by Alex Miller
I shout Adeli’s name and she bursts into the room and switches on the light.
‘Where have you been?’ I scream at her. ‘You’re never here when I want you. You’ll get nothing from me! My jug’s empty.’ I reach out and knock the glass jug from my bedside table to the floor. ‘I could die of thirst for all you care. Give me my exercise book!’
Adeli makes no comment but picks up the jug and helps me to sit up. Her hands are warm and her touch is tender as she holds me forward while she (the plump one) plumps the pillows at my back. When she has gone to fetch my water I open the exercise book at a new page and adjust my glasses on my hard white nose and I begin to fight my way forward into memory, making myself believe the energy will come for the struggle so long as I do not give in … If I remember well, it is Dante’s great insight that illuminates my endeavour. After his return from paradise he says, I saw things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it. But he follows it. He presses forward and does not give up. Dante knows that to succeed in his noble endeavour to recapture his vision of paradise he must first survive failure, and that the key to surviving failure is persistence enlivened by inspiration. Of course, Dante begins his journey at the portals of hell, and through long endeavour climbs slowly upward until he at last reaches the portals of paradise, but not without help. Despite my great regard for Dante as a poet of his time, it seems to me (lying here in pain, helpless and dependent upon a woman I do not love) that he got it back to front, and that the rest of us make the journey in the other direction, descending from the gates of paradise in our childhood years to the gates of hell in our final days.
But poets are an inspiration to us (for Barnaby they were his consolation), and isn’t inspiration the source of our energy? Suddenly we are energised, where before was boredom and lassitude. So while I disagree with the direction of his poetic journey, Dante’s solution to his problem will be mine all the same and I shall persist as he persisted. Everything is shared. The world is one. And it is my birthday. Sofia Station took me from the gates of paradise to the gates of hell in less than two short weeks. But what is time except the measure of experience? There are those in whom experience settles in the heart as a layer of dust, and those in whom it takes fire. Dante appealed to Apollo to fire his imagination for his last labour (his ultimo lavoro). In what is surely the most perfect invocation to inspiration in the poetic world, Dante quietly pleads, ‘Come into my breast and breathe there.’
I need help too. I have never told the story of Sofia Station. I have never had the courage to relive the humiliation of its outcome. But I can’t very well appeal to Apollo in the present century and expect to be understood or believed (who was Apollo? I hear you ask), but I can nevertheless hope to take fire from Dante’s example. One thing is certain, we do nothing on our own. If our dust takes fire it does so only because a voice other than our own enters our breast and breathes there. Without that voice our experience is only dust.
So here goes. Suffice to say, we went to Sofia Station. The three of us, that is. Me, Barnaby and Pat. Barnaby drove us in his car to the railway station and left his car there to be picked up on our return. It was a very long journey. How far I am not sure. But all the way from Melbourne to the Central Highlands of Queensland via Sydney and Brisbane, most of it by train, except for the last few hundred miles, when we enjoyed the swift luxury of flight. A small bright red aeroplane, with the wonderful name of Beechcraft Staggerwing, took us on a bumpy ride from Rockhampton to the portals of paradise, Leichhardt’s Expedition Range, where Barnaby’s mother and father and a solitary stockman lived in the calm isolation of their cattle station. The portals of paradise, it turned out, were in the outback, Australia’s home of heroes and legends (wasn’t it?). Apollo was needed there. He would have found much work for himself turning dust to fire.
17
Paradise garden
SHE LEFT THEM STILL AT THEIR LUNCH ON THE BACK VERANDA AND went down to the cottage and changed into her swimming costume. She put her robe on over her costume and took a towel and her notebook and pen and walked down the track to the creek, where Barnaby had taken them the previous evening after they arrived and they had stood to watch the sun setting among the paperbarks. The water was deep and clear, the bottom sand rippled with bars of shadow and lit by sunbeams. Blue and purple rocks projected into the water from the bank. She watched four silver and black fish swimming lazily around in a slow circle below her, following the shimmer of a sunbeam. Beside her the tree creaked in the warm drift of air.
She arranged her towel on the couch grass in the shade of the paperbark and opened her notebook. She sat a while watching the fish, then unscrewed the top of her pen and, resting her journal against her thigh, she began to write in her clear, well-rounded, slightly forward-sloping hand, her head held a little to one side, biting her bottom lip, considering her words. The broken shadows of the paperbark moved back and forth across her page, the hum of insects in the air all about her; and in the distance, across the valley, a crow lamented its fate.
This must be a new story, for this is a new country. It is a country unpainted and unwritten. A country that waits to be celebrated. Barnaby’s people belong to a modest culture. Theirs is a more measured world than the world we inhabit in Melbourne. With an ease that has astonished me they have made me feel at home among them, as if they and we are distantly related and they have known of us and heard rumours of our stories from the south, a distant place visited only by their eldest son, the poet.
