by Kim Mahood
BACK AT THE FIRE, SAM is uncomfortable. He does not like these overt expressions of emotion. I put the coffee on to brew and watch the smoke rise off the lake, thinking about nothing at all.
I am not ready to leave. I lay out the groundsheet and my box of ochres and pigments. The centre of the groundsheet is a dark rectangle, gridded to resemble a map. Somewhere within the boundaries of the dark space is the point of reference for which I am searching. I feel angry, full of wild physical unease, suffocated by memories and maps and history. I want to be here, now, without memory, without a past, without prior knowledge of this place. I want my life and my presence to be as meaningless and integral to the place as the pale dusty clay and the smoke and the debris of leaf and bark. I take handfuls of ash from the campfire and mix them into a paste in the camp oven. With the paste I mark out a circle which cuts through the edges of the dark rectangle. Then I find my cache of red ochre and mix it into the ash until the paste is a gritty deep red. I strip off my clothes, plaster my body with the mess of ash and ochre, and print it onto the black space, again and again. The prints come up like red bones.
The morning shifts through noon into the unassailable space of the afternoon. The dried ochre and ash itches and flakes. My body registers a breathless, spasmodic tension. If I remain very still I am able to let the surges of energy pass without collapsing into the rage and panic which seem to be at the source of it. This impossible country, which leaves one stupefied with emptiness. It recedes and recedes beyond my grasp. At the same time it takes hold of me at the very centre and wrings me slowly and excrutiatingly with a need and a desire which I cannot even identify, let alone assuage. People talk with such facility of its spirituality, but I have no idea what they mean. What I am feeling is physical, almost sexual. I want to scrape my flesh against the ragged bark of the boree, draw blood, crawl naked into the blinding stillness of the lake surface. So much Aboriginal myth and ritual is pervaded by a harsh sexuality. Genitals are slashed or penetrated with stones. The primordial landscape is scattered with the evidence of ancestral acts of rape, copulation, dismembering. It is about a physical encounter with the land itself, a wounding, a letting of blood, a taking of the country into oneself, of taking oneself into the country.
Many of the whites who live here struggle to articulate an attachment over which they have no control. They leave and return, resentfully, full of anger and indigestible griefs. The hard arid contours of the landscape become synonymous with the failures of will and desire that have driven them away and compelled them to return. What price the homage this country extracts? Acceptance, predicated on limited ambition; a moment by moment focus on the job to be done, the life to be lived. Seen at close quarters it is unendurable, but at the same time contains a narrow and deeply grounded wisdom. I would give anything for that sort of wisdom, not to be torn with ambiguities. But that is not true, of course. One never truly wishes to give up knowledge, whatever the cost.
The stillness of this immense dry lake is unimaginable. It is as if all the silence that is the measure of this country is distilled in this place, into something for which there are no words. The movement of my breathing, the beating of my heart, violates it. I lie wrapped in the groundsheet, scarcely breathing, chilled in spite of the sun.
Today I fell down on the lake, and did not wake for many hours. I dreamed that it stretched to the horizon in all directions. I was alone, and the surface on which I walked was made up of the bones and feathers and fur of creatures. Across this blighted landscape a figure approached, and as it came nearer I was afraid, for I recognised myself, walking inwards from the blind horizon. I turned to avoid this meeting, gripped in the helpless lethargy of dreams, and saw the same figure approaching from the way I had come. I turned and turned, and from every direction the figure came inexorably on, a crowding apparition from which there was no escape.
I hold off the mapmaker’s phantoms with an act of will. The place she invites me to share is too austere, these glimpses too deep for my imagination to follow. Washing off the ash and ochre shifts me back into my own skin. I do not want to think too much about all this. The shadows begin to move across the lake surface, cast by the small mad plants which grow on it. I am anxious for familiar human contact. As I drive away the stillness reaches out behind me. My past is dissolving as I touch it, each place and moment insisting on its own present.
You can never step into the same river twice.
