Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

‘How do you take them? Isn’t it hard to get them to stay still?’

  ‘The art’s in that,’ he said: ‘All the art. You have to think your way in. The photo’s just an afterthought.’

  Other people came, and went. I moved on. Some days later our paths crossed once more, and then again. I began working with Palomor, and heard his story. It had a delicacy and charm, not just because of his youth, but because he was engaged in a task of conscious self-fashioning. He was in the North to choose and shape his life. Each day he spent there was a day lived in this pursuit; each choice he made had an end in view. The future he was designing would be redemptive: freedom loomed there—but it had to be won, to be earned, through work, and through the force of capital, for Palomor believed fiercely in the power of rent, and compound interest. He longed to own property, to build, to make himself into a man of substance—and this developmental passion sat somewhat uneasily beside his love for untouched country. Only a few weeks earlier, he had begun working as a nature guide; he was soon dispatched on treks across the North Kimberley and Arnhem Land, and over the months of that long, balmy dry he proved himself to be a bushman of special gifts, a man so much in harmony with the order of the tropics that he could lead parties of strangers for weeks on end through swamp and savannah: he could sense the presence close at hand of sacred sites; he already knew each plant and each tree of the Top End; he understood the instincts of the birds and animals—and all this knowledge had come to him purely through walking, and through constant watching: he was an untutored master in the bush.

  I was travelling widely through the central deserts then, on research trips. Often Palomor would ride with me, and those journeys were always times of concord: he would read the landscape as I drove; he saw the changes all around, and caught them in his words—words that mirrored with the greatest exactitude the country’s look and feel. So it was something of a surprise, one late afternoon, during a long eastward haul, as we made our way in his old, rusting Troop Carrier back from Warburton Ranges towards the Rawlinsons and Ayers Rock, when he turned to me: ‘How self-contained the bush is out here! How Randian!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Randian—you know, as in Ayn Rand. The writer. You must have heard of her, and her books. The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged—she’s an inspiration to me: I’ve read everything of hers I can find.’

  In front of us, beneath a cloud front, bushfire plumes were rising north of the Great Central Road; the low red curve of the ranges was just becoming visible: there was the Giles Weather Station radome, shining in the late sunlight, far away.

  ‘That’s probably the first time anyone’s spoken that name in this landscape,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t think the desert’s a Randian environment? Remember: John Galt set up his hideout in the remote American far west. You know the plot, don’t you? Hold the world to ransom: men of force and genius take their labour, and withhold it—keep it—for themselves.’

  ‘That was only a story. And I can’t imagine a less Randian place than here, in fact.’

  ‘Why? Isn’t it a place where you have to make your world? Where nothing is, except what you see: what’s to hand?’

  But for me, it was a place where what lay beneath the surface was ever present, and all the tension in the landscape was hidden from the eye. A place of secrets, and reticence: where one would seek, rather than knowing, and be fearful of what was there to be found.

  ‘Always an answer!’ said Palomor. He shook his head: ‘See the turn-off? Let’s take it. There, that road—to Wingellina—I’d like to: it’s a special road for me. When I used to work at the Rock, before, I turned onto that track once: it was an interesting experience. It was at the time when I had a broken arm in a cast, and I was travelling alone. I made a bet with myself that I wouldn’t have a flat: it looked like sandy country all the way—and it was. At exactly the halfway point, one of the back tyres shredded: a hundred kilometres from anywhere—too far to walk; no chance of anyone coming by. I had to get the spare out from underneath the truck, and jack it, and change the wheel one-handed. It took eight hours.’

  ‘Death or life on will power. At least that must have been a fairly Randian kind of experience!’

  ‘My point,’ he said, with an air of triumph: ‘My point exactly!’

