Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, her mother disappeared into a blizzard never to return.
Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to the place of her childhood to visit her drunkard father. The shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, changing forever his living death and her ordered life.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.
This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
‘Some years, very good books win the Man Booker Prize but this year a masterpiece has won it’
A. C. Grayling, Chair of Man Booker Prize Judges 2014
‘Devastatingly beautiful’
Sunday Times
‘Magnificent’
New York Times
‘A superb writer’
Ian McEwan
Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl from Van Diemen’s Land, is adopted by nineteenth-century explorer, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane. Franklin is confident that shining the light of reason on Mathinna will lift her out of savagery and desire. But when Franklin dies on an Arctic expedition, Lady Jane writes to Charles Dickens, asking him to defend Franklin’s reputation amid rumours of his crew lapsing into cannibalism.
Dickens responds by staging a play in which he takes the leading role as Franklin, his symbol of reason’s triumph, only to fall in love with an eighteen-year-old actress. As reason gives way to wanting, the frontier between civilisation and barbarity dissolves, and Mathinna, now a teenage prostitute, goes drinking on a fatal night.
‘Exquisite’
New Yorker
‘Dazzling. . . A captivating tale of cruelty and disappointment’
Washington Post
‘Richard Flanagan is a master’
Guardian
After a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, pole-dancer Gina Davies finds herself prime suspect in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney. Hunted by the police, her face stares back at her on the unremitting 24/7 news cycle. She is soon running away from her dreams for a better life and witnessing every truth turn into a betrayal.
The Unknown Terrorist is a startlingly prescient novel that drums with the cadences of city life; where fear invades individual lives, pushing one woman ever closer to breaking point.
‘A terrific novel, maintained at fever heat’
Guardian
‘Stunning. . . A brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world’
New York Times
‘Flanagan’s a novelist and philosopher for our time’
Daily Mail
‘It grips from the very first page and forces you to read on to its explosive, tragic climax’
Sunday Telegraph
Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer and forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.
‘Flanagan’s masterpiece’
Washington Post
‘Hugely original’
Guardian
‘A novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day’
New York Times
Trapped within a waterfall on the wild Franklin River, Tasmanian river guide, Aljaz Cosini, lies drowning. As the tourists he has been guiding down the river seek to save him, Aljaz is beset by visions horrible and fabulous. As the rapids rise, Aljaz relives not just his own life but also his country’s dreaming.
‘Haunting’
New York Times
‘Stunning’
Sunday Times
‘A torrent of a book – take the plunge’
Independent
‘This novel of spiritual desolation and redemption gathers such an awesome, tragic momentum that the fantastical aspects seem as crucial to the story as do the raging rivers, sheer gorges and imposing rainforests’
Washington Post
Death of a River Guide
Gould’s Book of Fish
The Unknown Terrorist
Wanting
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
ALL THIS YOU will come to understand but can never know, and all of it took place long, long ago in a world that has since perished into peat, in a forgotten winter on an island of which few have ever heard. It began in that time before snow, completely and irrevocably, covers footprints. As black clouds shroud the star and moonlit heavens, as an unshadowable darkness comes upon the whispering land.
At that precise moment around which time was to cusp, Maria Buloh’s burgundy-coloured shoes reached the third and lowest snow-powdered step outside their wooden hut. It was then, as she turned her face away from the hut, that Maria Buloh knew she had already gone too far and that she could no longer return.
Some people say she was simply blown out of the town that night with the furious blizzard winds; that the tempestuous, billowing breath of the storm picked her up and that she rose with it like an angel into the forest beyond, flew like a spectre into the wild lands that lay at every compass point beyond that place that burnt like a fresh bullet hole in flesh.
But that was not the way it was, of course.
Some people even say that she turned into the wind itself, became the gale that was to curse them all. But such terrible winds are not something one can ride as if in a dream. They can only be braced against and it was this which Maria Buloh did, for she was a sensible woman after all, despite what people say, and not a flighty woman whatsoever, and she braced against the wind as though it was a wall that might at any moment fall upon her and she pulled the scarlet coat, that tatty scarlet coat, pulled it tight around her small body. But even that gesture is getting ahead of this story, for the winds were not to blow hard until she had almost walked out of the settlement. And she had some walking to do to get that far.