Here there are no betrayals in my past. Here I have no past. These quiet people look out from their home upon their red cattle grazing the open savannah, where great ironbark trees dot the landscape, as if some powerful landowner in the past ordered them planted for their beauty. The fine grazing stretches unbroken from the garden fence of the timber homestead to the foot of the distant escarpment, the land rising abruptly from there to a height of several hundred feet, the slopes topped by grey parapets of shining stone, which resemble the walls of an antique citadel. As we stood here by the creek last night watching the sun go down, for a brief moment those cliffs of grey stone glowed with an inner light, green and orange and amber, while the silhouettes of great flocks of birds passed silently far above us, as if the birds knew the citadel and its mysterious inhabitants beyond those escarpments and went home to them, the old spirits of that place. I slept alone in my little cottage like a child for ten hours and woke this morning deeply refreshed, my new purpose clear in my mind.
There is real vulnerability and there is the more debilitating sense of vulnerability, about which little can be done. In the days and weeks before we left Old Farm I suffered from that sense of helpless vulnerability. It was gone when I woke this morning. It is important to me that I make the attempt to record here what has happened to me. It is simple enough, and yet it is profound, as simple things almost always are when we pause to reflect on them.
I was twisted around in my seat for more than an hour after we rose from the end of the Rockhampton runway to begin our journey westwards away from the shining Coral Sea towards these cool highlands of the hinterland. I could not take my eyes from the landforms unfolding hundreds of feet below us. The wheel suspended from the shiny red underside of the left wing trembled in the thrust of wind and I imagined how it would rip off and float and fall away and leave us up there alone in the empty sky. The seeming fragility of the wheel’s attachment to us was a perfect mirror of my fragility of mind at that time. Pat had made it clear to me that he did not want me along. I could be sure of nothing. Mesmerised by the scene below me I soon forgot my fears and became lost in the unfolding revelation of my country. A country of which I had no knowledge.
Scrawled lines of green and gold and deep brown, random silver foil meanders, broken and uncertain in their courses, and white sky windows through to the world on the other side of this world.
Australia was revealed to me as an elaborate multicoloured etching; the vision of an unknown artist’s eye. A portrait of my country unfamiliar to me, wrinkled and crumpled, scratched and scoured, broken with abrupt shifts of tone and form, stains and inexplicable runs of colour one into the other, purple and rose madder, vast swathes of grey and fierce angry dragon spots of emerald green.
I saw in this image of the land below me an undreamedof freedom from formal arrangement. I was thrilled. My country! My own country. Unknown to me. Its history mysterious, inscribed in the hieroglyphics and elaborate arabesques of its unrecognised landforms, waiting to be deciphered. As we shuddered and bumped our way across the uneven sky my inner voice announced to me, No one has painted this. It was a thought that carried for me the force of revelation. No one has painted it. It is uncelebrated. Untouched by my culture. And (what is more) it is undreamed in the dreams of Europe.
This last perception at once gave me new confidence in the purpose I had conceived when I first met Pat: to acknowledge and make known his gift. I was certain I had made a discovery that would prove of great importance for Pat and for his art. I had felt vulnerable and helpless and had been bewildered and in pain, but I had never lost my faith that Pat’s art waited in him for the moment of its release and expression.
And so my original intention in joining them on this journey was dispelled in an instant. I had forced my presence on them because I had been desperate to bring us back into the first innocence and simplicity of our love (as if such a return could ever be possible). This was to have been my journey to reclaim him (or perhaps merely to cling to him weakly and offend him forever). Either I would succeed in this or I would fail. And if I failed I would fail for all time. So even though I knew he did not want me with him, I came. It was a decision made in a panic of helplessness and vulnerability. A decision made against all the odds. Suddenly all that changed. My fear and my uncertainty fell away and I was sure of my purpose.
So it is not a weak and selfish purpose I have now in being here, but a noble one. My Uncle Mathew would say it is my destiny. I will show Pat that his country waits for him. Here, I will say to him, is the subject and material of your art. And, somehow, though I do not know how, I will make him believe me. Somehow I will make him see his country as I see it. Or I will fail to make him see it as I see it. But if I fail, then my failure, like my purpose, will have been an honourable one. I am filled with new optimism and nervous anxiety at the thought of bringing my offer to him. On a certain level, I know he wishes to be rid of me.
She feared that he not only wished to be rid of her but that he hated her. But she could not write the word. It was too much. Hate is a greater disaster than love for those whose soul it enters into. Hate breeds its own malignant offspring; demons without the sensibilities of human morality—that otherwise universal gift which gives to each human life its unique value. A value that can never be described or understood. To love, she knew, was more important for the human soul than to understand. It is love that redeems us from the demons of hate. She feared to be hated by him, and could not write the word. It was too terrible. She would write it later, when she was old.
From her cramped seat in the shuddering red aeroplane high above the country, the ear-shattering struggle of the engine to keep the propeller spinning fast enough to drag them through the sky had seemed to be such a strain on every part of the material that was keeping them precariously aloft, she felt certain something must give way any minute. She waited for the one small falter that would send them spiralling out of the sky, to fall to their deaths locked inside their shiny red coffin. Earlier, when it had seemed to her that she had little or nothing to lose, she would not have cared if they had fallen out of the sky. Now she dreaded it and prayed (to the old god in whom she did not believe—was it Apollo? That most Greek of all the gods?) that they would reach their destination safely.
