The publican who put me up in Room 9 at the Wiseman’s Ferry Inn had been exasperated when I’d quizzed him about the ghost’s repertoire on the piano.
‘Look, love, I’ve only been here six months. You want to know about Wiseman, you’d be best off asking Patrick.’
‘Patrick?’
‘Local feller, been here donkey’s years.’
I whipped out my notebook and pen. ‘Got a number for him? Know where he lives?’
The publican frowned but before he could say anything the phone rang down in the bar, and like a man reprieved he shot away to answer it. Over his shoulder, halfway down the stairs, he called back, ‘In the bar, any time after four o’clock on a school day.’ He sketched a man-sized shape on the air.
‘Barefoot, blue singlet, big beard. Can’t miss him.’
Now I was winding down those familiar hairpin bends above Wiseman’s Ferry. What else was there to learn? I didn’t know. But I felt that Wiseman’s Ferry hadn’t finished with me yet.
I drove down to Laughtondale and looked at where the old mill had been. I took another photo of the headstone for Solomon and Jane Wiseman. I drove along the river as far as Spencer. Trees, cliffs, water. Water, trees, cliffs.
I took more notes, I stood by mistake on a nest of ants, I saw a long dark snake side-wind across the road. I stepped out under the branches in a patch of mangroves and got one of my shoes sucked off by the mud.
I wasn’t conscious of planning it, but at four o’clock I was back at the pub.
There was Patrick. Barefoot, blue singlet, big beard.
He heard me out as I stumbled through my story. Wiseman my great-great-great grandfather. Trying to piece together what happened. Writing a book.
I could hear my voice go uncertain on the word ‘book’. But Patrick didn’t ask any hard questions, like ‘what sort of book?’
‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘I can show you a few things if you like.’
It was getting late, but we drove in his battered four-wheel-drive, up the hill to Courthouse Cave, where in the family story Wiseman sat in judgment over his convicts (except that in the story it was Judgment Rock). To Wiseman’s Well, a dank mosquito-filled hollow where you could still see the flagstones lining a small pond.
As we looked around I learned a few things about Patrick, mainly that he was a man whose greatest pleasure was to be in the bush. He wasn’t indigenous, but he had a deep respect for the place and the people whose place it had always been.
I was probably the thousandth person to ask, but he patiently answered my questions about being barefoot in the bush. ‘Your foot doesn’t get hard like leather,’ he said. ‘More like a cellist’s fingers—hard but sensitive as well.’ Winter or summer, he told me, he wore the blue singlet and the shorts. ‘I never feel cold,’ he said. ‘Give it the chance, your body adjusts.’
He voiced my thought: ‘It’s how the Aboriginal people could live here, they understood all that.’
The sun was dropping below the high ridge behind Wiseman’s. I had to get back to Sydney. But Patrick offered to take me up into the bush another time.
He hardly knew me, had only heard a few words about what I thought I might be doing. But, as I came to learn, Patrick was a generous man as well as a knowledgeable one. Over the next couple of weeks we met several times and looked at many things.
He showed me a tree growing by the side of the road with a cigar-shaped scar four metres long in its side. The scar was made when a canoe was levered out of the bark, a hundred or so years ago. The scar started a couple of metres up the trunk. How did they get up that high? How did they lever out such a huge piece of bark in one piece without it splitting?
The tree was astonishing, but even more astonishing was that on my earlier visits, driving around looking for graveyards and so on, I’d sailed past it many times. I’d never noticed the scar. I might have looked, but I hadn’t seen.
He showed me caves with stencils of hands: big hands, small hands, hand after hand outlined in white pipeclay on the rock. I held my own up beside one. A bit different around the thumb. But a hand like my own, greeting me.
He took me along the MacDonald Valley, knocked on the door of a house and asked permission to go into the backyard, down beside the river. There, under some plastic garden chairs and a skewiff plastic table, was an engraving in the rock: of a European ship, complete with mast, sails, rudder.
The owner of the garden setting got out the hose and squirted the engraving so we could see it more clearly. He and Patrick stood on the grass discussing whether it was an Aboriginal engraving or a whitefeller one.
I was thinking, this could be Wiseman’s own boat.
Later, as the afternoon began to wear away, Patrick took me up along rough fire-trails, up and up through the National Park. We lurched along in his car, being lashed by branches, tossed about on the seats, onto the high ridges that I’d seen from the track to the campground.
When he turned off the engine the breathing of the bush came flowing into the silence, the sounds of it going about its life as it had always had. I followed Patrick along no track I could see, but he walked confidently into the mass of bushes and trees, glancing back occasionally to orient himself. Then he stopped. We were on a great open place among the trees where a flat platform of stone faced up at the sky. The place itself had such power—of space, of light, of some kind of intensity—that it took me a moment to see what was under our feet. Engravings, one after the other, grooved into the sandstone: kangaroos, emus, fish, humans. Not lined up neatly, but all over the surface of the rock, using its swells and dips to give the images life, each one at a different angle so you had to walk among them to see them and be drawn into the world they came from.
‘What do they mean?’ I asked.
‘No one really knows,’ he said. ‘No one’s left who knows the old stories.’
The engravings lay there on the surface of the rock, speaking up at the air. But there was no one who could hear them any more. There never would be again. Something was lost: not an extinct frog or flower, but an expression of the human spirit, the richness of its meaning vanished.
We stood on the rock platform as if silenced by the power of the place. Around us the leaves moved with a dry whispering sound. A big black bird perched on a branch and watched us with its yellow eye. Far up, in the pale sky, a cloud slowly shredded away to nothing.
I thought of the book that I was circling around, that I’d been trying so hard to control. It was the problem with having written a few books. You got cocky, thought you were the boss. You thought it was your book, to squeeze into this shape or that. Non-fiction. Memoir. The fictional quester.
How puny and little-minded all those plans seemed from the perspective of this ridge-top, in this vast room made of leaves and air. How presumptuous I’d been, thinking that this was my story alone, to pummel into shape as I saw fit, a story I understood enough to force into the form I wanted.
The breeze had picked up. The bunches of leaves whipped against each other, whipped at the air. The place was speaking. It was a language I didn’t know, but even so I was starting to understand.
How could I know what kind of book this was going to be? My job wasn’t to take what I’d learned and squeeze it into the shape I thought it should have. Before it could be a book this was a story. That story was somehow part of all this—these trees, these rocks full of language that was lost. I didn’t own that story. It had to be allowed to speak for itself. My job was to get out of its way.