My companion is pointing away to the east, toward the remains of the prison church. He offers me some points of its history. While two prisoners were excavating its foundation, in December 1835, one of the convicts, he says, killed the other with a pickax. And it was also a convict, he tells me, one Henry Laing, who designed this building, capable of holding a thousand Christian prisoners for service on a Sunday morning. When construction was completed, however, the Church of England claimed the house of worship for its exclusive use. Catholic convicts objected so violently that extra guards had to be brought in to reestablish order and maintain it until an arrangement could be worked out. The decision the appointed committee made was to accommodate all Christian denominations at the same service.
Roman Catholic prisoners who walked out during the first generic service were sentenced to thirty-six lashes each.
The church was later destroyed in a fire, in February 1884.
I’d asked the poet to bring me here to Port Arthur from Hobart so I could see this storied transportation prison, one of the best preserved of nearly three dozen such penal colonies built by the British across their empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These “convict dumping grounds” were meant to house that portion of the British citizenry the Crown had identified as “undesirable” for leading a life in the homeland. By the mid-eighteenth century, the population of these outcasts had grown too large to be warehoused in the carcasses of decommissioned ships—the “hulks,” moored in the Thames. Among those sent instead to Port Arthur was the Hobart poet’s great-great-grandfather, John Frimley, at the age of fifteen.
The poet and I both consider Port Arthur a monument to the absolute power of an imperial state to purge itself of criminals, the mentally ill, political protesters, paupers—of anyone who posed a threat to the authority of the state or to its right to impose civil order.
ON THIS PARTICULAR WARM AFTERNOON in the fall, the hundreds of visitors spread out across the former prison grounds appear to be enjoying themselves, to be at their ease wandering through the buildings, lolling on the grass. A group of Chinese travelers has just disembarked from a tour bus. Their guide is starting them off with a visit to the formal gardens. Shoppers in the Port Arthur gift shop, housed in a building that was once the prison’s insane asylum, are considering souvenir trinkets and postcards. In the flogging yard nearby, two young women stand together motionless before a discolored post with a sheen to it. Finally they step away, looking somewhat relieved.
The history of the criminals once housed here has been slightly jiggered for public consumption by the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, simplified and expurgated to not offend a modern sensibility. Many, perhaps most, of those picnicking on the cricket pitch believe that what happened here at Port Arthur was cruel, unjust, and unenlightened. Some, no doubt, are also inclined to regard most of the former convicts as the unfortunate victims of a misguided experiment in social engineering. Whatever iniquity might have characterized Port Arthur in the years it operated, I believe the consensus among visitors here today—as it might be among visitors to Choeung Ek, the killing field outside Phnom Penh—is that this extreme public violence toward people is no longer openly tolerated. Whatever its faults, civilization has advanced too far to allow it.
The Port Arthur Historic Site has been laid out to edify and reassure the visitor, to isolate its evils in a distant time. It is not set up as a caution to the visitor, nor meant to suggest the existence in the world of inhuman criminal intent or of punitive governments, or to remind the visitor of contemporary governments who regard those who protest their actions as “an affront to the Crown,” which was the case with the Irish Ribbonists and members of the Young Ireland movement who were punished here.
No connection is to be made at Port Arthur with Bashar al-Assad’s underground prisons in Damascus or of America’s off-site destinations for “terrorists.” Visitors to Port Arthur are meant to skate easily through and around all this darkness. Most are glad, one assumes, not to be forced to encounter any complexity or paradox here. They are, after all, many of them on holiday.
The poet and I stand about near the pitch, both of us looking slightly out of place. We do not speak to each other, though each has much to say about the situation—about the scourging ground, where the grass growing close around the whipping posts is so lush; about the intimidating presence of the commandant’s perfectly restored house, with its spacious veranda, its carefully manicured grounds. Fitful breezes off the water of Mason Cove rustle the dry leaves of massive eucalypts shading the commandant’s quarters, and the rising hush of this breeze tempers the shouts of the cricket players and the applause of the crowd.
MY COMPANION, Pete Hay, has been commissioned by the Tasmanian government to compose a long poem about Port Arthur, about the particulars of the experiments conducted here in penal discipline, the incidents of physical assault in the mining pits, the extent of sexual violence, the despair of adolescent victims of serial rape, and the furtive pickpockets, alert for any opportunity to advance their standing in the prison population at the expense of someone else.
The poet is a generous man. He has reams of notes, folders filled with research, the raw material from which he will fashion his poem; but he readily offers me a few of the discoveries he’s made. The poet is not an artist obsessed with ownership. He does not hide the knowledge he’s acquired. He’s eager to share. I liked him right away. When I spoke to him over the phone from my home in Oregon and told him of my interest in the prison, he volunteered to drive me there from Hobart and to guide me through the site.
From the picnic ground we walk off slowly to the southeast, away from the main compound. The poet says he has something to show me, a part of the penal colony closed to tourists but to which he has access because of his research needs, and because it is his intention to look squarely into the factors that complicate the history of this place.
We amble down a service road, enjoying the balmy March weather and exchanging views, like two people walking along the Malecón in Havana or the Marmara Denizi in Istanbul, where the aspect of an adjacent spacious sea encourages latitude in the conversation. I ask the poet who among Australian writers he most admires or enjoys, and he asks the same of me. Neither of us is looking for a critical appraisal. We’re feeling our way toward shared ground, so that our acquaintance might develop into a friendship.
We continue on to a locked gate, to which the poet has the key. Beyond it we pass through a copse of gums to emerge on a deserted field. A few buildings once stood here, says the poet, adjacent to a cliff which plunges straight down to the sea, a hundred or so feet below. The view west from this point of land jutting into Carnarvon Bay is toward the town of Port Arthur, and to the penitentiary grounds at Mason Cove. To the east are the waters of the northernmost arm of Maingon Bay, the bay a part of the Tasman Sea. From there, only the open ocean imposes between here and the George V Coast of Antarctica, 1,635 miles away over the southern horizon.
The poet begins his story. This is Point Puer, he says, the tip of a short peninsula that protects the prison compound from storms coming in off the Tasman Sea. And it is here, he says, that boys as young as eight, brought in on the transportation ships, served their time as adolescents inimical to the Crown or to the wealthier classes. The buildings here, set apart as they were, gave the boys some protection from pedophiles housed with the main prison population. The poet describes the general horrific atmosphere of sexual predation and debauchery at the prison. I stare at the ground. It’s covered with narrow leaves from the eucalypts, a carpet of fallen leaves, shed bark, and fallen seed capsules. I gaze out across the water at a ridge of mountains on a peninsula miles to the east. I nod stiffly, acknowledging the repugnance of the history, which the poet continues to present.
The poet takes no pleasure in setting out the graphic details. His intention is to establish a context for what he now has to say: it was from these cliffs that some of the boys jumped to their deaths, hand in hand. Pursued through the labyrinth of buildings in the main prison compound during the day, cornered in closets and storage rooms where they were overpowered and raped by sexual psychopaths, hounded and beaten at night by their dormitory guards, who enforced the boys’ adherence to a regimen of prayer, penance, and physical labor, some chose death. They slipped away from the dormitory at night and leapt into the darkness masking the water below. Some surely must have jumped during the day, says the poet, perhaps on a March afternoon like this one, when the warm air, soft breeze, and sun-spangled water embodied feelings of relief for them, of salvation. Running for the cliff edge, hand in hand, they ignored their warders’ counsel to resist the temptation to end one’s life in this hellhole, and sailed into the air.
With a gesture of my hand I stay the poet and walk away by myself to the clifftop, where I stand and watch the water below for a while and listen to the breeze in the eucalypts, the fondly remembered trees of my childhood. On the way back to where the poet waits, making notes, I pick up two dark eucalypt buttons and pocket them.
We quit the peninsula and return to the main prison complex. I do not tell the poet I understand why the boys held hands. If the poet had suggested to me that the suicides were unwarranted, I might have spoken up; but he seems aware of the human capacity to inflict humiliation and pain, and also of the depth of suffering some are forced to endure. Whatever he might have recalled of the forms of harm he’s come across in his research at Port Arthur, he offers me only a bare outline of the story, and acts as though he might have compromised himself by saying only that much. His physical gestures speak of his own grief and compassion, so I feel great affection for him and admire his decency.
We walk west along the sea-skirting road, past the commandant’s quarters and the site of the first prisoners’ barracks, to arrive at the flagellation yard, where Pete explains the procedure at this spot for any prisoner who broke the rules. Prisoners were secured to a triangle frame, arms straight overhead, hands tied at the apex, then the feet spread and tied. The customary lash was a flail, comprising nine lengths of knotted cord. The blows fell across the bare back from neck to waist. The usual sentence of twenty to forty lashes left the victim unconscious and the back a jellied mass of pulverized flesh.
I ASK PETE where we might get a map that shows the layout of the prison, one that might pinpoint where the original buildings once stood, and now that it’s a tourist destination, what changes have been made since the prison closed in 1877. He says we can get a map later, on the way out. Just now, however, he thinks we should continue on through the penitentiary complex, examine some of the cellblocks, and look at a few of the curated exhibits, including one featuring portraits of some of the more notorious prisoners. Just before we enter the old cell barracks, Pete points out the Broad Arrow Café on the far side of the cricket pitch. Later, he says, we’ll get a map there, as well as a bit of lunch. I can see Pete’s red Toyota Corona sitting by the café in the sunshine. Just beyond it is a yellow Volvo 244 with a surfboard strapped to the roof rack.
To get a full sense of what was once in operation here, says Pete, we need to visit the penitentiary itself and then walk through the Model Prison, and then afterward take in the prison museum, in the old hospital. With that sequence now organized in my head, I step into the partially restored ruins of the penitentiary building, three floors of cells in which the most dangerous prisoners were confined. The cells denied prisoners open space and forced them to comply with the prison’s daily routine. Stepping in and out of them is like swimming in and out of sleeping compartments on a sunken ship, the rooms emptied now of the bodies of the drowned.
What most transfixes me in the penitentiary building, however, is not this poignant austerity but instead a set of photographic enlargements hanging in one of the corridors, portraits of former inmates: the defiant faces of the insane, the duplicitous gaze of the pedophile, the vapid stare of the murderer.
The images call forth in me neither compassion nor condemnation, only astonishment. My intention had been to ferret out salient details of prison life here, but the day is hardly half over and I am thinking I’ve already seen enough.
Whatever was decent in men and women in England in 1786, it was not sufficiently strong to condemn this idea when it came before Parliament and to terminate the experiment before it began.
The two of us head for the Model Prison and the museum and then proceed to the Broad Arrow Café for lunch and to look for a map. I could not anticipate how vividly details of this café would remain in my imagination in the weeks and years to come.
MY FRIEND MARK TREDINNICK and I are following Annamaria Weldon, a woman from Malta, down the Old Coast Road, a hundred miles south of Perth on the west coast of Australia. We’re headed for Lake Clifton, one of the Yalgorup lakes, this one situated in the middle of a national park. We’re passing through an undulating landscape of sand dunes, of isolated stands of mallee forest and limestone outcrops, south of the city of Mandurah. The country hereabouts once belonged to Bindjareb Noongar people (or they to it). Some of them are still here, engaging chroniclers, articulate about the history and nature of their home landscape. They speak of it as you would a relative, a close companion or confidant, referencing a sphere of time inclusive of them and indistinguishable from this geography.
Annamaria, up ahead, has listened with the respect and curiosity of an ardent acolyte to the Bindjareb custodians of Noongar culture. She has tried out the templates of her own Mediterranean ideas on this land, and alongside that put in some twenty years of apprenticeship in the place, grappling with an epistemology different from her own, an Aboriginal way of knowing. The fulcrum of her imagining is the complex ways in which people are married to a place, whatever the tradition might be, whatever the place. And also her awareness of the threats to these marriages, from whatever quarter. Once she loved Malta, to the exclusion of all else I think. Now she is a student of Bindjareb love of place. She’s graceful, light on her feet, full of deep water, a person dedicated to something outside herself. Or so it appears to me.
I marvel at the way Annamaria and Mark pronounce “Bindjareb Noongar,” as easily as they might refer to “Italians”; and how they refer to other local cultural traditions as if they constituted a second subterranean culture, contiguous across Australia, from Anggamudi in the northeast to Wardandi in the Margaret River country, in the continent’s southwest, country toward which Mark and I are bound; from Wimambul in Kimberley, in the far north, to Tyerrernotepanner in Tasmania in the far south. An alternative tradition to the national Australian tradition.
A spur off the main highway takes us through a dying tuart forest. We move into thickets of swamp paperbark and peppermint willow, finally arriving at a spot where we park the cars. Annamaria leads us down a trail—there are a few acacias growing here, acquaintances I recall from Africa—and then there is Lake Clifton. We approach it on an elevated wooden boardwalk above a sedge flat that borders the water.
The summer sun is full upon us. The heat is terrific, but this apparition Annamaria has brought us to is so forceful, the discomfiting heat becomes incidental. The lake has the aura of an exalted being. Its presence is insistent, like that of a wolverine one has suddenly come upon, asleep in a forest clearing in North America. I cannot recall in the moment ever having seen a body of water as ethereal. It’s austere but benign, still as a mirror, its surface a color some painters call French gray, the reflection of a haze in the air above it.
In the beating heat and palpable stillness, the overpowering sight of the elongated lake, less than a mile across, undoes me. It’s bounded by greenish and gray-brown brush growing on long sand ridges that strike north and south. I identify the faint odor of rotting vegetation. For many minutes no one of the three of us says anything. A line of black swans passes by, bearing north over the water, and I become aware of voices piercing the silence suspended above the stillness—fairywrens. In the trees behind us. Southward along the lakeshore, red-necked avocets emerge from a deckled sheet of dunnish color at the water’s edge. Small clutches of hooded dotterel race the shore beyond them. Animated by the color of the sky sifted through a haze, the bowl of our space rounded by flocking birds and birdsong trembling in the heated air, all of this framed by earth-like colors, I grasp in its near fullness the lake Annamaria has brought us here to see.
A billion years or so after debris from a supernova started to coalesce into the rocky planet we now occupy, the possibility of lives like ours was set in motion by an as-yet-unidentified species of cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria oxygenated an atmosphere otherwise poisonous to the forms of life that were to come. A good guess, according to some, is that these bacteria built stony habitations for themselves in wet environments. Today these now abandoned habitations are called stromatolites. Stromatolites, which accrete in shallow waters in the same way coral reefs do, are related to structures called thrombolites. Together, these two structures set a benchmark in Precambrian time. It was modern-day thrombolites, still being built up by cyanobacteria in the near-shore waters of Lake Clifton, that Annamaria particularly wanted us to see.
This annunciation, Lake Clifton itself, was so overwhelming that for many minutes I didn’t notice the thrombolites. These pale hummocks of “living stone” in the lake are believed to be about four thousand years old. They stretch away from us in the near-shore water in both directions, looking like a scatter of white mushrooms at or just below the surface of the water. The circumference of each mound expands by about a millimeter (one twenty-fifth of an inch) per year. The cyanobacteria that create them are photosynthesizers, and it’s the residue from that process, a secretion rich in calcium carbonate, that comprises the thrombolites. The surface of each one is marked by whorls and cracks, patterns so distinctive that Annamaria can point out the difference between one structure and another. To my uneducated eye they seem identical. The rise and fall of lake water during wet and dry seasons makes the thrombolite reef more or less visible to a visitor, according to the season. The water is clear, however, so even when they’re fully submerged, the thrombolites closest to the visitor are still readily apparent. A line of sunken white pillows at the beach’s edge.
This freshwater reef is the largest such reef in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Australian government has designated it as critically endangered. Its future existence is threatened by a complex combination of natural and Anthropocene forces, principally real estate development and global climate disturbance.
Annamaria describes for us what it is like to see the lake and the thrombolites in full moonlight. She describes her encounters here over time with ibis and white-faced herons, with banded stilts and tawny frogmouths (all these creatures are birds). And she says the southern boobook owls and Carnaby’s black-cockatoos that once lived here, along with several others, aren’t around anymore.
The Bindjareb call the thrombolites woggaal noorook, “eggs laid in the Dreamtime by the female creation serpent.” A prominent mentor embedded in their mythology, this serpent is difficult to imagine separately from the Bindjareb’s home geography. She is an instructor, they say, who illuminates for them the threshold between the inanimate and animate worlds.
Leaving the lake, I thank Annamaria for her “translator’s introduction” to the Yalgorup country. How wonderful to imagine making your way across all of Australia with respectful guides like her.
MARK AND I SPEND a couple of days in the Margaret River country, around Yallingup on the Indian Ocean, and then return to Perth to meet up with a few others—a landscape painter, a photographer, another American writer, and two escorts who will lead us on an overland trip north to the Pilbara, a district in the northwest corner of the state of Western Australia. Here we will find the scale and intensity of iron-ore mining staggering; commercial mining’s insistence on its justified (and legal) place in the countryside intimidating; and the industry’s burgeoning growth regarded as inevitable by local whites.
