“That’s it,” he breathed. “De Grey Avenue – right there, that’s where they used to start off the Black Rock Stakes, and we’d hang up a banner stretching all the length of the avenue. You’d have the crews of competitors setting off into the night-time on the way to Hedland, and the street would be full of men and women cheering and waving their torches in the dark.”
“The Black Rock Stakes – you mean that odd relay race they run each year from Whim Creek to Hedland?” I said.
“Don’t you know anything? It began here, as a race from Goldsworthy – it was a Goldsworthy tradition. With teams of miners pushing a barrow of Goldsworthy ore. Of course now it’s gone elsewhere, and it’s become famous: there’s a song about it on that John Williamson CD, Mallee Boy, and sometimes they even cover the start on the local TV news.”
We pushed our way through the scrub – and the further we went, the more cut up the avenue became, until it turned into a set of ditches, scars and piled-up rocks. This had been deliberately done. Under the terms of its lease, the mining company was obliged not just to remove all Goldsworthy’s infrastructure, but to tilt the landscape against any simple recollection of the past. The street grid of the town, accordingly, had been planted with elegant acacia saplings, which were now in bright yellow flower – with the anomalous result that, all through the winter months, Goldsworthy’s ghost stood clearly out, delineated by arboreal colour code.
Kelvin began following these sapling lines. “See?” he said. “Over there – that was the post office: the real centre of everything. The women would sit there together and gossip, and if someone was having an affair, they’d hiss him when he came up. Now we’re just near where the shops and the mine office used to be. In front was the single men’s quarters, up on stilts. And ahead, yes – this must be the oval …” A sea of lemony grass, as high as the windows of the four-wheel-drive, stretched in front of us. “It hasn’t been destroyed, at least. And that was the pub, and shopping centre, and over there, that line of red boulders, that was the main mess: in the evenings, it became the heart of town. Everyone went there – the pit workers, their families. There would be a smorgasbord on weekends, all seafood – it was really something.”
I listened to him, for some minutes, with a distanced sensation, and imagined how I might react if I were ever able to inspect some landscape from my own vanished years – for, like Kelvin, I have always feared the danger of return, and preferred to linger in the climate of memory. We walked about the emptiness; I had a mounting sense of my trespass in his world.
“Do you want to go up?” he asked, then, pointing: his eyes were fixed on the bare rock-face in front of us. “It’s up there – where you can see that track: that’s the way into the pit.”
“But aren’t all mining pits pretty much the same?” I answered, a bit too casually.
“Not at all: of course not. This one’s special. It’s not just that this was the deepest hole in the West, or even that it was the first great iron venture: this was about people.”
“It would be an act of homage to go up?”
“That kind of thing.”
Almost at once we came to a high, locked gate, and a set of fearsome warning signs – “Abandoned mine. Keep out. Access prohibited.”
“Well, that’s it, then,” I said.
“Not at all. That’s just for passers-by. Don’t worry, there’s a way round. We’ll find it. Mining engineers can’t help themselves – they always leave a side door open to get back into their treasure chest. There – see those track-marks between the trees.”
And we wound down, across a creek-bed, onto a broad, curved access road. Soon we were following a fence of razor-wire: it led upwards, along a steep incline, out to a no-man’s-land of purple rock. A few more steps, and the land fell away. Before us was only space, and wind, and light: the dazzle of the sun on a stretch of water, far below. The walls of the open cut were black and purple, broken by neat, stepped banks. Opposite, the green texture of the Pilbara bush resumed, and reached off to a low, smoke-stained horizon. There were little flecks of shadow beneath us, circling in the air: they were eagles, aloft on thermals, high above the lake.
“There she is,” said Kelvin, in a gentle voice. “But you can’t really see her now. The water’s come up high. The pit goes down, much deeper: a good 800 feet more. When we were at the lowest level, on the pit floor, it would be like night-time there: we’d look up and see nothing but a little ring of light, far above.”
“And it was like a canyon – always cold?”