  *

  Months passed. The seasons shifted. One afternoon Palomor and I arranged to drive out to Fogg Dam on the Adelaide River floodplain, a lush, half-forgotten landscape to the east of Darwin, where grand plans for rice-growing export farms came to nothing, long ago, and the surviving dykes and embankments create a wide, enduring wetland, with a world’s-end quality, remote from view. We headed out, well prepared for all eventualities. The aim, of course, was snakes, for the dam structure and its surrounding swamps hold large supplies of dusky rats: frail, unhappy creatures, subject to constant ordeal and suffering, since they form the chief prey of the water python, also endemic to the region, and present in greater concentrations than at any other of its surveyed breeding sites. As a result, Fogg Dam, at certain times of year, resembles nothing so much as a gladiatorial arena, where terrifying pursuits and swift executions are constantly underway; and the struggle’s pitch is irresistibly attractive to western science: all through the build-up months herpetologists, wetland experts and population ecologists throng the near reaches of the dam road as night descends.

  We passed the Coolalinga lights: there was that sense of release that comes as Darwin falls away and the carpet of the Top End bush unfolds—all burnt screw palms, yellowed scrub and halfdead stringybarks. Soon we saw the croc farm and the circling kite-hawks high above its feeding pens. We turned onto the Arnhem Highway: past the electricity substation, the lagoons, the mango farming belt. Ahead, the masts of the defence radars were gleaming; a storm front loomed; the wind picked up.

  ‘How wonderful,’ I said, ‘to be here when the first rains come in from Cooinda and Kakadu.’

  ‘They won’t reach as far as here,’ said Palomor: ‘It’s too early; it’ll be weeks before the rains. It’ll just build up the tension, more and more. You can see everything drooping and panting all around us. Look—the kingfishers can barely hold themselves up straight on the powerlines.’

  He veered off the bitumen, sharply. We took a series of turns down a muddy track.

  ‘I thought we’d come in by a back way I found. It must have been an old access road, from the construction time. It’s narrow; the crest is just below the water level—it’s like driving through the sea, or, when the sun sets, through fire.’

  ‘Good for pictures.’

  ‘That’s the thing about photography—you always come away with something—or the ghost of it, depending on your point of view.’

  We began to slide: he steered back onto the submerged road.

  ‘Don’t look like that—we won’t get bogged.’

  ‘That’s what you said last time, out at Blackmore.’

  ‘But that was completely different. It was obvious from the very start of the day that we were going to come to grief; we both knew it: it was a kind of sacrificial mission; you have to have one every now and then. Anyway, we got out of it in the end. Look—over there, see—that’s the old shooting reserve—and here’s the dam basin—from the other side.’

  Ibises and herons gazed at us suspiciously as we edged along. We pulled up. It was almost sundown; a haze of rainbow spectrum reached across the sky; the clouds changed colour: bright orange, deep red, pale pink, grey.

  ‘It’s like Jurassic Park, here,’ said Palomor: ‘If you know. There’s everything. I was up in a helicopter over the dam the other day: all the animals were flushed—buffalo, dingoes, wild pigs, birds by the thousands; you could see the crocodile families basking on the banks.’

  By this point we had reached the viewing platform set at the causeway’s end. We climbed its steps; the dam was spread out like a fan before us; the water’s surface caught the gleam from the horizon, and quivered in the wind.


  ‘And now?’

  ‘We wait—until the snakes come. And they will. It’s an ideal night for them; they like to stretch out on the asphalt of the dam wall road; there are hundreds of them, if you wait long enough. What’s that you’ve got there?’

  ‘Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America,’ I said: ‘It’s a snake lecture—maybe the best one ever delivered. I’ll read a bit of it to you—it might tempt them out.’

  He checked the book.

  ‘Aby Warburg. Who was he? I know the name. There was a Warburg Bank.’

  ‘There was—the same family—but this one gave himself to art. He’s someone who means a great deal to me: he had a life that stays in the mind. I thought you might like to hear how things seemed to him.’

  He leaned back. I set the scene: the trip Warburg took; his reputation and his name; what he longed to find, and what confronted him when he reached those far-off desert citadels. I began. Warburg’s gentle opening words seemed to hang in the humid air.

  ‘ “If I am to show you images, most of which I photographed myself, from a journey undertaken some twenty-seven years in the past…” ’

  ‘You didn’t say he was a photographer!’

  ‘A very great one—but nothing was enough for him: he needed every way of getting to the heart of life.’

  I went on; darkness gathered; soon we were at Oraibi—we reached the climactic story of the dance: the high priest at the serpent-tree, the dancers taking up the rattlesnakes and holding them in their mouths.

