A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  Whatever the case, by the beginning of 1970, with him still barred by Gibbon from reassessing the problems out beyond Anglesea, and with the majority of his work therefore still dealing with the issues of drift on Bluff Road (he also worked during this period on proposed traffic lights in Grovedale, an analysis of a bluestone bridge at Waurn Ponds, and the pros and cons of a general philosophical shift in the department towards roundabouts), both his reading and ordering of books and his actual work on the dunes began to seriously dovetail. What he had seen around the Bassin d’Arcachon, and what he had learnt of his own heart in the mill behind the salt pastures of La Teste-de-Buch, had combined to set him out on what would become his own quietly revolutionary path.

  †

  Long before he breathed a word of what he had in mind, he dreamt one night in his single bed in Milipi Avenue of sand lying on top of a road, like salt spilt from a shaker, with a group of hooded plovers sitting at a table nearby with a red-and-white checked tablecloth, clinking glasses, toasting the arrangement with champagne. He woke up amused and recorded this dream in his journal. The following day he wrote also of a spotless black road running through a landscape of steep hummocks, with a sign beside the road reading:

  IN MOURNING. DRIVE SLOWLY.

  WORLD’S LONGEST CONTINUOUS GRAVE.

  He writes that in the far distance of this dream he could see ‘M walking on a hill-line. Know that I will only stop weeping once she has gone over the horizon.’

  But where exactly was that horizon, and how far into the future could his naked eyes possibly see?

  †

  One has to consider how deeply changed FB must have been by his experience in France to think about turning on its head not only what he had been trained to believe in Australia but what had been confirmed for him over there as well. Yet perhaps one should also consider that these were quasi-revolutionary times, even in Australia. When he listened to reports on the wireless of the Vietnam moratorium marches Dr Jim Cairns was leading in Melbourne and saw pictures in the Herald of the thousands walking through the streets, was he tempted to get involved? It seems not. There is no hint of sentiment at the idea of thousands of people wresting control from dark uniforms on their city streets. Nor is there any indication in his papers of his actual political position at that point or at any point afterwards. But as the planting of the marram grass by the Croatian women grew ridiculously successful – Ammophila arenaria Ammophila arenaria Ammophila arenaria – it seems he had begun to walk off on his own along the beach from time to time and stand away at a distance, a lonely figure of the striated air, looking back on the dunes growing ever taller amid the teal streaks and charcoal flecks of the stormy Bass Strait. What I presume he was thinking out there on his own on the beach, amid his ongoing calculation of the proliferation of new gradients, was whether he could refine the experience he’d gained. Could he de-acclimatise? Could three long centuries of engineering progress be allowed to drift?

  He was beginning to wonder.

  †

  I would not be honest if I did not admit to wondering myself whether or not I should presume to know what FB was thinking there on the beach all those years ago. Can I presume? Perhaps, given that there are such strong indicators there in his archive. Nevertheless, I ask myself two separate but interconnected questions. One, whether the FB I have created, or re-created, in these pages bears any real resemblance to the man who actually lived. And two, whether the written word is enough: pages of white sand full of black insects wriggling and darting about, each diary entry and journal note like the thrip-infested coast after a significant spike in temperature. Perhaps, like the thrips’ proliferation in heat, FB’s emotions hatched when he wrote – but what about the cooler periods in between? The time when he wasn’t writing? I’ve come to think that a man who is, on the one hand, capable of writing down his dream of nestling with the wallabies of the Jardin des Plantes, and on the other, the precise calculations of the length, formation, pavement and seal of numerous sections of a coast road, has a range so broad that he is destined for personal difficulties. In any case, that range does not leave much outside the realms of possibility imagined by an interested observer.

  Nor do these words, which he wrote in March 1971: ‘Everything suddenly too steep, the desire to make things permanent, to stabilise, has my emotions at 1:3.’

  Or on 6 June the same year: ‘M in my heart as either lover or artefact. How to unmake her in the landscape. Is this fit work? Is engineer the right verb?’

  †

  The law of gradients when it comes to marram grass is a factor that can be used on both sides of the argument. On the one hand, as the good folk of Port Fairy discovered so long ago, the matting rhizomes of the plant combined with its lack of thirst, its salt tolerance and compatibility with the tiny meiofaunal communities that thrive in sand, sees it quickly trap the sand around itself, taking the pressure of drift-granules away from ad hoc colonial streets until the dune steepens, the grass grows tall in its tufts, and a genuine hummock almost completely free of slacks and blowouts is developed. (The dune bailiffs of the Jutland coast, whose Ammophila arenaria is a native species, had figured this out way back when there were still only wild horses inhabiting Cap Ferret.) On the other hand, marram grass, in all its assiduous colonising eagerness, can also be viewed as the floral rabbit of the Australasian coastline, to which it is not native. When introduced it quickly proliferates, hence it being, like the rabbit and the blackberry, a darling of the early Acclimatisation Society of Victoria. By significantly altering the scale and contour of foredunes, marram grass dominated the native plant community, also disadvantaging native shorebirds which rely for nesting and general habitat on the continuing mobility and circulation of sand. The stabilisation for which the marram grass is so effective alters the porous interplay between sea and shore, preventing sand from continuing its amphibious cyclical motion, thus creating steep dune gradients which then become vulnerable to tidal erosion.

