by Kim Mahood
Camp 66. Thursday, August 9th, 1900.
The rockholes were a splendid sight, being situated in the roughest part of the gorge. They were surrounded by high precipitous rocks, and over both water was still running. They were situated on different levels … The upper was heart-shaped, wide, and ten feet in depth … The lower hole was circular, somewhat smaller in appearance, but of greater depth … The measurement of this hole gave 20 000 galls. of clear crystal rainwater. The unfortunate part about these holes was that they were practically inaccessible to stock.
Lorna Springs is in a long low red escarpment. The approach to the gorge is much rougher and stonier than I remember. The gorge and the rockholes are the same. I first saw this place with my father. We made the short climb to the rockholes while the Aboriginal stockmen remained at the entrance. Whether they were reluctant to go in I do not remember. They did not seem to know much about the place, although it must have been extremely significant as a rare permanent water supply. But this was not their country, most of them came from Billiluna and further west. On the other hand, maybe they just weren’t telling.
The first rockhole is perfectly circular, almost three metres across. It is undercut beneath the rim, and when the water level is low, birds and creatures fall in and cannot get out. Once my father rescued a wedge-tailed eagle, which watched him with unblinking yellow eyes, heaving its sodden wings when it felt the lasso of aerial wire fall across them. As a young man Malley attempted to measure its depth, diving in and striking a current some metres below the surface. He came up fast, imagining himself swept into the wet red darkness, drowning while just above the sun shone on bright rock.
Overlooking the waterhole, a little way up the gorge wall, is a large boulder. The shelf behind it is sandy and smooth. When I came here the first time there was a pile of round stones conveniently placed for a crouching hunter to hurl at an unwary wallaby coming to drink. Faded ochre hieroglyphs made soft patterns on the rock, barely visible until the eye learned where to look.
Higher up is the second, triangular hole. On the day I came with my father it held a shallow pool of stained water and was thick with brown and orange butterflies. Today it is dry, as are the waterholes along the creeks.
The second time I came here with Malley, en route to Billiluna. We met a mechanic travelling back to the Territory from the mission, who insisted on coming in to look at the rockholes. His attitude towards me was avuncular and sentimental. I did not trust such cloying regard, having seen it too often in violent men. It outraged me that such a person should invite himself into this place. It outraged me that I should attract this unwelcome regard merely because I was young and female. Remembering, I grin a little wryly to myself. These days the mechanic wouldn’t give me a second glance.
This time it is the paintings which hold my attention. Some at least have been retouched recently. The genius loci, a red snake, undulates across a shelf of rock above the circle of water. The ochre is matt and fresh. I pay homage to the old spirit in his new skin, crawling forever on the rock face. The pile of stones behind the boulder has gone. It is afternoon and the gorge is in shadow. It is easy to feel mysterious affinities with the energies and presences in such a place. Not so easy to feel them for the real people, who live here still. The past is more tractable than the present, being less cluttered with contradictions. As we leave, Malley remarks that a pile of flat stones near the entrance to the gorge may be a grave. He throws away these snippets of knowledge. I do not ask him how he knows. I have never asked him about the Aboriginal part of his heritage. If I did so now, he would be surprised and embarrassed.
17
A LARGE BLACK BLOTCH TURNS the border section on Davidson’s map into terra nullius. He travelled from the north-east, crossing briefly into Western Australia at the intersection of the 129th north-south and the 20th east-west parallels, and headed towards the southern end of the Lewis Range. The section of the diary I have begins at this point, in Western Australia, at camps 53 and 54. The quality of the photocopying is very bad, the print blurred and difficult to read. He crosses back into the Territory more or less where the present road cuts the border, and where the stock-route land party crossed on the return leg of their journey.
Camp 55. Wednesday, July 25th, 1900.
We sighted a somewhat prominent flat-topped hill on a continuation of our bearings. I decided to steer for the flat-topped hill with the double object of seeing if there was anything along the flanks of the far range, and also of examining the country in the vicinity of the flat-topped hill.
