by Kim Mahood
I AM SUDDENLY OVERWHELMED by a desire not to be here. This monotony of mulga scrub and red cattle-powdered earth confronts me with the raw stuff of my own irrelevance. A cappuccino in an Oxford Street coffee shop, a bit of window-shopping, a good escapist film. That is the way I would like to spend the afternoon. I make my coffee on the gas stove and eat a can of sardines straight from the tin. Somewhere among my gear is a Muriel Spark novel. It is a strange, disturbing little book, but too short. In a couple of hours I have finished it. I wish I had brought more escapist reading. One of those interminable Iris Murdoch novels full of people having ethical crises, or John Le Carre, with his world-weary spymasters and grey European borderlands. Anything to get away from here.
But I meant to pay attention, make every moment count. My travelling books include Lucy Lippard’s Overlay, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology, which I have never been able to read. I brought it with me on the principle that with absolutely nothing else to read I would be forced to persevere. The convoluted language makes a kind of mad sense in this setting, among the dusty mulga trees. I march around the cattle yards declaiming passages aloud.
—The critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on ‘the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension’, of energetic, molecular dimension—a space unto itself (un espace propre) that deploys its materiality through matter …
I articulate the parentheses and the inverted commas for the benefit of the listening crows, which cark derisively whenever I stop for breath. I climb onto the top rail and fling sentences at them.
—The primary determination of the nomad is that he occupies and holds a smooth space …
The crows are not impressed, in spite of the parentheses. I turn a few pages and try again.
—The sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate together …
It is no good. By this time the crows are hysterical, and so am I.
I DECIDE TO CONTINUE THE bore run and camp at Kim’s Bore, my namesake. They have misspelled it as Kym’s Bore. So much for posterity. Again there is a fence line, a gate. I take Sam for a walk, on a lead so there is no chance of him picking up a bait. The country is red and dry, dry. The sunset blazes crimson and gold through the blades of the windmill, an iconic Outback image. Topnotch pigeons burst past me in a soft grey flurry. I want to fling myself into a wild, bursting embrace of all this. Instead I wash my hair, rinse a few clothes and cook a rice pudding in the camp oven.
It is the time between day and night that is profound with melancholy. My attempt to stave it off with domestic chores fails. I sit by my campfire and accept it, knowing it will pass. There is a passage in that strange and wonderful book The Soul of the Ape, in which the South African scientist Eugene Marais describes the behaviour of the baboon troupe he studied. At sunset the busy activities of the day are suddenly curtailed, and silence falls among the baboons. Babies seek the comfort of their mothers, and adolescents gather to gaze towards the fading western horizon. Among the adult animals a kind of grief takes hold, and as darkness falls they call out in deep sorrow at the day’s ending. To Marais this was evidence of an inherent pain of consciousness, shared with humans and articulated in the moment when day shifts into night.
I watch the leaping flames and pay attention to these deep stirrings of primate grief. My sophisticated identity crisis flares briefly and goes out in the swooping darkness, and for a moment I am outside myself, feeling truly the pain of consciousness and the day’s death.
In my swag, sleep refuses to come. The Cross turns slowly above me, the Milky Way streams across the night sky, and my mind turns and streams with it. I am tormented and disturbed by what I find out here. It seems I cannot leave it alone. I know that this place and these people are intensely important. Once I would have claimed knowledge and empathy with it and them. Now I stand outside it all, transfixed and silenced. The picture I had of my life is crazing over like a shattered mirror, every fragment containing a distorted reflection.
Somewhere in all of this is the story I am trying not to tell. Along a route marked by campsites, bores, claypans and sand ridges I am tracing the thread of a life which is in large part my own life, a personality whose traits not only deeply influenced me but are my own traits, a temperament which is mirrored by my own. I came here to lay the ghost of my father, and am confronted instead with myself.
It was from my father that I got the notion of the sublime in landscape, and of the land as a site of redemption. But as I pursue his memory out here, he recedes from me and from this place, and I am left with a shadow, an after-image. I cannot see him for the shadow cast by my own presence.
My father’s life had in it certain focal acts. One of them was the stock-route trip. Another was the early years of establishing Mongrel Downs, then the remotest cattle station in Australia. The events are the stuff from which legend is formed, and they were shaped into a story which has embedded itself into the fabric of my family’s and my own history, until it seems that all other events gain significance only in relation to these legendary acts.
Am I attempting to do the same thing with my own journey? To create a focal act which will displace those of my father. It seems likely. This journey is like a cable which attaches my past to my future. Slowly, deliberately, with all the skills I have, I am attempting to weave another story. It contains my father’s myth, but it has another layer that is my own, which parallels my father’s but is profoundly different in its infrastructure. Is this how I attempt to free myself, by acknowledging the parallels, and within those similarities make a story that is very different in its intention?
Or is what I am doing a kind of heresy, an unmaking? For want of a better word I call it art, which my father would have seen as self-indulgent posturing. (And there are moments when I see it the same way.) It is as if I have dragged all my own messy baggage onto his territory and thrown it down like a challenge.
