“My only anxiety now,” wrote Wells, as he weighed up his escape and his passage through that iron country, “is for my cousin Charles and Mr Jones.”
Anxiety became obsession; then conviction of responsibility; then motive for a further quest. Less than a week had passed when Wells plunged back into the Great Sandy Desert, bearing emergency water supplies, in the first attempt at a rescue for the missing men; an attempt that was followed, over the next half-year, by four more journeys, made with ever-mounting passion, sweeping across vast swathes of red dune landscape, as the last episode of nineteenth-century exploration turned from geographic survey into haunted search. Wells had spread word quickly through the Fitzroy Crossing telegraph station. Within days, the most famous bushmen and pioneers of northern Australia were in contact, pleading to be included: from Adelaide, David Lindsay, who had led the Elder scientific expedition, and was uncle to young George Jones; from Halls Creek, the swashbuckling David Carnegie, who had just crossed through the central deserts with a camel party of his own. On the Oakover River, the West Australian surveyor William Rudall at once began a set of probes into the dune fields, while the celebrated overlander Nat Buchanan, equipped with a fresh camel string, came through to Fitzroy and offered his help to Wells.
There was a sense of final curtain in the air. The cast of an age was gathering; one feels the mood of closure, of stories meshing, joining, that comes when a soap opera’s last episode is shown. And much in the North was at an end during those days: Federation loomed, pastoral stations were fringing the frontier, the surviving wilderness would soon be tamed by stock routes and straight, sealed roads. Repeatedly, in a state of fixed, glassy resolve, Wells drove his camels southwards; from Gogo Station, where the river country gives way to the bleakest desert ranges; from Fitzroy itself; from Luluigui and then from Gregory homesteads. He narrowed down his search area; he reached nearer the resting-place of his companions with each failed bid. A kind of wildness overcame him; he fell under the shadow of his fellow searchers, hard bush cattlemen and police troopers. He sought out the desert people, those vague, exiguous family groups he had seen and crossed paths with, creatures who had appeared and disappeared before him like ghosts. Wells began interrogating them, enlisting them as guides; and at their campsites he discovered telltale clues: a geological sketch map, spans of hoop iron, blades of metal, made from bent packsaddle frames. A fury gripped the search. On the last trip out, Wells took with him Sub-Inspector Ord and Trooper Nicholson from the Fitzroy Police Station. The methods employed were simple: two desert men were captured; a degree of constraint and violence was administered; the searchers were led directly to the bare ridge line where the dead expedition members lay. From the back of his riding camel, Wells caught sight of a tent rope hanging from a desert gum tree on the ridge. “I could then see my cousin’s iron-grey beard,” he writes in his journal. “And we were at last at the scene of their terrible death.”
What, though, had Wells found with the end of this quest, which had lasted far longer than his initial desert crossing? He describes the moment with a fascinated horror, and in extreme detail he replays the movements of the actors in the drama; with his whispering voice, he reminds one of an archaeologist, penetrating into the lost tomb-chamber of some king from an ancient realm. “Dismounting, Mr Ord and myself went to my cousin, whilst Nicholson and Bejah went where they saw some remnants of the camp equipment, and found the body of Mr G.L. Jones, which was partly covered with drift sand. Where Charles Wells lay, half-clothed and dried like a mummy, we found nothing but a rug, and some old straps hanging to some burnt bushes, which held the brass eyelets of a fly that had either been rifled by the natives or burnt by a fire which had been within a few feet of his body.”
Like the dead George Jones, Sub-Inspector Ord was a photographer. He recorded the scene in a set of grainy, disquieting images, so glare-distorted they almost recompose themselves into abstract shapes. The eye makes out the ridge, the two chained Aboriginal guides, the body of Charles Wells, his hands stretched out above his torso, his head twisted to one side, his features tight. Tradition, at such moments, demanded certain thoughts, and a degree of retrospect. “Looking at my cousin,” Wells wrote that day, “as he lay on the sand with features perfect and outstretched hand, I recalled the last time we parted when I felt his hard, strong grip. I little thought then that this would be our next meeting! I remember we spent a lively evening, our last together, at Separation Well, when both he and Mr Jones were joking freely, hopeful and full of life.”
He went on to set down a handful of lines from the dead man’s favourite poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon. They were lines known by every bushman. They had been composed a generation earlier, for the unveiling of the monument in Melbourne’s Collins Street to Burke and Wills.
With the pistol clenched in his failing hand,
With the death mist spread o’er his fading eyes,
He saw the sun go down on the sand
And he slept, and never saw it rise.
God grant that whenever, soon or late,
Our course is run and our goal is reach’d,
We may meet our fate as steady and straight
As he whose bones in yon desert bleach’d.
