The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  After my documentary came out, with its withering footage, the respect for Ted and what he was doing was enhanced, and the whole country was ready to be harassed by him into decency or, to put it more in Ted’s terms, justice and efficacy. And all this somehow suffused with an air of kindness, hard to convey simply in what he said. The arguments continued, with politicians shifting blame but not able to deny the disgrace. For Ted Castwell had emerged as the man whose terse revelations could not be denied.

  Ted’s obsession with not being seen as “bloody missionaries” was a topic he returned to frequently. In Ted’s worldview, to be a missionary was to dip down into the pool of misery, succoring a case here or there but not giving the oppressed the tools to eliminate misery. And thus he demanded Aboriginal eye clinics be run by Aboriginals in the remoter, blinder bush.

  “If we keep doing it the old way, with us calling the shots, we’ll never be anything except a bloody visitation. A bolt from the bloody blue. They’ve had enough of that.”

  As for politicians, “Look up what E. E. Cummings said of them!” Ted urged us.

  Nothing Is Usual

  WE LEFT THE now Unnameable Sinner’s body and traveled for the rest of the light, and found a plump little runner and fed on its fat tail. Then we slept deeply, waking in early morning. The world felt different. We did not eat any thorngum but ran home swiftly, easily.

  Near the great ring of dunes by the Lake, we came upon a woman howling and cutting herself with sharpened stone. Her bared breasts were sodden with blood. This was not good to see.

  When she saw Stark and me, she ceased all mourning and self-cutting and regarded us in a way that, now we were simply men coming home, stopped us where we stood.

  “My daughter has drowned herself in the Lake,” she said.

  Stark raised his hand between us and the woman, telling me, “This is the mother of the Sinner’s woman.”

  The woman raised her stone knife to full stretch and brought it down onto her hip. Fortunately it was not flint and did not gash deeply.

  “My poor daughter has drowned herself in the Lake!” she screamed.

  The shame and her daughter’s extreme act had driven the mother out here to gash herself. She gashed her side with an edge of quartz. Her blood fell to the bluish earth. “My daughter,” she railed at us as if her daughter’s crime were our fault.

  Acts of self-destruction were uncommon. But the rarest and most frowned on was drowning oneself. To use the Lake for that purpose was considered a form of overarching selfishness. It said, “The death I take from the lake is of more meaning than the life everyone else takes from it.”

  “How do you know she drowned herself by her own will?” I challenged the mother.

  “She told her friend she would, and now she has,” raged the woman. “Her lover has gone.”

  “This happened yesterday, mother,” Stark asserted. Before the problem had been dealt with, that is.

  “It happened this morning,” she told us.

  So this was an evil business. How could we tell her, as if boasting, “We have ended the curse”? Her daughter had caught the echo of the Sinner’s death and had killed herself with it. Stupid girl!

  “The world is poisoned,” she said. To us, who had just unpoisoned the world!

  Without the influence of thorngum, the weariness of my journey entered my limbs. I was just a man now. I wanted my shelter and my wife. We continued on past the woman, who barely saw us. Her flanks ran glossy from the wounds she had given herself.

  Back at the men’s law ground, we took off and redeposited the feather-and-blood shoes. They had lasted the pursuit and the return. Now we cleaned the weapon of correction, and deposited the wad of thorngum. Going home, we were usual men again, though tentative at news of the girl’s self-destruction. Such a thing had never happened to me before: a girl killing herself with Lake water as if to dilute what we punishers had justly done to her lover.

  In the village by the Lake in the late afternoon light, people were watchful. Because the Earless Lizard girl had used the Lake to contest the justice of our killing of the Sinner, people expected to be restless, with questionable spirits streaking through their night.

  Girly told me the women had found the place her family had put the body and sang over it and burned fires. “This is a time,” said Girly, who both knew and did not know of my duties as punisher, “when nothing is usual.”

