Don was in charge of getting us out of trouble (‘If Plan A doesn’t work there’s always Plan B, and if that doesn’t work, well, there’s plenty of letters in the alphabet’) and Robyn made us welcome wherever we landed. She was tireless and enthusiastic, looked out for everyone, and had none of the high-school bluster and faux toughness of other people we met along the way.
The walkers usually went up ahead, or drifted along between the two wagons. We passed through mallee country and sheep stations, along ancient valleys and across plateaus covered in saltbush. If you got far enough ahead there was a strange buzzing stillness. When it was overcast you didn’t even hear bird calls. Just the gentle clanking of the approaching wagons, and the muffled shouts, like a distant football game, of people urging the camels up a hill or over boggy ground.
We’d stop once for morning tea, once for lunch, and whenever something went wrong. It never felt like we were covering any great distances, but the nubs of old mountains would appear in the morning and disappear behind us by the end of the day. Greg, a birdwatcher, would come up to us in camp and say, ‘Twenty-seven kilometres today, as the crow flies.’
When I got fed up with walking, or with being awake, I would climb into the back of the main wagon, curl up between rifles and saddlebags, and go to sleep. The wagon rocked back and forth and I dreamed endlessly about women. Of soft voices and deep looks. I dreamed of the brownest eyes I’ve ever seen, of blonde-haired guitar players kissing me behind stage curtains, of great poets reading in small, smoke-filled rooms and looking up coyly between stanzas. I dreamed of warm bodies tangling up in soft sheets, of curved shoulders and plunging necklines. The relentless masculinity of the bush was starting to wear me down.
In the afternoons we’d pull up an hour or two before sunset and let the camels out to feed. They’d trundle off and start pulling apart the native vegetation, and we would start a fire and get cooking. The camels didn’t need to drink for the entire trip, though I can’t say the same for their handlers. They started drinking port from a goon sack at lunch, and were pretty much trolleyed by the time dinner was served. Sometimes around the camp fire we heard bush stories: about desert crossings, about a guy who had to shoot the bull camel he was riding in the head because he couldn’t get it to slow down. But mostly we got the Nat and Chantelle show. They had shouting matches about semen swallowing. (I remember this particularly well because it was the same high-volume argument, almost verbatim, three nights in a row: Chantelle was for, Nat was against. It was Chantelle who kept bringing it up.)
My mum loved it. She thought they were hilarious. But it was all too much for my dad. (I think it was being twerked on that finally broke him.) It will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been to a dinner party with my dad that he actually has quite delicate sensibilities. One morning he said to me, ‘That Chantelle’s got a mouth like a sewer.’ Which was a bit rich coming from the guy who got up at my brother’s twenty-first birthday dinner and – reminiscing on the night of conception – said, ‘Yep, we should have settled for hand jobs that night.’ But I got his point, which was that he really wanted to be alone for a while and there was nowhere to sit.
It was a gruelling regime for my parents. They were hardly sleeping at night and were walking all day. When the wagons stopped for lunch, the cameleers would climb down to stretch their legs, and my parents would look around desperately for somewhere to rest. My dad didn’t want to sit on the ground because he honestly thought he wouldn’t be able to get back up. I started climbing onto the wagon at lunchtime and pulling down camp stools.
On the fifth day I was walking with my dad and he said that he wanted to go home early. I was shocked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad give up.
‘What does Mum think?’
He grunted. ‘She won’t even talk about it.’
He was looking pretty beaten. He’d walked thirty kilometres that day, and was chilled to the bone. (For days after the trip he would walk around our house shivering and trying to get warm. ‘It’s cold,’ he kept saying, when it wasn’t.) He’d developed cracked lips, a patchy white beard and various other ailments that had afflicted the early white explorers. My mum wasn’t looking crash-hot either. Her face was red and puffy because, for complicated reasons, she didn’t believe in sunscreen.