Grave, hackneyed, outdated, the verses caught the essence of the journey. Lindsay Gordon was in the expedition leader’s thoughts, and on his lips, all through the desert crossing: he named a waterhole Lindsay Gordon Lagoon “after Australia’s poet,” he filled his notebook with Lindsay Gordon quatrains; bush ballads by the author formed his constant mental music. For Wells, by this stage, was a being wholly spun from the romance of exploration, he was hollowed out, his own identity was lost – and the long record of nineteenth-century desert travel seems, at this point, at the very moment of its conclusion, to collapse, its myths overwhelm it, it becomes a collective journey towards evanescence, depersonalisation, the destruction of the conscious mind. It is a turning away from progress, a rejection of the modern, settled world, in favour of sufferings, and the insights of mirages, and mystic union with the face of death. More deeply than any of his brother explorers, Wells had stared into the lines of that face – but it is very striking that he never spoke of what he saw there. Discreet, silent, he continued to take part in expeditions, both as a surveyor and as a prospector, penetrating into the furthest reaches of the western deserts, surviving until his seventy-eighth year, when he was fatally injured by a rail car close to his home in the hills above Adelaide.
II
For a long while after I first gained a taste for inland travel I yearned, in vain, to see those far reaches of the Great Sandy Desert, a part of Australia that remains remote and little known today, although mining and resources groups will doubtless claim it in good time, and roads and airstrips and neat, geometric towns will come to shelter in the lee of its ranges, or along its dry creek-bed banks. They have put their promissory marks on it already: in the 1960s, during a phase of fast-paced expansion in the world economy, precisely mirrored by the first years of war in Indochina, a handful of mining and oil exploration multinationals scoured the region, attracted by the reports the early prospectors had made. In their wake, these companies – Hunt Oil and Shell Oil were prominent among them – left shot, or seismic lines: sets of straight grooves drawn across the face of the desert, which remain visible today, and confront the traveller down bush roads, and convey the impression of a vanished empire’s fortified redoubts. Fitfully, over the years, the great Australian mining houses – before their absorption into global conglomerates – turned their eyes, too, on the deep desert. Western Mining, under the tutelage of the exploration geologist Roy Woodall, even developed a little copper mine near Warburton, and its survey teams found many of the ore bodies that lie along the south road through the Ngaanyatjarra lands, where the Blackstone and the Cavenagh Ranges run. There, one day soon, new mines, extracting nickel laterites and cobalts, will stretch across the spinifex, their open pits balanced by acid-leaching plants and
bright blue tailings dams. But the most poignant traces of mid-century exploration in that remote region are those left behind by the geotechnical arm of Conzinc Rio Tinto, the Australian group. Often, when I was a child, I heard that soft, sweet-sounding company name spoken, or its even gentler set of initials, CRA – and I would try to follow all its doings. I would scan the business pages of the papers, though they were far beyond me, and lean over desert maps and search them for its prospects and its mines, which were always in the centre of the remotest, emptiest spaces. For months, I pursued this arbitrary fascination, and brought it up repeatedly, only to be assured by those who knew more than I that Conzinc Rio Tinto had no distinct essence – it was just a name, a name for shares and men. The dreadful disappointment this discovery bred in me lingered in my mind long after, and when I first came across the old tracks left behind by the firm’s geologists, and a desert friend of mine beside me at the wheel of the troop-carrier leaned over and murmured the soft syllables “CRA,” I felt once more a little pang of sadness, as though the memory of some lost love was stirring in my thoughts.
Conzinc Rio Tinto exploration parties mounted several expeditions deep into the Gibson Desert, in quest of seismic anomalies or suggestive rock formations, and in the course of those journeys they left behind them fuel dumps: great 44-gallon drums of diesel, which are still lying by the tracks today. They are remembered with precision: I have seen them used as navigation aids, and doubtless they are well on the way to incorporation in the fabric of the Tjukurrpa stories, the narratives of desert people, which wash smoothly over all features, new or old, that mark and fill the landscape. It was further north, though, in Calvert country, that CRA pulled off its masterstroke. Close to the location of Joanna Spring, in country first surveyed by William Rudall – country of mauve peaks and high bloodwoods – lies the Kintyre uranium deposit, rich in ore, outcropping on the desert’s surface. The Kintyre exploration lease was long held by CRA, which decided, in a moment of lateral thinking, to sink a well nearby and install a hand-pump, bearing an inscription of goodwill from the company to the desert world. It stands there still, with its fading legend emblazoned on an iron plaque around its base, and it never fails to arouse a sense of wonder: water – salty, sandy, but water – pouring, flowing amidst the red dunes and the burnt spinifex. “CRA,” the travellers on outback trails murmur to each other at their rest stops. “CRA,” the convoy parties of desert men from Punmu and Kunawarritji call out with habitual affection as they pass.
Such were the sentinels of my first journeys through that landscape: bore pumps and discarded tyres, and the wrecked car bodies and fuel drums that lie scattered, like exotic sculptures, at strategic points all down the Gunbarrel Highway and the Talawana Track. I was travelling, in those days, with photographers and with prospectors, with anthropologists and health workers, and I soon came to think I had a fair acquaintance with that stretch of desert.
But now I look back on those trips, I wonder if I knew it in the slightest before I drove out one dry season, bound for the shore of Lake Disappointment with my friend Charlie Firns.
He was a kangaroo shooter, and he had a way of driving on constant alert, scanning the country, hunched forward, silent for hours, his eyebrows rising just a fraction, maybe, if he glimpsed old dingo footprints on the road ahead. Then suddenly, in the thick of the corrugations, he would slow and pull up, both hands clutching the wheel tight. With a grin, he would turn towards me; his pale, piercing eyes would look into mine.