  Girly and I clung to each other that chill night, as if there might be an unexpected gap in the darkness, and we must prevent each other from being spirited through it. I was not at ease with the girl’s astounding act and nor was Girly or anyone else. As we found each other and a socket of warmth in the freezing dark, she asked me, “Have you dreamed a girl child for me?”

  “No,” I confessed. But I had seen a great orb of loss in Parrot Woman’s hands.

  “Good,” Girly said. She considered herself past bearing in any case. She had a grown daughter.

  “So you had some warning after all?” I asked.

  “The mother of the stupid girl came to the grave and told us there would be no girl child born alive.”

  “How did the girl get such power?” I asked. “A child who decides to choke herself to death on Lake water. A child who thinks she loved a clown?”

  Girly said nothing and seemed willing to be reassured. I think that beneath our disapproval of the girl we were thinking of her bravery and love. That she would try to poison the Lake with her contempt and reproach.

  Girly yawned and said dreamily, “Yet it may be something bigger than just this drowning girl.”

  I felt a nudge in the air. Our Sinner Unnameable, who’d had a name a day ago, was questing his way through the shadows and testing out his humor in the world of spirits, and no doubt by now knew more of what was wrong with us than did I.

  Lake Learned and the Carnifex

  AS I AWAITED results and medical options for my esophageal tumors, I was overcome by an urge to go out to Lake Learned again. I suggested the long drive to Cath, and she agreed with certainty that it was what we should do. My reasons were less clear, but I did realize that Lake Learned had been a sort of birthplace to me, where Mr. Learned appeared in his afterlife, and where I might undergo a similar revival.

  Though it is dry and vast now, the country is beautiful in its own way, with its saltbush and bluebush tufts looking sharp and vivid under rare rain clouds. We drove in on the one still-open dirt road, for this is red clay country, made famous for bogging in the folk songs and poetry of the nineteenth century, and in these days closed by traffic authorities during risky times. We skidded in from the west, from the direction of the Darling River, on this wide track set amongst the mallee trees and the native cypresses, and arrived at the lodge to find ourselves the only guests.

  Going to the visitors’ center, a modest enough low-slung structure, we were faced with the melancholy old mallee-wood Lake Learned shearing shed, so sharp-etched in this light. We were the only ones there that day, and the loneliness made us edgy, as if we were trespassing.

  The visitors’ center, normally staffed by members of the tribes of the area, was empty, but unlocked for anyone willing to turn up. When we passed a screen in the entryway, an excerpt from my first documentary came on: Learned Man was discussed and his bones shown and his height of 170 centimeters mentioned along with the ochering of his body, and his osteoarthritis of the shoulder. “We think of uncles having osteoarthritis,” said Jorgensen. “There’s something human conveyed when Paleolithic man has it. As if Learned Man is the uncle of us all.”

  And so there in that great landscape, empty except for plenteous ghosts and zoological wonder, the visitors’ center sprung alive and the lights went on automatically at the appearance of two octogenarians, in a dry lake bottom with saltbush and bluebush, and bush tomato and bush banana and all the other antipodean goodies. Learned Man and shattered young Learned Woman must have eaten these with the fish taken from the bright lake which, though n
ow empty and occupied by silver-blue foliage and mallee trees hissing and shifting in the wind, just like lake water itself under the steely sky, suggested the lake outside was as it had been in Learned Man’s day. On such an atmospheric day too, Megalania, great lizard, was credibly out there as in Learned Man’s day, returned razor-toothed amongst the foliage, devouring small marsupials. He could almost be heard!

  We knew the center well, but given that the lights had bothered to turn on for us, and did so as we progressed from room to room, we felt we should pay attention. We looked with new eyes at the collections of stone tools taken from around the lake, and of sharp quartz that must have been brought in from other places or traded for.

