The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

“And that was it,” said Charlie. “When Stan told me that, it was as if a key turned. I realised that the desert was full of secrets, if you knew how to find them – full of life.”

  He decided at that moment to make a journey of his own towards that country, across dunes and ridge lines, and he reached those ranges – although it was plain to me that the journey he was describing had found its fullest realisation in the realms of metaphor.

  “I suppose all that surprises you,” he said then, sadly, reproachfully. “In what way?”

  “I can tell. I know – you didn’t think I was like that.” Charlie stopped, and switched off the engine. “You thought I was just a roo shooter, didn’t you? – a redneck, without an idea in my head.”

  “I hadn’t really got that far,” I answered.

  “I don’t care, you know, any more, what people think.”

  “I imagine,” I said, cautiously, “it’s a profession that would give you a certain perspective on life and death.”

  Charlie began shooting in 1961, together with his older brother, in the Gascoyne, on the pastoral leases surrounding the Kennedy Range. They would drive out together and shoot kangaroos for seven or eight nights straight, the time it took to fill the freezer on the back of their Holden ute.

  “Six hundred and fifty, we’d reckon on. We used to get eight pence a pound, and that was good money in those days.”

  “You must have had a talent for it.”

  “Not at all: I wasn’t an exceptional range shooter. But my aim’s true. If you hold a bottle up at a hundred yards, I’ll shoot it clean out of your fingers without blinking an eye.”

  “I think I’ll take your word for that,” I said.

  “Once,” Charlie went on, meditatively, “I got 167 roos out of 167 bullets. Often, you’d get a 60 or 70 streak going, but that was the highest. Don’t look like that! It was your work. You didn’t think about it. But then sometimes you’d wound one, and you’d almost wreck your truck, trying to chase him and kill him because you didn’t want him to suffer. I used to reckon a head shot wasn’t as good as a heart shot. Now, though, they’re all head shots, and a lot of poor bloody roos get their heads half blown away.”

  “At least you wouldn’t have gone hungry.”

  “Oh, we never used to eat them while we were shooting. That took too long. You’d work all night, and have a huge breakfast; you were working eighteen hours on the run. I don’t eat them that much now, they’re just not for me. Camels, sometimes: the meat’s a bit tough, but you couldn’t tell it from beef. Donkey’s alright, too, a different taste. I wouldn’t go near horses, though: they stink.”

  And Charlie hurried on, in learned style: the best technique for donkey culling; the correct disposal of orphaned joeys; the way to dress a fresh roo carcass at top speed. I listened, rather swamped by this tide of carnage. He caught my expression.

  “What’s the matter? I thought you told me you were a foreign correspondent. You should be used to blood and death.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I am. It’s just that animals seem more defenceless. Anyway, we’re in the right country for you. That’s Skeleton Pass, there, dead ahead – maybe you should put in a native-title claim.”

  “Native title!” he said, in tones of outrage.

  “It’s not a form of land tenure that you favour?”

  “Who could ever fence this country, or divide it up? Who would ever think of it? Just look: it’s nothing; it’s freedom. It belongs to everyone.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “title over the Sandy Desert was granted by the Native Title Tribunal earlier this month: exclusive possession. I checked before I left.”

  “Are you trying to tell me I’m committing a crime now by coming out here? And who called it Skeleton Pass? That doesn’t sound like a very traditional name.”

  “Well, I may be able to shed some enlightenment on that front at least.” I reached for my copy of the Calvert expedition journal, which I had been struggling to read in tandem with our progress.

  “Not that expedition again!” said Charlie, in a voice of scorn. “What’s so important about who’s been here before anyway? We’re not doing some re-enactment journey. I don’t understand why you always want to see what they saw. They were then. We’re in another time. I don’t even like the idea of people having been here. I hate seeing my own tracks in the landscape: they’re intrusive – I wish they’d vanish behind us the moment we drive past.”

