Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  Another underwater city has been found off the eastern coast of India near Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu. Graham Hancock was directly involved in this find. He decided to take seriously the local fishermen’s story that when the gods grew jealous of a city’s beauty, a great flood had consumed it in a single day. Hancock’s initiative resulted in the Dorset, England-based Scientific Exploration Society and India’s National Institute of Oceanography mounting a joint expedition that discovered an extensive area with a series of structures that clearly show man-made attributes, at a depth of 5–7 meters offshore … The scale of the submerged ruins, covering several square miles and at distances of up to a mile from shore, ranks this as a major marine-archaeological discovery as spectacular as the ruined cities submerged off Alexandria in Egypt. The NIO added that this was the first-ever proof of the popular belief that the Shore temple of Mahabalipuram is the remnant of … seven such temples built that have been submerged in succession.

  Hancock has investigated other structures south of Mahabalipuram at Poompuhur; in the Caribbean; the Persian Gulf; off Malta in the Mediterranean; and in the Pescadore, or Peng-hu, Islands in the Taiwan Strait. Independently, underwater remains that may be man-made have been found off the western tip of Cuba from, it is surmised, a land bridge that may have extended as far as the Yucatan Peninsula where the Mayan civilisation had flourished. Of all these possible sites the most perplexing and intriguing is that off the Japanese island of Yonaguni at the furthest southwest extent of the island chain of the Ryukyus: once thought to be the location of Tarshish and Ophir.

  Yonaguni was an extension of the Asian continent until the seas rose as the last ice age ended; it would have been much larger then when it was part of a land bridge between the Ryukyus, Taiwan and mainland China. The massive sunken rock and stone formations now known as the Yonaguni monument surround the island. They were discovered in the 1970s by divers looking for hammerhead sharks that congregate there in winter months. Some of the structures resemble pyramids; in another part, two closely spaced pillars rise to within eight feet of the surface; there are also stalactites of a kind that form only on land. There is said to be a face on the side of one of the monuments and one of the formations, viewed from above, looks remarkably like a high-relief carving of a turtle.

  Professor Masaaki Kimura of the University of the Ryukyus believes that the structures are human built, the site of a city at least 5000 years old that sank beneath the ocean 2000 years ago. He claims to have identified at least fifteen structures off Yonaguni and nearby Okinawa, including a castle linked by roads and water channels. His ancient date for the city is derived from the age of stalactites in adjacent underwater caves. Kimura also says that he has found images of animals and people on the monument. Others, such as Boston geologist Robert Schoch, suggest the monument is made up of natural structures modified by human hands.

  There is in fact on Yonaguni and elsewhere in the Ryukyus a tradition of modifying, enhancing and improving on nature. On Yonaguni itself there are old tombs that are stylistically comparable to the architecture of the Yonaguni monument. There are also ancient human-carved stone vessels made of local rock. Beautifully crafted stone tools have been found on Yonaguni too. Schoch believes that the art and architecture of the area may have been influenced by the natural geomorphology of the Yonaguni Monument and similar structures. There may have been a complex interplay between nature and artificiality, natural forms and man-made structures, in very ancient times. Perhaps rather than being the work of humans per se, the Yonaguni Monument directly influenced the art and architecture of humans some 8000 to 10,000 years ago, thus helping to initiate a stylistic tradition that continues to this day. He allows too that there may be some kind of astronomical alignment to the structures. Ten thousand years ago the Yonaguni monument stood very close to the Tropic of Cancer. Perhaps the terraforming – if that’s what it is – of a natural structure on Yonaguni and nearby islands had, like Stonehenge, a relationship to the movements of the sun, the planets and the stars.