  More than the drudgery or knapping and shaping of tools, I was attracted to reproductions of the megafauna that had occupied the earth as it was experienced by Learned Man and his community. If you’re going to have a life-sized model of any member of these vanished beasts, you would have a life-sized model of a Diprotodon. And the visitors’ center did have one, and I was soon gawping at it. It was a hippo-sized wombat, though with a curiously shaped long nose, and represented two tons or more of protein on the hoof. Its extinction was said by experts to have something to do with Learned Man’s arthritis. Perhaps the old man had acquired the damage to his shoulder hunting the Diprotodon, running on great trunks of legs, towards the point where it could no longer make a claim on a future. What a feast the felling of one of these must have been!

  The megafauna item that gave me a delicious and childlike thrill was the marsupial lion. A creature with a terrible prehensile and opposable claw on each of its front legs, a beast with no descendants in this landscape anymore except in our darkest dreams, its DNA implanted on our phantasms. And what was it? Not a lion. It was a bear by some lights, it was a huge cat by others, and in fact, its like has not been seen since the last died out here, ailing in some fastness of rocks or panting by some billabong, some thirty millennia past. Its hunger for meat vanished from the landscape. They called it Thylacoleo when they found its bones. The pouch lion. For it was marsupial and grew its young to maturity in its pouch. It had all the ferocity the giant kangaroos, pouched folk themselves, lacked. Thylacoleo carnifex, the carnifex being the name of the public executioner in ancient Rome. Quite a title then—the executioner pouch lion. It had molars in its cheeks like blades. Scientists have created computer models of its jawbones and skeletal structure and claim that while a modern big cat will take up to fifteen minutes to suffocate its prey, the marsupial lion killed in a minute by crushing the windpipe and ripping the spinal cord, and slashing the carotid and the jugular with its great thumbs. Yet it begot its children as did the most amiable kangaroo—each as a mere worm which made its way to a pouch, in which it acquired nourishment and burgeoned towards maturity.

  * * *

  Cath and I moved outside, finding ourselves beneath dense steely clouds, not so common in this country, semiarid since the last ice age. We decided to walk north to an old pastoral lease and homestead. You can’t say that the European settlers didn’t give all they could to the dreaming of sheep and cattle, for they persisted a century and a half here with the consolation of intermittent rain. Cath and I were now the most dangerous creatures to be seen, and the red and gray kangaroos who inhabited that basin knew by their steady inspection that we were perilous to them. On seeing us, a sturdy kangaroo infant took to its mother’s pouch, its legs protruding comically, like a child who believes that because its eyes are closed it cannot be seen. A magnificent muscular male stood amidst the gray shrubs to stare at us, its female partner remaining hunched and grazing on the leaves. This huge male gazed at me so levelly, with the most unquestioning but serene authority, that I could see at once why in the Aboriginal cosmos the kangaroos stood for an ancient, marsupial-faced ancestor and fount of guidance.

  We passed by an old sheep station water tank, a red scar in the gray-blue. We held hands and rejoiced in each other’s company as we had not necessarily done when young and bemused by each other’s closeness, now relishing it! When young I had wondered why the aged were capable of such affection, and I attributed it to soft-headedness. But death is close and touches are precious, and the beloved remains beautiful even to the aged swain. This had been delightful to discover.

  The hero ancestor kangaroo amidst the saltbush saw us go. There was pity in his eyes. I was sure of it. There was pity.

  II THE BOOK OF WARS

  Ted and Tesfai

  BY THE EARLY 1980s, Ted Castwell had made the nation believe that his task of initiating Aboriginal eye health was ordained and not to be resisted. Around this time he told me he’d met an impressive East African man who had come to him with eye trouble—a corneal degeneration of both eyes, in fact. The East African, whose name was Tesfai, said that in the Red Sea area his eye disease was called “Dahlak blindness.” Ted told him that it looked exactly like the sandy blight the Aboriginals suffered from and asked Tesfai about the unfamiliar name he’d used. Tesfai said that the disease was named in this case after the Red Sea’s stony Dahlak Islands, whose bright light on barren white stone struck men blind, and not only there but in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

  “Where in the bloody hell is Eritrea?” Ted asked Tesfai, who told him it was on the rhino horn–shaped coast of East Africa.