23
ALTHOUGH THERE WERE TIMES when my father retreated behind the persona of the laconic bushman or into a punishing silence, in fact he liked to talk. We are a family of talkers, but my father held the floor when he chose. When my father talked I listened.
I knew when to throw in the right cues. I wanted to hear his stories. I was younger then, and I believed everything. I made myself in his image. Later, when I tried to get free of it, I didn’t know how to begin. I had never developed the habit of rebellion, only the habit of concealment. Did he feel that slow withdrawal of perfect faith, in spite of my attempts to hide it? I was angry when I finally started seeing his feet of clay, and how they held me down too.
He held my life in thrall for all of my childhood and much of my adult life. It was not intentional. Somewhere in the emotional space between a man and his first child, who was a much-loved daughter, an edifice was created that was both real and imaginary. It existed in the minds of the father and daughter as a marvellous bond of almost perfect understanding. And so it was, so long as the daughter was a child. I have watched friends and brothers who have become the fathers of daughters, and it is a miracle of tenderness. It is the most delicate, fraught and poignant of bonds.
MY FATHER WAS DARK-HAIRED and good looking as a young man. He kept his hair, which as he aged became a silvery mane. He disliked haircuts, and his hair was usually curling on his collar, at which point he had been known to saw the ends off with a pocket knife. He had a fine sense of the absurd. When relaxed and on his own ground he was excellent company, though usually as the centre of attention. I used to feel uncomfortable if others took the limelight away from him for too long. He read with penetrating and perceptive intelligence, but was immensely scathing of the theoretical that was not mediated by practical experience. He needed to be right about things. It was impossible to argue with him, it became a personal affront. We didn’t argue. It was easier not to.
He taught me how to
do things. I learned to drive when I could barely see over the bonnet of the Landcruiser. He bought me a pony and taught me the rudiments of riding. He taught me how to weld, how to use tools, how to make things and fix things. He taught me how to think my way into things, work them out, not be intimidated. And how to question and challenge authority, as long as it wasn’t his.
From him I learned the importance of nature, the value of small daily things, how to be trusting and trustworthy, to be respectful of human beings who deserved respect. All of us learned by example to value the Aboriginal world that surrounded us, and to learn from it. From time to time I heard my father referred to as ‘a bit of a blackfellow-lover’. In the Territory of that time this was considered unusual and rather eccentric. In my father’s case it was applied because he had a reputation for fairness which he extended regardless of colour. When he was a young superintendent on Hooker Creek, he took some of the Aborigines with him on a trip to Katherine. One of the boys came to him and said the shopkeeper had cheated him, and my father went with him back to the store and confronted the shopkeeper. It turned out he’d short-changed the boy a penny—A penny’s a penny, and anyway it’s the principle that matters, insisted my father, feeling a complete fool. It’s one of the things that never changed. Even at sixty that twenty-five year old was still there, prepared to make a fool of himself defending a boy’s right to his penny.
MY FATHER WAS SUSPICIOUS of anything that smacked of psychology, and deeply uncomfortable with any public expression of emotion. He described it as spilling your guts or, ironically, expressing your innermost feelings. I have some sympathy with his attitude, especially after the excesses that have resulted from a generation in search of its inner child.
But he was extreme, probably because he had a kind of terror of exposing himself. He was like someone who had experienced a religious upbringing, and had failed its principles in some profound way. I don’t know what it was he was afraid of exposing.
It may have a fairly simple explanation. My father was a shy, self-conscious boy who felt deeply the inadequacies of his education and social background. Drink set him free, allowed him to experience himself as clever, charming, talented—all things he was by nature. But the monster lurked in a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, a severe form which attacks the brain and causes profound personality change, eventually irreversible. There are hints, though no hard evidence, that this disease may have been the reason for his father’s abandonment to the orphanage. It wouldn’t be the first time the black dog of alcoholism has haunted an Irish family down the generations.
So there was my father. Handsome, funny, charming, intelligent, honest, extremely competent at everything he took on, a good horseman, any child’s hero. And there was my other father. Unpredictable, volatile, sentimental, morose, sensitive to every imagined slight or challenge. I loved them both, the one with uncomplicated delight, the other with great caution, which slipped at times into vertigo and panic.
The Outback was a serious drinking culture, kept in check more by geography than by design. The spree after a stint out bush was standard practice, and the awesome excesses some drinkers achieved were part of the Territory folklore. By the time my father’s drinking became visible as a problem, he was in bad trouble, having had several seizures during which he blacked out, each one causing cumulative brain damage. The dark personality was present like a stain even when he was in his lighter, cheerful mode.
When he understood finally that his drinking was a disease that was killing him and damaging his family, he stopped. But the shadow never left him. Maybe it had always been there. My mother says not, but she has a selective memory. I don’t think he ever forgave himself for his weakness, and the social ease that alcohol had given him was gone for good.
