Lost Worlds Read online

  No wonder there’s guilt in this new land. Guilt at almost destroying a complex culture, guilt at the nation’s one-time “white Australian” policy which resisted Asian and Oriental immigration with such phrases as “Two Wongs don’t make a white,” even guilt at the low-brow tone of rampant our-Australia-wrong-or-right “ockerism.” There’s plenty of guilt to go around here and you can sense it, crawling and festering behind the reassuring piles of middies and tinnies and stubbies and the buoyant cynicism and braggadocio of yarners and spielers in any tin-roofed, clapboard-walled, sawdust-floored outback pub.

  Murray had been sitting silent for a long time, playing with a lukewarm beer.

  “You know many Aborigines, Murray?” I asked.

  “Some…yeah, I know some.”

  “You think it’d be better just to let them get on with their own lives in those reserves—whatever you call them?”

  “The Lands. The Aboriginal Lands.” He was thoughtful for a while. “Hell…I dunno. I agree with Graeme, though. They have different ways of seeing things…everything. I mean…listen to the names they give places—thousands of places. They’re different from ours. They sound different. Sort of like poetry. Like they give them names that sound like how they look. We call our places after people—like Geraldton, Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Gladstone, or after towns back in Britain and Ireland…they have names like Kambalda, Yalgoo, Cooloomia, Ningaloo, Kalkariaji, Kununurra, Nulunbuy.”

  “Beautiful names,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Murray. “Different.”

  I could see he was still hesitating, not sure how much to say.

  “Tell me about the Dreamtime.”

  “Aw, I dunno, Dave…it’s not easy…. Graeme knows much more.”

  “C’mon, Murray,” said Graeme. “You’ve been in the outback all your life…. You know it.”

  “Well,” said Murray slowly. “It’s just a story. Sometimes I think they just made it up to get us riled.”

  “You really think that?”

  He laughed a kind of naughty-boy laugh. “Naw—not really. But y’wonder sometimes…. I mean, it’s just so…well, it’s different thinking, different way of seeing things…. They see everything as kinda alive, y’know, rocks, mountains, rivers…. They’re all like living things and they’re sort of in there with them…y’know, like a part of all this living land. They believe that their ancestors who’d come up out of the ground had ‘sung’ the earth into life…. They’d made it perfect but told the people, the Aborigines, that if they wanted to keep it that way they’d got to keep ‘singing’ it…. They’d got to walk along thousands of invisible lines that kept everything together—they called them the songlines—and they’d got to remember special songs, chants, and remember all the places, the landmarks, places where the ancestors, who were like early animals, had passed and made the land. And where they’re still sleeping under the ground. That’s what the Aborigine ‘walkabout’ is…. We used to think it was just a bunch of boongs goin’ off for a booze-up in the desert…some of ’em did…but for the others, it was more serious. Like a way of keepin’ the world right. They’d walk sometimes hundreds of miles, singing the chants and that. And all those special places…they call them strange names—a big pile of round rocks they’d call eggs—the eggs of the Red Snake, or a mountain with a pinnacle—that may be the tail of the Golden Lizard…things like that. Other places they’d name after honey ants, kangaroos, the bandicooks, the witchetty grubs, cockatoos, fire, wind…what else, Graeme?”

  “Something I once read, Dave,” said Graeme. “It said, ‘They wrapped the whole world in a web of song.’ That’s nice. Forgot who wrote it.”

  I looked around, through the lacy filigree of the ghost gum leaves, out across the vast emptiness of the desert, falling away to horizons sheened in a soft dusk light. What to me was a beautiful but featureless flat plain would be, to many Aborigines, an infinitely complex interweaving of invisible songlines and sacred places, each one a vital part of a huge complex whole. Their earth, as they knew it.

  Was it just one more way for man to deal with terrible loneliness of being, in a cold, disinterested universe, and particularly on this ancient, worn-down, empty land they now call Australia? The need to give a reason, an explanation, for things around us? The fear of the ultimate unknown—death—that makes us build elaborate fantasies of imaginings to convince ourselves that we are not alone, that we have a purpose, a function, a reason for being? The “walkabout” as the primary purpose of existence? All driven by that great cry of realization, bursting out with joy, fear, and hope—the eternal—“I AM.”

