The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  In London, Calvert quickly found a new channel for his literary energies. His attention turned to Spain: Spanish mines, Spanish art, history, architecture. He wrote no fewer than thirty-six books on Spanish themes over the next quarter-century. One of his publishers, the Bodley Head, even set up a special Spanish imprint for him: there were monographs on Spanish sculpture, appreciations of Goya and Velázquez, a life of Cervantes, a description of the Alhambra, Granada and Seville. Spain was everything, or almost – he did allow himself a hundred pages on questions of authenticity, and Sir Francis Bacon’s secret authorship of Shakespeare’s plays; he strayed once into the unlikely field of horticulture and penned an authoritative text on daffodils. At last the charms of Hispanic life and culture paled; he promptly made himself into an expert on the German colonies of Africa and their mineral resources. This gave way to a fascination with Freemasonry and its chain of secrets: his final volumes were devoted to Masonic themes. During the greater part of Calvert’s eventful life, he was rich, and generous in the gifts and endowments he made – but at the end some financial reverse befell him. He died penniless, in 1946, and for all his Stakhanovite literary production, he would be wholly forgotten today were it not for one act, which he soon came to regret.

  Determined to ensure the survival of his grandfather’s name, he decided, in the mid-1890s, to equip an exploring expedition, which he hoped would fill in “the remaining blanks of Australia” and reveal the deepest mysteries of the continent to Western eyes. It was to be the final flourish of the great tradition. He may even have half believed that some golden mountain would at last be found in the folds of the Outback, and give substance to the first and boldest of the family’s claims.

  The Calvert scientific expedition, overseen on his behalf by the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society, had as its declared goal the mapping of the Great Sandy Desert between the Murchison and Fitzroy rivers. It was placed under the steady leadership of Lawrence Wells, a veteran of many surveys and explorations; with him travelled a full complement of scientists and cameleers. The story of the expedition is well enough known, and yet somehow it is routinely avoided, reduced to a brief footnote in the records of the exploration age. The tale is too tragic, too pointless, it unfolds in country too remote to imagine – it has been cloaked in that characteristic unreality which hovers over everything touched by the Calvert name. The great disasters and heroic failures of mid-nineteenth-century exploring have almost all preserved a degree of celebrity: Burke and Wills have the dig tree on Cooper Creek as a memorial; Sturt has his Depot Glen, and Stuart his highway, while all the Simpson Desert’s dune fields serve as Leichhardt’s extended monument and grave. The Calvert expedition’s victims, though, perished quietly, nobly, at obscure Joanna Spring, where four-wheel-drive tourists never go. The country Wells and his team traversed is regarded now as an indigenous landscape, interrupted by the occasional mine and traversed by a bumpy, disused stock route.

  The seven explorers, for all the excellence of their equipment and the loftiness of their scientific aspirations, were engaged in a purely subsidiary venture; the likely pattern of their experiences was already known and set. By virtue of its place in the succession of events, the expedition was more an enactment of the idea of exploration than an exploration itself – and that odd, tricked-out quality was clear even in the first exchanges between Calvert and the Geographical Society, when its officers, in their most wheed ling, flattering manner, advised their patron of the scientific bene fits that might accrue from a large-scale survey. The Great Sandy needed to be traversed and measured. There were salt-lake chains to be followed up; there might even be high ranges of hills to be found. “You yourself have traversed its north-west area,” they wrote, “and, therefore, know what exists there.” Albert Calvert, of course, had hardly penetrated further than the gold-rush dray routes and the station tracks which still wind through the inland Pilbara, while it would be a brave soul who dared guess where John Calvert had been, or what he had done. But for all their fakeness, the Calverts, with the desert expedition, at last achieved something true: it was the grandest, most majestic of advances into unknown country, it was the final journey through the shimmer of the dune fields, beyond the contours of established maps. It was structured in the style of a narrative, with self-conscious actors, its outcome was all but predetermined by its ground conditions. It posed, in the stark, hard style of drama, the question that lay hidden in every explorer’s heart: how to perish, how to face death – marooned, in silence, alone.

