by Fiona Capp
Yet I couldn’t help feeling that these criticisms missed the point of the poem. For above all, it is a poem about repression and denial—both psychological and literal. It is about secrets that remain untold, words that remain unsaid. The ground we stood on as we stared uncomprehendingly at this nullified, grassy spot was, in the poem, symbolic of our collective unconscious. And buried in that collective unconscious is the spear of the hunter and the ‘painted bodies’ which remain with us as ‘a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot’.
Judith wrote ‘Bora Ring’ in 1944. Since then, much has come out about massacres of Aborigines, and about frontier conflict between whites and blacks. What the poem does most effectively is register the disturbing and pervading silence that existed for so long, especially amongst those who owned the land, about what had gone on. It was at this time that Judith first read Albert’s diaries and began to grapple with the dark side of her family history: the degree of the denial required to justify their claim to the land. In The Generations of Men, she imagines Albert reflecting on his complicity in the fate of the Aborigines:
To forgive oneself—that was the hardest task. Until the white men could recognise and forgive that deep and festering consciousness of guilt in themselves, they would not forgive the blacks for setting it there. He imagined a whole civilisation haunted, like a house haunted by the ghost of a murdered man buried under it.
SIX
Nigger’s Leap
Leaning against the chest-high fence at Point Lookout, we gazed through the branches of snow gums at the misty cloud that billowed up from the valleys below like smoke from a vast cauldron. This was the highest place on the tableland, almost 1600 metres above sea level. When travelling across the rolling hills of the plateau, the elevation of New England was easily forgotten. But here, at this precipitous edge of the eastern escarpment, the world fell sharply, breathtakingly away. This region is known as the Falls Country and much of it is so steep that it can only be entered by horse or on foot.
My stomach plummeted as I peered over the fence. In the deep blue-green canyon below, densely wooded mountains, ravines and pools of foamy cloud spread out before us. Hidden by a thick canopy of trees and vines, the Bellinger, Macleay and Nambucca rivers wound their way seaward to the coast seventy kilometres away where, on clearer days, it was possible to see the waves breaking on the beach and ships passing on the Pacific Ocean.
We stood, quietly mesmerised by the scale of the place and its ancient air of utter indifference to the tiny human figures perched on its rim. Out of the silence rose the ever-boiling vapour from the warm coastal valleys and the occasional tremor of bird song.
‘When I was a girl I had a recurring dream,’ Caroline said. ‘The fence here was much lower then. I would dream I was falling from this cliff and would wake up on the bedroom floor.’
Pip had told me she loved Point Lookout as a girl because it was ‘so scary’: the sudden drop that ‘went down for miles and miles’, and then the thrill of taking a walking track and slowly descending into the primal rainforest below with its hanging moss and dripping ferns and waterfalls.
Part of the appeal of places of this kind, it seemed to me as I strained to see further into the valley, is that they are great amphitheatres for our deepest fears and longings, their deceptively carpeted depths exerting a powerful vertiginous pull. Here, we can indulge our dreams of flying and fear of falling and our hunger for wilderness and far horizons without danger. We can give ourselves over to the intoxicating allure of the sublime. It was not hard to see why Judith adored this country. Yet I knew that its significance for her was not simply to do with the awe-inspiring views and operatic grandeur of the landscape. Once you knew what had happened here, your eyes kept being drawn to the ‘sheer and limelit granite head’ opposite. The series of flat-topped, basalt ridges on the far side of the canyon.
I turned to Caroline. ‘Which is it?’
There was no need for her to ask what I meant. She peered through the ever-shifting veils of vapour, straining to see the many spurs that scalloped the northern tip of the escarpment. Finally she pointed to the most naked and sheer of the cliffs that jutted out sharply above the many inaccessible slopes which made up the lowlands.
‘That one, I think.’
It was called Darkies’ Point. In Judith’s day it was also known as Nigger’s Leap.
