Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  The first white man to have traversed and mapped the country was Allan Arthur Davidson, surveyor and geologist, aged twenty-two or thirty-one. He notes in his report on the expedition he led into the region he called the Tanami, after the Aboriginal name for a site of permanent rockholes:

  Between latitude 20 and 21 degrees, and longitude 129 degrees, we struck a splendid belt of pastoral country, the only good country of its sort we sighted on the whole trip.

  The Davidson report was filed and forgotten in the archives of the South Australian Lands Department, his ‘splendid belt of pastoral country’ existing briefly as a rumour and then disappearing from memory.

  It is strange to be on this road again. I remember each landmark as it comes up, though they seem to have become slightly rearranged. The road has been well maintained since the reopening of the Tanami and Granites goldfields, so it is in much better shape than the track we used to travel in the sixties. At Chilla Well a loop of the old track has been cut off, and I follow it. This is the road I remember, red wheel-tracks up a limestone rise and the bloodwood tree with the carved trunk overlooking the bore. The tanks are rusting now, the windmill creaks occasionally into the wind but pumps no water. The stock-route bores have all fallen into disuse.

  The old Mongrel Downs turnoff is marked by two steel signposts without signs. Of the track itself there is no trace, although I walk in a hundred yards or more searching for it. These days the access road cuts back south-west from Rabbit Flat. I plan to call in to Rabbit Flat, but the roadhouse is closed for three days a week and doesn’t reopen until tomorrow, so tonight I will camp along the track.

  THIS FIRST NIGHT IN THE Tanami feels very benign and familiar. My campsite is of red earth and soft wheat-coloured grasses, spinifex and the elegant small desert gums with their white trunks and deep green furry leaves. The giant anthills are the most striking feature of this part of the country. They hulk across the landscape, almost animate, each with an individual weirdness of shape that hints at sentience, at some kind of purposefulness in their design. There is a steady light wind blowing, which is causing the fire to flame up. I was lucky to find enough wood for a fire, the remains of a solid, partly burned log, as the white ants consume every bit of dead wood almost instantly. The sun went down quickly, and the kerosene lantern is hissing softly, the only sound apart from the movement of grass in the wind.

  I have never been alone out here in quite this way. When I lived here there was always the family, the people who worked for us, the central focus of the homestead. All my solitary wandering moved out from a fixed, inhabited point. Now I am moving through it like a stranger, unsure of why I am really here, driven by some imperative I don’t fully understand.

  My father loved to be alone in this country. I think he felt safe in it, away from other people. This is a legacy I have inherited from him. I think one of the reasons I have come back here is to try to discover what is me and what is him, and to separate them as best I can. What I do know is that this place is an integral part of the equation.

  The country exists apart from all this stuff I am investing in it. It is separate from the memories, the attachments, the mythology. Coming back to it makes me remember this. The place in my head is not and never was this place. For moments at a time I am simply here. The wind which moves quietly in the grass is the same wind which moves across time and through my mind, leaving a clear emptiness behind it.

  I wake before daylight and watch the eastern horizon brighten slowly. It is suddenly colder, with the dawn chill that marks the last ditch of the night. Sam has complained so bitterly of the cold that I have made him a nest in the cabin of the Suzuki, warning him that this is not to become a habit. The sun comes up like the top of a forty-four gallon drum and rolls on the flat edge of the desert. A few scattered bird calls acknowledge it, but for the most part the bush is perfectly still.

  I am on the road early and pass the signs for the Granites goldmine. They warn of danger and no public access. This was the point where my father’s party left the beaten track and went west.