“Not at all: one time, when the company and the union reps pulled the Haulpak drivers off their shift, people were almost passing out – the temperature down at the bottom had touched 56 degrees. I used to love working down there, though. We would dislodge the rubble after blasting by driving the dozers at full speed against the pit wall: those machines tended not to last much longer than three months before they gave up the ghost.”
He turned away after a few more moments, and walked off; I let him go. I felt that silence that comes over places where men have been, and are no more: you tune yourself, in vain, to what they might have imagined, or thought, your mind empties, scale and distance force themselves upon you, until you almost seem to sense the progress of the earth through space. I listened to the breeze rising and falling for several minutes; we joined up again.
“Being here again, after so long,” said Kelvin, “reminds me of the time when I was a boy, and I went with my father to see the air base in country Victoria where he trained for World War II. He took us round, but it had all been dismantled; there were just the concrete foundations, and emptiness: but it meant a great deal to him; and now I look back on it, it was as though the effacement had deepened the effect: the past confessed itself. The symmetry between the two events is very striking.” He smiled, and shook his head. “This was my youth – that pit. Even if I never really felt like a fair dinkum hard rock miner, all the time I was here at Goldsworthy, when push came to shove that’s what I was: and looking at it now, I actually feel very much a part of that pit. I know all the nuances of it; its textures, the grades of ore. I may have liked to think I was a little different from the others working here, the way I went running around the bush by myself in my spare time, looking through all the ranges and the river valleys and the station country – but in the end I wasn’t – and it was really here that was the centre of my world.”
*
We made our way back to the Toyota and drove on, Kelvin still telling me various striking Goldsworthy tales, in a mazy progression, each called forth, in a way reminiscent of Aboriginal narratives, by some feature of the mine-site’s landscape: the charms of the old roadhouse, and its sophisticated ice machines, which drew all the tourists travelling up and down the coastal highway to Broome; the tale of the dedicated air-conditioning plant, and how it was destroyed one night when a miner drove his truck clean into it; the saga of the special block of cyclone-proof houses built to a NASA design, with a vacuum flushing system through which, with predictably chaotic consequences, one could easily hear each word the neighbours said.
But one of his stories above all stayed with me; it seemed to stand for all the grace and life that had been at Goldsworthy and were now gone. It was the habit of the teenagers in the town to amuse themselves on weekends by driving at speed up the sharp-curved mine access road, which offered the only bitumen surface within easy reach, and one Saturday night a group of them had set off in a V-8 panel van to practise revving up and down the slope. It was a familiar, noisy ritual, but this time the young driver failed to make the curve: the car turned over: the passengers were flung out. One of them was a young girl named Anna Ferntorp, an apprentice jockey who had only just graduated from school and was back in the Pilbara with her parents for a short holiday. Anna was the loveliest girl who had ever spent time at Goldsworthy – she was so beautiful that wherever she went she left a strange calm of happiness. Her father, Carl, who was of Swedish background
, ran the warehouse, and was engaged in a constant struggle there to balance the stocks: but it was an ineffectual struggle – his supplies would be routinely plundered by miners prone to absconding with whole cartons of CRC oil lubricant or Aerogard. When the first rescuers arrived at the crash scene that night, they saw Anna Ferntorp lying prone on the ground, pinned underneath the front of the overturned car. A young man there rushed up and lifted up the vehicle for a split-second, single-handed – it must have been one of those moments when people are given extraordinary strength. Anna was pulled, barely breathing, away. Talk of the accident had already begun to spread through the town. Kelvin went round to the Ferntorp house: “I found the father. I told him his daughter, the apple of his eye, was not well, and he should come at once. We got to the medical centre. Nature was already taking its course. The father was magnificent: I’d always felt he was an angelic, rather insubstantial kind of man – but he was transformed that evening into a giant of dignity. He cradled her in his arms, he held her, he spoke to her, softly, he was saying to her: you aren’t well, my darling. He was bent over, whispering, hugging her, not scaring her, but allowing her to go gentle into the night. I drew back. The child died. With great restraint, the father kissed her again and stepped away, the peak of grief and dignity, thanked everyone at the medical centre, and went home. It was a dark moment for Goldsworthy: it stopped the town for days. In many ways, it was the saddest of the many things I saw there. She was the most perfect creature in the town, and that was the end of an innocent girl on the brink of life. And I’m conscious, even as I tell you this story, that things pass away, and memory is all we have – it’s all we have to bring them back; that no one speaks her name any more, and I’m describing to you a death that took place in a town that’s nowhere, on a mine road that no longer exists.”