Barnaby had leaned against her and cupped his hand to her ear, pointing past the wing with his other hand towards a great dark bulk that seemed to hang on the edge of the world below, and he shouted, ‘Leichhardt’s Expedition Range.’ The landscape was grand and fearsome. A place of great mystery and terror. A place waiting to be dreamed.
Autumn read over what she had written then closed her notebook and screwed the top on her pen. She set the book on the grass beside the towel and she took off her robe and slipped into the water. The water was cool against her skin. She ducked beneath the surface and swam down and touched the sand. The fish darted away a couple of yards, paused, then reassembled, resuming their formal sunbeam dance, their bodies curved to the circle of their desires. The sunbeams bounced from the purple rock, now a pure and dazzling light, now a shimmer of viridian green.
She surfaced and swam a steady breaststroke along the middle of the stream until she entered the sudden cool of shade. Grey limbs of a sunken tree reared from the water ahead of her. She saw in their gesture the supplicating arms of a drowning woman and felt the chill of the omen in her stomach. She turned and swam back towards the sunlit paperbark tea tree and her towel, which already seemed to be her own little camp by the creek. She would soon forget the drowning woman, only to recall her again in memory at Old Farm.
He was waiting for her. Leaning against her paperbark tree smoking a cigarette, watching her. When she reached the bank he reached down and took her hand and helped her out. She thanked him and wrapped herself in her towel.
He said, ‘You look great.’ The sun was in her eyes.
‘Thank you.’
They sat apart, both looking at the water, smoking their cigarettes.
He touched her notebook.
She said on a sudden impulse, ‘You can read it if you want to.’ She had not thought of him reading what she had written. But why not? If it didn’t convince him, or even interest him, then she would try another way. But she would keep her new purpose clear and simple this time. She would do as Uncle Mathew had predicted and acknowledge another’s gift: encourage this man, Pat Donlon, to the vision and confidence that would help him to make a reality of his dream; an art of his country untutored by the traditions of Europe. Nothing in art is pure. It would not be pure in its newness or in its origins, but she would refuse to let him slip away and become distracted by dreams that were not his own. She watched him reading her notebook, his lips moving every now and then in that familiar way she had witnessed in the library at Old Farm, his hand holding her book open, the relievo pattern of his thick veins. The deep physical familiarity of him. The taste of his juices in her throat. Her body clenched to think of him.
Yet they were like strangers here by the sunlit creek. Polite and careful. She might have been visiting a distant cousin in the country, not visited since they were at school. Here the rules were not the same. Here there were no past difficulties from which to take their bearings. No Arthur. No Edith. No betrayals. No past at all. Was it possible, she permitted herself to wonder, that this could also become a new beginning? He seemed relaxed. At ease. He was not a man consumed by enmity or hate. Had he come down to the river to look for her and to apologise for his grimness on the journey, then found there was no need for an apology between them? This place had changed them. She knew him well enough, stranger though he was, not to ask him if he too had felt the change. He would recoil and refuse to speak of it, fearful that talk would break the spell and leave them with the dead silence of their understanding.
He had slept in the guest room in the house. She had preferred the offer of solitariness in the cottage. The cottage was a bare unlined fibro-cement worker’s quarters, furnished with a narrow iron bed and a two-drawer chest, a table beside the bed. A naked bulb suspended from the ceiling flex, nails driven into the timber studs for hanging clothes. Barnaby’s father and the stockman, Peter, had added a shower outside, loosely connected to the cottage by a piece of corrugated roofing iron and a narrow concrete pathway. The shower was a concrete slab under a shower head, the walls split slabs from a pepper gum. A red valve o
n the pipe in place of a tap. It was dark inside, cool and damp, green fingers of small ferns seeking entry between the timber slabs. The water fell straight from an overhead tank fed by a windmill. The windmill creaked as it turned, the regular clang and lift of its plunger, the continuous sound of running water. An area of lush kikuyu grass and boggy ground where the tank overflowed steadily onto the ground outside. She had enjoyed lying on her narrow iron bed last night listening to the water running into the tank. Already, even on that first night (perhaps more on that first night than she ever would again), she had felt that time here was not measurable in hours but was like Rilke’s clock without hands. Lying in the night under the pale gauze of her mosquito net, memories of her childhood came back to her. Memories of an age before time had begun to move. Before her life had begun to accelerate along the narrow pathway of the years. A time of small desperate fears and sudden desires. The time of Uncle Mathew and the garden of Elsinore.
She woke and knew she had slept deeply for many hours. When she stepped under the shower the water chilled her and she yelped and danced around on the wet concrete. Glossy green ceramic frogs clustered like the bloated fruit of darkness against the struts of the ceiling until the cool of nightfall, when they fell, their ripe bodies slapping onto the wet concrete pad with a little self-satisfied clap of approval. In the morning they were up there, sucked in tight against the roof beams and each other again, smugly defying gravity through the heat of the day. Barnaby’s mother, Margery, told her carpet snakes sometimes climbed up and devoured them. ‘Don’t worry, dear. The carpet snakes are not poisonous and won’t bother you.’
