By one of those ironies that add shape and depth to life, the first site manager to live outside the house was the one who, after Koeppel, understood it best. The days in Gove of the driven, hyper-cerebral, Elvis-loving Colin Agnew are still remembered with a kind of awe. He was drawn to sharp, contentious issues; he thought nothing of capturing his guests at the airport and subjecting them to three-hour-long ideological debates. He was, in short, an intellectual marooned in a bauxite-glutted paradise – and the house, its form and meaning, was one of his principal solaces.
“Of course it was a special place, with its own ambience,” said Agnew, his voice softening on the phone line from the plant he runs in Western Australia. “The location was itself a statement. The Catholic Church always built on the highest spot in town, and so with the mine manager’s residence. Physically, the house has a timeless sense about it, which I think is quite remarkable; there are very few people capable of designing anything that will stay attractive for thirty years. The way it has been integrated into the hill sits quite well. I have strong memories of my visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous building outside Pittsburgh, Falling-water: the house at Nhulunbuy has the same kind of integration with the environment, that timelessness, the feeling it’s the right house in the right place.”
Agnew has theories about why the house worked, what part it played in the abstract joust of corporate life; business, for him, was no more or less than the mutual understanding of personalities, and that was a game best played out on neutral, elevated ground. “But the house’s role in Gove is changing,” he continued, with sudden urgency, “and that represents more than shifting social attitudes. The key thing is that the house isn’t just the house. It never was. I’ve always felt it’s a declaration about life, a version of the world.”
On the streets of Nhulunbuy, the prevailing view is rather less expansive. Few people in town have crossed the threshold of No. 9 Garnet Close. Many newcomers don’t even realise it’s there. The long-term residents tend to observe a code of anxious silence – the kind of silence common in company towns – when asked about the building’s history, as if something scandalous had happened once behind its doors. And indeed there have been odd incidents. Incautious souls refer excitingly to an orgy on the hill – although on investigation this dwindles to a standard suburban affair: bored teenagers, a raided wine cellar, late-night cavortings in the pool.
The shadow of politics also obtrudes and casts a rather darker tone – for the house, like every building on the Gove Peninsula, subject of the nation’s first and most protracted land rights legal challenge, stands on fiercely contested ground. The hill it backs on to, and is built into, is the lower slope of a peak known in town by the innocuous name of Mt Saunders, and topped by a jaunty metallic belvedere. But Mt Saunders is none other than Nhulun, a place of much significance in the Yolngu domain.
As is well known, the fourteen chief clans of north-east Arn-hem Land chart their world – geographic, emotional, religious – in complex, overlapping fashion, with the result that almost every landscape feature has rich associations and connections. Nhulun harbours, or harboured, a ringgitj site – the best analogy might be with a Western embassy – a spot symbolic of connection, linked to one group but within the land of another. Such sites are of great importance in the endless interplay of obligations and responsibilities that have long shaped the Yolngu social universe. Unsurprisingly, when the construction crews building the town thirty years ago tried to push a road up to the lookout, there were furious protests: senior Yolngu men, painted for the confrontation, blocked the path of the bulldozers. Unsurprisingly, too, the forces of development eventually prevailed, but the memory festers, and Aboriginal activists and Yolngu people of the older generations still speak bitterly of the stand-off to this day.
*
It was full build-up season when I drove back to the Gove Peninsula. Dark clouds hung in the sky; the air felt like a vat of steam. For several days I searched through the town archives, and the records at Alcan, the Canadian multinational that has taken over the mine and plant and is now completing a vast expansion project. One afternoon, with the day’s heat waning, I made my way up to the house, anxious, half on edge: return always breaks the past’s elusive spell. I paced dutifully about its rooms and corridors, comparing what I saw with my memory, startled by the gap between the two. The furniture had changed, or so it seemed. There was pool fencing, and new decorations here and there, and little trinkets I’d edited out – all the corporate gee-gaws, for instance, that seem to play so large a part in the business world: a cut-glass disc “in recognition of caustic soda agreement”, Golf Day trophies, a gilt and plastic singing clock. I began remembering episodes I’d heard from the house’s history: the Swiss national day parties in early times when 100 patriotic guests would come. The famous birthday held for a senior executive who burst into tears and told his staff no one had done so much for him before. The late ’90s evening when Governor-General William Deane was passing through and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the political king of the region, gave a long speech explaining that the house lay on his clan’s land.