  Or was it something more? More than just elaborately defensive mental exercises against all that terrifying, screaming nothingness? Is there something within us that knows there is a presence, a context out there, or under or above? A shard of a once-absolute knowingness that remains implanted in our psyches and leads us, like salmon to the pool of their birth, seeking throughout our lives to reestablish contact, to regain the context, to know again the whole from which we have been released to live, and will once again return to after life?

  We all sat quietly with our own thoughts as the light dimmed into night and the fire flickered and flying things buzzed and clicked around us.

  “’Nother beer, Dave?” asked Graeme.

  “Sure.”

  “Murray?”

  Murray seemed to be in another place. His eyes were closed. For the first time he looked tired, as if his short but pungent monologue had drained him.

  “Murray,” said Graeme louder.

  “Yeah…what?”

  “Beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sleep came easily that night under a silver black sky crackling with stars.

  And the next few days were all mine.

  Graeme and Murray had much to do, cleaning up the campsite and removing all the gear that had hosted small groups of adventurers throughout the cooler April through November period.

  “Take the Cruiser,” Graeme had said, handing me the keys and a rough-drawn map of the Bungle Bungle massif. “Go and explore for a while. When we’re finished here we’ll try to get into the canyons with you.”

  He loaded the back with a large “eski” cooler full of water, soda, beer, and snacking supplies.

  “Take more’n you think you’ll need,” he advised. “Can get damn hot in there. You’ll sweat like crazy.”

  “Any other warnings? Snakes, biting things, poison plants?”

  “Naw. You’ll be right, Dave. Just get in there and enjoy yourself.”

  Which is precisely what I did. Day after day.

  The wonders and delights of this strange, sometimes eerie place have merged in my memory. Recollections return in drops and sprinklings of color, form, shape, and sound. To be alone in these strange clefts and canyons made me rejoice once again in the stroking comforts of solitude. I could imagine—I did imagine—that I’d discovered this place myself, just come across it on some long outback odyssey, entered its passages, learned its secrets after days on the bright brittle plains.

  The Bungle took me in and enveloped me. For hours I sat in the shade of canyon walls, three or four hundred feet high, listening to the soft prattle of palm fronds, watching the shadows move with the sun across the smooth striped and tiered walls, rejoicing in the occasional cool breezes that wafted down from the high, narrower places, letting the soft red sand on the floor of the canyons trickle through my fingers.

  I drank from clear cold pools fed by secret springs; I shared a sandwich lunch with a pink-crested cockatoo; I watched tiny lizards scurry through the sharp, spiky grasses; I looked for Aborigine wall markings and symbols, but saw none. Even they, I later learned, were reluctant to wander within these mazelike clefts. They buried their dead here and left them in peace, among the timeless silences.

  I remember the grand climax to an arduous walk and climb through Cathedral Gorge, where, after squeezing at one point through a cleft no more than two
feet wide, I finally entered a vast natural ampitheater where the gorge ended in a basilicalike bowl shaded by an enormous rock archway in which was a crystal pool fed by a trickling waterfall. The place echoed like the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, wispy threads of sound rolling around the towering curved walls. Mystical. Almost magic.

  I sat on a low dome of blown sand waiting for something to happen. Everything seemed set for an appearance, a celebration, an offering—something to give focus to a setting so spiritual, so silent, so majestic that it’s hard to believe it existed, merely for me and the moment of my being there.

  To think such a place as this has gone untouched, unmolested, unexplored for so many millions of years without even the modest intrusions of the Aborigines…. It gave new life to all my lost-world explorations and expectations. There may be hundreds of such places, still unknown, still unmapped in our seemingly poor, cluttered, overdiscovered, overused world. Not “may.” I know there are. Some too small or fragile to mention, even to friends. Others so remote and inaccessible that they exist in their wholeness, safe maybe forever from prying eyes and inquisitive minds. Vast underground worlds of water and caves and galleries dripping with millions of stalactites; deep, jungle-hidden grottoes harboring life-forms as yet unknown and unrecorded; other canyons, other Bungle Bungles, so elusive that we may never find them and never experience their beauty and their own special solitudes.

