What compelled such certainty? Was it just analogy with the provision of river and lake systems in Europe? There was scant evidence indicating the presence of such a body of water. The delusion was not down to excess of imagination but rather its opposite: an inability to conceive of a void, an uncultivable interior being discordant with either God’s providence or the equilibrium inherent in nature. The late-eighteenth-century British geologist James Hutton, otherwise a brilliant mind, asserted that there were only two truly arid regions on the planet: “Lower Egypt and a narrow spot upon the coast of Peru.”
The British explorer Charles Sturt took his discovery of the Darling River in 1828 as evidence of the great sea he believed lay at the continent’s heart. “Everything tends I believe to prove that a large body of water exists in the interior,” he wrote. It was the flocks of birds he had seen flying north over Adelaide that convinced him, for “birds which delighted in rich valleys would not go into deserts.” In 1844, aged forty-nine, Sturt set out from Adelaide on his final great quest. A public holiday was designated, and crowds filled the streets to see him and his entourage off. So confident was he of the existence of the inland sea that his party carried with it a whaleboat. The expedition missed the continent’s geographical centre by a single degree, some 240 kilometres, and discovered scarcely enough water to keep his camels going, let alone float a boat. It wasn’t until 1848 that he conceded the possibility that his faith in that body of water’s existence had been “fostered by the hope that such would be the case.” When Sturt’s former surveyor, a Scotsman named John McDouall Stuart, finally reached the geographical centre in 1859, he planted on a promontory nearby a silken Union Jack—“the emblem of civil and religious liberty,” in his words—declaring, “may it be a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilisation, and Christianity is about to break upon them.”
Break upon them it would, catastrophically. Any who came upon that flag might, if nothing else, have deemed it a portent. I thought of Stuart and his men, standing by their rag nailed to its pole, and in that godless “void” delivering their three dry-throated cheers to the Queen.
It was not until sixteen years after Stuart planted his flag that Ernest Giles crossed the continent from east to west. It was his second attempt, the first having ended in what he himself called a “splendid failure” following the death of one of the expedition members. His route would take him from the town of Port Augusta near Adelaide, westward across the Nullarbor Plain. Seven months after setting out, Giles’s party arrived in the south-western coastal city of Perth. His second-in-command on both journeys was a fellow Englishman, William Henry Tietkens. During the first leg of the journey, the party detoured north from the limestone fastness of the Nullarbor Plain into sandhill country. Giles would name this great expanse the Great Victoria Desert, a dubious honour for his queen: “It was the weird, hideous, and demoniacal beauty of absolute sterility that reigned here,” he recalled, and told his companions, “we [are] now in the worst desert on the face of the earth, but that fact should give us all the more pleasure in conquering it.”
Following the party’s triumphant arrival in Perth in November 1875, Tietkens sailed to England to obtain the support of a wealthy couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Leisler, in mounting an expedition to open up the land north of Ooldea for grazing. He knew the terrain. When he returned, four years later, he would come upon his own tracks.
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ON THE EDGE of a red plain six hundred kilometres north-west of Adelaide and two hundred from the sea, a scaffold fence surrounds a low mound from the centre of which a shaft drops deep into the limestone. It is still lined with the grey timbering that was put in when it was dug 150 years ago. The fence is to stop camels falling in (camels are lacking in certain areas of intelligence). This is “Tietkens’s Well,” which was sunk with the aim of opening up the arid region to sheep-grazing. In the library in Adelaide I read Tietkens’s journal of 1879. Whereas Giles writes with the calculation of one who had been a “delighted student of the narratives of voyages and discoveries,” Tietkens’s report is terse (twenty pages or so), more brutal and more immediate, as if he is getting it off his chest. The desert is never less than a foe, and never beautiful. There wasn’t much it could teach you. The location he selected for his well lay some sixty kilometres north of Ooldea on “rich open undulating limestone downs.” “I don’t,” he added, “understand why it is called the Desert.” He may indeed have found the land rich (certainly it was more fertile then than it is today) or he may have been exaggerating for his benefactors.