  The stock-route party carried with them the maps and a segment of the journal kept by Allan Davidson, the only official documentation of a previous traverse of the Tanami region. The diary segment is a yellowing photocopy of a typed copy of the original. It begins at Camp 53, Monday, July 23rd, 1900, at which point Allan Davidson has crossed into Western Australia, and ends at Camp 78, Friday, August 31st, 1900, somewhere in the region of the Smoke Hills south of the Tanami rockholes. It has been among my father’s papers for years. I have glanced at it from time to time, unable to muster the incentive to penetrate the blurred print and technical terminology. But now, persevering, I find myself slowly drawn in, because I can imagine how it was for him to see the country for the first time, this country that I am travelling through, remembering my own experience of seeing it for the first time, remembering my father’s description of seeing it for the first time. Davidson came upon the Granites from the west, having travelled to the Western Australian border along a route much further to the north. The Granite Hill, as he named it, was one of the last points he discovered before heading homewards.

  Camp No 71. Sunday, August 19th, 1900.

  From this ridge the blackish hill for which we had taken our bearing loomed up prominently to the eastward … Byrne had preceded us to this hill, and was to send up a smoke if he sighted water. A smoke went up shortly afterwards, so we continued our course to the hill … On his arrival Byrne saw a native, but he disappeared shortly afterwards, and did not again honour us …

  Good camel feed is abundant, consisting of munyaroo, bluebush, and various other dainty varieties of herbage … Jack (the blackboy) discovered a rockhole containing an abundant supply of water … Byrne managed to shoot a wallaby this evening, so we now live in anticipation of some fresh stew. This appeared to be the last wallaby in the hill, and as he is small, the natives had probably left him to develop.

  Among my father’s papers is a slide taken at the Granites on the return journey he made with Bill Wilson and Milton Willick. Bill sits in the roofless cabin of a rusting vehicle, his hands on the steering wheel and his hat pulled rakishly over one eye. Behind him is the skeletal silhouette of a windmill, and scattered about on the stony ground are the remnants of abandoned mine workings. Although it is a colour slide it gives the impression of a sepia image, the landscape is so bleached and monochromatic. It strikes me as a quintessentially Australian image in its depiction of the iconography of failed enterprise, its humorous irony and the sheer nondescript desolation of the landscape.

  New technology and good roads have made the mine viable again, and as I drive past I can hear the faint grind of heavy equipment burrowing and pulverising and processing. I spare a thought for Byrne’s solitary native, disappearing from the granite hill as a man on a camel appears on the skyline.

  At Rabbit Flat I renew my acquaintance with Bruce and Jackie Farrands, who met each other on Mongrel Downs in my family’s time and established the roadhouse shortly before we left the country. They are a kind of landmark now, having done their time and earned their place in the country.

  I ring the manager of Tanami Downs to let him know I will be arriving sometime during the morning. The wide red road which links Rabbit Flat and Tanami Downs surprises me, though of course it should not. It provides access to Dead Bullock gold mine, which is on the ancestral route between Tanami and Inningarra. The traditional owners of the country receive royalties from the mine.

  Between Rabbit Flat and Mongrel (I must remember to think of it as Tanami) Downs, runs a string of fresh and saltwater claypans. Davidson notes the nature of the country as he passes this way, describing claypans crusted with a fine salt, and dried-up marshland scattered with the small tough vegetation known as samphire. There is a glimpse of the old story in his language, the dream of an inland sea which tormented a generation of explorers.

  … and so where sheets of water had in days gone by brightened th
e features of a dead country there now exists this peculiar belt of country, which cannot be described as a lake and only barely comes under the heading of a marsh.

  In the days before the track existed, we used to follow the edge of the claypans and come out on the Tanami road south of the present location of Rabbit Flat. I remember travelling back just on sundown, picking the track we had made by the different way the light fell on the bent grass, glimpsing the marks of tyre treads here and there on patches of sandy soil.

  8

  I AM SHAKEN BY MY INITIAL encounter with the homestead. Some of it is very changed, some of it disturbingly familiar. It is impossibly strange to be here. I feel as if I have walked into my own past and found myself to be absent from it. I feel like a phantom, an animated absence whose identity is contained in the yellow Suzuki.