‘Mama,’ Maria Buloh heard a small girl’s voice coming from inside the hut. Then once again, this time more a whimper—‘Mama . . .’
Maria Buloh stood there on the step, looking anywhere but at the hut behind her as she tried to soothe the child she had left within. Maria Buloh looked down at her burgundy-coloured shoes, looked at the beautiful impression such battered shoes made in new snow, saw, on the two wooden steps above where she stood, her footprints beginning to disappear in a fresh flurry of snow, and wondered at the nature of beauty, wondered at the small time allowed anything good before it was obliterated. ‘Aja, aja,’ said Maria Buloh, attempting to soothe the child with the words mothers of her country always used to put their children to sleep. ‘Aja, aja.’
As she then walked away she did not look back at the hut, but let her gaze drift upwards, let it wander beyond the rag-tag disorder of the settlement into the dark forest. Looked at the night-time blackness above. Looked at the snow falling into the cones of yellow electric light. Watched the snow circling its way earthwards. The way the white flakes eddied and whirled in the air as if they were time passing not constantly but erratically. Maria Buloh watched the way the falling snow showed that the air was never still, but held endless circling complexities, held infinite possibilities for graceful inexplicable movements.
Maria Buloh felt herself at that moment to be watching everything including herself, as if she were in a movie and this were a movie set. By thinking this way she did not hear the distant sounds of her daughter crying out to her from the hut she had just left. Strange sounds. Sounds she would not hear.
‘Mama,’ the child cried, but her mother would not hear it.
‘Aja, aja,’ Maria Buloh said soothingly, though whether the words were for her or for her child or for no reason whatsoever, nobody can know, for she was already far from their hut and the snow, in any case, deadened all sound. ‘Aja, aja.’
She continued looking: seeing it all anew, as if it had no connection with her. She saw how the whole black-and-white scene was lit up by the stark electric lights that ran up and down what passed for a street, how on either side of the street were crude vertical-board huts with corrugated-iron roofs and corrugated-iron chimneys, and how to some who lived there it brought back all too painful memories of forced labour camps in the Urals or Siberia. But she knew it wasn’t Stalin’s USSR. Knew it wasn’t Kolyma or Goli Otok or Birkenau. Knew it wasn’t even Europe. Knew it to be a snow-covered Hydro-Electric Commission construction camp called Butlers Gorge that sat like a sore in a wilderness of rainforest.
In this land of infinite space, the huts were all built cheek by jowl, as if the buildings too cowered in shivering huddles before the force and weight and silence of the unknowable, that might possibly be benign, might possibly even not care about people, but which their terrible histories—chronicles of centuries of recurring inhumanities and horrors which they carried along with a few lace doilies and curling photographs and odd habits and peculiar ways of eating—could only allow them to fear.
Because not to fear was to imagine a world beyond experience.
And that was too much for anybody.
In those cowering corrals of huts had to live the workers, for in this remote highland country of the remote island of Tasmania that lay far off the remote land of Australia, there was no other human settlement for many miles. There were just wild rivers and wilder mountain ranges and everywhere rainforest that only ceded its reign over the land to intermittent buttongrass plains, or in the higher altitudes, to alpine moorland.
That is what she saw.
What she heard was precisely nothing.
It was the time of the beginning of the great dam-building boom. The time the new Australians came to such wild places to do the wog work of dam-building because work in the cities, which the new Australians would have preferred, was Australians’ work. But Maria Buloh, wife of Bojan Buloh, mother of Sonja Buloh, wasn’t coming to Butlers Gorge.
She was leaving it.
Forever.
So Maria Buloh continued walking down the empty street, a young woman clad in an old coat carrying a small cardboard suitcase, the tracks left by her shoes momentarily bisecting that grim, sour, snow-swept camp, her image already losing its earthly outlines in the falling snow.
