“And what do you hear? What does the bush tell you?”
“How beautiful life is – how precious, and how quickly withdrawn. We come into consciousness from nothing, for the briefest of spells, for no reason – and then, darkness once again.”
“Let me tell you a story,” said Latz, after a few moments. “One that might change your mind a little.”
“What? You’re not going to argue against that from your world view of total scientific rationalism?”
“Perhaps! Just listen. It’s night time round a campfire in the desert: it’s the time for tales and revelations, don’t you think?
Maybe the real reason why you came back, and why we’re travelling together, is so you can hear this. It could be nothing to you: it could be something that you need.”
At this, I settled back. He set the scene. The story came from several years before: a period of unease and transformations for him, when his thoughts about the landscape were shifting, he was travelling extensively, he felt himself lost and driven from his moorings by the tides of his own deductions and ideas – and this impression of drift and flux was only strengthened by the sequence of the account he then unfurled before me, which jumped from his usual laconic style into lofty, swirling passages of scientific theory-building, thought upon thought, idea upon idea, his specu lations rising ever higher, as though impelled by their own momentum, until we reached the limits of some wholly abstract mental domain. I clung on: his voice shifted.
“It was then,” he said, “that the experience I wanted to describe to you began. I’d been ill for several days; I fell asleep and slept heavily, for some hours, until the deepest point of night. Suddenly, I was wide awake, and in torment: pain had enveloped me; it pressed down on my skin; it was as though my body was being flayed. I struggled over to the house next door: you know how close it is. I barely made it there. They took one look at me and drove me straight into town, to Accident and Emergency.”
“Alice Springs hospital – that was really taking your life in your hands!”
“Too right. I had a perforation of the oesophagus. I was bent over in a knot – I could barely speak. They assumed I’d had a heart attack. The doctors put me straight onto anti-coagulants, with a line of adrenalin poised. I had a severe allergic reaction: the effect was instant. I knew it; I was aware of it – I began to float away – there was a sense of peace: nirvana, a oneness inside the world, a being asleep and yet awake. Of course I’d read all about such events and internal states. People have quite different experiences, depending on their backgrounds, but it always seems to be fundamentally the same thing: pain, stress, then escape, and relief. The nurses were watching me: they saw me going; they pumped in the adrenalin. I came back – there was a slight tunnel-like effect, and a tone, a mood, receding.”
That sense of connection, and a high perspective, as though he was slightly above himself, remained throughout his stay in hospital. He was placed in a critical-care ward. In the room opposite, one of the most famous of the desert artists, Turkey Tolson Tju-purrula, his classificatory brother, was quietly fading away. Latz would wake at night time, and pace in the darkness down the corridors, and stand for hours at Tjupurrula’s bedside, watching his laboured, heavy breathing. Then there would be some commotion: another patient would scream out, or have a fit; the nurses would respond in calm, efficient fashion, as though their acceptance of death’s nearness had lent them all a beauty and a poise. Some days on, Latz was discharged and went back to his block, transfixed by what had happened to him. He turned it over and decided that the experience had much in common with the trancelike states induced by ngangkaris – the doctors of the western desert, who appear to slow the organisms of their patients before they work their healing spells. Perhaps, he thought, the proximity of death had triggered a sharp production of endorphins in his brain, and these were responsible for the floating sense that had lifted him away – just as, once, at Surveyor General’s Corner, when he had scaled a high granitic boulder pile and felt himself stricken by heat, and vertigo, and half transported by a sense of union with all he saw. But even as he entertained these ideas, he knew he had been changed. He walked the boundaries of his block in slow reverie. He felt a deep love for each tree and plant.
He was linked to them: the vines with their twisting flowers, the leaves of the bush passionfruit, the birds above him, singing. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve always felt the landscape speaks to you – but it was speaking in especially pure form in those days. How intense it was, that new life! It was like being reborn. I came to feel that this was what the Buddha learned, when he was sitting beneath his tree.”
