The road was familiar now. The two-car garages, the three-car garages, the retirement villages. The bags of manure.
Around the last hairpin bends, past the pub, down to the ferry. Drive on diagonally. The river, the cliffs, a breeze along the water making dark cats-paws.
I was crossing the boundary between Darug and Darkinjung land as I crossed the river. Wiseman’s was on Darug land. Where I was going—the campground—was on Darkinjung land. I was glad I knew that now. It made me look at the river and see it doubled: the river I’d seen before, plus this new one.
Darug and Darkinjung would have visited each other. Bark canoes. I’d read about those. And they probably swam across too. The current looked strong today, the tide pouring downstream. But if you picked the right time it would be an easy enough swim.
Off the ferry, it was turn right along the road that hugged the base of the cliff. There’d probably always been a track here, so the Darkinjung could get along the river. I was looking out for the road that branched off up the escarpment. The Darkinjung, too, would have wanted to get up onto the plateau where I was going. The white man’s double-grooved track probably followed the course of an ancient path.
Feeling the nose of the car tilt up the steep dirt track, I felt a moment’s apprehension. Not long before, some hikers had nearly died up here, confused by the deep gullies and sharp ridges of this dry stony wilderness. They’d been found, but only in the nick of time.
I made sure that the water bottle was where I packed it, and still full. I wished I’d remembered to check the pressure in my spare tyre. The mobile was no use to me here: the peaks all around cut off the signal. I was on my own. Even Wiseman stayed behind at the ferry.
The first part of the drive seemed almost vertical, the road screwing its way up. At the top it flattened, the landscape opened out. The vegetation was thinner and pricklier, the air astringent, almost medicinal.
From this high point I could see miles in every direction, and everywhere it was nothing but ridges and gullies, ridges and gullies, each one woolly with bush, bluer and bluer into the distance.
I stopped the car and got out. The waiting silence swallowed the sound of the engine. A crow mocked me from somewhere: caar, caaar, caaaaar. The sky was a pale empty blue.
Wilderness. This was what wilderness was.
I could see an outcrop of rock that promised an even greater vista, but I had to force myself to leave the road. Only twenty metres, I told myself. What are you scared of? It was hard going. At every step I had to push a bush aside, or loop around a fallen tree, or detour to avoid a thicket of saplings. At times an opening looked like a path and tempted me to follow it, but it always ended in another thicket.
I was panting, although I’d walked such a short way: not so much from exertion as a sort of tightness in my chest that you could have called anxiety. Around me the bush was full of noise: an underlying hum and tick, the drone of a million insects; closer individual clicks and twitters; the birds going eep eep eep.
It was all bursting with life, but also utterly empty. I glanced back. The bushes seemed to have closed behind me, smoothly, silently, like water. Which way was the road? In making those loops and detours, which way had I gone? All around me, the shadows twitched, light and dark shifting together among trunks, bushes, rocks.
For an instant I let the idea of lost into my mind. It would be so easy to flounder on, through the formless up and down of it, the land bafflingly twisting back on itself, each ridge and gully looking like the next. In these miles of indifferent ridges, the thin wavering line of the road was the only thing made by people, and even that was invisible until you stumbled out of the bush and found yourself standing on it.
I looked down at my shoes, something familiar. I reminded myself of the idea of behind and in front. The road was behind me. If I turned, it would be there.
Back on the track I realised I’d been holding my breath. Silly. A few steps into the bush and I’d panicked. It seemed important to remind myself that my panic wasn’t a moral shortcoming, but an interesting thing to know. Wiseman didn’t have that track. Not behind, not in front. He had a whole continent stretching away around him, and those birds that made the place sound so very empty.
After the miles of dry ridges, the campground in the hollow was an oasis: a big clear area with soft bright grass, scattered trees, sunlight glancing between the trunks. A swift creek caught the light as it ran over plates of rock.
The silence was broken only by the occasional smack of whip-birds and the warbling of magpies. It was easy to imagine that nothing had changed here for two hundred years, even two thousand. Just the creek and the grass, and the breeze in the branches above me. I felt like the first human in the first, perfect garden.
I took off my shoes to walk along the creek. The water on my skin was cold and clean. Under my feet I could feel bumps in the rocks, shallow grooves the length of a hand. When I squatted down and looked sideways I could see that they were the colour of the rest of the rock but not part of its natural form. There were dozens, hundreds, all over the flat rocks.
It was a jolt, as if someone had shoved me hard in the back, to realise what they were. These weren’t some strange act of nature. They were made by humans. They were grinding grooves, where people put an edge on their stone axes. I’d seen the pictures in books.
This entire creek was a whetstone.
In an instant wilderness transformed itself under my feet into workshop. Generation after generation of people had ground their axes here. In this sweet glade they had eaten, slept, made love, had babies.
Forget feeling like the first human.
And forget any cosy illusions about Wiseman. This country wouldn’t have seemed like wilderness when he was here. He couldn’t have pretended for a moment that it was an empty land. Along every stream, the thousands of axe-grinding grooves would have been clear and fresh, the newly scraped stone gold against the dark. Narrow sandy paths would have wound through the trees. The trees themselves would have carried fresh bleeding wounds where canoes and shields had been prised out of the bark. Every rock overhang would have been blackened by a cooking fire, scattered with bones and shells from past meals. Wiseman would have known that every acre of this place was as lived in as his own house.
No wonder he thought he had to build a fortress.
The campfire later was a comfort, a room made of light, carved out of the darkness, with myself safe at the centre.
But it blinded too. You had a choice. You could feel safe, but be blind. Or you could see, and know how small you were.
I’d lit the fire, cooked my meal, heaped the wood on to push the darkness back. Now I let the flames die, the embers darken. It was time to see what was out there.
The bush at night was like a great sighing lung. Up on the ridge that encircled the hollow, a wind was blowing, but down here only the occasional shaft of breeze came through.
In the pauses between breaths, the night noises. A flurry and rustle, a small thump. Certain private sounds—pwik pwik pwik. Close at hand, the breeze was smaller, more personal, the flutter of one bunch of leaves at a time, a shaft of cooler air like the draught from an open door. With the fire burned away to nothing, the trees were bigger and closer. They leaned down, soft shaggy creatures, watching.
I was restless, alert. Almost as if I was waiting for something. Not that I was frightened, exactly. Nothing here was malevolent, nothing was hostile. This place wasn’t going to spook me.
But there wasn’t nothing, either. This was an empty place—but empty the way a room was when the people had that minute walked out of it. They left a blank, but the blank held the shape of their presence. I wasn’t feeling the emptiness of the place, but the once-fullness of it.
The wind was swelling again through the trees up on the ridge, each individual leaf adding its voice to the choir of moving air. It filled out of the silence into a stately roar of sound that travelled around the hillside, held its breath, then faded, tree by tree, leaving only a long pause that waited and listened.
Listening, waiting for the next respiration of the wind, I realised how far I’d travelled in my search for Wiseman and his world. A year before, I’d known almost nothing about him, and less about the place he’d come to and the people who’d been there before him. If I’d thought about telling a story, it had been a shallow one, blinkered by my ignorance: a biography at most, or perhaps an appendix to the family story, a few more details to be handed down to future generations.
Now, sitting so small in this immense airy night, I was beginning to sense the real dimensions of this thing. There was a story here that was bigger than my ancestor, bigger even than the tale of his relationship to the Aboriginal people. It was about the life that the place held within itself, within its rocks and trees. The place was speaking to me as I sat listening, and although I couldn’t hear it properly, and didn’t know how to tell its story, I knew I was going to try.