Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  After lunch, Mary and the others took up more yoghurt pots and went to work on the trees, stripping them of plums with astonishing skill and speed, filling whole billy cans in minutes. Knowing how hard the fruit were to pick, the effortless skill, the sheer nonchalance of the women, filled me with admiration. One moment they were relaxing and feasting beside the fire, the next they had become hunter-gatherers with 40,000 years of experience behind them, seizing the opportunity of these uncommon ripe plums. Moving from tree to tree, we picked every plum that afternoon. I remembered Latz telling me that opportunism would always take precedence over everything else in the desert, and that he once saw a man pause in the very act of stalking a kangaroo to bend down and gather some bush raisins he had stumbled across. It struck me that our afternoon’s gathering had been done with the minimum of fuss and effort, yet with complete efficiency and a great sense of fun. As we bent down the branches and stripped them of plums, I thought of our family rosehip- and blackberry-picking expeditions in the Chilterns, of how my father would use the crook of his walking stick to bend down the higher branches, and the musical sound of the postbox-red rosehips tumbling into a saucepan.

  On the dusty journey home, Ramona, squeezed in the back with Lily, Kylie and Mary, was handed the sticky, dusty baby to cradle. It ate bush plums all the way home as I swung the Toyota about like a dodgem car between the termite mounds, jointly directed by all the women in their soft, low voices. What looked to me like an endless high-rise termite city was country they evidently knew intimately. Termites, far and away the most successful animals in Australia, are the only ones that can eat and digest the most successful plant, spinifex, in its mature, tough form. Mary pointed out the faintest outline of the new moon, no doubt the reason for the previous night’s ceremony and dancing, and when I remarked that in England it curves the opposite way, she replied, ‘You have wrong-way rubbish moon.’

  Theo had several magnificent paintings by Utopia women on her walls, including a Bush Plum Dreaming picture by Kathleen Ngala and another by Gracie Petyarre, one of the five Petyarre sisters, all notable painters, springing from the loins of the same father but born of five different mothers. A real live huntsman spider loitered in one corner of the Bush Plum Dreaming painting. By the time we got home, we ourselves were bush-plum paintings of a kind: purple, sticky and well daubed, objects of some interest to the Utopian flies.

  At Leatherarse Gully

  Realizing that sleep might be out of the question in the stifling heat of the Whipstick Forest, I settled for a restless night on a mahogany four-poster beneath a tented wedding cake of mosquito netting hooked into the ceiling of one of John and Jenny Wolseley’s railway wagons at Leatherarse Gully. The place is hidden away in the abandoned goldfields outside Bendigo, two hours north-west of Melbourne. The retired wagons are wooden guard’s vans raised on brick piers in a gypsyish encampment in a clearing beside a tin-roofed bungalow that serves as kitchen and dining room. A winding path through the forest leads to Wolseley’s studio. I snuffed the candles and lay listening to crickets, nightjars and a hillbilly band of banjo frogs in the soupy dam where the artist sometimes wallowed in the afternoon. Opened wide on either side of the big bed, the heavy sliding doors allowed the passage of the night air. Across the clearing, I made out the dark forms of swamp wallabies among the box bushes just as our dinnertime wine got the better of me, and I dozed off.

  Dawn came up from a glow behind the mallee woods that soon outshone a clear, almost-full moon. Out of the stillness swelled the distant chanting of currawongs. A bell-bird started up like a car alarm. For a few drowsy moments I thought I was waking in my own railway wagon in Suffolk. ‘Which train is Roger in tonight?’ Wolseley had asked Jenny at bedtime. I got up and wandered through my quarters. Bedrooms at either end opened on to a central compartment with the guard’s chair before an iron brake wheel and a periscope that enabled him to look both ways along the roof of the train, a useful contraption in the days of steam engines and the smuts that flew straight into your eye whenever you stuck your head out of a train window. There were bookshelves, candles and a small writing desk. On the wall, Rouget’s The Beekeepers and a photograph of a 1930s Delaware & Hudson locomotive that hauled the weekly Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs, pausing halfway at a desert waterhole for the passengers to swim. Wolseley’s friend Peter Latz, whom we had visited outside Alice Springs, used to travel on it with his mother once a year from Alice Springs and remembers how the guard would pass through the carriages half an hour in advance, asking the passengers to be changed and ready in their costumes for the twenty-minute stop. When the driver blew his whistle, the dripping passengers would climb back aboard.