Much quoted Heraclitus. But I have stepped into the dry space of an inland lake.
21
FROM BULLOCK’S HEAD LAKE I take the shortest route to the Tanami Downs homestead, a courtesy visit to let the manager and his wife know my movements. The normality of the small family group at the homestead is almost surreal. They have been generous and hospitable, have not questioned my desire to drive about the country alone. They have taken for granted that I know my way about, that my credentials for being here are legitimate. I feel I should be able to present them with some landscape sketches, something traditional and familiar, as evidence of my good faith as an artist. But I have nothing suitable, explainable, to offer. The groundsheet would hardly be appropriate. To describe what I actually do as an artist would be as difficult as explaining the real purpose of my journey. The imposter quietly steps in, talks in the vernacular of the country of cattle and drought and changes. I listen with bemusement, almost impressed by this chameleon creature which shares my skin, which only hours ago was coated in ochre and ash.
BACK AT LAKE RUTH. I HAVE spent a quiet day here and feel myself slowly taking hold of it, and it of me. Just being here does it, spending time and paying attention. In this place in particular I can feel a part of myself that is still deeply aligned to this country. There is pleasure in making camp, the familiar ritual of setting up my small table, collecting firewood, boiling the billy, planning my evening meal of rice and tuna and the few remaining fresh vegetables. My camp is orderly and spartan. It suits me, to have the necessities of life contained in the back of a ute. For a brief time I can indulge the fantasy of a simplified ascetic life, free of attachments and the messy demands of relationships and responsibilities.
I drag the up-ended boat onto the groundsheet and draw around it. Shield-shaped, heraldic, it cuts the edges of the mapped rectangle. Sam wanders about through wet pigments, leaving paw prints, as if a lion has walked across the shield.
Later I walk across the brittle white surface of the lake to the far side. There was a portent of my father’s death engraved here, erased now by time and water, a hundred-metre channel scored by the nose of a light plane attempting to land. I imagine the shape of the aircraft, a broken silver cross impressed into the white circle of the claypan. My father’s diary entry describing the crash is non-commital.
Station diary. Friday, 1st November, 1963.
Departed in plane approx. 12.30 pm and followed the stock route looking for Litchie. Flew over Ferdie’s camp.
Plane crashed at Lake Ruth.
Shaken up and Bill got cut over his eye and was out to it for several hours.
Had the little portable with us and the plane battery was still OK.
Plane upside down. Got on to the Alice Springs base about 2.30 and arrangements made for rescue.
Our main trouble no water. Walked back to the
Homestead bore that night and I had my first drink of water from the future Mahood home. It looked and tasted like nectar in the moonlight.
Bore had been equipped only a few days.
This is one of my father’s voices, the practical, unembellished voice, with that one lapse into poetic cliché. The man it conjures up was here, in this place. He is far more convincing than the phantom I am pursuing across a landscape I have invented.
As light plane accidents go, this one was remarkably well orchestrated. They crashed on a clearly defined landmark. The radio and battery were operative. The crash was caused by a faulty fuel cap which allowed the fuel to vaporise, so there was no fire after im
pact. They were within four miles of water. The rescue was organised within a few hours, injuries were minor, mostly concussion and shock. My father’s diary entries give no indication of the fear and panic as the plane went down. I remember him describing the scramble to get out, still afraid of fire, and of Bill Waudby ripping the door off the plane with adrenalin-charged strength in order to pull out Bill Wilson, who was unconscious. Someone walked the two miles to retrieve the storpedo dropped by the rescue plane. When they opened it it contained no water, but quantities of toilet paper. The laconic voice of the diary describes the arrival of the rescue party the day after the crash, and the four hundred mile journey to Alice Springs over a bush track.
Ground party arrived with a load of tucker and grog.
Didn’t feel like any of it.
Long hot trip back and at one stage we all flaked out on side of road.
Two punctures and rough.
I don’t remember any drama being attached to the news of the crash. Everyone was safe, to my child’s eye view it was no big deal. I don’t even remember extracting any prestige from it at school.