In the Pilbara, the depauperate, bewildered, and disrupted original residents—Wajarri and Banyjima, remnant Jaburrara from the Burrup Peninsula, and Kariyarra—explain the deracination that has overtaken them by saying, “Natural resource extraction happened to us.” The more informed and sympathetic among mining company executives will say that the injustices and lack of charity that affect Aboriginal people in the Pilbara are occasionally deplorable; but the world—especially China—is hungry for more steel. And the fly-in/fly-out (Caucasian) workforce, with their homes and families set up in Bali or Perth, the people who actually extract the ore and haul it away, will simply shrug off the collateral damage to local people. They offer us a rationale they consider irrefutable—their astounding wages. “The money’s really good,” they say.
On the drive up to Perth, in anticipation of what we would be seeing in the Pilbara, I asked Mark to talk about his idea that geography exerts a powerful and unacknowledged influence on the human psyche. He believes it frames and encourages certain behaviors, human activities, and social arrangements, so much so that one is justified in speaking of a moral geography, a geography that over time inaugurates a social ethic among the people wedded to that place. I know this idea is bound to come up when we reach the Pilbara, between us at least, so I want a little bit of a head start in a discussion about land-based morality and the implacable force of the mining industry.
Annamaria had said to me, when I told her that in the moment I first saw Lake Clifton I had the feeling of stepping into a dream, that an Australian painter named Tom Carment had said once that he painted trees because he was interested “in the emotional content of the light around them.” I’m strongly drawn to the intelligence behind this statement, and aware that some industrialists consider Carment’s sentiment daft, even socially disruptive.
Mark and I met the others at Perth Airport, the photographer Paul Parin, the painter Larry Mitchell, both from the suburbs of Perth, the American writer Bill Fox, an expert on land art, and our escorts, Mags Webster and Carolyn Karnovsky. Mags and Carolyn are employed by FORM, a small nonprofit investing its energies in the creative work of artists in the Pilbara. FORM sponsors photography, painting, and writing workshops for local people, indigenous and non-indigenous, in the belief that an effective way to reduce tension in the Pilbara, generated largely by the social changes large-scale mining has brought to the area, is to encourage creative expression. FORM operates an art gallery in Roebourne and is heavily involved in collaborations with a number of communities trying to find a way out of the pattern of social destruction that industrialization has wrought here. FORM’s earnest partner in this search for another way of living in the Pilbara is BHP Billiton Iron Ore, one of the world’s largest mining companies and a principal investor in industrial infrastructure in the Pilbara.
The flight from Perth takes us to the mining town of Paraburdoo, where we rent two four-wheel-drive vehicles and head north to Tom Price, a mining town just west of Karijini National Park. It’s late February, coming to the end of summer, but the temperatures here are well over 100° F every day, and the humidity, I learn, will continue to increase the farther north we go. The ore ports at Dampier and Port Hedland on the Indian Ocean are our final destinations.
I had originally planned to drive up to the north coast of Australia by myself. I wanted to visit a square-kilometer array of radio telescopes near Murchison, several hundred miles north of Perth, where astrophysicists have entered into an agreement with local Watjarri people to build a huge phalanx of deep-space probes on traditional land. This technology was intended to locate dark matter and dark energy in the universe, partly to better understand the evolutionary dynamics that create galaxies. I’d spoken with a professor of physics at the University of Western Australia involved in the project and now wanted to speak to the Wajarri Yamatji, to hear their views about the importance and meaning of the array of equipment they’d permitted to be erected on their land.
Unfortunately, construction of the array had been delayed. It is not far enough along at this point for me to follow up on these plans before joining up with the others in Perth. I decide to come back to Murchison the following year, when I can walk with the Aboriginal owners through the radio-antenna farm and listen to what they think of a search for dark matter. What would be their metaphor, their simulacrum to make sense of the scientist’s quest? What sort of “white-fella walkabout” did they think was in play here?
Midway between Paraburdoo and Perth was a second place I wanted to see, a remote draw in the Jack Hills that had no name. At that time it sheltered the oldest known fragments of Earth, tiny zircon crystals dated to 4.27 billion years ago, about 250 million years after the formation of the planet. Shortly after the existence of the site was announced in scientific journals in the mid-1980s I made arrangements to travel there, a plan that eventually came to fruition. Now, some twenty years after my first visit, I was curious to see how the geography of the place might have changed, whether people had by now built a road into the area, or whether the manager of the sheep station on which the site was located had put up a locked gate to keep the curious at bay.
Once in Perth, however, I shelved these plans, too, and opted to travel to Paraburdoo with everyone else, a decision that gave me the afternoon at Lake Clifton with Annamaria and Mark and, later, time in the Margaret River country with Mark, an Australian author and poet living in New South Wales, on the opposite coast.
The seven of us were up and gone from Tom Price before sunrise, driving unpaved roads that took us into the heart of Karijini, a landscape that looked as if it were still damp from the creation. Paul had been all through this country before, photographing, and Larry had seen a good bit of it as well. We descended into and climbed out of deep desert canyons, narrow fissures in a rolling plain that rose to imposing heights in the Hamersley Range to the north and west of us, a brilliant magenta shield, dotted with white-barked gum trees and clumps of golden-colored spinifex grass. The crystalline air was shot through with birdcalls, and flocks of white little corellas and pink galahs passed so closely over us we could hear the creak of ligaments in their wings.
We swam in still pools of cool water and in slow-moving rivers in the bottoms of several of the gorges, out of the direct rays of the sun but with the brightness of its incident light ricocheting off walls of two-billion-year-old rock, walls in every shade of purple one might catalog, from damson to heliotrope, from hyacinth to raisin, each purple changing hue as the hours passed and as the sun’s reflected rays became direct, creating a harsher light.
In one canyon we hiked into, we stopped for a while where a narrow river bar had formed and several river red gums and weeping paperbarks had taken root. Jeweled geckos ran the vertical walls on either side of the canyon, great slabs of incinerated blacks and bronzed purples. As I lay back on cool, sandy soil, a flock of about twenty zebra finches passed across the narrow strip of blue above the canyon, small, brightly colored passerines with large bills and barred tails, quick as a school of mackerel. They were gone before their wooting cries reached the floor of the canyon where we lay.
Up on the plain, in great reaches of hummocky grassland to either side of the red-orange dirt tracks on which we drove, termite mounds rose higher than the tallest of us stood. Red kangaroos and common wallaroos, suddenly alert as our trucks rolled to a stop, bounded away, drawing the eye to bare escarpment walls rising to the base of the Hamersley Range. The traditional owners here are Banyjima, Yinhawangka, and Kurrama people. Their occupancy goes back more than 30,000 years. To an outlander, the countryside appears primordial; but it has been shaped by these peoples’ hunting and gathering strategies and by the fires they’ve deliberately set, pursuing their “fire-stick” style of farming.
Mags and Carolyn had wanted the five of us to see Karijini to establish a kind of baseline awareness of the country we would be traveling through, by comparison with which Karijini appears completely untouched. Leaving there, we swung north toward Dampier, situated at the far end of the Tom Price railway road, which parallels the tracks that convey the iron-ore trains out of the Hamersley Range toward the deep-water harbors at Dampier and Port Hedland. As we left the park—an open-pit iron-ore mine called Marandoo shares a boundary with Karijini on three of the mine’s four sides—the signs of human infrastructure quickly emerged from the otherwise apparently untenanted land. Fence lines, declaring exclusive ownership, and the many modern conduits for water, electricity, fuel, and information: power-line pylons, cellphone towers, and pipelines. Inscribed amid these was a maze of improved and primitive roads, from sealed bitumen two-lane highways to roads too dangerous, our maps warned, to attempt in a single vehicle. (In such spots a convoy is preferable, where mutual aid ensures some success, at least, in dealing with flash-flood washouts, drifting sand, and broken axles.) The maps also warned us away from areas closed to the public, abandoned mining towns like Wittenoom, where asbestos fibers still swirling in the air are too easily inhaled.
Loaded iron-ore trains gain on us and roll past as we drive north, trains too long for us to be able to see both ends in the same moment, each end lying as it does over the curve of the earth. The longest train ever documented passed this way in 1993. It consisted of 682 iron-ore cars, pushed from behind and pulled ahead by eight diesel-electric locomotives. It was nearly four and a half miles long and was carrying 110,000 tons of ore. During each twenty-four-hour cycle in the Pilbara, approximately eleven such trains arrive at Dampier and Port Hedland. Most are composed of more than three hundred cars, each bearing about 160 tons of pulverized ore. The dark umber mounds sitting inert in the cars, leveled off in the shape of neat trapezoids, follow each other like a series of mountain ranges.
At some point on the Tom Price road we cross a broad dry watercourse, its floodplain bounded on either side by a gallery forest of gum trees. On our right at that moment an ore train is passing. On our left a group of eight Aboriginal people are standing still in the riverbed, fixated on the train. Dressed in threadbare clothes, carrying cloth bundles holding their possessions, the group has the look of an extended family. For people whose psychological anchor in stressful times is in part the immediacy, the intimate closeness, of the physical country they were born to, and whose guiding stories are inextricably woven into that land, the passage of the train is traumatic. Its very presence signifies their loss of ownership and denial of access to their ancestors’ lands. This is an old story in Australia, in the Americas, on the Tibetan Plateau, and elsewhere. But now, before them in the cars, is the very country itself, being shipped off somewhere. For a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, it would be as if Jerusalem and the ground it stood on had been put through a rock crusher, and the gravel of the tombs, the temples, the churches, and the prayer walls had been hauled away by NASA to build dormitories on the moon.
We were enveloped regularly by dust storms as we drove the Tom Price. They forced us to slow down, in order to keep the near left edge of the dirt road in sight. These rolling storms of fine powder—of “bulldust”—arrived with, and then trailed far behind, a kind of vehicle I’ve not encountered anywhere else but in Australia’s parched outback. A road train, a conventional long-haul road tractor pulling a long string of trailers. Most of the trucks that pass us are hauling mining equipment—steel drums of engine lubricants and fuels, dry stores, pipe sections, machinery, and motorized vehicles—utility tractors, small pickup trucks, D4 bulldozers. The mixed load of material is chained down on flatbed trailers. As many as four of them might be lined out behind a tractor, each trailer riding on six axles (three forward, three aft), each axle supported by six tires, three to each side. Sometimes the cloud of dust that shrouds the road is being thrown up by more than a hundred and forty tires. The tractors, most of them sporting twin chromed smokestacks, are festooned with banks of driving lights and protected forward by a rampart of chromed steel bars called ’roo bars, mounted there to ensure that the impact of a large animal struck head-on won’t damage the radiator or slow down the tractor. Behind the tinted glass I could never quite catch the cast of the drivers’ clean-shaven faces, only the suggestion of the body’s determined lean, the glare of mirrored sunglasses, a sleeveless white shirt.
We stopped one afternoon for lunch at an oasis of shade trees and limpid cold flowing water called Millstream, once the headquarters of a homestead and now part of Millstream Chichester National Park. A pipeline originating here carries water sixty miles north to Dampier, that town today an entrepôt for the mining industry. Before that it had been a pearling center (until the pearls were gone), and before that a whaling town (until the whales were gone).
As we pulled into Dampier and drifted slowly down its streets toward our motel, I recognized the familiar trappings of towns I’d passed through in other places where the extraction of natural resources—fish, trees, coal, rare earths, oil, diamonds—fuels economic development. An isolated terminus erected on a pounded landscape. Someone here has planted but not regularly watered a few wilting saplings. In a weed lot, which seemingly belongs to no particular building, millions of dollars’ worth of derelict machinery sits rusting. The air is rank with hydrocarbon fumes and is headachy to breathe. Ramshackle houses abut tidy prefabricated warehouses. The parking lot at the motel is littered with cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, fast-food wrappers, glass shards, and bits of clothing. It gleams with spills of food grease and oil from dripping engines.
The air in the bar attached to the hotel is thick with cigarette smoke and hammered by thudding, raging music. Women in tight, skimpy clothes sashay past tables where knots of men fall silent, as if a shark were passing their life raft. The seven of us take our beers outside, onto a shaded patio, out of the air conditioning and into the night heat and humidity. A safer, less crowded, less desperate commons.
I feel a strange affection toward most of the men in the bar, that more than disdain. I can easily imagine anyone here might say, out of hearing of the others, that they feel trapped by the circumstances they find themselves in. Love gone sour at home, mortgages to be paid, college for the kids to save for so the kids don’t have to invest in some version of the treadmill work their dads are indentured to. You work every day, then search out an anesthesia that will bury the anger and ennui the work fills you with.
The deeper one pushes into the pall of violence and despair created among too many working people by the extractive industries that employ them—corporations off the leash of government restraints, their policies framed by a relentless quest for strong profit margins, all of it driven hard by men and women on trading floors in Hong Kong, New York, and Frankfurt—the more difficult it is to identify a villain in the fin-de-siècle morality play unfolding here.
The truth, one tends to think, is that all of us, drunk or sober, sedated or not, aggrieved or manic, live consciously or unconsciously within this maelstrom, which no one really wants to risk shutting down. Some of the men I sit with for a while at the bar in Dampier tell me they are making $250,000 a year working in the ore pits, two weeks on, two weeks off. They believe they will outdistance Death, and that those lying dead by the side of the road are just unlucky, no concern of theirs. They’re happy with what the job provides, and they are confident that anyone who wouldn’t trade places with them is simply dense. When they head for the men’s room, they walk with a swagger I’m guessing they learned from watching cowboy movies. They sit at the barstools with that same swagger. They remind me of the two men who compete in a footrace in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “El Fin.” The men, racing furiously side by side, are both beheaded in the same instant. The money down is on which body will run the farthest before collapsing.
THE FIRST MORNING in Dampier, our escorts from FORM have arranged for us to see the Burrup Peninsula. A mammoth desalinization plant has been built here alongside a petrochemical plant, which is the terminus for a natural gas pipeline laid out on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Plans for a nitrate plant, working in tandem with the petrochemical plant—which uses salt from the desalinization plant, combined with ammonia, to produce chlorine gas—will produce explosives to clear more land on the peninsula for additional plants and industrial infrastructure. The industrial development is considered economically feasible because funds from iron-ore mining are expected to last at least another forty years. (On the day after we arrive in Dampier, the local paper carries a story about a new billion-ton iron-ore deposit located recently just south of the Pilbara.)
The people with FORM have no agenda for us. Their sole interest, it seems, is in gaining our impressions of the Pilbara as writers and artists, and in the publication of all this—our photographs, words, and paintings—to advance their primary goal of promoting a better conversation about the fate of the Pilbara and its people. They want something more enlightening than a fistfight between a drunken Aboriginal and a drunken truck driver in one of the Dampier bars about what’s at stake, what’s being lost and gained. They want a better conversation than a shouting match with a middle-management executive at BHP Billiton.
It’s hard to understand how anyone can look at what’s happened to Aboriginals and their culture on the Burrup Peninsula and simply turn away, as if this cultural detonation is not happening. To merely bring up the subject of slavery or genocide, which underlie the varnished history of so many nations, mine included, is apparently to offer a calumny of some sort. The Burrup Peninsula, many academics maintain, was once the geographic center of the greatest array of rock art ever created. Thousands upon thousands of depictions of animals, of humans interacting, of spiritual drama and historical events once existed here. It was a Musée d’Orsay of petroglyphs and pictographs.
That morning in Dampier we were taken to see the fraction of what is left of this extensive outdoor gallery. Mark and I climbed a slope of boulders beneath a cliff face to get a close look at a four- or five-thousand-year-old pictograph of a now-extinct marsupial called a thylacine, and another of a second extinct animal, the flat-tailed kangaroo. All about us were dozens of other ancient glyphs. For diversity of imagery and density of depictions, the area has, arguably, no equal in the world.
In order to clear land for the nitrate plant, developers began removing hundreds of pieces of rock art with bulldozers, perhaps with the exculpating belief that a great deal of Aboriginal art would still remain intact elsewhere on the peninsula. When the traditional owners of this site, the Jaburarra, learned they couldn’t stop the bulldozers, they asked that, at the very least, the rock art not be crushed for use as foundation material. Might the rocks, instead, be moved to a kind of “graveyard,” to be surrounded by a cyclone fence, so that the artwork might in this way be cared for? They were told their wishes would be accommodated.
On a peninsula jutting out into the Indian Ocean, a place where the first white settlers repeatedly poisoned the Jaburrara’s water holes with arsenic and where, when that didn’t kill enough of them, they just started shooting the people, developers broke down 25,000 years’ worth of rock art and dumped it like so much construction debris in a single spot, which they surrounded with a cyclone fence. Like a quarantine station. The Jaburrara were left to sort the jumble out any way they could. The flayed walls of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet, dumped in a barrow ditch.
The Jaburrara sorted it out. Some of the pieces were too large for them to reposition without heavy equipment, which they did not have access to. Images that were not meant to be seen by Jaburrara women, or not meant to be seen by male Jaburrara, were placed facedown. Images of lovemaking, which the construction crews ridiculed and lampooned as “Abo porn,” were wrestled over so they could not be seen. Images of beings who should not be forced to stare at the nitrate plant were turned to face elsewhere.
