Craft For a Dry Lake Read online

  The Depression of my mother’s childhood is not a place of deprivation and hardship. It is a place in which a young girl with a robust sense of her own potential reluctantly submits to the domestic chores of the boarding house and escapes whenever she can, to the pleasures of playing Tarzan in a tree by the creek and rabbiting among the paddocks. Her other escape is in reading, and she revels in her grandmother’s dire predictions that she is just like her feckless father and will come to no good.

  The story which she doesn’t make much of, but which underpins the other, is of the entrenched narrow-mindedness of a small town in which people are still newcomers after a generation, and a Scotsman like her father is disposed of as a convenient myth once he disappears from the scene. Faint inferences are made about whether he has actually married her mother, and the delicate taint of illegitimacy spices the local gossip. My mother is admonished about some of her friends, whom Connie refers to as ‘common’. But her friendship with an itinerant Aboriginal family is not challenged.

  My mother’s war seems mainly to have consisted of the great lark of air-raids. By this time she was attending boarding school in Perth, and air-raids provided an opportunity to spend hours sauntering about the countryside, pretending not to hear the all-clear when it sounded. A non-Catholic at a Catholic school, she decided early that religion was mostly cant and hypocrisy. She nevertheless attended confirmation classes taught by Canon Bell, having heard a service in which he offered up prayers for the Japanese as well as the Allied dead and grieving, after which most of the congregation walked out. The Canon did not convert my mother, but he provided her with a model of courage and compassion.

  The counterpoint to this story is her father’s disappearance in Singapore, where he was interned in a POW camp. He subsequently reappeared on an Armistice newsreel, which my mother happened to see as the prelude to a film. He had been largely absent since her early childhood, and his protracted absence during the war did not seem much different. He continued to be an idealised and romantic figure to her, an adventurer who had slipped through the net of ordinariness, and who appeared from time to time on the periphery of her life, illuminated by the glamour of his escape.

  In her early twenties my mother’s ambition was to travel overseas and to live the exotic and dangerous life of an international spy. To this end she studied Russian and Arabic as extracurricular subjects at university and earned herself an ASIO file, a measure of the government paranoia of the time. Postwar overseas travel was extremely difficult. As a journalist my mother was witness to shiploads of war-shocked refugees, who brought with them stories of places and events that did not mesh with her visions of the exotic and magical. She turned her attention to the exotic that was closer to home, and went north, to the Outback.

  It is through my mother’s childhood stories that the Australia of the thirties comes alive, the texture and light of the Depression years, the attitudes of small-town rural Australia. My mother’s stories are different from my father’s. Her presence is often as the protagonist, but she is having an adventure. It is only between the lines that one sometimes glimpses a moment of confusion or fear or loss. She belongs to a generation that does not indulge much in either self-examination or self-pity. The same could be said of my father, but his stories are narrower, deeper, more sensitive and introverted. They are about feelings, perceptions, understandings and aspirations. This boy is familiar to me. I could be this boy.

  Between the child my mother and the child me there is a standoff. She is too thick-skinned, too lacking in caution, too embarrassingly herself. She confronts the world with cheerful bravado and regards me, if she regards me at all, with a certain scorn.

  AROUND THE FAMILY MEAL TABLE and the station campfires of my childhood I learned the value and the purpose of talk. There was no television. Radio reception was poor and subject to interference. Talk was a major source of entertainment. People told stories in which they won out over villains and fools and circumstance. They told wry and humorous stories in which they lost face, or fights, or money. They told stories of the perfidy, panache and courage of others. They told stories in order to transform the intractable matter of fear and loneliness and failure into something lighter and more flexible. They told themselves into the country.

  Often the stories had been told many times, had their own sequence and momentum. The retelling gave things their proper shape and integrity. Within this familiar web new stories found their place. When I left home I took the stories with me. They protected and identified me. They gave me a conviction, which amounted to arrogance, that I came from a world whose values were superior to any I might encounter elsewhere, and concealed, from me at least, the fact that I was afraid of a world in which I might turn out to be no-one at all.

  Ironically enough, it was the legacy I inherited from my parents that set me on a track which would inevitably lead me away from their world. They had both left the places they grew up in, had followed the nerve thread which felt like destiny, whatever its risks and unforeseen troubles. In the ethos of my family it was a given that life was a precious adventure, that risks must be taken in the pursuit of dreams. There was no question of settling for conventional choices, an ordinary life. It seems inevitable now that I chose art, which had the stamp of my father’s aspirations on it, but which also promised the possibility of finding my private unknown territory. And it did not seem an unreasonably dangerous or threatening place when I first set out to explore it.

  But making art involves messing about in dangerous places. It requires you to make yourself open and vulnerable, to listen to the secret anarchic voices which challenge all that is superficial and secondhand. I was locked into the language of my past, a barricade of words which gave my idea of the world its shape. It was a painful process to have it breached. It happened incrementally, at first through the struggle to make work which, if not especially good, at least tried to be honest. I began to glimpse the possibility that the identity I clung to would not serve me. My first response was to pull that identity tightly around me and retreat to the safer ground of developing my skills. But the rift was there, like a road suddenly ripped open by an earthquake. I didn’t climb into it willingly. I stayed on the edge until I was flung into it by the most conventional of events, a disastrous love affair.

