The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

So began for me the journey that became my novel, Journey to the Stone Country. Col and I camped in a stand of silver wattle and poison bendee out in the Jangga heartland south of Mount Coolon, country as uninhabited and remote as any outback place of the imagination could ever be. And in the morning we walked into the scrub. The country was flat, the scrub open and easy of access. To the European eye the scene was not picturesque but was undifferentiated and monotonous. There were no dramatic features for the tourist camera to focus on. This was not the outback of the travel brochures but was a desolate place. The wind was cold and the scrubs untracked and silent. I wondered where Col was leading me but I had learned to wait for the story to unfold and so I did not ask him.

  We had been walking through the scrub for maybe an hour when Col squatted and rolled a cigarette. When he had taken a drag on the cigarette he pointed, his hand going out in the characteristic gesture I had grown used to reading—a smoothing and moulding of the landscape with his spread fingers and open palm, almost a caress or benediction. ‘He would have had a good view back to the river from here, old mate,’ he observed quietly, as if our thoughts were the same. He did not say who he was referring to. ‘He’d catch a nice little breeze up here. See anyone who was coming up from the river.’ We had, I realised, stopped on a low rise. It was not enough of a rise for me to have noticed it as we walked through the bush. To me it seemed we had stopped at random. Nowhere in particular. There was in this place for me no sense of having arrived at a destination but only of having stopped.

  Liz Hatte and Col McLennan, Bowen River

  As we squatted there, close to the earth, however, I began to notice certain things. The stony ground was different. Col leaned and loosed from its embedded cast in the earth a fist-sized lump of quartzite. He examined the stone, fitting it to his hand, then he handed it to me without a word. He selected from the ground at his feet several splinters of quartzite. ‘You could fit these flakes back on to that core again if you had the patience,’ he said. We were at the work site of one of his stone tool–making ancestors. During the next half-hour or so Col’s quiet observations gradually brought the space around us into being and it soon became for me as likely a destination as any I have ever known; a good place to work, a place favoured by Col’s practical-minded ancestor, the Jangga toolmaker, and I understood that this desolate wilderness was not the outback for Col but was his homeland. I understood that it possessed a beauty for him that was not picturesque but was in his mind and in his dreams. I learned that this was the country of his Old People and for him they still dwelled there, as they always have and always shall. And I began to understand that the European had never truly dispossessed this Jangga of his land, and that culturally, historically and spiritually he was still richly in possession of it. A thousand years, after all, is a long time in the wandering steps of European history, but is little more than a flicker in the vast hinterland of the Australian Indigenous reality.

  When I was back in Melbourne writing the book Col had predicted I would write, I thought how the outback had always remained for me an elusive destination, a place of the mind rather than a particular geographical location, somewhere ‘out there’, further than any of us had ever been. And it was then that I began to think of the outback as an Australian embodiment of an idea that has existed in the European cultural memory since the time of the northern tribal migrations, since before the time of the heroic histories of settlement and colonisation that produced the great literature of the Icelandic Sagas. For certainly the outback was an idea of the Australian landscape that was without meaning for Col and for his ancestors. For Col the vast stony hinterland of unvisited endless scrubs was homeland. And it is of home that Aboriginal songs sing, but the earliest poems in Old English sing of journeying in distant lands. The poetic and literary culture of the English, since the beginning, since even before the English permanently colonised Britain, has had to do with the wanderer in strange lands. Home, in the literature of the English, like the outback, has been an ideal rather than a real place. Home and the woman and the hearth represent the place the wandering English poet leaves behind, as in the Old English poem The Seafarer.

  For the harp he has no heart, nor for having of the rings, Nor in woman is his weal; in the world he’s no delight, Nor in anything whatever save the tossing o’er the waves! O for ever he has longing who is urged towards the sea.

  In the fifty years since I saw my first photograph of the Australian outback, those stockmen lounging on the verandah have not moved. Unlike me they dwell in a place beyond the reach of time, a place of the imagination and of romance and myth. A place, like the abode of the Old English seafarer, beyond the reach of homeland. One stockman squats on his heels, his broad-brimmed hat tipped back and the silhouette of his spurs, another leans against the near verandah post, and a third sits on a bench against the wall, craned forward, forearms on his knees, gazing steadily from the shade of the verandah towards the flat horizon separating the broad expanse of earth from sky. No sound or sign has broken the rapt contemplation of those stockmen. Nothing has come into view over that distant horizon to break the stillness of their eternal vigil, and for me the mystery of their faith remains intact. It is an ancient European faith, a faith in the heroic potential of the human spirit. More than all the great paintings and sculptures in all the museums I have visited around the world, the image of those stockmen in that photograph represents for me the deepest longings of the human heart, and those silent figures are still the tragic prophets of my imagination. In them my being is inextricably both European and Australian. Col and I are different but we are friends and we share our love for the haunted landscape that for some will always be the outback, a place of heroic memory, and for others will always be homeland.