Our party was escorted by two local guides, one Aboriginal, one white. Sparks flew between them periodically, for example when the white man began interpreting the meaning behind some of the glyphs and the Aboriginal man, very disturbed by this, all but shouted at him, “They can’t be interpreted!” In the tension that persisted between the two throughout the afternoon, we saw the age-old collision of “scholarship,” on the one hand, and deference to mystery on the other. Without room for mystery and uncertainty, the Aboriginal man felt, there cannot be any truly intelligent conversation.
Paul wanted to climb a nearby rise to photograph the rock art graveyard from that height, and I accompanied him to gain the same perspective. “Mind the adders,” cautioned one of the guides, reminding us the loose rock and heavy grass here was a preferred habitat for Acanthophis antarcticus, the common death adder.
The cyclone fence around the catastrophic jumble of rock art sagged in several places where local white children, we were told, had scaled it to get inside the compound, in order to see the “dirty” Aboriginal art. Perhaps these were the same local children who had scaled the rock faces we’d clambered over that morning to paint their names and dates among the glyphs.
THE DAY FOLLOWING, we drove east through Roebourne, where we visited with Aboriginal artists at a center run by FORM. Many of them were working in the well-known dot style peculiar to generic Aboriginal art; but others were experimenting, painting in different, mostly modern styles. Some paintings were so accomplished, and so evidently of the landscape we’d been traveling through for several days, they were spellbinding. A few appeared to be from the artist’s memory of a place that had once existed here, before roadways, industrial infrastructure, and permanent settlements had altered the view.
From Roebourne we proceeded to Port Hedland. In terms of tonnage of material exported, Port Hedland qualifies as the largest port in Australia. As we approached on the North West Coastal Highway, Mark, staring at it, spoke one word quietly: Mordor.
It did look like some version of Tolkien’s hellish fortress. In suspension above the town was an enormous cloud of orange dust, rising up from machinery that inverted ore cars to empty them onto one end of a conveyor belt. At the other end of the conveyor belt, the dust rose up again from the bulk loading of ore ships. Off to our right as we entered the town were gargantuan piles of white salt from a desalinization plant. The ground on either side of the road approaching Port Hedland was denuded and scarred by errant vehicles in a headlong rush, each driver bent on an errand of some sort, the lot of them raising a second layer of dust into the air. In my hotel room a placard warned not to drink the tap water, which is contaminated with heavy metals, and for the same reason, to limit myself to a single brief shower once a week.
Mark’s image of Mordor—the natural end, as Tolkien saw it, of the road to worldwide industrialization—was a bit of a stretch for me; but Tolkien’s evocation of the heathen brutality inherent in industrial development, and of the tyrannical rule of the psychopath Sauron, a figure of puerile greed and the pursuit of power for its own sake, was a characterization of scenes like this that I could not shake. Mordor is one of the most dehumanized landscapes in all of English literature. Once you’ve slipped behind the curtain in Port Hedland—the well-kept lawns, the fine restaurant, the comfortable motel we stayed in—the town seemed not only to be the future that many dread but also to represent the marriage of ruthless desire and short-term gain that has laid waste to villages all over the world.
The seductive power of this system of exploitation—tearing things out of the earth, sneering at the least objection, as though it were hopelessly unenlightened, characterizing other people as vermin in the struggle for market share, navigating without an ethical compass—traps people in a thousand exploited settlements in denial, in regret, in loneliness. If you empathize with the Jaburrara over their losses, you must sympathize with every person caught up in the undertow of this nightmare, this delusion that a for-profit life is the only reasonable calling for a modern individual.
The last evening we were together on our trip, our FORM escorts arranged for us to tour the Port Hedland harbor with the harbor master. Home construction in Port Hedland, we had already learned, is not able to keep pace with the expanding workforce needed here, where every hour of every day is a work hour. The harbor master is going to show us areas of the port, we’re told, that are closed to other visitors. (An underwater fence in the inner harbor protects workers from sharks and poisonous sea snakes; on days when the heat here is stifling, the men jump into the water to cool off.)
Iron ore, the “red gold” of Western Australia, is the state’s—and the country’s—most lucrative export. The Pilbara iron deposits were discovered in 1952. In 2009, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, another giant of worldwide industrial mining, shipped 330 million tons of iron ore from this port, most of it to China. Despite the magnitude of this project, relatively few people are employed in the loading operations. Automated machinery and software programming, which create efficiency, substitute for a labor force. (During our two-hour tour of the harbor, I see only one person, a deckhand smoking a cigarette and watching us from the shadows of his ship’s superstructure.)
The ore arrives from the mines on the south side of Port Hedland. The load from each car moves several miles on conveyor belts to the docks. A gantry system there directs the ore into the ships’ holds at the rate of 140 tons per minute. Each vessel loads 200,000 tons or more in about twenty-four hours. As we motor through the harbor, six ships are being loaded and five wait at anchor in the outer harbor. The average draft of an empty ore ship is twenty-five feet; of a fully loaded ship, fifty-five feet. In the process of being loaded while we cruise the harbor are the KWK Exemplar from Hong Kong, the Mineral Shikoku, the Silver Bell from South Korea, the Spar Leo from Norway, the Onga, registered in Panama but, like many of the others, headed for Asia. Emblazoned across the headwall of the Mariloula’s superstructure, in letters nine feet tall, are the words PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT.
THE TOUR THROUGH the Pilbara has been tempering for me. Like many others, I hope to stay abreast of the scale of economic and social change in the world, and to be aware of the rate at which things are changing; but the scale and the speed of the changes is frequently beyond anyone’s grasp. Too much of what we expect to see appearing on the horizon with sufficient time to take preventive action has already become a part of our lives, entrenched before we notice that anything has happened.
When we returned to our rooms after the tour of the harbor, I sat out on the veranda that my room shared with several other rooms and watched the last of the sun’s light lose color on the ocean in the direction of the Burrup Peninsula. My appreciation of rock art aesthetics is not great, but the art vividly represents for me the long effort humans have made to understand the world they were living in at the time. Most of the petroglyphs and pictographs that I’ve seen evince, for me, both a sense of wonder about the nature of the world and, more subtly, an understanding that human beings do not control their own fate, that in some fundamental way humans are powerless to do so. From this, perhaps, springs both the notion of the existence of influential gods, beings to whom one can appeal, and a contrary notion, that a person is able to control his or her own destiny and, in some cases, the destiny of others.
Many people regard rock art as “primitive,” meaning the techniques are not refined and the ideas behind the art are unsophisticated. From there it’s a short step to believing that “primitive” man’s sense that his powers were limited and his fate beyond his control are fears made obsolete by sophisticated technologies. The vast majority of people in the world, however, find every day, sometimes in harrowing ways, that their fate is not theirs to control. A relative handful of people, primarily in business, engineer the plans for social and economic change that determine the fate of most ordinary people.
In my experience, even the most decent people in positions of power believe that ultimately they know best, that their experience, education, intuition, and instincts have made them authoritative. I am forced to object, with my memories of the slums of Jaipur and São Paulo, of ravaged landscapes in the Texas oil fields around Midland or of carbonized air in Beijing, and the sea ice gone from Arctic seas in late summer, to say that perhaps they do not know best.
Once, years before I traveled to the Pilbara, I had the opportunity to accompany a guide through the Paleolithic art galleries at Altamira, a cave in northern Spain. For half a day I had these galleries to myself, time to linger with Magdalenian Cro-Magnon imaginations. When I emerged from this prolonged encounter with their work, I was so acutely aware of the humanity of these people—their capacity for courage, for love, for innovation, for amazement; their ability to provide for one another here on the Cantabrian coast, 14,000 years ago—so awed I lost my orientation in time. From the edge of a cliff just past the entrance to the cave, I stared down into the gardens and stock pens of domesticated animals that belonged to those living there in two-story stucco houses, a semi-rural neighborhood of Santillana del Mar. Between the lives of the artists working in the cave and these people with their small plots of land—the rows of corn, chicken yards, milch goats, grape arbors, and fruit trees—there seemed to be no time at all. I indulged myself with the thought that both groups wanted the same—a feeling of allegiance with one another, relationships that were just, openness to the numinous character of their worlds, from time to time a quickened heart, and the ability to give as well as receive love.
These thoughts about Altamira, which came to me on the veranda that evening, gazing out toward the ruined galleries of the Burrup Peninsula, led me to think of my stepfamily. Their ancestral home sat on a hill above the town of Cudillero, a hundred and twenty miles up the coast from Altamira, to the west. Their casa del Indio, with its formal chapel, its extensive arbors and gardens secured behind high walls and a massive set of gates, always spoke to me of inordinate wealth and aloofness. I did not feel superior to those people and their families. Their God approved of their murdering los indios in the Americas, and their wealth made them seem good in the eyes of those who believed as they did; but I wanted a different path, one less violent, less indifferent. As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?
WHILE WE WERE VISITING the Aboriginal center at Roebourne, I met a woman named Loreen Samson, a thirty-seven-year-old Aboriginal artist and perhaps the most accomplished painter at the center. She had faced a certain amount of personal hardship earlier in life, I was told, but her focus was now elsewhere—on the goals FORM helped her set for herself. She told me she wanted to use her creative energies to open people’s imaginations to better ways of responding to conditions in the Pilbara. She did not want more despair or anger, or to encourage the feeling that the people here were trapped. She taught art as a way of seeing, of being in the world. She was an instructor at both the Roebourne art center and at the Roebourne Regional Prison, where between 90 and 95 percent of the male inmates are Aboriginal.
Loreen had prepared written statements to accompany eight or ten of her landscapes, some of which hung on the walls at the art center. They were not explanations of the work but continuations of the paintings, set out in idiosyncratically punctuated sentences with misspelled words, her syntax the syntax of spoken rather than written English. Bill Fox and I sat in an annex of the studio where Loreen and four or five other Aboriginal women were working, reading half a dozen of her statements, handing them back and forth to each other.
She wrote in one statement:
Every day I see my Dream Times grounds are drifting away from me. I cry out too stop[,] you are taking away the heart of my people. This lands is what we have[,] the grounds of knowledge for you and me too learn each other about culture. Our children would come and teach their kids of the great lands of knowledge. It hurt me of what I see now[.] We don’t have any solid ground to stand on just the tears that come down from my eyes[,] of shame of what our people have done for the prices of dollars. Look at this land[.] Now trains go by night and day with the richness of this wise old country […] Look around[,] that what have mining done to it will hurt people [who] shouldn’t [have] aloud mining [to] destroy the land of [the] knowledge that our ancestor put on rock art many years ago.
THE EVIL BEHIND colonial subjugations, from Portugal’s Brazil to France’s Algeria, has generated a wealth of contemporary anti-colonial writing, criticizing the quests for material wealth and economic control. In the New World, the criticism might be said to have begun with Bartolomé de las Casas and to have come forward to Eduardo Galeano and writers like Jhumpa Lahiri. The centuries of moral and ethical outrage over the colonial politics of race, over ethnic and national exceptionalism, have recently produced eloquent critiques of cultural ignorance and indifference to human life, both of which lie at the core of colonial expansion. These critiques of exploitation and profiteering have continually been deemphasized as international concerns because their logic makes people in power uncomfortable.
As much as anti-colonial literature looks back on colonial history’s injustices, it also looks forward today to what is arguably a far more important question: What are we to do? Or put another way: What is going to happen to us as temperatures change, as our numbers climb toward eight billion, as the Pacific becomes more acidic, and as more freshwater goes into making jet fuel from Canada’s tar sands?
While “turbocharged” capitalism is routinely singled out as the villainous cause of so much of what is socially and environmentally evil, eliminating hypercapitalism doesn’t seem to answer the central question, which is: Why do we harm one another so grievously? Or to phrase this differently, What is the root of our fundamental disagreement, now that the size of our population and the scarcity of essential supplies like uncontaminated freshwater have come into play?
As I read anti-colonial literature from different parts of the world, in English and in translation, what I’ve come to feel is that a disagreement over which path leads to the more desirable future is a disagreement about the place of empathy in public and corporate life. On the one hand are the ideals, unfortunately, of capitalism: progress, profitability, ownership, control of the marketplace, consumption. On the other hand are the ideals not of a system of economics but a system of social organization best represented in modern times by a group of flawed individuals who nevertheless became the iconic representatives of tolerance, respect for beauty, a preference for reconciliation over warfare, and compassion: the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the 14th Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Óscar Romero.
The question the latter group consistently addressed was, Why is there so much suffering in the world? Each person in their way tried to do something about suffering created by intolerance, injustice, and ethnic and national exceptionalism. This has always been a hard road to keep. It is not that most people don’t support such ideals but that the implementation of the ideals is so extremely difficult that it makes people cynical. Reflecting on the social, economic, and environmental harm that fracking engenders, or on Russia’s aggressive efforts to regain its stature as a world power, one must consider whether allowing human misery to develop further in order to gain some sort of short-term economic or political advantage isn’t an incurable, systematic problem. Perhaps the actual source of humanity’s trouble is genetic. Meanwhile, attempts to address these questions continue to be ridiculed, held in suspicion, or patronizingly dismissed by many people who have the power to make a major difference in the way disenfranchised people live.
Apparently it’s regrettable but finally all right to let thousands starve in order to ensure that a few have the yachts they require. Apparently it’s all right for thousands to die of lung cancer and for tobacco companies to withhold the evidence that would incriminate them, as long as the companies can show a profit. Apparently it’s all right for China to dam a tributary of the Brahmaputra River and endanger the flow of freshwater to Bangladesh if this will help develop a wealthy middle class in China.
WHEN I FIRST began traveling in Australia in the 1980s—not that Australia stood at the nexus of any particular world problem then; it was just that at this time I began to see more clearly the outline of what disturbed me—I was trying to understand a question about human fate. With the horsemen of a coming apocalypse so obviously milling on the horizon, riding high-strung horses, why was there so little effort to bring other ways of knowing—fresh metaphors—to the table? Why was it that, for the most part, it was only the well-groomed, the formally educated, the economically solvent, the white, the well-connected that were invited to sit at the tables of decision, where the fate of so many will be decided? Why, for example, were there no elders invited from indigenous traditions like the Sami, the Mapuche, the Onondaga, the Iñupiat, the Nuer, the Kuku Yalanji? These were people who valued wisdom as much as or more than intelligence, whose traditional concerns lay with the fate of the group, not the self. Were they not worldly enough? Were they too obscure?
I went to Darwin once, a coastal city in Australia’s Northern Territory, to listen to an assembly of anthropologists present papers, mostly to one another. These men and women were studying the last few remnant hunting and gathering cultures in the world—Hadza in Tanzania, for example, and Inughuit in Western Greenland. They get together regularly to share what they know. (The more humble say what they think they know.) Over a period of three days I listened to about sixty presentations. When I left, I felt informed by many specificities, and warned again of how perilous it can be to try to collapse any single complex idea, like feeding the members of your family, into one sentence that will serve everyone.
Among those I met at the international meetings in Darwin were a few Australian anthropologists with whom I later became friends. Eventually I returned to the Northern Territory to travel with them. They introduced me to Warlpiri, Arrernte, Pintupi, Luritja, and Pitjantjatjara peoples and their not-entirely-congruent ideas about the world and reality. I appreciated and savored the experiences we shared, but I never felt, as I’d never felt among Eskimo people or Native Americans on my home continent, that I wanted to trade places. What I wanted to understand, really, was what they might know that would be of use to my own people, whom I saw traveling very fast on a spavined road. I was looking for anyone who could speak the language of the god of no particular religion.
I returned to Australia a year later to dive on the Great Barrier Reef, to immerse myself in the mostly benign waters there, the blazing colors of tropical fish, the transparency of the water, and the expanse of the coral reefs, in order to remind myself that no matter how steep the spiral of despair might become, beauty without design, without restraint, was all around. You only had to step into these realms—Alexandra Fjord lowland, Roca Redonda, Victoria Falls in the moonlight—to remind yourself of the possibilities, of the things you too rarely thought of. Then you go back to the world of people who are not able to travel to Lake Clifton, to watch unsuspecting caribou through the clear air of a High Arctic summer evening, to behold the panoply of life flickering, like thousands of small colored lights, in an anodyne basin of tropical water.
You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home. That what you’ve found are not your things but our things.
WHEN I RECEIVED an invitation to speak at a literary festival in Hobart and was told that my escort for those days would be a Mr. Peter Hay, I began reading Mr. Hay’s poetry. I admired the integrity of his lines and was charmed by some of his Tasmanian locutions. When I reached him by phone and asked about going to Port Arthur together, I told him I was trying to understand why those in power so often seek to humiliate and punish those who disagree with them. Or perhaps I only wanted to look at the evidence of an episode in Western history that’s too little known in my country. And to consider how class distinctions, the harsh divide between the rich and the poor, for example, lead people to believe that “solutions” like Port Arthur are both just and sane. He said whatever I might make of Port Arthur, grasping the essence of the place would help me greatly in understanding what it means to be Australian.