“Now,” he would say in tones of triumph, over the soft throb of his decaying Mazda trayback. “Let’s just see how good you are!”
And it was my turn then to look; to gaze in all directions across the mulga, or the scrub and half-burned spinifex, searching in the glare for movement, shadow, tell-tale patterns. Nothing. I would shrug, and Charlie would shake his head: “Call yourself a bushman? Don’t you see? There!”
And he would point, and after much more prompting, I might begin to make out, hidden, in deep shade, the curved flank of a reclining animal: a young blue doe, perhaps, asleep beneath a corkwood, half a kilometre away in the curtain of the bush.
“There she is!” – and he would laugh, delightedly, and gun the engine; the kangaroo would wake in fright and leap up, and Charlie would stare after her with a kind of gentle pride for several seconds before he drove slowly on.
All through those days, during that long journey we made through the backlands, he was my instructor, as I realise now, and my interpreter, more than a mere companion on the road. It was he who brought me closest to the desert’s logic, the system at its heart, which is no system, but renunciation: order destroyed, the better to be reborn. We argued constantly, we disagreed – but his contention was a form of closeness. He was one of those inlanders for whom the country was a kingdom to be loved, protected – but explained, if at all, through tone and bearing, not in some easy, transparent narrative. And yet he led me into the glare, and silence, and slowly spread its world before me. I told myself the light had shown him a hidden language, and he knew the desert’s signs and words.
It was early, even by his standards; the dawn’s pale gleam was just showing when we set off from our first campsite on the desert’s edge, but as we drove out into the grey, a series of tales from the frontier – each one flowing smoothly into the next, each one more finely honed in its structure and its interweaving – began: his exploits while deep-sea fishing off the tip of Truant Island; his duels with killer sharks near Ningaloo; his excursions down the rig road south of Hedland, a road that lost itself progressively and ran out into salt lakes and a fine, suspended cloud of dust. And there were stranger stories still, which he delivered in his most hypnotic voice: experimental aircraft sightings in the deep country; the Min Min lights, and their underlying physics; the ghost towns and lost graves of the north.
“Are you always like this, at the start of your bush drives?” I asked him, a few hours into our journey, as we hurtled down a sidetrack towards the Canning Stock Route, and the dark peaks of the Carnarvon Range slid past. I peered at the topographic map, which was almost devoid of names or distinctive markers.
“Like what?” said Charlie.
“Endless stories, breaking off in all directions.”
I leaned back and tried to get on terms with the Mazda’s cramped seats. They were worn, their metal support frame was showing through the fabric; they jumped then slipped back into place as we took each curve.
“We can just ride in quiet,” said Charlie, sounding hurt by this. “Words can be enemies: you’ll find the instinct to talk soon burns away.” He proceeded to put this policy into strict practice: for most of the next two days, we pushed in deep, calm silence through the dead country of the stock route, past mournful wells and emaciated cattle, exchanging no more than a stray sentence here and there, until we turned off into bare, scorched desert. We struggled up a high dune in first gear. From the crest, a plain of red sand reached to the horizon.
“That’s a bleak view,” said Charlie then, with relish. “Enough to make you feel the bones beneath the skin.”
“So what makes you come out here?”
“I’ve always liked what’s far,” he said. “What’s open, and can’t confine you. In everything I do.”
“But why here in particular? What gave you the idea?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s an unusual story.”
It unfolded, in broken episodes, in the days that followed, as we explored our way amidst the creek beds and the ranges. Almost by chance, once his working days were over, Charlie had fallen into a pattern of bush travels, together with Jim Bailey, his oldest kangaroo-shooter friend. On each trip, the two pushed further out: past Lake Auld, and Scorpion Well; out beyond the survey and seismic lines; beyond the peak of Cromer Cone.
“It was really the never-never, there,” he said. “High dunes, soft sand. It was as harsh as you could like. I always thought I’d be happy, living out in that count
ry, just by myself. There’s rock-drip water in the ranges, I’d have a good tent and a gas bottle, a solar panel or two. It’s all worked out!”
“An Elysian picture!”
For several summers, he explored the margins of that world, turning over his life as he went: and often, in the range country, he found Aboriginal traces from pre-contact times. This became a compulsion with him. He would search for old campfires, caves, half-silted wells. One afternoon, on return to Meekatharra, after a long trip out, he fell into conversation with the bushman Stan Gratte. Stan recalled, at one point, the voyage that he had made in August 1977 from the nearby township of Wiluna, deep into the sand-dune country: the famous rescue mission, mounted to find and bring in the last nomads of the Gibson Desert, Warri and Yatungka, who were on the point of death from starvation after a prolonged, unbroken spell of drought. During the journey, as Gratte recounted it, the guide and leader of the mission, Mudjon, a Mandildjara man from Wiluna, led them past the Calvert Range. Gratte spotted a crested pigeon and realised there was water close by. After elaborate searching, he found a hidden gorge behind the cliff face and a deep valley full of paperbarks.
The Red Highway Page 24