  When Col first came to stay with me in Melbourne I showed him an ancient cylcon, a carved ritual stone, I had found eroding out of the bank of a creek thirty years ago. I confessed to feeling a little guilty at keeping it in my possession. But as to possession he gently corrected me. ‘It hasn’t come to any harm with you during these past thirty years,’ he said easily. And with that characteristic sideways fling of his hand he added, ‘She’s on her way home, old mate.’ He was content for me to be the keeper of the stone for as long as it needed my protection. It was a sentiment that moved me greatly. For me that stone was a precious memento from my days in the outback, for Col it was a sacred object of the ancestral household.

  And of course the book that Col had accurately predicted I would write was Journey to the Stone Country. Hazel tells me it is a book about ‘transcendence, the past, landscape and quest’. For it is not a story about Queensland ringers and the old cattle camps, after all, but is a contemporary story of Col himself and his partner, Liz Hatte. Journey to the Stone Country is a fiction, but like all fictions it carries its author’s truth as well as the realities of its characters. It is a fiction based on facts, a story that is partly my own and partly Col’s and Liz’s. And I am thankful they find in it a story that celebrates the spirit of the Jangga and the country they both love. But it is also a story that has been owned and celebrated by Frank Budby, portrayed as Dougald Gnapun, and his son Graham, portrayed as the silent Arner. While I was writing the book I often wondered at Arner’s role and what he might say if he were ever to speak the thoughts that were in his mind. A reader told me Arner is the silent witness. And I believe there is some truth in that. For in Arner there is surely something of the tragic beauty of his people, something that is perhaps too large and too encompassing for the sly intelligence of our slippery English tongue. The poets tell us we are a language species, but in the dignity of his silence Arner defies that perception. English has not colonised him. In him something stronger than the imperialism of the language has resisted and he has kept his silence. And with it he has kept his strength. But Arner’s is a tragic strength. Like Samson he is not invulnerable to betrayal by the Philistines.

  Alex (right) with Frank Budby at Nebo, 2009
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  His father, Frank Budby, tells me Graham cherishes the book and his role in it, but it was only long after I had written the story that I began to see how central to its theme his character was. We never know what we have written, after all, until our readers tell us to look again. Frank tells me that his son has found his dignity in the book. And I think of the books in which I first found my own dignity.

  2004

  1 While only mentioned here as a footnote, the granting of equal pay to Aboriginal stockmen is a big story in its own right. The cattle companies refused to pay their Aboriginal stockmen a fair wage and instead drove them off their country, thus bringing about the destruction of their culture. It is one of the major tragedies in the history of Indigenous and European relations in Australia.

  EXCERPT FROM

  Journey to the Stone Country

  Annabelle and Arner fetched the swags and gear from the Pajero and the truck while Bo lit the fire. Annabelle wrapped potatoes in foil and set them in the heart of the fire. They sat around looking into the blaze, waiting for the potatoes, Bo smoking and no one in a mood to talk, the wind shaking the timbers of the old kitchen and snatching at loosened pieces of roof-iron. When they could smell the potatoes baking and judged them to be nearly done, Bo spread the coals and barbecued the meat. She and Bo sat close, cross-legged on the swag, Arner seated on a plastic crate, eating their dinner from blue enamel plates. The wind slamming the door back and forth against the lintel and no one getting up to fix it.

  When Annabelle and Arner had cleaned the dishes, Arner said goodnight and took the flashlight and went out to his truck. A moment later his music started up, the thumping of the bass a drumbeat against the wind in the night, like the ritual accompaniment of a soul possessed. Annabelle wondered at his emotions, visiting for the first time the heartland of his father’s forebears. Or was he untouched by it? To have asked him directly, it seemed to her however, would have been to ignore Bo’s unspoken rule. Would have been to be insensitive to his preferred style and have risked setting a distance between them. It was not a matter of understanding, but of enduring. She resolved to wait for the story to unfold, as Grandma Rennie would have advised her to do. You’ll know where you’re going when you get there. It was Grandma Rennie, after all, who had brought them here together this night. Without her there would have been no return. For none of them, not even for Bo himself.

  Col McLennan with Alex on the occasion of the recognition of the Jangga people’s native title rights, October 2012

  2002

  Sweet Water

  The Proposed Damming of the Urannah Valley

  When the Birriguba people of North Queensland successfully acquired the 162,304-acre Urannah Station on 1 April 1998 through a grant from the Indigenous Land Corporation, they rejoiced in the belief that they were at last returning to a place from which they would be able to revive their culture and their language. Urannah is a pristine valley in the old heart of Birriguba country. There they would re-establish the strength of their shattered ties to their land and reacquire a full sense of their dignity. The Birriguba elders believed that at Urannah they could begin to come to terms with the social problems confronting their people while the cattle station would provide them with an economic base from which to move forward into a more secure future and out of the landscape of ruins that had been theirs ever since the arrival of Europeans.

