The Red Highway

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Such was Helmut Petri. I rounded off my tale, which I had stretched out and interspersed with other stories of the Frobenius expedition, and the role it played as end-point of a quest. Its completion marked the end of Europe’s search for clues in the Australian mirror: clues to its own face and heart. Charlie smiled at this, and allowed the narration to sink in, as though it had been a message from vanished, far distant times.

  “That was a story,” he said in an approving way, and accelerated.

  We were travelling across high sand ridges now, thick with turpentine bush and bloodwood; they were closely spaced. The track swung sharply round, then doubled back; we rode between the dunes, down deep, twisting corridors. After some while, I began to make out a set of gaunt peaks, dark-coloured, looming in the west.

  “The country’s changing,” I said.

  Charlie nodded.

  “Strange you should say that,” he said. “Just now, especially. Maybe we are in agreement on a few things, after all. I reckon,” – this intimately, with great emphasis – “that here, right here, is one of the secret borders of Australia. You can’t see anything much, but everything’s different that side. This is where the desert ends, and the Pilbara begins. And ahead of us, you could even say, the boundary marker: Georgia Bore.”

  A sand whirlwind jumped across the track before us. The sun dazzled on the red plain; the scrub branches drooped with dead, burned leaves.

  “My God,” I murmured. “What a desolate place: it looks like the way down to the Inferno.”

  “Don’t be like that,” said Charlie, in an aggrieved voice. “It’s a regular, top-grade Canning Stock Route well. This is a good belt of country. In fact the Capricornia Roadhouse fuel dump’s just up ahead.”

  “But what if that’s what hell really is?” I went on, swept up by the landscape’s mood. We drove slowly in, over deep corrugations. “Some people think of it as a place of fire. And there’s the model of hell as a small, dark room, with confining walls and cockroaches. But what if it’s actually a bore-head on the stock route, with bare, stunted trees, and red sand all around, and willy-willys patrolling the perimeter like guards to stop any escape. What if that’s the true, authentic, modern face of hell?”

  “Wait up,” said Charlie. “Did you see that – just there? What was it?”

  He eased ahead. He reached behind me to the stowed canvas bag.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, in some alarm.

  “Look. Can’t you see?”

  He pointed. There: something, sandy-coloured – moving. We stopped. I jumped out. The scene resolved itself before my eyes. The wellhead stood at the centre of a low scrub patch; yellow growths of spinifex were dotted through the grit and sand. All round us were dead, splintered, burned acacia stumps. A rusting car body lay beside the track, and in its shade a scatter of decayed fuel drums. There were aluminium cans, swept up beside an old campfire. Strewn round on every side I noticed odd, ragged flecks of tissue paper: soiled, dirt-covered, each beside a loose, freshly excavated depression in the sand.

  “There she is,” said Charlie, in a low voice.

  I followed his eyes. In the scrub, watching us, padding here and there, was a dingo – she came towards us, she retreated; she hid, she showed herself; she stared at us with bright, pleading eyes. Charlie raised his gun. The dingo looked at me.

  “She’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  The shot rang out: the dingo, gazing at me, staggered, stumbled forward, panted, and fell. I wheeled round.

  “Why did you do that? How could you?”

  “She was beautiful,” said Charlie, in a quiet, correcting voice. “Now she’s dead.”

  I went over to the dingo and knelt beside the body. It was stretched out – her eyes were open; her tongue drooped. Her ears were still cocked inquisitively; her legs were thin: they looked almost sculpted, like the legs of some marble hunting hound. Charlie came over.

  “She’d just had pups,” he said, appraisingly, and ran his Blund-stone smoothly along her flank. “I wouldn’t think they’d have survived.”

  “You’d been waiting, hadn’t you?” I said – I was almost shouting at him: “Waiting: to show me how to take life. You were longing for it! But why?”

  My fury flared up. The sun, the heat, the bleakness pressed down: they felt like a stone lying on my heart.

  “We can give her a Christian burial if it makes you feel any better. I never take life unless I have to.”

  “And you had to?”

  “Look around, bushman. Can’t you tell? Do you really want to know what the country’s telling you? Really want to know what’s at its core? We are! Our hand made all this. There is no nowhere now.” He gestured round – his voice dropped. “Listen: you’ve got your ideas, and all your love of nature, and your soft-heartedness. But you can’t even see the world we’re in.”

  He drew himself up, went to the trayback, produced a shovel and, in silence, with a few swift, fluid movements, dug a hole. With a quick heave, he pulled the dingo’s body over, then covered it with sand. I watched, not moving, numb. I felt complicit: I saw nothing but the dingo’s eyes. We drove on. In the succeeding hours, as the road broadened, and the long, geometric fault lines of Rudall River park stretched off ahead, he laid out his argument: how the Stock Route had destroyed the desert’s equilibrium; how travellers moved up and down it in the dry, cool months, and made their campsites at its wells, and left their scraps, and this lush feast was enough to lure in animals and birds from distant corners of the desert; until the hot weather came, and the supply of four-wheel-drive enthusiasts fell to a trickle, then stopped altogether.