The House on the Hill
ITS LINES ARE CLEAN AND SHARP AS CRYSTAL. Its rooms are dialogues of form, air and light. As much as a mere physical building, it is a manifesto, an act of intellect. And so it seemed to me at once, the House on the Hill, the mine manager’s residence at Nhulunbuy, that first evening I walked into it, half-invited to some minor corporate function, tired, late, unprepared – only to find myself abruptly plunged into a temple of high modernism.
Walls, boundaries, ornaments had been dispensed with. The house was gleaming in its own diffuse and hidden light. Its shape, its mood sank in on me. All around, the gathered executives, ministers and governmental staffers looked tranquil, as if ennobled by their stage-set surrounds. But who could have built such a place? Who could have dreamed so wild an architectural dream – and here, of all spots, at the farthest tip of north-east Arnhem Land, hard by an alumina plant and red dust-laden bauxite mine, overlooking a low-key, routine company town?
“This must be the strangest house in all north Australia,” I murmured, almost to myself.
“You reckon?” said one of the plant managers. “It’s a weird setup, that’s for sure. Take a look around; the light just pours in every where. All the bedrooms are in a dead straight line off in one wing, and there’s an open-air gap between them and the lounge and entertainment quarters. We only use it as a guesthouse now – all the big shots stay here, John Howard, Tim Fischer, the Governor-General even. It was put up more than thirty years ago, when the mine and the township were being built,” he continued, “back when a Swiss multinational was in charge: one of the corporate chiefs designed it personally, or that’s the story anyhow. To me, it’s very much a work of its era: a cross between Bauhaus and James Bond, Dr No vintage. What about that deck and the teardrop swimming pool – you almost expect Ursula Andress to come splashing out, don’t you, and ask for a Campari on the rocks?”
Years passed. The house, its lines and atmospherics, lingered in my mind. I began making further visits to the Gove Peninsula, to Nhulunbuy and to the outlying Aboriginal homelands where communities of Yolngu clans live, their world much changed by the alumina plant on the north-east arm of Melville Bay. Often on these trips I would find myself near the House on the Hill – though its unusual design renders it, for all its prominence, invisible from the township it dominates. The only clue to its presence is a cul-de-sac street entrance marked, discreetly, Garnet Close, and, close by, a row of lesser management dwellings affectionately known as the “Kentucky Fried Chicken houses” for their dubious gabling.
The heroic days of Nhulunbuy, when the town and plant were carved from the jungle, are long gone – but they remain vivid in the memory of old-timers, men like its first site manager, Alan Coogan, whose wry face can be seen in photos at the community library.
“Ah, the house,” said he, knowingly, after I tracked him to his Sydney home. “Yes – a very pleasant space. I think it has stood the test of years rather well. I went back to Gove some while ago for the twenty-fifth anniversary. It had become what we always wanted it to be: leafy, attractive, the Centre building up. But the House on the Hill was nothing to do with the Australian architects who laid out the town. It was a bit of a production, in fact. One of the original Alusuisse men designed it, Koeppel: he lives in Zurich now. He was a very punctilious individual and he wanted particular Swiss touches. A lot of Swiss people were associated with Gove in those early days. You might want to look up Hans Ryffel, for instance: I’ve heard he’s the honorary Swiss consul in Darwin now.”
