“It’s been a big year, mate,” Glenn nodded. “The Simpson Desert, Pakistan, the Khyber Pass. Our guide in Peshawar had an AK-47. I let off a few rounds myself. It was interesting – you could feel the power. I understood why people carrying them walk the way they do.”
“Right,” I said, nervously, but at that moment the distant roofs of Birdsville, its slender radio mast and squat watertanks began to show. We drove in slowly, down the wide, silent main street.
“Let’s find out what’s been happening!” called out Glenn: he turned into a large, gated compound.
“You can’t just go about it like that,” I said, sighing. “In this kind of hunt, you need finesse, and indirection – where are you going, anyway? This is where David Brook lives.” My thoughts filled with the image of the Mayor of Birdsville, the all-powerful, media-loathing organic beef king of south-west Queensland; I remembered, too, the sadness that hung over him and his family, and had mantled the whole township for the past half-decade and more. A vast chocolate-coloured bulldog now came towards us, growling, mouth slavering. “Are you sure this is such a great idea?” I began to ask – but Glenn was already inside, sitting, laughing, deep in conversation.
“Annandale? The waterhole’s dry, but of course you two can go out there if you want,” said David Brook, a soft, rumpled-looking man, with domed forehead and eyes that danced away from making contact. “Just take a picture of the cattle for me, and make sure you tell any tourists you see that the road’s been closed. I’m not really the person to ask about the history of the place, though: we’ve only had the pastoral lease a short while – although it’s true my mother’s father was Jack Gaffney, who used to manage the station, in the 1890s …” Half-appraisingly, he smiled at us. His voice trailed off.
A few minutes later, against a background noise of corellas screeching and crows lamenting, we checked into the Birdsville caravan park. No sooner had Glenn struggled through the door, cameras and telephoto lenses dangling from his shoulder, than Ian Doyle, the notoriously gruff proprietor, broke into a welcoming grin. “The traveller returns! And perfect timing. I found out the other day what those kids you were asking about on your last visit died of! We’ve got the old police records. They just turned up. Would you believe it?”
“Well, you’re certainly having a dream run with this investigation of yours,” I muttered.
“It’s our investigation,” said Glenn, magnanimously; he slumped down at one of the plastic tables. “I can’t tell you how all this feels. It’s too sudden. The things I did, to try to find out what happened out there; to track down any trace at all! It’s turned into an obsession for me these last few months …”
“And you’re not normally an obsessive type?”
“No, of course not! First I rang the records section of the Kid-man cattle company, who held the station in those days, but all their documents had been destroyed by fire. Then I made a trip down to the state archives in Brisbane, I went through all the files, and the newspapers, from the 1920s, and further back, the 1890s, the ’80s – nothing. I checked right through the Birdsville police folders: I don’t think anyone had ever looked through them before – there was red dune dust falling out between the sheets of onion-skin paper and the carbons. Most of the incidents, though, were drunk and disorderlies at the hotels.”
“That’s right, heaps of people shooting and killing themselves,” chimed in Ian. “It was a great little town until Federation. Why don’t you call in at the Wirrarri Centre: you’ll find everything you want to know.”
*
But what, exactly, might that be: some deeper secret lurking in the frontier past? Some tragedy that resonated with silences of our own? When morning came, we drove out to a new building that pokes up from Birdsville’s spare skyline. Indoors, in a makeshift library awash with tourism brochures, we found Susie van der Linden, the spearhead of Diamantina Shire Council’s publicity machine. Elaborately coiffed, the height, indeed, of fashion, a cameo ring on one finger, a silk scarf tossed about her neck, she scrutinised us.
“Your births and deaths records,” Glenn demanded, grimly.
“Well! I don’t even know who you are!”
I interceded. Susie fingered the red rose in her buttonhole. “It’s true,” she said eventually. “We do have the information – and you’re the first outsiders I’ve told.”
