Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Such stories, so far removed from the usual hardscrabble sagas of the North! And doubtless they were lodged in my mind on the hot day at the height of the build-up when I set off for Jirrawun, and drove the deserted road out from Katherine, at speed, with bushfire plumes spreading thick smoke across the sky. The Victoria River was still, at the crossing, and low. The bloodwood trees were drooping. The rangelines shimmered in the haze. Around the dams, the Brahman cattle gazed out despairingly: I hurtled on, over the grids and floodways, past the border quarantine, through landscapes free from any trace of man. The sun was already close to setting when I reached the Kununurra turn-off. I made a reconnoitre through the town: card games by the lakeside, a Greyhound idling at the BP truck stop, drinkers lying stretched out on the concourse grass—the rhythm of the Kimberley, repeating, loud and strong. A young Gija girl, thin, of utmost elegance, was standing by the shopping centre driveway.

  ‘Where’s the famous Jirrawun art centre?’ I called out.

  ‘You mean Uncle Tony?’ she said: ‘I can take you.’

  She jumped in, and made a turn sign, with a quick, slight wrist movement; then another, right away.

  ‘Who you?’ she said, as we wound through the warren of the streets: ‘His brother? Got any silver?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just asking. Stop now—we’re right here, brother—turn the wheel.’

  We had pulled up outside a low-slung, unremarkable house, fenced, with a wide verandah, on a side road facing a dramatic rock peak flanked by eucalypts and boabs. A tall man with dark, slicked-back hair was standing by the driveway, smoking, frowning, gazing at the sky.

  I walked up to him.

  ‘I want to bring it to an end,’ he said: ‘Die—cease to be—right here, right now. End it; no evasions.’

  He took a drag on his cigarette, held it up and stared at the glowing tip as if it was a thing of transcendent beauty.

  ‘So young,’ I said: ‘Before we’ve had any chance to know each other?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Is this the way you usually greet your visitors after they’ve driven all the way across from Katherine?’

  Nothing, again. He looked up once more, accusingly, at the last glimmers of the light on the blood-red rocks.

  ‘Have you considered a method?’ I asked.

  ‘A .303,’ he replied. ‘No question about it. I’ve seen what they do to the human body. There wouldn’t be any ambiguity at all about your passage from here to another world. And the results are always visually striking: you’d be leaving an artwork behind you. In that sense, it’s not just wanton destruction: it’s a resurrection of the self. A .303. There’s one here, right next door, in Freddie’s house: the kangaroo rifle. That’s what we use to put wounded animals out of their misery: we shot a bush turkey with it on the Argyle Road the other day.’

  He turned a pair of soft eyes on me, and put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Would you do it for me—as a favour?’

  ‘Hello, Uncle Tony,’ said the young woman beside us at this point, a certain anxiety in her voice.

  ‘Misery?’ I said: ‘Has something bad happened?’

  ‘No: that’s just it. There’s nothing bad. It’s the turmoil of happiness that’s tearing me apart. Misery itself: that we know, that we can handle, of course—we’re always dealing with it. You’re here at an unusual time. We’re at the shining summit, right now. What we’ve worked to build up, for years on end: it’s all coming to fruition. Everything we’ve struggled for, and longed for, and in our secret hearts most feared. Defeat, failure, those are easy enough to bear: you adapt to them quite quickly. Acceptance, though, success: that’s a different story. The success that implies disaster; the breakthrough that holds sadness in its hands. I can’t bear to see what comes next: what always comes next, in this world.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘People die, dreams fail, plans break, grief descends, the white man leaves, things fall to pieces; until there’s nothing left. What we’ve built is like a fragile castle, waiting for the whirlwind to sweep past. Let’s go up; sit with the old men; talk—you’ll see; they’ll tell you everything.’

  There, on the verandah, were the artists of Jirrawun, like figures in a portrait, silent, gathered: Freddie Timms, staring his formidable stare; alongside him, sitting on a half-broken plastic seat, Rusty Peters, his legs crossed and folded beneath him. In the next chair, Hector Jandany, wearing a bright yellow checked shirt, head cocked to one side, a wry, measuring expression on his face; far off, at the end of the decking, cross-legged in front of an unfinished canvas, Paddy Bedford himself, looking off into the dark. Dogs scuffled on the edge of the light; a television indoors blared.