  ‘“Here the dancers and the live animal form a magical unity—and the surprising thing is that the Indians have found in these dance ceremonies a way of handling the most dangerous of all animals, the rattlesnake, so that it can be tamed without violence, so that the creature will participate willingly in ceremonies lasting for days.” ’

  I paused. I tried to sketch the background.

  ‘All this led Warburg into strange terrain. He thought he had come to know what lay at the core of the world; he thought there were secrets in the snake cult: that the snake was lightning, power, that it was the sun and all its fire—he even believed our first religion was devotion to the sun. But there were caves of darkness for him, everywhere, caves to trap us, pits into which we might stumble and fall, and lose ourselves. You can hear it in what he says, can’t you?’

  ‘That’s the most beautiful book I’ve ever heard,’ said Palomor, and looked up through the murk.

  ‘More beautiful than Ayn Rand?’

  ‘Different! But those Indians back then aren’t the only ones who handle snakes. Anyone who follows down this path is looking, like them, of course: looking for something.’

  ‘So the snake’s not always just an animal.’

  ‘It’s never just an animal,’ said Palomor, with great firmness.

  We walked the causeway’s length. At its midpoint, a scientific party had gathered. Torches flashed; there were gruff voices, wry remarks. We reached them. It was a scene of industry. Trap nets had been spread beside the road: a spotlight was turned on them; moths and insects were fluttering and struggling in their mesh. A pair of mud-stained Troop Carriers drove up slowly, and parked alongside each other: lightning flashed, and lit up the faces of the drivers. They knew Palomor; they nodded gently to him. ‘That’s Canadian Dave,’ he said to me, softly, as we walked on: ‘A very serious man. He’s been doing his doctorate here for eight years, on tropical snake distribution—but it’s hard yards, these days, just getting the data. The cane toads are going through this country, you can hear them, later on in the night: they sound like Honda 300 quad bikes revving up. And that’s Gina—from the university—she’s studying python mating patterns. I used to dream of being a researcher, once.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  His voice became vague.

  ‘When I was growing up, on the Sunshine Coast, I was able to find anything, in the bush. We used to go for holidays to Tin Can Bay. It was quiet, and lovely, and full of reptiles: that was when snakes really took hold of me. I look back, now—I think about that time a lot. I used to dream snakes into being: I would see them in my dreams, and then I would see them, in the day, curled up in the gum-tree branches along the coastal adventure walking strip—or I’d feel them close by when I went to the marina harbour to watch the dolphins coming in. I’d climb up into the range behind the bay, and I could tell what was around me. I could sense them: black snakes, little pythons, sand goannas. It was a strange sensation. I stopped talking about it; no one believed what I was saying; but I knew. It lasted for years—it was as though the snakes were guardians, and they were there to look over you, to watch, to help, to warn. They weren’t negative forces: not at all. They were everything around me that was quick, and clear, and true. I used to long for them, to close my eyes to see them. I felt that would stay with me forever.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘Later, I remember, at school camps, in the bush, I’d go out secretly, every night, all night, snake hunting—and only come back to sleep in the daytime, as if I was leading a vampire existence. I was very good then at finding the rarest creatures in the hinterland; I was even on the trail of elf skinks; you’d find them by tracking the bush turkeys between their nests: that’s how you’d see them—but you’d longed for them so much they looked unreal. And that’s when I learned a bitter lesson inside myself.’

  We were far down the causeway now: his voice had filled with sorrow, step by step. I let him speak on.

  ‘It was a lesson I hadn’t expected. That life will give you what you want. That you will find what you’re looking for. You will see beyond the surface. You will. The thing is to deal with it. I had another experience like that, once, in Queensland, before I came north. In fact, it was what decided me on coming here. It was in Chinchilla. I was working for an environmental survey firm. One late afternoon, I was out, alone, and I saw the light, at sunset, coming from the flat west. You know how suddenly in that country a chill comes into the air. You know that outback chill. That vacancy. I knew that I had to get out. I felt darkness all around me in that landscape. I felt what had happened there, without knowing. It was a few months after that I left, and came to the Territory. I’d imagine everyone who comes up here has something in their life like that.’