  Lines of ants were already on the move as I stepped outside, and the sun baked the reddish, sandy earth between the acacia bushes in this undulating, stony terrain left behind after the Bendigo gold rush of the 1850s. The goldfield was once one of the richest in the world and led to the creation of Bendigo’s Victorian elegance, so much admired by John Betjeman. The railway van still bears its original red ochre lead paint outside, the wooden boards overprinted here and there with obscure stencilled shunting-yard lingo: ‘Forward Seymour Loco’, ‘4697 D only’.

  In its gold-mining days, the Whipstick Forest was an industrial landscape, busy with people and steam-driven machinery. It is still full of leats, artificial running streams dug out to carry water to the gold miners panning the soil or running their rock-crushing steam engines. In this respect it resembles Dartmoor, another once-peopled mining landscape now pretty well abandoned. The gold miners reshaped the Whipstick with their craters, derelict huts and rusting machinery. Scarcely a tree was left standing, but now they have grown back: ironbarks and white gums, grey box, and dense coppice woods of mallee gum trees.

  The mallee is the basis of the one industry that continues here: it is coppiced every few years to make eucalyptus oil. Shadbolt’s famous Eucalyptus distillery once stood a few hundred yards up the track, one of several now abandoned in the woods. These days the leaves are stripped off the coppiced poles and carted off to town to be boiled up and distilled for oil. It can be a dangerous business with all those inflammable gum gases around: stills have been known to explode. I crushed a leaf, put it under my nose and imagined myself with a towel over my head, face to face with my reflection in the surface of a steaming jug of water as a child, getting sweet relief from a cold.

  Even at home, Wolseley cannot altogether shake off the air of the encamped explorer: he seems more at ease out of doors than in. He is tall, relaxed, genial and still distinctly English, with a mischievous sense of the ridiculous in everything, including nature. Preparing mangoes for our breakfast, he flicked the peel on to the veranda deck to an expectant stubby-tailed lizard that appeared from a hole in the wainscot. The reptile devoured it and lingered tamely in the hope of further titbits. It was a foot long, wonderfully plump, and watched us with intelligent, black sparkling eyes as we ate. I noticed hanging on the kitchen wall a salvaged fragment of oft-painted plywood, the ‘wrinklescuro’ of the paint, as Wolseley called it, revealing a map of its history in successive under-colours. In the garden, odd scraps of iron sheet rusted to the flimsiness of leaves were gently returning to the orange earth. Such leisurely processes of nature and mutability in the Australian landscape have formed the core of Wolseley’s work in Australia since its beginnings in 1976, with The Gippsland Wallpapers. He spent months at a time living in abandoned farmhouses in Gippsland and the Otway Ranges in Victoria, and found that, as he writes in his journal, ‘this new landscape doesn’t seem to fit into small rectangles any more; as it did when I was an English gent painting copses and meadows in Somerset.’ At first, he resolved the problem by drawing and painting graffiti directly on to the fading, peeling wallpapered lath-and-plaster walls of the Gippsland ruins, later removing entire sections of them to exhibit in the gallery.

  After breakfast we meandered down a woodland path to the studio. It was once the main residence at L
eatherarse Gully, another bungalow with a low tin roof and veranda, with a water-butt at one corner. Outside by the door stood a glass-topped museum case full of Wolseley’s finds on his painting expeditions in the Australian wilderness: dingo skulls, the tail of a native cat, the skulls of the long-beaked ibis and the stork, nuggets of primeval rock, the out-sized feet of emus, a camel skull and another that wasn’t a dingo but might be a mastiff. Beside the feral display was a tiny kitsch, absurdly tame concrete pond surrounded by gnomes, some fishing, some just thinking: the quintessence of suburbia.