The sunlight lengthened. On some impulse I called once again a number I had been given and tried fruitlessly days before: a number in the baroque Swiss city of St Gallen. It rang and rang.
“Koeppel,” said, at last, a lilting voice. I explained the unusual nature of the call. “The house,” breathed Walter Koeppel, tenderly. “Of course I remember it. How beautiful it was. We loved that house, we love to think back on our time there. We’re still part of that world, you know – we’re half Australians in our hearts.”
How much he said in those moments. It was as if he was building the house again before me with his words: its lines, its aspect, his struggle to bring it into being on his precise blueprint, all the ideas, the dreams that once impelled him. “It was our concept: mine and my wife’s. I’m looking at her now, just as I always have, throughout my life – she’s very much at home in the world of modern architecture. We had two modern houses in Switzerland built by a renowned architect, a friend of ours, Ernest Giesel.”
He and his wife wanted a building in Gove that could overlook the town, “that would speak about our world. It had to be a house that could represent the management. I tried, you see, to be an authority figure, the person who could integrate the whole society, Australians, foreigners – and to some extent I think I succeeded: as father of the place, yes, in a way. We had a very good understanding with the Aborigines, I loved their company. I collected their bark paintings and some of those paintings are with my children in Australia. And how is it, now – the house?” I looked around and began to answer, but Koeppel’s voice broke in: “I saw it, almost ten years ago. I was surprised. There was all the fencing: it kept out the animals.”
Animals?
“That’s right. We had buffaloes grazing on the lawn in our day, and wallabies, and a snake in the bedroom, and dingoes drinking in the swimming pool.” It was on that visit that he realised it was no longer “a home in which people live but a guesthouse. It’s an administered outpost. All the ideas I once had, that were originally behind it, were no longer being fulfilled.” As he spoke, his meaning gradually widened until it seemed he was talking not just about his house but about the whole town, the mine, the plant, the entirety of the modern, brutally productive world. And what precisely were those ideas of his, I wondered. Koeppel laughed: “I would like to come back one more time and look around again. If I could put that simply into words! Why not walk through the house yourself, and you might find out.”
I did as he said, slowly, letting the last sunshine pour over me, watching the shadows shift, my mind clearing, emptying – until I realised that my thoughts had gone. I was standing, still, alone and calm. The house was working its gentle alchemy on me: its lines, its light, its clearness had thrown me back in time – back to those distant mid-century days, when progress seemed the measure of our world, and dreams of aluminium cha
nged the face of north-east Arnhem Land.
Australia Twice Traversed
RECENTLY, AT WARBURTON in the remote Western Desert, I found myself strolling along the bed of Milirrtjarra Creek, in deep conversation with Cyril Simms, an imposing elder statesman of the Ngaanyatjarra Council.
“You see that sandstone formation over there,” he gestured. “It runs along, beside the riverbed, for almost 100 kilometres, all the way to my country” – and only then did I realise that Warburton, one of the more cryptic and engaging of Australia’s isolated Aboriginal communities, was part, also, of the nation’s most unusual and unregarded literary tradition. For Milirrtjarra Creek, I suddenly saw, was also Elder Creek, the winding and fugitive waterway of the Warburton Ranges – just as Proust’s Guermantes and Méséglise ways in A la recherche turn out to be one and the same.
