But that first train journey, for all its richness of persons and scene, was not yet a story for me, and it still isn’t. The ‘story’ was my first sight of a place I hadn’t heard of till then and have never heard of since, though it exists. It is called the Valley of Lagoons and it lies inland from Innisfail on the far side of the Great Divide. All the major rivers of North Queensland, those that flow south and east to the Pacific, the Burdekin, Burnett, Isaacs, and those that flow away north-west to the Gulf of Carpentaria, have their source there in a chain of waterlily swamps, an area of lagoons and tropical forest the size of a modest republic. It is a kind of primeval garden, and was for me an early vision of nature untouched, a great green place that existed entirely without man but did not resist his appearance, and was neither hostile nor predatory.
It presented a different Australia from the one that is sometimes offered as the real, the harsh, the authentic one. It was not a desert but a vast water park crowded with creatures. I went there for five days on a shooting trip and have never forgotten it. Its paradisiacal light at all times of day, the great flocks of birds that haunted its shores, filled its skies and were reflected in its waters, stayed with me for years afterwards. I could summon them up at will, and knew always that I would write something one day that would owe its existence to them and would try to give that existence back. When I returned to Brisbane I tried to catch the place in poems. It would not be caught. Recently, reading a few paragraphs in a literary review, the whole scene suddenly swarmed about me, I found myself as if at the centre of a marvellously recaptured dream. The suggestion of a plot presented itself, a little complex of characters appeared, and the thing I wanted to write, and had always meant to write, was there complete. I had only to enter the landscape and let it occur.
No piece of writing, of course, is ever so inevitable, so effortless as that first glimpse of it may promise. The clarity of that first view is exceptional. It is not in itself the work. But whenever I wanted, after that, to ‘see’ what I was doing, I had only to let the light into my mind of what I had recalled of the Valley of Lagoons as it was some twenty-five years ago and all was clear. The landscape of the story and its weather, the tonality and pace of the whole stretch of what I had to write, was immediately before me, though the ‘story’ was not in fact set there, and what I had in mind had no source in the events of my five days in that extraordinary place, or in the lives of my companions: the owner of the pub at Atherton where I had been staying, who was sufficiently engaged by my youthful enthusiasm and lack of experience to offer me the chance of going; the local major and his son (a boy of my own age, but a country boy, utterly unlike myself), the professional kangaroo hunter who was to be our guide.
I learned something in those days that was relevant to what I have now written, but only indirectly. I learned to live rough. I learned to handle the dogs we had with us, which I had to hold while Cam, the mayor’s son, shot his first pig. Most of all, I saw a whole range of native birds – scrub turkey, western bustard, bronzewing and top-knot pigeons, half a dozen varieties of ducks, spur-winged plover – plovers rising out of the early-morning mist, with sunlit drops of water flying from their wings and the swamp water breaking in circles below. The white of them, and the brilliant yellow of their wattles and the scarlet of their feet, is one of the clearest of those images I carry about with me, and one that returns, unbidden, and with a freshness as of something utterly new-made and springing into the world as for the first time, on occasions to which it is in no way relevant but to which it brings, as I see afterwards, an energy that is a source of renewed being.
It means something more than itself, that image. It is the real beginning of this novella, and the work, however far it stands from the original, is an attempt to re-create that meaning, not by wringing the plover’s neck but by allowing the landscape it leaps out of to surround me, yield up its events and, through them, its significance.
What I was after in 1955, as this piece makes clear, was the ‘exotic’. That is hardly unusual. What was less usual, I think, is that I was looking for it at home.
North Queensland, in those days, at the end of a two days’ train journey and more than 1600 kilometres away, was barely known. It was part of the state but on the other side of an imaginary line, the Tropic of Capricorn, that put it in another zone. It was still sparsely inhabited, a lot of it still largely untracked.
I knew people who came from ‘up there’. They were like us but had the light of another order of experience in their heads: the wet season, cane toads, crocodiles, and the darkness of impenetrable rainforests. Even the cultivated land was different. Cane fields evoked the Caribbean, molasses the Deep South. The wisdom, even in Brisbane, was that white men would never live there.
Italians did, and Maltese, and in the rush of migrants immediately after the war, a few Balts and Yugoslavs – only the men. They went up there to work as seasonal canecutters.
Bonded teachers and bank clerks were deployed there and put up in rooms at pubs. They too were temporary. When they had served their time they were brought back – before the climate and the easy pace got into their blood.
Australians still thought of themselves in those days as cool-weather people. Because our forefathers, for the most part, had come from cool-weather countries, they had settled in the parts of Australia that still felt like ‘home’ and could be reshaped to resemble it. Most of Queensland could not. Even our part of it. The North definitely couldn’t.
These days we have redefined ourselves as hot-weather people. Australia from Kempsey north is now the norm. But when I was growing up, Brisbane, the big, sprawling, one-storeyed wooden town I thought of as mine, the place that was closest and most familiar to me, was too far north to be the norm.