There’s a peculiar anguish to seeing your own parents suffer. If it’s your children suffering, you know or hope that it’s because they’re still building their characters, that the world will accommodate them somehow. But if it’s your parents, you know that things are probably only going to get harder for them. The world for them is a cruise liner steaming towards the horizon, leaving them bobbing alone in the vast, lonely ocean with only each other.
My dad said, ‘Jesus Christ, Bob, do you have to say this shit out loud? It’s pretty bleak.’
We trudged through flat, heavily grazed country that had the feeling of a ghost town. Rain had washed out some tracks ahead, so when we reached the ruins of the Waukaringa pub we turned around and started back the way we’d come.
The camels never trudged. They held their heads up high like queens at a ball, for days. A horse pulls in a straight line. But the camels were always looking around as they walked, with a prospective optimism that eluded us now that we were heading back the way we’d come.
I tried to entertain my dad with half-baked theories about possessions. I had visited a camping store on the day before the trip and everything in there had felt so essential. I got so excited by the gadgetry that I would have blown all my money in one go, if I’d had any. And what you realise, once you actually leave the city, is that it’s all crap. That’s why they never have those stores out in the country. I can’t think of one thing in those shops that we could have used out there. What we needed was a pair of pliers and some wire. Throughout the journey we fixed everything with that combination. The broken steering column, the billy can, the bracket on the solar-powered system. I remember being impressed by the quality of Don’s camp oven. It was a thing that would last a lifetime. I’m through with flim-flam, I said. What is it about city living? All I want to do when I’m there is buy stuff. What I want is just a few beautiful, useful things.
My dad asked, ‘Is that why you bought that camel skin?’
Well, OK. So you can get fooled in reverse, too. At the camp fire one night I was talking to the manager of the local meatworks, and got a great price on a camel skin. Twenty-five bucks! Say what you want about my decision-making, but don’t tell me that’s not a bargain. When I arranged to buy it I honestly thought, This will become one of my most useful possessions.
I’ve been back home for two months now and I’m lumbered with this camel skin. I also find myself in the ridiculous situation of trying to find an apartment big enough to keep it in. Too many people have gone to too much trouble for me to throw it away. Robyn drove it from the Flinders Ranges to Adelaide. My parents – who did finish the trek, and walked the whole way – salted it themselves and sent it to a tannery. But I have it rolled up in the corner of my room. Just as I have the vision of my dad and mum on the last day of the trip, utterly miserable, but walking side by side and leaning into each other on the road to Orroroo.
Endlings
Harriet Riley
In 1996 a correspondence published in Nature coined the term ‘endling’ to refer to an animal that is the last of its species. It’s a fantastical word, like something out of a fairytale. An endling lives deep in a dark forest beneath distant mountains, and can only be seen at midnight once every hundred years.
In a way, this isn’t so far from the truth. Every now and then there’s a sighting of an animal, like the Australian night parrot, long thought extinct. But just as often we know exactly when and where the last member of a species died.
Whether it’s Martha the passenger pigeon or Lonesome George the Pinta Island tortoise, every endling is a lesson in how humans should – or rather, shouldn’t – interact with the natural world. But the word ‘en
dling’ itself tells us something important, too, about how we relate to species on the brink of extinction. We do not see them as real.
Or, perhaps more accurately, we do not see extinction as real.
I first noticed this while consoling a heartbroken ornithologist. It was winter in Sydney and my friend, Katie – who has a PhD in parrots – had just split up with her fiancé, Gus. As rain streaked down the windows of her kitchen, I told her to focus on her other great love. Birds. Gus had never been the only thing in her life, after all, and it was important to do what makes you happy after a breakup.
A few days later Katie was in New Zealand, keeping busy with kea and kiwi deep in the valleys of Fiordland National Park.
The plan worked, or it would have, had she not encountered an endling.
