Lighting Out
The news came in April but it took weeks to sink in. The book was finished, my publishers were happy. Some days I felt drunk with relief. The rest of the time I had my doubts and suspicions, and I was beset by a strange and mounting urge to get in the car and head for the border. To go where and do what? I had no idea. I just wanted to get out and go. So one day in May I hit the road. My hands were shaking. As I wound up the parched escarpment above Perth, through horse paddocks and orchards and into the jarrah forests, the first cold front of the year rumbled in my wake.
Lighting out for the border is problematic in a country as stupendously large as ours. For a West Australian it’s no small thing to get to the state line. Driving from Perth to the Northern Territory takes the best part of a week. The shortest route out of Western Australia is to traverse the Nullarbor Plain into South Australia, a trip of only a couple of days. The last time I’d made that crossing was in the summer of 1969. In those days the Eyre Highway was a vicious limestone track and the journey was the first real travel adventure of my life, after which I set my mind on being a writer. I was nine and a half. Thirty years later I was having second thoughts.
On that previous trip I made the trek with the family in a Hillman Hunter station wagon towing a box trailer converted into a rudimentary camper. Out on the great plain where the blacktop petered out to a limestone track we pulled over to prepare ourselves for the ordeal. Until that point we’d endured only heat and boredom, but when we saw the towering plumes of white dust barrelling our way we knew things were about to get lively. Every oncoming vehicle laboured under a roofload of shredded tyres and mangled rims. Some cars were without windscreens, others looked partially disassembled, and as they hit the civilized bitumen beside us, drivers and passengers alike looked demented. The old man got out and sealed the doors and windows with masking tape. Then we said a travelling prayer and pounded out across the treeless space, teeth rattling in our heads. It was mad fun. For the first hour. In our little English car we were higher than anything else in the juddering landscape, but the chalky dust was infernal and the vibration like nothing I’d ever experienced.
Decades later I swept across the smooth, quartzy bitumen in airconditioned comfort with Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life playing on the stereo. Late that first day, having made a modest 600 kilometres, I camped on the wooded outer edge of the goldfields where the earth was the colour of chilli powder and the sky a chemical blue. The bark of salmon gums hung in strips like unravelling bandages and as I gathered firewood in a road-daze I thought of poor Rufus Dawes, the convict character I’d puzzled over as a boy. My mother had given me Clarke’s novel the year we crossed the continent. It was the first grown-up novel I read. I hadn’t realized the connection when setting out this time, I’d just snatched the audio tape off a rack in haste, something to pass the time and ward off thoughts of my own book.
I cooked dal over the fire and watched the stars. The night looked clear enough to throw a swag down on the dirt but I expected the cold front to overtake me before dawn so I sacked out in the back of the LandCruiser and slept so deeply I didn’t hear the roadtrains lumbering by in the distance or even the rig that was pulled up nearby when I woke at first light.
That morning I drove past saltpans and vast eucalypt woodlands into monochrome treelessness. The overcast sky spilled to earth, its blotchy greys hard to distinguish from the cloudy puffs of knee-high scrub stretching windblown and insubstantial to the horizon. The gunmetal two-lane ribboned out changeless until the afternoon surprise of Madura Pass when there was a sudden decline as the Hampton Tableland gave way to the hypnotic Roe Plains. Down on the flats it was all sky. It was like travelling across the seabed, which is more or less what that land is. Everything looked scoured, as if one giant swell had just receded and another was about to come surging in. The only thing separating me from Elsewhere, it felt, was this low, dun-coloured shelf I was pelting across. I drove until I ran out of daylight and when I climbed down onto the dirt I felt stoned. Collecting firewood, boiling a billy – such things seemed to require immense concentration. A gale gathered force from the south-west – the front I’d been outrunning. It came ripping in across the saltbush. There was nothing out there taller than a dog to offer resistance to the elements, nothing between me and the horizon, me and the sky. Even the earth’s crust was thin. Beneath me was a limestone karst system stretching inland from the Southern Ocean. It was hard not to feel vulnerable. This place felt more remote and exposed than the wilderness of the far north Kimberley.
