They headed due north up the Goldfields Highway. Val drove fast and confident, she was rapt and preoccupied. The journey was at the centre of a new frame of knowledge: they pushed into acacia country, mauve and red; they aimed for the vanishing point of the spearing road. Together, side by side, neither spoke a word. In the buzz of the car, in the absence of traffic, moving through what looked to Frances like empty and invariant land, she fell into a kind of slumberous reverie. Nothing focused occurred to her; it was impressions she passed through. The faces of her grandparents and her heartless aunt, the fig tree at Midas Street, and the reconfigured back yard, Will, ashen with pain, his face slipping away with his dying. Her bad dream still pestered, casting a veil over her thoughts, of the woman on fire, all flapping alarm, and the abandoned dog, howling.
She was crowded with presences before the world returned. From the moving land and the light, a single emu materialised. It headed at speed for the car, swerved suddenly and turned away, fluffing its barrel body, twitching its stick legs, loping with huge strides and a rocking toy run. Frances and Val in unison called ‘oh!’ but the incident needed no comment; both lapsed again into silence. It was a relief to have death or accident averted. Road kill lay everywhere, strewn to remind them: mashed flesh and torn fur. A wallaby flat to the tarmac, steaming with new blood, and a murder of crows lifting grisly and stained from their feed.
When Val turned off the highway, passing through the sparse town of Menzies, Frances at last asked: ‘So, where are we heading?’
And Val replied: ‘You’ll see.’
Lake Ballard was a vast salt lake, fifty kilometres long and twenty kilometres wide. Frances had heard of it but had never visited. The Fiat turned onto red gravel and they bumped along, moving through Yilgarn flatlands of mulga and spinifex. Old fence wire lay twisted along the edge of the lake, the sky was all glare, the wind a low flex.
‘Wangkatha mob,’ Val said, ‘this is their Country.’
Country was flowing towards and around them. Respectful of traditional custodians, they were driving slower, and with caution. Val hummed something under her breath and gripped at the steering wheel; it was an invocation, perhaps, a ritual request or a greeting. What place was this, that needed her voice as permission?
When they drew alongside the lake, at the western end, Frances was at first uncomprehending. It may again have been the apprehension of scale that confused her. The shore fringe, of dried mud, was orange-red and pricked with grasses in the midday light, but further out lay a white salt plain, as far as the eye could see. There was a sparkle to the crystals and an illusionist distortion of distance. Uttermost, apparently, like light itself. When she left the car, Frances saw human statues here and there, spread randomly across the broad stretch of the lake. Alone, not in clusters, they were skinny abstractions of the locals, whose bodies had been scanned, reduced and remade iconic. The sculptor Antony Gormley: she remembered the details now. This was his art installation of standing figures at the salt lake. She was halted, as Val was, at the edge of revelation.
Space, light, these were newly expansive. Frances scanned the distance and observed how still a body might appear. This was a function of statues, surely, to still and commemorate.
Val stepped beside her. ‘Women’s Dreaming place, this one.’
Frances waited for more information, but none was forthcoming. She felt too shy to ask. There was purpose and delicacy to Val’s withholding, but it seemed she saw another lake, holding other, more plausible figures.
‘Drought here, too,’ Val added. ‘But there’ll be rain pretty soon, and then it will change.’
She sniffed at the wind, lifted her face, and closed her eyes. As if summoning, she said: ‘Then water birds will appear, and little shrimp, which hide under the salt in the dry, sometimes for years, like they’re asleep.’
But for now there was no rain, only a sodium crust to walk upon. Between the statues the women could see tracks of footprints, so that earth showed through as the smear of human trace. Frances remembered the pigment: it was burnt sienna. All those minerals down there, iron, nickel, gold. All that whitefella wealth.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ said Val, though Frances had made no comment.
They climbed a neat hill that reminded Frances of the cover of The Little Prince, a hemisphere, like half a planet, in the middle of nowhere. From the top they stood in the wind and looked afar. Before them, beneath the white glaze of the sunlight, lay asterisk on asterisk of fanning trails, the footprinted patterns of earlier visitors who had tracked between the statues.
‘How many?’
‘Fifty-one.’ Val knew. ‘Some are way, way out. Poor lonely buggers. We’ll set up camp and walk on the salt when the sun is a bit lower.’
So, this was where she had been delivered, to this stillness, to this vision.
There were no other campers at the campsite, and no tourists or visitors anywhere. Val and Frances had the lake to themselves. Though winter, it was mild, and the sun was sharp and clear. The salt might have been snow, for all its supernatural dazzle.
They gathered wood, made a fire and boiled a billy. Val poured the tea into enamel mugs and they sat idly drinking and swatting at flies. When the sun slid a little they ventured together onto the lake, walking with care, almost ceremoniously, as the surface demanded, feeling the crunch of salt crystals under their feet, watching their footprints form unevenly in a trail behind them. Each statue was modelled on the same humble abstraction; the women had breasts on sticks, like alien pods, the men had long thin penises, half upstanding. There were one or two children. All stood with their arms held slightly away from their bodies, as if caught in a posture of pleasant surprise. Frances found them puzzling. She and Val wandered a few kilometres into the white distance, keeping the hemispherical landmark in view. The figures stood as if in mirage, already thinned by refraction.
And when eventually they came back, there was not much to say: this was the slow astonishment of landscape made art, and neither felt the need to express their responses. Out there, the only sound was their breath and the wind. And the sky above was a noiseless infinity.
What was Frances thinking?
