“It is said privately that up the country,
instances occur where the Natives are ‘shot like so many crows,’ which never
comes before the public.”
(Colonial Advocate & Tasmanian Review and
Register 1830)
1.
Pilgrimmage:
Closing the
front door of Sacre Couer at six twenty-five,
my daughter
and I dissect empty Sunday streets.
We are
leaving on a pilgrimage to the middle of this cryptic island.
The roads
are threadbare.
The sky
unfolds, and at last, we can breathe.
We divide
fields of white poppies,
the road a
seam of hand-stitches hemming up the wild places;
the sides
of the gravel pinned with the regular white tacks
that keep
the small wildnesses in place.
Blackwoods
and gums crowd the edges
like
tattered beggars jostling for place. Hills rise up suddenly.
They are
the backs of grey-green carrion,
their
spines picked clean of flesh or pelt…
their
backbones exposed to the scavenging seasons.
Voluptuous
farmland, fecund and stretch-marked,
dimples up
to the foot of a plateau-
it rises
like twins born scalp-to-scalp,
their
stubborn chins pointing east and west, defying separation.
Sheep are
molasses-faced and fat.
Even shorn,
they are lardy and stolid.
There are
recently-ploughed acres,
the orange
soil worked to a delectable tilth.
Staid towns
are uncluttered and almost unpopulated streets
where old
bachelors drive unpretentious utes
and raise a
single finger in greeting.
This is a
kind of pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage to the heart of the island-
a wide and
brazen chalice surrounded by a circle of rough-cut stone.
But once:
an open wound, gouged out by the persistent thrust
of ice-age
glaciers. It is summer and there has
been rain.
The pasture
is electric and plush; cattle long-bodied and svelte.
We cross
corduroy bridges tatted over rivulets and rivers.
You wonder
how anyone can manage to carry on the threads of a life
so far away
from everything, and are reminded that everything tends to be
wherever
you decide to tie off the knot of your life.
2. The
Sacred Heart:
I grew up
with the image of the Sacred Heart
affixed to
my mother’s bedroom wall
alongside
Our Lady of Sorrows: both in heavy gilt frames.
He was a
caucasian Christ, of course, with long, pale gentlings of hair.
He held his
hands open to reveal cuneiform slits
in narrow,
uncalloused palms.
Most
surprising of all was the open heart exposed
to show
beating muscle bound by a woven ring of penetrating thorns,
a cross
skewering the flesh from above,
and a
bright flare of flames encroaching from behind;
(while,
alongside, Our Lady of Sorrows wept her hot tears
with seven
swords stuck permanently in her guiltless heart
and a twist
of something like fencing wire corseting her throbbing valves).
3.
Badly-behaved children in a two-dollar-store:
We have set
off to see the absolute heart of this island, and to return.
We are
seeking something spiritual- some throat-aching sacredness-
but have no
expectation of where we might end up,
except that
it is a place called Jackeys Marsh.
Just
off-centre of this wild dead-end,
a narrow road
leads to some pasture where another wave of invaders,
(the photos
show uncommonly large-chinned souls;
they could
be the founding members of some
Appalachian
Anabaptist Clogging Jamboree),
have
returned to set up camp over a couple of decades.
Not so different
from those original invaders,
they have
come from the tail-end of an Age of Enlightenment,
and they,
too, believe they know a better way of being human.
And, just
like the first invaders, they barely see the people
who have
made their homes in the wide and motherly expanse of the valley.
Like some
tribe invented from the pages of Anthropology for Dummies,
they
misappropriate the gewgaws and baubles of culture,
barging
through millennia of complexity and subtlety
like
badly-behaved children in a two-dollar store.
They gobble
religion and mystique before they even reach the check-out,
leaving
their empty wrappers behind. But,
in the
strong and beating heart of this place, they are only a murmur:
their
djembes barely puncturing the deeper rhythm of long centuries.
There are
photos from each festival on the ‘net, dating back to 1983.
I am no
longer a wide-eyed romantic.
I can
imagine the pit-toilets, the mess left behind by these
strangely
detached children-of-nature. Along
Jackeys Marsh Road,
the blackberries
have invaded the bush and crowd at the edge of the gravel.
We imagine
the excreta of the forest-festival-goers infesting the bush,
germinating
all these noxious weeds.
4. Omphalus:
We pass a
man and a woman leaving a cabin to clamber onto their pushbikes.
They look
like they are meditating on where the hell they are.
We turn
onto Sugarloaf Road.
The surface
becomes rougher, the road narrower.
Eventually,
we come to a portentous Private Property sign.
My daughter
gets out of the car to read a sign further up.
She returns
to tell me that our foray into the heart of the bush has ended
at a
Buddhist Retreat. I turn the car and retreat to Meander.
Like the
weeds by the sides of the road, another exotic invader.
At this
omphalus, this navel at the centre of the valley,
a resting
place for that flighty moth: introspection.
Yet there
is room here, too, in this place where we throb with separation,
with the
ultimate cutting of the cord that once attached us to the soil.
We pass the
bike-riders again.
They seem
serious and intent, wobbling on their silly bicycles
their
senses of humour clearly left behind with their soy chai.
And you
think, if this is truly the heart of this large island,
surely a
good laugh would not be out of place.