  His words fell through me. I looked down, as if from some high point of vantage, on my younger self: on the days when I used to pore over the exploration journals and their charts and engravings; when those clipped, repeating entries seemed the peak of tension for me, and the abrupt, florid outbursts of landscape description reached into the realms of the sublime. We made camp, in silence. Night fell. Along the horizon to the west, a bushfire was burning. Its flames jumped and danced, rising, vanishing, then leaping higher, like the prominences seen when the moon’s disc conceals the sun.

  “I used to think,” I said after a while, carefully, “that the explorers were the first real writers of the landscape. They knew it, they loved it as much as they hated it – they studied it. They opened a kind of way for us to be here.”

  “Of course they studied it! They had to, or they would have died. I don’t need anyone to open the way for me. I just decided to come out here, and I did – and found what suited me. They brought all their illusions with them.”

  “And you have none, about the desert? None at all?”

  “The desert’s just a screen for life and death,” he said. “That’s what you should be looking out for. You see everything here for what it is. The order’s perfect. There’s no mistakes. A hawk dies, the other hawks eat it. A crow dies, the other crows eat it.”

  “But that’s not true,” I protested. “I’ve seen them in mourning, when another crow’s shot or run over. They all gather and stand around, and lift up their heads, and make the most heartfelt, unearthly cries.”

  “And where did you see that?”

  “North Star – outside Moree, in New South Wales.”

  “They’d have different standards over east,” said Charlie, with a note of victory in his voice. “Out here, the desert only has one lesson: life’s the way it seems, and when you can’t see the hills for the mirages, it’s the mirages you have to steer by.”

  “A very philosophic take on things.”

  “What other kind would you expect? Isn’t everyone who comes out here a philosopher? And isn’t that what you’re here for, really: not just the landscape – not what’s here, but what’s behind it.”

  Those words of his came back to me some days later. We were in deep desert. The strange sense of harmony that springs up when two travellers ride through empty country had emerged: long, mazy conversations would begin, then die away, only to resume, hours on, almost in mid-sentence. The drive was becoming dreamlike: I found myself lost in memory, and worlds I moved in long before. The most vivid, lifelike pictures took shape inside me: whole imagined narratives unfolded, vanished, then reappeared, advanced in their progress, as though I had missed a vital scene or two. Repeatedly I would close my eyes, and surrender to this drifting carousel – then open them, and be shocked by what I saw around me through the windscreen: red plains, the horizon ringed by dark mesas and red, crumbling cliffs. The sun beat down; the engine pulsed. Drowsily, from time to time, I heard Charlie’s voice. His exposition came circling round: the bush world: its harshness; the need for precision in all one did.

  “The precision of an accurate shot, you mean,” I put in.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “So you’d be fairly relaxed, then, about taking your own life, if it ever came to it?”

  “Man’s an animal, and he returns to earth. We come from earth, and return to earth. Of course I’d be relaxed about it. But I’d want to do the job properly. I might even use that rifle there, behind you.”

  I craned round and not
iced a slender canvas bag protruding just beside my head.

  “For sentimental reasons?”

  “Of course: it’s a .243, made by Carl Gustaf of Sweden. It’s a beautiful rifle.”

  “Do you have many others?”

  “A muzzle-loader shotgun, a single-shot Lithgow, two target rifles – oh, and there’s a double-barrel Hammer shotgun too.”

  “And that would cover most eventualities?”

  “Not really – it’s a basic selection.”

  He broke off. We passed over a crest line. The country changed.

  “Now look at that,” said Charlie in a soft voice, his manner quite different. “Isn’t that a sight? It reminds me of the hills of the south-west when I was growing up. I remember when I first came out here, with Jim, years ago. We both took a deep breath when we came over that ridge. I felt it was the promised land.”

  He pulled up. We were in a bowl of red, crenellated ranges; thin, grey-leaved grevilleas and twisted corkwoods filled the valley; grass, tall, pale green, waving in the breezes, stretched away.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked – and at once I knew we were in his chosen corner of the desert: the place he most loved, and lived for, and saw in his imaginings. “I wouldn’t think many outsiders have ever been here,” he went on. “Aboriginal people, plenty, the old ones. There’s a ravine back there with trap water, and a walking track, a back way through the range, with paintings all along it, and there are grinding stones, too, in the cave up there.”

  “You know it well.”