This little settlement, despite its distinctly writerly name, was christened not for the reformist peer in James’s Portrait of a Lady but for the gloomy and unimpressive explorer, Colonel Peter Egerton Warburton. It was near here, though, that a much greater explorer and describer of the inland, Ernest Giles, accomplished in 1874 his most spectacular feat of personal survival. Giles found himself marooned in wasteland north of Warburton when his travelling companion became lost and perished in the engulfing desert. There was only one course left to Giles: he marched on foot, largely by night, almost 160 kilometres through burning, waterless sand country back to his base camp. His life was undoubtedly saved by a chance encounter with a baby wallaby: “The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it raw, dying as it was, fur, skin and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget.” The tale of Giles’s return is told in dream-like fashion in the pages of his autobiographical masterpiece, Australia Twice Traversed.
Hesperian Press of Perth, an obscure specialist publisher of Australiana, put out a handsome edition of this magic book, which bears the subtitle The Romance of Exploration. It has also republished Ray Ericksen’s biography of Giles, a work of great originality that elaborates a theory of exploration as the prototypical Australian art form and holds up Giles as its key exponent.
To these was recently added a new volume, something of a first: a complete collection of Giles’s Parliamentary Papers, the expedition journals that form the original record of his main journeys. Giles is a vivid, idiosyncratic author, capable of entrancing and sustained narrative peaks. His sensibility is romantic; indeed, he bears the mark of his education at London’s Christ’s Hospital, where Coleridge had preceded him through the frigid schoolrooms. It has long been known that Giles based his narratives closely upon his field notes, which he wrote up each evening on his route. These Parliamentary Papers give us the raw material of his later books, which turn out to be almost direct transcriptions of the words he wrote by night in the deserts and the ranges of the Centre. This, then, is literature dictated by the land; shaped by the meeting between place and imagination.
The lack of excitement about books such as this is sharp testimony to Australia’s baffling historical amnesia. Perhaps when your past is so brief, it is a point of honour to dishonour it. A similar pattern of indifference greeted the recent appearance of Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Tropical Australia – the first republication of one of the key works both of Australian exploration and of our nineteenth-century literature.
Mitchell, unlike Giles, is at least reasonably well known to Victorians, who stumble across annoying little road signs marked with his likeness every time they cross his route-path between Swan Hill and Hamilton in the Western District. Queenslanders, too, find their four-wheel-drive tracks between the coast and Carnarvon Gorge fringed by plaques bearing such thrilling legends as “Major Mitchell camped somewhere near here.” Very few travellers, though, will be conversant with Mitchell’s elaborate style, his seriousness, his literary enthusiasms (he translated Luis de Camoens’s Lusiads from the Portuguese), or indeed with much beyond his penchant for naming river valleys after his favourite artists – Claude and Salvator Rosa among them.
Tropical Australia, despite its formal structure as exploration journal, has all the sombre, backlit tension of a tragic text. Its tale is straightforward. Mitchell set off in 1845 to find a route from the east coast to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Leichhardt was already in the field. Midway through his journey, Mitchell learned he had been beaten by his upstart rival. This bitter knowledge seems to glint in every aspect of his narrative: his extraordinary reflections on the perfection of the Aboriginal race and the hypocrisy of European dealings with them; his responses to the “art” of nature; his melancholy receptiveness to the sounds, colours and textures of the outback.
Mitchell was in the field, and writing, some thirty years before Giles. His, accordingly, was a purer romanticism. He was, in fact, the most significant architect of a particular style of European reaction to Australia: he rode with Ruysdael in his mind; Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare were ever on his lips; when he met the Balonne River, he saw the Thames at Richmond. In short, he brought his culture with him, and sought to infuse it into the land.