  OPPENHEIMER’S SUGGESTION that the lost origin of world civilisation lies beneath the shallow waters of the Java and South China Seas is beguiling but unproven and will remain so until someone finds some other undersea city there. This does not mean that it lacks credibility. Nor that it should be ignored until it is proven or shown to be false. The catastrophe as a trigger for the Austronesian dispersal is at the very least persuasive; and the focus it gives to island South East Asia as the original Hawaiki seems intuitively right and is supported by the observations of early European travellers who had the opportunity to meet peoples in the eastern Pacific as well as in South East Asia. Here is Alfred Wallace writing about the Galela people who lived at the extreme north of Gilolo, that is, Halmahera: [They] are great wanderers over this part of the archipelago. They build large and roomy praus with outriggers and settle on any coast or island they take a fancy for. They hunt deer and wild pig, drying the meat; they catch turtle and tripang; they cut down the forest and plant rice or maize, and are altogether remarkably energetic and industrious. They are very fine people, of light complexion, tall … coming nearer to the drawings and descriptions of the true Polynesians of Tahiti and Owyhee than any I have seen.

  Polynesians were also megalith builders and some of their structures, such as the Ha‘amonga-a-Maui on Tongatapu, are astronomically aligned. Marae in Tahiti and the Marquesas were monumental and often took the shape of a wide, low, flat-topped pyramid. The statues on Rapanui stood with their backs to the sea on marae platforms. Easter Island stonework is as impressive as some Inca walls of shaped and fitted stone blocks. In the western Pacific, and especially in Micronesia, there is also monumental architecture – for instance the latte pillars on Rota and Tinian in the Marianas, uprights of coral or volcanic rock with hemispherical capstones like mushrooms, usually arranged in two parallel rows. Peter Bellwood suggests, in Man’s Conquest of the Pacific, that the form is a translation into stone of the raised pile houses of island south east Asia. In the Palau Islands of southwest Micronesia stand monumental carved andesite heads and terraced hills that look like Māori pā: they appear to have served dual defensive and agricultural functions.

  And in the Carolines to the east, notably on the volcanic islands of Ponape (Pohnpei) and Kusaie (Kosrae), there are monumental ruins of the cities of Nan Madol and Pot Falat. Nan Madol, with its burial enclosure called Nan Douwas, is the most impressive. Built over a swampy lagoon of coral rubble faced with basalt walls, and especially hexagonal basalt prisms laid in header and stretcher formations, it consists of flat-topped platforms that probably supported pole and thatch houses. The gaps between the platforms are flooded at high tide and the city – more properly a town – is thus interlaced by a network of canals like a small (70-hectare) Venice. Despite various wild theories as to their origin and provenance, the structures in the Carolines were most likely locally built and probably do not extend back much beyond 2000 years. The islanders’ own oral traditions state that small canals cut into the islets allowed sacred eels to enter from the sea so that they could be honoured with the sacrifice of captured sea turtles. You can still feed eels there.

  AMONG OPPENHEIMER’S suggestions is that rice cultivation was pioneered in South East Asia and spread west from there into India and beyond. If this is correct, it’s not impossible that other kinds of knowledge, some of it not so much material as intellectual and philosophical, went with it. We can’t, given the present state of knowledge, say for sure. And the more conservative among the scientific fraternity are certainly skeptical if not actively derisive. But why not? Among the most satisfying implications of this speculation is that rumours of a Great South Land were not after all the product of delusive ideas promulgated by Hellenistic Greeks in Asia Minor and Alexandria a couple of thousand years ago but derive from an older tradition, partly oral, latterly literary: that a centre of civilisation existed far to the east of Babylon, east of Uruk and of Ur, from which both wisdom and
knowledge came.

  There have been attempts to associate Plato’s Atlantis with drowned Sundaland but they do violence both to sense and to text. The same might be said, with less certainty, of those who maintain that traces of an ancient civilisation persist beneath the Antarctic ice. And yet the Flood was real and it occurred, if not within human memory, at least in a span of time that could be comprehended by our oral traditions. This would mean that when navigators set out from the Mediterranean world, and later from Europe, looking for the fabled land, they were searching not just for a future but for a past as well. That past, if it exists, has not yet been discovered. As for the future that too, like all futures, is inconclusive; part reality, part dream, its inheritors are the mongrel societies of the antipodes: ourselves.