  ‘And things seem different now?’

  ‘This is a lucky place for me. Unknown tracks. Every time you drive down a back road here you’ve got an eye out for some lovely billabong you didn’t know before: sometimes you get rewarded by the bush, and there’s a dingo running beside you for kilometres at a stretch…Quiet! Listen. Do you hear? Do you see?’

  In front of us, in the blurry light of refracted stars and cloud glow, on the straight roadway, close by, a knot of shadows was twisting: sinuous, shimmering, in a constant subtle arc of motion.

  ‘Water pythons,’ said Palomor: ‘There they are!’

  ‘They’re not afraid?’

  ‘They like human beings.’

  He knelt, and with swift, flowing movements picked up a snake, and then another. ‘They have a very pleasant presence. They like being looked at, and admired; they like being picked up, and handled.’

  ‘Just like the rattlesnakes.’

  Palomor had wrapped one python round his arm; another coiled itself round his waist, and gazed up at him engagingly, its tongue flicking in and out. It is the image of him I preserve in my thoughts: a tall, slender figure, two snakes entwined around his body, laughing, smiling as lightning cascades from the cloud banks on the horizon, and thunder rolls, far away.

  *

  The new year came: rain, floods, a flurry of art events. I took Palomor to the opening of the first show of the Darwin season, in the upstairs art space at Parap. We climbed the stairs to the exhibition.

  ‘I heard the artist might be here,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘He’s from Arnhem Land.’

  ‘The artist!’ he replied, in a hushed voice, which echoed in the narrow stairwell: ‘I don’t
know I’ve ever met a real artist!’

  In the gallery the familiar crowd had gathered: administrators, curators, the enlightened classes of the North. We navigated our way through the throng. The walls were hung with ochre paintings: small, lustrous squares; their grounds were in dark hues that gave the impression of void, more than surface, and against this darkness a variety of plants and animals had been depicted: bats, sugar gliders, sand palms, lilies—all shown in schematic outline, their edges picked out with such finesse they seemed to float. Palomor gazed at them: he stood with his face pressed close up to the panels, as if he was trying to trace the individual brush marks.

  I stepped back. They were unusual works: they lacked the appealing, urgent quality one finds in the bark painting styles of our day; they held themselves back. ‘Come and find me,’ they said to the viewer: ‘I’m not looking for you; you might not even exist for me.’ I had paused before a large rendition of a snake-like creature, its flanks surrounded by curved lily pads.

  ‘Strange art, isn’t it?’ said a voice, and laughed: that was a laugh I knew.

  ‘But you’re a veteran,’ I said: ‘An expert. You must have seen all this before.’

  It was Tom Elman, a remote community manager, and a man of literary inclinations and descriptive gifts so well developed that only a desire for obscurity could explain his continued presence in the Top End.

  ‘I was just checking this one out,’ he said. ‘I’d say it’s a file snake, wouldn’t you? When we lived at Ramingining we saw them all the time: docile creatures—but very odd; they seem to be completely without an instinct for self-protection. Certainly they got eaten quite a lot: the local women were always heading off into the Arafura wetlands to get bush tucker, and their haul always included file snakes.’

  ‘They ate them?’ said Palomor, in horror.

  ‘All the time. I remember late one afternoon the ladies came back from one of their trips, and deposited their catch at the women’s centre for cooking the next day. My wife had a lot to do with snakes in that country: whip snakes seemed to be particularly attracted to her, mangrove snakes as well. The locals were very conscious of that affinity—in fact, they came to think of her as a semi-formal snake custodian: so she was put in charge of a large plastic rubbish bin full of the file snakes to lock up and keep safe overnight. Next morning, she came in: of course the lid was off, and there were no snakes to be seen. How many snakes were there, she asked. Mmm—maybe twelve, they thought. But even after the most extensive search of the women’s centre and its vicinity she only managed to find eleven, hiding under fridges and freezers, behind cupboards, under the sink, everywhere. She could tell from the dubious looks from the ladies there were more—they scoured the whole area again, but it wasn’t until lunchtime that they found another four, large ones, in a bad temper, all hiding in the washing machines in the laundromat.’