  In keeping with its end, the first portents were ominous. Wells and his party were late into the field. It was mid-July before the expedition’s camel string left the prospecting camp of Lake Way and began crossing a stretch of sand-ridge country, dotted with desert gums, and bloodwoods, and bush grasses so thick they seemed like fields of waving corn. After a month’s fitful progress, with the weather already hot and menacing, Wells split the party and led a rapid reconnaissance into the ranges, bound north-east, in search of water – but as he pushed further, the landscape changed: there were dry, deceptive channels, and fields of conglomerate and rubble; the dunes stretched to the horizon line. At each crest, his camels struggled; they lost condition: they looked to his eyes like starved kangaroo dogs.

  “I feel thoroughly disgusted with my trip so far,” Wells lamented to his journal. “Everything seems against us – sand ridges, poison plant, sore eyes, and no water discoveries. On starting from Lake Way I had great hopes of finding some good country about this latitude, but now I am afraid those hopes are smoul-dering in the ashes of despair.” His thoughts filled with the tales of earlier explorers in that landscape – Forrest, and Giles, and Warburton, and the privations they had each endured. Wells decided to turn back – but the very next day, walking in front of the string, he flushed a crested pigeon, gave pursuit over the next dune and found a belt of lush tea-tree and outcropping limestone. There were the remains of Aboriginal encampments. There was a serviceable waterhole. This, optimistically, he christened Midway Well; it would be his depot – the portal that would guarantee his passage through the desert. There was rejoicing; the men bathed; the camels drank their fill. Late in the afternoon, when the day cooled, and the birds flew in to drink, Wells, gave in to an impulse that seems near-universal at desert waterholes: he raised his gun and fired a shot at a pigeon, but succeeded only in breaking its legs – the intended victim escaped, blood-spattered, in torment, and fluttered away. “It afterwards appeared to me a cruel return to perhaps the identical bird that led us to this haven of rest,” wrote Wells that evening – but then, as he consoled himself in philosophic fashion, “man’s hand is ever slow to spare and ever ready to strike.”

  When daylight broke, conscious of his mandate to fill in the bare spaces on the charts, he set a new, south-west bearing for the route back to the main party, passing alongside a low, deep-red range system, to which he gave Calvert’s name. To name was to discover. Increasingly, though, the landscape he was passing through seemed to him not empty, but full: full of signs and presences: the tracks of old explorers, the faded traces of geometric carvings, the remains of ceremonial sites abandoned by the Aboriginal groups whose smoke plumes were burning all around the camel string as it maintained its loping pace. At last he and his men reached the depot camp; there were the firm reunion handshakes, the silent, heartfelt greetings of the time. The party regrouped and headed for the line of waterholes ahead, sure now of their path through to the distant Fitzroy Valley. But even as they advanced, the atmospherics of the journey continued a gradual, almost imperceptible shift: plains of burnt grevillea and towering, desiccated spinifex surrounded them. Dust storms flashed across the country; at night, thunder echoed in the distance, and continuous bolts of lightning lit the sky. It was already 30 September when the full expedition reached Midway – a time of year when the sand is burning to the touch, when the blood throbs in one’s veins, and mirages glare and dance before one’s eyes. “We
will continue our course,” wrote Wells, “and I can see that there must be no delay, owing to the lateness of the season. In so terrible a country as this, where glaring red sand-ridges, all trending almost at right angles to our course, present themselves to the view at every quarter, it is extremely difficult to proceed.”

  Once more, after a further find of water in a native well, he replenished his supplies; once more he split his team. On a northward heading he dispatched his two keenest, most intrepid men: his own cousin and deputy, Charlie Wells, and the student scientist of the party, George Lindsay Jones, who was only eighteen years old, and a specialist in the new field of photography. The pair were given the three best camels and provisions for a month. They were to travel 180 miles to the sand-surrounded well at Joanna Spring, which had been rather imprecisely mapped by its discoverer, Colonel Warburton, during his arduous desert crossing more than two decades before. This was their point of rendezvous with the main expedition. But if contact failed, they were to push on, north, to the Fitzroy River, that shining lifeline that wound down into the pindan plains. In the prevailing conditions, and at that season, these instructions amounted to something very like a sentence of death. But if that thought occurred to the two men, they expressed nothing, and they set off into the blazing sands.