  Both Australia and New Zealand were imagined before they became real and both societies can be seen in terms of an ideal that, however stunted or deformed it may have become in the working out, still persists. New Zealand was Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and a nowhere, while the imagination of Australia Felix persists in spite of all opposite tendencies. This essay does not seek to close the open questions that have been asked in the previous seven; rather it looks at examples, particularly artists, of those who continue the dialogue between the real and the ideal in their work. These include, among select contemporaries such as Shane Cotton and Gordon Bennett, Marian Maguire and Fiona Hall, ancestors Sidney Nolan and Colin McCahon, each of whom set their imaginations to work on a reality that does not yet accord with the ideal that is our equivocal birthright.

  VIII

  AFTER EREWHON

  IT IS HARD TO SAY AT WHAT POINT A COLONIAL SOCIETY escapes the domination of the mother country and comes into its own. Legal changes don’t really suffice: the Australian states federated in 1901 and in New Zealand Dominion status was proclaimed in 1907; but in neither case was true independence from Britain achieved and some say it hasn’t yet been. In both countries republicans look forward to the day when the Union Jack drops off the top corner of the national flag but, equally, there are still many loyalists who dispute the need for this to happen at all. Australians sometimes say they came of age as a nation at Gallipoli, where their soldiers fought bravely in a useless manoeuvre under incompetent British leadership. New Zealanders were there too and so the myth of the ANZACs was formed.

  Recent attempts to revive this myth of origin cannot obscure the fact that the Anzacs were fighting as enthusiastic colonial troops in an imperial war and that they did the same thing a generation later in parts of Europe not so far removed from the Dardanelles. The invasion of Greece and subsequent retreat from Crete were the result of another doomed Churchillian strategy that, he later admitted, had little to do with military objectives but was of consequence only for political settlements after the war was over. It is also the case that Australians and New Zealanders first fought together many years before Gallipoli, in the land wars in Aotearoa in the mid-nineteenth century; and that, without the home front across the Tasman, the British-colonial ascendency over Māori could not have prevailed. The true birthplace of Anzac, one historian wrote recently, is not the beaches of Gallipoli but the forests of New Zealand.

  Taking a longer view you could say that the Great South Land sought in the feverish imagination of Europe turned out to be nowhere. Samuel Butler did, although he turned the word around and changed it slightly to read Erewhon. He was the son and grandson of clergymen and was expected to take the cloth himself; but Butler’s relationship with his father was difficult – He never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him … I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me – he was troubled by religious doubt and anyway wanted to be a painter. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1859 and established a sheep station called Mesopotamia, on the Rangitata River in Canterbury, which he farmed successfully for half a decade before selling up and returning to London to live an artistic life. He composed music and exhibited at the Royal Academy regularly in the 1860s and ’70s; but is remembered today not for his symphonies or his paintings but for his books. Among these are prose translations of Homer’s two epics, his autobiographical and posthumously published novel The Way of All Flesh and in particular his utopian fantasy Erewhon and its lesser-known sequel.

  Butler, wrote Kingsley Amis, saw the utopian convention as elastic enough to accommodate both … the serious-ideological and the comic-satirical, and widened it further to include adventure, preaching, wonder, terror, parody, obsession. Butler’s satire these days seems sometimes quaint and sometimes prescient. The notion that the sick should be imprisoned and the criminal hospitalised continues to resonate, as does the prospect of a Hospital for Incurable Bores. And his suggestion that machines will evolve the way Darwin said humans did has an eerie reverberation for those who believe this is precisely what is now happening – the proponents of technological singularity who anticipate the imminent arrival of computers with artificial intelligence that they will then use to improve themselves exponentially beyond what mere humans are capable of. Erewhon ends with a proposal that the British should take a light gunboat … to the outskirts of the Erewhonian country and the inhabitants be persuaded to go, or perhaps forcibly transported, to Queensland to work on the sugar plantations – as, at that time, Pacific Islanders were.