I am confused by Davidson’s references to the flat-topped hill. It seems probable that he is referring to Mt Tracey, but I can’t make the map and diary references tally. My father has pencilled in the location on Davidson’s map, and it is not on the line between camps 55 and 56. I follow my nose, cutting south along station tracks until I can see the sandstone hill, then leave the track and drive across the flat grasslands to its foot.
I climb the steep slope of broken sandstone and look for Davidson’s name scratched on a rock at the summit. Davidson, 1900. I remember it clearly. Bruce Farrands, my brother and I climbed Mt Tracey one afternoon, and we found his name and the year scratched at the base of a cairn of stones. But today I can’t find it. I begin to wonder whether I imagined it. Until this moment I would have sworn to the memory. I can recall the quality of the air of that particular afternoon. It must have been winter because it was mild and the shadows were barely beginning to stretch towards the middle of the afternoon. But I am no longer confident of the things my mind conjures up.
I stand on Mt Tracey and the Davidson party weaves its slow progress across the landscape, a line of camels, five men and the shadowy presence of a small dog. Davidson’s journal describes the surrounding country and the view from the summit. It is not much changed, though in this dry time there is little evidence of bird life, and the ‘splendid grass flats’ are grazed to a blond stubble.
Camp 57. Friday, July 27th, 1900.
I obtained a good view from the summit of the hill, which was surrounded by open grass flats. To the southwest and west were several short tablelands extending round to the end of the detached range. Blackfellow’s smokes were visible in this direction, and also to the northward beyond a strong depression which encircled the grass country …
Birds were extremely numerous about this locality, and coming along early this morning, with splendid grass flats to walk on, flocks of grass parrots and birds of other description chirping and singing, made me for a while imagine I was in a more favoured locality than Central Australia.
The hill on which I stand is the most striking feature in this part of the country. It is named after my sister, whose life has been as touched and troubled by this place as my own, though in a different way. Her child’s footprints make small smudges, a part of the pattern of women’s tracks across the country. There are many tracks, my mother, my sister, the girl I was, Daisy and Millie and Margaret and Patricia, all the women who travelled this way, the ancestral women and the ones who have come back to their country.
My adult feet, bare and white and bony, toenails painted a brave red, search for the right path. It is like a tentative and stumbling dance, stepping as lightly as possible in order to displace nothing and to avoid doing myself an injury. There is a big story here, about women and country, too big for me to tell. Or maybe it is not a big story but many small stories, spreading in intricate detail across the country. They are barely visible beneath the more emphatic stories of exploration and development. Those are the big stories, but they no longer convince us as they used to. They need to be amended and retold, the possibilities teased out towards different endings.
The Suzuki looks tiny and far away. The hill is not particularly high, but it is a curious feature of this country that any change of perspective is exaggerated. The tyre marks show clearly on the ironstone pebbles they have displaced. This gives me an idea, to make a mark or a sign, like the hieroglyphs
in the Chilean desert. A whirlwind appears on the horizon, a cone of red dust manifesting like an ancestral spirit. It hangs there, undulating slightly. As I climb down over the sharp red flakes of stone a small wind rushes suddenly past my feet like an escaping animal. As a child I took it for granted that the country communicated through the elements, and through trees and stones and creatures. So it still feels to me, though I can no longer take it for granted.
I walk a circle on the ironstone flat, my footprints slowly dislodging the polished reddish-black pebbles, revealing the paler earth beneath them. It takes a while. Step by step I engrave a circle at the foot of the flat-topped hill which bears my sister’s name. I cannot tell whether I am completing something or simply describing the process of covering the same ground, trapped in the self-contained story of my own past. I climb the hill again to see how it looks. It is clearly visible. I wonder how long it will remain.