“That death is just a screen, and what hides behind it is a full consciousness of life?”
“That only by being aware of death, and believing in death, do we truly die.”
“And does the nature of the life one’s had affect one’s death?”
“This isn’t a seminar,” he sighed. “I don’t know. All I know is that I felt awful before. I was sick, and in pain – and that’s all gone. It changes your life forever, when you no longer fear death: when it’s a completion, and not an end. Remember Mozart, and what he said.”
I waited; he waited; the sentence remained between us, in the air.
“So?” I turned to him. “What did he say?”
“I thought that was your part of the world,” Latz replied, in minor triumph. “Europe, Vienna, that kind of thing? Joy dissolving into sadness, and then back again? It was near the end for him, when he was pining away. I heard it on Radio National …”
“Practically first-hand testimony!”
“Do you want to know?” There was a slight, reproving pause; he went on. “This was in the winter months: he’d made his journey back from Prague, and the first performance of the Clemenza di Tito; he was already writing the Requiem, which he was convinced he was writing for himself. I always picture him in those days crushed by the sheer weight of all the beauty he’d fashioned and passed through the filter of his mind. ‘I used to fear the touch of death,’ he said, ‘as a fearful, lined old woman – but now I have seen her, I understand she is a beautiful young maiden, and I long for her final embrace.’”
Latz fell silent. The fire had burned down to its embers. I could barely see his face beside me.
“Why,” I asked, “are you telling me this?”
“Isn’t that what’s on your mind, really – what lies there, at the end? Isn’t that what you’re trying to find out in this country; what you’ve always been trying to find out, in all your life’s permutations – all your shifts and movements: how to die?”
Still in the shadow of this conversation, the words of which seemed to reach back like a judgment deep into my past, I set off, some days later, on my long-planned trip out to the ranges, bound for Mantamaru and the Ngaanyatjarra lands. By mid-afternoon, I was nearing the low, symmetric line of Mount Conner, which rises sheer from the saltbush and red sand of its surrounds. On the far side of the narrow western highway, named, by some humorous soul in the Northern Territory roads department, for that unsuccessful tourist Lasseter, lies Curtin Springs – a bleak roadhouse, favoured by international backpackers, which I had avoided religiously for years. But I was low on fuel, and in a mood for experiment: I slowed and turned in, and I was almost blinded as I did so by the flash of light from chrome and steel. Perhaps a hundred Harley Davidsons, all gleaming in the low sunshine, were parked alongside each other, their front wheels turned in tandem and neatly aligned. In that harsh landscape, framed by a pair of stunted gum trees, with smoke plumes from distant bush-fires hanging in the sky behind them, they looked like the elements of some fiercely ironising installation artwork, aimed at the wastes and vanities of modern life.
I went towards the seating area, which was mantled by a complex array of nets and shade-cloth canopies. The tables were full: leather-clad bikers, most of them ageing, grey-haired, with benign expressions on their faces, strolled about or lounged in t
he wooden chairs, drinking, smoking, eating, their exchanges drifting in the air. Please assist in preserving the beauty, entreated a sign at the entrance to this enclosure, alongside a large cage filled with listless, panting guinea pigs. I walked into the bar. Its atmospherics were unchanged since my last visit: it was cramped, and dark, and narrow. There was a clutch of backpackers at one end. A couple, in full leathers, both with long grey ponytails, stood just before me. Behind the bar, on a high stool, sat Peter Severin, the wiry, white-haired leaseholder of Curtin Springs, a founding member of the once-dominant political party of the Centre and a man with pronounced opinions on the proper order of the region and the world.
“You look familiar,” he called out at once. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
“A while ago,” I said, “but things seem much the same.”