Nine years of my family’s history are layered into this lake surface, dry and dusty now, intermittently filling and drying in the years we lived here, sometimes a clear blue expanse, sometimes a shallow milky puddle, always a focus for us. They are like palimpsests, these inland lakes. Everything drains into them from the surrounding country, everything is distilled into a tracing of events and passages, erased and reinscribed and erased. This one is an important site, a red ochre place in the dreamtime. Did the tear the plane made on the skin of the lake set loose some angry spirit, and has my father’s death appeased it?
Walking out on the lake surface I carry my father’s death with me. No, it is his life I carry. I believed that his death freed me, as the death of a parent, whether beloved or despised, should free one finally into adulthood. But if that is so, then what am I doing here?
When it is dark I drag the boat as far as I can out onto the lake, wrap myself in a blanket and get in. Although there is no moon, the bed of the lake glows pale in the starlight. Oarless, my boat drifts in a sea of stars. This is where we should have burned my father’s body, on this little boat cast adrift on this dry lake. Not in the sterility of the brick crematorium in Rockhampton. That ceremony had no meaning beyond the gathering of family and friends. Our rituals have become so eviscerated, so antiseptic, it is impossible to engage in them in any meaningful way. Or at least that is my experience. I wonder if I was to wound myself, like the Aborigines with their sorry business, would it release the bloody congealed accumulation of a lifetime’s attachment?
My boat is sinking in stars, and Sam the dog has suddenly become frantic with fright, trembling and whining. Have I roused the local spirits? They might remember me. I used to dream here, skin brown as toffee, floating on the milky water, nothing in my head but the sensation of water and sun on skin. This place mapped itself into my body then, and breaks out on my adult self like stigmata.
Whether it is local spirits or my own demons I’ve raised, they have got the better of both of us. Sam’s behaviour has completely unnerved me. I give up my vigil and leave my stranded craft for the safety of my swag and the fire. The dog digs in as close as he can get, and I pull the groundsheet over my head to shut out the reeling stars.
I WAKE TO A STEADY WIND blowing across the surface of the lake. It becomes stronger as the morning wears on. I try to paint a couple of gouaches but can make no sense of them. Conventional forms of representation seem to carry no meaning, and I don’t know where to begin finding a means of recording this experience. I make pencil drawings of the ti-tree, the same trees under which my brother and I camped as children. The drawings are perfunctory. I cannot find the necessary detachment or focus to work properly, and have neither the skill nor the insight to translate the inscription these stunted trees make on the sand and against the skyline. The pencil stops moving across the sketchbook on my knees, and I am enclosed in one of those autistic moments when everything slips into isolated sharp focus, without sense or connection, absolute and unrecognisable. The shapes of light framed by branches, the shapes of shadows enclosed by sunlight, hold together in a vibrating stasis, a perfect balance between thing and non-thing beyond which there is nowhere to go.
I want to transcribe the marks and shapes which would represent a shared language of form and colour and light. I want to make visible the things this country makes me feel, and the things which have nothing to do with me and my personal quest. I feel the isolation in which so many artists work, attempting to dredge out of personal mythologies some form or image which will redeem the individual experience and make it part of something larger.
THE GROUNDSHEET HAS BECOME a kind of map, to record the day to day immediacy of the journey. The underside, which is serving as a swag cover and accumulating the ash and dust of each campsite, is becoming a travel-stained register of the trip in its own right. There did not seem to be an appropriate moment to bring it out at the women’s ceremony, which would have provided all sorts of possibilities for marks and traces. Now I am sorry, and annoyed with myself. The groundsheet is raw material. I am sleeping in it, so that it must be absorbing the overflow of my dreams and confusion. Like a kind of Turin shroud, bearing the imprint of a transformative journey. What a pretentious notion. I could call it the Mongrel shroud.
