Craft For a Dry Lake

by Kim Mahood

  Monday, August 13th, 1900

  The natives fulfilled their promise, and paid the camp another visit. One of the younger was replaced by a stranger, who was deeply interested in things generally. No fresh information was gleaned from them. On leaving our visitors incidentally took along with them a quartpot which was lying at the waterhole, so we shall probably not see them again.

  Davidson was more than usually interested in Aboriginal society, citing Spencer and Gillen, and making reference to the tribal divisions as being similar to those of ‘the Great Arunta Tribe’. He noted extensive evidence of the trading of iron tomahawks into the region, in spite of lack of contact with whites, and described the hitherto unrecorded customs of weaving spinifex capes and sand-thatching the bough shelters. However, his observations in the journal are usually to do with the sightings of smoke and tracks and the reliance of the party on this evidence to locate soaks and rockholes. The dependence on Aboriginal knowledge to locate water is a recurring motif in the exploration of Australian deserts. In his crossing of the Great Sandy Desert, gentleman explorer David Carnegie habitually captured and tied up lone Aborigines, forcing them to lead his party to water, and on one occasion feeding the captive salt beef to make him thirsty. Davidson, however, was generally successful in his use of smoke signals, which were answered by any Aborigines in the vicinity. There is a somewhat poignant entry when the camels had gone some nine days without water, and the party pursued what it believed to be answering smokes, only to discover them to be whirlwinds rising from the ash of freshly burned country. It was here too, in the region of the Smoke Hills, that mirage distorted the landscape ‘into snow-topped mountains instead of wretched little hills’, making it impossible to take accurate bearings. I have seen this phenomenon myself, in the late winter when unseasonal humidity invades the atmosphere. It is an odd experience, to see a familiar place take flight into the regions of fantasy.

  19

  WHEN I FIRST ATTEMPTED TO read Davidson’s diary I found it impossibly dry. I wanted to read a tale of adventure, loss, frustrated desire. I wanted something that Gosse or Giles might have written, not a pedestrian document about travertine limestone, camel feed and dollied samples. But each time I read it now it draws me in a little further. Between the lines, through the geological terminology and the practical daily accounts of camps and landforms, a young man of twenty-two, with his small band of men and camels, pursues the chimaeras of gold and smoke and water. The small dog which began the expedition with them was lost somewhere near the nonexistent ‘High Mountain Ranges’, victim of some dog-chimaera of its own: ‘Our dog rushed out barking into the night and disappeared for good.’

  Wretched little hills turn into snow-capped peaks, and native smokes are discovered to be whirlwinds of ash. The few features marked on the map prove to be in the wrong place and misleadingly described. Everywhere the country promises the signs of gold and delivers nothing. The other human inhabitants of the country are rarely sighted, the traces of their presence evidenced by tracks, abandoned campsites and the marks of burning. Watercourses run so infrequently that it is impossible to tell the direction of the flow of water. Ancient marshlands and dried-up claypans hint at the remnants of great systems of inland lakes, the inland sea which runs like a thread through the Australian psyche.

  In a lecture given to the Adelaide Geographical Society in about 1902, Charles Winneke says of the Davidson expedition:

  ‘The journey, owing to his able management, was a thorough success. No mishaps of any kind occurred, and Mr Davidson has assured me that the utmost harmony prevailed throughout the party during their long and tedious journey. I consider Mr Davidson’s journey, although not quite so extensive, should be classed with that of other leading explorers; his work is of double interest also to us by the fact that it gives us a correct knowledge of the topographical as well as geological nature of the country, which has not been the case with many other explorers, and I feel certain that his traverse is more than ordinarily accurate. Mr Davidson’s work covers 27 000 square miles, and fills up one of the blank spaces in the map of Australia …’

  Thorough, painstaking and competent, Davidson too has almost slipped from memory. His rivers, unlike Mitchell’s mythical river to India, flow nowhere. His inland sea is a dried-up marshland disappearing under sand dunes. Even the timing of his expedition has become misplaced in the records of Australian exploration.

  He comes through the poorly photocopied and fading pages as practical and good-humoured. Did he question himself, doubt his ability as leader of the expedition? Did he feel the strangeness and the silence of the country through which he travelled? Several pages of the diary copy are impossible to decipher, so I sit in the shade cast by the rusting tanks and try to unearth the unwritten diary that is concealed in the blurred print.

  Three months into the journey, and as yet we have not found gold-bearing country. The type of country is unfamiliar, and I lose confidence in my ability to read it. The strangeness of it affects us all in a different fashion; Byrne becomes more noncommittal, Woods by turn morose and garrulous, and the Pater more eccentric and unreliable. The boy, who by all accounts one would expect to be most at home in this setting, exhibits a growing uneasiness. I put this down to the naturally timid and superstitious nature of the blackfellow when faced with the unfamiliar.

  We travel through a monotony of landscape, in which were I not obliged to take bearings, find camel feed and water, in other words to take care of the daily requirements of the expedition, I might easily lose my bearings and my sense of purpose. As leader I can let no glimpse of this become visible to the other members of the party, although there are times when I suspect Byrne has some intimation of it, being a perceptive fellow, though not communicative. This may be purely conjecture on my part, a need to impute to a companion the possibility of some fellow feeling. One becomes aware of one’s fundamental isolation in these circumstances.