  Inside the studio, it was sweetly cool. A vintage air-conditioner clanked away in a corner. On the wall were photographs of some of the camps, nearly always in remote parts of Australia, where Wolseley spends several months of each year botanizing, observing birds, insects, rocks and skies, drawing, painting, recording what he finds, cooking over a wood fire, snoozing in a hammock or swag, walking, collecting botanical, zoological or geological specimens, taking photographs and writing assiduously in his journal each night by candlelight. In one photograph, his friend Peter Latz sits at some faraway bush camp dinner table holding up a desert yam. Another shows Wolseley at an ‘Art Camp’ he says he was ‘roped into’ once, out beyond Alice Springs. A group of handsome women in middle age stand in the dry, sandy bed of the Finke River. Dressed in shorts, shirts and Akubra hats, they pose under a river red gum admiring a work of art they have assembled in the sand: a giant clitoris composed of river-bed rocks wrapped in pink cotton, an Antipodean riposte to the priapic Cerne Abbas Giant.

  Wolseley moved about the studio among the objects of his never-ending curiosity, telling extraordinary stories about everything in it like Merlin in the upstairs room of his cottage in the Forest Sauvage in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone: ‘There was a real live corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very life-like and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed.’ Wolseley’s habitat was likewise marvellously crammed with papers, books, maps, hats, drawings, specimens and works-in-progress pegged up on the walls or suspended like washing. Drawers in a map chest were labelled ‘Wallace’, ‘Sedimentary Paper’, ‘Emotive Fragments’. Laid out carefully on a table were various buried paintings, or parts of them, bearing the ghostly impressions of the roots of grasses or trees, or nibbled by termites. These were the results of the artist’s habit of occasionally burying his work in situ, usually somewhere remote, and returning up to ten years later to exhume the remains, nature having by then collaborated, leaving comments and a signature. In a Perspex box sat a leaf of the recently discovered, ancient Wollemi pine from the Blue Mountains north of Sydney. Evolution and the vast span of geological time are recurrent themes in Wolseley’s work. There were sticks, bits of charcoal and charred fragments of wood: the land-flotsam of successive desert and forest camps and wanderings. Set out on a table-top were two of the adobe nests of mason wasps attached to the dried carcass of a lizard, the wings of a pardelote and a frogmouth, something like a nightjar, and a row of the cone-like seeds of casuarinas, which Wolseley had been drawing repeatedly for months. Leaves that had half decayed into a lacework of veins were juxtaposed beside the wings of butterflies and birds, which, in turn, were mirrored by aerial photographs of the Spice Islands. A section of white-gum trunk had been drilled out all over to take a hedgehog of pencils. Hanging like Cheyenne headdresses from the picture rail, bundles of parrot and other bird feathers had been bunched and taped together, with notes attached on luggage labels. The spiky branches of bushes lay on sheets of white paper beside collections of lichens or seeds in the ordered trays of delicately dovetailed specimen drawers. Looking perfectly at home against such a background were several drawings of the displays of bower birds.

  The walls were honeycombed with more drawers, racks and shelves of books on taxonomy, natural history, geography of one kind or another, back numbers of Kenneth White’s Cahiers de Géopoétique, the works of other painters or explorers, more maps, well-thumbed field guides and yards of poetry. Rows of Wolseley’s notebooks were crammed with watercolours, drawings, notes, pressed leaves, feathers and seedpods. Images were pinned all over every available inch of whitewashed board wall, some drawn, some photographed, some torn from magazines: an owl in flight, a squirrel leaping, a bee-eater taking off, bracket fungi on a tree-trunk, sailing boats, leaf drawings, fruit drawings, dried fruit, sprigs of leaves and more of the ‘crackotura’ of the ancient sun-baked paint-strata on bits of the flimsy walls of some long-gone plywood caravan. But, among all these, my eye was compelled towards a small formal painting of a child in a flowery summer frock, an early work by Wolseley’s father, Garnet Ruskin Wolseley. A distant cousin of John Ruskin, he had been a prize-winning Slade School artist and one of the Newlyn group of painters in Cornwall.

