by Carmel Bird
On the hill to the west of Circular Head stood the house called Highfield, pretty, charming, airy, nestling in the landscape, imitating in its miniature way the great houses of the homeland. It was the domain of the Manager of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and so did service as the manor house for the people living in the countryside all around. It was approached through imposing stone gateposts, the stone imported from England for the purpose. There were rose bushes in the gardens at Highfield, and one day in summer every year the Manager, James Gibson, invited everyone from almost all levels of the isolated society to gather for a picnic and to admire the flowers. When she was a child Rosa Mean believed the roses had been planted in her honour.
The first time the Means went to the picnic, Minerva, dressed in her best blue gown, such as it was, and wearing, as ever, her silver pendant, was invited to join some of the other ladies for a stroll through parts of the house and the immediate grounds. The dimensions were smaller than those of the large houses she remembered, but the number of rooms, and the fabrics and ornaments made her both joyful and sad. She longed to live in such a place, and might have done so had she and Edward completed their journey together. Such thoughts could creep into her mind at night, as she was falling asleep, but she knew how to dismiss them and to go forward into everyday life, for she was alive, and she knew what a precious gift her life was. She was safe on dry land with a miraculous new husband and a strange wooden house, and Niña and another child, Rosa, on the way. But even knowing this, the roses in china bowls on the fine cedar tables, the silken drapes and the handsome piano, all brought a sigh to her throat. There was an embroidered Spanish shawl draped across a piano stool, a shawl that resembled in its glossy bright-blue flowers and its trailing fringe the shawls Minerva had lost at the bottom of the sea. Sunlight streamed through the window panes onto the pink Turkish carpet in the drawing-room. The long mahogany table with sixteen balloon-back chairs glowed in the dining-room. Minerva heard there were five bedrooms and an attic. There were quarters for the servants, and a vast kitchen where gleaming copper pans hung from the walls. The company walked out through the kitchen garden, across a paved courtyard, and were led by lavender hedges and a rose walk and flowerbeds filled with pansies and calendulas, out onto the lawns which were planted with young oak trees. There was an orchard where the Manager grew apples and pears, and a wide, neat vegetable garden smelling of fresh earth and onions, blue-green with cabbages, strawberries decorating the edges like embroidered motifs on a cloth. They went along the bowery walk to the honeysuckle bower where they saw the funeral urn commemorating the death of two-year-old Juliana Theresa Curr who had been thrown from her dogcart in 1834. Minerva wept as she heard the sad story, and held on tight to Niña who lay in her arms.
The Means were manufactured by the sea off Puddingstone Island, new creatures, three, actually four of them, Minerva, Magnus, Niña, unborn Rosa, tossed and thrown and blown from the bottom of the ocean to the shores of the wind-chewed edges of the rocky land on the edge of the heart-shaped world. They were fish gasping in the air, cold, sopping, scaly, crawling, finding their way blindly into the dry shelter of the cave. They were sea monsters with cracked skin and with satin staring eyes, washed with a primeval simplicity. Back, back into the darkness of the crumbly Puddingstone cave they moved in their darkest night thoughts, slowly, fearing the presence of fabled creatures, dragons, pirates, wild beasts, ghosts, vampires, cannibals, but seeking the warmth, the dry rocky floor, the embrace of the low roof, the womb of that musty space. They slowly surfaced from the deep hallucination of the slate-grey hell-black ice-green waters of the storm, feeling the gradual welcome of the land that had saved them, claimed them, made them new and strange and knotted together by fate and fortune and water and wind. On that first visit to Highfield, Rosa was the secret fourth member of the square, a tiny speck of mathematics dividing and multiplying in the salty warm waters slopping deep inside her mother, sparked by the seed of Edward Hinshelwood, poor drowned Edward Hinshelwood.
