Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  And at this point in the story Maria Magdalena Svevo broke down.

  Aljaz attempted to take the conversation into less troubled waters. ‘See we’ve got new neighbours.’

  ‘Ja, the Maloneys,’ said Maria Magdalena Svevo, ‘an Aboriginal family.’

  ‘They were all out the front drunk when I came home,’ said Aljaz with no particular rancour, then paused. Maria Magdalena Svevo looked up, then looked back down at her runners. Aljaz felt unbelievably tired. He continued talking for the sake of saying something. He felt angry, he didn’t know why. He wanted to talk about his father, but something seemed to have come between them that wouldn’t permit talk about Harry. He continued talking in the way that men on the farms and on the building sites had talked when they hadn’t wanted to think, when they had talked enough about car engines and footy and cricket and had to talk about something without betraying what they felt or thought. He thought of Harry, how he wanted to see him just once more, wanted to talk to him once more. Wanted to ask him how had the world grown to be this way, so hard. He was angry that Harry had been unable to warn him. But he heard himself saying, for want of having anything to say, heard himself saying, ‘Bloody Abos, eh.’

  Maria Magdalena Svevo looked up again. ‘You know what an Aborigine looks like?’ she asked.

  Aljaz realised he had upset the old woman. He backtracked. ‘I’m sure they’re all right.’ He stopped. She said nothing and waited for him to finish. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Maria Magdalena Svevo’s reply was some time in coming. ‘No. I mean a real Aborigine. A dinky-di Aborigine.’

  ‘Well, I spose … sure.’

  ‘Harry never told you that either?’

  ‘Told me what? What is there to tell? Everyone knows. You know, I know.’

  ‘No. No, you don’t know.’ Her scrawny hands, so wasted and withered they looked like birds’ talons, dug into the electrical-tape tapestry of the armchair’s arms; her desperately thin arms tensed and she pulled herself into a standing position. She picked up her cigar and her stainless-steel Zippo lighter and relit the cigar, inhaled, then looked at Aljaz with a great, intense curiosity. ‘Do you?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Maria?’

  But her back was to him and she was walking out of the room. Aljaz was reading a K-Mart catalogue when she came back in. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘look here.’ Aljaz looked up from the catalogue. Clutched in her bird talons Maria Magdalena Svevo held before him Harry’s shaving mirror, which had been cracked for as long as Aljaz could remember. In it, he saw his sallow face reflected, the hairline crack neatly bisecting his image. She held it for as long as he could bear to look into it, and then longer.

  Saying: ‘This is an Abo.’

  the fourth day

  Quiet.

  Then the crash of scrub breaking and suddenly I see, half shoving, half falling out of the mirror into a mass of tea-tree, Aljaz and the Cockroach looking about for a route through the dense riverbank bush, scrub-bashing their way downriver to scout a rapid before shooting it in their rafts.

  When they get near the rapid, the bank turns into a cliff and they have to swim down the side of the cliff hanging onto low-lying branches to avoid being swept downriver. Close to the rapids the cliff ends and they are able to climb back onto land and find a vantage point high enough to check the rapid. It is big, frighteningly big, nothing like the straightforward rapid it is at lower levels. They work out a line through the rapid to avoid the two major stoppers. Then they return by a long circuitous route behind the cliff to their punters who have waited in the rafts that are moored to the bank. Aljaz’s body feels more comfortable, more in control, once he is back sitting on the rear pontoon of his raft.

  ‘All right,’ says the Cockroach, addressing the punters of both rafts, ‘there is one line down this rapid, and if we mess it we’re in big shit. So when Ali and I tell you to do something, do it, or we’re all fucked. We’re not playing around any more. This is serious.’ The punters are uneasy. Up until today their river guides had seemed invincible, frightened of nothing, and it reassured the punters greatly. But this new river, these furious, confused waters that live in a wet and cold climate so dissimilar to their first balmy days on the river, this new river frightens the punters, and now, it is apparent, it also worries the guides.

  Aljaz senses the unease. He tries to soften the Cockroach’s message without lessening its import. ‘Unfortunately we have hit the river in a bad way,’ he says, ‘and we just have to make sure we somehow get down and through this thing safely.’