  “I’ve looked around,” he said, almost blushing with pride. “It’s different here from other places. I was talking, once, to an old botanist at the museum in Perth, and he told me there are parts of the desert, far out like this, where the country’s unspoiled. No cattle have ever been there. The ground is still the way it was: soft and springy. And you can feel that here. There’s nothing alien: no plant that doesn’t belong. Nothing foreign in the landscape.”

  “Except us.”

  I walked away from him into the shadow of the headland, and leaned back there, in the sun – and after some moments, the light, the warmth and the sound of the soft wind in the grevilleas transported me. I was once more in the valleys I knew in childhood, far away: the distant roofs and fir-clad hills seemed close enough to touch; the peaks beyond them were still and white against the sky. From the grounds of the hotel, it was the briefest of walks into the forest, where the wide paths led downhill to the Cauma Lake, and beyond to woodland clearings, where no one went. And there nothing could be heard but birdsong, and the clouds in their silent movements passed overhead. But there were days when I explored further, in the long, still afternoons when I was free – and once I even made my way down winding paths, half-overgrown, until I reached the cliffs above the Rhine, which, at that point in its journey from the glaciers, flows through a rift fringed by dark ramparts – and along the edge a pathway had been made, as much by goats as men. It was narrow: there were points where one had to cross thin ledges, above a sheer drop, and hold tight to the rock face, until the path broadened, and only then, after a last flurry of twists and rock-strewn turns, did I reach the pasture straight ahead. It was filled with flowers, and above them hovered clouds of looping, dancing butterflies: blues, and purples, pale yellows and swallowtails. I still see that sight in my mind’s eye, with exact recall, though so much one loves in life goes rushing past and leaves no trace. I see myself running back to the park hotel, up the forest paths, and searching for someone to tell my news – but I found only my friend Vicky, the cartoonist, a man of kind and fragile bearing, who had that summer begun holidaying with us there. I told him, I described the scene to him with every detail I could muster, I poured out all my joy and agitation – and he, as was his habit when I came to find him, produced a blank pad of sketching paper, leaned back in his chair and began drawing. With a few curving, fluid motions, as I leaned over at his side, he conjured up that valley and its dancing, coloured cloud of butterflies – but they were transformed by his hand, they had become more perfect, the patterns on their wings were blurred, and smudged, and shimmered more brightly than in life. “Something like that?” he asked, and tore off the sheet of paper with his customary flamboyance, and placed it in my hands – and as he did so, I had a sense of darkness in the world: at that moment, I knew there would be no more summers with him there, in that wide valley – and I was calm and quiet, next year, on a cold February day, when I was told the news that Vicky, who saw the line of truth in everything, had taken his own life.

  “You’re far away,” said Charlie. “Very far.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “I am,” – and I laughed a little at myself, at the strength of what I remembered, and what it was that came to mind. “That’s true. I was looking back. Back to somewhere I was very happy, once – and sad, as well.”

  “They go together,” said Charlie. “This place does that to you. It’s nothing, and it gives you a universe – it fills you up with dreams and memories, if you stay here long enough.”

  “Time to keep moving?”

  “Of course: next stop, Lake Disappointment.”

  “A logical progression!”

  And he was as good as his word. Some hours later, after further duels, and silences, and brief snatches of soft discussion, the Mazda, just clicking over its quarter-millionth kilometre, lurched over a dune summit, and the great salt surface of the lake loomed.

  “There she is,” Charlie called out. “A world of emptiness. The country you were looking for – at least, if you really wanted the end of the line.”

  “And who gave it the name?”

  “Don’t you know anything? I thought you were the expert on all that history. It was Frank Hann, of course.”

  “The Queenslander? Who walked off Lawn Hill Station and overlanded all the way across to the Pilbara? The one who crossed the Leopolds and opened up the North Kimberley?”

  “That’s him. I’m not too good on the timing – he passed through some time in the 1890s. He was flat broke, finished, at the end of his tether. I think he was looking for new country, out of Nullagine.”

  “And so he came here?”