  I drink tea with the manager, whose wife and children are away at a pony club meeting, and discuss my plans for spending some time driving around the station. Adam is employed by the Aboriginal owners to manage the property and has been here with his family for several years. He gives me a recent map, with new bores and tracks and fence lines. Within the net of new lines I can see the simpler tracery of what I remember.

  The homestead has been painted white and is fenced in with a neat yard of lawns, cedar trees and bougainvillea. There is even a swimming pool. It is as if a kind of green band has been established between the bush and the homestead, a narrow zone of emigrant trees and artificial tidiness. When we lived here the building perched like a tent in the mulga, more like a permanent campsite than a serious homestead. The clear images of memory slide in and out of focus. As I walk around I register gaps, intrusions. The windmill has gone, and with it the creak and whirr of the blades that was as familiar a sound as the wind itself. The overhead tank is still here, with the narrow metal ladder I climbed as a child when I needed to test my courage. The big bough shed which was the first campsite and later the five-star chook pen has gone, and so has the orchard of citrus trees so carefully nurtured by my father. I am surprised to discover that I am crying. A chained blue heeler watches me beadily, and Sam grumbles at him from the back of the ute.

  The interior of the homestead has been modified so that the basic design of a central rectangle of rooms surrounded by a wide flywired verandah has almost disappeared. It has the feeling of a real house instead of the adapted shearers’ quarters of the original design. The place is much changed, but the same single beds occupy the verandah. In the living room there is now a television set. There are also two green vinyl armchairs. The sight of them, more particularly the vinyl smell of them, transfixes me in the centre of the rather nondescript room. Outside, the crisp winter light breaks into patterns among the cedars and bougainvillea.

  THE GIRL RETREATS FROM the afternoon heat and persistent flies to the living room of the half-finished house. She has unearthed Hatter s Castle from a carton of paperback novels abandoned by some passing traveller. It is the summer before she goes away to boarding school, and she is spending the holidays with her father on the station. Her mother will not move the family out here until the house is finished.

  In the uninhabitable hours of the afternoon the girl reads. It is a dark tale, of fathers and daughters and betrayal and tragedy. The green armchair in which she curls gives off the smell of sweaty vinyl, an ochre-coloured smell that sticks in the back of the throat and leaves an aftertaste. Outside the dark cave of the room the afternoon looms like a hallucination. It is that time of day when the light presses everything flat and there are no shadows. The mulga gives off a faint but perceptible acacia stink.

  She has set herself the task of climbing the overhead tank later in the day when the light is friendly. The tank is very high, almost as high as the windmill, and she is afraid of it. When she saw it she wished she did not have to climb it, but the harder she wished it the more she knew she would have to do it. Now it is simply a matter of getting it over with.

  The old man who is finishing the interior of the house is a compulsive talker and inflicts on anyone who will listen the story of his life, which is a meandering and pointless invention of almost lunatic banality. At first, conscious of the respect due him as an adult, the girl listens, but she soon learns to retreat into her book and shut him out, as everyone shuts him out. Days go by when no-one allows him to speak to them, for fear of triggering the unquenchable flow of words. She would avoid him altogether if she could, but the house is the only place where she can escape from the flies. In the end the flies and the dangers of the overhead tank are preferable to the whining drill of his voice. She can still hear him talking as she scampers across the hot red ground.

