The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  An intelligence officer spoke to me and I must have answered him, though I can’t remember anything he asked me. Nor did I know what to do next. I was shown to a room appropriate to an officer and given a bottle of bourbon for my comfort. I did not like it for it seemed sickly sweet beside scotch and its comfort was ersatz. I could not stand, I could not sit, and any normal exercise of living seemed excessive or irrelevant or an act of pretense. I thought how stupid I had been not to countenance death, which had been so authoritative in the rubber trees.

  Within a day I had all this footage, and nothing to do but take it to the US lab in Bien Hoa. I still thought, now and again, I’ll talk to Andy when they let me and ask him for his ideas.

  I crazily thought, It was that fucking letter of agreement they made us sign that killed him.

  And what culpability of mine had prevented me from seeing something so momentous happen to him—the moment when the bit of steel entered him?

  * * *

  The combination of rock and Shakespeare, and of the mayhem that killed young men, and Andy, made Shakespeare in Nui Dat a feature-length success. Critics mentioned the mud mist as a filmic phenomenon of which Andy and I had taken advantage, an image of the sundry obfuscations under which war was mediated to the public. A symbol. It was particularly effective in Andy’s footage, and I must say that Andy’s material collaboration was crucial. And, at least in theory, what greater claim could be made for a documentary than that a man had died making it?

  Even American hawks loved Shakespeare in Nui Dat because it showed what noble allies they had. To doves, it represented the comprehensive tragedy of Vietnam and the young sacrificed for imperial dreams. All of them found the Australian rock performers charming and a counterpoint to conflict, etc., etc. I asked the Academy would they give Andy an award posthumously to go with mine, but they said that sadly he hadn’t had the chance to edit and produce the documentary. I still, on balance, took mine, and was not forgiven for some years by that wing of opinion interested in punishment and even by some reasonable enough people. As the years passed I paid the sum of $10,000 to Andy’s estate, that is to his family, for rights to Andy’s footage. It was a substantial enough figure for me to have to take a mortgage at the time, though it seemed negligible after inflation took winged foot.

  Andy had reasonably been waiting all this time for my body to turn on me. He had been very patient as I had continued to devour the world through a series of lenses. And now that I was going towards him, I could not argue it was unjust. It was time.

  And if I had been so ashamed of my good fortune in encountering the Viet Cong in that rubber tree plantation, and of the collateral damage to Andy, there was much I did do that I need not have done. I need not have dressed in an Armani suit and gone with young Cath, whom I had met when I employed her to edit the film and who inevitably felt ambiguous about the circus atmospherics of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which we reached by limousine. I need not have accepted an Oscar. Twenty-four young dead, of whom thirteen had been conscripted, barely reproached me as I advanced on the stage under a wall of applause from people who chiefly wished proceedings to move on to the big items of the evening—feature films and their stars.

  When I heard my name called, I made it to the stage and there appropriately began to dedicate the Oscar to those who had perished amidst the rubber trees, including my friend Andy. My tears became a minor story in themselves. They were authentic but derived from shock as well as grief. The artillery of renown had thundered down upon me. Yet how piteous that Andy wasn’t there to be so thundered down upon! I wept because his death seemed so gratuitous and thus remediable, as if a little effort of grief would bring him back. Then I made some remarks through my tears about my government and the Americans consigning conscripts to fatal encounters. And finally I said with sudden insight, “Andy died within the sound of a rock concert, as if peace did not know what it was anymore, and nor did war.”

  Andy, who had perished from a barb into the meat by his collarbone. I doubt anyone would have been able to get Andy into a dinner suit to go to the Academy Awards. He was what they called “authentic.” He abhorred such indignities as dressing up like a pox doctor’s clerk. It was as if he had died to avoid doing something he would have rather died than do.

  And the battle at Nui Dat was not just a tragedy for Andy and the young Australian conscripts and regulars. It was a tragedy too for nameless hundreds of North Vietnamese regulars, who should be remembered somewhere, if these things are not to achieve total absurdity.

