At the pinnacle of Mount Waychinicup lie several gnamma holes the size of bathtubs, carved into weathered granite by symbiotic relationships between weather and people. My friend and I were there, where granite boulders bigger than blocks of flats squatted among alpine gardens and stunted forests of marri. I knelt beside one of the holes and peered into the water. Tadpoles and strange beetles I’d never seen before swam around.
I was thirsty. I put my hand into the water and just before I’d scooped it into my mouth I saw the feathers, circling in flotillas over the water’s skin. Tiny and iridescent purple, the feathers gleamed like an oil slick in a roadside puddle. The feathers changed my mind about drinking from the pool. Then the sight of a bird’s wing bones lying on the bottom confirmed it. A yellow glass bead glinted beside the bones.
The peak is so isolated and difficult to get to that the only signs of humanity are ancient ones. And there lay a glass bead. In a pond. Tiny, shining feathers on the water’s surface. I reached down to the bottom of the pool and picked up the bead.
The feathers, the bones and the bead. ‘It’s a pigeon’s leg ring!’
I had visions of this doomed pigeon crashing into the mountain in an exhausted daze – or maybe it was killed by a raptor and taken to the peak to be eaten?
That night in the cave, we lit a fire and cooked some kangaroo meat with garlic and mushrooms. As the sun set, the lakes and creeks sitting in the country below shone in the low light. We squatted in the dirt by the fire and inspected the leg ring with our headlamps. Then we got out our smart phones and started googling ‘Danriz. Loft #5’.
Now you may think that googling a dead racing pigeon from a cave nestled into the top of a mountain is unusual, but it was quite sedate compared to the mother lode of pigeon fanciers we encountered on the internet that night. A YouTube clip, posted by the owner of our unfortunate pigeon, depicted his avian heroes posing coyly among graphics of sparkling rainbow fireworks and red love hearts, to the strains of that ultimate stalker song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police. I recognised the purple feathers cloaking the birds’ throats. Seeing those feathers set to the music completely did my head in. The clip was unsettling but I kept returning to it like a dysfunctional lover. I wanted to understand such single-minded adoration, even fanaticism, for a pigeon.
Over the next few days we explored the mountain and the one next to it, joined by a saddle of prickly hakea forest. We found a nineteenth-century sealers’ camp, the remains of a less-ancient marijuana crop, a white cross in a cave, close to the site where several narcotics detectives and the local whale spotter pilot had crashed in his Cessna in the 1990s. We became lost in the damp, mushroomy karri forest late at night and … well, all these things are another story. The whole time, I kept the pigeon’s leg ring in the coin pocket of my jeans. On returning to civilisation, I searched out the dead pigeon’s owner on the internet and rang ‘Danriz’.
‘Hello, I’m Sarah. You probably don’t know me. Um, I think I may have found one of your pigeons. Do you live in Albany? Do you have pigeons?’
‘Ah, yes, yes. You find my pigeon? Where you find my pigeon?’
‘At the top of the mountain, at Waychinicup.’
‘The mountain? At the top?’
‘Yes. At the top. I’m sorry. I didn’t find a live pigeon. I found feathers and bones of a bird and a leg ring, in a pond.’
‘Ahh, the peregrines …’ he sighed. ‘What number?’
‘Number? I don’t know. Loft Five?’
‘No, no. The blue ring.’
‘I only found a yellow ring.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘You might know me. I used to sell fish at the Sunday markets.’
His accent sounded Filipino and his name Dante echoed the impossibly romantic and deadly histories of Spanish conquistadors. The local Filipino community were great patrons of our stall. They liked to buy whole, fresh fish (and a fishmonger who has to fillet for hours on a Saturday appreciates a customer who prefers whole fish on a Sunday).
‘Fish? Not pigeon?’ Dante sounded confused. ‘You want to sell me fish?’
‘No. No! I want to give you the pigeon’s leg ring. I’ll drop it off tomorrow if you like. Where do you live?’
Later that night, Dante sent me a text message: ‘Ah ok ako lang pala nakapag pauwi sa 1000km sa.wa. sikat ibon natin’ which I translated rather clumsily as, ‘Ah, okay homewards now SA 1000km. SA to WA. Famous bird.’
Dante arrived home with his wife and children, as I parked on his verge the next day. He was a short, sturdy man with bushy eyebrows that made him look stern. In the YouTube clip he was wearing a short straw hat, Chilean style, but this day he was hatless and his hair was speckled with white. A Jack Russell rabbited around our feet. Dante showed me into the backyard, to the pigeon loft.