  When the rain comes no one comments, for it is expected and the depression at its arrival has already been met. At first the rain is light and occasional, then heavier and heavier, till it drums on the taut red hypalon of the rafts’ inflated pontoons, till it runs in rills down all their faces, extinguishes what little conversation there is between the punters as it smashes down on the river. And beneath the rubber flooring of the raft both the Cockroach and Aljaz can feel the river halting its fall and beginning to rise. They feel the river rise in the way their rafts run, in the way they glide quicker on the flat, in the way little boils appear from nowhere, in the way the waves begin to crest over the top of the raft’s pontoons, in the way eddies become more pronounced and powerful. They feel it in their arms, in the way their paddles grab harder onto stronger water and pull their forearms and shoulders. Aljaz feels it in his disrupted memories as they arrive at landmarks too quickly - first the Brook of Inverestra and then almost immediately Side Slip, and then they are in Inception Reach and they all feel it in their guts as a loosening unease. Once, not so long ago, none of the river’s features had names, and Aljaz could not help but remember his early trips down the Franklin as a youth in the 1970s, when they experienced each day as a surprise, when people remembered the river as a whole, not as a collection of named sites that could be reduced to a series of photographs. But that was when the Franklin was unknown, when it was the province of only a handful who were interested in it for its own sake. Then the developers came to dam it and then the conservationists came to save it and word of this strange and beautiful river spread throughout the country. A great battle arose and ultimately the conservationists won. Part of their winning had been to name all the river’s features, to render them citable and documentable by those who would never know them, and in that process of splitting the whole into little bits with silly names, Aljaz felt something of the river’s soul had been stolen away. Aljaz hated all the hippie names - the Masterpiece, Ganymedes Pool, Serenity Sound. But most of all he hated that while they had done something, he had done nothing.

  He could not help but remember how he had explored other rivers of the west, then watched them drown without helping them. He watched the Murchison River drown and he watched the Mackintosh River drown and he watched the Pieman River drown. He drove all the long way from Hobart by himself to watch the rivers begin to disappear on the first day the new hydro dams began to fill. Watched them begin to fill and their great gorges disappear and die and he cried and he drove all the long way back to Hobart and he did nothing. His was a memory of defeat only, and the most he felt capable of was bearing witness. So he watched, so he cried, so he tatooed all the blue and red feelings that arose within him upon his soul. I will remember, he thought as he drove all the long way home. But to what end?

  Then there was the Blockade, the battle to save the Franklin. He had walked into the greenie camp at Strahan, intending to join the blockaders. A woman with a smile as wide as those once stitched onto the faces of rag clowns, a woman he did not know, came up and hugged him. He walked out of the camp. Thinking, These are not my people. These are not my people. He did nothing.

  The rapids grow larger and run longer. What is a hundred-metre rapid in low water now runs three times that length. Too high, thinks Aljaz, too high.

  And around them the hills begin to turn into mountains as the gorge begins to bank up around them, like a wave picking up height
and power the closer it moves to shore.

  Deception Gorge, thinks Aljaz. And he laughs. And then stops laughing.

  Thinking: Too high, too high.

  Aljaz walked the streets of Hobart aimlessly, wandering through the old town’s streets, past its small stolid buildings of the state which were without ambition but retained a dour intent, past its dingy shops more akin in their emaciated displays to the shops of Eastern Europe before the wall came down than to those luxurious displays of the mainland. The whole town was poor, desperately poor, and he saw it in the eyes of the tracksuited hordes that walked by him and he smelt it rising from the gutters.

  He tried not to look at his reflection in shop windows. It means nothing at all, he thought, remembering what Maria Magdalena Svevo had told him, because I’m nothing. It’s just an idea.

  It means nothing. And on he walked.

  Aljaz walked and walked. Finally he stopped, looked up from the pavement and there it was. Without intending it, without even desiring it, his feet had finally brought him back to the home of Couta Ho for a second time since his return. He stood at the gate and stared up at the doorway. The paint - that he had painted one hot long-ago summer - was now peeling away in big blisters from the weatherboards. It had been a prosperous burgher’s house once. It probably wasn’t even so bad when old Reggie Ho had bought it. Now it was dilapidated. Would he go in or wouldn’t he? For a second time he turned and walked away.