  The general thrust of this summary of the marram grass debate could easily be found these days on any number of websites, in a little under five minutes. But these private paragraphs, written on the pale green CRB notepaper that itself seems to proliferate amongst the hummock of FB’s archive almost as vigorously as the plant in question, were composed on 6 December 1971. The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, which FB mentions, was by then long defunct in its original form, but rest assured its philosophies very much endured, particularly in the field of flora. Which makes FB’s subversion of the law of gradients here, by including the counterargument against marram grass and thereby putting the very stabilisation work that he had long been passionate about at risk, quite remarkable.

  As is his scrawled inclusion of the following quote from the end of À la recherche du temps perdu at the bottom of the very same pale green page:

  Authentic art has no use for proclamations . . . it accomplishes its work in silence.

  20

  Drift Line

  In thinking about FB’s experiences in France I continually wonder how it must have been for all the thousands of ordinary people: the workers at the Renault factory on the Île Seguin, at Sud Aviation in Nantes, the families and friends of the two hundred drowned in the Seine near the Pont Saint-Michel, the families and friends of those boys sent off to battle in Vietnam. Even the guys holding the riot shields on the night of the barricades, the living police in their protective uniforms, even they must have felt small, invisible, trodden upon. But it’s what you do with that smallness, that invisibility, that counts. For a brief moment in May ’68, a large part of what Professor Lacombe might have described as the meiofaunal population of France stood up, staked a claim, shouted to be heard, only to find themselves described by de Gaulle as chienlit, or chie-en-lit: ‘shit in bed’.

  In actual fact, the French students and workers were perhaps worse off than meiofauna, which, although microscopica
lly tiny and seemingly insignificant, are perfectly happy in their sand-bound situation. So happy, indeed, that, as far as any biologist, entomologist or dune morphologist can ascertain, they have absolutely no need for the concept of ‘happiness’ at all.

  Extended metaphors like this, which often seem a tad facile, can nevertheless be useful. FB certainly thought so. A former colleague of his at the CRB, whom I was introduced to after FB’s death, could barely wipe the smile off his face as he explained to me how back in the seventies FB co-opted the British pejorative term ‘rotter’ – as in ‘you rotter!’ – to create an in-house nickname for Gibbon amongst select CRB and volunteer crew. The esteemed regional manager was thus known in certain circles as ‘the Rotifer’, which turns out to be a phylum of meiofauna quite prolific in the local dunescapes of southern Victoria, and which quite obviously could be employed to refer to Gibbon in either its full or rather more slangy and shortened version. The colleague of FB’s told me this story over a drink in the Sawyers Arms Tavern. He was keen for me to understand how funny FB could be and thus how much he was liked by the rank and file. When we’d finished our drinks and were saying goodbye out on the street, he said wistfully, ‘By the end he appeared around the place as a quiet and old-fashioned gentleman, what with the vintage French car and the tweeds and the like. But he was as vibrantly alive and progressive as you could ever imagine.’

  Rotifers, nematodes, mystacocarids, tardigrades, gastrotrichs, turbellarians, kinorhynchs.

  I came upon this short list amongst FB’s papers a few weeks after being told of the nickname he’d coined for Gibbon. It made me laugh, of course, and also got me wondering what use he could potentially have made of the other names. It is just a little list and could easily be overlooked by those with less interest in the private dimensions of such a man. For myself it only added to the strange desire that’s been with me ever since he died: the desire to have known him better.

  †

  It was during the years when he was sequestered by Gibbon into the stabilisation work at Barwon Heads that FB first met my neighbour Anna Nielson. At the time, she was living amongst the community of Croatian migrants of East Geelong. On her evening walks along the Barwon River, Anna had got to know a number of the women who were planting the grasses with FB out near Barwon Heads. She would talk to the women about their children, also their gardens, the vegetable patches and grapevines which had begun to thrive in the southern river loam amongst the light industry of the streeted riverbank. Often she would end up being coaxed through the dusk into one or another of their houses and showered with food and homemade wine. It was during one of these house visits that she heard about the grasses they were planting for the CRB man on the dunes out on the coast near the mouth of the river. She showed an interest and, encouraged by her neighbours, agreed to go out with them on the Queen’s Birthday holiday to lend a hand.

  In the end, she only worked with them for one day. The hours were long and the work was backbreaking. An older Croatian man named Lex Ravlich had arrived at Anna’s door in a brown Commer van at 6 am sharp. Lex Ravlich acted as an agent for the larger market gardeners out on the flat alluvial fields on the volcanic plain between Geelong and Melbourne. When harvest time came, or onion grass needed to be slashed, he would, for a fee, round up the women of his community, few of whom had cars of their own at this stage, and transport them out to those fields near Lara, Little River and the You Yangs to earn some money. When the work was due to begin on the dunes of Bluff Road, Gibbon had suggested to FB that he contact Lex Ravlich and arrange for the women to plant the marram grass during breaks in their market garden schedule. So in the grey dawn Anna Nielson joined eight other women in Lex Ravlich’s Commer, and they travelled out through the salt pastures and marshy guzzles of Moolap towards the dunes.