‘Three weeks ago, the club take three hundred birds to Laverton. One hundred birds came home.’
‘You lost two hundred birds?’
‘Yes, yes. The peregrines. They eat them. They eat only brains,’ he picked at his head with his fingers. ‘Only brains.’
Two hundred pigeon brains.
‘How far is that? How long?’
‘They fly eight hundred and sixty-five kilometres. We set them at eight in the morning and the first three come home at six o’clock.’
‘I couldn’t drive from Laverton to Albany in that time.’
‘Yes. Very fast. We have big races in Adelaide. This bird, this is a famous bird,’ he pointed one out to me. The pigeon eyed me. A fine looking bird, sleek and muscular, its beautiful purple throat reminding me of the gnamma hole at the top of the mountain.
‘All over Australia, people come to race birds in Adelaide. We send them when they are babies. November thirtieth. Then July we race them from Marla or Coober Pedy, one thousand kilometres to Adelaide. That bird is a famous bird. He came –’ he holds up two fingers.
‘Second?’
‘Yes. Three thousand dollars prize.’
I have to say that at this point I was dangerously close to becoming a pigeon fancier. I’d entered the murky world of a subculture previously beyond my ken. I was beginning to understand the theme song to his YouTube clip. Stalker song? I think not! Oh, can’t you see, you belong to me is really about the relationship between a man and his homing pigeon.
‘Can you tell me the name of the club president?’ I asked Dante.
Dante put me in contact with an old man who knew a thing or two about racing pigeons. Days later, Ray and I sat in the sun outside his house. He was eighty-seven and had been in bed all week with the flu, so he was appreciating the warm air.
‘You want to know about pigeons?’ He handed me a book. ‘This is the best bloody book I ever read, mate. Got everything in it. Here, take it.’
‘They say I have a way with birds and animals,’ he said. ‘But specially birds. I’ve been racing birds for seventy years now. Since I was little. That’ll open your eyes, hey?’ We talked pigeons for a little while. He told me about his pigeon lung, a common pigeon fancier’s affliction. He talked of how young people weren’t interested in racing, how well the races used to be attended and not so much anymore. I followed him up the hill to his hutches where pigeons sat on the roofs, gleaming, iridescent, eyeing me cautiously.
‘But I can tell you another story if you want to listen. It’s all in here.’ He stabbed with his fingers at his West Coast Eagles beanie. ‘Have you ever heard of the Kalgoorlie race riots?’
‘No … I don’t think so.’
‘Nineteen thirty-four, mate. Bloody race riots. I was there. I remember it. It’s all in here.’
There was an intensity to his words. I thought, my goodness, these pigeon racers are fanatics. Race riots? Did these guys really riot over their pigeons? In 1934?
‘Let’s go and sit down,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I record your story?’
‘Nah, nah, mate. I’m happy to talk. You can tape whatever you like.’
The recording, because I couldn’t work out how to do a voice recording on my phone in the seconds I had before he started talking, is a ten-minute video of a pigeon fancier’s sock in a black plastic sandal. This next piece is transcribed verbatim.
‘In Kalgoorlie about that time, they reckon they were doing slingbacks, you know? To make a bit of money on the side?’
‘Who? The pigeon owners?’
‘Nah mate! The Italians. And the Aussies. Anyway. That’s only half the story. This day … er, the bloke’s name was Jordan. And the Ding’s name was Mataboni, he was the one who owned the –’
‘Was that Maroni?’
‘Nah, Mataboni.’
‘Okay.’
‘He threw this bloke Jordan out of his pub, you know? But when he hit the ground, he was stone dead. And some stupid bastard yells out, “He’s got a knife!” but Mataboni didn’t have a knife at all but anyway, the game was on.’
‘So the Australian man was dead?’ I had realised by then that this story wasn’t about pigeons.
‘Yeah. But anyway, it was one of the best sporting families in Kalgoorlie, the Jordans. The game was on. So this Saturday morning, six or eight o’clock, a bloke, an Aussie bloke, he come to our place, said to my mum, “We’re gonna give the Dings the run around tonight, Mum.” You know … lucky for me I got it all in here. And that night it was on, mate. The Aussies burnt all their hotels down. We were kids. I remember it all. Then they burnt all their houses down. All their shops down. Ah ha. Then anyway. There was a copper there and he’s taking all the kids’ names, you know? He couldn’t stop them, a lot of bloody maniacs, anyway, this is true. They were going along saying, “This one’s a good Ding”, “This one’s a bastard, we’ll burn his house down”, this is true. So they came to this house and this Slav is standing in front of his house trying to protect his family and the bastards shot him dead, see?’