Among the Australian states Queensland’s status had always been doubtful, anomalous. Up to the eve of Federation its sugar plantations had been worked by black labourers, Kanakas, from the Pacific. When the Australian government, in 1942, called on American troops to save us from invasion, and discovered that some of these troops would be Negroes, they objected, then reluctantly agreed that black Americans would be acceptable, but only in Queensland. Brisbane was ‘segregated’ through most of my childhood: black Americans were restricted to the south side of the river. So my hometown already harboured within it a hint of the exotic and would reveal itself, when I looked at it closely at last, as the most exotic (that is, strange and unknowable) place I would ever know. I was just beginning to grasp that in the middle fifties – the period of Johnno, the events of which, at that time, I was still living through. Meanwhile, North Queensland represented our version of the exotic – neat. That is what drew me there.
Over the next three years, I went north on three occasions. Once, it was on a return trip to the Atherton Tableland to see the lakes, Eacham and Barrine, the Tully Falls, and back to the coast to stay at Innisfail, where in those days half the town gathered on Saturday nights at the Exchange Hotel. Another time, I drove north up the coast road, the Bruce Highway, and back on the inland route via Charters Towers, Claremont, Emerald and the Brisbane Valley with a friend who had been born at Chillagoe in 1933, when it was a rich mining town of some 11,000 souls. We went there in the little two-carriage train that ran from Mareeba, through country stacked with three-metre-high anthills, all built in the same direction along a magnetic line, while great herds of kangaroos raced along beside us in the swiftly falling dusk.
When we got there, Chillagoe turned out to be a single chimneystack sticking up out of acres of ruins under waist-high lawyer vines. There were five surviving buildings, including a pub and a general store, and nine surviving inhabitants, who had different memories of where the street might have been where my friend had lived till he was three years old; of where the Catholic Church used to be, and the site of the oval where his father had played football. All the houses had been lifted off their stumps in the late thirties, loaded onto trucks, and taken to Mareeba, the little tobacc
o-growing town we had started out from earlier in the day.
Another time, I spent a whole sweltering summer in Townsville – a stony place in dried-out scrub country, not at all a tropical paradise, except on Saturday nights when we went across by boat to the all-night dances beside the beach on Magnetic Island.
Later, of course, the exotic quality that to me was hidden under what I saw as local untidiness – of tumbledown fences, peeling paint, buckled corrugated iron, rampant lantana and lawyer vine and swathes of ineradicable morning glory – was repackaged and commercialised for the tourist industry. Places I had seen as wild, Port Douglas for example, thanks to air-conditioning and architecture and cash, and some imagination, became oases of good living – a fair example of what the wilderness can be when it is nearly contained, and what can be made of the exotic when it is taken out of the realm of mind and made ‘real’ in the form of ponds and discreetly placed elements of the international post-modern. The Far North, with its profitable tourist industry and its mines, is now a ‘resource’.
It is easy to be condescending about this. To pretend that the ‘old’ North, the one you had to discover on your own, was purer and more authentic because it had not yet been given a public form, had not yet been tidied up and packaged for general use.
In fact, the tidying up, if you look beyond the smoothness and glitter, is not very successful. How could it be when the elements are so extreme, the energy with which things push up and grow so excessive, the air and the smells, especially the sweetish smell of rotting vegetation, so heavy, the dampness so intrusive as it gets in and causes rust and covers boots and leather belts in a wardrobe with mould, and there are so many Aborigines in the streets and under the trees along the Esplanade who are unwilling to disappear into the landscape, and undisposed to present themselves as happily industrious or indolently picturesque. There are many elements in the North that remain outside control.
And wasn’t it just this, the belief that there might be ‘up there’ a place that was uncontrolled and uncontrollable, that first attracted me and attracts me still? Isn’t that what I meant by exotic? A hope that somewhere close there was a place that belonged to us and was in that sense ours, but that had escaped the laws and the interpretations we like to impose, and remained unknown within us. Darkly mysterious. Overgrown and hard to find our way into. Not yet mapped or fully described. Where we, too, when we entered it, might become other and unknown, even to ourselves.
I see now that that was what I was after when I lined up and bought my ticket on the second division of the Queensland Mail all those years ago and set off hopefully for the North. I found it, too. And then found it again, more powerfully, closer to home, where it had escaped me because I didn’t yet have the eyes for it and hadn’t discovered where to look. In the familiar streets of Brisbane itself. In the rooms of the house I had grown up in.
The book I began writing immediately after Fly Away Peter was Harland’s Half Acre. I was already at work on the first part of 12 Edmondstone Street.
Griffith Review, ‘Up North’, Spring 2005
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
THE FATAL SHORE: ROBERT HUGHES
THE MOST ENDURING FACT ABOUT Australian settlement appears at the end of a chapter of The Fatal Shore in a phrase that deserves to be quoted early. It concerns the Land. At first deeply alien, itself a confining factor, part of a nature that was ‘destined to punish’, the land, Hughes says in writing of the bushrangers, was ‘re-named with the sign of freedom. On its blankness the absconder could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonised and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England.’
What Hughes is uncovering here is the point at which newcomers to the Australian continent first recognised, in a place that had been intended only to intimidate and restrict, an area for action, and the sort of experience that makes a wild place home. It is the very heart of his theme.