In the narrow shade of the Suzuki I fill in my journal, the pen scratching its mundane notations of days and events and locations. It is all I can do, to record my movements, describe the country, hope that this net of words will catch something which I cannot articulate.
18
I TRAVEL EAST, THEN NORTH, then east again, tracking Davidson. This gives me a superficial sense of purpose, and staves off the sense of being on a fool’s mission. A set of wheel tracks, disused, cuts north from the main track. I know without recourse to my maps that it must lead to Macfarlane’s Bore. It is odd how familiar it all feels, after so long, as if my body has stored the information. Partly it is a picture, a mental image of tracks and locations, but it is something else too, a set of visceral alignments over which the intellect has no jurisdiction.
A mile or two along the spinifex-muffled track I find the bore, which is overgrown and abandoned. The column and tanks have rusted out from the salty water. Just north of the bore a line of low sandstone hills breaks the profile of the horizon. Davidson’s route took him through this point, travelling in a north-easterly direction from landmark to landmark. I make the short rough climb to the top of the nearest hill and look out towards the pinnacle hills and tableland of Davidson’s journal. The view has not changed.
Sunday, July 29th, 1900.
From the summit of these hills the surrounding country was visible for a considerable distance, showing some likely looking pinnacle hills six miles distant to the north-east, with a strong tableland range beyond to the east of this line at about eleven miles.
Inscribed in the language of a surveyor, Davidson’s story is still visible in landforms and foliage and horizon lines, but it belongs to a particular time. Bits of the Davidson journey have disappeared. It was in this rough escarpment that his sidekick Byrne discovered a rockhole fed by a small waterfall and overhung with figtrees. My father searched in vain for this rockhole and, in spite of the specific description of its location, never found it. Of course I cannot resist searching for it, without success. Some time between 1900 and 1963 the figtree rockhole ceased to exist. The people disappeared as well. By the time my father came into the country there were traces and relics, but the dreaming track which traversed that part of the country had become a story lodged in the mind of its custodians, who had gone away. The rockhole is like the place in the Borges story which is kept in existence by the visits of a horse. Eventually the horse dies and nobody comes there any more, and the place is forgotten, then one day it is simply not there any more. First the people went away from the rockhole. Then the big animals forgot it, and the birds, and last of all the lizards and hopping mice and butterflies. By the time my father read the Davidson journal and went looking for it, the rockhole had slipped out of memory and out of existence.
The country north of Macfarlane’s showed all the signs of gold-bearing country. Again and again Davidson’s journal records raised hopes of discovering traces of gold; again and again the samples prove disappointing.
Camp No 61. Saturday, August 4th, 1900.
The panning off of all our choice samples confirmed the work of yesterday, inasmuch as every sample panned showed a clean dish—not even a microscopical colour being visible. Anywhere else this result obtained from such splendid reefs traversing good metalliferous country would be considered extraordinary. Here it was what we were learning to expect.
Davidson’s geological instinct has since been vindicated. Rich goldmines have been opened in recent times in the country he explored. But the best gold stories, the ones I believe in, are the stories in which gold is found and lost again.
One of our stock-camp cooks told of an uncle of his who found a gold reef somewhere to the south-west. He loaded samples of gold into the pack and set out for civilisation. But the packhorse died, and the uncle had to jettison most of the gold, along with a bag of horseshoes, in order to lighten the load on the horse he was riding. He was never able to locate the spot again. So somewhere out there, on an ironstone ridge, there is a bag of rusting horseshoes, the bones of a packhorse and a pack full of gold nuggets.
There is another story, told to us by a traveller with a broken-down ute and a wild look in his eye. He was searching for the bones of a duck. Where were these bones supposed to be located, we asked him. On the edge of a claypan somewhere to the east of here, he told us. An uncle of his (uncles seem to be an essential part of the story) found gold and nearly died, only saving himself by catching a wild duck on a claypan full of water. His relative ate the duck raw and left the bones, so the traveller told us, and if he could just find those duck bones he would be well on the way to finding the gold. We asked him how long ago all this had taken place, and he said thirty, maybe forty years. We asked him how, if he found the bones, he would be sure they belonged to the right duck, and he said he would know by instinct.