Were the
original people of this place as poe-faced as those who came after?
Surely
there were times when their smoke-reddened eyes brimmed with mirth…
when their
lungs heaved with amusement- the old mother’s fat old belly quaking,
her old
cheeks pushing so far upwards that she could barely open her eyes.
Do we truly
imagine the old-timers living lives devoid of hilarity?
Do we
picture those first immigrants seeing out whole generations
without a
wry chuckle? At the heart of this
island,
in the old
belly in the shelter of the stony heart,
there must
have been tears of laughter besides tears of despair.
There must
have been the ridiculous, as well as the sublime.
5.
Keepers of the Ochre:
There are
layer on layer of history here,
like the
smooth muscle layers of a human heart.
Long before
the Buddhist Retreat at the end of Sugarloaf Road;
long before
the forest festival and its own brand of colonialism…
even before
the ordered streets, the quiet homeliness of the Meander Store,
there were
the settlers and there was a people called the Pallittorre.
The old
mother was ancient even before the Pallittorre people arrived.
Like
children and grandchildren, they found the safe place in her belly,
tucked in
underneath her stony heart. And they made their homes there,
little
knowing the icy violence that had gouged out her motherly softness:
a monster
river of ice and gravel had scooped out her insides
leaving
behind the savaged wound that would become a beautiful valley.
Her many
sorrows gathered like great tears pooling in the rim
of an
eye…and they fell, and they fell,
feeding the
gentle river until it burst its banks with maternal suffering.
The old
mother, the ancient grandmother, would be pierced at her very womb,
and knowing
this would happen was one of the sorrows
that
penetrated her.
Over the
millennia, she had given birth to trees,
to birds
and to beasts, and to the people who, like all people,
and unlike
the other creatures, had given a name to themselves.
The
Pallittorre people belonged to that old mother, and,
because
they were her people,
she gave
them access to her ochre mines…her mother lode.
The ochre
was the thick, sweet after-milk of the old woman’s flesh.
The
Pallittorre people grew fat and important on the oily milk,
the chrysm,
of their old mother’s teats.
6. The newcomers:
When the
newcomers came, pushing inwards into the old woman’s innards,
the old and
faltering womb was pierced again and again.
When the
sleeping Pallittorre people were shot with nails around their campfires,
the old
mother wept her hot tears…Such great and unstoppable tears!
When the
women were raped and mutilated
in reprisal
for the theft of a couple of lice-ridden sheep,
the old
mother wept tears of blood;
and when
the children were stolen away from the dolerite and quartzite
from which
they were made, there were no tears good enough,
except
those terrible and timeless tears of stone.
Still,
those exiled peasants who came to hack the trees
and burn
the stumps and breed their sheep
were more
akin to the Pallitorre people than the head-shaking Government Man
in his
paper steeple of bureaucracy.
Those
peasants understood the pull of the motherly valley;
they knew
the threat of a long winter and slow hunger and probable death-
they, too,
knew what it was to have a wife and children slaughtered…
they knew
the fear of inexplicable Otherness,
and in that
way, were not so far removed from the people they displaced.
It was the
clean-handed and detached official in his fortress of detachment
that was
most despicable…who came from an era of Enlightenment
and truly
believed he knew a better way of being human.
The
Pallittorre people perhaps saw themselves as a Scaled-fish people;
they saw
themselves in the river blackfish that swam its meandering path;
they knew
their brothers and sisters in the divergent gaze of the tiny galaxia.
And, being
a high-born people, keepers of the sacred,
the
Pallittorre people would never stoop to consume a scaled fish-
just as
those later foreign people would be repulsed
by the
greedy consumption of dog or dolphin.
For it is not
the creature that a people reviles, that is taboo;
it is the
creature that is most cherished in the
souls of the people
as brother
or guardian.
Nor did the
people sew their kangaroo or possum skins to make clothing,
but wore it
as it came off the beast: whole and animal-shaped;
and in this
way, they showed their great respect.
7. An
echidna by the side of the road:
Heading
home toward the Lakes, we are followed by a series of convertibles,
multi-coloured
and polished with impatience.
Their
united bravado irritates us in this primal landscape of rock and water.
I take each
bend carefully and the convertibles swing behind
like a
colourful tail on a kite.
Finally,
sealed road gives way to gravel. I pull
over to let the cars pass.
They slow
down to park before the bitumen ends.
The last
car in the convoy passes us and we read its number plate:
ZEN. Laughing heartily,
we leave it
behind and contemplate white rock
strewn
across this god-sized world.
An echidna
waddles at the edge of the gravel.
And, so, if
that wide and comforting valley is the mother, crying tears of blood,
then the
embracing ridge-tops are the son, young yet, and arrogant.
Scourged
and weatherbeaten, the ravaged ridge-tops
tower over
the pliant green valley.
Columns of
dolerite and quartzite flaunt their naked perpendicularity.
The open
stigmata of clearfelling punctures distant hilltops,
the acres
yet unburnt cross-hatched with a cruel mockery.
Where,
once, the settlers cornered the original people
there is an
unending line of power-poles silhouetted against the great emptiness,
like an
unending row of crucifixes waiting to be adorned
by an
endless supply of messiahs.