Leaving his two hired well-sinkers to dig, Tietkens went off to explore the land to the west. Returning a few days later, he “had to listen to the lies and growling of the two greatest villains unhung.” The men had struck soft sand at twelve metres and the walls simply would not hold. Dehydrated, exhausted, sick of horsemeat, they refused to dig any further. “It’s with difficulty one keeps the pistol in the belt in dealing with such carrion,” reflected their employer. Finally, in disgust, he dismissed them—“clods of infamy”—and returned to Fowlers Bay for replacements.
On 22 October he was back, and overseeing the digging of a new well not far from the original one. Conditions as summer approached became unbearable, even for Tietkens, who was accustomed to the desert’s brutality. By November he was nearly blind with “ophthalmia”—presumably trachoma, a contagious inflammatory condition that continues to afflict Australia’s desert-dwellers today. “It is quite impossible to exaggerate what we suffer from the flies,” he wrote on 21 November (another Australian blight that has not gone away). Two days later, his eyes were “smarting with intense pain, the flies feeding off my hands.” His hands were peppered with sores. “I thought the sun never would have set upon this day of horror and pain…Darkness and death were a mercy, a thing to be devoutly prayed for for life is HELL.”
Nor were his troubles over. The following day the camp was attacked by a group of Aboriginal men led by one Wantem, whom Tietkens had employed to carry his post to and from Fowlers Bay:
The pistol was out in an instant and off…Following up the mailman I fired with the rifle at about 150 yards and he fell…The screaming of the women, the curses of the men was in a high key; the country around was engulfed in smoke, huge dense clouds black as pitch showing where they were sending up signals…If these people make a night attack we are most unhappily situated, for my eyes at night are now quite closed.
But there was no repeat attack; the black clouds dispersed.
By mid-December Tietkens’s men had dug to twenty-five metres without striking water. Deeper, Tietkens told them. On Boxing Day 1879, at thirty-eight metres, the well finally began to fill. Tietkens had the water brought to the surface: it was foul—salt, as desert water often is—but not so foul that livestock would not drink it. He returned to Fowlers Bay in triumph. Where there had been nothing but bluebush and mulga and spinifex since the dawn of Creation, there would soon be sheep stations, mines, townships; churches!
When he returned to the well a few months later, with twenty-five sheep, he found that the timber lining had collapsed and fine white sand was filling the shaft. The well was unsalvageable. William Tietkens was not discouraged. In January his men set to work nearby. At eighteen metres they struck an impenetrable floor of granite.
It was, Tietkens admitted, “the most bitter part of my life’s history.” His well-sinkers might have felt the same way. He returned to Adelaide, the mission to which he had devoted two years a failure.
The plain where he and the men laboured—Tietkens Plain, it is called, in tribute to their failure—remains unpopulated to this day, though you’ll see dromedary camels from time to time, descendants, perhaps, of Tietkens’s, which in turn were descended from Indian or Afghan herds imported by the British. But whereas the land in Tietkens’s time was, at least to his eyes, virgin, horribly so, today it is scarred a
nd littered—perished black cables, concrete balloon-tethering blocks, giant burial pits, hard-standings, the footings of watchtowers, and hundreds of kilometres of roads. A ruined place whose silence is less tranquillity’s than that of a battlefield where the killing has just ended.
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I HAD BREAKFAST with Céline and Greg before driving west from Adelaide. Much of southern Australia is underlain by a series of gargantuan basins created by the continent’s slumping and faulting millions of years ago. Most of the Great Victoria Desert, which straddles the border of South Australia and Western Australia, lies within the Officer Basin, which was formed between 800 million and 350 million years ago. To the south, along the sweep of coast known as the Great Australian Bight, stretches the Nullarbor Plain, a crescent strip of limestone almost undeviating in elevation and covering some 250,000 square kilometres. Once underwater, today it is as treeless as its name suggests. Its northern edge is encroached upon by dunefields, and it was these dunes that characterised much of the country I would see as I travelled north. The plain was a callused web of skin between two digits—that’s how I visualised it. At its south-eastern corner, three hundred kilometres west of Adelaide, I spent a night at the port town of Ceduna. The old military outpost of Maralinga, where I planned to be the day after tomorrow, was about three hundred kilometres north-west, in the sandhill country.