I could never hope to understand what it meant to be Australian, but appreciated the latitude he seemed to be giving me to think about it. To be freighted off to Port Arthur in the eighteenth century was more than to be banished. It was to be seriously punished—and, it was hoped, to thereby be reformed. Parliament believed it could create at Port Arthur a valued and self-sustaining commercial trading enterprise, and that the penal colony could be profitably operated. It proposed reforming the “dregs” of its own society to run the place, and to achieve that reform through public whippings, long periods of solitary confinement, hard labor, and instruction in Christian living. The notion, of course, was daft, but Parliament thought it could work. Whatever happened, the experiment would cost Parliament very little, if you just ran the numbers with the right attitude and kept the details quiet.
This is an old story. It’s unfolded in many places, under many guises.
So one April morning I went with Pete Hay to Port Arthur to take in the aftermath of the experiment. We drove down from Hobart to Eaglehawk Neck, a narrow isthmus that connects the Forestier Peninsula to the Tasman Peninsula. From there it was just a matter of twelve miles to the historic site.
Eaglehawk Neck gives you a good sense and a quick read of the place. In the years the colony was in operation, the authorities maintained a picket line of dogs here to attack and savage any convict attempting to escape to the north. (Fewer than half the convicts at Port Arthur were held in cells. The others, encouraged to ascend the ladder of “good attitude and good works,” were permitted to roam freely over the peninsula, logging trees, digging coal, building a railroad, constructing buildings, and competing with one another through their endeavors for privileged positions in the penal hierarchy.) Writing in 1837, the artist Harden Melville said of the picket-line dogs, “The white, the brindle[d], the grey, and the grisley, the rough and the smooth, the crop-eared and the long-eared, the gaunt and the grim [stood chained to wood platforms erected across the isthmus and its salt marshes]. Every four-footed, black fanger individual among them would have taken first prize for ugliness and ferocity at any show.”
Mostly ill-tempered to start with, the Eaglehawk dogs were spaced so that two dogs might attack a man together but not get their chains crossed. Their handlers abused them to keep them vicious and edgy, depriving them of food, water, and affection, no doubt making them all the crazier by this treatment. When they wore out, they were shot.
Prisoners confined at Port Arthur were generally held to be “ignorant, stupid, revengeful, hardened, sullen, cunning, thievish, restless, disobedient, and idle.” To improve the character of each man, to make him “clever, informed, cheerful, contented, simple, cleanly, obedient, industrious, and faithful,” the prison staff implemented a plan for the reform of its incarcerated prisoners based on a system employed at Britain’s Pentonville prison, in London. Each inmate in Port Arthur’s Model Prison was isolated in solitary confinement. They were not allowed to speak, to make eye contact with the guards or, indeed, to make any audible sound. All prisoners and guards were required to wear slippers to muffle their footsteps. Attendance at religious services was mandatory, with each prisoner quartered in his own small closet within the chapel. One hour of daily exercise was permitted, but prisoners were roped together in the prison yard in such a way that no prisoner could draw closer than five yards to another. All inmates were required to wear visored hats, the visor to be lowered upon leaving the cell, to prevent anyone’s seeing anyone else’s face. It was believed that anonymity, depersonalization, and silence would provide the right environment for the “divine spark” of enlightenment to ignite in each man the desire to see and accept the road to personal reformation.
Historians believe the decision later to build an asylum on the prison grounds came in response to the number of inmates driven to insanity by residence in the Model Prison. At the end of its years of official usefulness, in 1877, Port Arthur housed mostly the mentally ill, paupers, and the indigent, men who had served their time but who had no family and nowhere else to go.
The question that begs to be addressed at Port Arthur is not about the reasons for the sentence of banishment from England—for the psychopathic child rapist, for the too-assertive Quaker, for the nine-year-old petty thief—but the reasons for so severely punishing these people.
In eighteenth-century England, banishment was a tool of large-scale social engineering. The “nether region” to which the Crown first sent its banished was the American colonies; more than 50,000 prisoners were transported there before the American Revolution ended this option. Prisoners were then warehoused in derelict ships moored in the Thames. When the English courts ran out of space there, the transportation system was inaugurated, which initially transferred prisoners to the southeast coast of Australia. The First Fleet, carrying 759 prisoners, sailed from Portsmouth for Port Jackson, just north of Botany Bay, in 1787. (By the 1860s, Great Britain was operating thirty-five such penal colonies, from Corradino in Malta to Glendairy in Barbados to Port Arthur in Tasmania.)
The overarching idea behind promoting the transportation system was that these penal outposts might function as self-sustaining colonies and provide some income to the Crown. While the incorrigible were to be isolated there in actual penitentiary buildings, and while these settlements were expected to accommodate experiments in reformation like the Model Prison, they were also meant to serve a strategic purpose. Prisoners were to be taught trades—blacksmithing, coopering, printing, tailoring, carpentry, and husbandry. They were to sink wells for water, raise their own food, and build a transportation infrastructure on the peninsula. Selected prisoners, both female and male, were to be transported with their families; others were instructed to marry after serving their terms, to have children, and to take up in these regions the duties of the servant and working classes. They were also expected to provide assistance to a separate group of volunteer emigrants, people of “good character” and from the educated classes, who were to be employed as administrators in the penal colonies, developing lumbering and mining operations, constructing shipping facilities, and establishing an export infrastructure. Together, reformed convicts and volunteer emigrants were to extend civilization into the outlands surrounding the penal colony and to cultivate and improve those lands.
While this stratagem struck many as an ingenious and efficient way to establish civilized life in a “terra nullius” like Australia (land that, legally speaking, belonged to no one), it couldn’t be expected that all prisoners would grasp the wisdom behind the plan. Enlightening them would in all likelihood require a certain amount of discipline, to ensure conformity with the vision. Britain drew on yet another class of citizens, men with a taste for administering the necessary beatings, scourgings, and humiliations, to take on this task.
The transportation plan was arrogant, immoral, and foolish, and its many injustices sparked nearly constant rebellion in the prison system. One reason some Australians identify today with well-known rebels in the transport prisons, many of whom were in fact criminals, was that these individuals attempted to defy a brutal system of class distinctions. They attacked the presumptions of those who chose to assign every person a state in life, to dictate the shape of each person’s future. Although the settings and circumstances were different, the prisoners’ yearning to be free of these presumptions was fueled by the same feelings of outrage that precipitated both the American and the French Revolutions.
Among the most remarkable—and for some, heroic—of those in the prison system who refused to be yoked was a “clever, informed, industrious” woman named Mary Bryant. Her defiance and her determination to escape along with her family from the grip of those who sought to make her submit, symbolize, for many modern-day Australians, the will to establish one’s own way in an unjust world.
MARY BRYANT (NÉE BROAD) was convicted of assaulting an older woman and taking her purse. Initially sentenced to death by hanging, she was subsequently transported to Port Jackson, where she met William Bryant, a fellow convict and her future husband. The living conditions for everyone at Port Jackson—prisoners, guards, immigrant British citizens, and assorted functionaries and administrators—were miserable. (In making his recommendation for the southeast coast of Australia as a site for a transport prison, Sir Joseph Banks, perhaps waxing nostalgic, gave Parliament the impression that the country was well watered and suited to growing crops, which it was not.) The Bryants and their two young children, Emanuel and Charlotte, experienced the worst of conditions there, with rationed food, insufficient water, and the burden of onerous labor. On the night of September 26, 1790, five convicts unaffiliated with the Bryants managed to steal a boat and equip it for travel. They were caught the same night attempting to put to sea and were savagely punished in front of the other prisoners. Their effort resonated, however, with the Bryants and with a few of the Bryants’ friends.
The authorities suspected the Bryants might be planning some sort of escape, but for unknown reasons, no one kept very close watch on the couple. Will Bryant succeeded in stealing a coastal chart (based on Cook’s 2,000-mile survey from 1770) and was able to acquire a compass. Mary secretly stockpiled food and water and, with her husband, began inviting a few convicts with crewing skills and navigation experience to join them.
On a moonless evening in March 1791, members of the group stole a cutter belonging to the governor of the colony. It had recently been rigged with a new mast and sails, and fitted with six new oars. The historian C. H. Currey writes, “The cutter breasted the Pacific in the early hours of Tuesday, 29th March 1791,” and then, very quickly, they were gone—the Bryants, their two children, and seven other convicts, some serving life sentences. After a harrowing journey up the east coast, facing storms and shortages of food and water, and after clearing the Great Barrier Reef and doubling Cape York, they sailed 1,200 miles across the little-known Arafura Sea to arrive, sixty-nine days later, in Kupang, a relatively large city and Dutch entrepôt at the west end of Timor. According to Currey, their escape and 3,254-mile journey was “a masterpiece of organization and cooperative effort.”
The Bryants were inspired to make for Kupang by a group of Englishmen who’d sailed for there from Port Jackson two years previously—and who, they’d heard, had made it: Lieutenant William Bligh and the eighteen crewmen who had remained loyal to him after mutineers forced Bligh to relinquish command of his ship, HMS Bounty, in the Tongan Islands. When Bligh, who had a terrific temper, reached England, he had a ship, HMS Pandora, under the command of Edward Edwards sent out to track down the mutineers. Sixteen of them had disembarked from the Bounty in Tahiti and had made homes there while their leader, Fletcher Christian, had sailed away with eight others. The crew of the Pandora captured fourteen of the sixteen on Tahiti but could not find the other two. On the return voyage to England, the Pandora had its hull torn open by coral spikes as it attempted to cross the Great Barrier Reef. Most of the mutineers, caged and shackled in the ship’s hold, would have perished had it not been for the efforts of the Pandora’s crew, who defied their captain’s order to let the men drown. (Despite the crew’s efforts, four of them did drown.)
After the ship sank, its officers, the survivors among its crew, and the remaining prisoners made their own remarkable journey across the Arafura Sea in four lifeboats. When Edwards arrived in Kupang and encountered the Bryants, he became suspicious. He informed the authorities that the Bryants and their friends were not the shipwrecked survivors that they claimed to be but escaped convicts. Determined to bring them to justice, along with the Bounty’s mutineers, Edwards hired a Dutch vessel, the Rembang, and on October 5, 1791, sailed for England with them, the mutineers, and those of his crew who’d survived the sinking of the Pandora. En route to Jakarta (Batavia at the time), the Rembang nearly foundered in a typhoon. Had it not been for the courage and skill of the Australian convicts, Currey contends, the ship would have sunk. The heat, humidity, and pestiferous conditions at Jakarta—malaria, dysentery, typhus—had taken the lives of four of the Bounty mutineers and four of the Port Jackson convicts, including Will Bryant and the Bryants’ son, Emanuel, not yet two years old.
Edwards, abandoning the damaged Rembang, put those who remained aboard four other ships and continued his journey across the Indian Ocean for the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa. One of the four, the Horssen, with Mary and her daughter aboard, encountered another typhoon, and another of the convicts was swept into the sea. Arriving in Cape Town on March 18, 1792, Mary, her daughter, Charlotte, not yet six, and the four surviving convicts were transferred to HMS Gorgon. According to Watkin Tench, a historian who sailed with Mary Bryant and the others from Batavia, Mary was greatly, but discreetly, admired by passengers aboard the Gorgon. She was twenty-seven at the time. “I never looked at [her] without pity and astonishment,” wrote Tench. “They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty.” The six of them were regarded, wrote Tench, as people who had manufactured their own dignity. He thought they should be set free once in England, not forced to stand trial as escaped convicts and sent back to Port Jackson.
The punishment for escape from a transport prison, Tench knew, was imprisonment for life. Mary Bryant, whose daughter died shortly after the Gorgon left Cape Town, was eventually set free by the court. Numerous people, including the biographer James Boswell, supported her release, citing her courage, the inhumanity of the transportation system, and her personal bearing.
ONE OF THE REASONS Port Arthur stands out so prominently among the images many Australians have of themselves, I believe, and why a rebellious figure like Mary Bryant is appealing to so many is that a significant number of Australians have ambivalent feelings about their country’s origins, lying as they do with the penal colonies and, later, with the violent usurpation of Aboriginal lands. Some Australians would just as soon Port Arthur remained obscure in the national memory, and that any mention of one’s “convict ancestors” be left to Australia’s working class to ponder. Just as many, probably, appreciate knowing the truth about the transportation system and about the lethal violence directed, historically, against Aboriginals. One occasionally hears in Australia comparisons made with Native American genocide in the founding history of the United States. Americans, generally, are loath to acknowledge what invading whites did, and caused to be done, to indigenous people in North America. And are equally as uncomfortable discussing the early decades of their country’s slave-based economy, or the treatment of the thousands of indentured servants England shipped to America to assist in the labor of establishing the new colony.
It’s harrowing business, trying to sort out the foundations of any nation. Bigotry, genocide, violence, and greed always emerge to play major roles in the narrative, and assigning ethical responsibility for acts that took hundreds or thousands or millions of human lives is always divisive. But without the effort, all nations eventually founder. The decision to stick with civil war, righteousness, denial, and exploitation keeps the door open for tyrants to rule and loyal citizens to become refugees.
The fact that an outsider can hardly detect any regional accents in Australia makes it easy to assume that the country’s populace (forgetting, for the moment, Aboriginal people) is in some way seamlessly united. Two significant extremes, however, are apparent in the general population. One prefers to cling to what is essentially English; the other wants to discover a purely Australian destiny, the way Revolutionary era Americans wanted to discover a uniquely American destiny. The former would prefer to avoid the disruption that comes with having to examine the treatment of Aboriginals in the past; the other wants the injustices addressed. A similar division is apparent in the American population, where blacks and Native Americans are concerned. (Interestingly, the majority of Aboriginals in the one instance and of Native Americans and blacks in the other with whom I’ve spoken would be pleased if the injustices were simply widely acknowledged, and if the persistent barriers to equality were systemically dismantled.)
America revolted successfully against its parent country, declaring its opposition to colonial impositions of any sort and enshrining a “melting pot” folklore that, while it claimed to welcome the oppressed, remained suspicious about and resistant to diversity. And America, the most successful of England’s former colonies, went on to become a formidable colonizer itself, imposing its system of political organization and its policies for economic growth on other nations, to the point of authorizing assassinations and supporting juntas and coups that agreed not to interfere with the international operations of American corporations. At the same time, America also ignored institutionalized social injustice around the world, like apartheid, and strong-arm dictators like Suharto and Syngman Rhee, if raising an objection might create significant economic tension or disruption.
Australia, like Canada, has yet to decide how to expend its revolutionary energy. The courage to politically confront what most of the world’s peoples consider wicked—the appropriation of other people’s lands, the exploitation of human beings for profit, the enforcement of policies that perpetuate economic servitude and promote cultural or racial superiority—is Australia’s step to take. It’s arrogant of course to suggest this. I mean the observation only as a respectful salute to the citizens of a sibling country who have said similar things to me, for example, after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s now-famous apology to Aboriginal peoples. When, they asked me, would such a thing happen in the States?
THE DAY I VISITED Port Arthur, Pete parked his car in what was then called the upper car park, a short distance from the lower car park, in which a yellow Volvo 244 sedan stood. A white surfboard was mounted upside down on the left side of a roof rack and the kind of cartoonish stickers one associates with young children adhered to the left rear side window.
After our tour of the grounds we crossed the cricket pitch again and entered the Broad Arrow Café for lunch. (The image of a broad arrowhead on prison equipment and clothing was a sign of Crown ownership.) I found some materials to read later—Marcus Clarke’s famous 1874 novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, was available—but I couldn’t find a decent map, and after we ate, we departed. Pete wanted to use a restroom at the edge of the lower car park. Physically and emotionally drained, I started to lean back against one of the cars there to wait for him. Almost instantly I sprang erect again, as if recoiling from the vehicle. The feeling that I had actually been pushed away from the car was so strong, so strange a sensation, that I turned around to study the vehicle—the surfboard, the small decals in the window, the Tasmanian license plate, CG 2835—as if one of these details might explain what I’d felt. I was still standing there when Pete walked up. I told him what had happened.
He gave me a friendly smile, said, “Sure, mate,” and we walked on to his car.
A few weeks later, back home in Oregon, I was walking up the driveway to my house with the day’s paper when I stopped to read a story about a massacre that had taken place the day before in Australia. A gunman named Martin Bryant had shot and killed thirty-five people at Port Arthur, twelve of them inside the Broad Arrow Café. He’d wounded nineteen more, many critically, and had been arrested by local police when he came running out of a house he’d set fire to near the entrance to the historic site. As I quickly scanned the following paragraphs my eye fell on a sentence stating that during the melee Bryant had “abandoned his yellow Volvo sedan.”
I called Pete immediately. He remembered the moment. A few minutes after I hung up I got a call from the Tasmanian state police. I faxed them a copy of the article in my American newspaper, so they could see precisely what information the story had provided me with, and then told the officer who called, a woman, additional details about the car that I recalled. She said the car Pete and I had seen was undoubtedly Bryant’s. She speculated that he might have been there that day to determine the most effective way to kill a lot of people quickly. (The attack was phenomenally lethal. From the moment he fired the first bullet from his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle inside the small café until he stopped momentarily, seventeen seconds later, Bryant killed twelve people and wounded ten.)
