Cape Grimm

by Carmel Bird

  Dedicated to the memory of Dinny O’Hearn

  ‘In the whole array of living things there is only one terrestrial order that is homeless and is alien to any land.

  This creature is the moonbird.’ CARRILLO MEAN The Flying Sheep of the Pacific Ocean

  ‘The north-west cape of Van Diemen’s Land is a steep, black head, which from its appearance I called “Cape Grim”.’

  MATTHEW FLINDERS Journal

  ‘There is the story of one’s hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connection of things, the story of one’s story itself.’

  HENRY JAMES

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE Dust

  CHAPTER TWO Mask

  CHAPTER THREE Air

  CHAPTER FOUR Story

  CHAPTER FIVE Fire

  CHAPTER SIX Word

  CHAPTER SEVEN Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean I

  CHAPTER EIGHT Water

  CHAPTER NINE Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean II

  CHAPTER TEN Gold

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean III

  CHAPTER TWELVE God Sees the Red Umbrella

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Earth

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Path of the Insect

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean IV

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Roses of Highfield

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Mission

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean V

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The Ghosts of Suicide Bay

  CHAPTER TWENTY Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean VI

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Taos

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Letters to the Dead

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Butter Dream

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Heb Dhu Heb Dhim

  Epilogue

  Time and Tide

  Time

  Tide

  P.S.

  About the Author

  Meet the author

  Life at a glance

  About the book

  The critical eye

  Behind the scenes

  Author’s top ten favourite books

  The inspiration

  Read on

  Have you read?

  Find out more

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books By Carmel Bird

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Berlin

  24 July 1850

  My Dear Lady Franklin,

  I return to you my best thanks for your kind letter. It was most comforting and remarkable for me to learn from you of the popularity which Die Kinder-und Hausmarchen have found among the children of far-off Van Diemen’s Land. My brother also wishes me to extend to you his gracious thanks. That you should personally have read the stories to the little ones in the Queen’s Orphan School at Hobart Town is a matter for my heart’s rejoicing. Like the memory of a dream, or like unto something I have imagined, using your eloquent description of the scene as the source of my vision, I see the children gathered in the firelight as they listen to the tales through the delightful medium of your voice. We are humbled by your confidence in the stories. I contemplate the globe of our little world and in my heart I smile when I realise that the tales themselves are able to travel to the four corners, voyaging between the covers of books, carried also in the minds of those who have heard them, transported by such gentle ambassadors as yourself.

  Your accounts of your own travels and those of your intrepid, visionary and most courageous husband, Sir John, have implanted in my heart a strong desire for a visit to those distant shores of the Antipodes, to see with my own eyes some of the wonders to be witnessed in those parts. I confess to you, however, that in my own case the length of the journey and the rigours thereof, as well as my responsibilities to my family and to my work, present themselves to me as serious impediments to such an undertaking. I have much admiration for those who put out to sea, placing all their trust in the grace of our loving Father in Heaven to deliver them safely to their destination.

  Please do me the honour of accepting a small contribution to the funds dedicated to your search for Sir John in the Arctic wastes. I share with you and also with many other folk the earnest belief that your dear husband and his faithful men will most surely be discovered alive before many more weeks have passed. May Our Lord in His infinite wisdom watch over him, and also over you, dear lady, and may He swiftly bring your sacred enterprise to its happy conclusion.

  I would also beg you to accept, as a token of my great pleasure at the thought that the tales have by your efforts given instruction and pleasure to the children of Van Diemen’s Land, a presentation copy of a new English translation, the Nursery and Household Tales, bound in my own favoured crimson watered silk casing. All your efforts in general to bring the gifts of language and literature to the people of your dear husband’s former province are a part of the great work in which my brother and I, and all philologists and storytellers everywhere are engaged. Though the universe is full of sound, with the air whistling and howling, the fire crackling, the sea roaring, and every animal making its own specific noise, only man has speech. While primitive expressions of joy and sorrow, laughter, sighs and tears, are common to all mankind, each language and each story is a creation, always subtly changing, always renewing itself, an outcome of mankind’s God-given ability to think.

  May God guide you and may you be soon reunited with Sir John, to live in joyful good health for many long years to come.

  I am your sincere and faithful friend,

  Jakob Grimm

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dust

  Much of eastern Australia is turning to dust.

  Once there was a fair country where the people lived in peace and in prosperity until there came a time when a strange child appeared and the land was turned to dust, to dust and ashes. A strange and powerful child came and the land fell away into dust and ashes, and the child gazed at the land, gazed with his great gleaming aluminium eyes. The sun beat down upon the surface of the land and no rain fell for a thousand days, and for a thousand and one nights no rain fell. The crops withered in the red earth which opened up with patterns of cracks, the cracks in the visage of a wild old woman. The cracks yawned open. The earth yawned and no rain came. And the cattle died, and the sheep—and the trees began to hum. Then the forests exploded into flame and the words in all prayers were ‘bushfire’ and ‘drought’. Dear Lord, save us from the flames; Dear Lord please send rain. Holy Mary Mother of God, intercede for us. Then there came the fearful word of ‘famine’, and then came ‘plague and pestilence’ and next were added war and tribulation. And sorrow and sadness and loss. Heartbreak. Somewhere in there were the locusts and the winds. The winds, the hot and cold winds blowing hot and cold across the land.