Technology has taken the myth out of the search for gold. Today, once reefs have been found they stay found. But out there somewhere a packsaddle rots on an ironstone ridge and the forty-year-old bones of a duck leave traces of gold in the imagination.
As for the man Davidson, what do I know about him? He did not get lost or die, so there is no folklore or mythology surrounding him. He was too competent to capture the imagination of history. The little information I have is contradictory. For years all I had was the diary excerpt, copied from the South Australian Lands Department Archives. The date is clearly 1900, and there seemed no reason to doubt that this was when his survey took place. When I searched for more information all I could find was an entry in the Australian Biographical Dictionary, giving his date of birth as 1878 and the Tanami expedition as circa 1909. In 1900 he would have been twenty-two years old.
So I am left with a double exposure, a cheerful turn of the century young man and his older, steadier counterpart of 1909. They move companionably through my story, usually walking beside their camels, in the company of second-in-command Byrne, the enigmatic Pater and the shadowy Woods, and the Aboriginal boy, Jack. The young surveyor was commissioned by the Central Exploration Syndicate to equip and lead the ‘Western Expedition’ out from Barrow Creek to the West Australian border. The expedition was a geological survey to look for gold, and although Davidson found evidence of gold, and more importantly permanent water supplies at the Granites and Tanami, his assessment of both sites was that their remoteness and the lack of major reefs made development at that time uneconomical. In spite of his advice, mines were established at both sites, but the inaccessibility, lack of water and harsh conditions defeated all but the most determined and experienced prospectors. There was a brief and abortive rush at the Granites in 1932, and limited mining continued until the early 1950s, after which the mines were abandoned until the 1980s when new technology made them viable once again.
In the opening lines of his journal Davidson remarks:
The exploration and development of Central Australia is a history of hardships and disappointments, and our experience, covering three of the driest years ever recorded in that country, was no exception.
The assumpt
ion is that an expedition that does not find either mineral wealth or pastoral country is a failure. If there is a streak of romanticism in Allan Davidson, it is well concealed. He has a job to do and does it with remarkable authority. The voice of the journal is pragmatic, scientific, detailed and thorough. It is articulate, sometimes discursive and even humorous. There is in the language an awareness that this is a document which will be read by others, a document of exploration and potentially significant discovery. What was the world Allan Arthur Davidson travelled through at the beginning of a new century? Australia was on the brink of Federation. The promise for settlement and progress was in the notion of mineral wealth, which it was believed would transform the desolate waste of Central Australia into a place of prosperity. Spencer and Gillen had embarked on their collaborative study of the native tribes of Central Australia. Ethnographers around the world were excited by the prospect of information regarding a people who appeared to be living a Stone-Age existence. The hint of an awareness of the cultural complexity of indigenous Australians was beginning to infiltrate Australian society.
Davidson’s only direct encounter with the Aborigines of the Tanami occurred near the Tanami rockholes. It is worth quoting for the glimpse it gives of the curiosity, wariness and opportunism each party brought to the encounter.
Camp 66. Sunday, August 12th, 1900.
Jack sighted three blackfellows at the rockholes, and induced them to come and pay their respects to the camp. The party consisted of one old man and two young men. The former was very doubtful of the advisability of coming too close, and stood on top of the range to wait the reception accorded the others. When he saw that they were given a feed, he concluded it was safe, and joined them. They were about the average height, but somewhat bony and weedy. On enquiry, the boy learned that the native name of the rockhole was ‘Tanami’, and that they never ‘died’—the conclusion we had already formed. They were shown the gold specimens, but had never seen anything like it before … They knew where the stone came from, and volunteered the information that there was ‘mobs’ of similar stone to the east, together with a large creek containing plenty of water and fish.