‘In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.’
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
My life as a collector ends in 1972. My father is on sabbatical travelling between Fiji and Tonga, hunting through the colonial archives for a history he is writing on the ‘Friendly Isles’, and the family is installed in an old colonial house on Verata Street, a short walk from the University of the South Pacific, where, when Dad is around, I hang out after school eating hot chilli-peas and drinking sweet tropical pop from recycled beer bottles. When I am not swimming endless laps of the pool, I eavesdrop on the men talking up the politics at the bar. It is the year the government falls and the excitement of the change to come heats up the conversation. The boys are coming home, White Australia is out, free education and health-care are in.
Fiji is hot. The streets are hot. Gossip is hot. Even the squashed cane toads encrusting the tarmac steam in the mid-afternoon heat. The heat winds its way into my dreams, tangles me up in my mosquito net, leads my hands to find shelter in cool hollows but the heat finds me there too. Strange heat. Heat I have no words for, like the grotto my fingers find scampering like a beetle running to a crack in the walls. One day my father storms into my room and nails an iron grille to the window furious at some unspoken crime I can’t remember committing. The boys playing football in the street let out whoops of delight when I run as their ball lands at my feet and they give chase. More fury from my father and this time the crime is mine; false charges. But what have I charged them with? I don’t know.
One runs from neighbourhood boys one doesn’t know; it is what one has always done.
At school the gossip says that Caitlin has been raped walking home from school. Caitlin and I are friends and walk home on the same track together every day pushing through heat that drenches our cotton school-dresses so they cling wetly to all our crevasses as we slip and slide on our plastic sandals.
We don’t talk about what the man has done. We talk about ents and orcs and balrogs.
I spend hours in the garden reading and dreaming in the branches of an avocado tree. On the passage to Fiji I have read The Lord of the Rings; the avocado is my wise talking tree, the fruit-bats overhead my messenger-eagles, the mongoose darting through the cassava plants my shape-shifting bear. When I am not dreaming of magical creatures, I am thinking about collecting. Each night I set a light-trap and see what comes my way.
I am on the hunt. My father has promised me a camera with a telephoto lens from the duty-free shops on Little Cummings Street. Thinking about it has kept me quiet when my insects are packed away for the year. The camera is going to make up for all the missing displays, the books, the specimens. I am going to take photos of insects’ eyes, of the scales on a butterfly’s wing, of the coconut rhinoceros beetle. All I have to do is wait for a pause in the comings and goings, the fast talk at the bar, the typewriter clacking, the endless jotting—for my father to make good his promise. Each night I set up my light-trap and wait. I am going to catch a giant coconut rhinoceros beetle, photograph it with my telephoto lens, and set it as the centrepiece in my one professional mounting case, surrounded—and here imagination becomes dusty—by all the tropical moths of giant wingspan I have yet to learn, name, collect and set.
I had first seen it years before it in my Shell Picture Album where it sat beside ‘One of the true and most beautiful Weevils in Australia’—the Botany Bay diamond beetle. In the album, the rhinoceros beetle looked unconvincing, almost like a plastic toy, a cartoon beetle overshadowed by the far more dazzling weevil. Although its picture lacked true brilliance—I knew. I never tire of watching diamond beetles, thinking my way down into their gentle meandering through the wattle, shimmering and glinting with the azure of a swallowtail, the cobalt green of a blue triangle, their colours shifting in communion with the sky, the clouds, the light. I never trap them. Like the cicadas I fight to free from the ropey webs of orb spiders, it never occurs to me to collect them.
When I learn we will be living in Suva my heart stalls on the possibility of catching the rhinoceros beetle’s glorious relation—the coconut rhinoceros beetle. As big as a fist, armour-plated and hairy, it is more arachnid than coleopter. I am going to hunt it, collect it, photograph it, and set it.
Whatever books make their way from Suva’s bookshops to Verata Street make their way into my hands as I try to keep up with the big talk. The idea of limiting what a child reads hasn’t yet occurred to anyone; certainly not to my parents who are busy with their own troubles.
My mother has had another baby. She wears electric-coloured jersey dresses and complains about her varicose veins. There are too many people in the house and it is too hot. There are seven of us, and then the ‘house-girls’: Lola, Lemba and Watti. Sometimes, Lola’s and Lemba’s children are with us too. Watti is ancient. She is my Watti, who wove straw watches for me each morning when she walked me to preschool in 1964, cut sugar-cane for me to chew and let me run naked in the rain, but now we hardly talk to each other. She sits on the back step grating coconut or sweeps the house with a broom made of sticks.
Lemba’s little boy and my little sister play poo-poo in the garden and my big brother plays something else with Lola’s daughter. He is sent home in disgrace. I am in trouble too, heading for expulsion from Suva’s Grammar School for a rebellion—cause unknown—that lights up the family panic as it spins me like a giant Catherine wheel.