A complex narrative emerged. Four years ago, the policeman of that day had mentioned to Susie that the town’s records were lying in the old courthouse, strewn about. “They were going to end up on the tip! Can you imagine – all the records of the past, from 1886 to 1976? This is life itself – the history of Birdsville.” With a flourish, she reached into her drawer, and produced a sleek, new-bound volume. “I asked the Council if we could have it restored. It’s been down at the John Oxley library for years. It only came back two weeks ago. See: these are the original pages, conserved under plastic leaves. Everyone’s ecstatic: now, at last, we can identify the fates of our ancestors. You could say this book’s the key to our cemetery.”
I leaned over: the pages, sky-blue, lined, columned, were filled with entries in a hand of copperplate. “Just look,” said Susie. “The things they died from!” She read out loud: “Supposed cause of death: shooting in the head. Senile decay. Or sadness – I can identify with that – out here. That’s why I’ve always been interested in the mystery of what happened at Annandale. In fact, it’s intrigued everyone for years. I’d been out to the ruins, and I knew there was something strange about the place – you really feel there are souls out there. So, last week I took the book home with me one night. I ran through the records, still not really knowing if I believed the story, looking for two names together – and – I saw them.” Her finger came to rest on a neat, understated pair of entries: “death” – in blood-red ink, and then, in black: “Hurtle Wilfrid Lethbridge died at Annandale stn 23rd January 1922. Apparently poison.” Close beneath, in the same cursive hand, almost the same words: “Darwin Thomas Richardson Lethbridge died at Annandale 23rd January 1922. Apparently poison.”
“But they were boys!” I said, feeling somehow deflated by the ease of our discovery.
“That’s right. Boy angels.”
“So,” I asked Susie, “do you think it’s actually true – the story?”
“I do believe they were killed by their mother – yes. Just think about what it was like here in those days, for the women: the loneliness, the responsibility of raising their children without their menfolk, who were away all the time, droving – and they were left, on their own, in that heat, in that drought country …”
We strolled out. “You’re pretty quiet,” I said to Glenn. “I’d have thought you’d be over the moon. It usually only happens like this in the movies. Questions answered. Mystery solved. Case closed.”
“What are you talking about! It’s only the beginning. We still have to go out there, of course, to Annandale, into the sand-dunes. I have to see it when it’s dry, and harsh, when there’s no water in the river-channel – the way it was back then, when it happened. Knowing the past isn’t just about knowing how: it’s about feeling why!”
*
And so it was, early next morning, yet more kitted out with swags, tarps, iron rations, that we headed west, at first along the tourist route, then, as soon as the high dune ramparts came in sight, off, down station tracks, through harsh terrain: burned gidgee scrub, pink sandhills, samphire plains. The day warmed: we began passing dead cattle; another ridge-line, and we hit Eyre Creek, or what remained of it: a barren, cracked-mud river-bed. The ancient coolabahs were bare; the spinifex had died; gaunt ridges lined our way. At last we saw the chimney of Annandale. Beneath the ruins, by the creek-line, we made camp. “I was here only weeks ago,” said Glenn, almost whispering. “And it was full of water. Full of birds, and noise, and life. I’m going to walk over to the homestead, and take a look around. Do you still remember what it’s like, up there?”
Intimately, I thought: t
he strewn belongings, the foundations mouldering away. I remembered, too, what the last explorers felt when they passed by, in 1938: “It seemed as though some plague had descended, or some invader despoiled it and driven off the inhabitants …”
“I wonder what it is,” I asked him, “about this place, that speaks to you – so strongly?”
“The atmosphere, of course,” said Glenn. “Of hopelessness: but not just that. I was a bit crazed, it’s true, when I came up here after the Afghanistan war. But I didn’t know, at first, about the Angels: then, hearing the story about what happened, that made me realise my instincts were right. It was almost like learning to see for the first time, coming up here alone taking photographs. I suppose it took me all my life to learn – that the way of the bush is to look, and tread quietly, and pay attention.” He glanced away from me. I left him there, crossed the creek under the blazing sun, scrambled up the dunes, over a wide clay-pan, and stared out: before me the sand-ridges, in their sharp order, reached away. There was that sweet temptation to go on: into nothing; into silence. I looked, and listened; thoughts drained away. Eventually, from a distance far behind, I heard a four-wheel-drive’s engine. I made my way back, following my shadow across the river-bed, and reached the camp-site just as a white troop-carrier, heavy-laden, came in view.