“Oh, we’ve been powering on,” he said. “My wife passed away; my Holden FX is on its last legs; there are days when I can’t remember my own dog’s name.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
I allowed my gaze to sweep across the wall; it was choked with the standard eccentric roadhouse touches: a military map of Iraq, a recipe for camel stew, a framed newspaper article, of faintly salacious tone, featuring Julie Andrews on ‘My Favourite Things.’
“We’ve been updating,” said Severin. “You can see. You’re a valuer, aren’t you? An insurance valuer – I remember now.”
“I’m not a valuer,” I said, “but I value things.”
“Are you the ABC reporter for the convention?” asked the woman of the leather couple, who had been listening carefully to this elliptical exchange.
“Do I look like an ABC reporter?”
“No – come to think of it,” she said. “On a second look, you don’t have the kind of easy, open face one associates with a public broadcaster.”
I searched for some reply to this coruscating remark.
“Oh, he doesn’t look that rough,” said Severin, emolliently. “In fact,” he went on, “you get bushmen a lot less presentable than him all the time in here. We’re almost friends, although I can’t quite place him for the moment.”
“What convention?” I asked.
“There’s a Hogs’ convention,” said the woman. “It starts tomorrow at the Rock. I’m the event publicist. There are fifteen hundred Harley Davidsons converging on Yulara even as we speak.”
“And doubtless a healthy police escort as well.”
“Why?” said the woman, indignantly, putting her hand around her partner’s leather-belted waist. “It’s not as if we’re Hells Angels, or gang members, or anything like that. Harleys don’t always mean blood and violence. We’re just motorcycle lovers, aesthetes of the road – people who like an edge of wildness and freedom in life. You should call in and see – you might be surprised. Are you headed that way?”
“Past,” I said. I heard the low whisper of my voice, sounding as though it was giving a secret away. “Well past: Warakurna, Mantamaru, and then on – maybe to Wiluna.”
“The beckoning west,” broke in Severin. “That’s mirage country out there: dream country, delusion country. You need to have your wits about you.”
He repeated this last phrase and shook his head, as though to register his private alarm at my reckless enterprise.
“Stop in on the way,” said the woman. “You might be quite surprised. We’re going to circle the Rock: more than a thousand Harleys around Uluru – revving their engines at the nation’s heart.”
“That’ll give the spirits there something to think about,” said Severin. “Maybe I should go myself. It’s been fifty years since I started with the Rock. There was nothing there back then.”
“You’d need a Harley if you wanted to drive round it with us,” announced the woman, rather pityingly.
“There’s an old 1935 Triumph out the back,” said Severin. “I wonder how it would go.”
We trooped out behind him to inspect this marvel. My eyes were drawn by a long line of meshed structures, set some distance away, at the far end of an open courtyard. More cages: aviary cages, I realised, as I went towards them. In each there was a pair, or family, of native parrots – scolding, chattering, whistling, calling, their voices mingled into a constant, modulating, chaotic blur, as though one drifted on a stream of sound and a whirlpool or waterfall was drawing near. I walked along the line, prompting flurries of attention from each enclosure in turn. There were superb parrots and red-wings, ring-necks and lorikeets. Some were perched morosely on the bare branches of acacias or eucalypts contained within their little prisons. Some were clinging to the wire mesh by their beaks and struggling along, with frantic, wholly pointless effort, keeping pace with me for a few steps as I went. Severin came up beside me as I reached the budgerigars.
“Marvellous creatures,” he said in a proprietorial voice, at which the two birds chirped, and twittered, and darted from side to side of their cage with whirring wings – and with each gesture of Severin’s in their direction, the speed of their movements mounted, until they became a haze of greenish light trails, impossible to follow except in the brief moments when they collided with the cage walls and beat vainly against them with their wings. I retreated, and Severin too. The birds came to rest, and f licked and shrugged their plumage; after a short pause they jumped alongside each other and began preening and gliding their beaks over their wing feathers.
“Strange,” said Severin. “They’re not usually that way.”
“They look a bit mangy.”