I looked at it and thought of ‘the bone and skull / that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff / and then were silent, waiting for the flies.’
We did not have time to descend into the escarpment or for the full day’s walk that would have taken us to Wright’s Lookout, named after Phillip Wright in recognition of his efforts to have the area declared a National Park. Instead, Caroline took us along the Tea Tree Falls walk, a track some distance back from Point Lookout which runs from the main road into the National Park and provides glimpses of the kind of vegetation that grows in the temperate rainforest below. Every few steps we found ourselves stopping to touch the trunks of Antarctic beeches which were covered in a fleece of brilliant green moss. The long, pale threads of lichen and moss that hung from their branches like great beards brought to mind the Ents, those great sentient trees of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—one of the many glimpses of the magic that Judith and her father had experienced when they came here as children.
When Phillip first camped here with his mother and sisters in the early 1880s, there was no road in. The only way to reach this part of the escarpment was by bullock dray and no one but a few local farmers knew of it. To an eight-year-old boy it must have felt like a wonderful secret. Enthralled by the views, they explored its slopes and the rainforest below. Phillip later remembered this trip as one of the most memorable events of his childhood. He continued the tradition with his own family and, like her father, Judith fell in love with the ‘great blue sweep’ of the view from the lookout to the sea, the ‘mysterious darkness of the rainforest’ and the early morning sight of ‘a level ocean of cloudtop lapping the very edge of the plateau and luminous with dawn-rose.’
In the late 1920s, at a time when few people gave any thought to conservation or protecting the landscape from development, Phillip Wright began lobbying local politicians and other influential people to have the area around Point Lookout and the Falls Country declared a National Park. When Judith was an adolescent, her father would sometimes bring politicians and other officials camping with the family in order to show them what was at stake. Phillip’s discussions with his political allies and opponents introduced Judith ‘both to the idea of setting aside such places for their beauty and value, and to the problems of convincing the official mind that such qualities had any importance at all.’
In his submission to the local council, Phillip talked of the huge old red cedars, unique to Australia, but which were rapidly being wiped out. The commercial value of the wood, he argued, was nothing compared with the value of the trees as a ‘national asset’. They should be protected as were the giant Sequoias of California. It disturbed him that ‘many logs have been cut in the area in years gone by, and are now rotting on the ground.’
These cedars would come to hold special significance for Judith and she would remember them as ‘more like gardens in the air, than trees’, abundant with orchids and ferns and providing homes for all kinds of birds and insects. In her novel for children, Range the Mountains High, a bushranger escorting a woman and her two children through the Falls Country recalls the once-abundant cedars in the ravines and how the cedar-getters had taken most of them. In a direct echo of her father’s remarks, the bushranger says: ‘Wasted—like that log—you’ll see many of them, lying there to rot because the bullock teams couldn’t drag them out. In one hundred years’ time Australians will curse the cedar-getters; good timber will be as scarce as gold.’
In a sadly ironic twist, the trustees of the New England National Park were later forced to allow logging of the remaining old growth cedars because of lack of govern
ment funding after the Second World War. The removal of the old cedars upset the balance between predators and prey that had protected them for so long, and Cedartip caterpillars decimated the remaining young cedars. Years later, Judith would remember the ‘red wounds in the soil—bleeding in every rainfall’ as all that remained of the felled trees.
Our path through the forest finally brought us to the headwaters of the Styx River, where it was little more than a swiftly running creek. We crossed to the other side of the Styx and, as if we had indeed passed into another world, the vegetation abruptly changed—the moist, mossy rainforest giving way to dry sclerophyll species, the snow gum and stringybark that signalled a shift to the high plateau. As we retraced our steps back to the car, I was conscious of how little I had really seen of the park and how superficial my understanding of it was compared with Judith’s and Phillip’s. I was a tourist here and could never hope to feel the connection with, or responsibility for, this country that they had known and loved so passionately. Nor could I feel the very personal guilt that Judith carried all her life about what early settlers like her ancestors had done here over one hundred and fifty years before.
