The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  And he did indeed have something of the faintly used-up air that tends to mantle the members of this profession – that air of grievous knowledge, painfully acquired and nobly borne – but there was something else as well. I looked at him more carefully. His manner was resigned, irony-laden, yet easy, with a slight edge of energetic malice that peeped out when he made his thrusts and jabs. He told me something of the circumstances that had brought him to the deserts, going into minute detail at obscure link-points of the causal chain, then skating abruptly over crucial episodes. I tried to follow this strange self-presentation: it resembled nothing so much as a medieval world map, with vast inconsistencies in measurement and scale. Life and background had made him a student of man, he said in cryptic fashion. By this stage we were sitting amidst the convention-goers, who received him as one of their own and gathered round, with the result that our talk took on an almost dramatised quality, and his words and gestures became more fluent and expressive as his tale wound on.

  “It’s an inclination, anthropology,” he said. “It always was: a kink of character. Some people like ideas and their interplay; some like power. I like the poignant attributes in life: the things you only encounter in the minds of human beings.”

  “Such as?”

  “Hate. Deception. A sense of beauty. Love. Those were the things that fascinated me, once.”

  “This all has a nostalgic feel,” I said.

  “But isn’t it obvious,” he said, with a soft, expansive gesture to his listeners, as though the narrative unfolding could serve quite self-evidently as a portrait sketch for every one of them. “We’re an army of the lost – all of us. We’re gypsy riders, drowning in nostalgia – otherwise we wouldn’t be riding these machines of sadness down the open road. When I was studying in Adelaide, I knew a woman who had a striking theory about the course of our journeys through life. She believed that the longer we live, the more damaged we become – and the more we inspire love – love being, as you know, a response to need and loss.”

  “In the giver, or the receiver?”

  “Both, of course.”

  “And was she beautiful?”

  “Naturally – why else would one pay attention? She influenced me. She’d spent time in the remote world; in fact she was brought up on the Ernabella mission – and she felt that in all our engagements with traditional Aboriginal people, no matter what the warmth and friendship, we’re never doing any more than peering over the horizon of ourselves, and vainly trying to see what lies beyond.”

  Those thoughts, impetuously thrown off, led him further. His training; his days in the field; his commitment to the cause of land rights, which drew him, as the first outstations and homelands were established, ever further into the desert’s deep redoubts. He came to rest in the southern Pitjantjatjara lands, and from there made remote-area field trips into the Victoria Desert’s southmost reaches – country long since regarded as empty, silent waste, trackless save for a single red-sand access route.

  “You mean the Anne Beadell Highway,” I said.

  “You think you’re a real bush connoisseur, don’t you! Even then, we’d dropped that name: we called it the Serpentine Lakes Road.”

  “It must be a little impractical for motorcycle touring.”

  “Impossible, it’s true. It’s the kingdom of the troop-carrier. There’s a large biosphere reserve down that way, full of desert kurrajongs and marble gums – or it was back then: the Unnamed Conservation Park.”

  “That’s its name?”

  “Most things in Australia of real importance are unnamed – haven’t you noticed? But in this case that’s the gazetted name. I found I was travelling out there more and more, on field trips from Iltur and Wartaru, to escape from the chaos all around me. It was hard to believe in what you were doing when everything you were researching – everything – was dying and falling apart before your eyes. That was an implacable backdrop: I saw myself clearly when I lived in the outstations.”

  “How could one not?”

  “And it was hard, out there, not to feel the beginnings of a contempt for myself and all my colleagues. Man studying man: what gave the right? What could you learn that wasn’t theft? What could you give?”

  He fell silent.

  “And then?”

  “Then there was a contact episode. Or a quasi-contact episode, it would be better to say. It’s not well known. It wasn’t written up.”

  The Harley riders sitting round him drew closer: they looked like the attendant figures leaning inwards at the edges of some carved nativity.