Minerva regretted many things, looked back in sorrow and loss, and one of these was the fact that she had lost the pepper seeds, seeds carried long before from the pepper tree in the garden in Lima, and seeds from red peppers as well. She had carried them to England, to the Iris, hoping to plant them, to grow great pepper trees and hot little pimentos on a green and sunny farm in the fabled pastures in the south of the world. But now the pepper seeds would rot at the bottom of the sea. Or they would take root in the eye sockets of drowned pirates and princes and would sprout new kinds of pepper trees, waving and drifting among silent corals and the jagged splinters of rotting decks. Remembering the phantom pepper trees and pimentos, Minerva would often call hot-tempered Rosa her little guindilla, and the nickname was affectionately passed down through generations of children in the family.
And those generations grew in all directions, fanned out, reined in blood from other families on the northwest, the northeast, until the growing community at Skye began to take on its own busy, industrious form, which was also a philosophical and religious form, with its Temple of the Winds and its remote pure ways of looking at the world, at life, at death, at work, and at the joys of sharing all in a frontier community.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mission
‘It seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern.’
VIRGINIA WOOLF, ‘In the Orchard’
Over time, when there is a closed community such as the one at Skye, two kinds of folklore grow up about it, one inside the community and one outside. All my life I had been familiar with the stories told from the outside, but from Virginia’s chronicles and letters I am able to glean insights I could never otherwise have had. As children we used to think that inside the village of Skye was some kind of old-fashioned cannibal and incest hell, fascinating and repellent. Everything bad and mad and evil was contained in what we imagined were the walls of Skye. There were no walls. It was just a remote collection of houses and very small farms with a few workshops and a comprehensive general store. And a Meeting Hall, never discount the Meeting Hall. And the incredible and fabulous Temple of the Winds. It was a strange place, Skye, cut off yet probably harmless enough, until its time had come and it imploded. Until Caleb came along and took things so very seriously, it was at worst eccentric, at best harmless. To the people of Skye the world outside was full of the dangers of the devil’s invention, and they saved themselves from all this when they left the planet. It is particularly difficult for Virginia who has been catapulted across the border and now has to adjust to the way things are done here if she is to survive. She can’t stay forever in Ben Fox’s hideout. And it’s important to remember that she is very young, has been stamped by generations of Skye dogma, and believes she is still in love with Caleb. I suppose she is, but if so it will probably kill her. I wonder if she realises that a few other women have fallen in love with wicked celebrity Caleb too, and they write letters to him, letters he never receives. And so the folklore of inside/outside continues to fabricate and multipy, with a little help from the media, and the boundless imagination of the human heart.
It is certainly just as well we got Virginia (I find it hard to call her Claudina, I don’t know why) out of the hospital in Hobart, as I think being there was driving her deeper into a kind of helpless and obsessive narcissism. She was hallucinating and could only be controlled by medication, whereas now she is in a kind of family setup with Gilia and Michael, and she’s got fresh air and ordinary activity such as gardening and cooking and caring for Stella. For a time she wrote down every minute detail of the house, was tracking the movement of the sunlight as it fell on the table, the floor, the bed. Then she would describe the moonlight, likewise. I asked her about why she did this and she said she had been trained always to ‘follow the light as it moves across the surface of the world’ and document it. Why? I said, and she said it was because the hour would surely
come when the light would stand still, would die, and it was her responsibility to be there. I gave up on that line of questioning. The arrogance of these people is breathtaking and alarming. Never mind that if the sun stood still (the earth stood still?) the last thing you would need would be Virginia taking notes. But some of her documentation of Skye is historically quite valuable.
Caleb was sixteen when Virginia was born. (So was I, for that matter.) She grew up knowing him as the handsome, powerful, charismatic preacher. To her he was not the Preacher Boy, El Niño, but someone altogether more magical, a young man to whom the whole community deferred. It is a testament, I suppose, to her nature (not to mention her youth and beauty) that he selected her to be with him after the fire, to be his proposed partner in the amazing leap into eternity from the clifftop at Cape Grimm.