Ceduna had a parking lot with electricity hook-ups for RVs, several charity shops, and a single modern hotel whose gaudy-carpeted restaurant-bar was known to the townspeople as “the pub.” All day and night the pub was full of white college sportsmen in team tracksuits—hockey and Aussie Rules football—who occasionally broke off from bawling at one another to suck oysters from their shells. “The only people who drink Western Australian beer,” I heard one of them bellow to his teammate, “are dark in colour.”
Outside it was raining. It rained the whole time I was in Ceduna. Grey rain merging with the grey sea. When I looked out of my window at dusk the streets were scattered with destitute Aboriginal people. They came into the town centre for the alcohol and didn’t seek shelter from the rain. A bony girl of about twelve stood barefoot in a torrenting gutter and stared up at my balcony.
When I took off my boots that night a scattering of sand fell out onto the hotel bed; not the red sand of Australia but the fine grey-pink sand of Oman.
In the morning I walked through the rain to the Maralinga Tjarutja office on the edge of town to meet Roger, who was driving a delivery to the Aboriginal community at Oak Valley, four hundred kilometres north-west of here, and had agreed to take me with him. From Oak Valley it wasn’t far to Maralinga. Maralinga Tjarutja Inc. was the business founded to manage the affairs of the traditional owners of the Maralinga lands, and it was through them that I’d arranged access to the area.
I wasn’t sorry to leave Ceduna. The rain stopped after we’d driven a few kilometres, but the clouds remained. The truck’s cabin barely contained Roger’s bulk. It would take us all day to get to Oak Valley; he could have done the drive with his eyes shut. He was surly and opinionated and infinitely practical, and once he’d got the measure of me he wanted to talk. Roger, who was mixed race, had been an athlete in his youth; a cousin in Port Lincoln was a pro Aussie Rules player. A few days ago, he told me, the great indigenous player Adam Goodes, a defender with the Sydney Swans, having been booed for years by racist crowds, finally snapped and, with a traditional war cry, mimed throwing a spear at the opposition supporters. The newspapers were bewildered—where did such aggression come from?
Roger spoke about the “traditional people” with wariness; he feared them. “There’s traditional people at Yalata,” he said. “They’ll spear you if you break their law. There’s a lot of places I’m forbidden from going. Cultural stuff. Sacred sites. You gotta be an initiated man to go down there.” Chief among these places were the claypans; it was there that “men’s business”—male ceremonial activity—was carried out and ochre for body-painting gathered.
We drove west through the eucalyptus and into the endless grey of the Nullarbor Plain. In every direction grew nothing but knee-high bluebush, saltbush and samphire, a grey sea continuing for fifteen hundred kilometres west. The sky was clumped with small beige clouds that mirrored the clumping of the bushes. The only animal we saw was a halfbreed dingo that had penetrated the dog fence that stretches the length of southern Australia. He was teddybear yellow, limping; perhaps he’d been shot. The fence worked both ways, and I wondered if he wanted to cross back.
We turned off the Nullarbor road and drove north until the saltbush and bluebush gave out to the sandhill country known as the Great Victoria Desert. At a place signposted Ooldea the track crossed the transcontinental railway, which runs east–west along the bottom of the country. A station had been established here by missionaries in the 1920s. The “soak,” or spring, nearby had been a sacred Anangu meeting site for as long as anyone could remember. (Anangu, meaning “the people,” refers to speakers of several languages and dialects of the Western Australian and South Australian desert, including Pitjantjatjara, the dialect used by the people who now live in Yalata and Oak Valley.)