  “And there’s no retreat for the animals trapped there? That’s what you’re trying to tell me? They’re in a prison of our making: they all die?”

  “Exactly. Your little dingo was the last survivor, and she was on her last legs. I’ve come across that scene a hundred times. Didn’t you see what she’d been feeding herself on? Just think about it for a second. Just allow it to sink in. All that toilet paper. She’d been digging up everything those neat, well-trained, eco-friendly tourists had buried. She was living on human excrement.”

  I made my accusations, I answered him, I parried, I conceded – I let the symbolism of his picture brush through my mind. The deep desert, I then murmured, inside myself: revelations; the curtain drawn aside. The road smoothed out; the purple ranges and the mine sites of the Pilbara drew near. Above us, the grey clouds thickened. I felt, more with each passing minute, the trapping, anvil pressure of the sky.

  III

  Time passed: a month; a year. That stretch of silent country, and the various expeditions through it, and their glamour and disaster, faded from me, they lost their definition – and it was only long afterwards, when I came back from the Middle East and began travelling again, that the desert and its landscape resurfaced in my thoughts. Those days, as I described at the outset of these chapters, were ones of grief and emptiness for me. I was still possessed by the routines of war; my old surrounds seemed at once too familiar and quite foreign; I could see no pattern or path ahead in life – and if I made frequent journeys then, it was only in the hope that movement, any movement, might help me find my way back into the country. After one of these trips, which had proved especially unavailing, I drove back in to Darwin, called at the sombre, low-slung post office in Cavenagh Street, and found in my mailbox there the briefest of notes, hand-written. It had the force of a summons, or a pledge. “The landscape awaits,” it read. It was from my friend John Galvin, a lawyer well known in the west, a scholar of Pilbara history, a man with an air at once of poise and of dark, well-mastered depths. My tie with Galvin had always been close; it combined formality and a faint tone of brotherhood. I called him at once, and told him something of my mood and situation, and quickly learned that he was at a cusp-point of his own in life. We arranged to meet and set off on one of the bush trips we used to make in the years before I went away – and so it was, a week later,
in the company of a crowd of miners and oil-rig technicians, that I boarded a Qantas jet for Karratha airport, our customary starting point.

  By chance, that morning, there was a cyclone system close offshore; the flight veered inland, above the desert and the Canning Stock Route. I looked down on my old track across the dunes; I gazed down on the country with longing eyes. How austere it was, how full of grace; how unending in its scale, how precise in the repetition of its finest details. There, below me, was the Cal-vert Range and Durba Springs; there were the fine curved wisps of salt lake, like pale feathers laid upon the sand. The descent began; we banked over the Burrup coastline. I saw the evaporation ponds, the turquoise ocean, the gas plant’s columns glaring in the sun. The plane came racing in and touched down heavily, as if returning from far dimensions to the world of man. On the tarmac, I quickly made out the figure of John Galvin. He was standing at the far entrance to the terminal, tall, aloof, one hand cradling an elbow, the other resting appraisingly at his chin. He wore his usual expression: reserved, a touch quizzical. As I came up, he turned smoothly and fell in beside me.

  “The voyager returns,” he said, after a few more seconds of assessment. “‘Crank her over once again!’”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember anything? It hasn’t been that long. Our old theme song: Gene Clark – ‘Gypsy Rider.’ Put your face into the wind / Find another road where you’ve never been.”

  “That would be hard,” I said, “up here, for you.”

  “So: any wishes? Where are we going?”

  “I’m at a loss,” I said, and recognised the familiar Galvin technique: first, wrong-foot your conversation partner, then swamp him with the relentless application of detail.

  “Lucky, then,” he said, “that I have a complete itinerary planned, and a fully loaded four-wheel-drive as well, complete with recovery equipment, provisions and a moderate supply of audiovisual distractions in case you find the company begins to pall.”

  We had reached an antiquated Thrifty troop-carrier. Its front half was almost wholly concealed by a set of rusting, heraldic bullbars. They swept forward threateningly, while their spurs and supports curved round the wings of the vehicle, much like the reliefs that clasp medieval altars in a sheltering, protecting frame. The back compartment had been stuffed full with swags, spare tyres and battered metal workboxes. The roof-rack was covered over by a bulging khaki tarpaulin, from beneath which protruded the blades of two shovels, a grease-stained kangaroo jack and several loops of bright orange snatch-strap cord.

  “This is the four-wheel-drive?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” said Galvin in indignation. “It’s the only vehicle on the road intended both by its manufacturer and its owner for consistent and unyielding abuse.”

  “I notice you didn’t drive your Mercedes up.”

  “Those town four-wheel-drives are good for nothing – certainly not for where we’re going.”

  We set off, the troop-carrier vibrating passionately. The way-stages of the road flicked by: Roebourne’s old stone buildings, their fronts boarded up; the saltbush plain that leads to Cossack; the new veranda of the Whim Creek Hotel. Soon the power lines that run from Port Hedland began to shimmer on the horizon; they drew nearer, across the spinifex, then receded; vast cloud systems swept overhead. Galvin had always been a somewhat silent driver, for whom the choice of music, as a tonal adjunct to the road, was critical, and in those first hours of our journey, a swirl of sound enveloped us. The Moody Blues, Roy Orbison: it was a realm of nostalgia and regret.