  “You remember the last nomads – those ones who came in during the ’80s, near Kiwirrkura? And you’ve heard of Warri and Yatungka, out in the Gibson? And the desert dwellers, down in the spinifex lands on the Nullarbor? Well – there are other stories like that. There are people out there in the deserts; old Aboriginal men living out their days.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Outstation families see their fires. They come across their tracks. It’s an open secret – and I could leave it at that.”

  “But you have experience of your own?”

  “I do – and it was enough to change my tilt on many things.”

  Towards the end of a hot, rainless January, he had travelled out, alone as was his habit, deep into the reserve. He was driving beneath clear skies, when he saw, straight in front of him, a spinifex fire take hold. He stopped, in puzzlement; it turned to excitement, then to a kind of sharp and painful joy. He stepped down from the troop-carrier and went cautiously ahead, quite aware what was happening to him, exalted, almost dazed by his sense of anticipation: how closely he had studied the contact stories from decades gone by; how much they meant to him! It was as if he was himself now one of the characters in those heroic tales, or an actor in one of the grainy documentary films. There, ahead, was a lone, tall man, with spears, wearing a hair-string belt, standing, one hand raised up. They walked towards each other across the dune: they stopped; they said nothing. They looked at each other.

  “And the look I saw there in those eyes stays with me still – it was such a look: it destroyed me!” He laughed, but bitterly. “There are so many stories about the desert and the secrets that it holds: the Dreamings – the ceremonial journey lines, the sacred places: so many stories being generated by outsiders. All the fantasies and projections we bring with us. And that’s what’s really there: what I saw then. He looked at me with the eyes of love so deep it made nothing of everything – every feeling I’d ever had in my life. For a minute, perhaps longer, he gazed at me, as if he was reading me – and then he turned, and with long, loping strides he ran away. I watched his figure receding over the dunes; he never looked back. He ran from me as though I was carrying some dreadful infection or annihilating plague.”

  “And when was this?”

  “A while ago,” he answered, with studied vagueness. “Before there was GPS equipment. I was tempted to go back, of course, and find that place again, and him – I decided not to. It was far away, where I’d seen him: it was the furthest I’d ever travelled into that landscape. The weeks went by. After that, you can imagine I found it hard to take my professional tasks too seriously: in fact impossible. I understood what the real deserts are: us: our death and taint. I’d look at all our frontier encampments, our little bush empires – the brick-block outstation houses, the metal roofs, the water tanks, the sick children, the scabies-ridden dogs, and just want it all to vanish away. That was what we made as desert life; that was our idea of tradition going on. I could see the world that we were building there, with ourselves as overlords: all the council clerks, and program managers, and executives; and the anthropologists, too, like gods of the outback, presiding, advising, being sensitive as they inquire and probe and wreck.”

  “That’s a fairly apocalyptic vision,” I said.

  “And the desert people in the homelands, too,” he swept on. “Those places are tombs for them: they go along, and answer all our questions, an
d paint the art we want, and surrender all the furthest details of their belief-systems, and stare back at us with their limpid, compliant eyes – and that’s enough for us to keep our little fantasies of co-existence and cultural survival running on.”

  “And all that – that loss of faith – came from one meeting in the desert?”

  “Perhaps it did. At any rate, I began to feel that I was living in a world of shadows on the outstations: a world where everyone was dying or fading or had suffered strokes so debilitating they couldn’t think or speak. It was the palest echo of the world before. My dreams had dissolved. I chose, as you can see, a new course in life.”

  “And what do you do now?”

  “I have a nomadic existence,” he said. “I travel – and I consult, from time to time, on First Nations issues, for a multinational” – and this rejoinder, with its various glinting ironies, brought our conversation to an end.

  I got up and went to find my deluxe accommodation, but ran straight into Peter Severin.

  “Unusual man,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ve seen him here before. Any revelations?”

  “One or two.”

  “Believable ones?”

  “Of course – and maybe even true.”

  “Almost time for the scenic sunset tour of Mount Conner,” said Severin.

  “Mount Conner: the home of the ancestral ice spirits? Too dangerous for me.”

  “But it’s one of the three great tors of Central Australia – and the only one in private hands. Just a short trip down a station track.”