  ‘I know how it goes, you see,’ said Tony, over his shoulder, almost in disdain: ‘I know it all. The high-profile exhibitions are just beginning, the sales are coming. The phone rings constantly. Eager voices, friendly voices: recognition, warmth—and sales, always, sales. It only took five years: five years in the wilderness. Five years to persuade people to look and see what was right in front of their eyes. See infinity; find a new way to look at paint. But there’s further to go. More moves to play out in the art bazaar.’

  ‘So that would mean death’s off the agenda for now?’

  ‘For now—but you have to be open to it, always. That’s the way with the Ngarringgarni.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Rusty, what’s the Ngarringgarni? You’re the intellectual here!’

  Rusty lifted the brim of the wide black hat that shadowed his eyes. He peered up.

  ‘You call it the Dreamtime,’ he said to me, in a low voice, very slowly: ‘But we just don’t know why.’

  A mazy conversation followed, in which different definitions of this elusive Gija concept were aired, examined from multiple aspects and, one by one, found wanting. It was the past, and it was the future, and the way the two time phases fit together in the present. It was the ancestral beings of the country, and their overarching powers; it was the nocturnal hierarchy of owls and nightjars, and the secret signals they transmitted; it was the perpetuation of life; it was the force that gave man’s existence shape, and tension; it was freedom, and it was all-controlling fate.

  ‘Best, perhaps, under those circumstances,’ I said, ‘to keep things simple; not project.’

  ‘But you have to know your path, up here,’ said Tony, sternly: ‘You have to be what you must be, not what you want to be. Leave your will behind; leave caprice behind; understand the place the world’s made for you. Conform, rather than rebelling against the order of the system. Don’t look like that, with such horror on your face! Rebellion’s overrated. Think of art: what seems revolutionary always turns out to be conformist; tradition’s always changing, and it always holds the clues to new ways of seeing form.’

  ‘That’s the lesson of the Kimberley? Did you have to come all this way to find that out?’

  ‘I did, it’s true,’ he said, in a stricken voice: ‘I could learn nothing elsewhere. Nothing at all, in that world I left. For a long time I thought I could never go back there.’

  ‘Now, though?’

  ‘Now: we have to. All of us together. We have a task. Enough fencing and sparring! Who’s got time for that? There’s something you have to see.’

  He led the way indoors, into a ramshackle studio room. There were trestle tables piled with canvases; there were rolls of canvas on the floor, and half-finished works in various states of completion hanging on the colour-spattered walls. He drew the painting on the top of the pile towards us, and pinned it up. It was a rectangle of darkness; large colour fields, with white fringing dot lines bisecting them: blood-red, jet black, a heavy, haunting lilac-blue.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Take it into you; see what’s hidden; look at it until your eyes hurt. It’s the story of the Kimberley, the story of Bedford Downs: can you tell what it says?’

  It was a still, hard work. There was no easy point of entry; the lines were
cold, and strong. How to read them? They showed the landscape, and the landscape’s tones, but the marks also had the air of codes and symbols; it was a painting of control.

  ‘The Emu Dreaming place,’ said Tony. ‘But you know that already, don’t you?’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘From the iconography! It’s the kind of thing art-world types like to be familiar with these days, isn’t it? Reading the image. Knowing the vocabulary of the symbols; going past the surface. It’s easy to see there’ll be a time, and very soon, when all the Gija knowledge and tradition has gone out, and outsiders have taken everything. When everything’s been excavated and become known. You can read the canvas, I’m sure. You’d even know the way a work like this has different levels. It has its metaphysics.’

  ‘Its metaphysics?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s not just the journey story of the bush turkey and the emu: it’s the origins of fate. The emu wants to stay in a never-ending daytime. The bush turkey sleeps at sunset. So it is for us, too: so it was the moment we entered this world. We follow the rule of night: we sleep; we have balance in our lives; light, and dark; we know time.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said, and stared obediently at the painting’s grid of interlocking fields and lines.