And why should such an oddball matter to us today? For a simple reason. Australians often bemoan the lack of a profound home-grown nineteenth-century tradition. They scrape about, and come up with Geoffrey Hamlyn or Robbery Under Arms. Well, here is that tradition: a long line of works, impassioned yet analytical accounts, journeys at once imaginative, intellectual and emotional, beginning with Edward Eyre and Grey, reaching their mid-point with the Renaissance-accented Mitchell, before coming to a fierce, baroque crescendo with Giles and his successor, David Carnegie.
All these men knew, studied, reflected on and even loved Australia. Their tradition, once rather cloyingly revered, looks these days very much like a road not taken. Popular historical understanding of the inland now has a much more demotic accent. Its heroes are the inarticulate settler-farmers, overlanders and bush battlers. The intelligentsia of today, for their part, much prefer the Aboriginal to the European past, and the Dreamtime to those first Europeans who entertained Australian dreams.
So be it: both traditions, after all, are versions, like Proust’s Guermantes and Méséglise ways, of the same landscape – but let us at least be conscious of the past we are dismissing, and its supreme artist, the touchy, vainglorious, self-promoting yet sublime Mitchell.
Here he is, complete with ironic twists and trademark Sophoclean echoes, in the heart of tropical Australia, upon the banks of the Victoria River: “What, then, is civilisation in the economy of the human animal? Cultivated man despises the perishable substance, and pursues the immortal shadow … when the shadow he pursues is worth more, and is more enduring than the substance, well might it be said that ‘Man is but a shadow, and life a dream.’”
The Angels of Annandale
“I’VE GOT A MYSTERY FOR YOU,” said my friend Glenn Campbell, his grey eyes even more narrowed and intense than usual. “A real mystery, out at Annandale Station, on Eyre Creek, along the east edge of the Simpson Desert.”
“Mystery?” I replied. “I don’t think there are any mysteries left for me out there: I’ve camped by Eyre Creek scores of times, I’ve steeped myself in that desert country – I know it like the back of my hand.”
“That may well be true,” said Glenn, pausing, with a little, triumphant smile. “But have you ever heard anything about the Angels – the Angels of Annandale?”
*
A few days later, we were hurtling down the dirt track from Mount Isa to Birdsville, our Landcruiser sliding across the corrugations as Glenn ran through the details of his encounter with this murky outback tale: how he’d first ventured out that way months before, at a hinge-point in his life, and began making trips, on his own, through the dune-fields: how he heard about the ruins of the old station at Annandale, drove out, and was captivated. While camped there, in high summer, beside the waterhole noisy with pelicans and cockatoos, he stumbled across two bush graves, set well back from the remains of the h
omestead. They were indistinct, almost covered over by the drifting sand.
“I’d never been anywhere which had that kind of atmosphere. I felt it was the saddest place I’d ever been – and that something dreadful had happened on that spot. I began asking around, when I got back to Birdsville, and that’s when I heard. Apparently, one summer, in the first years of the last century, or so the story goes, the station manager’s wife had been left out there with her two young daughters. It was in the middle of a drought season: her hus band had been away for weeks, droving cattle. They say she went mad: she was afraid the whole family might die slowly out there from starvation – she poisoned the two girls with strychnine, then tried to kill herself. The day afterwards, the head stockman came back from Birdsville, and found her wandering in the dunes.”
“And those are the Angels?” I said. “The two dead girls? It’s got a good ring to it, you’re right: The Angels of Annandale. But it sounds to me a bit like a bush legend. Really, you need to find some kind of evidence. I’ve heard tales like that before, from Tempe Downs, south-west of Alice Springs, and Dalhousie in South Australia as well.” The truck bumped across a creek-bed; the supplies jammed in behind us rattled.
“We need to stock up, too,” said Glenn, frowning.
“With what? We’ve got enough supplies back there to feed a battalion.”
“A rifle, for one thing. I ran into a bullock last time I was on this road, at dusk, just past Bedourie. I had to put it out of its misery, and all I had was a knife to slit its throat.”
“I suppose there’s been a certain amount of gunplay in your life recently?”
Another Country Page 9