  He stepped out from the shadow of the accommodation block and pointed: the mountain’s flank glowed and shimmered in the sunset light.

  “It’s the real thing,” he said. “A genuine natural wonder. Better than staring at that panorama painting of it they used to have in Alice Springs.”

  “Used to have? You mean the Panorama Guth?”

  “Didn’t you hear? It burned down last night: down to the ground. It was on the TV news. The fire was so fierce they couldn’t put it out – it burned almost until the morning came.”

  I left him. With deliberate steps, I walked back to my vehicle, started up and drove east, at speed, passing with metronomic regularity little fleets of bright-painted combi vans, swerving round the thin, exhausted herds of cattle as they loomed before me in the half-light. First Ebenzer roadhouse came, and then Erldunda. I joined the Stuart Highway and its procession of mining trucks, and livestock transporters, and caravans, weaving my way through them until, two hours later, the range line before Alice Springs and the mast lights on the peak of Mount Gillen showed. I reached the heart of town, and turned into Hartley Street, and looked: but there was nothing where the crenellated tower had once been. The enclosure was cordoned off. A fire truck was parked nearby, its red lights twirling. The front building of the Panorama had been saved: beyond was rubble, wreckage, black, twisted beams and disordered concrete slabs. I was taking in the scene and its surrounds – the car yard, the motel bedroom block next door, both quite unharmed, despite their proximity to the fire – when my gaze fell on a little plaque of polished bronze. I bent down, beneath the flowering shrubs that marked the edge of the Panorama’s property, and, almost overpowered by their sickly scent, I made out, by the red flashing light, the words engraved on the metal. It was a message Guth had designed as his envoi: I am proud since I came to the Centre. I have done this for this country and this nation with love and thanks. When I was gone, I left something special behind me for your children and grandchildren and the next generations. And so are our best desires subverted, I murmured to myself. Alongside was another plaque, of similar style and shape, recording the opening of the Panorama, which had been presided over, on the first of November 1975, by the Honourable E.G. Whitlam, Q.C., Prime Minister of Australia, in one of the final public acts of that statesman’s brief, eventful reign.

  Some days later, at Keller’s Restaurant, a landmark of Alice Springs, which offers a strikingly divided menu of Swiss and Indian dishes and serves as the natural backdrop for conversations of any substance in the town, I heard more about the Panorama’s fate from my friend Dick Kimber, the historian of the Centre in its many different faces, a historian whose work verges on artistry, so serene is its interweaving of the roles of chance and coincidence in life, so evenly does it present the beliefs and actions of each figure it plucks out from the mirage-like pattern of the past. I told him at once how eagerly I had gone back to the Panorama on my return from overseas, how much it had come to mean to me, despite its old-fashioned look and the rambling, inchoate nature of its exhibits, those objects in it which had remained resistant, almost invisible, even though they were spread out before one’s gaze.

  “Indeed,” said Dick gently, with a smile of utmost tolerance, and, after several preliminary diversions, began his account. The fire, he said, had broken out in the small hours of the night, and had been caused, in all probability, by an inconsequential fault in the wiring of the structure. The emergency crews were quickly called, and had been able to reach the front galleries, but they were driven back from the main building by the smoke and by the heat of the blaze: and despite their best efforts, the panorama itself was wholly destroyed before their eyes – as was only natural, for its sloping, sand-strewn foreground was covered with dry, intensely flammable spinifex grass, which had served as fuel, while the skylight, so like a fan vault, designed to light the canvas in an even fashion, had become an air vent, an inadvertent chimney, drawing the flames upwards and creating a firestorm effect.

  “And was anything saved?”

  “The desert watercolours: the Namatjira works, and others of that school, but all the more perishable artefacts were burned up: the cockatoo-feather headdresses, the kadaitcha shoes, the decorated wooden boards. The flames burned for a day. When at last the fire teams could make their way into the main galleries, they found the sacred stones – incinerated, seared, but still intact: all the carved stones, you remember, with their fine patterns, circular and rippling, all the treasures of the old Aranda men who confided them so lovingly into Henk Guth’s hands, and who saw the Panorama as a kind of sacred cave. There they were, seemingly preserved. The moment, though, that they were moved, or even touched, they all disintegrated, they turned to powder and to dust.”