  By asking the question, though, Ted had engaged himself on an inevitable journey. For he never asked a question without ingesting the answer thoroughly, as if in his own flesh. Ted’s radical apostolate of the eye applied itself, now, to Eritrea.

  Tesfai was a freedom fighter, or according to the Ethiopian ambassador in Canberra, “a bandit.” His rebel movement had sent him to Australia, where there was a handful of politicians who knew where the bloody hell Eritrea was.

  Tesfai and Ted became mates. And thus I met the Eritrean, a tall young man with curly hair, wide eyes, and delicate features. He was an intellectual of Coptic-Christian background from the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands.

  Tesfai explained to me that his country had been fighting against Ethiopian tyranny for a quarter of a century. His task—on behalf of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—was to negotiate with the Australian government and NGOs for relief food and medicine by building contacts here. After seeking help for his own corneal degeneration, then, Tesfai began to turn an Australian rebel named Ted into an East African one, with results for all of us who knew either Ted himself or Tesfai. For to be within Ted Castwell’s ambience was to be subject to his enthusiasms. There were no excuses for apathy in Ted’s world, and—remarkably—he did not seek excuses for himself.

  “Look,” he told me on the phone, “this is a rebel front, okay? But it controls a swath of the country. And no eye doctor. We could bring one of their doctors to Australia to do ophthalmology, and we could also put in place a new scheme, the sort of thing we can’t do here, but can do there.”

  I gave an enthusiastic answer, but he went on as if I still needed convincing. “Your old friend, Learned Man—he’s a star, yes. But look at the map. This place is at the north end of the Rift Valley. And his mother and yours come from there. Mitochondrial Eve. I mean, that’s one thing that should interest you?”

  Such shiny concepts interested me, of course. I was not sure of the extent to which they interested him. For he was a man in perpetual and urgent wrestle with the present. But he did like poor tubercular Keats. That was a clue to something that accommodated the history as well as the eyes of humans.

  * * *

  Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia had come down punitively on the Eritreans, canceling their parliament and proscribing their language. Massacres were carried out by the Ethiopians in Eritrean villages, and urban atrocities began in the Eritrean cities of Asmara and Massawa. Tesfai, who’d had a decent education, became a mountain rebel in a country of inadequate water, shared washcloths, food tainted by the hands of those whose eyes ran with discharge. He had as well a very good chance of being hit by automatic or artillery fire b
y the army of Ethiopia’s emperor, which then became the army of the emperor’s killer, Mengistu Haile Mariam.

  As well as being a guerrilla and ambusher, Tesfai became a safekeeper and distributor of the Ethiopian army food stocks the rebels captured. He negotiated with the nomads, the people of the camel, so that they would transport food, and issued them with payment from the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. This food that had belonged to the Ethiopian regime reached rebel distribution points in the shadow of the mountains, or in the dry country stretching west to the Sudan.

  Tesfai was soon removed from combat peril and sent to work on a primitive but well-organized aid network. If the Eritreans, in the time of the emperor’s famine in the 1970s, had waited on the mercy of others, they would have died. The rebels were attractive because they were such a valiant group with an ideology of brotherhood between highland Christian and lowland Muslim, and because they had begun a war, ultimately unwinnable, against the traditional practice of genital mutilation of girls during childhood. Thus they attracted friends from progressive countries, not least the Norwegians, the Danes, and the Swedes, who found them Mercedes trucks to help move relief from other directions, southwards from the Sudan into the rebel areas. And Australia, in a rare year of spaciousness, took an interest in Eritrea as well. There were a few senators who had spoken in favor of Eritrean independence, or at least of a compassionate settling of the war, in the federal parliament, and that was enough to cause the shadowy head of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and Tesfai’s boss, Issayas, to send Tesfai to study and to raise Eritrean relief in the Antipodes, a long way from East Africa.