  ‘Or you can read it as a mapping: that’s the way they explain works like this these days on the information placards in the public galleries. That mark there—that’s the break in the range: that’s where the emu’s journey came to its end.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And its presence stays in the country, always: the emu sings over the country, and laments. But there’s something further. Something dark. You see the red circle, there?’

  His voice had dropped down low.

  ‘See it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s a scene of massacre. That’s why the painting feels so still; that’s why it feels like a block of marble before your eyes. The people of that country were all killed there. Up on the side of the hill, that slight incurving is a cave: it’s where the spirits of the dead sang and danced.’

  He pulled out a second painting: the companion piece; he told me its narrative—and then the next. All the stories were detailed, and all were drenched in blood.

  I felt movement behind us: the artists had edged into the room. They watched silently, and listened, and moved their hands across the canvases. The country seemed to pass before us, with its folds, and valleys, and hidden tales—Mistake Creek, and Lissadell, and the ranges round Bow River: the gold rush, the coming of the cattle, the time of fear. Tony went on speaking. His words rushed past me; the paintings seemed to throb and pulse before my eyes.

  ‘How did you first come to hear about all these things?’ I asked him quietly, much later, as the night drew on. We were sitting on the verandah steps, alone, by this stage, with dogs stretched out before us: the artists were fast asleep on their mattresses and swags.

  ‘I’m sorry I did that to you,’ he said. ‘Blindsided you like that. But I find maximum impact’s always best. That’s how it was for me. When I first came up here, and I was living with the artists, out at Crocodile Hole, or when we spent time camped out on country, night was always the time for talk. There were months of testing, to start with: they were waiting, all of them, watching, gauging me, dropping clues. Then, one night, the deeper stories began to come. How hard it was, back then, for them to even think of trusting an outsider with what they knew, and held so hidden away inside themselves! I can hear those talks beside the fire as if they were unfolding right here in front of us. The nights were always dark, moonless, when the tales of the killing times came out. There was just the Milky Way, stretched high above us, and the campfire glow, and with each crackle and burst of flame the faces of the old people sitting round me would appear for a second, then sink back into the night. They’d be sitting on old flour drums: I was on the ground, looking up, listening to the wind blowing through the grasses and the gum-tree leaves, hearing the constant rhythm of the frogs down by the waterhole. For the most part, it was old Gamarliny who told me; he would put his hand on my knee, and lean towards me, and he’d say: “I have a hard story,” or, “A bad story now”—and the others would sigh, and shake their heads and stare into the flames of the fire. “That’s true,” they’d say: “A true one.” Each new story was hard to listen through: hard to comprehend. I’d keep quiet, and look up, and watch the stars turning above me in the darkness, and I’d try to keep pace in my heart with everything they said. Those dark tales, with no exit, ever. The end always the same.’

  He took a last drag of his cigarette, in dramatic style, and stubbed it out. ‘We’ve been asked to take them down to Melbourne—that set of paintings I showed you. For an exhibition, at the university. Can you imagine? God knows what they’re going to think. They don’t exactly know yet what’s coming at them. I’ve told them the title, though: “Blood on the Spinifex”.’

  ‘Succinct.’

  ‘Why not come down? Come with us? It’ll be the first time city people get to learn about the story of the North, the Kimberley saga—I mean the real one, seen through Aboriginal eyes. They think they know, from all the soft-focus histories and well-intentioned studies, but that’s just play, compared to what we’ll bring: what we’ll tell—in words, and in paint. We’re all going to go. Come down too!’

  He looked around. Behind us, on the verandah, we could hear the gentle sound of rhythmic breathing from the line of swags and mattresses where the artists were all asleep. He smiled, and shook his head: ‘Poor things,’ he said: ‘They’re pretty anxious.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tony drew himself back, with a sudden, violent movement; he turned his head to me; his eyes flashed: ‘They’re afraid, of course! Afraid they might be killed for telling all this: sharing it, bringing the secrets out. Haven’t you understood a single word I’ve been telling you? Don’t you get any of it? This isn’t some culture game, some art project for the natives! Don’t you have any heart? Any capacity to take things into your soul? Any intuition? Instinctual understanding? And I was beginning to think you were a kindred spirit. I got you so wrong!’