Ooldea had been a place of peace, where warring tribes sojourned in harmony. To serve the railway, built in 1912, a bore had been sunk and a condensing plant built. From the bore 45,000 litres had been drawn each day; the condensing plant, which purified that water, was fuelled by black-oaks felled from the surrounding sandhills. As early as 1930, the water at Ooldea was beginning to run out. The once rich land by now was stripped bare, a bowl empty of all but dust and flies. The mission persisted until 1952 when it was abandoned and its residents relocated to an unwanted sheep station 140 kilometres south, on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. This place was Yalata; and by now the land to the north—the land the Anangu had walked for at least forty thousand years—was prohibited to them. The white man was busy there.
The glory of the Australian interior is its soil. Its redness is of such ubiquity and intensity that it seems not only to stain the hands and the hair but, after a few days’ exposure, to tint the whole world for weeks, as if the cerebral cortex has been injected with a solution of carmine. When the people were dismissed from Ooldea and the desert nearby and forced to settle permanently on the unfamiliar, unstoried limestone plain to the south, which the white man called Nullarbor, they found they ailed. Pana tjilpi was what they called it: “grey earth.” “We felt lonely about Ooldea,” said one old man in 1985, giving evidence to a Royal Commission enquiry into the aftermath of the nuclear tests. “We were sad for all the places that we were related to, and we worried because these places had been spoiled…We were told we could not go back there.”
Ooldea was entirely unpopulated. Once the tests began in 1958 there was to be no return; to this day, Anangu people will only enter the test zone briefly and with reluctance. It was not until the 1980s, long after the last bomb was detonated, that some older citizens of Yalata established a smaller outpost deep in the desert, close to a string of sacred claypans, named Oak Valley: not a mission, but a village run by and for the land’s owners.
I had made a detour to Yalata the previous day, before going to Ceduna; it was a couple of kilometres from the northern edge of the Nullarbor Plain. A grid of prefabs set down in the eucalyptus scrub. A characteristic of eucalyptus is that its bark peels off in long ribbons, and at Yalata these ribbons hung from the limbs and swung back and forth under a slight breeze. There was something about it of shed skin. One of the roads had been blocked with boulders and on a wall was freshly painted “Domestic Violence! Wiya!” The police station close to the entrance resembled a Belfast checkpoint, bollarded and barricaded behind a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. It seemed to be unoccupied. Outside the community centre four women sat on a low wall. Seeing me they laughed and waved and a child shouted in Pitjantjatjara. A young bearded man in a neon tabard stood at the d
oor to the community centre. I spoke no Pitjantjatjara and he no English, but it was clear that the person I’d arranged to meet, one of the local administrators, wasn’t there. There’d been a murder, it turned out, and she was dealing with the repercussions.
In 1936 the United Aborigines Mission established a camp at Ooldea, and it continued to run a mission there until its closure in 1952. A ration depot was established, providing a ready source of food for the tribes of the desert. There was the school, the church, the children’s home. The boys and girls were given three meals a day and on Saturdays a hot bath and a change of clothes: for boys braces and a blue tie, for girls a pink hair-bow. The boys were taught to pump water and cut wood and drive horses, the girls to sew and iron and crochet. In 1944 a mass baptism occurred: “It was no easy thing for them to take this step,” wrote the UAM secretary, “renouncing the practices of their forefathers [and] forsaking the superstition of heathenism to follow Jesus.” He observed that some of the old men seemed “hard and bitter” and wondered if it was because “many of the young men had stated that they were not going to become men in the old tribal way.”
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OAK VALLEY IS a hundred kilometres north of Ooldea. The dirt road rollercoastered over the sandhills, a blazing red ribbon cutting through the shimmering green of eucalyptus. Roger leaned heavily over his steering wheel, chewing, and gazing at the corrugated track ahead. “Know what I reckon? I reckon if things keep going the way they’re going we’ll see the first assassination of an Australian prime minister within ten years.”
The Immeasurable World Page 7