The sheet of silence the snow had thrown over the settlement was ripped apart by the approaching clatter of a small engine. The diffuse yellow streaks of a single small headlight made a moving piss-coloured puddle in the drifting snowflakes. Then a hunched rider on a motorbike with empty sidecar shaped out of white nothingness and bore down the street toward her. The rider sped past Maria Buloh, then fifty yards or so beyond slowed as he turned right and slewed to a halt outside the canteen. Maria Buloh stopped, turned, and stared.
In front of the canteen’s main entrance, a double wooden slat door, she saw a dozen women huddled around a fiery brazier improvised from an oil drum, preferring society under such conditions to a warmer solitude. They were clad in a quixotic motley of summer dresses and heavy winter coats, their heads covered with hats of varying exotic types—some berets, one slouch hat, two straw hats, a rainbow of beanies. Some women stood and some sat on the empty wooden beer barrels around the entrance, chatting and drinking beer brought out to them by their blokes—husbands and boyfriends and flirters—from the men-only canteen. When the doorway opened for a man to pass in or out, gossipy steam and steamy stories and laughter and the splintering of falling glasses spilt out over the women and onto the main street.
A leather-jacketed and helmeted figure got off the motorbike, and, conscious of making a dramatic entrance, strode past the women into the canteen. The barrel women were momentarily taken with this colourful new arrival. They heard his voice boom through the crowded canteen. ‘Name’s Eric Preston,’ he yelled. ‘I’m the AWU organiser and I’ve come to sort out the problem with the reffos. Who’s the rep here?’
But then his strident voice was lost in the babble of tongues that was the canteen drinking its past away and the interest of the women swung to the sight of the solitary woman with a suitcase walking out of the town on such a Godforsaken night to God knew where; the solitary woman who was staring at them and through them as if they were there but had never been there, as if she saw a future akin to the past when they would all once more be scattered with the wind and nothing of this horrible time and place would remain. Her face (so young, so young that it now looks shocking) seemed almost Oriental: the structure of the bones and large eyes different from those of Australians, and the lines—only a few, but deep nevertheless—seemed induced neither by the passing of the years nor by the sun, but as if they had been chiselled into her face by a sculptor to accentuate a strange, exotic beauty.
Some later said she was wrong, condemning what it was beyond them to understand. Perhaps because of this judgement, or perhaps arising from an opposite emotion, some small measure of sympathy for a tragedy that might befall any of them, or perhaps for reasons none of them would ever figure out, they nudged one another and they stopped talking when Maria Buloh looked at them so, and all that any of them or Maria Buloh could hear was the ongoing noise of the men inside.
Maria Buloh turned away. She recommenced walking out of the town. From the canteen she could hear the faint, ever fainter strains of a new American country-and-western song being played on the gramophone. The song seemed to simmer tears, like a goulash stewed out of sadness. As Maria Buloh walked toward the dark forest the babble from the canteen died away. The song became lost in the soft whip of sleet. Maria Buloh’s face was without emotion. Yes, that face—beautiful, yes; young, yes; but something else. What was it? As if fixing her mystery forever, tears—though only a few—slid from her eyes and glazed her face.
Behind Maria Buloh ran the tracks that led back to the place from where she came, the tracks that were being lost even as she made them in the falling snow, that were disappearing in the whiteness that threatened to enshroud everybody and everything in that grim little village long, long ago.
And it was some time afterwards, after the canteen had closed and the fighting finished and even the card players had given up for the night and were snoring yeasty breaths into the backs of women who wore their beanies to bed, that the gale rose and the wind began to cry such that it chilled even that wild wet earth.
Aja, aja, it seemed to howl. Aja, aja.
And the old, huge trees could be heard to crack and groan, and the new wires that scratched the vast night sky to whistle eerily, and none of the women who lay awake in their sagging beds that night were soothed by such sounds.
HE WORKED WOOD; that much Sonja Buloh wished to recall.
How often?
Whenever he could, at work and at play.
What sort of wood?