I later learned, during his trial, that Bryant had considered two other locations before settling on Port Arthur. One was the ferry from Lauceston, Tasmania, to Melbourne, Victoria, across the 225-mile-wide Bass Strait. His plan had been to kill everyone aboard the ferry but the pilot, whom he would kill as they were docking. The other venue Bryant considered was the grounds of the annual Salamanca festival for writers and artists in Hobart, an international event that draws a large weekend crowd and to which I had been invited that year.
Pete reminded me, when I talked with him about our having seen Bryant’s car there that day, that many Australians had come to believe that the Port Arthur prisoners—especially the ancestors of some of them—hadn’t really been bad people. This was a widespread type of denial, he said, of the real nature of Port Arthur. And he cautioned me that Bryant’s rampage should not be taken as Bryant’s comment on what many Australians refer to as the “hated stain,” the nation’s convict history. He was just killing people.
This was only one more example, Pete and I agreed, of how some angry or unstable people express their distress. Around the same time as the incident at Port Arthur, an Indonesian soldier killed nineteen people and wounded thirteen at an airport in Timika. And a former scoutmaster, Thomas Hamilton, shot and killed sixteen children, their teacher and then himself at a schoolhouse in Scotland.1
SEVEN MONTHS AFTER the massacre, Bryant was sentenced to prison “for the term of his natural life.” The Broad Arrow Café was torn down and the prison grounds were reconfigured. The local community would spend the ensuing years sorting out their emotional response to Bryant’s descent on Port Arthur. There would be much speculation about why he murdered so methodically and relentlessly, following two small children around the base of a tree, for example, until he’d shot them dead next to their dead mother.
Bryant’s name came up for me during dinner once with an Australian friend visiting in Oregon. She was from Tasmania and told me she’d actually taught Bryant in a special class for children with learning disabilities, in Hobart, along with four other boys. All five, she said, were prone to violent behavior. According to her, two later killed themselves, and one of the other three, like Bryant, also committed murder. She characterized Bryant as obtuse and withdrawn, a brooder. He seemed always distracted, she said. And lonely. She believed he’d bought the surfboard—he didn’t know how to surf—in order to join a group of surfers who’d rejected him. When he inherited some money, she told me, he used it to travel to California several times so he could visit Disneyland. By himself.
Her recollection of him as slow-witted and someone with limited social skills was later confirmed for me by a woman, a psychologist, who had employed Bryant as a yard worker for a while. She and her husband could finally no longer put up with Bryant’s interminable mumbling monologues, she said, and with his wandering errantly all over their lawn with the riding mower. She did not dislike him, she wrote me in a letter, but could do nothing to help him. (Around the time of his trial, to judge from news reports, it was popularly believed that Bryant was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome. A court-appointed psychiatrist agreed.)
The policemen who arrested Bryant when, clothes ablaze, he ran out of a bed-and-breakfast he’d set fire to—he’d killed two people inside and left a third behind, tied to a staircase—smothered his flaming clothing and got him airlifted out for treatment to a hospital in Hobart that was also the destination of eighteen of the people Bryant had wounded. Numerous death threats were made against the officers who tried to save Bryant instead of killing him, and many Tasmanians said during the trial that they would kill Bryant in the courtroom if they could get close enough.
The proper response to Bryant and the mayhem he was responsible for is grief. He is apparently unable either to comprehend the immorality of what he did or to understand his culpability. (He giggled in the docket during his sentencing and attempted to engage people in the courtroom to goof around with him.) To feel grief for everyone who was part of the tragedy. And admiration for those who managed to, or are still trying to, find their way out of the trauma. And gratitude to those who did not respond in violent ways but worked toward some semblance of a resurrected moral order in the midst of the hurricane Bryant unleashed.
Australia does not kill people convicted of capital crimes. Bryant, who has spent virtually all of his years since being convicted in solitary confinement, has several times tried to kill himself. If he had been killed for what he did, it is unlikely he would have understood why.
WHENEVER I RECALL Port Arthur, though I’ll always carry images of the swift, indifferent violence of that April afternoon, I think most often of how beautiful the landscape there is, and how much of human endeavor, human endurance, is apparent in humanity’s effort to rebuild in the wake of catastrophe. In the boreal fall of 2008, fearful that in my own comfortable life in the United States I had lost a sense of real human plight, I traveled to Lebanon to visit refugee camps and then on to Tajikistan, at that time the most impoverished of the old Soviet Republics; then to Afghanistan and finally to northern Sumatra, where people were still trying to put their lives back together after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
The local people I was directed to for interviews in these places by my host, Mercy Corps, the international relief agency, were men and women with great poise, great compassion, great capacity for understanding. Each day they systematically addressed themselves to meeting their neighbors’ basic human needs—physical safety, food and clean water, employment, and affection. These were people others deferred to naturally, because they knew them to be the most fully aware, the most trustworthy. And it was they who returned to me a sense of deep faith in the human capacity to overcome nearly every threat to the dignity and possibility of human life, in circumstances that call into question the ability of people to survive severe trauma emotionally and physically intact.
Despite the fact that none of them was, formally, a tribal person, and that some were still in their thirties, these were elders. Not surprisingly, none was officially affiliated with their national government’s often-compromised plans to aggressively develop their country’s commercial infrastructure. Instead, in developing jobs, they leaned strongly toward arranging small loans for enterprising individuals from not-for-profit sources, declining to link up with large-scale business and government infrastructure.
Standing there in my driveway that morning, reading about an unpredictable moment in the life of the psychopath Martin Bryant, I would have appreciated the counsel of an elder. How does one manage horror like this without cynicism, denial, or indifference? How does one not feel incapacitated by the inevitability of more Martin Bryants, more Stephen Paddocks (fifty-nine killed, more than five hundred wounded at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas), more Omar Mateens (forty-nine killed, more than fifty wounded at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando)?
It’s little different from what happens when some militia’s rocket tears through a house, burning, maiming, and decapitating. You get up off the floor, tend to the wounded, bury the dead, clear the debris, and start over again. You seek consolation with your neighbors, help them recover from their disaster, and discuss with them strategies to mollify the angry, the indignant, the headstrong, the self-important, and the righteous. You nurture the belief that this is not all we are.
At least this is what I heard men say one afternoon in a meeting hall in a northern Afghan village, Dūābī Ghōrband, when I asked about the Taliban. They spoke of their opposition to the Taliban, to militias of any kind, and of farming, and of the importance of caring for their children. What confounded me was that they were seemingly entirely unaware that others, all over the world, victimized by militias, thought as they did.
ONE EVENING I came across a brief article in the British journal Nature about the discovery of tiny zircon crystals in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. The crystals were dated to 4.27 billion years before the present. I immediately wrote to the two authors, asking if it might be possible to visit the site. I wanted to see the line and color of the place, find out how it was situated in the surrounding land, and of course learn from them how they found the crystals and which process they’d settled on to date them, and so on. I told them that, as chance had it, I was actually going to be flying to Perth, where they were both teaching at Curtin University, in the weeks ahead, en route from Zimbabwe to the Northern Territory. Could we get together?
I never heard back from them. Several years later, when I returned to Perth with the intention of exploring the Jack Hills, we did catch up. One of the authors told me he hadn’t responded to my letter because “this is the sort of lunatic request you might get from an American.”
His point made, he then went out of his way to help me. He drew a detailed map of the roadless area in the Jack Hills where he and the other scientists had worked. He showed me samples of the rock formation in which they had found the crystals, so I might recognize the terrain and geology when I got there. He arranged for me to stay with the manager of the sheep station on which the search area in the Jack Hills was located. He also insisted on paying for our lunch that day.
I flew up to Meekatharra from Perth, rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and drove west about 120 miles on an unsigned dirt track, arriving at the manager’s house in the late afternoon. He and his daughter had a meat pie in the oven, and he wanted to know whether I took milk with my tea. They could not have been more accommodating.
That evening after supper I sat out on the veranda with the manager, taking our final cups of tea. When I asked, he set out for me some of the logistical problems he faces running a sheep station of this size (about 83 square miles) by himself, having to control feral animals grazing on the station as well as predators going after the lambs. He had to make sure in this dry country that the sheep had enough water. We ended up talking about how fortunate we’d each felt in the lives we’d chosen, and agreed that no matter what you did with your life, there was always more to know.
A stone walkway led from the veranda across a small, neatly trimmed lawn to a hip-high hog-wire fence and, beyond that, an open yard. His plane, not a car, was parked there, under the converging crowns of two massive gums.
ON THAT SECOND EFFORT to connect with the geologists at Curtin University, I flew from the States to Sydney and then took the Indian Pacific passenger train to Perth. It departed Sydney every few days, crossed the Blue Mountains in the Great Dividing Range, and then went on to Adelaide before starting across the Nullarbor Plain on the longest stretch of straight railway in the world—296 miles. On the far side of the Nullarbor, a treeless, semiarid, hardly inhabited landscape, lay the historic gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie and the hills of the Darling Range, before the train dropped into Perth at the East Perth Terminal. The journey from Sydney, situated in a maritime climate, takes nearly four days and crosses the drainages of two of Australia’s three longest rivers, the Murray and the Darling, in pastoral country just west of the Great Dividing Range. The Nullarbor is casually referred to by Australians as “a desert,” but Australia’s truly formidable deserts—the Simpson, the Great Victoria, the Tanami, the Great Sandy—lie far to the north of the train line.
Before we left Sydney I asked the porter in my sleeping car if he thought I might ride in the train’s locomotive for part of the journey. From there, I said to him, I’d have a view forward of the train as well as away to both sides, and I’d be able to talk to the engineers about their work. He said he didn’t think so. Besides, he said, if I was riding up there in the locomotive, I might easily miss a meal.
I said I wasn’t worried about the meals. He said I should then step back out onto the train platform and make my case directly to the engineers. I did, and they said it would be fine to ride along. They were going to make a brief stop for water a few miles out of Sydney. When they did, I should step out onto the platform like I was going to stretch my legs, then stroll forward and climb up into the cab. Which I did. As my need for sleep (and the occasional meal) allowed, and the spacing of train platforms that necessitated our stopping permitted, I spent most of the journey across Australia with teams of engineers in the cab of the locomotive.
That first night, when I returned to my own cabin at about three a.m., I found my supper sitting on my bedside table, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil to keep it warm. The following day, when I took the seat assigned to me in the dining car for the first time, my table companions greeted me cordially. Two elderly sisters, accompanied by their teenage niece. One of the women asked if I’d gotten on at Adelaide. I said no, that I’d actually gotten on in Sydney.
“Then you must be quite hungry,” she said.
I said indeed I was. And the other sister remarked that I had missed quite a lot besides meals, because, in fact, from the dining car you’re able to see to both sides of the tracks. I agreed. And we all were in agreement, too, starting out as we were now across the Nullarbor, that this journey was providing us with a terrific education.
I thought their niece, driven to the extremes of boredom by our table banter, which mostly concerned Australian history and had nothing remotely to do with things that truly mattered to her, was several times about to bite through her lower lip.
In the locomotive one day, studying a Michelin map of the state of South Australia, I saw that we would be passing just to the south of Maralinga. Between the cold war years of 1956 and 1963, the British conducted a series of nuclear bomb tests here. (I wondered if the sisters would be mentioning this to their niece.) From Woomera, east-southeast of Maralinga, the British had also launched missiles toward the Great Sandy Desert, hundreds of miles to the northwest. They considered the area a wasteland, though it was actually thinly populated by Walmajarri and several other Aboriginal tribes. The Australian authorities sent representatives out to clear the target areas of Aborigines before the missiles were launched; but the country was vast and they were not certain they’d been able to contact everyone living there. (The tests of the warhead’s delivery system were deemed too important to delay.) The Australian authorities also attempted to reach Aboriginals who would be affected by fallout from the warheads detonated at Maralinga. After the testing ceased, Aboriginals who had been removed from their traditional lands to allow for the tests to take place were denied further access to them. (In 1994 the Australian government made compensation payments to the tribes involved, for the usurpation of their lands.)
One day on the Nullarbor the train suddenly ran into a wall of water, a rainstorm so fierce the windshield wipers could not, for some minutes, keep the glass clear. When the storm passed to the east and the sun broke through the trailing clouds, we saw a double rainbow off to the south. It seemed to span a dozen miles of the desert. In the same moment we saw more than a hundred kangaroos bounding north and west across the plain, then veering away to the west as they approached the train tracks and the hurtling train. The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now. For some reason we all felt compelled to shake hands.
IN MEEKATHARRA, men at the shop where I rented the four-wheel drive wanted me to understand that the roads I proposed to follow to Nookawarra, the sheep station, were not all that easy to locate. They were, in fact, easy to lose. I said I was familiar with the problem they were referring to and that I would be all right.
The physical evidence that sets a human-occupied landscape apart disappeared almost entirely a mile west of Meekatharra. Soon I had only the road to guide me and a grid of fence lines, some sections of which proved to be miles long, well-tended wire fencing, as taut and as straight as men could make it. I was usually within sight of a fence line to the north (my right), frequently close alongside it; the road—a less insistent domestication of the arid plain—bent to the shape of the land and so was more graceful than the fence line.
The main problem with navigating dirt roads that traverse extensive sections of fenced land becomes apparent when the road passes through a gate. If the gate is open, you leave it open. If closed, you close it behind you. Because there are often only a few gates in very long stretches of fence line, vehicles converge toward a gate from many directions. Once the vehicle is through the gate, the tracks radiate away in as many directions. Without the help of a landmark it might not be possible to pick out the main track again. Similarly, in isolated villages in arid land the world over, it’s easier to drive into the village on a dirt track than it is to locate the main track on your way out of the village, because local residents with distant destinations create such a fan of diverging routes as they depart.
At several places on the dirt track, headed west to Nookawarra, I drove away from the gate in the wrong direction. A quarter-mile or so out, it was obvious that I’d done this. These “errors,” however, never raised the fear that I was “lost” in unfamiliar country, or that I was going to be “delayed.” This far from clocks, the fear of being delayed lost much of its urgency. When I’d reached him by radiotelephone from Perth, my host reminded me of this, saying the drive from Meekatharra was three and something hours and that if I arrived “sometime after three,” he would consider it being punctual.
I had only one difficult moment, when the narrow track I was on entered the equipment yard of a pastoralist and passed, like a private driveway, between a couple of his buildings. The man stared me to a stop and bluntly asked what my business there was. I told him I was on my way to meet a Mr. Richard Brown at Nookawarra. I showed him my hand-drawn maps, given to me by Bob Pidgeon at Curtin University, who I’m sure had passed this way many times. He glanced at them and then waved them away, as if they were gnats annoying him.
“You tell ‘Mr. Richard Brown’ to let me know when he’s got some bloke coming for a visit, understand?”
I said I completely understood his point. His point was that he owned the land I was driving on, and further, I was intruding on his privacy. Like many pastoralists, he felt a challenge to his legal right to the land was likely to be in the air whenever a stranger showed up, because of the peremptory way the land had originally been acquired, by sweeping its first occupants out of the way. He was irascible, I supposed, because he knew some people thought his hold on the land was ethically tenuous.
I volunteered to him that his station seemed very well kept. His machinery appeared well maintained, his sheds in good repair. In the part of America I lived in, I told him, people value these indications of serious purpose and frugality. We looked for it when new neighbors moved in.
He thanked me and I drove away slowly, so as not to raise any dust.
WHEN I ARRIVED, Dick Brown pointed me to a comfortable guest room, and after he and his daughter and I had supper and Dick and I had had a chat on the veranda, we retired. The following morning, just after sunrise, Dick said I might benefit from an overview of the Jack Hills before I drove into that country, and offered to fly me over the land in his Cessna. With the map Bob Pidgeon had drawn for me open in my lap, and aided by the low angle of the sun, I picked out a route to follow through the hills. I was confident I could find my way now to the draw where the zircon crystals had been found. The ground at the foot of that draw, I saw, was boulder-strewn and too steeply pitched to navigate in a vehicle, but I spotted a copse of eucalypts nearby where I could park out of the sun and then walk the rest of the way up the draw.
The drive from the station’s headquarters compound took less than an hour. Shortly after I parked I found the rock matrix Bob Pidgeon had directed me to. With the aid of a magnifying glass I found the tiny zircon crystals in it. I sat there in the draw for a while, next to the matrix, trying to place everything I could see from there into a time frame. The sun was well up by now. The surrounding land was an immensity of windless silence. To dig one of the crystals out of the rock I thought would disturb some sort of magic veil I didn’t want to disappear, and anyway, I didn’t feel compelled. Many places in the world have been so profoundly altered by development projects of one sort or another that they are no longer recognizable to the original inhabitants—or even the residents of a few decades ago. But making this kind of intrusion wasn’t really what was holding me back. It was my desire to steer clear, this time, of a bad habit, the desire to take things you don’t think will be missed. I didn’t need the crystals, any more than I needed many of the other innocuous things I’d pocketed over the years in out-of-the-way places.