Although my father stopped drinking when I was in my early teens, the relationship between us had been formed in the drinking years. The shadow personality spoke directly to something in my own nature, an awareness of the damage people could do to each other, of the paradoxical nature of love. One could neither choose love nor evade it. It was a force of nature, a direct link to the soul. It gave meaning and abolished it. Nothing could be done about love, particularly a child’s love, which has no measures or boundaries.
I have my little suitcase of baggage, left over from that time. I have unpacked it often over the years, taken out the contents and examined them, thrown out anything that has become threadbare and moth-eaten. I have found strange cherished half-forgotten things, which I have carefully folded and put back, and unlabelled parcels pushed away at the bottom which I have not dared to unwrap. It is a Pandora’s box. I never know when I open it what may suddenly fly out into the world, leaving me shaken and amazed.
The suitcase weighs differently at different times. There was a time when it seemed unable to contain the awkward shape of my confusion and fear. Mostly these days it travels fairly lightly, though at the moment it has the additional weight of maps and diaries, and a tea tin containing a scraping of clay and ashes.
I have felt craven before various social frameworks, eager to please, to not be found out. It has seemed as if all around me are forms and structures which have an a priori existence, within which authority is vested by some ordained right. The things I have wanted for my life have not been compatible with these structures. It has been necessary to find gaps and holes through which to move, as unobtrusively as possible. A strange and precious byproduct has been the discovery in these gaps of the raw materials of art. I have tried to avoid being unmasked and forced to make a stand, not sure whether I have the necessary courage to do it. Many of the choices I made were influenced and encouraged by my father. His authority stood stronger than the broader social authority. As long as he approved the direction I chose for my life, I could withstand the pressures and expectations from other quarters. Somewhere in the suitcase is a package labelled ‘Authority’, and this trip has something to do with it. It is about telling this man in my head, this ‘father’, who has taken up the space the dead man left, that I no longer need him to authenticate me.
AT BOARDING SCHOOL, IN THE neat box pleats of her tartan uniform and the circumscribed symmetry of her days, the place the girl called home seemed as improbable to her as it did to her schoolmates and teachers. She began to wonder whether she had simply made it up. Sometimes she did make it up. She discovered that people were inclined to disbelieve the true things she told them and to believe the more outlandish inventions. She invented her home as a counterpoint to the unrelenting femaleness of the school. At the same time she became absorbed in the finely-tuned nuances of style and behaviour necessary to survive school life.
It demanded on all sides a kind of conformity, which was the conformity of tradition and social convention, the particular conformity on which the school’s reputation was built, of producing young women of sound education and social conscience, who would be fine citizens and mothers and would help shore up the foundations of civilised behaviour. She was once given a thousand lines to write as a punishment, which gave her the opportunity to examine their meaning and repudiate them at length.
Obedience is essential if a civilised community is to be maintained.
She was not old enough, or knowledgeable enough, to cite historic examples of the dangers of obedience, but could only resist the premise as if her life depended on it. But this sort of conformity was visible and could be resisted.
It was the soft, small, constant barbs of girls she could not fight, that said, you are not one of us, you don’t belong, your clothes are wrong, your words are wrong, you are wrong. They clustered like anemones and measured out with waving barbed tendrils their precise collective judgement, which applied to that place and that moment, which had nothing to do with family or society or the visible structures of school life, but was to do with a self-invented girl realm. Among them she was constantly alert, a chameleon child, ready to adjust her dress, her speech, her behaviour, if only she could grasp what it wa
s that must be adjusted. She watched their mouths and their eyes. She was like a deaf child learning to lip-read.
On Sundays, walking to church in her white dress and gloves and panama hat, indistinguishable among fifty white-clad girls, the elegant suburban mansions giving off an odour of gentility, she could not believe that any other world was possible.
He stepped straight from the exotic realm of the Outback into the circumscribed boarding school world, and in that moment he authenticated her and the world she came from. He didn’t look like the other girls’ fathers, the wheat and sheep farmers who seemed diminished by their town clothes, who wore flat-brimmed hats and tweed jackets and waited in the car while their wives negotiated the release of daughters.
He had the bowed legs and gait of a horseman, the sides worn down on the heels of his high-heeled boots. The brim of his Akubra tilted down over his eyes, and his hair was black and curled about the collar of his blue shirt. He was deeply tanned and his eyes were hooded already from staring into the sun, though he was not yet forty. There was a hint of lawlessness about him. He walked into that inner sanctum of femaleness and prohibitions in his high-heeled boots and his rakish hat and plucked her from it.
Her friends watched her pack a few clothes, enough for several days. She did not know how long she would be away, or where she was going.
—That’s really your father!
He looked the way he had always looked, but she saw him now with the eyes of the other girls.
That first night they stayed at the Adelphi Hotel, which was the flashest place she had ever stayed in, and ate in the grand dining room. The silver service waiter patronised them, which she noticed but her father didn’t. Her school was teaching her to recognise refinements of class and manners. She loved the way her father was so direct and friendly, so that before long the waiter came out from behind his waiter’s face and was friendly too. It turned out that he was a country boy from Narrikup who wanted to be a writer, and her father said—Good for you, if you’re prepared to do a job like this, then you’re bound to get wherever you want.