  FB was there to meet them at the designated spot, and he and Anna were briefly introduced, after which she joined the Croatian women in traipsing back along the dunes to where they had left off the previous day. Anna had always found the women so warm and friendly but now, after showing her the planting method and the area to be covered, they hardly said another word until the first break – a quick fifteen-minute snack at 10 am. By that stage Anna’s back was aching, her face was red with a mixture of exertion and windburn, and the prospect of having to go to the toilet by squatting in the nearest dune slack was not that appealing.

  By lunchtime she had stinging scratches on her hands, and her knees were so sore it made her aching back seem bearable. The group sat to eat in the lee of she-oaks one hundred yards back towards the golf course boundary. FB joined them, having worked elsewhere all morning directing two local blokes who were erecting the palisades (or ‘slat fences’ as he was calling them locally) in the foredunes on the ocean side of the plantings. He noticed immediately that the new friend of the Croatian women was quite flushed and exhausted. He could also see that she was not complaining or drawing attention to herself. She was even managing to laugh along with some of the jokes the women were making at Lex Ravlich’s expense.

  FB made his way over to Anna Nielson to thank her for coming along. As she explained to me later on after his death, she found him courteous and amusing, and could see that the other women felt the same. She laughed loudly when she told me: ‘We were a bit like his little harem in the dunes. It was positively Bedouin!’

  Anna no doubt discovered over the years ahead just how far from such a mindset FB was on that Queen’s Birthday holiday in the middle of 1971. If there was to be a romance in the dunes for him, it could only be at the other end of the world.

  †

  I like to think that to a casual acquaintance of FB’s in Geelong at that time, the somewhat distant charm he exhibited to the Croatian women, and to Anna Nielson on that Queen’s Birthday in 1971, could easily have appeared as entirely consistent with the reticent tone of his public personality before he went to France. However, whereas the interior remove of his persona before France had more to do perhaps with the doting of his mother, and therefore with general feelings of constriction and guilt, the social distance he displayed after his return actually had a different quality, an undertow perhaps resembling that which I found so compelling and mysterious when I first read his book on the Great Ocean Road.

  On page 64, of The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties, he had this to say:

  In case of instability, or even dramatic subsidence, on such a public carriageway, it is not altogether spurious to ask the question of what, at heart, has caused the incident: the road or the dune? Inevitably, the engineer will cast the faultiness of the road (and perhaps even of the roadmaker involved) as the culprit, but the dune morphologist would view it from the other perspective. He would point to the nature of the dune, to its inclinations, even to its personality, in order to demonstrate how the situation came to arise. Perhaps the nub of the problem, however, lies not in one thing or another, but in the relationship between the two.

  It is possible that the kangaroo disappearing down the hole on Mr Lane’s private road between Anglesea and Sunnymeade may have inspired this reflection of FB’s. But what struck me when I first read his book during the research for my own work on the road was the mention, in such an apparently dry and minor local publication in 1982, of a sand dune having a personality. This was highly unusual, to put it mildly. There seemed to be a consciousness below the surface of a concept like that which was almost audible in the sea air around me. If, as far as this civil engineer FB Herschell was concerned, sand dunes had personalities, then the whole ocean environment into which the famous road was set could have a character, a voice even, which could speak, in the wind, even sing.

  †

  Slowly, slowly he carried on with his life during this period and slowly, slowly his mindset changed. He rejoined the Moorabool Chamber Orchestra for a time but soon seemed to grow tired of it. From time to time he drank at the pub with col
leagues, he travelled on the train to Melbourne to visit his favourite libraries and bookshops and to attend classes at the Alliance Française. Then, nearly five years after his return from France, in a note on March 1973 (once again on the faded, grass-green CRB paper), he wrote: ‘Have begun to see the marram grass as barricades. But would they unplant for me?’

  Marram grass barricades. Instead of the diverse ready-made barricades of the Latin Quarter, where he had seen anything and everything scrounged and piled up high in order to resist the aggression of the state, now suddenly he sees laid out before him, in so many serried ranks, barricades consisting of one, and only one, species. These barricades have not swelled up out of the place itself but have been inserted into the scene to stem the rioting effects of wind on sand. And it is he who has inserted them.

  The local authority that had been invested in him due to his studies in Paris, his field trips to Arcachon and his surveying of the theories of everyone from Brémontier to Bagnold, had not prepared him for this. Rather, it was something else that had prepared him: an entirely invisible deepening that came with the consideration of his plight from all the various angles. He had not been rejected for another man, this much was clear. Instead, he had been left behind for an idea, an idea of a society so much better than what the aftermath of World War II had created. His heart’s wrench, his anger and jealousy not towards another man but towards a cause, was gradually transforming into a kind of emulation. In short, he began to pay attention. He was no longer distracted. If nothing else, Mathilde had taught him – not Lacombe, not Gibbon – how the environment of the dunes could become more than just the object of his intellect, the sand archive more than just a furrow for his love.