  To know that our world still remains a thing of mystery, silence, and secrets—this I find one of the greatest joys of all. It gives me that shiver of pure duende that scampers through my body when I experience a place or a thing with new eyes and new sensations; when the mind’s constant gauging, measuring, comparing, and contrasting cease and you gaze—mindless—at something so unexpected and so overwhelmingly all-encompassing that you are drenched in the golden cascades of pure feeling. A great cleansing of the spirit, a breaking of barriers, an annihilation of “attitudes”—a powerful rush, upward and outward into infinite new possibilities, infinite new delights. A rejoicing in the great “I AM”—and, even more—a reinforcement of the “you are”…a sense of being propelled into far broader spaces and conceptions…and, most strange of all, a sense of coming home to a place that, somehow, deep, deep down, you always knew was there.

  Maybe I’d been reading too much of Chatwin’s Songlines. Maybe I’d been touched by Murray—that raunchy, stolid out-backer—trying to understand some of the secret world of the Aborigines he so easily dismissed in barstool lingo as “boongs” and drunken layabouts.

  He knew. And despite all the bravado, he possibly yearned for a sense of the wholeness and the completeness—a Dreamtime—in the confused, roustabout world around him.

  He’d never say so. But neither would many of us, plowing through the clutter and distractions and trappings and little tired emotions of our lives of quiet desperation.

  I come to places like this to shed the cloying skin that envelopes us all at one time or another. I come to be cleansed. I come to learn—or rather, to be taught. Or maybe I come to be reminded of things part of me already knows. The part of me that needs air and light and solitude and silence…the part of me that I laid on those soft sands of Cathedral Gorge and offered, freely, willingly. And watched it soar…

  Oh, yes. There was magic in that place.

  I found it. And it found me in many other places in this Bungle Bungle—this still-unexplored enigma. In the clefts of Echidna Chasm, in Frog Hole, in the long, winding corridor of Piccaninny Creek which ended once again in a crystal pool filled with dazzling reflections of red-domed canyon walls.

  I could—maybe should—have stayed longer. Every day brought fresh discoveries and new sensations. Each evening I would return to camp worn out but, as Graeme noted, “charged.”

  The last day came and the camp was gone, leaving a few worn patches of boot-marked earth between the straggly gum trees and explosions of spinifex.

  “Got a surprise for you,” Graeme said with his slightly secretive Graeme-grin.

  “What?” I asked. One more surprise in almost a week of surprises wouldn’t hurt.

  “Hang on. You’ll hear him in a minute or two.”

  “Who?”

  “Just wait.”

  So I waited, wishing I had time to go back into the canyons for one last quiet walk.

  The air throbbed way back behind the ridge, then thundered, then crackled like smashed glass as a tiny bubble-cockpit helicopter skimmed over the treetops and landed on a bare patch of dust close to the campsite.

  “Well—here’s your surprise.” Graeme smiled.

  “A helicopter?”

  “Friend of mine. Takes flights over the Bungle in the spring. He’s coming to clean up. Says he’ll give you a ride if you like. See the other side of the Purnululu.”

  “Y’mean the beehive formations?”

  “You got it, mate. Those are what really put the Bungle on the map. Better get on over.”

  I ran across the open ground. The pilot remained in the cockpit, we shouted our introductions at one another, and then I was off in that doorless Plexiglas bubble that whisked me high over my beloved canyons, across the eroded red plateau, and—well, I described it all at the outset.

  Suffice to say it was one of the most enervating and exciting journeys of my life and a fitting finale-experience in this most unique of landscapes, deep in the northwestern outback of Australia. A place I was learning to love and even understand. A little. I’d hoped for a tour around the town when we got back to Halls Creek. Graeme had told me about the abandoned gold mines, remnants of western Australia’s first rush in the late 1800s. “There’s a meteor crater too a few miles out, second largest in the world,” he had said, “and then we could drive through some of the Kimberley cattle country.” He’d also promised to introduce me to a local legend, Betty Johnson, a longtime Halls Creek gold prospector who once slept through a cyclone in the outback and awoke to find her campsite surrounded by fat, shiny nuggets.