Crouched in the back of the rain-lashed vehicle, eating leftover dal, I recalled how in 1969 we camped in enormous gravel scrapes like moon craters. Nothing lived there; they were desolate, claustrophobic pits whose pink ramparts shielded the wider landscape from view. Puzzled at being deprived of the horizon my brother and I climbed the gravel bund and walked barefoot into the country beyond. You could hear tiny creatures rattle and flutter in the low scrub. From here the world went on forever, like a dream. Apart from the road scar, there was nothing to see that looked like anything much to us: no fences, nor buildings, nor lights, nor people. We didn’t know it but that week our father slept with a hefty stick beside him in the trailer because he’d heard on the coppers’ grapevine a madman was preying on travellers out there on the plain.
As the storm rocked the LandCruiser on its springs somewhere short of Mundrabilla I locked the doors and went to sleep alone.
Ceduna, the first actual town across the border, was the logical end point for this less than logical road trip. Unless I wanted to press on to Adelaide – and then why not crack on to Melbourne and Sydney, to finish by staring out upon the Pacific? Maybe. For the moment Ceduna was enough; if I got up early and went like hell I’d make it by dark. All I remembered of it from childhood was a wind-ravaged caravan park and a late-night shower in thongs in a reeking ablution block.
At first light I hit the road. Taj Mahal on the stereo. I was relaxed now. I could do this for days. The road was wide and flat and all but empty. The driving was effortless. I ploughed on, foot on the floor, mind mercifully blank.
Suddenly I was in South Australia, blowing along the brink of the Bunda cliffs. I caught glimpses of the wild sea, streaks of spume, spray in the air. I’d been through Eucla and Border Village and crossed the state line without even registering them. It’s a wonder I wasn’t stopped; I was driving like a fugitive.
Then, quite suddenly, the trance lifted. I don’t know why. I eased off the throttle and pulled over. I clambered down into the buffeting salt wind and felt all the momentum leach away from me. I watched a rain squall hammer in across the heath and knew I was done; I’d lost the urge to go any further. I wanted to climb back up, pull a U-turn and head home. But I was only a few kilometres out from the White Well ranger station and the head of the Great Australian Bight. At least that was a landmark. And there might be whales, something memorable to seize upon as punctuation. I made myself get back in and drive those extra few minutes.
At the lookout I stared down into the storm-torn sea. Spray misted my face as waves hurled themselves against the crags. If there were whales out there I couldn’t see them. I gave it three minutes. Then I got back in the car and drove west. Ceduna could wait for another occasion. And so could all the other places I remembered from my childhood adventure. I filled up and headed for home, and thanks to the long-range tanks I wouldn’t need to stop for anything but sleep. I was locked in, hurtling, pausing for nothing: not the dune-covered telegraph station at Eucla nor the Cocklebiddy caves and the blowhole at Caiguna. And though I’ve always wanted to make the trek out to the Eyre Bird Observatory I blew on past the turn-off.
But the road back looked different. I saw things I hadn’t noticed on the outward leg. Like the roadkill, for instance: so many roos and emus and reptiles twisted and split at the shoulder of the highway. Every few minutes there’d be something sprawled directly in my path, a dark hump of flesh
under a poultice of birds. How had I not noticed this carnage before? What had I actually been taking in these past days? Had I seen anything except the horizon?
Once I’d registered the highway gore it was pretty much all I saw. I fixed on the crows in particular, the way they feasted at the gravel shoulder in querulous brigades. The road was so flat and straight and empty that these congregations were visible for kilometres. Massed in the shimmering distance they were legion. They didn’t even look like birds, they could have been people out there gathered for ceremonial purposes: mourners, dancers, singers, all leaping and crooning and feeding behind an aqueous veil. With such a distance to cross between sighting each new aggregation and reaching it, I had a long time in which to anticipate, to puzzle and wonder. And I must have seemed so far off and inconsequential to the birds themselves because once I finally reached them they seemed startled, even affronted. Most stirred and cranked themselves aloft. Some merely stepped back at the last possible moment and shrugged like bored labourers in the slipstream.
