Landscape of Farewell (25 page)

It was obvious the moment I saw it. A dry stone wall was built into the face of the low cliff. It was such a considered, man-made feature in that otherwise entirely natural landscape that its presence was as startling, and as beautiful and mysterious in its way, as the ruins of an ancient temple. Seeing it there, it was possible to imagine strange gods. Dougald said nothing, but turned to me as I came up to him and put his arm around my shoulders. I was moved by this unaccustomed intimacy.

‘I would never have come back here on my own,’ he said. He left his arm around my shoulders, and we stood together thus, looking at the stone wall in the deep quiet of that wilderness, the morning chorus of birds far below us in the valley. ‘My grandfather set up this wall to protect his father’s bones. The day he brought me here I saw it for the first time as you see it now. It is just as I have seen it in my memory since.’ He laughed softly, marvelling at the perfect register of his boyhood memory with the intact wall in front of us. ‘All my life,’ he said with a kind of wonder, ‘I have been able to close my eyes and to count every one of those stones.’ He turned and examined me. ‘Me and Grandad looked into the cave, then we set each of them stones back in place before we left here fifty years ago.’

He continued to stand with me, looking at the wall. I had begun to think he intended to approach no closer, when he
dropped his arm to his side and made his way forward the last few metres. When I hung back he turned and beckoned to me to join him. The stones were flat and long and had been carefully selected. He lifted the topmost of them from its place and handed it to me. ‘Set it on its base,’ he instructed me, and he watched while I carefully laid the stone on the ground at my feet before he turned and handed me the next. He might have been handing into my care not stones but the precious antique volumes of his library. I thought of the poet’s line,
Stones on which there was nothing mortal
. ‘They have to go back just the way Grandad set them.’ When we had removed three courses of stones down to a level with our chests he reached his arm around my shoulder and drew me towards him and we leaned together and looked into the cavity.

It was a rock shelter rather than a cave. The low ceiling sloped down and met the floor no more than three metres from the entrance. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the shadowed interior. The skull was the first thing I saw. A human skull is such a distinctive object that there is no mistaking it for something else. The bones were not so obvious at first. The skeleton was half-buried by an accumulation of debris that had evidently leached from the roof over the years. A tiny black bat, no larger than the final joint of my little finger, clung to the ceiling above the skull, its eyes the bright jewels of a funeral decoration. Its body trembled as if in anticipation of flight.

Dougald said, ‘I liked the way you got that into the story that Gnapun and the leader were brothers. Those two brothers, you know, the sons of the leader who were bringing the sheep up through the scrubs? They didn’t join in with the retribution afterwards but gave shelter to the messengers’ people who survived the killing that went on in the days and months after the massacre. Years later those two boys had fellers working on that place with them that they knew had probably been involved in the massacre of their own family. They accepted something deeper than a need for revenge about what happened that day between their father’s party and the local people. I think their dad would have been proud of the way they acted.’ He fell silent, looking in over the lip of the partially dismantled wall. ‘Gnapun remained a stranger to his people. After the massacre he took a woman to live with him and they had my grandfather. The three of them lived up here on their own until old Gnapun died. After his death my great-grandmother moved down into the valley, and my grandad began working for the stations around the place. I think he went over to that country one time and did some fencing on that place where the massacre was. When Gnapun was old he must have regretted the deaths of those people. Only a young man could do something like he did that day.’ He was silent. Then he said, ‘He is my hero.’

He seemed to wait for me to say something. ‘I had an uncle,’ I said, and as I said it I realised that my uncle had not been one
of my ghosts last night. ‘He too loved his land and lived and died alone for the sake of it. I am the only one who remembers him now. I believe he also came to prefer his solitude to the company of other men, though I don’t know what led him to that. He did not have Gnapun’s reason for it.’

‘Gnapun had to live with what he had done,’ Dougald said. ‘Old men don’t make good killers.’

We stood a while longer, then Dougald said, ‘We’d better close her up and get going.’

I paused on the way down and looked back at the wall of stones that Dougald and I had carefully set in place again. They would remain undisturbed there long after he and I were dead. I turned away and followed him and his pale bitch down the incline. Stumbling over loose rocks in my town shoes, and flailing his mother’s stick in the air and letting out a yelp whenever my ankle went over, I followed him down the mountain. It took us less than two hours to reach the camp. The two brown dogs were lying in the shade waiting for us at the truck. Dougald lit a fire and made a brew of tea and we looked at each other and smiled to think what we had done.