  But I got an Academy Award. And with it, a sort of license to point my camera at the world for a lifetime.

  Mending the World

  IN CLAWBACK’S TRACK we flew amongst the many stretches of cone bushes to the south. The frost had melted. Nectar-eating birds paused in their probing of fronds to observe us. We were composed. We knew now we would have him by dusk at the latest, so half the task was done. We were content to follow his path on the yellow earth of the country.

  By late afternoon, beneath purple-streaked clouds, Clawback began to falter. He did not have certainty, he lacked flight, and though we could see him chewing, his wad of thorngum had lost its power to protect and speed and numb him. A remarkable river bird flew by as if to mark a limit, and then a white ghost tree, magically tall in grassland, presented itself in the same spirit. I thought, He will be run down and executed before we reach that tree. I surged ahead with Stark, since that was our duty, singing, “I am fast down on you to mend the world.”

  I saw Clawback look back and my tears went his way. Poor man. Poor clown. Poor violator. Soon after, he stopped, turned, hands dangling.

  He threw his short spear to the ground and called, “Forget me, Shade!”

  “Am I Shade?” I called back, still running, with distances of running coiled in my limbs.

  He stood at the end of a spear-throw’s length, as close as that, and pleaded, “Forgive me, both of you. Stark, forgive me.”

  Stark did not answer him.

  “I’ll go to another country and apply for manhood with other people,” he offered us. “No one will be hurt anymore. If I had known …”

  But he had known. Stark and I, having been tempted in the wilderness by luscious phantom women, and withstood them as well … could not listen to or let ourselves be distracted by Clawback’s cheap prick penitence.

  He flung his shield and throwing stick in our direction, just out of hopelessness. He would not reach the river. That was settled. But seeing we could not be persuaded, he did run on then. The sun was falling and throbbed between two bands of purple cloud. It lit his shoulder.

  If it had not been such a serious chase, we would have let ourselves think that we had won it. But this was too important an effort to be savored in that way. Stark said to me, flatly, “We’ll really get him now.”

  I caught Clawback in a golden stretch of sweet bush. I cast my spear and thrower aside since I did not wish to fall on them. I flew at his shoulders and he crumpled beneath me.

  He howled. I held him by the upper body so that he lay against my chest, and sweated and writhed. I could smell him, his urine and shit. He smelled like a boy. His strength equipped him only to writhe at the end. From the cord around my chest, I pulled the bone with the bounder shinbone slivers in it.

  “There it is,” I called to Stark.

  To Clawback I cried, “This is kind. Don’t struggle.”

  “But the ancestor is angry with me,” Clawback complained. “I wanted to go somewhere where he would come to forgive me.”

  “He’ll forgive you soon,” I promised, kissing Clawback’s head. “You’ll go walking in forests of stars with him.”

  “I know what you’re trying to say,” said Clawback, peevish now. “I don’t want to hear that sort of thing. That you’re going to finish me.” And he began to struggle again, though he had no strength for it.

  Kneeling before him, Stark had now opened the cavity of the human leg bone, and drawn o
ut the long needle of bounder shin. “You have to die because of your crimes against blood,” Stark said. “Shade and I have no hatred of you. Here we’re not even ourselves. It’s the order of things and that’s it.”

  I clamped Clawback’s body in my arms and legs with all the strength I had, which was adequate to prevent him moving. He was again in the state of a child, and I restrained and caressed him as I would a child.

  Stark appeared above him. “I wiped this bone in my shit,” he said, displaying the long sliver of bounder shinbone.

  “I’m weak with women,” said Clawback, thrashing his head back and forth.

  “That doesn’t matter,” I cried out to pacify him. “It doesn’t matter now whether you were weak or strong.”

  I nodded to Stark. Clawback was nearly still. Stark plunged the sliver into Clawback’s heart-side collarbone. Down it went with barely a hiss. Clawback was amazed by what he was feeling, and I said, “It will find your heart …”

  But it already had. After all that energy of escape, Clawback trembled and was utterly still. Stark withdrew the plunging sliver. It was barely red. The wound on Clawback’s collarbone might have been a scratch. There was a flap of skin there that Stark closed. A passerby would have considered him struck dead by gods.