  The country itself exerts a presence which causes one to question one’s most firmly held suppositions. There is a point in each day when purpose and will threaten to evaporate, and one feels oneself travelling in an aimless hallucination of sunlight and silence.

  This Davidson satisfies my desire for self-questioning, my contemporary need for a glimpse of the inner man. But he would never have written it. He was twenty-two years old, maybe; a nineteenth-century man. Could he have questioned the exploitation of the country for gold or pastoral purposes? I do not think so. It was not in the vocabulary of the time.

  Sixty years later my father’s diary tells nothing of the mysteries that moved him and the fears that haunted him. Any faint whispers questioning pastoral practices are simply echos of the eccentric noise of cranks and fools. And yet I know it would hurt my father at a very deep level to see the country now and to know that he was in part responsible for its domestication. He never wanted to come back and see this country again. On the occasions when someone visited with news of it, he would rather not have listened. He sometimes indicated a regret that the country had ever been developed, and he would have been happy enough to see it revert to wilderness. He received the news that it had become an Aboriginal station with equanimity. I think secretly he preferred the Aborigines to have it. He was a queer mixture of conventional attitudes to land development and an almost mystical belief in the redemptive power of the land. He loved the country for its remoteness and inaccessibility, yet spent years of his life developing it and bringing it under control. He was both a practical man and a dreamer, and the two cohabited uneasily. I think the older he got, the more he felt the contradictions of his position.

  DAVIDSON HAS PROVIDED ME with a brief reprieve from my real purpose. The rusting tanks, the immobilised windmill of Macfarlane’s Bore stand as a harsh memorial to the failures and endeavours of my father’s time. This bore was the northernmost watering point on the lease, the site where my father encountered a bewildered road gang from Western Australia, hoodwinked by Father on Balgo int
o believing they were grading a track on mission territory. Father’s plan was to subvert passing traffic to bypass the mission, sending travellers instead through the back roads and bore runs of Mongrel Downs. My father, enraged, drove the grader gang off at gunpoint, though they went readily enough when they realised they were twenty miles inside the Northern Territory border.

  It was here too that my father spotted tracks of a mob of horses travelling west, some of them shod, and put together fragments of rumour, of horses gone missing on properties far to the north and east. He guessed who the horse thieves were. Hydraulic and Trewalla had established themselves on a block to the north and were old hands at subsidising their various enterprises. He guessed too where the horses had gone and quietly indicated his suspicions to Father, though not in so many words. The border war went quiet for a while, since it wouldn’t do for a Catholic priest to be suspected of receiving stolen horses.

  SAM POKES ABOUT HAPPILY among the ruins, sniffing and peeing, bringing his dog’s perspective to this site of ancient dramas. Any dingo that strays into this place is going to know that Sam the Dog was here. I make a small fire and put the billy on to boil, spread a slice of damper with jam and think about what to do next. I have no plan, just a desire to move from one location to another, to absorb a sense of the country, to remember. There is a relief in being alone, after the tough confronting energy of the women’s business and the uneasiness of encounters with old friends.

  I could not articulate what brought me back here, except that I was afraid. Since I was a child who had to climb the narrow ladder to the top of the overhead tank, I have understood that there is something important on the other side of fear. It is not courage which pushes me towards it. It is more akin to what I remember of my mother’s driving technique when she encountered a bad stretch of sand or mud. She would aim the vehicle in the right direction, shut her eyes and put her foot down. After a few experiences of being in the car with her on these occasions, we children would insist on being let out to walk, leaving her to make the blind dash alone.

  The point is, one does not stop being afraid. I am making my own blind, fearful dash, with no idea of where I will find myself when I open my eyes.

  20

  WHEN I TOLD MY MOTHER I was coming back to this country she said to me—Take some of Joe’s ashes with you. Part of him always belonged out there.

  It was a generous suggestion, because she knew the part of him which always eluded her belonged here. Prising open the rosewood box of ashes was a little like digging up a grave. My mother hid in the living room while I did it. I found an empty tea container, a brand he always liked, and transferred a portion of the ashes into it. They have given me less discomfort than my memories. I can deal with concrete things, but ghosts give me trouble. Although I did not make my journey in order to scatter my father’s ashes, the tea tin has been on my mind. I know the place, I think, but I will not be certain until I am there.

  We called it Bullock’s Head Lake. It is shaped like the elongated head of a bullock, with the horns formed by two creeks at its western end. The last time I was here was with my father, and the lake was full of water. It is not really a lake, but an immense shallow claypan which has been intermittently filling and drying back for millennia. We came over the rise and there it was, this tremendous expanse of water, remote and self-contained. Waterfowl scurried into the shallows, the boree shadowed the rim like a fortress. To the south-west a long red dune lay sheltered by sprawling ti-tree, its surface scattered with flints and grinding stones, so numerous that the place must have served as a seasonal campsite for a very long time.