This detailed and dramatic account of the first seventy years of white settlement in Australia is not the first book on the subject – the two early volumes of Manning Clark’s monumental History cover the same ground. But till recently Australians were not much concerned with their own history. Robert Hughes seems to suggest that this has its origin in shame: in an unwillingness to face our origins as a nation founded not in the spirit of Enlightenment but as a place of punishment and despair. He makes a good deal of what he calls The Stain, meaning the shadow of convict blood. But the fact is, these days, that one in every three Australians was either born outside the country or has no British background. For these Australians, the past is elsewhere. And till the last twenty years or so, we were, as a people, too busy coming to terms with the continent itself, its dimensions and distances, to be concerned with the past. You have to be engaged by time to be interested in history. The consciousness of Australians has been dominated by space. It takes something like a Bicentenary to make people aware that they have also had a life in that other dimension.
The Fatal Shore, then, is a timely book. There are big things still to be said about what happened in those 200 years, and Hughes grasps his subject with great boldness and flair. His writing is full of passion, anger, pity, wit, and it will surprise no-one to hear that he has an eye for the moods of landscape and weather. His theme too is big: nothing less than the meeting of the European spirit, at its most pragmatic and brutal, with a continent that was never intended to receive it; an alternative story both to America’s and to that of Europe itself, running from the French Revolution to beyond Auschwitz. What we have here is an example of that peculiar capacity for remaking things in our own image, or remaking ourselves in the spirit of the Other, that is so characteristic of our ‘Northern’ culture: the making, in an unlikely corner of the world, of what used to be called ‘The New Britannia’, and which we might see now as a nation of its own, English-speaking but unique.
The first Australian settlement had its origins, oddly enough, in an American act.
One of the many inconveniences to Britain of the American Revolution was its interruption to the trade in convicts; the Crown had been used to selling its felons off as slaves, first to private shippers and then to plantation owners in North America. The British expected the intermission to be a short one. But the colonials won, and the new nation (which by 1783 was receiving 47,000 black slaves each year and had no need of white ones) declined the King’s offer to go on supplying ‘Men unworthy to remain in this Island’. A new depository had to be found. The government, rejecting Madagascar, Tristan da Cunha and several sites in West Africa, decided at last on what was then the remotest spot on earth, the place on the east coast of New Holland that Cook had called Botany Bay. What better repository than the very Antipodes of the Kingdom, its dark opposite on the underside of the earth, for what Bentham was to call an ‘excrementitious mass’? – all those thieves, whores, highwaymen and others who had stopped being passive victims of enclosure and unemployment and become the entrepreneurs of their own fortune. A System that Americans would no longer accept was to be established in a new form elsewhere. Transportation was the grand alternative to death. Those whose lives were forfeit under the law were to be bodily removed, not into eternity but to a place where they would be invisible and harmless in fact but might still serve as symbols. At Botany Bay the Kingdom’s excrementitious outcasts would, by the standards of the time, be well used and encouraged to rejoin the industrious part of mankind. This was Mercy. But their fate as exiles suffering all the cruelties of penal labour under an unknown sky would be presented, at home, as hellish. This was the new Terror – as Hughes puts it in one of his many memorable phrases, ‘a theatre of horror acted out for a distant audience’.
In May 1787, eleven ships, well appointed and provisioned, set out under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, who would be, on arrival, the Commandant of the Penal Settlement and also (since the two intentions were there from the start) the first Governor of the Colony. The original nucleus was 158 marines, who
would mostly return to Britain, and 563 male and 189 female convicts, who would not. These latter, as Hughes shows, were not the innocent poachers of Australian legend. None of them was a rapist or murderer, but several had committed crimes of violence and none was a first offender.
The Colony was proclaimed on 26 January 1788 – not, as it happens, at Botany Bay, which proved to have no fresh water, but up the coast a little at Sydney Cove. But Botany Bay had already been established as a symbol and it remained one for nearly half a century. Only those who were on the spot knew there was nothing there.
This is only one of Australia’s ‘beginnings’. It would begin afresh in other places and at other times: in free settlements at the Swan River (Perth) in 1829, Port Phillip (Melbourne) in 1835, Adelaide in 1836. One needs to be wary of speaking of ‘Australian’ history. To explain Melbourne or Adelaide by referring to New South Wales is like beginning a history of California with the Salem Witch Trials – possible but far-fetched. Sydney is not Australia. The settlement there just happens to be the first.
As befits a colony that was intended to exist in two places, a real geographical antipodes and at the same time an antipodes of the mind, everything that occurred in early New South Wales seems double and ambiguous; yet what was eventually worked out, in the pragmatic English way, by improvisation rather than theory, was a System that in Hughes’ words was ‘by far the most successful form of rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history’.
To be fair to the originators of the scheme, and Hughes is not always fair, this intention was there from the start. The Colony had several purposes, some of them contradictory. The most ambitious, and least likely, was the founding of a new Empire in the south. The penal settlement was to exist within it and was to have a triple purpose: to rid the Kingdom of its criminals, to rehabilitate as many of them as possible in a new and distant place, and to make an example, through Terror, to the rest.