  Stark said, “Well, we can go back now to normal things.”

  I hurled Clawback away from me. I wanted no commerce with his ghost. Then I stood and took the sliver of bounder bone from Stark’s hand and returned it to the casing. I picked up the gear I had dropped.

  Clawback would be left to the birds and the ants and the large striped hound.

  Bright Star

  IT WAS PERHAPS ten years after I had first met him in the Northern Territory that I encountered the eye doctor Ted Castwell once more. It was at a party in Sydney, and he took me seriously enough to be brusque with me.

  He addressed me in these terms: “You thought I was out there in the desert that time doing charity work. Nice Dr. Castwell. But not so. Two hundred years of us and they’re blind. Two hundred years of mission clinics and they’re blind. I dare you, now you’re a big shot, to go out west with me, out to Bourke and beyond the Darling River. Because, Shelby, I’m actually a revolutionary. I am working to a plan. The plan is to wipe out cataract blindness and fix the causes of glaucoma and trachoma amongst the first Australians. And to give themselves the means to do it. You see, it makes no sense to me being just another bloody potterer.”

  I have to say that as well as being gruff he had an easy, contradictory charm, and thus he argued further, “Now, it’s all right getting het up about some fellow who died forty thousand years ago. But these are his descendants, and they’re hostages to blindness. D’you reckon they deserve a bit of your attention?”

  This was not so long after I had met Peter Jorgensen and made my first film on Learned Man. Shown on Australian and British television, in part through the voice of Jorgensen, the documentary argued that the modern descendants of Learned Man deserved to be treated with national respect as the true owners of the continent of Australia.

  Ted gave a little aggressive praise to the film, but concluded that some jokers were more interested in the remote past than present injustice. My contribution was to say that a well-made documentary was the best way to take public opinion by storm, rather than a drip-feed of news items. Ted said, “All right, then let’s make a bloody film!”

  He and I set off from Sydney without his saying explicitly that I was to document what he was up to, bringing my authority as an Academy Award winner to the task. God knows he never fully approved of me, and I was hungry for his good opinion. Why, I can’t explain. But everyone seemed to want an accolade from him.

  Sometimes on the country roads, just to show that he was more than equal to the task presented by remote Australia’s eyes, he would leave the four-wheel-drives and run in the brilliant ocher clouds of dust behind them. He was tall but chunky, and powerful in the upper body. He did not run to show off. A militant lack of pretense seemed bred in the bone. Yet he combined this with a passion for John Keats, whose poems he could recite in couplets in his aggressive proletarian accent.

  “Bright star,” he would have breath to declaim at the end of a five-mile jog, “would I were steadfast as thou art …” There would be a beer in his hand as he continued. A nurse had put it there, and her name was Danny Cullerton, a dark-haired beauty who bravely had her eyes on Ted and was up to his level of strength.

  Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

  And watching, with eternal lids apart,

  Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

  The moving waters at their priestlike task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores …

  Despite the Keats, at evening campfires beneath the lights of an entire explosive sky in western New South Wales, where you could see the universe hurtling away on its out-gust, what was undeniable was Castwell’s authentic fury at the clumsy earth, too many of whose children were blinded.

  For out there in the desert there were Aboriginals so afflicted by eye diseases that they tried to tear their agonized eyelashes out by the roots, and went on suffering a gravelly blindness, their eyes full of abrasion and muck. Their disease was called sandy blight. The $5 name for it was trachoma. It was a condition spread by sharing the one standpipe and tap with a hundred other folk.

  It made him testy with people, not least me, since he saw me as fussy about technical matters—light, sound, shooting reverses—and tired of me asking him to repeat crucial statements. My strength was that at heart I didn’t give a damn for his judgmental mien. I took it as one takes weather on the shoulders. So in our way we got along.

  While we sat drinking whisky one evening after the nurses and others had taken to their swags in the outer velvet dark, he said, “You make a bit of a show of being a polite man, don’t you?”