Judith first learned about what had happened at Darkies’ Point when she was back in New England during the war. One day she went with her father, who was in charge of civil defence for the New England region, to search for an old track leading from the tableland to the coast that might be used to evacuate people if necessary. Their search took them to the plateau’s edge at Point Lookout. As they stood looking across at Darkies’ Point, she asked him how it got its name. He told her that in retribution for the spearing of cattle, early white settlers had driven a group of Aboriginal men, women and children over the cliff.
The shock Judith felt on hearing this story can be gauged through the poem she wrote about the massacre a few years later. From the first line of ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’ there is a feeling of disorientation and foreboding. It begins with a vertiginous description of the eastward spurs tipping ‘backward from the sun’ as night falls—a physical sensation which, through the course of the poem becomes a kind of historical vertigo; a feeling that nothing about the past is stable; a feeling of having been set frighteningly adrift. The poem’s many jolting shifts of perspective and mood underscore Judith’s bewildered sense that her own history has been cast in a new and disturbing light. When she asks, ‘Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers?’ and then replies, ‘We should have known . . .’, we can hear her struggling with the guilt that was to become inseparable from her love of the place; her horror that she had been coming here all these years in a state of false innocence, unable to see what was in front of her eyes. This place which she felt a personal claim to because her father had been instrumental in protecting it; this place that laid bare the geological mysteries of the tableland; this place where she had camped since childhood and which had produced ‘times of bliss’ was now irrevocably changed. The whole atmosphere, the mood, the feeling of it had darkened.
When Judith was researching The Cry for the Dead over thirty years on, she could not find any written reference to the Darkies’ Point massacre. But she did later acknowledge the discovery of an account by an early settler called F. Eldershaw, whose station on the north-western side of New England was attacked by Aborigines in 1841 and who lead a reprisal raid that tallies with known details of the Darkies’ Point massacre.
In the early nineteenth century, as the early settlers began pushing inland from the central New South Wales coast in search of new grazing land and outward from the tableland of New England, the Aboriginal people of the region retreated into the Falls Country. Deprived of their original hunting grounds and the vegetation which made up a large part of their diet, starving Aborigines stole cattle and sheep and sometimes killed the shepherds looking after them. In retaliation, parties of white settlers would hunt them down.
Eldershaw’s florid and self-justifying account, with the retrospectively chilling title Australia As It Really Is, makes grim reading. On discovering that three shepherds at an outstation had been killed by Djungutti Aborigines and 2000 sheep taken, Eldershaw gathered a party of ten men to pursue ‘the murderous villains’. ‘Each of our men was savagely anxious and eager to be chosen for this painfully imperative task; the thought of their butchered comrades, with sundry vivid reminiscences of personal escapes from a fate as dreadful, made them pant for an opportunity of vengeance.’ By the fourth evening, after a number of skirmishes with the Djungutti, they spotted the Aborigines’ camp on a ledge of rock below them. ‘Here a scene of most astounding wildness was presented to our gaze; a perfect amphitheatre lay beneath us, formed by a mass of perpendicular rocks, whose bare and rugged faces would have afforded scarcely sufficient room for an eagle’s nest.’ Eldershaw believed that the Djungutti were attempting to lure them into a trap. From their position above, the whites fired on the Aborigines. The panicked Djungutti began to ‘rush in reckless despair towards the only means of escape from their exposed and dangerous elevation.’ Screaming and yelling, they were ‘urged over the ledge’s brink by the pressing crowd behind’ from where they fell into ‘the yawning sepulchre beneath’.