  When I finally crawled out the landscape had changed in all sorts of subtle ways, or the way I saw it had changed, which amounts to the same thing. I had encountered someone in the fault-line whom I didn’t know, and whom my own particular set of myths could not accommodate. She crawled out with me, inarticulate and storyless, and although she looked at the world through my eyes, when I tried to speak for her the language was crippled and absurd, full of psychological cliché. Over the years I learned, and am still learning, to listen to her silences. If my own busy voice goes on for too long she begins to howl, a primitive psychic noise which cannot be ignored.

  4

  I fall from a horse, over and over. In the moment of falling my body is charged electrifyingly with the surge and sweat of the horse, to which I am still linked in a flying arc. For this moment I am raw energy, foam, and sweat, volitionless, a momentum at the extremities of horsepower.

  THIS IS LESS A MEMORY THAN an experience I have again and again. When the link breaks and my body flies away from the horse, hits the ground, hurts, collects itself, it turns into memory. But the moment before the link breaks, the sensation of being there, is different in kind from ordinary memory. The story to which I need to give a form is punctuated with charged moments of this nature, which do not lose their intensity with the passage of time.

  There is another kind of experience which has also located itself within the unfinished story. At some point in my adult life I became aware of travelling companions. Sometimes I glimpse them in the distance, travelling across my line of vision on some trajectory of their own. At other times I am aware of them as shadows falling just beyond the edge of my conscious mind. Sometimes I encounter the
m in other people’s stories. And sometimes I am travelling with them, their presences as distinct and individual as my own. It is a kind of dreaming, though it does not take place when I am sleeping.

  WHEN MY BROTHER BOB RANG me to tell me our father had been killed, I felt as if I had done it. I was working on a series of sculptures and drawings in which I finally felt I had pulled free of my father’s influence. The exhibition of the work was to be a declaration to myself of the legitimacy of my own vision. Although I did not expect my father to come to the exhibition, I felt as if I was betraying some old and precious agreement. I did not fully understand the nature of that agreement, I only knew that if my father should see this work he would finally know I was not the daughter he adored, but a stranger whom he neither knew nor understood. It seemed that the curious intensity I had experienced for weeks was the tension of our life threads at cross-purposes, abrading each other, until mine had proved the stronger and cut his through. Although I felt a terrible grief at his death, I felt no guilt. I felt he had given me time, by dying early, to find my own life.

  I have two memories of my father’s death. There is my own memory, of my brother’s voice breaking in the silent grey space of the studio, his words like a physical impact dropping me to my knees.

  —Dad’s been killed. Helicopter mustering. It crashed. Come as soon as you can.

  The seven-hour drive towards a future utterly changed. My mother, so small and terribly crushed.

  And there is my brother’s memory. He told it to me, and it is as if I am there, running from the gate towards the smashed bubble of the helicopter, hearing the pilot moan, insisting the moan has come from my father even though I know he is dead. I run as one runs in a dream, slower and more slowly, calling my father’s name, and the small broken machine recedes and everything is very clear and still. I run and run, and do not get any closer.

  Trying to write about him feels the same. Forcing my way through oxygen-deprived air, pushing through the pain barrier with every excrutiatingly slow step. And never getting any closer. But if I was to get close, feel the impact of his personality as I felt it when he was alive, then I could not write at all. The nature of what I am doing is the greatest transgression I can make. I dream often that his death has been temporary, that it was all a mistake. I wake from these dreams in a cold sweat that I have been caught out in my betrayal.

  AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH I began to make maps. To begin with they were dredged up from imagination and a visceral curiosity. Fragments of an imaginary journey, they charted the passage of a mysterious band of travellers, whose existence had first registered as a series of cryptic entries in my artist’s journal. The voice which inserted itself into the journal between the rough notations of ideas was the strongest I had yet encountered. Its tone was oddly authoritative, yet full of doubt. The journey it described traversed a landscape which was perfectly familiar to me, but when this strange, faintly prophetic voice took me there, it was as if I had entered a hallucination.

  The children are beginning to leave. The townspeople have begun to congregate in the square to watch their departure. Each morning the crowd is a little larger. Sometimes the horsemen ride out behind the bands of children, and the mud men follow, uttering sad, wild cries like the calling of birds. The horsemen and the mud men return, but the children do not.

  The old songs haunt me. I know every track and landmark of the routes which I have never travelled. The green places which the children seek are not a solution. This desert is our place. Our answers are here.