*
At its wheel was Wolfgang John, the artistic conscience of Birdsville, the Gauguin of the desert, and alongside him Jo Riggs, the local nurse from Frontier Services. In the back seats rode her children, Ella, Amy and Ben, singing in unison, with sublime appropriateness, the first verse of “It Never Rains on the Dusty Diamantina”, a mournful, half-forgotten Redgum tune. “So you found us,” muttered Glenn, in his most enthusiastic manner.
“Didn’t you want us to?” said Wolfgang, jumping out of the truck, bearded, lanky, looking every inch the hero of his own outback tale. “We thought that was the whole idea. Anyway, your tracks are all across the desert – and people know you’re out here by now.”
“How come?”
“Everyone in Birdsville’s becoming curious about the story – and it’s a small place. Word gets around.” We sat by the fire, and Wolfgang ran through his latest Simpson adventures: a cold camp in the middle of a glistening salt lake; a spell in the sandhills with thieving dingoes all around. As night fell, though, our thoughts came circling back to where we were; to what had happened when people last lived at Annandale.
“The first time I came out here,” said Wolfgang, “would have been in 1987. I was travelling with a dear friend of mine, Michael May. We’d heard all kinds of different stories about the desert, and the old stations. The details don’t really matter: it was the harshness of the life in this country, the stoicism of the people, the belief they had, those were the things that inspired me. And the Angels, as well: the two children who met their end here. I felt a great sympathy for them, as if they were somehow still part of this world. I even painted a picture of them, for an exhibition that I had that year – and I gave it to Michael. When he died, some years ago, he left it to me in his will.”
“But who actually told you about them?”
Wolfgang smiled: “It would have been on that trip. We were travelling, you see, with Taffy Nicholls, a Welshman, a poet, a singer, an artist, the kind of man who would never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. He’s very ill now: to be truthful, I’m afraid he’s dying, he’s in a hospital in Adelaide. Michael and Taffy liked each other very much: Michael thought Taffy looked like his father, who was badly shot up over New Guinea – and they shared a love of Lord Byron. In fact, Michael gave Taffy a volume of Byron’s poetry, right here, that evening at Annandale. And it was then that Taffy told us both the story, the same one that you heard. He said he’d seen the whole thing set out in the Birdsville police incident book, and that when the moon comes up – the way it will tonight, in an hour or so – if you look into the sky above the homestead chimney, you can sometimes still see the two Angels, just as I painted them, flying together in the Milky Way.”
When the time came, we all walked up to the ruins, along the dune-path, past rusted wheels and broken fence-posts. “I’ve seen them, too,” said little Ella, beside me, proudly, in a whisper, as we climbed.
“Seen who?”
“The two children – the Angels. I saw them in a dream. I was sleeping in my swag, the first time we camped here, and two children with long hair came and got me, and poisoned me, and poisoned my sister Amy too, and then they pulled me down to the waterhole, and started to drown me – they were pushing down on my neck – and I woke up: I was screaming and screaming.”
“That’s quite a story!”
“It’s true,” called out her mother, from behind us. “She had a dreadful nightmare. The really strange thing about it, though, is that Ella didn’t know Eyre Creek was a river, or that there was ever any water around here.” What a lovely, imaginative child, I thought to myself. We were at the ruins now; the starlight cast our shadows on the sand.
“And what do you want to be, Ella,” I asked, “when you grow up?”
“An ortho …”
“An author? – that’s wonderful!”
“… An orthodontist,” she finished, a little puzzled.
“And you’re not afraid to camp and sleep out here again?”
“No. Do you think I should be? Should I be haunted? Are they coming back? Are we disturbing them?”
“Not at all. It’s not as if we’re detectives, trying to find out every last detail. We’ll let them rest in peace now. I imagine we were trying to fill up some space inside ourselves.”
“Oh.” She laughed: “I see.”
And so the evening went. The moon rose above the homestead ruins, and fell. The dingoes prowled about. Some days later, full of thoughts, and questions, half sombre, half satisfied, Glenn and I headed back across the high dunes and spinifex to Birdsville.