  His guts felt bad again. He felt like a drink real bad and he had in his pocket a flask of rum that he had bought earlier in the day, after visiting the undertaker. But he did not open it. He did not. He walked on.

  So I watch Aljaz continuing to roam the streets of Hobart, seemingly without purpose, yet his feet follow a path that his eyes and mind are blind to but that is known to his soul. So I can see that it was not coincidence, though it must have seemed entirely that way - indeed, I can truly say that it felt entirely that way - that after a great deal more walking, walking that took him through not only much of Hobart but also through that afternoon and much of that evening, Aljaz found himself standing outside a pub, wondering whether or not to go inside, nervously fingering a still unopened rum flask in his pocket.

  Inside, he thinks, there will be the unavoidable problem of being recognised, of having to explain the last eight years. And he isn’t drunk enough for that. He looks up at the colonial brickwork of the old pub, now painted Irish green, and remembers the story Harry had told him about William Lanne - King Billy Lanne - the so-called last of the so-called full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines, a whaling man who worked the southern seas upon the Runnymede, who had died on the top storey of the pub in 1869. When his body had been taken to the hospital, a local surgeon by the name of Crowther snuck in and cut Lanne’s neck up its nape and pulled his skull out and placed a white pauper’s skull in its place, then crudely stitched the mess back together. Later in the same evening another doctor, Stokell, turned up with the same aim, only to find to his dismay that he had been beaten, so he contented himself with chopping off and stealing Lanne’s feet and hands for the Royal Society. The skull brought the surgeon scientific credibility, for there was much interest in Europe in the phrenology of supposed inferior and degenerate peoples. When very drunk, Harry would sometimes sing a song that swept the Hobart pubs at the time:

  King Billy’s dead, Crowther has his head,

  Stokell his hands and feet.

  My feet, my poor black feet,

  That used to be so gritty,

  They’re not aboard the Runnymede

  They’re somewhere in this city.

  Now Aljaz knew why Harry had sung it.

  Will he go in or won’t he? The pub is old and decrepit and still witnessing knife fights and broken-bottle battles. Upon its walls had once been pasted Governor Denison’s proclamation of 1848 forbidding fiddling and dancing because of their subversive nature. Will he go in or won’t he?

  And then before he could decide, before he could weigh up the pros and cons, he was stepping up through the narrow doorway, pushing past fat women in black mini-skirts and skinny men in large leather jackets. No one recognised him and Aljaz laughed at his own absurd vanity in thinking anyone any longer would. Through the shifting, steaming jackets, and past gloomy coats that leant to try and hear what they cared nothing to hear, past the eyes making all sort of motions but in which it was impossible to read anything, past the slack wet lips mouthing betrayals and the dancing dry lips, cigarette chapped, shaping inanities, beyond the smoking shuffling bar crowd jostling so close they rubbed shoulders and backs and buttocks but still managed to preserve their individual cell-hells of isolation - beyond all that, shattering the darkness, were shards of light in which a band could be discerned, sweating and playing, and no one seemed to care enough to listen. The lead singer was balding and had a paunch, the lead guitarist older and fatter with a mane of lank red hair. Behind them was draped a tatty Aboriginal flag. The lead singer introduced their next song. ‘This is about Shag’s sister who just left Tassie.’ Shag, Aljaz surmised from the direction in which the lead singer waved a beer that rolled in small waves back and forth between the walls of its glass until it inevitably spilt upon his hand, was the lead guitarist. ‘Why she leave, Shag?’

  Shag stepped up to the microphone, looked over towards the lead singer, smiled, coughed a ball of static, and said, ‘Because she reckoned Tassie a shithole.’ And as abruptly as the smile had appeared on his face, it departed. ‘Because,’ said Shag, ‘she reckoned there was no hope here.’ When Aljaz heard the sound that then screeched forth from Shag’s guitar he knew what Shag was playing upon that guitar, knew that fat old man wanted to make those strings scream: If you leave you can never be free.