After a brief security check – for a degree of paranoia seems to mantle everything to do with Nhulunbuy – Ryffel agreed to an audience at his home in Darwin’s outlying suburbs. He was a Zurich man as well; for most of his professional life he had worked for Alusuisse. He settled back, with an air of authority, in a garden chair beside his ornamental pond.
“When we got to Gove in 1970,” he said, “everything on the right of the highway, where the town of Nhulunbuy stands now, was just pegs in the dirt. For a person like me, an ordinary professional, this was something you could only do once in your lifetime – be part of a big plant built in never-never land. There was green landscape, water, geography – and that was it. All the design was done in Zurich, at our headquarters, the Aluminium Palace, we called it, in Seefeldstrasse, on the right-hand shore of the lake. It was a remarkable corporation … another era: can you imagine – the whole management were chemical engineers.” He pronounced their names with reverence: Tschamper, father of the bio-process; Schnorf, who had over flown the Gove Peninsula and picked out the site for the alumina plant; Meyer and Mueller … but among these titans, one above all meant the most to him: “Koeppel, of course, Walter Koeppel, a wonderful person – I loved him. He was there at the beginning. A chemical engineer also, from the Technical University in Zurich. He had the highest possible scientific qualifications, a real aluminium man … but Koeppel was not just a technocrat; no – he was a human being, he was fascinated by the Aboriginal world. It was he who stood behind the site manager’s residence; he and his wife, Ruth, you see, were great lovers of modern art.”
And so the House on the Hill was born. The Koeppels gave their design to a young Swiss architect, Rolf Scherrer, who later worked on the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and had a penchant for ferro concrete yachts. The building, with its air of a Zurich lakeside palazzo, went up. Ryffel ran through its effect on the bemused construction teams hacking through the stringybark forests and the coastal mangrove swamps.
“You must have spent a lot of time there,” I put in at one point, “since you were such good friends of theirs.”
“Oh no,” said Ryffel’s wife, Hedi, almost blushing at the thought. “It was by invitation only. We used to go up to the house for parties, on 1 August, our Swiss national day – but that was about it. I called the house Dreamland, and it was a bit of a dreamland, different from everywhere else. Remember, in those days in Gove, the other houses were all uniform. And for us, Koeppel was on a different level; he was the master. The Swiss way was that there remains a certain gap between boss and employee, and we are from the old generation. Sometimes, I must say, we had problems, when we
were at a party with Australians, and they would clap Koeppel on the shoulder and call him Walt.”
The Ryffels spoke on: a world, a value system, danced before my eyes. One anecdote was strangely evocative. The Koeppel family had gone away on holiday. Hedi Ryffel had been given the keys and somehow became trapped for several hours in Koeppel’s private aviary, among his prized collection of birds: fire-finches, grassfinches, chattering double-bars. And was the aviary still there?
“Of course not,” said Hans Ryffel, sighing. “I flew into Gove some time back for a visit and I even stayed in the house as a guest. I suppose it’s the same way with everything in life. All those old touches were gone.”
For years after Koeppel’s departure, the house retained its quasi-divine air. The alumina plant managers lived in it, and perhaps its architecture inf luenced them; perhaps they came to see the world, in some small way, through Ruth and Walter Koeppel’s eyes. Ken Davey, who ran Nhulunbuy as manager from 1975 to 1981, then returned in 1983 for another two-year tour of duty, remembers the house chiefly in terms of its environs, its garden that seemed to envelop the rooms and reach inside: “There were pawpaws, mangoes, jackfruit. The house was something of a magnet, really: we had all our special functions there. It’s a shame it’s no longer the senior executive’s place of residence.”
But the corporate culture of the Gove plant, and the community, had begun to change. From a pioneering frontier outpost, Nhulunbuy gradually turned into what it is today: a standard remote area service town, with clubs and video stores and tight, interlocking social codes. In the mid-1990s, Nabalco, the joint venture company that ran the mine and plant, decided the House on the Hill had become ostentatious and outmoded: it would be more democratic if the town’s kingpin lived in a modest house like everybody else.
Another Country Page 8