  It has not changed. It is dry, marked and powdered with cattle tracks, but the same. Still, remote and silent. I find firewood in a stand of boree, but make camp in the open, close to the lake’s edge. It is nearly sundown, the country all about me luminous with that saturated colour which seems to come from the earth itself, as if I could take a handful of it and see it gleam gently with its own interior fire. Although this place is full of memories, it is clear to me that my father no longer belongs here. If I leave the ashes, it is for myself, and for the country, not for him.

  THE GIRL SITS NEAR HER father, the campfire burning between them. The sun is going out on the western horizon. She is barely a child any more, on the brink of adolescence and resisting it fiercely. If there is a way to avoid becoming an adult, she will find it. But at this moment she is focused with perfect intensity on her father’s words. They glow and burn in the ardent heart of the child, whose whole being leans towards the man and his words. She wants nothing more than to perfect her capacity to listen and respond. He speaks about the country, and she knows the words before they are spoken, because they seem to come from inside herself. This fierce love she feels encompasses her father and the night sky and the deepening red curve of the land, a landscape which might appear nondescript but to her is full of subtlety and nuance, because here in the beam of her father’s love and approval her soul comes fiercely to life. She would walk out into the desert and die with him without a backward glance. She would walk out and die alone if he thought it was necessary.

  I look back in wonder at this child who feels so intensely, so absolutely, and am almost regretful that I can only remember how it was, that pure unquestioning intensity of feeling, particularly in the light of all I have since felt about my father and about this country. If love can purify or save, the love the girl feels is of that order. The country is illuminated by that beam of love. It is her father’s country, and what he loves, she loves.

  I cannot see my father clearly. My own sense of who I wanted to be was so closely bound up with his approval that it has created a kind of tunnel vision. He is framed distantly within a circle of light, and I can’t see beyond it. What I begin to understand is that my real difficulties with my father do not belong to this place. Those childhood years, intense and vivid, are illuminated with a vast unboundaried passion to protect and preserve the magic circle of my family and home. They are haunted by an intermittent melody of fear and pain, which intensifies as my father’s drinking reaches crisis point. But the crisis is averted, the world does not come apart. The adventure of our lives remains intact, and so does my father the hero.

  After we moved to Queensland the legacy of my double life began to manifest itself. I continued to put in my time, returning at every opportunity from university, from travelling, from the slow formulation of my career as an artist, to help out and to offer support. I did not resent this, in fact I continued to draw much of my sense of identity from this link to land and family. But my father’s world was narrowing as my own broadened. The only point of intersection was in my return visits, and it became increasingly difficult to describe or share any but the most superficial aspects of my life. And I had no real desire to do more than that. I could see no point in precipitating the silent withdrawal that was my father’s normal response to attitudes of which he disapproved. But I felt over the years the slow erosion of honesty from the relationship, and this caused a kind of pain from which it seems there is no recovery. I think my father’s power over me always lay in his vulnerability, and the fact that my own reflected his too closely. I can take no credit for the care with which I nurtured the remnants of our relationship. Should he have broken, I feared as much for myself as for him.

  Can it be that I have come back not to lay my father’s ghost but to recover something of the man to whom I gave such unconditional childish allegiance? To offer him a simpler grief, as unconditional as that child’s love. If so, I have not succeeded. The man who was here continues to elude me, and I am left with the burden of my adult grief, shapeless and incomplete.

  THIS MORNING I WAKE BEFORE daylight. The fire is still smouldering, so I throw on some wood before drifting back into a light sleep. Suddenly it is first light and I am sharply awake. The smoke from the fire has spread across the lake and weaves into the ti-tree on the far shore, more than a kilometre away. I collect the container w
ith my father’s ashes and am up and following the path of smoke onto the lake bed before I have had time to think. This is the time and place. I walk far out onto the lake surface, the smoke curling and drifting around my knees. I am wading knee-deep in smoke. On the lake bed bizarre small succulent flowers grow, which look like something you might find growing on the surface of Mars. Towards the middle of the lake I open the container and shake the ashes into my palm. They are gritty, more like holding a handful of fine gravel than the soft feathery wood ash with which I am familiar. So this is what is left of a man. This is my father’s material remains, cupped in the palm of my hands. Of itself it has no meaning, beyond what I choose to invest in it. My father’s spirit departed a long time ago. This is a symbol for me to use for my own purpose. I scatter the ash carefully in a circle around me and then step outside it. But it seems too final, too complete. Such things are not ended so easily. I kneel and scrape a break in the circle’s perimeter and place the tiny portion of ash and dried clay back in the container. The grief I feel has little to do with my father. It is for loss and time and the remote familiar contours of sand dune and ti-tree and boree. The profile of the far shore with its garland of smoke matches a template of recognition, as if it was here, in this place, that some ancestor stood upright, looked forward and saw a pattern of shapes which were inscribed forever behind the eyes. It feels right, to have made this offering of my father’s substance, for it to become part of the lake surface and to seep into it with the next rain. This tracing of his life onto the lake surface joins the passages of millennia. One more passing of a life, no more or less significant than the dying back of trees and grasses, the broken egg of a mallee fowl, the crumbling away of a plateau, the ebbing of an inland sea.