Ray shook his head. ‘My old mate, he said, “You can’t do that,” he said. He said that. They were his exact words. He said, “I don’t mind burning his house but I don’t wanna shoot no poor bastard.” They were the exact words he used to me. But he died years ago, so I’m using them myself now, see.
‘You may think it’s bullshit but it’s not bullshit, mate. This is the truth … but anyway … two days burning houses down and a bloke called Joe who had more testosterone than bloody brains, so all the Dings were down by the railway line building trenches to save themselves, dug themselves in and this bloke got his mates together and they pulled all these pickets off the fences and used them to charge them, they charged them just like in the war with bayonets. It’s true!’
‘That was nineteen thirty …?’
‘Nineteen thirty-four.’
‘Was that the same year as the Kristallnacht? You know, the night of the breaking glass, with the Nazis …?’
‘Nah, nah that was a few years later.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Yeah well. There was other blokes see? Good blokes. My father was a violent man. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me but he was. Oh, but he was a violent bastard. Anyway, so that night, he got his twenty-two out the bloody corner behind the kitchen door and a packet of cartridges out the cupboard, I can see it now. Like it was the other night. I didn’t know he was gonna go out and find this Ding though and bring the poor bastard home, see? His best mate from up on the mine. So he brings him home and hides him under his bed for two days and two nights. I didn’t even know he was there. Two days he hid him. I’ll bet that’d open your eyes, hey?
‘I tell you what, the people who were there, there’s no one left alive now. My mates are all dead. One of my mates said afterwards, “You couldn’t find any young men between sixteen and twenty in Kal after that. They’d all bolted!” ’
‘Right. So you reckon men between sixteen and twenty were the ones who were burning and –’
‘Oh yeah. All over the world, it’s the same age, no bloody brains …’ He laughed then and I could see the tension of the story leave him for a moment. ‘I was six, you see? Six. And I can remember that bloke saying to my mum, “We’re gonna give those Dings some hurry up tonight, Mum.”
‘There was another bloke too. Everyone reckoned he was getting slingbacks from the Dings so they burnt his house down too that night. And while they were burning his house down, he was trying to put it out with his garden hose and someone chopped off his hose with a bloody axe. That’s the truth. But of course it goes back a lot further than that. Hoover, the bastard. He sacked all the Aussies from the mines and kept the Dings and Slavs on. Bloody well cut their wages and increased their hours! It’d been bothering the Aussies for a long, long time. Twenty years. You know how that is?’
‘Mmm. Yeah, I get that … hang on, hang on: Hoover?’
‘Yep, took off and became president of the United States, didn’t he. Left all that bloody trouble behind. Jesus Christ, that’s the truth. It’d open your bloody eyes, eh?’
He finished up at this point, took off his glasses, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. I turned off the recorder.
Then he said, ‘You know, two days later me and my mum were looking out the front window at these Italian women walking down the road, in the middle of the road they were, with wheelbarrows full of tents and cooking pots and clothes and water bottles and things. Those women’s faces were as black as the clothes they wore … from the soot, you know, from sorting through their burnt out houses. Me and Mum was watching the women, and I remember her crying. Mum had tears streaming down her cheeks.’
None the wiser about the Great Southern pigeon racing fraternity that day, I drove home with Ray’s book about pigeons and some rather chaotic thoughts. Kalgoorlie Race Riots? Hoover? Pigeon lung? I kept thinking about those homeless women walking with all their worldly possessions, their faces as black as the clothes they wore, to the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where they set up a refugee camp by themselves.
Not long after talking to Ray, I was to have an unexpected interview with a third pigeon fancier, during a trip to Bali.
In a small room off Hanoman Street, Ubud, the tattooist pauses his needle from my foot and looks at me.
‘You alright, sista?’
I nod but he had already felt my leg twitching as his gun hit nerves and pressure points. I am sweating, lost in a strange world of low-level, insistent pain.
‘We have a quick break,’ he says.
It’s early evening. The noise and heat is intense. Scooters, jeeps and taxis beep and roar by, ferrying people between the day and the night. Street-side, the tattooist smokes, his bare hands streaked in the powdered flock from his plastic gloves. His little brother comes to sit with us on the bench, waves his fist at his leonine dog to squat on the concrete at his feet.
‘Selemat mallam, guark,’ says the little brother, looking at the outline of a crow on my foot.
‘Good evening, crow?’ I ask him. ‘Is that what you say?’