  Butler’s tone is always ambivalent, his point of view often contradictory, which has of course kept his book readable. Moreover his Erewhonians are recognisably a new kind of people, undoubtedly based upon those he met during his time in New Zealand. Kingsley Amis again: He admires their temperament … their sharp way with illness, with the unfortunate, the squalid, the difficult, the upsetting, the conscience-arousing. And above all, the Erewhonian is completely his own man, not plagued by guilt or sentimentality, instinctively doing the right thing without the intervention of sterilising, incapacitating thought. This sounds like an admittedly idealised sketch of the character of Anzac soldiers in both twentieth-century world wars; but it might also be taken as a description of actual individuals. And it may be that indications of Australasian independence from Britain should be sought not in constitutional or political emancipation but in the activities of such individuals – specifically, in this case, in the career of Australian painter Sidney Nolan.

  IN AN INTERVIEW WITH A. Alvarez in 1969 Nolan said: It’s a light that’s worthy of Dante. It has this transcendental incandescence that Dante is describing at the end of his poem. And one is always conscious of the intensity of this light, and it’s always beating on you, and the fact that you don’t have any objects, as yet, underneath that light, or on which this light can shine, that are worthy of Dante is bad luck but it doesn’t matter. There’s always the hope … that there will be psalms written, and there will be paintings painted one day that will stand up to this light. He means Australian light but he wasn’t overtly nationalistic about such things. In a diary entry almost two decades earlier, in 1952, he observed: Remember also that we are not the light: although it is always with us, it comes from afar. From Heaven, from Nirvana, from Einstein’s version of things. Each takes his pick, it does not matter, but the fundamental thing to keep clear, is that the light comes from a source that is not ourselves. And, from the same diary: I no longer wish to affirm or deny. Transfiguration is the task, and the only task. Under this light all things are equal.

  It’s difficult to imagine a figure such as Nolan emerging from any milieu other than early twentieth-century Australia. He was born in 1917 in Melbourne, the eldest child of a family that was at the time farming along the Goulburn River in rural Victoria; but the land was poor and the Nolans soon moved permanently into town where Sidney’s father, also Sidney, became a tram driver who moonlighted as an SP (starting price) bookie and, because of his illegal bookmaking activities, was later to be denied the promotion he believed was his due. The Nolans were Irish and Catholic but had be
en, as Nolan père liked to say, lapsed for 300 years. Son Sidney’s grandfather was a country policeman in the 1880s and took part in the largely futile attempts to hunt down the Kelly gang; the painter liked to joke that his grand-dad had captured the gang single-handedly. In later years his own nickname would be Ned.

  Nolan grew up in the beachside suburb of St Kilda, with its Palais de Danse and its Luna Park, its swimming pool and Catani Gardens, its pier and its view out over the flat waters of Port Phillip Bay. It isn’t too much to say that the St Kilda of his childhood and larrikin youth stayed with him for the whole of his painting life. When he was a teenager he would sometimes get up very early in the morning and go down to the beach to draw huge abstracts in the sand. Later, going to work by tram, he would look down over these drawings; later still, returning, he would see that they had been washed away by the tide. They were hieroglyphs of his own Great South Land, as mutable and enticing as the many historic and imaginary examples.

  It’s often said that Nolan was self-taught but this isn’t strictly speaking true. In Melbourne in the 1930s he took classes when he could, for instance at the National Gallery School; he was also briefly, and disastrously, employed as manager of an art school that operated by correspondence; and he worked for six years in advertising as a commercial artist for Fayrefield Hats, assisting in the design and construction of advertising and display signs, which were then sent to stores all over Victoria. Typically, he refused to wear a hat himself until the company pressured him into it; and even then wore it only from railway station to factory and back again. Nolan also moonlighted as a model, promoting the company’s products at prestigious social events. During these years he was a keen sportsman, playing table tennis and cycling in competition. He was in the habit of travelling enormous distances on his bicycle, an early sign of the restlessness that would characterise his career as an artist. As was his omnivorous study in the State Library of Victoria, where he read through the philosophy section starting, perversely, at Z.