  John Wolseley was thirty-eight when he arrived in Australia in April 1976 for a short visit. Nearly thirty years later he was still here, still fascinated by the enigmatic Australian wilderness. He was by no means the first of the Wolseleys to try his fortune in Australia. His great-grandfather, Frederick York Wolseley, came over from Ireland in 1854 aged seventeen. Eric Rolls believes he was probably the inventor of barbed wire: an irony for the ancestor of a champion of all that is fenced out. In A Million Wild Acres, Rolls records that around 1867 Wolseley enclosed 10,000 hectares of the Pilliga at Arrarownie on the Borah Creek with a twelve-wire fence eighteen miles long to protect his sheep from dingoes. Wolseley’s fencers wound wire barbs into the sprung fencing every six inches. He moved on and invented the Wolseley hotbox, the first shearing machine. It transformed Australian sheep farming. He employed a brilliant engineer, Herbert Austin, as his factory manager, and they eventually diversified, launching, in England in 1896, the first Wolseley motor car. Austin later started his own motor company in a disused printing works at Longbridge in 1905.

  Frederick York Wolseley handed on Arrarownie to his seventeen-year-old nephew, Erle Wolseley Creagh, who had been banished to Australia for some minor misdemeanour by his uncle, Viscount Wolseley. Eric Rolls knew people in the Pilliga Forest still alive in the 1970s who could remember him. Wolseley Creagh bred horses, milked goats, lived off his orchards and fig trees, and read the newspapers. Rolls describes how, at the end of the day, ‘he washed his hands in the tin dish on a stand outside the door and went in to play his grand piano. Before the last Aborigines left the creeks, a group of them came each evening to hear him play. They walked quietly into the house and sat in a half circle around the piano.’

  However, it was yet another of his ancestors whose life drew John Wolseley to Australia. William Trevelyan Wyndham sailed south in the 1850s and lived the life ‘of an early hippy’, as Wolseley put it, mixing with the Aboriginal clans of northern New South Wales, learning their customs and languages. As a wild colonial boy, he lived by hunting and fishing with the Aboriginal people on South Keppel Island. In 1888 he bought a farm near the mouth of the Boyne River in Queensland. He grew rare plants, planted an orchard of oranges, bananas and pineapples, sailed his forty-foot gaff-rigged cutter Pelican, discoursed to the Royal Society in Sydney on the Aboriginal bark canoes of central Queensland, corresponded with the Smithsonian Society of America on Australia’s indigenous languages and was buried in his orchard in 1898.

  The thermometer outside the door stood at 40°C already, and the air-conditioner was running gamely at full blast. Bloopy, the Wolseleys’ red heeler kelpie cross, with kelpie ears, a long dingo nose, speckled paws and ginger flanks, lay panting on the floor. She was too old for such heat. I helped Wolseley unroll a big charcoal frottage tree drawing ten feet by five and pin it on to a soft-board wall. Three animal skulls sat on an adjustable Vemco architect’s drawing board: rabbit, dog and wallaby. We examined the suture lines between the cranial plates through an eyeglass. Everyone should have an eyeglass and a microscope, I thought: it is much better than TV. We looked at the side of the dog’s skull and
saw how the sutures meandered like rivers, how the surface of the bone was pocked and puckered like the surface of the moon. The big charcoal picture, we discovered, could either go way up or, even better, go upright and look like valleys and ridge-tops. Wolseley was comparing the skulls and their rock-fault jigsaw with some feathers of the frogmouth he had laid out beside them on the drawing board. They were brown and speckled, resembling tree bark. Under the eyeglass you could see the wave forms within them and the analogous sutures meandering along their central veins.

  Wolseley pointed out how the skull and lower jawbone of the wallaby have surprisingly sharp sets of incisors for biting straight through grass rather than tearing at it, as cattle do, and how, further back, there’s a set of grinding mandibles for chewing it. Marsupials, he said, are infinitely kinder grazers to the delicate native Australian grasses than cattle and perfectly adapted to the delicate soil structure the earliest settlers would have encountered. Over lunch in the minescape of the abandoned goldfields, we looked up Eric Rolls’s classic description, in one of his essays, of the fragility of the Australian land as it once was:

  The surface was so loose that you could rake it through the fingers. No wheel had marked it, no leather heel, no cloven foot – every mammal, humans included, had walked on padded feet. Our big animals did not make trails. Hopping kangaroos usually move in scattered company, not in damaging single file like sheep and cattle … Every grass-eating mammal had two sets of teeth to make a clean bite. No other land had been treated so gently.