The mission that people of Skye took to the world was really a small one, concentrating on rural Tasmania, never moving from a tiny corner of the island. There was a hope that they might establish a second centre on the east coast, but it foundered in quarrels over money and something to do with crayfish pots that I could never quite understand. Throughout his adolescence Caleb was driven all over the state by his father, preaching in church halls and school halls and to gatherings that came to see him principally, I understand, out of a rather idle curiosity. They wanted to see a freak show, and in a way that is what they saw. It is tragic that he was sincere in what he said, and so far from the point. He was interviewed twice for a TV news program, but never chose to do the obvious thing and sell his message that way. Caleb was well built and magnetic, yes, but there was something utterly alarming about his eyes, his teeth and his hair, his white or silver suit and he could resemble a crazed hedgehog. Sometimes the newspapers on the northwest coast would be short of local news and would write up some story or other about Skye, particularly about Caleb the Preacher Boy, but in a way it was all just part of the fabric of existence, nothing so special. I used to read these things avidly when I was young, impressed by the fame of this boy of my own age.
The way I see it there was something quite dark and creepy about the way Caleb and his father always quickly retreated to Skye, never straying far from base for long. On reflection I think they wanted the world to know that they had the answer, but did not particularly want the world to join them at Cape Grimm. It’s quite a twisted way of doing things, but then twisted is what it all turned out to be. Caleb is a highly learned man, but with what we would have called in my childhood ‘something missing up top’ or ‘a screw loose’. More than one screw loose actually. This is no way for a man of my profession to talk, but I find it quite descriptive and liberating. Several people did in fact choose to follow Caleb into the community. Virginia knew of two teenage girls from Scottsdale. Their families made desperate and futile attempts to recover them from Skye, but the more they tried, the less hope they had. The girls stayed at Skye, cut off all contact with their own people, and they died in the fire. I can only begin to imagine what it must be like to be the parents of those girls. And there were others. Enraged, bewildered and bereft, families occasionally went to the media, engaged cult-busters and so forth, but nothing ever came of it except in the case of a woman called, improbably, Marina Galaxy. (The Galaxys are in fact an old Chinese–Aboriginal family from Mount Olympus, near Lake St Clair.)
Marina Galaxy was about fifty, the mother of six children, grandmother of who knows how many, and she attended a meeting in a remote timber church underneath an old gum tree just outside Ringarooma one wild afternoon in spring. (We used to call it Ringaringaroses.) There was a small congregation, Caleb was in full voice, full flight, howling above the wind and rain, when the tree came crashing down on the roof, smashing everything in sight, narrowly missing the people in the pews. Marina, cut on the face by a splinter of flying glass, was within an inch of her life, yet rather than see Caleb as being maybe responsible, she decided to see him as her saviour. It was as simple as that. She washed her bleeding face under the tap at the gate, joined Caleb and his father on the drive back to Skye, and settled in, supposedly for life. But this was not taking into account her large, active, vocal and furious extended family who roared into Skye in a couple of Land Rovers and kidnapped her, holding the astonished members of the community back at gunpoint. I wonder about all this, actually, as I think perhaps Marina might have found her spiritual home. Who knows? There was certainly a fair element of Aboriginal story in the narratives and the thinking of the Skye community, and a decent quantity of Aboriginal and Chinese blood as well. The incident with Marina Galaxy put Skye in the news Australia-wide for a couple of days, but then things settled back into cloudy sleep, and other stories washed over the papers and the airwaves, and all was quiet at Cape Grimm. I sometimes wonder what became of Marina after that, after she went back to Mount Olympus. Where do stories end?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean V
‘All is born of water. All is sustained by water.’