  Almost at once they hit hard country. Their camels struggled. They reached a winding salt lake, dead across their path, its soft crust impassable – “one shining surface of spotless white.” As they stood on its shore, hundreds of zebra finches, the birds of blood and sacrifice in desert ritual, began whirling and circling above them, twisting in a spiral of ever-closer flight. Abruptly, they felt the horror of the landscape: fear gripped them. They retreated, by slow, painful stages, to their starting point, nursed their camels back to health for five days, then set off in pursuit of the main party – and it is a cause of amazement to those who know the country that the two did indeed reach the vicinity of Joanna Spring, a week later, after a constant ordeal of climbing and descending high, loose, jumbled sand dunes, with the temperature burning by midday, and the last frosts of the year falling by night. The waterhole they found was empty. They lit signal fires and waited: no one came. Their supplies dwindled; they weakened; the end drew near. Jones wrote, in pencil, to his mother and father, a last note. It is in the archives of the State Library of South Australia today. It allows the young man to step for an instant from the shadows of the forgotten expedition into a strong, sharp light.

  “To My Dearest Mother and Father G.W. and J.R. Jones, Edwin Street, Gilberton, Adelaide,” it begins: the hand is neat, and upright, and precise. “Do not grieve over me darlings,” he says, before telling, in the briefest of summaries, the story of his fate: how one camel had died, how the two others had vanished into the bush, and there was no catching them. He had tried to explore the surrounds, but could go no further than half a mile, and then returned exhausted. There is a terrifying sweetness in his closing words: “Somehow or other I do not fear death itself. I trust in the almighty God. We have been hoping for relief from the main party but I am afraid they will be too late.” Reading that note, seeing those letters on the page in the musty library some years ago, I remember forming the idea that they embodied something; that Jones, and Wells beside him, knew some truth they had been travelling towards, and which their journey had helped them to reach. And I imagined, too, that the desert claims those of sweetness and kind temper, for they alone can soothe the clang of its stillness; that it needs them, and they belong there, and they rest in its arms at peace – and the temptation towards such thoughts seems fanned by desert country, as if the landscape seeks the touch of man, and longs for us; and travels in the bush still breed in me a kind of carelessness about what lies ahead, a readiness for anything: joy, annihilation, insight. From time to time, in the months that followed, when the Calvert expedition and its unravelling was fresh in my thoughts, I would often picture the two men stretched out beneath the shade of a bloodwood and a handful of spindly acacias, on a ridge line surrounded by dry soak holes, a few short miles west-south-west of Joanna Spring, and think myself into that silence – and just such pictures formed in the mind of Lawrence Wells too, on his journey through the fiery dunes, as he turned over the fate of his advance team, and it slowly dawned on him they must be lost.

  His own passage had been scarcely less arduous. His party had moved off in good formation, rested and strong. Within a week the desert brought them to the very edge of life. Each day, Wells wrote up his observations. Each day, his words become more jagged. From cool scientific writing, he drifts towards a surreal, broken narrative: dreams, wanderings, reflections: how bleak the spinifex, yet how necessary, in that landscape, to stop the shifting of the sands; how tall the ant hills; how loud the chirping of the crickets round the camp at night. The heat mounts: the camels cannot tread the burning sand by day: they rush to stand in one another’s shadows and topple off their finely balanced packs. The leader adopts the only strategy he can: “Our position has now become most serious owing to the intense heat, the sand ridges, and need of both food and water. I feel I must give up day-travelling and endeavour to push on by moonlight” – and so the string, in ghostly fashion, proceeds through the silver night time, trudging slowly, up dune and down, over the crests at right angles, their strength ebbing, fading. Wells tries every bushman’s trick. In his quest for water, he follows up the tracks of emus across the sand. He even turns his thoughts to the Aboriginal groups whose presence in the landscape round him he has regarded, all through the journey, with a chill, seigneurial detachment. Seeking their help, signalling to them, chasing after them, he almost strands himself, together with Bejah, his trusty cameleer. “Staggering over hot sand, parched with thirst, I became exhausted, and only able to manage a quarter to a half a mile at a time, sinking down at the top of each sand ridge in a half stupor, and falling into a sleep each time, only to jump up again with a start and urge Bejah to rouse himself. The tops of the ridges becoming cooler as the night advanced, we repeatedly pulled our clothes off and poured the cool sand over our burning skins.”