The effects of the jarring ride out here in the four-wheel drive from Dick Brown’s home took a while to drain away. It took even longer for my list of questions about this place to evaporate to the point where all I was doing was sitting there beside the rocks. They were like exotic animals. On that June morning I watched the sun bear off into the northern sky from the east above a Serengeti-like savannah of scattered trees and open brushland. The rays of its light seemed to tinker with the pale colors of the horizon. I sank into the time pooled in this shallow draw, sank through the Cenozoic into the Mesozoic, the Age of Dinosaurs, and fell further into the Permian, fell down through the Age of Fish in the Devonian, to the time of the first mollusks in the Cambrian, and then into the Proterozoic, the eon of the relatives of the cyanobacteria I’d seen secreting their homes at Lake Clifton. And finally into the eon when there was no life, the basement of Earth time, the Archean. It’s from then that these dazzling grains by my side had come. Theirs is the very long view. My time is not even a hair-thin splinter in the great sequoia of the time that is theirs.
Into this reverie a flock of ubiquitous budgerigars suddenly flew, about thirty of them, small green-and-yellow parrots with blue tail feathers and warbling voices. They zoomed past swiftly, actively maintaining their close alignment, like race cars in the tight turns of a road course. I’d spooked them. I watched until they bore off in a straight line, like a single animal. I was aware now of sounds that must have been there all along but which had not registered—the cries of cockatiels, a crested parrot found nearly everywhere in Australia. A plaintive qweel.
The birds’ voices break and animate the stillness here but do not overtake it. With my binoculars I scour the open hilly country. It has the general look of untrammeled land, but the admixture of plant life and the dry, broken sheets of friable soil signal that sheep and other ruminants not native to the place have been here a while.
I left the bed of the dry wash and climbed a ridge to get a better view of country to the north. I was there only a moment before I saw a red fox. It looked up at me as it emerged from between two boulders and then was gone. I saw it once more in a pile of loose rocks below, and then it was gone for good.
The fox, like the sheep, did not come with this country; it arrived with colonization, the fox to establish the English tradition of fox hunting, the sheep to create the foundation for a pastoral economy. Today Australia is home to large feral populations of a great array of non-native animals. Among them are pigs, camels, hares, cats, dogs, horses, mongooses, several species of deer, donkeys, goats, zebu cattle, and famously, rabbits. Their grazing, rooting, browsing, and predation on native species has so radically altered the nature of Australia’s nineteenth-century plant and animal communities that it is now impossible to say, across most of Australia, exactly what these communities once looked like. Imported birds—sparrows, canaries, Indian mynas, quail, pheasants, starlings—have also played a role in altering the landscape. And poorly managed sheep and cattle ranching operations have exposed millions of acres to erosion and desertification. What Cook saw during his coastal survey in 1770, what Matthew Flinders saw during his epic circumnavigation of the continent thirty years later, and what early white explorers of the interior saw—Ernest Giles, John McDouall Stuart, Edward Eyre, and the ill-fated Robert Burke and his partner, William Wills—will never be seen again. Which is as it should be, of course, in the natural order of things (i.e., if Homo sapiens is not to be set apart in the natural order). But the changes have been huge. They came on very quickly, and for many, they have been disorienting to the point of despair.
The modern urge to turn a landscape into “what it once was,” to make it “better” by eliminating “pests,” to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn’t coevolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease—biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to “restore” any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has “destroyed” a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren’t able to reverse the direction of evolution, to darn a landscape back together like a sweater that has unraveled. Restoration privileges some animals and plants over others, and therefore presents ethical problems identical to those one faces in examining any project of social engineering or any country’s policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, it is not possible to restore the soil chemistry of lands turned nearly lifeless by decades of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and overgrazing.
The chief value of restoration projects, perhaps, is psychological. At a time when the extent of serious damage to Earth’s ecosystems has ceased to be a topic of special interest, restoration projects, like any act of atonement, fill humans with a sense of self-worth and enhanced dignity. This humbling and pioneering work, despite the biological and ethical challenges, seems to me to mark the beginning of a kind of human behavior that will (partially) restore more than landscapes. It will provide living grounds for all life, including human life, until industrial expansion ends and begins to show signs of drawdown.
It is not possible to consider the question of restoration in any complete way, it seems to me, without confronting the discomfiting issue of intolerance that underlies all efforts to restore. And this places one uncomfortably close to the volatile politics of immigration. The chief objection local people have to “invasive species” is that they can so quickly eradicate the familiar, the valued, and the iconic, can so easily turn what was once thought beautiful into what is considered aesthetically offensive. Some people come to feel that the arrangement of life that was formerly in place was intrinsically more valuable than what has replaced it. These judgmental attitudes toward exotic animals and plants overrunning indigenous animals and plants, of course, differs little from the attitudes of an indigenous human culture toward an invasive human culture, or an entrenched human culture toward an influx of representatives from an “exotic” culture.
Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as “invasive” or “foreign” and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are figuratively, not actually, timeless. And ours is an age of unprecedented cultural exchange, of emigration and immigration. Reactionary resentment around issues of race and culture has no future but warfare. And all landscapes are on their way to becoming something else, with incremental slowness and terrifying speed.
The agitation people feel around subtle and radical change in their home landscapes has only partly to do with physical change in the land—Burmese pythons overrunning Florida’s Everglades, say, or copses of fast-growing balsa trees appearing in Galápagos. It has equally to do—possibly more to do—with the time available to absorb such change. It is more psychologically disruptive to be confronted with many changes over a short period of time than to encounter only a few changes over the same period of time, which was the universal human experience until a few hundred years ago. Today, with modern aircraft spreading local viruses all over the world, and commercial shipping flooding international harbors with thousands of new species when they flush their ballast tanks, and with communications technology fundamentally altering, in only a few decades, the way people communicate with one another, a continuously changing environment actually seems, for some now, more stable, more comfortable, than a seemingly static environment. Ideas such as racial superiority, once tolerated, now seem outdated. Further, globalization has created an environment in which mixed-race, mixed-culture, dual-citizenship, and immigrant-status populations are increasingly the norm in cities like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro, bringing the outsider face-to-face everywhere with an evolving and vital international mestizo culture.
At some critical point, accommodation and cooperation replace violence and exploitation, or humanity’s fate is delivered into the hands of barbarians.
WATCHING THE FOX disappear in a boulder field below the ridge, I can appreciate what makes this creature inimical to so many Australians. When chasing foxes here on horseback with packs of hounds went the way of powdered wigs in American courtrooms, the no-longer-harassed foxes spread far and wide. They killed off many of the small native predators they were in competition with for food, and the environments they entered provided few curbs on their behavior and no effective restraints on the growth of their populations. The red fox stands out on the land today as a symbol of colonial incursion. Certainly they snatch the occasional lamb; but actually, they are only foxes, endeavoring to make their way in a world they were transported to, like the camels overland explorers used and then turned loose when they were finished here. And the cats and dogs that ran away from homesteads. And the zebu cattle brought in in 1880 to supply workers building an overland telegraph line with fresh meat. And the mongooses brought in to control the rabbits and to reduce the population of Australia’s unusually large number of very poisonous snakes.
Of the many “exotic” animals Australians mounted eradication campaigns against, once the species’ wild or feral populations were large enough to be perceived as a threat (campaigns were also mounted to eradicate native animals like the kangaroo and dingo in areas where their existence threatened the profitability of farming and ranching), the one against the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) was the most epic. Rabbits arrived in Australia with convicts aboard the First Fleet. Later, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, they were introduced at more than thirty different places by immigrants, for whom they were a source of both food and commercial profit. Some rabbits escaped, others were abandoned by families moving on; by the 1860s, wild populations had colonized about two-thirds of the continent. Between 1885 and 1914, more than 200,000 miles of rabbit-proof fencing was erected across Australia to control the extent of damage rabbits were causing farmers by grazing and by the construction of extensive underground warrens. While the fences were going up, farmers turned to increasingly more violent strategies to slow the spread of rabbit populations—explosives, bulldozing, poisonous gas. House cats and mongooses were loosed after the rabbits, and ways were developed to introduce lethal myxomatosis and caliciviruses into wild populations.
Had I been a conservationist at the height of the campaigns against rabbits in the fifties, I would no doubt have cheered the bulldozers on, unaware of the effect 200,000 miles of wire fence was going to have on the land. If I had been a farmer or a pastoralist, I might have spent whatever money I could afford on gelignite explosives and phosphine gas. If I had been one of the handful who still raised rabbits for profit, I might have gone to Brisbane to complain loudly about the manufacture and distribution of viruses lethal to the rabbits of Queensland. If I had been sentimental, uncomfortable taking on the messy business of unenlightened planning, I might have thought that the rabbits were too cute to kill. Who can say what theologians, philosophers, pragmatists, and proto-environmentalists of the time might have said if they’d been offered room at the table along with the pastoralists, the agriculturists, and politicians?
Sitting that day in the Jack Hills, after losing sight of the fox, I felt a twinge of the nostalgia that might come over any of us when we learn that a wild landscape that was emblematic for us in childhood has been turned into a resort community peppered with condominiums. Whatever one finds in front of herself at the moment, however, is what the given situation is. That other thing, the so-called pristine landscape of a former time, is no longer available; and somehow a person must make peace with that. To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is.
An observation I heard several times, in different circumstances, about the makeup of Australia’s human population—it’s a popular assertion, but not one I was able to confirm—is that half of modern-day Australians are either immigrants or first-generation Australians. The increasing heterogeneity of burgeoning populations around the world, of course, raises the ire of reactionary politicians in many countries. They rail against the loss of putative racial and ethnic purity, just as many of the same people rail against evolutionary theory and global climate change. They read these signs of inevitable change in the status quo as threats to plans for human perfection that they feel responsible for engineering.
What is to become of us if we decide that the only relief from a persistent sense of discomfort or irritation in our individual worlds is to go after the newcomer, to denounce reconciliation as cowardly, and to kill the Arab student in Tel Aviv, the black intellectual in Atlanta, the Caucasian relief worker in Somalia? Will we also be burning down the eucalyptus trees in Florence, the bougainvillea in Caracas, the ginkgo trees in Manhattan? Will we be inventing a rationale to legitimize the use of arsenic against the Jaburrara or the eradication of rabbits? Will we drag our gods in, and our economists, to preside over the division of wealth that comes with each of our victories over those whose only mistake was to have other ideas? Or will we grant the imperfections in our behavior which have for so long been apparent, and examine instead the forms of reconciliation, those already known and those yet to be invented?
Crossing back over the countryside to the copse of eucalypts in the draw where I’d parked, I felt suspended still in that deep well of time at the bottom of which molecules of zirconium silicate crystallized and became tiny brown grains with four billion years of history ahead of them, before some traveler with a hand lens bent down to peer at them. I pictured the emergence of hominins at the distant end of this arc of time, their lone survivor, Homo sapiens, standing with its paintings, its music, telling mythic stories, and becoming acquainted with its problematic appetite for triumph, for vengeance, cruelty, war, and acquisition.
An arduous life in a world of gargantuan human mistakes, of realpolitik decisions, and of personal failure might have prepared any one of us to grasp unflinchingly our own capacity to become immoral, to become the terrorist, the seeker after power and extensive privilege, the anointed enforcer of whatever we construe to be right. And enabled us to understand, considering shortages of good water, metallic ores, and arable land worldwide, what many human populations are likely to face long before the century is out. And compelled us to object to the efforts of elected governments to ferret out and review the thoughts of each of their citizens, and to object to the argument that for-profit businesses be accorded the same rights individual citizens enjoy, to oppose the ceaseless manufacture and distribution of lethal weapons, and to consider that our own progeny will have to face harrowing decisions in the future merely to survive.
Are we not bound, now, to learn how to speak with each other?
RICHARD AND I had tea on his veranda again that evening. He told me stories about seeing flocks of galahs and other birds flying alongside his plane, about the upwelling of affection he felt for them, their guileless effort at life, and how very different this dry country seemed to him after a pelting rain, how fresh. That morning, before I left for the Jack Hills, Richard had brought me a .308 Enfield. He asked if I might take the rifle along and shoot any wild goats I saw. They compete with the sheep for food, he said. I declined, and he nodded his understanding.
“It’s not for everybody,” he offered, and returned the rifle to its place in the rack on the living room wall with the other rifles and guns.
Richard was such an agreeable companion, thinking so hard about trying to find his way in the world, I was sad to see our last evening end. A year later, in the wake of an airplane crash he had limped away from, he came to visit me in Oregon. I was so very pleased for the opportunity to show him around.
AT A MEETING of hunter-gatherer experts in Darwin in 1988, I met a young woman named Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, an anthropologist who lived in Alice Springs and who had gotten to know Bruce Chatwin when he came through the country with Salman Rushdie to research his book The Songlines. She invited me to come to Alice, as local people call it, to learn about the land claims movement in the Northern Territory, an effort to establish a legal basis for returning certain stretches of Crown land to their original owners.
It was some months before I was able to get back to Alice and meet Petra’s colleagues, including her then-husband, Jim Wafer, and the writer Robyn Davidson. Robyn, who had a background in anthropology, was teaching with several other Australian women in Aboriginal settlements. Like Petra and Robyn, these women were also providing professional help to the land claims movement. Robyn offered me her home to stay in while she was working in the settlements.
I returned to Alice with the intent, first, of traveling out bush with a group of wildlife biologists and field technicians from the Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory’s (CCNT’s) office in Alice Springs. They were collaborating on a project with local Warlpiri people, hoping to reestablish a population of rufous hare-wallaby on Aboriginal land in the southeastern Tanami Desert. (The word for this particular wallaby in Warlpiri, and about twenty other Aboriginal languages, is mala. A small marsupial, about the size of a hare—thus its English name—it’s also known locally as the Western hare-wallaby or pejoratively, as the spinifex rat. To scientists it’s Lagorchestes hirsutus.)
At the time, mala were endangered throughout their range. They were in direct competition with feral rabbits for habitat and they were preyed upon by feral foxes and cats, which had hunted them to extinction in the Tanami Desert. The spot the Warlpiri and the scientists had chosen for the reintroduction experiment, about 220 miles north of Alice Springs and about forty miles north of Willowra, a Warlpiri settlement on the Lander River, was in semiarid desert country, a savannah dominated by a scatter of melaleuca trees and tussocks of spinifex grass.
The biologists placed several groups of mala, raised in captivity in Alice, in a 240-acre enclosure adjacent to the (usually dry) Lander River and the sprawling Tanami Desert Wildlife Sanctuary. Electrified fencing kept rabbits and predators out. Once they had acclimated to the area, the idea was to release the mala into the countryside.
We set our camp up out of sight of the enclosure, next to a billabong. The purpose of this particular trip to the mala enclosure was to observe the animals from a distance, using the nearby brush for cover and approaching the enclosure only to check the drip tanks along the fence line, to be sure they were providing the mala with enough water. When we walked back into camp from our observation posts that afternoon, a few people headed for the billabong for a swim, a relief from the heat. I assumed my hosts had made certain it was all right to swim there. Places this obvious, no matter how remote the country you find them in might seem to be, always have the filaments of the Tjukurrpa attached to them, the Dreamtime narratives. It would be tragically easy to “pollute” such a place without realizing it. Just before I spoke up, the leader of our small group called the swimmers back.
IN THE YEARS before I made this trip, I’d had the opportunity to travel, mostly in the Arctic, with a number of field biologists who’d developed close working relationships with indigenous people. They’d apprenticed themselves to native hunters in order to learn more about the animals they were studying, mostly, in my experience, wolves, bears, caribou, and marine mammals. They came to believe that even though Western field biology had traditionally ignored, or simply disparaged, ind igenous field observations, this enormous body of native knowledge was as precise and rigorous as what Western science had built up. It often, in fact, went deeper and was more nuanced. In the minds of many of the field biologists I accompanied, taking both kinds of research into account provided a more complete understanding of the animal. (It surprised no one that given periods of close observation exponentially larger than Western scientists had been able to manage, native knowledge sometimes corrected erroneous conclusions scientists had reached or challenged assumptions they’d made.)
The biologists I joined for the field trip to the Lander River mala enclosure had taken this kind of mutually respectful cooperation one step further. Knowing that mala were threatened throughout their range by feral animals, biologists at the CCNT approached Warlpiri elders about helping the CCNT restore the Tanami Desert population. The Warlpiri thought this was a good idea and helped the scientists locate a place on Warlpiri land that would provide excellent mala habitat. The scientists told the Warlpiri, however, that they needed a special kind of help to restore the mala to this part of its traditional range. They said they could get the biological part of the restoration project right (i.e., captive breeding and the selection of suitable habitat in which to build the enclosure, in order for the mala to make a successful transition from the breeding shed in Alice to wild land); but they felt their efforts would eventually fail because they had no knowledge of the spiritual nature of the mala, of its place in the Tjukurrpa. They asked the Warlpiri elders to assist in the reintroduction by “singing the wallaby up,” by ritually calling mala back into the country. After some hesitation, the Warlpiri said they would do it. The older men—no children, no women, no “white fellas”—would go out to a certain place in the Tanami, they said, “paint up,” and sing the mala back into the country.