Now and then, in the sky above these roadside gatherings, I caught the profiles of kestrels and hawks. Late in the day I saw a wedgetail eagle, a magnificent specimen the colour of mahogany. Its great wings were spread. Wind rifled through its plumage as it lay there, knocked flat on its back at the roadside. The spectacle shook me. I couldn’t help but take it personally because it brought back the summer I’d tried so hard to put behind me.
I pressed on miserably until dusk when I came upon a solitary grove of eucalypts clumped together conspicuously on the plain. I’d begun to make camp in the lee of these emaciated gums when a car with a caravan pulled up almost on top of me. In a funk I packed my gear and drove another kilometre into the low scrub beyond. I grilled a T-bone on two sticks over some hard-won coals and when it was ready I fumbled and spilled it into the fire. I ate it disgustedly, ash and all. I was tired but too unsettled to climb straight into the sack.
The previous November, after nearly seven years of mostly pleasurable work, I’d boxed up the manuscript of my latest novel so it could be sent to the publishers before the deadline. At twelve hundred pages, weighing 6.5 kilos, it was a hefty parcel. My daughter, ten years of age, could never recall a time when I was not working on this story; it had been the backdrop to her life and its completion was something of a puzzle to her. In the rest of the family there was cautious relief. No one, including me, could quite believe it was finally over. It wasn’t.
At the end of that momentous day my wife came home from work to find me exactly as she’d left me six hours earlier – standing white-faced at the desk, straightening pages, leafing through, reading passages and restacking them. For months I’d harboured a gnawing doubt and during the day it had become uncontrollable. I was paralyzed by the hardening realization that the entire thing had taken a wrong turn in the final draft. It didn’t work. It was a turkey, a terrible mistake. I should be burning it, not sending it. After twenty years as a novelist I was about to blow a deadline for the first time. Worse, I’d have to can the book completely. But it had already been advertised. Not my idea, but there it was. There was a production schedule, a publication date, a title in the public realm. For me this was a disaster. Never before, at the approach of a deadline, had I had a manuscript so far away from being a book.
I told my wife the novel was a wash. I’d have to cancel it or begin rewriting immediately. She advised me to do nothing until I’d cooled off; I should get some rest and seek counsel, there was time yet. It didn’t feel to me as if there were time for anything but despair, but I held off burning the manuscript and sent it to a couple of luckless friends before limping off for the summer holiday.
Summer was a disaster. The wind never let up. I lay awake every night in a slimy sweat and spent the daylight hours brooding. I was doing nothing at all but beneath the weight of those wasted years I could not rest.
Eventually my friends called. They were kind; their verdicts confirmed my suspicions. They thought there was a novel buried in the manuscript and they had many suggestions about unearthing it, but by this time I’d lost faith in the story and didn’t believe I could salvage it. Worse, I’d lost all confidence in my abilities as a writer. I’d certainly had bad days before, but not weeks and weeks like this. I couldn’t control the panicky conviction that my gifts had deserted me. Every book I read only confirmed what was beyond my reach. The great pleasure of reading became a misery. I’d begun the summer trying to be philosophical. There’d be other novels, I told myself; nothing is ever really wasted. I could learn from this. I just needed to accept it. But then I wondered if there would be other novels. It began to feel there might be nothing left, no stories, no craft, no sustaining impulse. I was sick, ashamed, bitter, afraid.
The holiday petered out unhappily; we went home early and I met the new year in the grip of an unfocused rage. Depressed, unreachable, sleepless for days on end, I was a malignant presence in the house.