GOETHE
Father Fox has brought me a picture that I requested, a replica of one of the South American images my family treasured, part of our memory of Minerva. It is a painting of Jesus as a small child, dressed in the cloak and the hat of a traveller or pilgrim. He has cockle shells on his hat and a staff in his hand. It is El Niño of Atocha. When Gilia saw it she said I might also like to have a particular statue which was given to her by a gipsy woman outside an old cathedral in Spain one evening at twilight when the swallows were flitting round the stone towers, slicing the soft darkness, promising spring and hope. It is a statue of Mary standing on the waves above a little boat where two white sailors and one black one are battling the waves. Mary is in a bright-blue cloak with gold stars, and she has the baby Jesus, in a pink dress, in her arms. She has a huge crooked gold halo hovering above her head. I would very much like to travel to such places, see such things. Once I was uninterested in travel, being as I was so accustomed to visiting strange places in my imagination, but I have begun to have a real interest in foreign lands. How thrilling it would be to go to South America, to China, to Paris and New York. Father Fox laughs at me and says this is what comes from reading Vogue and watching television. When Gilia speaks of other places, even of Hobart, but particularly of faraway places she has been, I feel my mind stretching, out, out, around the world, flying along, and out I also go into space, visiting the stars and the planets. And I wonder what is my purpose in the world, what I am to do, beyond caring for Stella and washing and cleaning and cooking, drawing, writing, walking in the bush.
In my imagination I pull myself back into this house of safety, like a snail, encased in the whorls of its shell. I have made several sketches of seashells and nautilus shells, which are, I now realise, among my favourite objects of contemplation, and which are so very satisfying to draw. When I draw the nautilus I remember my father, the way he would say we were all trapped inside one. It was a strange and potent thing to say, and I never quite understood what he really meant. I need a specimen for my sketches, and so Father Fox has said he will bring me some shells, including a nautilus from Hobart next time he comes to see us here. He will buy them in a shell shop. How very strange that is to me, buying shells from shops, when I so often collected my shells on the yellow and white sandy shores of the northwest where the land, like shortbread, crumbles into the sea.
The walls in the central part of this house were originally made, long long ago, from logs, lined with clay and grasses, and then papered on the inside with sheets and sheets of newspaper which was glued and glued and then painted over. These days the colour of the paint is a dusky apricot, all soft and uneven, and like warm warm stone lying in the sun. And on the apricot kitchen wall, on a piece of board, there is a little oil painting that shows a sailing ship rocking on a wild sea. There are two human figures on the deck, and six at different positions up the masts. Three men, wearing black hats, are in a lifeboat, rowing towards the ship. There’s a floating box,
and one person swimming towards the ship. But the fantastic thing about this picture of rescue is the opening in the greenish-grey clouds of the heavens. Standing in the opening, the edges of which are peeled back like curling paper, is the Virgin Mary dressed as a queen, holding the child Jesus. They are standing above and behind a big brown bull, and Mary’s face is quite grim and ugly. You might expect to see those heavenly figures appearing in the sky, but seeing the bull there is a great surprise to me.
Near the picture in the kitchen there is always a large green china bowl that is filled with flowers—lovely sprigs of pine heath, melaleuca, kangaroo apples and orchids. Gilia grows flowers and vegetables and fruit here, and whenever Michael goes to Hobart he brings back, along with all the groceries and other things, always some flowers. He says that the day when people do not love flowers will be the beginning of the end of the world. Father Fox always brings flowers too. He comes trundling up the wide bush track in his dusty old Land Rover, pulls up at the back door of the house, and jumps out with his arms full of flowers. He brings such things as great big white lilies and banana-yellow tulips and gladioli and roses, roses of all colours, so big and soft and dreamy—some from a garden in Sandy Bay and some from the shops in the city. I have never walked in the city streets. I imagine being able to go into a flower shop and buy bunches and bunches of every kind of flower. The most important plants are the native plants, but in a part of the garden where there is a statue of Saint Francis, very old and weathered, Gilia grows many kinds of old-world herbs, as well as calendulas, primroses and pansies, lobelia and daisies, hyacinths and daffodils—but they all have to be carefully contained and strictly cared for because we are living in the heart of an ancient and delicate forest, and the principal aim of Michael and Gilia is to care for and protect the forest that matters most in the world to them. Saint Francis is often visited by little native birds.