“Mangy – yes, it’s hard out here, with all the lice and pests we get. And we’ve had the worst conditions: we’ve been in drought for years, it’s been like those spells of unbroken heatwave they recorded in the ’30s – and the fire.”
“I can see.” I nodded towards the distant smoke plumes blurring in the sky.
“That’s nothing – you should have seen it in the bad times. We’ve had the most savage fires I can remember here. Two dreadful seasons. The whole of Curtin’s been burned out. There’s scarcely a stick of feed left on the place: it’s like a wasteland. One fire burned for eight months – it’s still smouldering, out on Lyn-davale and Mulga Park.”
“Perhaps it’s not ideal cattle country.”
“It’s not ideal for any life form when you get a run of years like this. I’ve heard stories from the road-train drivers coming up from Kalgoorlie on the south road, through the Aboriginal reserves. There were flame fronts fifty metres high along the track, and palls of smoke hanging like layered veils above them; the fires burning on the ground were reflecting up at night to the dust clouds. There’d be a pink glow overhead, like some aurora effect across the sky – and when the trucks were passing through the desert-oak forests, they’d see the trunks bursting into f lame around them: whole trees would go up like torches, sparks would blaze and catch, there were fiery leaf fronds and seed pods flying through the air.”
In front of us, as though lulled by this alarming word-portrait, the budgerigars had composed themselves. They now turned to face each other and began nuzzling, with open beaks, their little stubby tongues emerged; they kissed, at first decorously, with quick bobbing motions, then more ardently, great, impassioned kisses, mouth on mouth, with locked beaks, tongue grinding upon tongue as though they were trying to excavate the deepest recesses of each other’s throats. We watched.
“They’re in love,” said Severin, a touch disconcerted.
“Is that entirely normal avian behaviour?” I asked.
“There’s nothing entirely normal left in this landscape, after so many nightmares, and such disruption,” said a tall, striking blond-haired man in leather motorcycle leggings, who had just come up.
He stood appraisingly in front of an empty cage.
“What’s in there?” he said.
“A night parrot,” replied Severin.
“True story?” said the man, and looked with greater focus at the little enclosure. On its stone floor was a ful
ly filled water bowl, surrounded by the white flecks of droppings.
“I thought they were extinct,” I said, “except in the realms of imagination.”
“Oh, they’re common, really,” said Severin. “Ornithologists just say that to give a bit of spice to their lives. They’re all over the place – you often see them at dusk, poking through the spinifex.”
“So where is it?”
“It’s a night parrot,” said Severin, in a wry voice. “Obviously it’s not going to come out during the daytime; it’s asleep, in its shade box. If you want to see it, you’ll have to overnight here, won’t you? There are rooms free. We’ve got new deluxe cabins. Ninety dollars a night. How does that sound?”
“You’re headed for Wiluna?” said the tall man at this point, somewhat combatively, and brushed back his long hair from his shoulders.
“News travels fast: Warakurna, Mantamaru, then maybe on.”
“Down the Gunbarrel? Past Carnegie homestead? Do you know that country?”
“Do you?” I parried.
“Why are you going out there, to those communities? Or do you have a taste for pulverisation and cultural collapse?”
“More for tranquillity and friendship,” I said.
“A true believer,” laughed Severin at this. “With all his dreams and ideals intact!”
This exchange, which had the quality of sparring, flowed on: the life today in Warburton, and the country round about; the desert river channels, the ranges and their undetected mineral reserves, the sites of ritual power scattered through the west. Severin broke in a few times more, but found no response, and, night parrot forgotten, he moved away.
“And how come you know so much about the landscape?” I asked my new companion. “Who are you exactly?”
“I didn’t say. And I didn’t ask you who you were, either. Sometimes conditions of anonymity favour true dialogue, don’t you find?”
“Are you a scientist?”
“I was once an anthropologist,” he replied, with a little emphasis upon the tense.
The Red Highway Page 20