Tas oak, blackwood off-cuts retrieved from work wastebins, Huon pine when it went cheap from the Finns’ sawmill; chipboard when it didn’t. The white wood of old packing cases, the six-layer plywood used for boxing on some construction jobs, craggy with concrete dags. Celery top and King Billy and black-hearted sassy, when woodyards cleared out odd lengths of local exotic timbers. But he made something of it all and it was something good of which she was part.
What did he make?
Anything and everything: cupboards and tables to sell, chests to keep for linen they never had, a console for the FJ in the manner of those he had seen in an airliner advertisement, handles for the old Frigidaire, chairs, stools, bookshelves for neighbours, and pot stands and toolboxes for themselves.
He would show her the qualities and uses of different woods: how sassy burnished and Huon shavings kept dog fleas away, how Tas oak framed beautifully and bad pine didn’t, how plywood could be steamed and blackwood made you sneeze when it was sanded, how myrtle was for furniture and celery for windowsills.
He worked wood and he tried to make something of it and in his making make something of them. He worked wood and for her he was wood and she loved him for it, o God, how she so loved him for it.
But when that pungent odour of sour sweated bread and all that it grimly foretold came yet again to Sonja Buloh’s nostrils and she looked up, it was unmistakeable. He was yet again drunk. He was not, it has to be said, a big man, but when the rage was upon him, he could appear so huge that he would be fit to burst out of a room and collapse its walls and crush its frame with the size of his anger and crush you like a steamroller would an ant and anyone else in the process. And the rage came upon him when the drink was within him, which was often and which was more and more with the passing of the years.
He stood above Sonja Buloh swaying, his head turned slightly to one side, and she could see the flesh at the back of his neck puckering red. Wild and dishevelled, part of a blue-checked flannelette shirt hanging out, fly at half-mast, trousers marked with florettes of dried urine—a roaring giant, a maelstrom of a man with pieces flying off everywhere but never quite breaking away and she one more piece, one more item of disarray that was halfstuck and half-unstuck, all only held together in motion by some huge unknowable enigma at his centre from where his arm raised in anger above his head which was shouting, ‘You bloody don’t call me drunk,’ the arm flailing, pushing away something that could not be seen or apprehended, ‘Nobody call me drunk, I have a few beers in pub with my mates, a bit of a good time, and I get home and you bloody say I’m a drunk.’
He was not big nor was Sonja Buloh big nor had she his unusual quality of growing to gigantic proportions. Her quality was precisely the opposite. To elude his wrath she had learnt the art of smallness, of rendering one’s being so tiny as to be invisible to all but the closest scrutiny. Her body, at sixteen years, if stretched out and released from its obligation of smallness was in fact tall for her age, perhaps almost a full five foot ten inches, which made her as tall as him, a point of equality neither seemed to want to dwell upon, and which she had developed a slight stoop to deny.
But this was not the only quality Sonja Buloh possessed. Upon smelling the scent of sour sweated bread her soul had the wondrous ability to take leave of her body. In this way Sonja would see his rage only from far away. His voice she would only hear as if from a great distance, as if she were listening to a spirit caught in a sea shell held to her ear on some distant sand dune. This day she transported herself back out fishing with Bojan in a dinghy in the middle of the Derwent River. Against the immense forested blueness of the mountain behind it, the pepper shaker sandstone spire of the old Cromwell Street church in Battery Point sat yellow and solitary. She could see, but only incidentally, only as blurs, the houses of the city beneath it. It could have been the 1840s or the 1940s. It could have even been Eastern Europe. But it was, as she had written across her schoolgirl’s folder, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Universe. It was 1967.
It was not him. It was not.
But in the far distance she saw her home and her home was breaking into pieces and a giant was exploding out of it and the giant would not stop growing and the sun was eclipsing behind his back and the world was darkness and the giant’s anger had become a frenzy.
‘I bet you been out with the bloody boys, I know, I know, you bloody slut, you little tart, you are just like your whore of a mother carrying on with—’
And at this point his top lip drew up and shivered and his head quivered and his body shook and his rage momentarily faltered, as if a memory long pushed down was suddenly rising up, but he fought it back, with every particle of strength remaining to him, he forced it way, way back down and he momentarily staggered like a charging wild pig catching a bullet and cried out but one word in vehement denial ‘—bullshit.’