  A little over five years later the elders are divided, their dreams have unravelled, and the intact flora and fauna of the valley is threatened with permanent extinction. Urged by the Bowen Shire Council, who are supported by a group of Birriguba elders, a proposal is under consideration by the Queensland state government to dam the Urannah Valley. Those elders who support the building of the dam do so in the hope that the Birriguba will receive a half-share in the sale of the water. Elders opposed to the dam, however, argue the dam will be run by the state government in alliance with private enterprise and that the interests of the Birriguba will be swept aside and forgotten as they always have been in the past. The water from the dam, it is claimed, is required for the growing city of Bowen and for crop irrigation in the Collinsville area downstream on the Broken River. There is also little doubt that with a state election due before next May, Premier Beattie will be tempted to make the building of the dam an election promise in order to assure a secure water supply to the powerful mining interests in the massive Bowen Basin coalmines. Frank Budby, one of the Birriguba elders opposed to the damming of Urannah, and a man exhausted by the long struggle to regain dignity and independence for his people, said to me, ‘Words can never explain how important this place is to us.’

  Scarcely anyone outside North Queensland has heard of the Urannah Valley. But then to be unheard of is in the nature of pristine wilderness. How many Australians had heard of the Franklin before we were called upon to save it? And to our credit we did save it. Australians saved the Franklin because they were certain its loss would impoverish our landscape and our culture. Will the loss of the Urannah Valley entail a similar impoverishment? Will its loss affect the moral and spiritual quality of our lives as inhabitants of this country? Or will it be enough for us that this beautiful valley continues to exist in its pristine state only in a novel and has no other reality? We all know without any doubt that it would be a poorer world if Mount Everest ceased to have a physical reality and was a cultural memory only. But what about our own place?

  The valley of Urannah Creek is an aspect of the landscape in my novel Journey to the Stone Country. In reality, as well as in my story, Bo Rennie’s sweet water of the Ranna is to be sacrificed to the so-called needs of progress. This is not simply a problem for North Queensland. For it is the powerhouses of the economies of demand generated by the great cities like Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne that make developments such as the damming of the Urannah Valley feasible projects. Growth, we are told every day of our lives, is the sacred key to our wellbeing in this modern economy.

  The Birriguba lived in the Urannah Valley since the beginning of time. And the European settlers—Victorians, for the most part, who overlanded their cattle and their pianos and their libraries of books—trod lightly on that country when they came. Consequently, today the flora and fauna of this astonishingly beautiful place are as intact as they were in 1863 when the last of the Birriguba were either murdered or driven out and were replaced with cattle. According to Frank Budby, ‘The Urannah Valley is the place where the last of our people lived in a fully tribal state.’

  Bo Rennie, a fictionalised elder of the Birriguba in Journey to the Stone Country, is re-entering the valley with his partner, Annabelle Beck, after an absence of more than twenty years. It is a view of the valley I was privileged to see during my researches for the novel:

  It was late afternoon going into evening by the time they came off the spur. Bo pulled up in a tall stand of untracked grass and they sat looking at a dark bank of lofty trees along the river ahead of them. Ancient forest gums and casuarinas, here and there a red bottlebrush blossom low down among the blue shadows around the bases of the trees, the glint of running water between the foliage, a dense traffic of insects and birds back and forth through the failing sunbeams. The charmed coolness of evening in the perfumed air of the valley.

  Bo said, ‘Smell that sweet water!’ He pointed. ‘The old Bigges causeway’s in over there.’

  Annabelle leaned close to see along his pointing hand.

  ‘To the left of that sheoak,’ he said. ‘See up in that high fork? That’s where the Bigges anchored their steel ropes when they was setting them stones in. The last time I seen that tree me and Dougald was tailing a mob of bally Herefords out of this valley. I sat here rolling a smoke, my horse snatching at this sugargrass, and I looked back at them trees. I can smell that mob of cattle coming out of the water now, their backs all steaming and them bellowing at each other for comfort.’

  Behind them the sun was topping the high ranges, the distant stony ridges of Furious and the Hea
rn’s Zigzag. He looked at Annabelle. ‘The Ranna valley,’ he said.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Take a photo.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t come out in a photo. Not in one I’d take anyway. I wonder how old those trees are? I’ve never seen such big casuarinas.’

  ‘Them trees have always been here,’ Bo said, offhand, as if the ancient trees were not subject to the years as man is and their ages could not therefore be calculated by such a measure … He engaged the gears and they moved off across the flat towards the trees, easing their way through the tall grass and keeping an eye out for old flood debris. They crossed the river at the Bigges causeway, the water running clear and deep over the black stones, and they rode on up the bank onto a wide plain of silver grass, isolated crow ash pines casting long shadows in the late sun. Far over to the east the grasslands edged the ironbark forest at the base of the ranges, foothills rising in tiers towards the far-off rockwall of the escarpment, standing tall and cold and hard in the splendour of the evening light. A purple shadow across the deep of the sky.

  ‘She’ll be a cold night,’ Bo said.

  Annabelle pointed. ‘Look!’ she said excitedly. ‘There’s the homestead!’

  ‘That’s her.’

  A pale cluster of buildings out ahead of them on the plain, catching the evening light like a village set along the dorsal of a low rise back from the treeline of the river. Bo was silent, gazing at the old Ranna Station homestead for the first time since he was a young man … ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘There she is. I can just about see smoke coming out of that kitchen chimney.’

  ‘It looks inhabited.’ She turned to him. ‘Has there really been no one down here for twenty years? You expect to hear dogs barking.’