  The plagues of the desert then descended: ants infested them; bees attacked them; loose sand defeated them; one by one, the best pack-camels weakened and died. Mournfully, methodically, Wells unloaded all the specimens his team had collected, all the expedition’s tools and provision boxes, all their personal possessions, and abandoned them, stowed beneath a tarpaulin at a campsite within fifty miles of Joanna Spring. Two days on, and almost at the rendezvous point, Wells saw a smoke plume rising close by, due east: surely it was the advance team! He set off, with nothing more than a half-pint of cold tea in a bottle, to find his men – but as he went, and fired the country before him, he noticed other, answering smokes, ahead, around him: one, two, several. It was not his cousin’s fire. “Retracing my steps as best I could, I hardly remember how I got back to camp. Many times, at the semblance of a shade, I sank to the ground with a singing sensation in the ears, going off into a stupid doze, only to jump up with a start and push on again. In the flats of dense porcupine and coarse acacia scrub the atmosphere was like the heat from an oven. On one occasion, when rising from the ground I noticed my own boot tracks and found I was going the wrong way. Pulling my shirt, hat and compass off, I carried them rolled up under my arm and, on reaching the last high sand ridge, at 7 p.m., I saw the signal fire.” He clambered up. He saw the camp, and heard the voices of his party. He was too weak to call out. He lit the bush: the spinifex became his beacon – he crawled towards them, and was found. From death, and wilderness, across the threshold, to camp, the settled space, and life.

  By this stage in the expedition’s narrative, even the most transfixed of readers will be aware that certain conventions and tropes are active in the tale. It unfolds in almost formulaic fashion: each of the actions Wells takes, indeed each of his thoughts, seems predestined. The mood has long been set: the dark omens, the closeness of the air, the dry rivers and mocking salt pans
. The various episodes as well – the meetings with indifferent natives, the lost comrades, the dying animals, the ditching of scientific specimens, even the lone, near-fatal march – all these are familiar, they come straight from the pages of the first explorers, whose long shadows loom over Wells and his party – Leichhardt and Stuart, Ernest Giles and Eyre. As if to confirm this suspicion, at this very point in his tale, the point of greatest tension, Wells breaks off, and he cites at length the journey narrative of none other than Colonel Warburton, who had travelled through the same landscape, whose track he was now seeking to follow, and whose experiences were hauntingly like his own – until one feels oneself inside some infinitely doubling mirror-chamber of sensations and experiences, a desert of dreadful repetition. How not, as one nears the end of the journey, to let one’s thoughts run. How not to picture that constant reader, Albert Calvert, that man of stories, waiting, spellbound, in his Broad Street office, beside the telegraph machine – address “Spinifex, London” – waiting for news of the great adventure being written in his name. How was the plot progressing, what was the drift of the story – or, since there was only one fitting end to such a story, how was it reached?

  Wells himself, caught in this dance of influences, could do no more than stay in character. Exhausted, he led his party on, past Joanna Spring or its supposed site; he rode through the dark, now barely conscious, his body being scourged as he went by the sharp, burnt branches of acacia scrub. The surviving camels could hardly find the strength to walk. They moaned, and their throats rattled constantly; gluey, urinary liquids oozed beneath their tails. The country was no more than vague, repeating patterns, it was an abstraction, it was nothing – and so it stayed, until the horizon broke at last. It became a line of low, notched peaks, they took on shape – and then Wells recognised them from the writings of his brother explorers. He knew those books by heart; their charts and illustrations hovered constantly before his eyes. Mount Fenton, the St George Range – he could read the landscape again: he was safe. After four months in the desert, and 500 miles, the expedition cleared the dune fields. Before them were lagoons, fish, wildfowl, paperbarks, the Fitzroy flowing in its wide, clean channel.