  Behold I will send upon them the sword the famine and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs that can not be eaten they are so evil.

  That is one way of putting it, as recorded by the Prophet Jeremiah. Many people believe that stories will somehow save the world, and maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I don’t know of any story that has the kick back of an assault rifle, or the reverse ability of a nuclear missile.

  The child in the story about the dust appeared in the far northwest of the little world of Van Diemen’s Land where the Roaring Forties meet the rugged rocks, where round and round the rugged rocks a ragged rascal ran. Van Diemen’s Land dangles at the bottom of eastern Australia, like a jewel on a pendant, and the child in the story was born in Van Diemen’s Land, now generally known as ‘Tasmania’, in the second part of the twentieth century, in 1959. I am not that child, although I t
oo was born in 1959, but I am simply the teller of the tale as it unfolded, as the winds blew and the waves rose, and the sun beat down on the great southern continent and the red waves of the central desert blew forward to the coast, and somehow, everything was reduced to dust. And ashes. My name is Paul Van Loon.

  In my father’s office there’s an old map on which the southwestern wilderness of Tasmania is labelled ‘Transylvania’. This office is at our flower farm in a small place called Christmas Hills in the northwest of the island. I have always had a fanciful turn of mind, and it’s not hard for me to imagine the mythic qualities of Transylvania merging naturally with the landscape of Tasmania. For in this place are mysterious and impenetrable swarthy forests, woods of deep and black-green shadows where demons lurk and angels hover nervously. One of my great interests lies in the connection between psychology and poetry, and I am in many ways well placed to pursue this interest, since I write poetry, and in my ordinary working life I am a psychiatrist. ‘Ordinary working life’—where did I find such a phrase? I think I watch too much television and read too many newspapers so that my use of language is being infected with and bleached by the jargon of the day. The old map of Transylvania, like maps in the Bible, is tinted with a pastel purple wash, with areas of watery malachite, ash and primrose, and is detailed with fine drawings suggesting cauliflower thickets of dense forest woodland, lumpy multiplying mountain ranges, filigree lacework showing the veins and arteries of rivers. The mountains conceal vast mineral wealth, such as is mined by teams of industrious dwarfs, and the forest will build ships and many thousands of houses and make enough paper to construct not one but several pale pathways to the moon—and the rivers, like great snorting horses, will provide enough electricity to blow up the planet.

  Since I was a very small boy I have always loved that map of Transylvania, and have dreamt about it, conjured it up in moments of reverie, moments of stress, times of joy. When my father dies—he’s sixty-three and shows no signs of slowing down or bowing out—I hope to hang the map of Transylvania in my own office. My grandfather was one of the Dutch on the Burma Railway in the war, and he lived to be eighty-six, so we Van Loons are made from tough stuff. As far as I know my grandfather never spoke about the war, and he died with his secrets, experiences, memories and forgettings locked away in his sinewy old heart. He had a watch that had belonged to one of his companion soldiers, and when he died that watch was buried with him. The gracious mysteries of the map of Transylvania suggest a place inviolate to the forces that might turn a land to dust. This is a place of grey and lilac rock scabbed with moody lichens, a place of drifting mists, milky haze, splashing waterfalls and living lakes and rivers, carpeted green fields, leaping rainbow fishes chasing the flittering flying carpet of newborn moonfaced moths. Clouds of mournful sheep, ash-green clumps of still and whispering treetops, dark as velvet. The wisdom and breath of ancient thoughtful trees. There are four thousand lakes—it seems to me that’s an enormous number of lakes. And deep mournful forest ravines where rumours of pre-history murmur and burble, seething softly with the imagination of some great brooding spirit. Nesting underground on the islands that dot the ragged coastline are the restless creatures we call the moonbird, the muttonbird, the shearwater, homeless, forever winging in a great figure eight around the Pacific Ocean from north to south, south to north, their aerial path describing the image and symbol of eternity.

  ‘Much of eastern Australia is turning to dust.’ With a straight face the woman reading the autocue of the television news repeats those words. It sounds credible; I can easily believe it. One of the true horrors of modern life is the fact that every night, night after night, straight-faced newsreaders look into the receptive eyes of all the world and spill out, spin out, the stories, speaking of seven Israeli children gunned down on their way to school by Palestinian militants, two hundred and forty-five people killed in an earthquake in Colombia, as fire sweeps through most of California, and Belgium is being washed away by the worst floods in one hundred and fifty years. Numbers, always numbers. If you watch and listen long enough you will have heard spoken every number that ever was—that’s a thought. Night after night they do the numbers on TV with that cool straight face, that smooth, bright, clean, level, hypnotist’s voice. The number of dead, the number of homes destroyed, the number of years since history started, the numbers of the weather, the number of years lived by Cleopatra, the numbers of finance, the number of people struck by the disease, the number of goals scored, the number of minutes it took the horse to run the race, the number of angels, the number to ring should you wish to order pizza. The price of health insurance. The price of petrol. The price of matches. You can easily see why people might go mad. Possibly there will come a TV time when everything will turn to numbers, like star dust, and will disappear in one great piece of arithmetical and brilliant wonder.