  “Almost like the objects found in Egyptian tombs: you know all those stories about wooden spear hafts collapsing and their metal points clattering to the ground the moment the entrance seal was breached?”

  “Perhaps. Afterwards, the fire and emergency services calculated that the temperatures had reached about a thousand degrees centigrade: enough to melt the thick steel girders. The crews had been pouring on the water: it evaporated even before it touched the flames.”

  Much of the glass in the Panorama had liquefied, Dick went on, after a pause, in which he seemed to struggle not so much to maintain his composure – invariably absolute – as to make his mind a space of contemplation broad enough to frame the phenomena he was seeking to describe. And that liquefaction could be seen in the form of glassy strands and fine stalagmites where the display cases had once stood – while the remainder, the glass in the skylight windows, for instance, had simply been vaporised by the flames and blown away – and on hearing of such things, he said, it was hard not to turn one’s mind to the firestorms that devastated the great cities of Europe in the wartime years – those years, so far away from us, yet so close in the imagining, when Henk Guth’s life was turned upside down and his long journey into exile, and towards Central Australia, began.

  Return

  I

  IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE nineteenth century, a young, flamboyant financier named Albert Calvert made a series of expeditions through the north-west, into the coastal regions of the Pilbara, where life and death seem always to lie closely intertwined. Calvert was a speculator and investor, a share trader and company floater, but his shifting loves and interests ranged much wider than mere capital: he was a philatel
ist and racehorse trainer, an artist and a newspaper proprietor, a publicist and an obsessive author, indeed a graphomane, a figure wholly possessed by the desire to see his words in print.

  This multiplicity and taste for self-invention reminded many observers of his prodigious grandfather, John Calvert, a man of vast wealth mysteriously amassed, who claimed to be the first discoverer of gold in New South Wales. And it was stories of this kind – stories akin to the foundation myths of his own lineage – that were uppermost in Calvert’s thoughts in the days when he equipped and set out upon his little expeditions through the bush. He was cautious, though, to avoid the trap of casting himself in the old tradition and describing himself as some kind of “explorer.” The frontier was almost closed when he began his journeys: gold rushes had scattered new towns across the North; there were only a few blank spaces left upon the continental map. No, Calvert viewed himself more as a traveller, a narrator, a watcher with a creative sensibility. He preferred to regard his ventures into the landscape as “tours,” and he was also quick to stress his practical qualifications as a mining engineer. When a journalist from the Western Mail asked him if he objected to being called an explorer in his own right, Calvert had his ready answer: “I consider that I have far more claim to be called a pioneer, for my work in the colony as well as in the old country has been mainly directed into this channel.”

  In truth, he was tracing out his own version of a familiar trajectory, which had exerted its pull not only on his grandfather but on many of the outsiders drawn to the Pilbara in the years when the north-west was being opened up.

  Even today, this austere landscape, with its basalt piles and dark peaks rising from bare red soil or yellowing spinifex, seems too much for the eye to bear. Men flinch from the country, they seek to master it, but not to know it: they gouge it up, as though its lunar splendour was offensive to them. They are there for minerals; for treasure: and both Calverts had heard that call. All through the first years of northern settlement, eccentrics and conspiratorial types loved to exchange tales about the secret riches of the country, or pass from hand to hand the coded topographic guides prepared by early prospectors, or whisper to each other of the secret Portuguese forays south from Javanese outposts to “Provincia Aurifera” – that region marked so tantalisingly on antique maps that seemed to sketch the Pilbara coast. Even Cal-vert’s restrained, punctilious biographer, the geologist Geoff Blackburn, cannot resist the passing observation that Roebourne, the constant centre of the young man’s expedition efforts, is the only gold-bearing coastal locality in the whole north-west.