Eldershaw then claims that the growing darkness prevented him seeing any more of the ‘horrid scene’. Yet, he goes on to describe in detail how, when his men moved in, continuing to fire, the remaining blacks ‘dashed themselves in frantic violence to the depths beneath’. Some of the youngest of the tribe hung briefly from the branches of a solitary tree before plummeting to their deaths. ‘Sick of the horrid carnage below, I fain would have retired from the dreadful spot, but all my efforts, entreaties, threats, were utterly useless. Shot after shot, with curses wild and deep, the excited fellows launched at their hated foes—their butchered comrades’ blood was that night fearfully avenged!’
While disturbed by the carnage he and his men had inflicted, and distancing himself from the worst of it, Eldershaw justifies his actions by turning his version of events into a morality tale in which the natives of the district learn their lesson and renounce all violence. The once ‘wild and savage Blackfellow’ becomes ‘harmless’ and ‘tractable’, winning the ‘toleration’ and later the ‘kind regards’ of the local whites. Everyone lives happily ever after.
Much as Eldershaw might have needed to believe this fairytale, his further observations about Aborigines in his book suggest that his conscience was not so easily assuaged. To read page after page of his insistent claims that the Aborigines are doomed to extinction, that they are ‘deeply degraded beings’, that they have no feeling for others, that they have no religion and are incapable of improvement is to glimpse a man struggling with the intolerable memory of his own barbarity. After mounting his case that Aborigines are subhuman, he describes himself as ‘the most sincere well wisher for these unfortunate people’. He then goes on to argue that squatters ought to be entitled to take the law into their own hands—both in self-defence and to exact ‘the punishment due to such offences’. The British government owes its subjects ‘an indisputable right to protection’, he says, regardless of questions about the legitimacy of its claims to possession of ‘the wasting territories of such savage tribes’.
While Judith had not read Eldershaw’s account, her poem about the massacre reads uncannily like a response to it, for it is as much about the self-justifying mentality behind the massacre and its legacy, as about the massacre itself. Whether she knew that the massacre happened at night is impossible to say, but the poem is pervaded by images of darkness and night. Just as Eldershaw claimed that the darkness stopped him seeing the worst of the carnage, the poem captures the early settlers’ willed blindness to what happened, their need for the evidence to remain hidden. Only if we recognise the fact of this repression, confront the darkness of our history and accept (as Eldershaw could not) that ‘all men are one man at last’, Judith argues, will we be able to move on without being haunted or swamped by the past.
Nigh
t lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time.
Tellingly, the same sense of responsibility that fuelled her feelings of personal guilt also provided her with a means of atonement. Years later she would argue that our last chance to make amends was to protect the original beauty of the country. ‘It was not “wilderness” to the people who lived by it and through it, but the source of their very life and spirit; and to those of them who somehow survived our invasion it remains so. And for us, too, it can be a place where we find some kind of rest, joy, and even forgiveness.’
There are no graves for the Aborigines killed at Darkies’ Point, but Judith surely had in mind their epitaph when she wrote: ‘And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.’
SEVEN
Dream scape
As she grew older, Judith returned less often to New England, but she never stopped going back to Wallamumbi in her dreams. In part, she was revisiting what she called ‘childhood land’—a very specific part of the property which was probably the garden area around Council Rock. But these dreams were not simply a return to the ‘lost garden’ of childhood. They were always overlaid with adult anxieties about her on-going relationship with this place and her very mixed feelings about her family.
After she began reading Jung in the 1940s, Judith started a dream diary which she kept on and off for decades. Her daughter Meredith still has one of these diaries from the 1960s and 1970s. She showed it to me one evening while I was staying with her at her bush property near Mongarlowe, not far from where Judith lived at Edge. I took the small leather-bound, loose-leaf folder with me to bed and struggled to decipher Judith’s handwriting. Many of the dreams recorded were ‘big dreams’, a phrase used by Jung to describe particularly significant dreams. Big dreams, he said, were not simply personal, they had a universal quality. ‘They reveal their significance—quite apart from the subjective impression they make—by their plastic form, which often has a poetic force and beauty. Such dreams occur mostly during the critical phases of life, in early youth, puberty, at the onset of middle age and within sight of death.’