One night in a bar after a long day’s tramping, the locals told her about the kakapo. The kakapo is a greenish, ground-dwelling parrot that looks like an overfed corgi. It’s the world’s only flightless parrot, as well as the heaviest, and because it’s nocturnal it has whiskers to help it to see in the dark. To attract a mate, the male kakapo selects a location in front of a large stone or tree on the side of a mountain, and digs a basin about the size of a paddling pool. He then sits in the centre of the amphitheatre and ‘booms’ – a deep, low call that can be heard by females for miles around.
But European settlement decimated the kakapo. Dogs, rats, cats and weasels – even the settlers themselves – all found the bird delicious and drove it to extinction. This wasn’t unusual; most of New Zealand’s endemic birdlife had fared the same, and Katie knew it. Nevertheless, the story of Fiordland’s last kakapo got to her.
The locals explained that by 1970 all the females had died. Just one lone male remained, and he continued to perform his booming ritual night after night in a nearby valley. Kakapo live for a hundred years and their calls – which are lower than 100 hertz – can carry for five kilometres. Each night the kakapo boomed, and the locals heard him, like the bassline of a song being played in the next room.
Finally, in 1985, he fell silent.
Just like that, Katie fell in love again. The next morning she set off into the mountains with a notebook and Wanderstöcke to find the lost kakapo.
I went along with the kakapo ride. Every few days, Katie would text me a picture from somewhere they’d filmed Lord of the Rings. This, she’d point out, was definitely kakapo country. Of course it was, it was Middle Earth. All sorts of impossible species existed there.
Perhaps that’s why we associate extinction with fantasy: nothing but the epic scale of myth can capture the immensity of losing an entire species. I say an entire species. We actually lose about 383 a day. Because this is the Holocene Extinction Event, the sixth great extinction since life evolved on earth. The first two were the Ordovician–Silurian Extinction and the Late Devonian Extinction, but it’s the Permian Extinction, known to scientists as the Great Dying, that really takes the cake.
When volcanism and bolide impacts heated the atmosphere 252 million years ago, in much the same way that human activity is heating it today, huge quantities of methane and carbon were released from the land and sea. Runaway climate change took hold and destroyed a full 96 per cent of life on earth. It was ten million years, longer than any other extinction event, before the planet recovered its former biodiversity. Then came the Triassic–Jurassic Extinction, and the Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction, when a meteorite obliterated the last of the dinosaurs.
But it’s the Great Dying that the Holocene resembles most, with the same changing atmosphere, and the same seismic scale. According to the Living Planet Index, more than half of all living creatures have died out in the last forty years. Reading this report didn’t give me a conscious sense of dread like most environmental papers do. Instead I felt a deep, primal pain – a disturbance in the force.
That’s how I realised, as Katie was grieving her relationship, that I was in mourning too. I’m a climate scientist, but for the past nine months I hadn’t read a thing about climate change. Friends would email me links to articles and I would delete them, telling myself that I was too busy, or that I knew that study already.
But the truth was I was avoiding it, because all the news was bad. I’d worked on the issue for years – going to UN summits, prepping lab reports, writing articles – I’d dedicated myself to it night and day for a decade. And every new article felt like a fellow doctor telling me about a cancer patient – how they were getting worse, how they’d been in remission but it had come back. How it had metastasised, how they had found a new drug but it wouldn’t be on the market for another ten years, how it was growing and changing and shifting and spreading and how we had to prepare for the worst.
So I stopped reading. I started working on other issues. I slunk away from the bedside because nobody wants to watch their patient die. The Living Planet Index was the first climate paper I’d read all year and, sure enough, it led to an eye-scratching, skin-tearing, dirt-in-hair-rubbing outpouring of grief.
I’m not the only one. We call it a climate depression (yes, that’s a weather joke) – and it’s the main reason for the unusually high burnout rates among environmentalists and sustainability experts. But new research from around the world shows that it’s not just professionals who succumb. Kari Norgaard, a sociology professor from the University of Oregon, ran a study in which she asked people whose towns had been impacted by climate change to describe how it made them feel. They spoke of fear, frustration, anger, hopelessness and guilt. One of the most telling responses came from a participant living by a river: ‘It’s like, you want to be a proud person and if you draw your identity from the river and when the river is degraded, that reflects on you.’ Climate change destroys your sense of self-worth.