  “You don’t have anything more up-to-date, maybe – or more in keeping with the country?” I said in mounting frustration, after several attempts at casual talk had died.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it,” he said, “picking up the threads of old associations. But, you know, there are some things you just have to put up with in any human friendship.”

  “Like Roy Orbison?”

  “To some degree. And besides, I think you’ll find the prevailing ethos of the music extremely well suited to our eventual destination.” Hedland loomed. We swept through its system of fringing roundabouts and railway crossings: road trains, mine trucks, Landcruisers with numbers and flashing lights.

  “My God,” said Galvin, “It’s become imperial. I remember when it was just the stockpiles and the port hotel – and even that was a hit and miss affair.”

  “You see an improvement?”

  “It always had a kind of poetry – that is, if you go in for industrial monomania – but now it has the desolation of an unfinished kingdom, don’t you think? All the portacabins, and the new street signs leading off to nowhere.”

  His voice trailed off. In the rear-view mirror, I watched the BP truck stop receding into the distance.

  “The end,” I said, “for the next 600 kilometres, of settled life. Which raises an intriguing question: where, actually, are we going? Eighty-Mile Beach? Pardoo Roadhouse?”

  “Almost!” said Galvin. “Geographically close; but emotionally far away – so no cigar. We’re heading for the lost town of Condon – the end of the old telegraph line.”

  That name was familiar, in a distant fashion: it brought up associations from long ago.

  “Is there some connection with the Calvert expedition? In fact, didn’t John Calvert end his journey there?”

  “Those fantasists! I wouldn’t worry about them. Condon was a bit more real than that. In fact, it was the key to the Pilbara for many years – though nothing’s left from the old days now. It’s the kind of place that might speak to you. It helps to open up your thoughts. In fact, it strips everything away and leaves you with the bones of things. You’ll see: here’s the turn – at least I think that’s it. The roads here wind about, but they all seem to end up at the same spot after a while. It was Quandong Inlet when they founded it – then just plain Condon: the first port on this coastline, for the wool trains from the station country. And it was a pearl-shell centre, too – plenty of grief and pain and loss of life. You would have seen old photos from its glory days. There’s one famous image, showing the sailing barque Arabella, loading wool on Condon sands. She was a tall ship, well decked-out; there was a marble fireplace in her aft saloon. She used to anchor a kilometre off the creek inlet, and sit on the mudflats at low tide. Then the bullock teams from De Grey station would trudge out and they’d load up in the emptiness – and if the tides came in too fast, they’d just unyoke the bullocks and let them swim back ashore.”

  “Quite a practical arrangement.”

  “Those tides,” said Galvin, in a low voice, paying no attention, “were well known for one thing. They came in at speed, of course, but they’d retreat very far, so far you couldn’t even see the waterline. And then, when they turned, and the water started rushing in, you could almost feel it in the silence – and at last, as the waves came closer, you’d begin to hear a distant, elusive, gentle roar.”

  We turned again; the road narrowed. It was little more, by now, than a faint suggestion of a track.

  “I used to come here often,” he then said, “when I was working up here: in my dark past! I’d heard about the place. My friends told me all about its splendour. Of course I expected something smooth and sandy, like Cable Beach – but what I found was flat harshness – samphire, salt pans, rocks. At first I thought it was hideous: pretty soon I was transfixed. I’d drive out this way whenever I could, alone, and make camp, and read, and look about. Something in the landscape got to me: there was some pull. I paid attention. I began to feel that dreadful things had happened here – and, this being north Australia, of course I was spot-on. The more I read about the area and its background, and the more I learned and spoke to people who were bush historians, or travelled up the tracks and came to know the country, the more I understood that the intuition I’d had was right. The Aboriginal population isn’t here: they’re a loud absence.”

  “But there are communities all across the Pilbara: Strelley, Yandeyarra.�
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  “Inland, yes, of course; but look around you. How lush the country here is, how rich. There’s a river; there are fish and freshwater springs – it should be full of life. I went quite deep into the records of the pearling industry and the stations; it was hard not to notice that in the old histories there were never any pictures of local people working in Condon, or in the country round about. I soon found out their fate: they were wiped out by the great influenza epidemics that hit in the early years of the twentieth century – those who hadn’t been killed or driven away before. And that’s part of the feel of Condon – for me, at least. Now look!”

  We had come out into coastal landscape. Before us, sheltered by a dark promontory, the grey shore, rock-strewn, stretched off. A spume of salt froth in the middle distance marked a vague boundary between sea and mudflat. Galvin stopped and rested his hands on the wheel.

  “The ocean!” he said with a proprietorial air.

  “It hardly looks like the edge of a continent.”

  “No. Just an infinite stillness; a stillness like a medium of sound. The silence was what always appealed to me. And the townsite itself: deserted, unmade, absent; the ruins of the wharf, a well, and nothing else. And the emptiness about it, that weighed so heavy; but emptiness is something you can turn around, after you’ve lived it, and occupied it.”