  He jumped up from the verandah steps, and glared at me. He paced its length; back he came, leaned down, and grasped my forearm. I stood up. He brought his face close to me, eyes blazing like a wild animal’s.

  ‘Go on,’ he snarled: ‘Do something real: don’t just look, and listen, with that wide-open stare. Go on—push back. Fight, contend, don’t give in and break!’

  I began to make some answer—but as soon as he had spoken, he slumped down once more, on the steps, shoulders fallen, head bowed.

  ‘Strange,’ he said at last, in a low voice: ‘It always goes this way, here, in Kununurra, at this time of the night, when the evening star’s gone down. It’s as if the place was under some kind of a curse. Things begin with kindness, harmony—then, suddenly, breakdown, that black conviction that one’s alone: lost in the world.’

  He laughed. Through his thin shirt I could see a trembling along his backbone: it was laugh and sobbing all at once.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘We were cruising along. Let’s go back to that. Tell me something?’

  ‘Anything you want.’

  ‘How is it you came here, and stayed here? What made you? What brought you and then kept you?’

  ‘You’ve heard all the stories, haven’t you?

  ‘How you and Freddie met up: at the gallery?’

  ‘That’s all true, as far it goes. All correct. It’s the outside story, the simple, unvarnished tale—the one you see recycled in every story and exhibition catalogue. But there’s more. Much more. Isn’t life always chains of causes, binding us, until we have no choices left? It was painting that brought me here, that led me. I’d like to tell you: the deeper version. I’d like to talk through the night.’

  The dark humidity was all around us. We both felt that exhaustion the build-up season breeds, when rest becomes impossible, and one
has to chase one’s thoughts down without end. We leaned back together, shoulders touching; after a while we began talking, the words in whispers, with long stretches of looking out into the dark, and listening to the sounds on the verandah and in the night-time air: breath, engine noises from the highway traffic in the distance, the dogs whimpering in their dreams, the wind picking up. He told me how, when he was young, he used to stare at the map of Australia, and see the names of the Turkey Creek and Kalumburu missions on the map, and dream of going there. How drift and desperation had been with him all through the years of his first success; how he had yearned constantly to flee the limelight; and that escape had come only after a hinge point in his experience of life.

  It was close to the time when he and Freddie Timms first met. Everything was sudden: his father fell ill. The summons came: he travelled home. All the family had gathered. The death approached, in the small hours: it entered the room of the dying man; it claimed him. Tony looked on; he marvelled at the event’s simplicity. He sat with the dead body for hours, on his own, quietly, until the sun came up: the room seemed to him to be full of particles of energy, coming into being in pairs and then vanishing. This epiphany had a strong effect on him: he lost the conviction that our familiar ways of seeing mirror anything profound about the world.

  ‘Experiences of that kind seemed to be multiplying in my life just then,’ he said: ‘I was coming to mistrust everything around me. The world of art, my own ideas about the world and what it was, my judgements about what was beautiful and true. And it was at that time that I first went up to the Kimberley. I was plunged into this landscape: redness, haze, heat, lightning, rain. Suddenly everything I’d known was being assaulted; my senses were under attack. Freddie and I travelled together; we went into deep bush, by ourselves; he took me far into his own country, on Lissadell; he told me a great deal, in a concentrated way. It was like a seminar: a more wondrous tutorial than any other I ever had. He tried to show me what was hiding in the landscape, the past that was there, our place in it. I looked back on my own life, in those days, but with a stranger’s eyes: the pattern was very clear. All through that time I could see that I’d been wrestling with myself: painting, writing plays, looking for a language to catch the way we fit with the world. I’d already removed myself from the art scene: it had become repellent to me. I tried to start afresh. I went to Wollongong.’