The degree of awareness the biologists showed here was, in my experience at the time, unprecedented, and the approach they took spoke in a profound way to Warlpiri elders. The principal reasons for the collapse of mala populations in the Northern Territory were predation by feral mammals and rabbits that took over mala denning complexes and competed with them for spinifex seeds and other favored foods. The root cause of the collapse, however, was more complicated than this. Aboriginal people had practiced for millennia a sophisticated land-management technique called fire-stick farming on lands where mala lived. They used controlled burns—slow-moving grass fires—to remove dry spinifex brush and encourage new growth, thereby creating a mosaic of old and new spinifex vegetation which served their needs as hunter-gatherers. The practice also served mala well. They denned in the older patches of spinifex and fed in the new sections.
When Aboriginal people began coming in off the desert during a prolonged period of drought in the Northern Territory in the 1950s, taking up residence in settlements and mission stations, fire-stick farming no longer affected the ecology of the desert as much. This had a deleterious effect on mala populations, and because of this foxes, feral cats, and rabbits had a greater impact on remnant mala populations than they otherwise might have.
In the Dreamtime narratives of the Warlpiri, Luritja, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, and other desert traditions, Mala plays an important role in bringing Aboriginal lands to life. Like other Creation Beings, Mala was a traveler, and a Mala songline, marking part of his travels, runs roughly north and south from the Lander River country to an isolated monolith called Uluru (Ayers Rock). The collapse of mala populations along this songline threatened the spiritual foundations of many Aboriginal traditions, and as the mala population headed toward extinction, Mala ceremonies began to atrophy. The sensitivity of the CCNT biologists to this relationship between the spiritual and material world, and their telling the Warlpiri that they had neither the authority nor the ability to act in this realm, but that they understood that without the help of the Warlpiri here the reintroduction effort would collapse, was mind-boggling for the Warlpiri.
I later had a conversation with one of the men who’d traveled out into the Tanami to sing up the mala, prior to their release from the enclosure. He told me that the idea of an animal being “locally extinct,” as the biologists said, was a difficult concept for him to understand. It’s possible, he told me, that the body of an animal might not be visible to someone traveling through a certain country, but the animal was still there. In its corporeal form it might be “finished” in a particular place, but it wasn’t “gone,” the way white people use that word. If you couldn’t see it, I asked, couldn’t find its tracks or scat or signs of its feeding, wasn’t it “locally extinct”? No, he said. He waved his extended left hand quickly in a sweeping arc. “It’s all out there, everywhere.” After he and the other men sang the mala up, he said, the spirits of local mala who were present entered the bodies of the mala in the enclosure.
Someone entirely wedded to a Western way of knowing might find this story fatuous, but in interviews with Western field biologists over the years, I’ve found that the issue of local extinction is, for many of them, not entirely clear. There are too many cases of animals being declared locally extinct only to have them turn up again. “Singing” an animal back into existence is a metaphorical expression for some as-yet-unplumbed biological process of restoration, quaint only in the minds of those who believe they already know, or can discover, precisely how the world is hinged.
ON THEIR RETURN to Alice Springs, the CCNT field party dropped me in Willowra. Petra had long been conducting research in this settlement, and with her intercession I was able to stay there for a few days. Some weeks later she arranged for me to visit with Pitjantjatjara people in Mutitjulu, the community at Uluru. My experience in these places was little more than incidental, and of course I missed a great deal of what was right in front of me, not being familiar with the traditions or the “ways of seeing” of Warlpiri or Pitjantjatjara people, and not knowing the physical geography of either culture. Reading the work of anthropologists who were studying these two desert groups, however, and later interviewing a few of the anthropologists, as well as indigenous people in both those settlements, I came to appreciate their detailed knowledge of the physical world of which they were a part.
I was able to get away from Mutitjulu on several occasions and into the surrounding country with a small group of Pitjantjatjara men. They were bilingual and patient with my questions, and never appeared bored or offended by my effort to understand how very different this place was from other places I’d visited. One day when a couple of us were north of Uluru a mile or so, I asked my companions if they were permitted to tell me about the songlines that converge here, about the Creation Beings of the Dreamtime who came here. What direction did they come from, and where were they going? I wanted to know specifically about Mala. Had Mala been here?
Oh yes, one of my guides answered. Mala was here. With a tilt of his forehead he indicated a spot at the base of the north side of Uluru, an indentation like a grotto, marked at that hour of the day by a long vertical shadow. Mala had slept there, they told me. They told stories about Mala for a long while. The four of us were sitting in very strong sunlight on a sandy rise. They spoke in English and I resisted the desire to impose questions to clarify what they were saying. When they were finished, I was reluctant to break the silence.
I cannot recall all they told me. To have stepped away at the conclusion of one of the narratives and gotten out my notebook to write down what they said would have been rude, and, I thought, it might have given me the appearance of being a thief. And to have interrupted the experience itself with questions might easily have disrupted or truncated the stories, broken them off in such a way that the storytellers would have been reluctant or unable to submerge themselves again in the particulars of their emotional and intellectual history.
We continued to sit in silence on the sandy rise. I had the sense when they were speaking that the three men were really talking to one another, that I was not there, that they were reminding each other of the great breadth of Mala in their lives, in the life of their community.
We continued to sit facing the north side of Uluru. Then one of the men began pointing out other features of Uluru and explaining their places in the Dreamtime narratives, how each was related to the activities of other of the Dreamtime Beings. Somewhere in this explication I realized that they were describing features I couldn’t make out, because they were features on the other side of the rock, a part of Uluru I couldn’t see but which they apparently could easily imagine. Some time later they returned in their recollections to the place they’d first spoken about, the place where Mala slept, and I understood then that they had circumnavigated the rock. They had taken me completely around Uluru without referring to any shift in perspective that might be required for me to understand this. What was seamless for them was broken for me into two separate parts, what I could see with my own eyes and what I could not.
From childhood on, these three men had heard the Tjukurrpa stories that included Uluru. What they could see in any particular moment, and what they could remember having seen, which only memory, in fact, could give them, constituted a piece of whole cloth. In this way, not only did memory function as one of the senses for them but the way they described Uluru made it clear that they, far more than I, lived in three spatial dimensions. Their view of the physical world had no correct or privileged point of view. Sitting together on the north side of Uluru as they spoke with me about Uluru and the Dreamtime was actually incidental to their story, to accurately describing the way Uluru fit in their world. For them there was no “front” or “back” side, no “right” or “left” to the phenomenon. They were not hampered, as I was in my perception of the rock, by a lifetime of learning from flat surfaces, reading about the world mostly left to right and, as often as not, top to bottom—books, maps, drawings, and computer screens.
Traveling with these three men around Uluru—we also drove off one day about twenty miles to the west, to visit Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), a rock formation with a female identity for my companions—our conversations ranged across many topics: pop music, the virtues of the Toyota Land Cruiser in comparison with the Nissan Patrol, tourists swarming Ayers Rock (whom they referred to uncharitably as minga—ants), petrol sniffing, and the fortunes of the various rugby league and football clubs these Pitjantjatjara men followed closely. It took time for me to recognize that it was only when we were riding in the vehicle, or back in someone’s home in Mutitjulu, that our conversations became this topical and animated. When we were walking across the land together, no one said much at all.
Wherever we walked, our steps always seemed to fit the landscape. The pace never felt rushed or uncertain. Our movement was like water’s—measured, responsive to the topology of the ground. If someone began telling a story while we were walking, the story would be about a place we were then moving through. The story would start just as a prominent feature of the place came into view. The duration of its telling matched our pace through the region, with the story tending to end in the same moment as the prominence that was at the center of the story passed out of view. A rhythm (the pace of the story) within a rhythm (the pace of our walking) within a rhythm (diurnal time passing).
My intuition, that for my Pitjantjatjara escorts being fully present in a place meant not only a high degree of sensory awareness but being acutely aware of one’s memories of the place (or of what one had been told about it by a trusted voice), led me to another intuition, or at least to a fuller explanation of the meaning of our exchanges. Even though we all spoke English—the English spoken by two of the three men I was with was excellent—I couldn’t help but feel that something was not coming across. Something elusive in the conversation made me think I was missing important points my companions were making. What I came to believe was that the Pitjantjatjara were so cognizant of the third dimension of the landscape around us that for them, the land we were passing through was never a projection. They were never outside a place looking in, they were incorporated within whatever we were seeing. To them, some of my questions about the places we were in were too strange to answer easily. For example, my questions about “aspect,” seeing something from a particular point of view, often seemed to present them with difficulty. These questions of mine grew out of my habit of flattening the third dimension (depth) in order to create a bounded scene, something a painting or photograph provides. When I lay awake in my bed in Mutitjulu one night, I tried to imagine the way in which our conversations on some occasions took place in the dimension of 2.5. And it became my opinion that they were not as eager to find and hold this two-dimensional view, the one I was most often comfortable with, as I was to learn how to stay with them in the realm of three-dimensional perception, once I located it.
The possibility of being able to see a country more fully in this way was clear.
ONE AFTERNOON IN Willowra an opportunity I had not anticipated presented itself. Sometime in the late 1920s—I was asked not to present all the details of this story—a small group of Warlpiri men and women were murdered by territorial police at a water hole in the Tanami Desert. The murders spiritually contaminated the water hole and Warlpiri people stopped going there. Previously, it had been an important stopover, because surface water in that region is scarce.
Elders in Willowra had decided the time had come to return to this place and to “clean it up,” to spiritually cleanse the water hole and the land around it through ceremony, and to physically remove any natural debris that might have accumulated in the water hole.
It would take four or five days to travel there, then there would be ceremony, then four or five days to travel back. Did I want to travel with them? Yes, I said, I very much wanted the experience of being on the land in their company, and of watching, and also helping if that would be all right, while they cleaned up the place. I was certain they had extended this invitation because of the affection they had for Petra, more this, I think, than whatever impression they had formed of me during my short stay in Willowra. (When Petra and I traveled with her Warlpiri friends, it was imperative, she explained to me, that we conduct ourselves as if we were brother and sister. It wasn’t a matter of what we actually were to each other—good friends—but a matter of fitting into Warlpiri society in a way that showed respect for Warlpiri mores. In order for us to place our sleeping areas next to each other on the ground, it was necessary that we be brother and sister. In the same vein, before Petra left Willowra for Alice Springs, she pointed out some places outside the settlement I should not approach or inquire about, Dreamtime places. They were off-limits to someone like me. I followed her instructions precisely.)
Despite what I felt was the honor, as well as the gift, of what the Warlpiri offered me, I finally decided not to accept the invitation to travel with them to the water hole. An acquaintance in the settlement helped me frame my explanation so that it wouldn’t be read as either a rejection or an insult, and the party left without me. To this day I do not know if I made the right decision. The argument for going was that I would be able to report an extraordinary story of Warlpiri vitality, of human passions and historical perspective, of racism and perseverance. The argument against going was essentially my discomfort with being a witness. The Warlpiri, I decided, did not fully appreciate what I did as a writer. For them, the invitation they extended was an invitation to be with them socially during extremely significant days. It was not an invitation for me to describe for strangers what I had witnessed—or at least it was my impression that this was the case. If I wrote about it, I argued with myself, I would only be putting myself in the position of interpreting something spiritually important about which I had only the most superficial understanding.
If I had to make the decision all over again, I think I would have gratefully accepted the invitation, let it inform my general thinking about traditional people, and never have tried to interpret publicly what I had witnessed. I asked the people who went to describe their experience to me when they came back. I wanted to leave the decision about what was said about the event to them. It didn’t seem to me that I was going to miss something important by not going. It seemed I would miss something important by not waiting for them in Willowra, and letting them, for once, be the sole reporters, the only interpreters, of their culture.
IN THE YEARS I was growing up, paleoanthropologists like Louis and Mary Leakey, with their pioneering work in Tanzania and Kenya, provided people with a rough sketch of the physical evolution of Homo sapiens. The view since then has been greatly refined; in recent years, however, the attention of scientists interested in the history of mankind and what it means to be human, has moved more toward cognitive research. Their focus is not on the outward appearance of our human ancestors but on the evolution of the mind within. Their work offers us new ways to understand human beings by moving us away from long-simmering questions about racial and cultural superiority and toward more pressing issues, such as the development of empathy and the human capacity for cooperation.
Research into the development of the human mind is a pelagic and not infrequently contentious field of inquiry. It’s easy to become completely lost in its neurological pathways and psychological implications—not to mention having to deal with the utility (or inutility) of altruism, and a related assertion, that compassionate governance and altruistic behavior constitute “socialism” for some on the political right. To successfully address major international problems like freshwater availability, however, for all human cultures in the decades ahead, will require empathetic understanding. But, one must ask, How is empathy on this scale to operate in cultures that remain suspicious about the predicaments of strangers? Or in cultures that are already on the verge of falling apart because of war, environmental stress, and the abuse of dictators? Or, indeed, in cultures that are indifferent to the fate of those living beyond their borders, believing their final disintegration is of no real consequence?
Empathy and compassion would seem to be requisite components in the development of any new politics that aimed to place human welfare, for example, above material profit in a restructuring of national priorities, or in the redesign of domestic economies.
I return to this topic of the capacities of the human mind, originally presented in the chapter set at the Jackal camp, because research into the psychological development of personality and into the phylogenetic development of the human mind suggests that certain people within the same social group—psychologically fit and emotionally mature Australian pastoralists, say, or psychologically fit and emotionally mature Pitjantjatjara Aboriginals—have a greater capacity to empathize with others in that group across a broad spectrum of ideas, such as the utility or appropriateness of certain ethical positions. In any given group, then, some people will be more capable than others of understanding what another individual is trying to say. They are able to help make that person’s position or reasoning clearer to others in the group. Again, this ability to listen closely and empathetically, to ameliorate social tension and increase understanding in a group, is not necessarily associated primarily with a listener’s relative level of intelligence or his or her ability to perceive and then explain complex patterns. Success here depends as much or more on something harder to define: the ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view without fearing the loss of one’s own position.
For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person’s perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order.
I’m often fearful, listening to discussions about human fate arranged around the agendas of government and international business, that “the best minds” are infrequently present when critical decisions are being made. If Theory of Mind psychology is correct in saying that minds operating at the higher levels of intentionality have the greatest capacity to be discerning and empathetic, and if it is wise to take seriously the idea that global climate disturbance, ocean acidification, and other planetary environmental problems cannot be successfully addressed without the highest level of international cooperation, what are we to do in our time about ultranationalists and xenophobes in positions of power and authority? Or more important, if the best minds are not at the table—because of prejudices about race, ethnicity, gender, formal education, urbanity, and material wealth—what is the process that will place them there?
Theory of Mind speculation supports—almost inevitably, it seems to me—the observation that in traditional societies the selection of elders, the people who are widely supported when it comes to making decisions (with other elders) for the group, has relatively little to do with how old a person is or with how intelligent they might be. More important is an ability to empathize, an ability to respect other views. (Another common attribute among elders is that they have historical imaginations. They draw on the details through memory of what has worked and what has not worked in the past when people were faced with challenges.)
In order to imagine a successful conversation among people who deeply understand one another and who can bring into play the metaphors and patterns of thought upon which their enduring cultures are founded, it would be necessary to set aside the Western commitments to progress and improvement. (When Darwin argued that the arc of biological evolution for any particular species was not about improvement but instead about successful adaptation to a new or changing environment, he was making a point about the evolution of Homo sapiens fundamentally at odds with much of Western thinking.) Furthermore, for such a group to function productively, it could not begin by embracing any one culture’s views, or by differentiating, for example, between “advanced” and “primitive” cultures, or by favoring any one religion’s sense of human destiny. Confronted with the task of discovering a path to reconciliation and cooperation in a time of unprecedented threat to human existence, elders focus on the idea that the primary organizing principle for human achievement is stability, not progress, meaning that balance, symmetry, and regularity are more to be valued than change, growth, deviation, and ambition.
The idea that people without an overriding allegiance to any particular form of governance, economic organization, or religious conviction, and with no great investment in personal advancement or cultural superiority, can come together and achieve what neither government nor business nor armed combatants are able to do today, to put human physical and mental health first, not their own welfare, is of course anathema to most governments, corporations, and armies. Until we can do this, we remain stuck with the often venal aspiration that drives many first-world nations—to triumph. To win.
I’VE HEARD SOMETIMES that unless you’re truly interested in the physical landscape you find yourself moving through, it’s tedious to travel with traditional people, that when you make camp in the evening “there is no intelligent conversation to be had.” That is not my experience, and the complaint ignores several important considerations. Are things that are human more important to talk about than the things that are not? Is it right, in such circumstances, to pursue a conversation that doesn’t make room for everyone? Would it be the case that people from your own culture are more likely to be engaging conversationalists than those from another culture? It’s generally true that traditional people are mostly quiet while traveling, because the syntax and vocabulary of spoken language too often collapse the details of a place into meaning, precluding other interpretations. The conversation around indigenous campfires, however, is often metaphorical, or even allegorical. So it engages more than one type of mind. It provides for more than one level of intellection.