With a butterfly on the cover and a tuft of corn-coloured hair, John Fowles’ The Collector looks like it has been written for me. The first pages are filled with butterflies. Fritillaries and burnets, cabbage whites and painted ladies, black hair-streaks, the Large Blue, the Heath, the Glanville. I am learning a new way of reading. I flutter above the book swooping in on those passages I understand and flitting over those I don’t. I discover it reading the new books that come my way like The Female Eunuch, The Dutiful Daughter, The Magus, where I find alighting points like: ‘a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, and occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of’. In this way, more over than in, I make my way to things I understand, like women turning into heifers, horse-women, women feasting on blood, magical forests, chrysalids, camouflage.
In The Collector, Fred is trying to catch a Miranda, ‘a pale Clouded Yellow’ with silken hair ‘like burnet cocoons’. I am hot on the trail with him. Fred ‘got a camera at once of course, a Leica, the best, telephoto lens, the lot; the main idea was to take butterflies living like the famous Mr S. Beaufoy’. Fred goes to bug-section meetings at the Natural History Museum. I start an insect society at school. He has an entomological diary and marks his sightings of M., just like I do. He goes collecting with his net while his uncle goes fishing, and together they watch the imagoes shake off their cocoons and unfurl their wings. He is going to use chloroform, like me. My killing bottle is primed. Dad has not bought me a camera with a telephoto lens, but he has been to the chemist for chloroform and Mum has given me one of the biggest jars in the kitchen. Like Fred, ‘I was going to catch a rarity going up to it very careful, heart in the mouth as they say.’ It would be—
‘…the best thing I ever did in my life…like catching the Mazarine Blue or a Queen of Spain Fritillary. I mean it was like something you only do once in a lifetime and even then often not; something you dream about more than you ever expect to see come true, in fact.’
When Fred catches Miranda and locks her in the basement I am pinned to it, the way I always am with reading, unable to stop, even if it’s just the back of cereal packets, or street signs. I flitter through all the strange exchanges between Miranda and Fred. Sometimes they seem to be friends, they talk and read books together and it’s clear that Fred loves Miranda and would do anything for her. He buys her anything she asks, caviar, wine, chicken, whatever she fancies.
I flutter over Miranda, her diary and its doubling of Fred’s. I flutter over GP, Miranda’s artist-boyfriend, his fetishising of Art the mirror of the fetishising Fred. I don’t get any of this, but what begins to think its way through me as Miranda turns from the coveted pale clouded yellow into something ‘worn, common. Like a specimen you’d turn away from’, what starts to hatch in me is the thought that my collecting has something nasty in it, some ‘great dead thing’ and that my great love, like Fred’s, is weighted with the death it carries; its carrion load, and as this thought takes wing—I catch the coconut rhinoceros beetle. In that miraculous way, as Fred says—
‘It finally ten days later happened as it sometimes does with butterflies. I mean you go to a place where you know you may see something rare and you don’t, but the next time not looking for it you see it on a flower right in front of you, handed to you on a plate, as they say.’
The coconut rhinoceros beetle flies into my light-trap bigger and blacker and more horned, armoured and hairy than I ever imagined, a fist of a beetle with its strong legs beating at the net, its crescent horn thrusting, its hair tufting furiously. I have got it. Hunted it. Snared it. Brought it down. And The Collector is forgotten in the excitement of setting it.
Elizabeth Costello says kindness is the ‘acceptance that we are all of one kind.’ When I read this line fifty years later, I think about how the coconut rhinoceros beetle’s legs claw up the cotton wool as it tries to fly back to its coconut tree.
It doesn’t die.
Dad says that maybe the moths have used up all the chloroform and I should put it in the freezer. I think it might get cold in there, it being a coconut rhinoceros beetle and used to the heat, but Dad says it will just get sleepy and die without realising it is even cold. Elizabeth Costello says, ‘Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don’t see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught that it is all right to kill and eat them.’ She tells a story about Albert Camus who, as a young boy, is asked by his grandmother to bring her one of the chooks from the garden. He does so, and then he watches his grandmother cut off its head—
‘The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then,’ Elizabeth Costello asks, ‘that the hen did not speak?’
The coconut rhinoceros beetle is one of the only beetles that makes a sound loud enough for a human to hear, like a cicada. But I can’t hear what it is saying in the jar and I haven’t read Elizabeth Costello in 1972. I read Time Life International’s Life Nature Library, bought for me with great love and expense by my parents. The sum of $4.30 is still visible on the inside leaf of the volume The Insects, where I read that Harvard biologist Dr Williams has performed a brilliant piece of scientific sleuthing, revealing the secrets of insect metamorphosis. I want to know everything about metamorphosis. Dr Williams stops a cecropia caterpillar from spinning a cocoon by tying off its head with a piece of thread. The hormones it needs to transform into a moth stop flowing into its tail so that the caterpillar starts to become a pupa above the thread but stays a caterpillar below. Dr Williams goes a step further. He makes a headless mother cecropia moth lay eggs by putting hormone into its cut-off abdomen and sealing it in with plastic. A male moth fertilises the eggs and they hatch. Then, he goes even further. He cuts a pupa in half and inserts plastic tubing between the two halves to see how the flow of hormones between the severed parts causes metamorphosis. The moth, he discovers, has to heal from its injuries before it can transform, although one pupa, with its two ends connected by a thin thread of tissue in a glass tube, turns into a moth, but when it tries to fly the glass tube breaks and it dies.
