Cape Grimm

by Carmel Bird

  Michael works at his forest business most of the time, and he is always on the telephone, or away somewhere on important forest matters. He has a computer in his study and he prints out pages and pages of information that is sent through the computer by electronic mail. People from all over the world, but mostly in parts of Tasmania I think, gather information about the dangers to the forests, and they send them to the computer here. It seems exciting and mysterious to me, and I really love the idea of someone in somewhere like Greenland typing a letter to Michael, and sending it zap-zap-zap and zing-zing-zing through time and space quick as a flash, until it ends up in Transylvania and he can read it on his screen and print it out and file it in one of the big wooden filing cabinets in the hallway. All these documents and many of the conversations in this house are about the old-growth forests and the problems of woodchipping and logging. ‘Green’ is the most important word in our vocabulary. Green is good and logging is evil. How quickly I seem to have adapted to new ways of thinking and being. I have learnt to watch the clock on the kitchen wall and to measure time as Gilia and Michael and Father Fox measure time.

  When I lie in bed at night, in this dark corner of the earth, in the solemn, starry silence of the forest, far far away from the troubles of the outside world, I can always hear, somewhere in the distance, the roar and grind of gears as trucks go up and down the mountain roads, great snaking, thundering, fire-breathing monsters loaded up with stacks and stacks of fat raw logs from the forest. There is a droning and a roaring, a relentless gorrrrrrh. The noise is the sound of the lazy hungry rage of a huge wild beast that roams the darkest night, seeking smaller animals with sweet flesh and delicate soft bones—travellers, children, babies, honeyeaters, fish, dragonflies—and the monster will open its jaws and swallow them whole or will chomp them with the saws of its sharp and gory teeth. It is difficult to imagine that there is a driver, a human being in the cabin of the truck, since the trucks have a life of their own, and they resemble enormous scaly medieval dragons, lumbering about eating up whole mountainsides of trees, snorting, snarling, slicing, biting. They hide out in caves larger than it is possible to imagine, leaving great steaming droppings that wipe out whole towns, cathedral spires poking up through the middle of the stinking mess with the shiny cross on top, like the decoration on a cake. Gipsies selling holy statues outside the cathedral are drowned in the dragon droppings, and little wooden images of El Niño float quietly to the surface and peer out at the sky.

  Maidens in flimsy yellow-kid slippers and white dresses of swishing silk with thick blue-satin sashes and wreaths of fleshy rosebuds are sent up to the cave to keep the dragon’s appetite down, and this slaughter will not stop until there is a special knight who dares to come and kill the beast. History sometimes follows a very repetitive and well-worn narrative. Today the wild old forests of Tasmania are at terrible risk, and Michael and Gilia and Father Fox are part of a group that is fighting to save them.

  Old stories—stories about the shipwreck. I can sometimes dream of that night of the wreck—and how Niña was thrown from the drowning ship and landed on Puddingstone, and also stories about the wars between the shepherds and the sealers on one side and the Aborigines on the other. These things are traced through my sleeping hours, inhabiting my self as I dream. Niña is one of my ancestors, and so on one side of the family we do not really know who we are, since her identity was lost. Gilia has told me that with the latest scientific ways of reading the blood it would be theoretically possible to find out who Niña was. But where would you begin? And I ask myself the question—do I really want to know who Niña was?

  In waking dreams I am sometimes aware of the presence of Niña as a child on the beach. She runs down the sand as far as the water’s edge, and then she stops, and stands there in a long white dress, staring out to sea, with the little bracelet of animal sinew and the arm of a china doll. In this vision she never speaks. Then she fades. I do not know exactly what to call these things—are they hallucinations—should I just call them ghosts? It seems to me there is no word for the images I see. They are presences that visit me from the past and they frighten me, but not because they are frightening, but because I am helpless, impotent, unable to assist them, or even to cross the barrier between real and unreal that separates us. What is real? Apart from Niña, my only other waking dreams have been of the ghost of one young black woman who was shot by a sealer and drowned while trying to escape. Her name is Mannaginna—she told me her story on one still, still evening as we sat together in the shelter of a shallow cave halfway down the cliff. It was a desolate yet familiar and comforting place. It was the first time I had met her, a soft rain was drifting, clothing the world, and there was a feeling of menace in the air, a sense that something was about to happen. Such feelings come to me, and the messages they bring are seldom false.