One Saturday night, having thrashed about into the small hours, I got out of bed, walked down to the office and confronted the manuscript on the desk with its many boxes of drafts and notes. I hated the sight of that pile – hated even touching it – but I was furious enough to rip the brown paper wrapping off and stare again at the title page. After a couple of moments I sat down and sharpened a box of pencils. Then in a weird, vengeful spirit I cracked a ream of green paper and began the whole thing once more from the beginning.
It was as if a fever had come upon me. I was angry at the story, at the wasted time, at myself. I squirmed in my seat, hardly able to credit the fact that I was embarking on this journey again. It was a crazy thing to do but it felt no worse than rolling around in bed and just thinking about it. The tedium was immeasurable. I felt as though I were bashing back up a long, stupid detour in order to find the old track and the only thing propelling me was fury. That anger scoured every page, every word. The tip of the pencil felt hot, as if it channelled rage, and my mind was no wider than the pencil itself. I didn’t know it but in my madness I was testing the boundaries of an ancient puzzle, namely how to get a camel through the eye of a needle. And as I was to discover, it mightn’t be a pretty business but it’s certainly possible.
First kill your camel. Next, light a big fire. After that get a cauldron big enough to hold your hapless dromedary. If it becomes necessary, hack the beast of burden to pieces and keep the pot at the boil for days on end. Then take a straw and a suture needle and begin spitting your rendered camel through the tiny aperture. Just don’t expect to enjoy yourself. And for pity’s sake, do it in private; this is a spectacle no one else should ever have to witness.
I’m only half joking about this, because that’s what the process felt like. I didn’t regret the murder of my camel. I was grinding up years of work, masticating it and spitting words back onto the page in a stream as thin and hot as an oxy-flame.
By two-thirty next afternoon, when I staggered up from the chair, I had twenty fair sheets. I went home, slept a few hours and returned. Mostly I came and went in the dark, seething, disassociated and slightly deranged. Fifty-five days later I had a novel. It was six hundred pages shorter than what I’d set out with, a different book, but at least it was a book. And there was still time in which to have it edited, set and bound. I sent it off. My publishers seemed happy. But I didn’t know what or how I felt. So I bunked off.
I sat up late that last night on the Nullarbor. When I ran out of firewood I sat in the dark with the stars lording it over me. It was clear and cold out there; I could feel my thoughts sliding back to the book. In the end I took a pill to make me sleep but it was a restless night. At dawn I drove back to the blacktop and put the rising sun behind me. I was agitated again. The relative calm of the previous couple of days was gone.
In the middle of the morning I overtook two cars, one of which seemed to be towing the other on a perilously short rope. When I blew by I saw there was no towrope at all; the two drivers were simply entertaining themselves,
all but touching bumpers in an effort to relieve boredom. At noon the road finally veered a little. I pulled in for fuel at Balladonia. Coming out of the roadhouse dunny I saw the tailgaters introducing themselves to the tailgatees. Both parties were in high spirits.
That afternoon I lost count of the wedgetail eagles patrolling the highway. Hunkered on shaggy legs over the burst remains of mammals, they were an impressive sight. As I approached them, barrelling along at full tilt, they collected themselves in ponderous articulations of bone and feather and sinew to get themselves aloft. In flight they were majestic, every one of them a glory to behold. But they bothered the hell out of me. Each new eagle brought to mind the fifty-five monstrous days and nights of summer. I thought of the six hundred pages I’d slashed from my novel without a second thought. Not all those lost pages were gone because they were poorly written. Whole scenes, chapters, characters and subplots were discarded for being suddenly surplus to requirements. They were the good country I’d back-burnt to save the homestead. Cutting a manuscript is usually a pleasure, relatively easy to do for being so obviously beneficial to the project. But I’d never slashed and pruned on this scale before, nor had I done it at such heinous speed. I suspected I’d made errors of judgement, expunged sections I could have retained. It took me half a day out there on the treeless plain to understand my agitation: I was grieving for lost material.