  From the top of the overhead tank she has a view out across the mulga scrub to the north and west of the homestead. To the east she can see the red spinifex country with the giant anthills, right out to where the country changes colour and begins to drop away towards the shallow basin of Lake Ruth. There is a long blue hill on the eastern horizon, and a line of trees to the south which indicate a watercourse. From her vantage point she can look directly down onto the green circle of the stock tank and the roof of the bough shed. The smoke from the campfire winds a blue ribbon above the mulga. The camp cook potters about, stoking the fire under the beef bucket, mixing a damper, filling the flat-sided billycans. She wishes she had a shanghai to ping him with. He would never look for her up here. Now she has climbed the tank she is not at all afraid and is reluctant to relinquish this bird’s-eye view. She can see the old man sawing wood on the verandah of the house. Malley and the black stockmen are cleaning up around the shed, the small busy figures carrying bits of steel and timber. She sleeps outside, and she imagines floating down slowly and coming to rest in the middle of her bed. Further away the dunny sits in the middle of the flat, with a piece of hessian draped around a few pickets for modesty’s sake. It is a forty-four gallon drum sunk in the ground, a hole cut in the top with an oxy torch. For most of the daylight hours it is too hot to sit on, so everyone goes bush.

  There is a line of dust coming up along the track from the west, her father and Ferdie coming back from checking a site to drill for water. Ferdie is Austrian, and teases her, calling her the little skinny witch with the long skinny legs.

  She is very content in this world. She is no-one’s older sister here, there are no domestic chores for which she is responsible, there is no domesticity to speak of. Every few days when she feels grubby she washes herself, her hair and her clothes in the cattle trough. Most days she rides out bareback on the piebald horse she has been given and explores the surrounding mulga scrub and the claypan country. Sometimes the camp is moved for a few days to one of the bores, and the cattle are mustered and branded. Then life becomes even simpler, though harder.

  The girl absorbs this perspective of the world which is her father’s world, which is to become her world. The late afternoon light fills it with colour. She can smell the woodsmoke of the campfire. From here she owns it all.

  LATER, WHEN I DRIVE TO Lake Ruth, the sense of dislocation is even more intense. A dreamy suntanned teenager dogs my footsteps as I walk to the clump of ti-tree at the edge of the big white claypan. It is dry, as it was when the light plane carrying my father and four others attempted to land on it thirty years ago, crashing instead, with miraculously no serious injuries. The topography is utterly familiar. The boat is still here. My father brought it back from Adelaide and we all learned to sail. It lies like an abandoned folly on the edge of the dry lake. If I am looking for an icon for my trip this has to be it. A craft for a dry lake, a vessel to carry the detritus of memory, marooned in the desert light.

  The rusting remains of the raft some visiting friends built is still here too, in scattered fragments across the lake bed. It is all instantly familiar, and yet it resists memory. It will not receive the load of the past I want to dump onto it. I am standing on the rim of a remote, low-lying claypan surrounded by ti-tree scrub and spinifex. Its dry surface is powdered with cattle trac
ks, a strong wind blowing gusts of white dust. It reduces me to a kind of suffocating anguish, and I crouch for a long time in the sand among the ti-tree. The flies are bad, but not as bad as I remember, probably because of the dry years.

  After a time I collect myself and walk across the bed of the lake to the little creek my brother Bob and I named Flint Creek one afternoon many years ago. Sam the dog is a little uneasy and sticks close, a pace or two behind me. The flints are lying about everywhere, as I remembered, and I pocket a couple of reddish golden flakes to take back for my brother.

  A DREAM. A MEMORY. AN AFTERNOON.

  The water splashes softly around the oars, creamy, pale brown, the colour of milky tea. Nothing but the small boat moves through all this stillness of water and sunlight. The two in the boat are mesmerised by the slow dipping of the oars. The creak of oars, the soft splash of water is the only language of this sun-stunned, emptied afternoon.

  Beneath the membrane that divides above from below is an opaque blind turbulent place. They have been there and encountered mud and swimming things and each other’s flailing limbs. It is not dark, but pale and luminous, and yet one can see nothing. It is full of eyeless, mud-dwelling, scaly things. They watch themselves and the boat mirrored in the shining opaque surface of the lake. They are castaways … sharks nudging their makeshift raft … days since they have had fresh water to drink … nothing to eat but a raw and stringy seabird, a cormorant, the boy thought, which they managed to trap and strangle. The sun beats down, there is no chance of rescue, they are dying …