Sonja heard his rage from far away. His slap across her face she wished to feel as if from a great distance, like an unexpected cold wave deflected by the dinghy’s railings. But the slap was not a wave. It was a demand, that she leave the dinghy, leave watching the mountain, leave looking at the town that nestled in its thighs. His slap across her face demanded she leave the river and come back, and his voice was suddenly loud and his hand brought fire to her face. She saw him, a monster unrecognisable. She wanted her father. She did not want him. She did not.
She screamed. She screamed to bring her father back from the dinghy. ‘No, it’s not true, you are only angry because you are drunk, you only say . . .’
But before she could finish the monster again slapped her across her face, this time twice, this time with more force, this time saying, with anger so cold, the words scaring Sonja more than his open palm, saying, ‘I show you who’s bloody drunk.’
As he continued hitting her, Sonja remained impassive and did not cry, although his blows hurt her greatly. She did not cry, though the welts rose on her flesh and the blood dripping from her nose sprayed the walls each time her head spun with another blow or slap. She did not cry, but he was breaking something and she could not put it back together no matter how she tried, and the hurt opened up like an abyss within her heart. Sometimes she even perversely thought that it was this feeling she carried within her that caused him to be so. Every day she prayed that this faultline of emotion would not move and yet every night it invariably did. Huge subterranean, cataclysmic forces beyond her ken which destroyed that home, and both as powerless to stop it as the tree to stop the earth from collapsing beneath its roots.
She pleaded with the earth in Slovenian.
Saying: ‘Ni, Artie, ni, ni, ni, ni . . .’
But his rage was absolute, impervious even to her shrill cries, impervious even to his memory that he succeeded in drinking away evening after evening, only for it to return the next morning to drive him to drink again that night.
She ought to have wept, she really ought to have, or at least let a single tear flow, but something within her had long before shattered and though his blows brought forth cries in the way a bellows pumped hard emits air in bursts, he could never find reflected in her face the things he felt himself and so he had no choice but to continue searching that mute, inscrutable land of this girl’s body with his punches and slaps for what he carried within himself. It was an unspeakable act of description, those blows, a painfully eloquent attempt to find what they had in common by sculpting with violent intent all that he felt. But there are good ways of describing pain and bad; and his only increased their agony.
The following morning the house seemed light and airy. He sat at the table freshly washed and shaven, looking only a little seedy. Sonja made some coffee to which she then added milk. She broke bread into two bowls and poured the coffee over the bread. Then she sat down and they began to eat. Without looking at her directly, he began to talk.
‘Funny thing,’ he said, stirring his spoon around the coffee-soaked bread. ‘I can’t remember a thing that happen to me after I left the pub last night.’ Sonja said nothing. His eyes remained averted. He lifted a spoon of coffee and bread to his lips and was about to swallow it when he stopped.
And spoke once more.
‘You remember what happen when I get home?’ And then he looked up at Sonja for confirmation of what he knew to be a lie. ‘I must have go straight to bed.’ Sonja raised her face from her bowl of bread and sweet coffee. He pretended not to see what was so apparent, pretended not to notice how badly swollen the face was, how grotesque the one he thought so beautiful now looked, pretended not to see the puffiness and the purple welts and scarlet bruising.
‘Yeh, you went straight to bed,’ she said. There was a long silence. He said nothing, his face betrayed nothing. ‘And you snored something terrible,’ Sonja added.
He laughed at the small joke. He was satisfied. Sonja laughed too, because now he was sober and guilty, things would be good.
Until his next binge.
That was all many years past now, and as much as possible Sonja had spent her life since then attempting to divest herself of all things that were not necessary for day-to-day living: any extra possessions that were not totally needed, any recollections that were surplus to what she needed to work, to exist, to know who she was. But some things remained, some memories. Sonja remembered the place as possessed of a certain violence of emotion. The wind cuffed the house with sudden wild blows, the rain fell upon their tin roof with the intensity of an avalanche, and afterwards the sun shone so bright she screwed her eyes up every time she went outside, where the steam rose from the hot blue-black bitumen yard in splendid vents between her toes.
