-marker, for Ooraminna or Deep Well, just the way there is for Durba Springs.”

  “For where?”

  “Durba Springs, on the Canning Stock Route. If you fly from Perth to any Asian capital, you pass right over Lake Disappointment, and Durba Springs close by, and from the dot on the video map, at least, you’d think you were passing over Leinster or Kal-goorlie: some thriving inland town. But there’s nothing, down at ground level, except a red range, and the sandy stock route, and a waterhole – and if you go at the wrong time of year, a campground full of four-wheel-drive expeditioners – until midnight or after, when the planes fly over, just like now. You look up and see them – and it’s hard, then, not to picture yourself up above, staring down – hard not to have a twin perspective on your life, and see it in all its lovely futility: see its shape from the outside.”

  “A certain tone of melancholy there,” said Latz.

  “Of course,” I laughed. “It’s important to stay in character.”

  “But that’s not the way you should be directing and stage managing yourself. Not at all: it doesn’t have to be like that.” He leaned over and pushed together the branches on the fire.

  “I find, on the contrary, it does. And that’s the best way, the only way, to cope with all the coldness of the world.”

  “And you think that’s why you make your trips out here, and why you throw yourself against things: to have their measure, to feel the clash of swords, and the glamour of a landscape that can take your life?” I tried out the thought. I felt him looking intently at me.

  “It may be there’s something in that,” I replied. “But the more I come out here, the more time I spend in the bush, the more it seems to me like a neutral space, and that’s its real attraction – like one of those anechoic rooms, where you can hear the truth of things.”