  I am sitting in the cave that is a place to which I go, a special secret place. The black girl swims towards me, beseeching me for help, and whispers a word that sounds like ‘Mercy’ over and over again. Even though she is far below me in the water I can hear her whispered moans and sounds and words as they climb through the air towards me, up the cliff. Ladders of whispered words ascend the split and crumbling battered flecky stoneface of the crenellated cliff. And as a strange reddish light descends on the hills behind me, and as a low whistling rustle shifts through the gorse, and as a sharp little wind flurries up, Mannaginna rises from the waters below and materialises quite suddenly in the cave where I am sheltered. I feel no fear and I feel also that she is comforted by my presence. I hope I comfort her. We sit in the cave, side by side, facing out to sea, thinking together, silent as ghosts. Ghostly tears roll down her face, my own cheeks are wet with tears and the air seems to tremble, to quiver around us in a haze of terrible sadness. We trickle sand and shells through our fingers, we gather energy and then we collect pebbles from the dry floor, and we hurl those pebbles out, out into the ocean. A hundred rolling pebbles flying out across the spectral air, slicing the sky, then plunging to the ocean, penetrating to the heart of the deepest silky sea. Mannaginna is no ordinary spectre. Did I dream this, Mannaginna? Black girl, did I dream you? You show me the tracks of ants, you lead me to the nests of strange and edible insects. You teach me the names of trees, of winds, of mysterious pathways. I touch your hand and it is real.

  The pebbles we throw stir up a whole theatre of the imagination, of the memory, of the dream as they slice the sky and split the water. Often in the sea air I can smell the scent of violets—the sea has a dark-blue perfume, sombre and sweet, creeping into the recesses of my memory and imagination. We look out to the horizon and we see tall ghost ships sailing along with purpose and intent just behind a scrim of gull-grey drizzling gauze. We see small flashes of the red coats of the soldiers, we hear the sound of guns, the rough cries of the men in chains, the lofty ideas and the practical measures, and the jokes and the miasma of disease. We see a company of black men on the shore, throwing spears, we see black women who are stolen, and black women who are pleased enough to leave the tribe to travel with the sealers. We see black people making sad mistake after sad mistake, and white people making different violent sad and mad mistakes as the chaos grows and the rain falls and the animals flee and the forests fall. And swiftly death comes to haunt the tribal lands, death in the guise of war and of disease and sorrow. We watch it as it happens. It is as though the sea before us, the hills around us, are a floating, drifting, open stage, and the things that happened here can be played upon that stage to those with eyes to see and hearts to understand.

  We see the things that happened here, and that still haunt the cliffs and hills. I have heard people say that it is not what happens to you that matters so much as how you respond to what happens. But how would anyone respond? In truth how would people react to those mysterious powerful phantom gliding great swan ships freighted with surprise and misery and death, death by the strangulation of starvation and poison and the raging fever of dismay?
If strangers suddenly have the power to inhabit the land and take the wives and kill the children, how do the people respond? How would a man respond if his wife had tiptoed out one night to join a murderous crew of raucous sailors clubbing seals? The moans of sorrow and despair curdle the craggy darkness beneath a greystriped marbled sky.

  Like George Augustus Robinson, I hear the shrieks of the mothers, the cries of the children, the agony of the men. And I see the people, and I see the massacres, and they move across and through the phantom landscape of my sight.