‘Yes, guark, a crow,’ he smiles. He is softer, younger than his brother. ‘I like birds.’
‘What is your best bird?’
‘Pigeon. I have plenty of pigeons.’
‘You have pigeons? Do you race them?’
He looks confused.
I say, ‘You know … ah … competition?’
‘Ahh, yes! All around Bali. Very fast birds. When I was little –’ he holds his hand a metre above the ground, ‘I have lots of pigeons. My mother say, “Take birds away! Too many pigeons!” So I took them to the market and sold all the pigeons. The next day, they all come home!’
‘Ha! Homing pigeons. So you had money and pigeons!’
‘Yes!’ He laughs. ‘Now, I have fifteen pigeons. I sell them every week at the market. Sometimes they do not come back but most times, I get my pigeon back and I sell them again.’
‘That’s so cheeky! Don’t you get pigeon buyer come to your house with big stick?’
He shakes his head. ‘Another man sell them for me.’
His brother, smoking, watching the street with the kind of detached cool that only tattooists possess, stubs out his cigarette in the bakelite ashtray and nods me inside.
It seems that I am now the proud owner of a book about pigeons.
I rang Ray a few weeks after he’d told me the story of the Kalgoorlie race riots. I begged him for a longer loan of his book because I hadn’t finished reading it yet. Also I’d promised him a copy of my own book, Salt Story, in return for his allowing me to interview him.
‘Keep the pigeon book for as long as you like,’ he said on the telephone. ‘I’ve been a bit sick anyway. Been in hospital. Had a minor heart attack apparently. That’ll open yer bloody eyes, won’t it!’
‘Sorry to hear that, Ray. I won’t stay long. I’ll just knock on the door and drop off my book.’
‘Nah, mate. It’s too cold for me to go out today. Just put the book on the back veranda for me.’
The weather was rancid that day and it started hailing as I drove to Ray’s house. I parked in the driveway and hunched around through the chill to the back of the house, past brightly painted concrete gnomes, potted geraniums and cast-iron garden chairs. I left my book, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, under the veranda clothesline. The plastic sandals he’d worn the last time I’d seen him lay beside the doormat, the imprint of his feet pressed into them.
Five days later, his death notice was in the local paper.
Ray had told me that he was the last person alive who had witnessed the Kalgoorlie race riots. I’m not sure if he was right about that, but I reckon he’d be close. His passing away, he being a man with whom I’d had a cursory but … what is the word … instructive? … enlightening? conversation with just once, reminded me of those pigeons who were given medals after World War I, for carrying one small but vital story strapped to their bodies. Ray wasn’t a loved one to me. We’d not even shared a cup of tea but he told me that story because he wanted someone to remember it.
I rang the president of the Albany Pigeon Racing Association and told him of how I’d first encountered Dante and then Ray.
‘Oh yeah, we lost a lot of birds that day,’ said Ed, referring to the club’s two hundred pigeons that didn’t make it home from the Laverton race.
He was a tough talker and his speech cadence reminded me of the racehorse trainers from my adolescence. But he was also keen to emphasise the humanitarian aspects of pigeon racing. ‘It breaks our hearts to lose so many birds. It really does.’ I knew that it only takes a single piece of footage of cruelty or negligence to go viral on the internet, and that he was carefully selecting the information he gave to me.
‘You know when you were camping and found Dante’s loft number on the internet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, sixty years ago you would have been receiving pigeons with messages, Sarah. The thing is, what we are doing looks like a silly old hobby, but when the world goes back to bows and arrows, when everything breaks down … well, we lost a lot of birds that day but we have to press on. We have to maintain the old knowledge and not lose it. We have to press on because one day, you never know, hey? One day pigeons may be the fastest way of communication that we have. Again. It’s really important that we continue.’
His dystopian vision both amused and impressed me. It struck me that whenever I started talking pigeons with strangers, some kind of witchery occurred. Stories occurred, retellings that hardened into narratives over the years. Stories about stories even. We harbour stories; they are strapped to us in the same way as pigeon fanciers strap stories to their birds’ legs. As soon as people realise you are listening, they will unfurl a tale and hand it to you. It’s just the way it is.
‘I will tell the club this story,’ said Dante, the day after I’d returned from finding purple feathers floating in a gnamma hole at the peak of Mount Waychinicup. ‘That woman who climb the mountain and find my bird. Is a magnificent story.’
With thanks to Dante Salvadore, Ed Shilling, the tattooist’s brother at Bali Bagus Tattoo, and Ray Barrass (dec.) for sharing their stories with me.