  “I hope it’s not a show,” I told him.

  “I thought you’d bloody well say that. But you must be pretty ruthless deep down. I’m ruthless too. I’m using you to shame people. But you needn’t pretend to be so bloody polite. You’re not fooling us.”

  “I save my impoliteness for the commentary,” I warned him. “And the editing.”

  “Can you, boy-oh?”

  “Do you talk to other ophthalmologists like you talk to us?” I asked him.

  “Some,” he admitted. “Only the bastards that are worth bloody saving.”

  I would continue to seek out men like Ted Castwell all my life. Sages of the tribe. Castwell and Jorgensen. Their certitude was a balm, though I found them bracing too. It was a tonic to be measured and, if necessary, judged by them. Cath did not understand this in the least. It seemed crazy to her to queue up for chastisement. And reasonably enough, since she knew I did not relish her own chastisements. But also, any respect they retained for me had been through the furnace of our collaborations, and so was tempered metal, unadulterated.

  “Well,” murmured Ted, “at least you’re good at your job.”

  I was honored, nonetheless, to shoot footage for him. He spoke to the sufferers with a jovial, tradesman-like patter as if he’d come to fix the toilet—not that there were any plumbed toilets on the cattle stations or reservations beyond the Darling River. That was part of the trouble. That all helped the trachoma along.

  “You see, they believe there’s a curse on their eyes. And you know who the bloody curse is? It’s us. We forced them off their land and made ’em live in shitholes in the bush without sanitation, and reduced them to a crappy diet.”

  “Why do you think none of us have trachoma?” he continued. “Go back to Europe four hundred years ago and you would have seen it. But go back four hundred years in Australia and if you’d been a whitefella here you wouldn’t have seen it at all amongst the indigenous. Because then they weren’t disinherited, and being nomads they left their shit behind them and their religion was all to do with keeping campsites and water pure. We took away
their freedom of movement and used their water to leach mines and gave them the freedom to contract trachoma. This is a disease of disadvantage,” growled Castwell. “The more disadvantage, the more bloody trachoma.”

  I directed the filming of his work at camp after camp in the country around Bourke and the strangely lovely but harsh hinterland of Wilcannia. Since I had not paid attention to what Castwell had been doing at Wattie Creek those years before, I was shocked to see Aboriginal kids sit up in a chair and show the full, excruciating, swollen-eyed condition named trachoma.

  “We need clinics all over Australia to defeat this,” Ted growled. “And run by the people in the area, not by city cunts.”

  The trachoma, the cataract sufferers, neglected out in bush camps, all needed surgery. “Where am I to get the resources? The authority? Well, your film will help. It better be bloody good.”

  The handsome dark-eyed Danny, who was the other fearless member of the party, was an ophthalmic nurse from an un-reconstituted Irish-Australian bush family—they were the sort of people who traveled from the boat into the bush, bought and stole livestock, and exhibited unchanged attitudes and virtues from the 1840s to the 1970s. Cancer had killed Ted’s first wife three years before. And what a woman was this Danny! What a tigress, as Cath was! And Danny shone with his certainties and her own.

  We laughed, we cheered, we cherished him. Was he a bully? Was he an abrasive prophet? He delivered. I became more renowned just for filming him.

  “We can’t fix this one operation at a time. That’s what fucking missionaries do. We’re not bloody missionaries. We’ve got to fix the system.”

  After we left the arid but weirdly beautiful country around Bourke, we returned to Sydney—me to the editing suite with Cath, and Ted to his crusade. He appeared one night on the ABC and brought the news of an unjust blindness to a nation’s people in a way they hadn’t heard it before. A conservative minister for Aboriginal affairs on the show with him was mocked and harried and exposed as ignorant and institutionally callous. Ted shamed the nation with his proposition that not only had we disinherited Aboriginals, we had blinded them. And just as I took insults and chastisement from him, so did the public, who loved him. Because Ted had this capacity to love us enough to expect better things from us.