That she was incapable of thought but needed to feel where she was. That her tender puzzlement would likely increase and persist. That Val had brought her here for instruction, and to move beyond grief.
Val, apart and pensive, had begun humming again. Her murmurous voice dispersed around her. Every now and then she moved into words, but they were her own; they were Language, they were not English words. Disqualified from full meaning, Frances watched Val’s face.
The sunset was vermillion. Clouds massed at the horizon like an omen of fire, then unrolled in purple skeins, and streamed windswept above their heads. Below, the statues looked eerie, then receded into darkness. As the stars appeared Val made a dinner of damper and fried eggs and they sat cross-legged on a strip of canvas close to their fire. When the temperature dropped, they crouched under their swags, holding together as one body.
They cleaned their boots with sticks and banged them together. Set them beyond the fire in a neat line of four. Removed big stones, cleared the ground for sleeping. They would keep the fire going all night; they would lie close like lovers for warmth.
In the middle of the night, Val woke Frances to show her the stars.
This, Frances knew of, or thought that she knew: how the night desert blazes.
But Val was pointing and speaking and instructing once again, and through her half-awake fog she heard, ‘Pleiades, this one, whitefellas call this one Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. We have this story too; we have our own Seven Sisters. That big hill we stood on, that’s the oldest sister. Six more sister places out there, long way, across the lake.’
Frances lay on her back, facing the stars. She was conscious of a cold wind that made the fire start and flicker, and Val reaching for a dry branch to feed and revive it. She felt a soft luminosity touch her, and shapes, and stories. In her sleepiness she was free-floating beyond her body, thinning out, disappearing, spreading into the dark.
‘They ran across the lake, they hid in rock holes. You can see where one of the sisters fell; her breasts and her face shaped the earth.’
Pleiades, yes, the earthly version that was hereabouts, of women fleeing, afraid, and securing their sisterhood. Of women impressing the earth, of bodily formations. But she learned nothing more. Val was now speaking her mother tongue, Martu Wangka, as if she’d forgotten her companion was an ignorant whitefella. Or perhaps this story was only made true in Language. There would be another time to ask. There would be a reclamation. Val’s voice was low, like a lullaby, sweet and low, and Frances was carried, and pacific, and fell back into the bosom of sleep.
When she woke, near dawn, there were grey kangaroos very close—nine, ten, she counted—grazing in peace near the edge of the lake.
Val gestured: ‘Shuush.’
They lay together, half frozen, on the cold hard ground. When Val leant over and pushed a thick branch towards the cooling fire, the kangaroos all looked up together, unanimous. All lifted a little, turned their pert ears, all held their small forelegs tremblingly still. One of the smallest made a single bobbing hop. They were tense now, but curious.
A whisper: ‘Kirtikirti, grey kangaroo.’
Val pulled her swag close to her body and tried to huddle back to sleep. Frances lay on her side, feeling stiff and sore, watching as gradually the kangaroos lost interest, and returned to the graceful moves of their concentrated grazing. She saw how they bent to the earth, then raised up to chew, how they tilted down to move forward, then tilted up, then again down, as though performing this repetition and reversal for the first time, all sheer invention. Now they were less bothered by human proximity. Now, chomping away, they ignored the strangers.
Frances watched the kangaroos in a happy drowse. Their faces seemed to her particularly benevolent. The air was blueish, breath-like; the wind had dropped away. She could hear the faint murmur of dry grasses blowing.
And she must have slept again because it was fully light when she realised that the kangaroos had gone. Close beside her, touching, Val sounded a gruff snore. Frances swung herself upright and blew on her hands. She patted her cold arms and held her swag like a cloak. Carefully, she stoked the fire and balanced the billy in the coals.
Calm, bright now. Tea, they would share tea. Then they would walk again on the salt lake, flashing in the morning, its lit bowl holding up figures already dissolved in mirage.
The return journey was chatty. Val loved the comic dimensions of the statues at Lake Ballard.
‘You pick your day, and it’s quiet. You can visit the tribe of skinnies in peace.’
She was laughing, throwing her warm voice out the window. Driving fast in the wind. Her skin vivid in the light.
In response to questions she disclosed a little more of her past. No, she didn’t have children, but big mobs of kin, black and white, scattered all about. She had a man once, good bloke, strong in the Law, but he was killed out droving, an accident, when his horse fell on him. She still wouldn’t say his name aloud, though it was long, long ago.
But the stars, the skinnies. These she spoke of. The women stars becoming earth.
Both felt their spirits lifted. Both wished to talk. There was disclosure and confidence and a calm jokey tone.
Emboldened, Frances asked, ‘So, will you take me to your Country, round Wiluna way?’
Val frowned and went quiet. Ease of talk had gone, they were in a blur of journeying.
‘Not now, too soon. Not in your sorry time.’
She paused and her gaze remained directly ahead.
‘You have a lot to learn. And you need time, real time.’
There was a complication here, between the sayable and unsay-able. It was a rebuke and a gentle criticism. Frances shifted in her seat and looked out the car window. After such kindness, such intimacy, she was surprised that her request had been immediately denied. Perhaps she’d assumed too much. Perhaps she was hungry, too, like a kid, who wants more of something forbidden.
‘Those kangaroos, eh?’ Val was changing the topic. ‘A good feed there!’
And she was laughing again and saying: stars, kangaroos, sisters, skinny tribe. She slowed her driving to catch the thread of an idea. The earth grew nearer, and the sky.
‘I’ll think about it. Country.’
Smoke hung in a seam on the far horizon. The rust earth fled away. Val turned to smile. In the Fiat they were close again, and again reconciled.