  My maps gradually accumulated the evidence of real places and real journeys. I went like a fugitive among my father’s papers, finding the maps and journals which were used on that first trip he made through the Tanami. Among them I found a scrap of paper on which he had drawn an early map of the station. Silverfish had nibbled the edges, but the details were intact within the boundaries he had drawn. The neat slanting print transfixed me with the names I remembered so clearly. Madame Pele’s Hills, Wild Potato, Lake Ruth, Pedestal Hills, Lucky Bore, the Graveyards, Bullock’s Head Lake. And of course the station itself, Mongrel Downs. An ironic joke of a name. Holding the fragment of paper in my hand, I could feel myself disappear into a wilderness of spinifex and claypans and mulga. My father’s voice reached out and took hold of me as it had always done. The place and its story seemed to blot out my life, as if nothing had happened to me before or since. And the irony of it was that so little of it was my story.

  For a while the map-making concealed the imperative which was slowly building, the need to return to this place whose ambiguous geography haunted me. I did not want to go back. The idea of it filled me with panic. I pretended I did not really have to do it, and began to make left-handed preparations.

  5

  MY FIRST DAY ON THE ROAD. Swag, supplies and artist materials are packed on the back of my little yellow Suzuki ute. Sam the dog has made a nest in the spare tyre and has already managed to broach the large bag of dog food that is to last him for the duration of the trip. I am filled with trepidation. It is not the travelling which daunts me, or the being alone. I am afraid of what I will find at the end of the journey.

  But it feels good to be heading west, into the heart of the country. My friends who are coastal dwellers feel this when they return to the sea. For me it is the going in that feels right, the further in the better. As the country becomes sparser and redder and drier and stranger, I know that I am getting close to home.

  This northern road takes me through remembered country, the windy grasslands, dried out to a palette of umbers and ochres, with the dark blue slash of the bitumen, arrow straight, dividing the horizon at its vanishing point. Trucks float towards me, monstrously tall, reflected in their own mirage. I pass a utility pulled over on the side of the road; a woman is standing some distance away from it, arms folded. A man waits by the open passenger door, his face shadowed under his hat brim. Wedge-tailed eagles rip and nuzzle the swollen corpse of a road kill. The space renders the moment both meaningless and iconic. Cattle graze in pools of light above the horizon. My father, travelling with cattle mobs as a young man, saw windmills suspended upside down over the plains. As I take a bend a line of steel fence-pickets flexes and whips like the tail of a reptile. Along the skyline the grass appears to be running like a herd of small blond animals. It is all illusion and mirage, a place where the imagination cannot outstrip the strange chimerical creations of wind and light and space. It is the kind of country which would take hold of you if you stayed in it for long. In the winter it is riven by bitter winds, and in summer can become a monochrome wasteland. Unrelenting places seem to brand the psyche as gentle green places never can.

  The car is hiccupping. It feels like fuel or the electrical system. Problems like this unnerve me. I always feel somehow implicated, as though it is something I’ve done that has caused the problem. It is bitterly cold, and I can tell already that my cold weather gear won’t be sufficient.

  I AM BROKEN DOWN BY THE edge of the road among the stony spinifex-covered Mt Isa hills. This is hard, wild country, but its colouring is delicate and full of subtlety. The gums are sharp white, the spinifex blue-green and pale yellow, the stones apricot and pink and terracotta and blood-coloured. The road has been built up here, giving the illusion that the country has been civilised. You have only to step out of sight of the road to know this is not the case.

  A big yellow truck comes along and picks up my small yellow truck. Sam looks alarmed at finding himself suddenly so far off the ground. Ignominiously we return to Mt Isa, where a mechanic replaces the points. Somehow I think the problem is larger than that. I suppose it is an act of folly to set out for the Tanami Desert in a second-hand Suzuki ute which has seen much better days, with a toothless, deaf blue heeler for a companion. But there is no turning back now.

  The road between Mt Isa and Camooweal is rough. The new points have not solved the problem, which seems to get worse on rough roads. I stop several times to check th
e petrol filter and clean the fuel line, and on each occasion a Japanese cyclist I have overtaken catches up and cycles past. On the third occasion he nods and smiles. When I finally reach Camooweal I drain the fuel tank and strain the fuel. I also ask advice from the local mechanic. He is a peeling, ferrety little man who looks as though he has inhaled too many fuel additives. He is supervised by a doting and jealous wife, whom he ignores. If he has any ideas about what is causing the problem, he is keeping them to himself. I decide to keep going, and put my trust in the fact that the Suzuki has never let me down in bad places. It always chooses convenient locations to break down. I have a friend in Alice who will look at it for me, a kind of mechanical magician who will really care about solving the problem.

  As I leave Camooweal I see an Aboriginal transvestite standing by the side of the road, apparently waiting for a bus. He is glamorous and unmistakable, with a sinewy brown body and long tawny hair, and is wearing a yellow skirt which reaches his ankles. He is an apparition materialised out of nowhere. The sight of him feels like a good omen. I can’t believe that Camooweal could sustain such a life, although the inland is full of surprises, and I am in the border country now. In the past when I have approached Camooweal from the east or west it has been a hallucination of corrugated iron shimmering in and out of focus among dusty earth and white rocks. The Japanese cyclist who kept passing me on the road yesterday is preparing to leave the camp ground and gives me an ironic wave.