This is supposed to be an artist’s journey. But I am losing the boundaries between doing the work and paying homage to the pilgrimage it is turning into. My perception shifts constantly from surface to horizon to surface. Somewhere between the two is the narrative zone, the place where stories like the one I am tracing occur. It is a zone which seems transparent, fragile, provisional. It exists in the memory and the imagination as much as it exists in real space. There are the threads of journeys, thin lines connecting nodes from which activity radiates. It reflects the Aboriginal model, the line of sites connected by a track. It is a place which is about relationships, a psychological and a mythological zone. If you can’t locate yourself in some sort of narrative or myth, you can’t survive for too long in this country. It needs to be a strong story to take its place out here, and it needs to be something that comes from the country itself.
I am overtaken by the need to walk and touch, to feel earth and foliage against skin. It is as if there is an agreement between earth and flesh that draws them together. More and more as I try to make work that deals with the country, I feel the need for this physical encounter, something which cuts through the distance which drawing and painting force.
I walk barefoot, looking down, at tracks and the evidence of creatures, the hollows and nests and burrows they make, at the things which grow and the traces of the things which have died, at the colours and textures of stone and sand and soil. I remember the way it is when you live and work in the country. You are constantly looking at the tracks of cattle and horses or the tracks of vehicles, dingo tracks, kangaroo, emu, goanna, snake, pussycat, bandicoot. It is the way you know the country is busy, alive.
There are the tracks of a dingo, half erased in the soft sand. Near Flint Creek the feathers of a plains turkey are spread about among clumps of spinifex. The downy pale fluff of the underfeathers, evidence of killing, blur the sharp edges of a turpentine bush, as if it had burst suddenly into bloom.
I scoop out the sandy centre of a clump of spinifex. This is real spinifex, with its woody blue-grey base. The larger the circle of spiny foliage, the older the plant. I collect the largest of the scattered turkey feathers and line the scooped hole, feathering the nest within the harsh grey spikes of the spinifex. This act comes closer than any drawing I have done to reflecting a truth about this country. The wind nibbles the edges of the nest, and the feathers pulse gently. They will blow away soon enough, and sand will fill the hollow.
SAM SKULKS ABOUT LOOKING like a blue dingo while I pack up the camp. There used to be black dingoes around here, with tan feet and white-tipped
tails. Sometimes at night one would cross my path when I was walking, or I would glimpse a black shape among the anthills in the late afternoon. The massive red forms of the anthills recede to the horizon, as if a crazed sculptor had lurched across the landscape attempting to create an archetypal form. When we built the airstrip we had to blast the anthills off with gelignite. My father brought home buckets full of monstrous white ants for the chooks to eat, and the flavour contaminated the eggs for days. My brothers and sister called one of the anthills near the lake Friend Anthill and used to perch on its summit, but I cannot remember which one it was.
Before leaving I make a few notes in my journal. The cold wind blows dust in my eyes, my nose runs and the ink blurs on the page.
My maps grow stranger. I do not contrive this. I do not even understand what the marks mean any more. The mud men watch me intently, and they come when I have finished and ponder over the marks and copy them. Sometimes they urinate on the symbols and plaster the resulting mud on their faces and genitals.
I move about blankly on the lake surface, inscribing, digging, scattering pigments, laying out arrangements of small stones. The maps become more intricate and precise, yet often I have no recollection of what I have done. Sometimes I fall and lie on the crusted salty clay for hours at a time. The child has taken to following me about, like a small gnome in her protective burnous. When I have a falling fit she waits for a time and then rouses me. The mud men creep out and watch me, but they do not help me. Their eyes peer out of cracked clay masks, spit collecting in the corners of their mouths and turning to muddy slime. No-one understands the purpose of the mud men any longer. It is believed that they were once shamans and holy men, but they have become something else now. It seems they are always somewhere about, at the periphery of vision, scratching themselves, defecating, fondling their genitals, occasionally breaking into furious biting scuffles. Their bodies are plastered with dried whitish clay, sometimes decorated with feathers and bits of grass, and they are always watching.