  “He was out this way. I suppose, like everyone, he was hunting for salvation of some kind. It must have been a very good season: he saw all the creek beds, winding down towards the lake, and he had the hope there might be water somewhere on its bed – he looked and looked, but what he found was what you see.”

  All round us was red sand and bleached spinifex. On a promontory above the salt flats were old, gnarled desert oaks, trailing their windswept leaves. Bushfire smoke was rising and unfurling on the horizon; the sun came beating down. Ahead, the lake’s white, dazzling surface glittered: it was too brilliant to look at; it caught and magnified the glare. On the far shore, where the red line of dunes merged with the distance, mirages – vast, troubling likenesses of ships, or breached, decaying castles – boiled away. In the view, there was that mingling of quiet and anguish that the far deserts hold. The compulsion, too; the urge to look. Come, the landscape seemed to say: come – come closer; dissolve; let the whole world slip and go. I dragged my gaze away. I shielded my eyes.

  “He was picking up on something, though,” I said, “wasn’t he? Something real: a mood, a tone.”

  “It’s just country, like anywhere,” said Charlie.

  “That’s not what Aboriginal people used to think. They could feel things, here. They were afraid of it: in fact, it filled them with grief and torment, if you really want to know – this whole region of dry lakes and dead river systems. They avoided it at any cost: they thought there were malign spirits here, and dreadful water snakes beneath the surface of the salt.”

  “Whoever told you that?” asked Charlie.

  I glided by this question and began, instead, to tell him the tale of Helmut Petri, the German anthropologist, whose greatest breakthroughs came in remote Australia, though his name is largely forgotten in this country
today. Petri, a linguist of extreme gifts, arrived in the far north-west in 1938, at the head of a rock-art expedition dispatched by the Frobenius Institute, and he was able to complete a single, rich season of field research, travelling from Broome to Munja, and across the Kimberley, before his return to Frankfurt the following May. Within three months, war broke out on the Polish front. It was only after enduring six years of military service that Petri was able to resume his tasks of science, but his research material had been largely destroyed. The Frobenius Institute itself had been annulled by bombing raids, and when Petri was at last able to publish his bleak ethnographic masterpiece, The Dying World of Western Australia, he regarded it as no more than the damaged torso of the work he once hoped to write.

  It is, in fact, a piece of literature, drenched by Petri’s experiences of war and Europe’s fate. It discerns, in the world view of Kimberley Aboriginal people, a tone of deep pessimism, together with a conviction that the end of the world looms, and will surely come if their new cults are not perfectly maintained. Petri formed a keen interest in these rituals, which he was seeing during their first, devastating northward spread. Kimberley people knew them by the generic name warmala – that was their place of origin, war-mala, mysterious country, far away. It was a word of power, spoken in fear – but Petri soon found that it held such terrifying associations only in the far north. Among the coastal peoples at Lagrange Mission, where he based himself on his first journey back to Australia, in the 1950s, the word was merely a directional term, pointing to the desert country beyond their reach. In western desert languages, though, warmala describes the revenge parties of marauding warriors, on their march across the landscape, armed with spears – and these spirit beings, which hover between the realms of myth and fact, often take the guise of young desert oaks – trees which, with their slender trunks and trailing, tress-like foliage, do, in certain light conditions, bear a sharp resemblance to the human form. Through the whole western desert, the warmala parties were feared; and one still enters at one’s peril certain large stands of desert oaks, such as the avenues near Docker River, or the valley where several lines of warmala trees join up, close by the Patjarr waterhole. Beyond this, though, the warmala by their sheer presence set their seal upon the landscape, they give it a gravity, and a disquiet, which has seeped into the desert’s religious tradition – and it was this strain that Petri caught, and that found an echo in his mind, torn as it was by his memories of war and his sense that civilisation would not hold. For the rest of his life he maintained his links to Lagrange and Beagle Bay; he wrote ethnographic papers of great intricacy and strange predictive force, as if the powers of foresight possessed by the Australian magic men he studied had somehow crept into his heart. He died in 1986, in Cologne, his native city, which had been quite pulverised by bombs and rebuilt in new form. But the cults he gave his life to had subsided: the darkness the desert landscape transmitted northwards now lives on solely in his words.