It was after midnight and I was still at my desk. I was looking out of the window, remembering Mount Nebo. The chestnut trees were in new leaf and the rain was coming down so softly through the streetlights the drops drifted as if snow was falling. The street was deserted. It was the best time, and I was content to be alone. I had restored Winifred’s photograph to its former place on my desk and had set Dougald’s battered copy of Leichhardt’s
Journal
beside her. Dougald’s mother’s stick was propped in the corner within reach beside my chair. In ten days Vita would be with me again. She was to attend the annual conference, and afterwards we planned to travel and to see something of Europe together. As she had feared, her friendship with her new boyfriend of the narrow shoulders had not blossomed and once again she was
waiting for the black prince to rescue her from spinsterhood.

I was remembering a certain day after Dougald and I had returned from our expedition to Gnapun’s cave. We were to go to Sydney together and he had asked me to cut his hair. I set a chair out in the yard in readiness for this operation and was sitting at the kitchen table looking out the door waiting for him to finish feeding the hens. The two brown dogs were sprawled on the concrete in the shade of the gum tree. I watched Dougald making his way up the path towards the hen run, the blue plastic bucket of mash in the crook of his arm. He had aged greatly since our return and I was concerned about him. He was wearing his blue overalls and a brown beanie. He had lost weight and the overalls hung on him loosely, as if he had borrowed them from a bigger man. When he reached the hen run he stood at the wire gate, steadying himself against the post, gathering his strength. It was clear to me that he had begun to fail and had not recovered from the hardships of the journey into the escarpments. It surprised me that my own health had not suffered any lasting setback from the experience. I watched him lean and fumble with the latch on the wire gate to the hen run. The gatepost sagged and the latch was inclined to catch. The post needed re-setting and the wire tightening. He had spoken of his intention to make these repairs and I had said I would help him. But I am confident neither of us believed we would ever do it. Sitting there watching him, I thought how one
day soon the hens would be gone and the old wire enclosure would be overgrown by blackberries, or by one of those thorny bushes that had flourished since the death of the goat. He had the gate open and rested for a breath before stepping into the enclosure. His bitch remained outside, guarding the opening. But there was no need for her to guard it, as the hens were fussing around Dougald’s boots. He tipped the mash along the length of the trough for them, taking care not to spill any into the dust. I watched him making his way back along the path. Perhaps, after all, I had caught a glimpse of the Promised Land from Mount Nebo. He was my hero. The end came swiftly.

We were in Sydney staying with Vita. I was to fly home to Germany within the week. He promised to visit me in the summer, when we would be tourists together for a while. We were at a restaurant overlooking the beach in Manly having lunch with Vita and some of her friends, when he leaned and touched my arm and murmured that he was not well. I knew at once there must be something seriously amiss and I had the waiter call a taxi immediately. Dougald collapsed before the taxi arrived. He survived for three days, then suffered a second, more severe collapse. Vita and I were with him in St Vincent’s Hospital when he died. Before his second stroke—if that is what it was that felled him in the end, for the doctors did not seem sure of how to name his malady—he said to me, ‘It’s time for me to go over to the Old People, old mate.’ I understood that he
was not unhappy with this death and that he even welcomed it. Vita was distraught. It was her first intimate loss. At the funeral she clung to me and wept helplessly on my shoulder throughout the service. That night she said to me, ‘I want to know everything. You must tell me everything.’ I promised her that once I was home in Hamburg I would write an account for her of my journey with Dougald into the escarpments of the Expedition Range. I gave her my journal to read that night and in the morning she said ‘Massacre’ made up for the shitty paper I had written for the Hamburg conference. ‘But I still want to know everything. Uncle Dougald never told me any of that stuff about Gnapun.’

I began writing this account for Vita six months ago. I was working on it for only a few days when I realised the story of our journey to Gnapun’s cave told in isolation would not offer her the true dimensions of the experience for either Dougald or for myself. So I began with the day Vita and I met, the day I had planned to be my last, until she convinced me I had another life to live. Now I was impatient to see her again and was wondering what new challenge she would set for me.