  The images fade, the moans, the cries, the whispers die away. I am a dreamer, but Mannaginna herself is not a dream. I sense in myself a great, great longing to merge with this dark bright spirit who sits beside me in the cave. But the sky turns to ivory and lilac, the gorse on the hill darkens, the gulls wheel and call their empty mournful call, mist begins to cloud the horizon, and Mannaginna slips without effort into nowhere, merging with the thickening air, dropping like an invisible feather onto the surface of the ocean. She is gone. The beautiful pain of this absent vision, this hallucination, this quiet visit stays with me for hours and hours, for days, paralysing and infecting everything I try to do. Only a few times has this happened, but Mannaginna is part of my life, part of my soul. I try to think of all the words I know for ghost—is she a phantom? Is she an apparition? I suppose she is all those things, and none of them. She is fifteen years old, and tiny, and beautiful. Her eyes, even though they are the eyes of an apparition, glint and glitter, they are black, gleaming, gliding in their gaze, shifting brightly, sadly, across her world. I think she resembles Trucanini, from pictures I have seen, and from descriptions I have read. They are from different groups, different peoples, but the girl who sat beside me in the cave up above the ocean could almost have been Trucanini, the ghost of Trucanini when she was young.

  The last time I saw Mannaginna was a long time ago now, I must have been only thirteen myself. Without her I have never had the power to see the ships and soldiers and tribes of men and women and their struggle. Perhaps I will never see them again, will never again see Mannaginna. But I will never forget. I have told no-one about all this, as it seemed to be correct, to guard the knowledge of something that is really beyond words, beyond understanding, which seems to me to be sacred in ways that I do not understand, that I can not explain, that slip away from me even as I try to recall them. It is pointless to try to tell anyone such stories, for who would believe? Who could believe? I know I have been honoured in a strange way, honoured, yes, that’s what it is, honoured. And gifted. I can only treasure that fact.

  I don’t believe that Mannaginna will ever find peace, will forever and forever haunt the ocean and the cliffside. She will never find peace; I will never find peace. My life is a tattered epilogue to the theatre of the holocaust that is itself a flaring epilogue to the story of the disintegration that began—oh, but who can say where such things begin?—even before the Iris disappeared in Bass Strait, before the whalers and the sealers and the soldiers and the farmers came to Van Diemen’s Land. Where in the world do stories begin? They begin, I believe, in the air, and in the waters of the ocean, in the rocks. Thoughts of Mannaginna bring up in me thoughts of my own deep, deep sorrow, a sorrow that I can not even name.

  These are strange thoughts of how and when things start to go wrong, start to crack, start to unravel—there must be hundreds of ways to say this, and none of them means what I want it to mean—when things collide and start to disintegrate there is nothing you can do but watch it happen. You learn to watch as I learnt to do in the cave beside Mannaginna, to watch as we watched the theatre of dreams. For when the ships with their cargo of soldiers and sailors and prisoners entered the horizon, the moment of fracture before the violence and before the disintegration had arrived. But the ships had been coming for a long long time. The idea of the fatal visit had been some years building in the minds of the great swan ships and the people who sent them here, and the ships themselves had been out upon the water for many months. But Mannaginna and her people were not expecting the visit. They were not prepared for the world to change.

  The land where I grew up was always haunted. And now in recent times it must be inhabited by the ghosts of all the people who died in the fire at Skye. And my own heart goes round and round in dervish circles, flying round the world like a moonbird seeking a home. For this house in the forest with Gilia and Michael is not to be my home forever. I must discover how to seek a home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Ghosts of Suicide Bay

  ‘The only object of the early colonists was to stamp the natives out. The settlers would surround their camps by night and destroy every man, woman and child.’

  MRS CHARLES SMITH, from The Westlake Papers of 1908–1910 (edited by N.J.B. Plomley)

  After reading Virginia’s story of the ghost of Mannaginna I began thinking more about the sorrowful history of the northwest of the island. Flocks of sheep and their shepherds gather by the remote stone huts where the shepherds live. Fur seals and elephant seals move in the seas and on the islands around the coastline of Van Diemen’s Land. Swirling shifting shawls of shiny iodine-brown seaweed, slap in drifting straps and beaded chaplets through grey waters, against silvery-blue rocks. The empty sky, the stretch and curve of empty ocean dream of long ago. And long ago men in small tough boats came to harvest the seals. Pale eyes looked out from the bearded weathered faces of these white men of enterprise, bright dark eyes glittered from the black faces of the black men. One group carried guns, the other spears. The white men were expecting to find the black, with their strange habits and ways, but the black men had not expected to see the white, with theirs. It took almost twenty-five years for the blacks to realise they were going to starve, and for the whites to realise that the blacks of Van Diemen’s Land could be more than a tedious nuisance, could be a serious threat. The sealers and the shepherds were trussed up in dark wool jackets, thick hide boots. Except for some animal skins, the black people were naked, their bodies strong and lithe, the hair of the men in ringlets dyed red with precious ochre, resembling the dreadlocks of the 1990s. The breasts of the women were gloriously visible and inviting, decorated with sinew necklaces hung with little shells and seeds that were polished from gentle contact with the skin.