When Elizabeth Costello delivers a lecture on the lives of animals at Appleton College, she omits detailing the horrors done to animals ‘in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories…all over the world.’ I am not going to omit anything, although I realise that, like Elizabeth Costello, my reasoning is faulty, my analogy not just exaggerated and fanciful, but some might say obscene. No doubt that is because, like Elizabeth Costello, my reasoning is riddled with all the things that are not reason, like the beating heart of a child as it breaks.
Fifty years later I wonder how a child’s kindness, that first seeing of the self in the true beauty of a diamond beetle, leads that child to go to a chemist to buy chloroform, to soak cotton-wool with all the care chloroform requires, to put it in a bottle for the purpose of killing the creature she loves, and then to go a step further, and attach the dead body of this once living being to a mounting-board with the aid of steel pins specially fashioned to allow the dead body to hover above the board, tantalisingly, as if in flight. This does not occur to a child unless of course her imagination has been skewed by an earlier encounter. A lessoning in love, in the same way we now know that a child can be skewed by the lessons they receive in other kinds of love, the abusive kinds that may befall them. Timothy Morton calls this ‘The Severing’, when the great continuum of life is cut out of the human, a fissure that every child born into a kindred world has to learn. That is why, he quotes, ‘children are just as traumatised when a nonhuman is abused in the home as when is a human’. A child being ‘someone who is still allowed to talk with an inanimate stuffed animal as if it were not only an actual lifeform but also conscious’. For the mounting case to create its spectacle the object must first be killed in order to be viewed. Dispassionate, neutral, the child-scientist has no emotional entanglement with the objects she learns to position so as to resemble life. But what if, in that acquired moment, the child makes a still life but fails to kill it first?
When I wake in the night, I hear the coconut rhinoceros beetle. It is not hissing like the book says but screaming like a cicada screams when it is caught in an orb-spider’s web and the spider strikes and strikes. It is screaming like fingernails on a blackboard, like my little sister when the sewing machine zigzags her fingernail into the zipper I am sewing, like me when a nail finds the bone in my foot, like me in the night when from that moment forward the giant C of the rhinoceros beetle’s crescent horn catapults me from my dreams. But that night there is no waking from the catastrophe I have created. My hands are damp and sticky and slip and jerk on the pin that I have skewered through the coconut rhinoceros beetle’s gleaming black carapace, through its thorax, and deep into the mounting-board. The moths are waking up too, as sleeping children do when there is crying in the night, opening and closing their giant wings trying to fly against the pins that hold them fast in the ‘as if’ I have created, but they are not flying they are dying, their antennae trembling, their legs spasming, in that way an insect kicks against its death. But the coconut beetle is not dying. It is screaming. Its legs scampering in the air like a cartoon beetle but it is not a cartoon beetle, it is my coconut rhinoceros beetle, the one I have dreamt my way into, and hunted and caught, like Miranda who coughed and coughed until her chest was so tight she couldn’t breathe anymore and Fred made a coffin for her from apple crates and buried her in the garden. In that moment the giant crescent horn of the coconut rhinoceros beetle capitalises what Miranda says of Fred: ‘He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.’ The coconut rhinoceros beetle’s scream cuts a moment of clarity out of the confusion of that year, of the big talk that doesn’t fit the small talk, of the chasm between the way words fix the world and it shifts underneath them, in the shape-shifting that is catapulting me out of the cocoon of childhood into the crises to come, but what I cut out of the coconut rhinoceros beetle is its life; the great joy of being that Elizabeth Costello speaks of, short-changing it of its entirety. When death collects a life it pockets the change.
It must have been my mother who came, for who else would hear me crying in the night? She takes away my coconut rhinoceros beetle and the mounting case and the mounting pins and the chloroform in the killing bottle, and I don’t see it again, or my net, or The Collector. It too has disappeared like my insect collection which never again comes out of the crate where my mother had packed it. All the slide boxes of specimens with their wings spread and pinned disappear too. There are just some books and a lingering smell of insects, of chloroform, of mouldering. But the coconut rhinoceros beetle never goes away. It has thought its way into me and it is always here, waking me in the night, screaming, so that like Albert Camus’ chook it is still talking to me—even now. So that like Elizabeth Costello who discovers in a moment of crisis at the gate that she believes in the belling of frogs, I know I believe in the true coconut rhinoceros beetle, and sometimes just before I wake, when I am held in, within the breathing living kindred world—I am the coconut rhinoceros beetle.