  But things didn’t work out as we’d planned.

  “You’re in luck again,” Graeme gushed. “How do you feel about a ride in a mail plane into the Never-Nevers?”

  “Into the what?”

  “Pilot’s off to Mount Augustus—middle-of-nowhere place—and then to Exmouth on the coast. Near the Ningaloo Reefs—sort of a west coast Great Barrier Reef. Beaut place, Dave—very quiet.”

  “Never heard of either.”

  “Well—neither have most blokes. But you’ll really get a feel for this part of the country. And it’s free.”

  “Free?”

  “You got it, mate. He likes company. And you’re not such bad company…for a pile.”

  “And what the hell’s a pile?”

  “’Nother word for a pommie Britisher. Piles come out, never go back, and give you a pain in the ass!”

  “Thanks, Graeme.”

  “Only kiddin’, mate. Good word tho’, in’t—we got flooded with pommies back in the sixties. Government usta pay ’em to come here. Free flights from London, free put-up till they got fixed with a job. Nice cushy little package.”

  “I remember that. I even thought about doing it myself.”

  “Too good a deal, Dave. They came out in the thousands. Had to stay two years to give it a try. Lots of ’em went back. Miserable whining bastards.”

  “And y’think this pilot would like a ‘pile’ for company?”

  “He likes anyone who’ll listen to him. Gets bloody boring flying around the outback by y’self. She’ll be apples, Dave. Bright red ones. You’ll be fine!”

  I had other plans, but they could wait. I accepted the offer and the same afternoon left Halls Creek in a twin-engine plane sitting beside a stocky and very animated pilot whose name seemed to be either Taffy, Dick, or Walrus (he had a big black mustache that drooped walrus-fashion almost to his chin), depending on who he was talking to.

  And could he talk.

  Above the roar of the engine, Walrus expounded on Australia
n history, Australian flora and fauna, the Aborigines (of course), the perils of flying “junkers” like his, and the sexual prowess of outback cattle station wives who gratefully received their mail every two or three weeks and got “real lonely” when their spouses went off for days, sometimes weeks, rounding up the errant steers on million-acre station spreads.

  Walrus seemed to enjoy his life. “Listen, Dave. My thinkin’ is that life is like a big bloody orange full of juice. You peel it, slice away the crud, dig out the pips, cut it into as many pieces as you want and suck ’n’ chew each piece till you get every mouthful—every drop. And if that’s not enough, you can chew on the peel too…whaddyathink?”

  Walrus liked to talk rather than listen. My responses to his rhetorical questions were usually irrelevant as far as he was concerned. Attempts to answer or argue were usually met in mid-sentence with “Right y’are, Dave, so anyway…” After a while I gave up and sort of half heard his rambling philosophies and outback adventures while watching the enormity of the desert ease by hundreds of feet below us.

  The scale of this wild, empty country is staggering. Hour after hour we flew over these ancient peneplained plateaus. Hour after hour across the Great Sandy Desert, an ocher-toned infinity where the reds ranged from brilliant crimson to the deepest rust, patterned by sinuous streambeds that captured the swirl of rain torrents maybe twice a year at most.

  Way to our east we caught occasional faint glimpses of the notorious Canning Stock Route that snakes eleven hundred miles across some of the most unforgiving land on earth. Surveyed and bore-holed for wells by Alfred Canning from 1906 to 1910, this legendary track provided the only way to move thousands of head of cattle from the east Kimberley cattle stations south to the teeming southern oil fields and the railhead at Meekatharra.

  The endurance and determination of Canning, his men, and his Aborigine guides became the vivid stuff of Australian folk history and his route was in regular use until the emergence of the road train system after World War II. Herds made this last journey in 1958 and today it is a key element of the outback exploration dreams of most citybound Australians. To have been a “Canning Cowboy” is something very special.