  It was a dreadful noise, but there was something in it that even then I recognised. Now I know it was not a new song, but a song I had unknowingly carried within me for a long long time. But what was it? Once more I hear the lead singer, shouting, screaming, joining Shag’s guitar. Even back there in the bar Aljaz felt compelled to watch the singer’s hands, outstretched as if he were being electrocuted, watch the fat of his face wobble and his forehead sweat and the few thin streaks of hairs that crossed it grow wet with exertion. He screamed it out until he looked worse than some animal in agony. He was no longer singing for the crowd or for the lousy money those behind the ringing till would give the band at the end of the night. Nobody in that bar knew, but I know it now. That he was not even singing for himself. That he was singing out of himself and out of his soul and out of a memory of loss so big and so deep and so hurting that it could not be seen or described but only screamed about.

  Away from the crowd, hearing his screams and shrieks here in my oppressive solitude, my mind fills with a vision of when the English first arrived and the land was fat and full of trees and game. Had the loss begun at this time? When the English first saw plains so thickly speckled with emu and wallaby dung that it looked as if the heavens must have hailed sleek black turds upon this land, when they first saw the sea and the vast blue Derwent River rainbowed with the vapoury spouts of pods of whales and schools of dolphins swimming beneath. From that time on, each succeeding generation found something new they could quarry to survive. First the emu disappeared, then the tigers, then the many different fishes and seals and whales and their rainbows became rare, then the rivers were stilled under dams, then the trees, and then the scallops and the abalone and the crayfish became few and were in consequence no longer the food of the poor but the waste of the rich.

  I wonder whether the memory of loss was carried with those who had originally peopled this land. Had it begun with them fighting for the land because, although they knew they belonged to the land, the English had an idea that a single man could own land for his own advancement? Had it begun with this idea of the land not as a source of knowledge but as a source of wealth? Was it this: the white imagining, which grappled with and overwhelmed the black knowledge by claiming as its own the land t
hat lay at the root of the black knowledge? Or was the memory of loss carried with those brought here in chains, ranked up like horses and sold out to the planters to plough the island they now called Van Diemen’s Land? Or was it something the convicts and blackfellas shared, that divided them yet might one day bring them all together?

  The singer picks up the microphone stand and slings it across his back, wearing it as if it were a crucifix. He sways dementedly, arches his head back and screams once more. His screaming comes from the heart of the loss and his scream pierces even this water around me now and fills it and fills me with the keening and lamenting and praying of all who filled the island prison as convicts, all those miserable bastards, all my poor forebears.

  And then something rises up from these furious waters, and the singer’s scream and the scream of the past and my own agony become one and the same. More than a vision, it is an all-encompasing madness which I cannot escape. The Van Diemen’s Land that bubbles like boiling blood in my brain was not a world, nor even a society. It was a hell. Who would seek to change hell? I witness how the most ambitious only sought to escape it, by boat if possible, by death if desperate. I see how many convicts died, by their own hand, by the hands of others, by sickness. How many more felt something within them break that could not be fixed by conditional pardons nor healed by time, and they knew it could not be fixed or healed and they knew themselves to be somehow less. And after the English government stopped sending convicts and after they stopped sending the gold to pay for the upkeep of the convicts, the island entered a long winter of poverty and silence.

  Nobody spoke. Unless it was to lie, nobody spoke.

  The singer screeches now, and where his screech becomes so high pitched that it can no longer be heard, there is the most terrible silence. A silence that takes its form and its energy from a lie.

  The lie that the blackfellas had died out. That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions. A great many blackfellas had been killed, even more destroyed by the physical diseases and spiritual sickness of the Europeans. A great many ex-convicts availed themselves of any chance to leave the island prison, so many that the prudish people of the colony of Victoria passed a law forbidding them to emigrate to that land. But at the end of it all most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night fell they slept together, some openly, some illicitly, but whether they slept together out of shame or pride or indifferent lust the consequence was the same: they begat children to one another. But the lies were told with sufficient force that for a good many years even the parents remained silent, and whispered their truths only occasionally, and then only in the wilds where no one could hear, or in the depths of drink when no one would remember.