  After the news explaining that much of eastern Australia is turning to dust, there are some pictures of cracked earth dotted with dead trees. From the yearning tip of Cape York in northern Queensland to the sugary dots of Maatsuyker Island in southern Tasmania, the woman in the nice pale-pink jacket suggests, the wind may soon come and blow the whole thing away. El Niño has brought the drought to eastern Australia, she says. And to Colombia, even-handed, he has brought the flood. On the same day—it’s the first of June 2002—the newspapers document the tenth anniversary of the Mabo decision, referring to a High Court ruling that ‘Aboriginal title to land had survived British settlement’. Now it is just called ‘Mabo’ and it was the dramatic beginning of a lengthy process in the life of the land and the people, black and white, a process that so far has benefited mainly the lawyers, as these things so often do. Today’s newspaper records that, according to the smooth talk of a white speaker, Mabo has brought ‘a lot of uncertainty’, while a cautious black speaker says ‘the exercise appears to have failed’ and adds that indigenous people are ‘still living in the dark corners’ of Australia.

  I have a sense that I too am living in a dark corner, speaking to you from the obscurity of a small place called Black River. Here in the dark corner we have Paul Van Loon, commenting on the events of the day; and here in the light corner we have the ubiquitous girl in the pink suit, bringing you the smiling evening news.

  Dark corners and uncertainty. These shadows mark the flip side of life’s bright moments and firm facts. The way I see it the whole thing is probably some type of fairytale—life I mean—a fairytale, a dream, a strange and bitter-sweet once upon a time, a journey by the hero in search of paradise. Monsters and wild storms and battles are encountered along the way until the darkness closes in, and the land returns to dust and the girl in pink can wash her hands of everything.

  I wonder if I am the hero of this story? I suppose not, hope not. I’m the narrator, the storyteller, the Brother Grimm, and I will lead my readers along the path through the forest, will show the way the people behave—this includes myself, my own behaviour is not exempt—and show what happens, and how things turn out in the end. What do they say at the end of fairytales? ‘My tale is done, and away it is run, to little August’s house.’

  Ten years is a short time in history; it’s a long time in a human life. It is in fact ten years now since Caleb Mean destroyed the village of Skye, and that event is the one that really sets my narrative in motion. The fire at Skye, in my world picture, as a focal point around which and towards which the histories I will describe all move and tend, back and forth, round and round, waves rolling in against a cliff.

  In the central Australian deserts, according to today’s papers, half a million feral camels are running wild. The Claudina butterfly has been placed on the endangered list. Meanwhile, out in space, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are in straight alignment. In Colombia twinkling blocks of snow-white cocaine are fashioned into the likeness of the scene of Christ’s Nativity, and shipped to distant destinations. Famine in Africa, unrest in the Middle East, melting of the polar icecaps. In A
sia the deadly golden apple snail is threatening rice crops. A giant squid comes from the ocean’s depths to surface on a beach in the southeast of Tasmania. In the past century only about fifty examples of these creatures have been found, and they were dead, but apparently they exist in dramatic living splendour in huge quantities deep deep down in the ocean. Bits of them have been salvaged, and recently a scientist in New Zealand tried to raise some baby ones in captivity, but they died. In their gliding, embracing, strangling, swallowing millions they explore the waters around Van Diemen’s Land. Mysteries drift in all unseen places, deep in the ocean, high in the sky, thick in the darkness of the blackest forest. The deep blue pearly water—is that how it goes, the song? I think about the sea a lot, as might be obvious by now—I’m afraid of the open sea, and when a slimy pink prehistoric monster turns up on the beach I am reminded all over again that there is a great deal of danger out there, deep deep down.

  To the northwest of Australia, India and Pakistan are facing off with nuclear weapons. On nineteenth October last year more than three hundred and fifty refugee parents and children, wanting shelter, wanting asylum in Australia, drowned when their boat, which came to be known as the SIEV-X, sank in international waters, north of Christmas Island. ‘If I die in the sea,’ said one little girl to her father, ‘don’t leave me here alone.’ This has been a year, the paper says, of most unusual mass strandings of paper nautilus shells on the west coast of Flinders Island in Bass Strait. In Lima fresh rose petals sparkling with dew have miraculously appeared in the arms of a statue of Saint Rose. Water has been discovered beneath the surface of Mars. Scientists are planning to distribute by helicopter, in September, baits of Fipronil in an attempt to control the crazy ants on Christmas Island. The ants have effectively wiped out the crimson crabs which are a key species in maintaining the ecological balance of the island. At this point, the newspapers note, the Australian cricket team is due to play Pakistan, also in September.