  Little details gleam out of a mist of lost stories and lives, and I see the shepherds, the sealers, the tribesmen and women as bleary smudges in a faraway landscape that sits, looms, hunches, weeps in a forgotten corner of the past, not quite real, not quite invented, less defined than a well-known fairytale or the story of Adam and Eve.

  The forlorn and ragged end-of-the-earth cliffs at the northwest corner of Van Diemen’s Land are soaked in the mingled nineteenth-century blood of white and black. Long before the incredible tragedy at Skye, Europeans came here at the very beginning of the century to kill the seals that bred on the islands. I have read no documents written by sealers, who were not a reflective or literary lot, but I have seen in the library in Hobart diaries and other accounts giving testimony of violent, desperate, half-crazed creatures of the wild waters who would club the animals like so many giant flies, shoot the black men, steal and rape the black women, and keep those women chained up in caves on the islands. There are accounts of strips of black women’s flesh being eaten round the sealers’ fires. This earth, these waters are stained bloody crimson, a deep sad opal crimson that churns endlessly through the waves of the sea and forever nourishes the ghosts that walk the land, those ghosts that Virginia has the ability to see. The air today is constantly monitored and measured for its content, for the detection of impurities, but no gauge can ever quantify the broken human souls that haunt this wild and windswept edge. I say ‘haunt’ and I don’t say that lightly. You can often enough hear people saying that this island is haunted by its past, and I go along with that, but I am here talking about more specific haunting, about revenants, ghosts who may be encountered in the twilight, or on the midnight hour. I have never
met a ghost at Cape Grimm, but while I realise second-hand reports of the supernatural are easily dismissed, I have to say I believe not only Virginia, but the accounts of others that have been reported to me.

  A stench of mournful abject violence hangs in the air, howls in the waves, moans in the wind, rustles in the heath and stirs among the adamantine rocks. Call them ghosts. Call them the sorrow that inhabits the atmosphere, but they are not shapeless, they have the form of tormented human beings, restlessly returning to the place where their lives were lost or taken from them. Even on a sun-filled summer afternoon the land, the sea and the air in this place are haunted. Some ghosts are white, most are black. The figures and voices of sorrowful men who died in the attempt to protect their own lives, and the lives of their women and children. The mournful cries of the violated, mutilated women who saw their babies dashed against the rocks, saw their family groups scattered and dispossessed. There is nowhere a report of a black man raping a white woman—if such an event had taken place it would surely have been recorded? There could be several reasons for the blank space where rape might be expected—for one thing I suppose the few white women around at the time on the far northwest coast were well shielded from such harm. These ghosts of which I speak are the ghosts that haunt the cliffs and rocks and waters of Suicide Bay and Victory Hill.

  Clear and unbiased documentation on massacres in this region is difficult to come by. George Augustus Robinson visited here in 1830 and made an attempt to find out what had happened back in 1827 and 1828, but already the truth was clouded by time and emotion, and the account in his journal makes it fairly clear that the facts can never really be known. Virginia’s story of Mannaginna is another part of this record, and I believe it should be heeded. It is probably crazy of me to suggest there is anything to be gained by listening to ghosts, but I throw the story into the mix, for what it’s worth. It is part of a tale of a time of dark violence, and it involves the sealers and the shepherds, and three Aboriginal tribal groups: the Parperloihener, the Peerapper and the Pennemukeer. I am fascinated by the sounds of those names. When we studied History at school, we didn’t learn any of this.