Another survey, this one by Yale and George Mason University, found that ‘most Americans (74 per cent) … “rarely” or “never” discuss global warming with family and friends, a number that has grown substantially since 2008 (60 per cent)’. In other words, the closer we come to destruction, the less we want to talk about it. It’s counterintuitive, but these negative feelings make us less, not more, likely to fight the problem.
So this is climate change – something that, before depriving us of our lives, first deprives us of our self-worth, and our agency. Thankfully, psychologists know all about this. They’ve studied it everywhere from smokers to drinkers to people in bad relationships. It turns out that when someone thinks they can’t solve a problem, their brain tells them to ignore it.
This insight led to one of the most successful climate interventions ever made. A team of researchers asked a group of climate deniers to install energy-efficient light bulbs, explaining that it would save them money. Several months later the researchers returned and told the participants their light bulbs also saved energy, and had significantly reduced the carbon footprint of each household. They then asked the participants about their views on climate change, and this time, they all believed. The fact that they had already made a difference meant that making a bigger one didn’t seem impossible anymore. They could let themselves believe in the end of the world, because they’d been given a way to help stop it.
Katie, meanwhile, was still in denial. Every day she found signs of the kakapo – tracks, droppings, the severed stems of tussock grass. It wasn’t a completely crazy idea, she told me. The takahe, another flightless bird, had been rediscovered in this very same part of Fiordland, and thanks to conservation efforts there were now 300 of them. Why shouldn’t the kakapo be there too, nestled beneath a stand of pampas grass?
It’s easy to empathise with an endling when you’re single. I’ve thought a lot about how that parrot must have felt, on the night that it died, curled up in the cool loam, drifting off to sleep. He must have been confused at still being alone, but he would have assumed, as we all do deep in our primitive hindbrains, that his mate would arrive tomorrow.
And that’s the problem with the weird romance of extincti
on. The strange thrill that something might be the last of its kind wakes up an ecstatic hope that it’s not: that maybe, just maybe, there is a thylacine, or a passenger pigeon, or a fat, bewhiskered ground parrot out there beyond the mountains, if we could just go out and find it.
There might as well be unicorns.
We can’t bring extinct species back from the dead any more than we can escape the consequences of climate change. And one day one of us will be the last human being on earth.
I was brooding over this solitary image when Katie arrived at the cafe to meet me. She was back from New Zealand, no parrot, no Gus. But she was happy; ‘I wouldn’t marry him now if he was the last man on earth.’ I laughed out loud. ‘Now we know what happened to the kakapo.’
To feel grief is to admit that we loved. And sometimes it’s easier to pretend the lost thing didn’t matter than to confront the fact that it’s gone. That’s why we call endlings such a fanciful name, because pretending that they never existed means that there’s nothing to grieve. But any psychologist will tell you that you have to grieve to move on.
We sat in the sun with the galahs and the lorikeets like a float left over from Mardi Gras. A magpie sidled up and gave my carrot cake a long, entitled glare. It was hard to feel depressed around birds like these, and hard to give up the fight.
Then Katie told me about the Kakapo Recovery Programme. In 1989 Stewart Island’s last sixty-one kakapo were moved to three predator-free islets nearby. A government team took charge of the birds and, since then, their population has risen to 123. The project aims to one day reintroduce the kakapo to Fiordland and has begun restoring two islands in the park for the purpose.
This, we agreed, was the better way to love – to work for the living, not hunt for the dead. After all, humans aren’t endlings yet, and we can always find new people and new species to care for. Katie got out her phone to show me her photos. It turns out the Kakapo Recovery Programme has some very handsome park rangers.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 3