The rain had stopped. I reached for my stick and got up and switched off the study light and stumped out into the sitting room. I poured myself a shot of whisky—yes, I have become a whisky drinker in my old age, but I take it without the tablets. Perhaps I would disclose my next task to Vita before she had a chance to suggest it to me. I was no longer the grieving, defeated old man
she had rescued from suicide that day, but had perhaps become more the man she had thought worth rescuing. To write of my father’s war, to venture into the darkness of my family’s silence, no longer seemed to me to be utterly taboo and an impossibility. Whether my father’s story might best be written as history or as fiction, however, I could not yet say. There was much work to be done and I was looking forward to getting started on it.

I switched on the television. There was an old Greek film on. It had evidently been running for some time. After I had been watching it for a few minutes I remembered that Winifred and I had seen the film together more than thirty years earlier. Although I had forgotten much of the story, I enjoyed the broken fragment of the film as greatly as I had once enjoyed the whole of it. But there, it is all fragments, and in the midst of it we may know this sense of completion.

I wish to thank the Australia Council for the generous grant of a two-year fellowship during the writing of this book.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my friends Frank Budby, elder of the Barada people, and Col McLennan, elder of the Jangga, and to Liz Hatté, for their encouragement and enthusiasm during the writing not only of this book but also of my earlier novel,
Journey to the Stone Country
. Without their confidence and friendship over the years neither of these books would have been possible. I owe a particular debt to my dear friend Dr Anita Heiss, one of Australia’s foremost Indigenous scholars and writers. I take this opportunity to record my gratitude also to Professor Gerd Dose, of Hamburg University, who generously read the manuscript and offered me invaluable advice and encouragement.

Lastly, I wish to thank my wonderful editor, Ali Lavau, and publisher, Annette Barlow, and her splendid team at Allen & Unwin.

The chapter titled ‘Massacre’ is my own fiction. It is, however, a story that I have based on a real event in Australian history known as the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre. Cullin-la-Ringo is said to have been the largest-ever massacre of white settlers by Indigenous Australians in our history. I first heard the story when I was sixteen and was newly arrived from London in the Central Highlands of Queensland—embarked, so I understood, on the most astonishing adventure of my life. I was working as a stockman on a cattle station near Springsure, not far from Cullin-la-Ringo, the station on which the massacre took place on 17 October 1861. The massacre was an event that owned then, and to this day I believe still owns, a sacred place in the collective memory of the local station people and their families.

On that fine October day in 1861, every member of the strongest and most well-armed party of white settlers ever to enter the Central Highlands up to that time was killed by the local Aborigines in whose country they had thought to settle. There were nineteen deaths in all. The accounts tell us there were no Aboriginal casualties that day. When I first heard this
story as a youth, it seemed to me that the attack on this large party of armed white settlers must have been extraordinarily well planned, and that there must have been an Aboriginal leader of great character and ruthless strategic intelligence behind the planning of it. No mention of such an Aboriginal leader was ever made, however, in the accounts that were told to me, and my earnest inquiries about the existence of such a person at the time were met with a response which implied that, as a newcomer to Australia and in particular to the Central Highlands of Queensland, my question was naive. My private belief, that there must have been such a leader among the Aborigines of those days persisted. In writing this fiction I have not relied solely on my own memory of the stories I was told in my youth, nor on the results of my contemporary discussions with Aboriginal friends, but have consulted a number of books and articles, some of which have been of great use to me in recovering a sense of the European historical context of the massacre. The most thorough and detailed account is to be found in Les Perrin’s assiduously researched
Cullin-la-Ringo: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tommy Wills
, Les Perrin, 1998. Gordon Reid’s essay ‘From Hornet Bank to Cullin-la-Ringo’, in the
Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland
, Vol. X1, No. 2, 1980–81, was of great use to me, as was, Henry Reynolds’ ‘Settlers and Aborigines on the Pastoral Frontier’, in
Lectures on North Queensland History
, James Cook University, Townsville 1974,
and, lastly, David Carment’s, ‘The Wills Massacre of 1861: Aboriginal–European Conflict on the Colonial Australian Frontier’, in the
Journal of Australian Studies
, 6 June 1980.