*
There was news, and plenty of it, at the Wirrarri Centre: a sandstorm was brewing in the Simpson; a road-train of condemned camels was parked in town; and it turned out there was fresh evidence in our case – an eyewitness account, salvaged from the murk of Annandale. A short drive further east, and we were sitting on little chairs in the kitchen of Roseberth homestead, perched high above the Diamantina’s braided flood plain. I leafed through the set of neat-bound books before us, while our hosts, Geoff and Bev Morton, sipped their tea.
“You have to understand,” said Geoff, scowling, from behind the pair of large dark glasses that he kept permanently clamped to his face, “people in Birdsville know nothing about their history. Nothing. It’s lucky we’ve even got these records. Nan came out to Australia from Northern Ireland in 1913, and up to Birdsville as a governess – it’s all in there.”
And so it was, though Nan – Eleanor Villiers Morton – proved to be a most discreet memoirist. After a lifetime on the land, she had produced, in the late ’70s, for the benefit of her many grandchildren, three loose-structured books of reminiscence, “Nanna’s Recollections”, “Nanna’s Travels” and “Nanna’s Memoirs”. These conjured up a placid world: strong bushmen, verdant gardens, flowing wells.
I read through for some minutes, and then, suddenly, there it was: a description of Annandale – Annandale as we had never seen it, when it was busy, crowded, noisy with life: a big homestead, with canegrass verandahs, so handsome and so elegant it was known as “Government House”. There were storerooms, and sheds for the buggy, sulky, drays and wagon. There were native women working the gardens, where tomatoes and watermelons grew. Nanna had even included a set of photographs. They were blurry and faded: they showed the station house, its porch full of stockmen, their families and children, all neatly posed, like ghostly memories in Sunday dress.
*
Several days went by without new leads. The time drew near for us to go. As a courtesy to the past, I drove round to the Birdsville cemetery, and walked through, alone, checking off the names from the book of births
and deaths, industriously making notes – and I could hardly fail to see once more the large, shaded grave, set apart, where the Brook family’s treasured eldest son, Deon, now lies at rest.
We loaded up, then called once more by the big compound, to see, and thank, the leaseholder of Annandale. Once more the slavering, growling bulldog approached, its jaws closed on a green tennis ball of great antiquity; we were beckoned in.
David Brook looked us over as we told him what we’d learned. “And who’s the authority for all this?” he asked, a touch sceptically. I explained. “Taffy Nicholls! Taffy was on the dog fence, and then he managed the pub, in the early ’70s. That would have been his first contact with the area – it’s not as if he had any long association. I wouldn’t be too sure about that story you’ve been told.” Crushed, we nodded.
The conversation drifted on: bulls, and drought, sealed roads for export beef. “David,” I interrupted. “I couldn’t help noticing, in the cemetery, a particular tombstone, with an unusual name: Hurtle Durrant.”
“So?”
“According to the Birdsville death records, Hurtle was the name of one of the boys – one of the Angels.”
“Is that right …” David’s face changed a little. “Well – maybe you do have something, after all. I’ll wager that Hurtle Durrant in the graveyard was the father of Sylvie, Taffy Nicholls’s wife: it must be a family name – so Taffy would have had the story straight.”
So there were Angels, after all, I was getting ready to say, trium phantly, and we were right, there is a presence in the landscape – but David went on speaking, in a soft, meditative voice. “There’s one or two things I’ve been thinking about, and turning over, about that country, since you first came. I expect I told you my mother’s second name was Annandale …”
Glenn and I glanced at each other, in consternation. “No!” we chorused.
“Yes – she was Dorothy Annandale Gaffney. I expect the family left the station just before she was born, in 1911 – so there was always, in her name, a memory of the place. When we approached the Kidmans in 1981, to see if we could buy the lease for that stretch of the flood plain, and they agreed to sell, one reason, from my point of view, of course, was that it was better country for us, but the other was the historical connection, wanting to do something, to come back, revive the place – and I do feel I’ve got a tie with it now.”
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