It is also true that in every culture there are people who choose not to say anything, though they could say a lot that was worth remembering. In my experience, it is possible to soar in conversation with someone not of your own culture, if you can find a way around the language barrier and if you and the person you’re speaking with are focused on a world outside the self; and if both of you are able to empathize with views not your own and to incorporate them into the great reality of human experience. For this to work, both sides of the conversation must be informed by curiosity, respect, and an understanding that the world we find around us is too changeable, too multifaceted, too ramulose, for anyone to fully comprehend. It is not meant to be understood.
I’ve implied much here about the ability of elders in traditional societies to guide their people down the perilous roads all societies must travel (and left it to the reader to imagine that some elders, engaging their own egos to too great an extent, or seduced or corrupted by the secular world, fail at the work). I should emphasize, then, that all elders know they’re fallible, that they know there are “no guarantees in life,” and that some dangerous situations simply cannot be circumvented. But the thing with them is that they also know that once they are chosen, they must never quit out of despair or fear. To do so would be an act of betrayal. And they are chosen because people agree, every day, that this person is the best mind they have. It is not possible to make oneself available to serve as an elder, and I’ve been told that no one really seeks the position anyway, because the responsibility is so great.
With the disintegration of traditional societies the world over, the model they represent of wisdom passed on through a series of elders whose decisions were not questioned is in danger of being lost. The democratic model of governance in the West is based on the idea that everyone’s voice must be heard. Those individual voices are often drowned out and subsumed in the West, however, by charismatics who say, “Follow me! I know the way!” In traditional societies people come to understand who it is who can really hear another person’s voice, so they are comfortable with that person coming up with a plan in conversation with other elders in an emergency, and they feel no loss of autonomy in doing what the elder asks of them. They know the elder is not a “follow me” personality. His guiding thought is no one left behind.
OVER A PERIOD of two decades, partly by accident, partly by design, I visited many of the Pacific landfalls of James Cook and Charles Darwin. I went ashore at Valparaíso on the coast of Chile to walk the streets of that town where Darwin began his journey on foot across the southern Andes. I rounded Cape Horn, as both Cook and Darwin had done, and walked the shore at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawai‘i where Cook was killed. I picked up Cook’s trail in Tahiti, in the waters of Antarctica, and along the coast of northern Alaska. I imagined Darwin present on the streets of Buenos Aires with me, ashore in the Falkland Islands, having a meal in Cape Town, and bushwhacking his way to the top of Isla Santa María in the Galápagos.
Any reasonable traveler or reader, I believe, given the time, can draw his or her own conclusions from all that’s been written about Cook and about Darwin, and can enhance their views by visiting places like Kealakekua Bay. I admire Cook for the reasons I’ve previously set forth. He lost his way, figuratively, on his final voyage, and he was a never-around kind of husband and father; but he encouraged in us all a sense of endeavor and of great imagining. I’d give nearly anything to have had dinner with him, ask him how he imagined the duties of a navigator changed when it was not a journey of exploration but a journey in service to commerce. What, for example, was to be considered a detour?
It is his counterpoint, however, whom I think about more often today, the poorly recollected and uncelebrated Ranald MacDonald, a man born into two cultures, in neither one of which did he ever feel truly comfortable. He arrived in Australia in the early 1850s, setting up in the Victoria goldfields around Ballarat, hoping to make a fortune after his months in Japan and after sailoring for a few years in southeast Asian seas. We lose track of his whereabouts after that, but not of his life quest. Ranald MacDonald longed to be someone, in part because for most of his life he was regarded as no one. He made his mark in Japan, but history moved him aside to create room for Commodore Matthew Perry. MacDonald didn’t have the pedigree, the friends, or the money to establish and promote his claim.
What would we have thought of MacDonald if he’d found the gold he was so eager to acquire in Ballarat, or later in the Cariboo region of southern British Columbia, and if he’d been able to use that wealth in a well-managed campaign to amass accolades and achieve social standing? Would this mestizo roustabout ever even have taken that route of self-promotion? He wasn’t any kind of erudite James Cook, a cultured person to sit down to dinner with. It would have been a plate of beans and a cup of sugared tea in a ramshackle mining camp for him; but his conversation, his opinions, would have provided perspective on what we thought we knew about the world when we sat down together to eat. He would have tinted the view we have of ourselves, standing before our gods with the lists of our accomplishments. And we might have felt some tenderness toward him, as his long-lived dreams and the trouble he weathered emerged from beneath the dramatic accounts of his adventuring.
Elders would have understood equally the unfiltered lifelong inquiries of either man, the bicultural mestizo and the Enlightenment hero.
ONE CLEAR, LATE SUMMER afternoon in early March, in Sydney, I was crossing a greensward in a city park, en route to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I’d been invited to give a talk there about a collection of short stories of mine that had just been published. Fair-weather cumulus clouds were nearly stationary above me as I walked, and the air immediately around me was calm as well. The most fragmentary of breezes occasionally unsettled the leaves of gum trees in the park. The delicacy of the weather reinforced a feeling I had in that moment of unfocused exuberance, a faith that no matter what people had to face in the world that is coming for us, they would fare well. Whatever the nightmare, some group of us would see a way through, for ourselves and others. I recollected bits of conversations I’d had with people well placed in international business who seemed, to my mind, to have no substantial belief, really, in what they told me they believed in—a world of successful commercial strategies and conventional success. Instead they appeared to believe in something quite different, in affection for certain parts of the broken world, and in the possibility of changing the corporate enterprises they ran, so that they would no longer be contributing to the social and environmental wreckage around them.
I recalled some lines of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, published when he was only twenty-four, in a poem called “El pan nuestro”:
And in the cold hours, when the earth
smells of human dust
and is so sad,
I want to knock on every door
and beg forgiveness of whoever’s there,
and bake bits of fresh bread for him,
here, in the oven of my heart…
(my translation, with Luis Verano)
An affection for humanity had swelled in me that morning, a hope that we would be all right, find the grace to accommodate each other more completely, invest more deeply in the philosopher’s cardinal virtues, the ones that transcend all religions: courage, justice, reverence, compassion.
THE READING TOOK PLACE in a sunlit space that had a view down toward Sydney Harbor. People had a few questions after I spoke and read and then most went on their way while I shook hands with a few people and signed some books. Among the last of those who introduced themselves was a man named Luke Davies, a poet finishing his degree at a local university and teaching in Sydney. He had come over to the museum on his lunch hour with a signed copy of his second book of poems, Absolute Event Horizon. He said he’d dedicated one of the poems to me. He didn’t appear to be looking for congratulations for his work or for a way to insinuate himself. He seemed at peace with his life, a guileless person. We spoke for a few moments and shook hands goodbye. As he turned to leave, I asked if there was a way I might contact him. He gave me a phone number and I told him I was going to be in the city for a few days and might call.
The following morning I took a long walk in Sydney’s botanical garden with an Australian landscape painter, John Wolseley, whom I’d once traveled with through Watarrka National Park in the Northern Territory. Later we went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales together where a number of his paintings were up, a retrospective show. He walked me through the galleries, making humorous, self-deprecating remarks but being serious, too, about the importance of art in a highly industrialized and commodified world. I admired the way he could infuse the static space of a canvas with time, creating images that were not animated by time but where both the presence and passage of time were clear.
I felt a peculiar sense of camaraderie as John and I went along, passing, at one point, the gallery where I’d spoken the day before. Our aesthetics were different, but we were enthusiastic about many of the same questions, like how to render and comprehend the way time gives space another dimension. John’s life was so unselfconsciously about art. He was someone who had become his own idea.
That evening I called Luke. I told him I wanted to visit Botany Bay, where Cook had made his first landfall in Australia, on April 28, 1770. Did he want to come along? Luke lived at Bondi Beach, next to the water in east Sydney. He said it would be easy for him to come by the hotel and pick me up.
We drove past the airport, crossed the Georges River on the Captain Cook Bridge, then turned east onto a road that went out to Inscription Point, on Kurnell Peninsula, where we parked the car. The fair weather of the past few days was holding—salubrious might have been the word—behemoth cumulus clouds with flat bottoms and rounded shoulders in a cerulean sky, holding faint shadows in their thick folds.
Cook’s landfall here marked the beginning of a major shift in European thinking about possibilities for trade in the South Pacific. In 1606, Willem Janszoon, a Dutch sea captain, made the European discovery of the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the northeast Australian coast, west of Cape York. His landing on the shore there, the exploration of the west coast of the continent in 1619 by Frederik de Houtman, and of the southwestern coast in 1627 by François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts, established a Dutch claim to a “new Holland,” the east and most of the south coasts of which had not yet been seen by Europeans.
In 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, set out from Batavia in the Heemskerck with a consort, the Zeehaen, intending to expand the sphere of Dutch influence to the south. He rounded the northwest and southwest capes of Australia, discovered and doubled the Tasman Peninsula (he assumed it was the continent’s southeastern cape, not knowing it was the south coast of an island, Tasmania), and continued on to “new Zealand,” leaving the east coast of Australia unexplored. He returned to Batavia in 1643 via Torres Strait, which separates Cape York Peninsula from Papua New Guinea, having discovered neither Bass Strait, which separates Tasmania from Australia, nor the Great Barrier Reef.
In an informal sense, Tasman was the first European to circumnavigate Australia, to prove that it was not the northernmost part of a fabled southern continent. The question of whether New Holland included an inland sea was still unsettled, however, and would remain so until 1798–1803, when Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and then Flinders and Nicolas Baudin charted all the rest of Australia’s coastline that remained undemarcated. Flinders’s surveys, made in several ships, confirmed that there was no entrance to an inland sea north of the Southern Ocean’s Great Australian Bight. Australia was one landmass, not two.
Early in his naval career, Cook established himself as a cartographer by creating impressive charts of the coasts of Newfoundland. His charts of Australia’s east coast—Flinders, a great admirer of Cook, was full of praise for their accuracy—became the basis for England’s claim to eastern Australia, called New South Wales by the British to distinguish these lands from those of New Holland.
When Cook looked beyond the entrance to Botany Bay at dawn on April 28, he thought the embayment, beyond high headlands on either side of the entrance, comprised a large, sheltered harbor. He entered the bay later that afternoon and anchored off its southern shore. Perhaps it was Eora people he saw camped there on the beach. Whoever they were, they all but ignored the ship, continuing to go about their business. When a landing party put ashore, the Eora walked away, leaving two men armed with spears standing to meet the sailors. When people from the boat tossed iron nails and colored beads to them, they ignored the trinkets; when someone shot off a musket, the Eora barely flinched. They had never seen, probably, nor ever heard about sailing ships like the Endeavour—or people like these Europeans.
As the party stepped ashore—the first to do so was eighteen-year-old Isaac Smith, Cook’s wife’s cousin—the two Eora men retreated from the beach and joined the others who’d withdrawn into the fringing forest of gum trees. As members of the landing party approached the Eora’s bark huts, the owners stepped back farther into the trees. The sailors found a few children hiding behind a warrior’s shield in one of the huts and gave them strings of beads. When Joseph Banks picked up some fishing spears to examine—he had them taken back to the Endeavour—he suspected they might have poisoned tips. He cautioned Cook to stand well away from the Eora.
Cook’s officers and crew, shouting at the Eora, denouncing them as cowards, went off in search of freshwater and wood, which they continued to load aboard the Endeavour over the following week. Banks and others with an interest in natural history explored the perimeter of the bay and the lower reach of the Georges River. The field parties made a large collection of plants, work that later inclined Cook, long after he’d left the area, to change the name he’d originally given the place, “Sting ray’s harbour,” to Botany Bay.
When the onshore winds that had kept Cook penned in Botany Bay longer than he wished finally abated, he sailed out between the headlands and northward up the coast. Over the following four months he would chart nearly the entirety of the shoreline—and his expedition would almost end tragically when the Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
Cook wrote that Botany Bay was “Capacious safe and commodious.” The field parties’ notes describe waters rich with oysters, clams, and mussels, trees of imposing size (likely casuarinas), and impressively large flocks of cockatoos, parrots, and waterfowl. The naturalists judged the soil’s potential to support farming poor and said they were puzzled by the Eora’s lack of interest in the gifts they were offered (the Eora having drifted back onto the beach to occupy their huts, opposite the anchored Endeavour). “All they seem to want,” Cook wrote in his journal, “was for us to be gone.”
An Ordinary Seaman from the Orkneys, thirty-year-old Forby Sutherland, died of tuberculosis while the Endeavour lay at anchor in the harbor. Cook named the inner point of the south headland for him and he was later buried at sea.
The general impression of Botany Bay that Cook, his officers, and the supernumeraries aboard took away was favorable, even enthusiastic. Nine years later Banks recommended the area to Parliament as a destination for prisoners. Eight years after that, the First Fleet sailed for Botany Bay. On arriving the captain decided instead to go ashore at a smaller harbor just to the north, Port Jackson, a place that would one day become the city of Sydney.
LUKE AND I WALKED OUT to Sutherland Point and read the inscription there on a plinth, erected close to a spot where Cook had ordered his date of departure, May 6, 1770, and the name of his ship carved in the bole of a tree. The public park where the plinth stood—the tree is long gone—seemed now part of a thoroughly humbled place at the tip of the Kurnell Peninsula, in contrast to the wild land Cook had found there more than 230 years before.
Luke and I stretched out on the grass and talked about the books we’d each been reading. I asked him for a list of writers whose feel for things Australian impressed him. I told him I’d been reading David Malouf, Helen Garner, Tim Winton, and a few others, and thought that Malouf had a great gift. Luke agreed. I asked him more about his own work. He’d just finished a novel, Candy, which would later become the basis for a movie, for which he would cowrite the script. The novel was a fictionalization of his battle with heroin addiction.
I listened to his description of the broken life out of which the book had come, a life of thievery and scams, of manipulation and self-hatred, of suicidal despair. But here he was, just out of university after the long delay occasioned by his addiction. I’d read his Absolute Event Horizon and thought the poems were very good, the work of a singular imagination. In the middle of our conversation about literature—given a kind of wrenching twist by his telling me about the background for his novel—he said the turning point in his heroin addiction—he’d been clean for three years at this point—came when he read a book of mine called Arctic Dreams. It changed his perspective, he said.
I understood then why he’d come to the reading.
I told him about a conversation I’d had a couple of years before this with a few writers at the festival of arts in Adelaide. The festival committee had put some of us up at a resort about thirty miles outside the city in the days before the festival got started, so we could get to know one another a little. One morning after breakfast five or six of us began talking about what we thought we were up to as writers. The group included Canadian novelist Susan Swan, a young writer from India named Vikram Chandra, John Coetzee from South Africa, the American writer Annie Proulx, and David Malouf. Someone asked whether, despite the differences in our cultural backgrounds, despite the difference in gender, in literary taste, in the genres we liked to work in, and in our politics—despite all these differences, was there some subject we were all writing about, one way or another? Everyone immediately said the same word. Community. Why does it fall apart? Can you put it back together? What makes that smallest of communities, marriage, cohere? How do we go on with life when we’ve chosen to remain cut off from our traditional communities, or chosen to remain with others who have no interest in knowing who we are?
Luke said he could understand that, could see how all of us, including himself, were writing about the functional and dysfunctional dynamics of different sorts of communities, the integrity of which, or the possibilities for reconciliation within which, provided us with a promising, or at least a believable, future.
The idea seemed so big, so close to self-celebration, we dropped it. But we believed in it.
We fell silent, basking on our backs in sunlight on the great lawn there, the rain-softened ground. A Greek chorus of lorikeets, of turquoise and king parrots, of cockatoos and galahs, sailed back and forth above us, beautiful, dazzling, streaming colors, the birds babbling and calling sharply, as if they had not yet gotten the word that we were all civilized now.
Occasionally a 747 or one of the smaller Boeing jets, a 727 or 737, decked out in Qantas or Singapore or KLM or Air Canada livery, lumbered overhead on final approach, pushing against a wind out of the north that we could barely feel on the ground, and floated down to touch the runway at Sydney Airport, which jutted a mile out into Botany Bay like a quay.
I showed Luke a bit of technology I took out of my backpack and was now about to use, an early version of a handheld GPS device. I said I liked the air of authority it seemed to be equipped with.
“It’ll tell you right where you are, you know,” I said.
“Really? It’s that accurate?”
“Well, it’s very precise, but I don’t know how accurate it is. It says we’re at thirty-four degrees, zero minutes, eleven seconds south latitude and one hundred fifty-one degrees, thirteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds east longitude.”
Cook made this spot 34° 16' South and 151° 21' East. But it’s the same place, where we lay on the south shore of the bay that afternoon, many years later, watching clouds, the birds, the planes, each of us glad of the other’s company.
The device has no power to determine any further where we are, by noting that cumulus clouds, with their involuted heads of cauliflower florets, were passing through. Or how the spaciousness of the sky here changed when flocks of birds flew over us in a rush. Or how all this might look if it happened to be raining. The numbers marked a portal, like the address on a house.