She would visit that place now, of course she would—that little hut in a backyard of a northernsuburbs home in Hobart, in which they spent that whole lifetime before this lifetime—she would, were it not that it would be disenchanting. She was a stranger to her past. No-one would see in the professional woman that skinny frightened child with eyes always cast sidewards in expectation of the unexpected blow.
And in that shack, there would be no wood to work, nor sour sweated bread to smell and thus no magic to conjure her soul away from her troubles. These—her troubles—she had in any case long ago learnt to live with, to accept as part of herself.
Therefore: no giants, no magic, no happy endings.
SONJA BULOH TRIED to remember the first thing that had formed in her belly but she was cold and her hands burnt and her nipples ached so and the chill tore through her flesh into her bones.
Something had seized her like a cramp, had gathered her guts together and cast them downwards that fateful morning in Sydney only a week before, something she at first only understood as a longing, curious and big and strange as the sky above. A wanting to once more see the peculiar Tasmanian light and what it touched upon, what it was that stood between the sun and the earth, that strange light of negative images, whereby the sky could be dark as pitch and the earth could glow ruby gold, and only shadows holding the two together.
She commented upon the cold to the service-station man who had appeared to fill her car with petrol. He was tall and skinny with short black hair and a moustache that belied his middle age, the years and then decades he had watched dissolve and run off the garage tarmac with the dirty oil and and pure rainwater.
‘Mainlander, eh?’ he asked. This was a big question which was not so easily answered, even by answering simply she belonged nowhere.
‘No,’ Sonja said, though it wasn’t quite true, but what was quite true wasn’t that easy to know, let alone say.
Sonja handed him some money and followed him back into his small office to collect her change. Sonja looked at herself in a mirror behind the counter, realised she was staring, not listening. The mirror was old and chipped and contained a large picture of a spark plug in a corner and the logo ‘Moving into tomorrow to keep you moving today!’ She saw in the mirror a woman approaching middle age, in her late thirties, elegant in what was almost office attire, as if off to some formal engagement with a stranger, which was, she supposed, effectively what she was about to do. At whose heart was a mystery few even apprehended and none could divine. And having not been divined, the mystery had grown into a swan of sadness, and in the mirror she saw reflected the wings of that swan growing out from her padded shoulders like those of an angel. Sonja saw her face, still smooth, still olive, if somewhat lined. Her bobbed hair, tipped blonde, but beneath still not grey. A body still not dried up, in the way she could see many of the women of her age were drying up. Still ripe, and she was shocked and amused at such a notion. Ripeness was not something she associated with herself. But she could not deny what she felt: ripe. Nor her pleasure, her folly and her pride, in feeling so. Even the wings in the mirror quivered slightly.
‘We have a lot of mainlanders stop here,’ the service-station man said, handing her the change. ‘They like our heritage and things.’ Sonja looked out beyond the office at the concrete-block toilet, a puddle of urine spreading out from it and at the puddle’s edge where the urine had mixed with old sump oil she saw swimming all the colours of the rainbow, and beyond the extraordinary swirls of metallic wonder a beaten-up country town. She glanced back up at the mirror and saw reflected not herself, nor an angel, but a small frightened child holding a teapot. She involuntarily trembled. But when she looked back the child was gone and only her own image remained.
‘Cold, missus,’ said the man. ‘Lot of mainlanders find it cold down here in Tassie.’
She would find him even after all these years, finally track him down and and ask him what was it that had happened to them? What was it? she would ask. Was it only life? Him? Her? Or was it the woman dressed in lace who tormented Sonja in her dreams?
She would find him, she thought. She would.
The man gave the old wooden cash drawer a forceful shove and as it slammed shut a bell rang within, its brief toll jolting Sonja. Her head swung to look at him. He flashed a smile of reassurance.
‘Even colder out west.’
THROUGH THE BLOODY dark of the eclipsed morning Sonja Buloh drove along the road to the west, a writhing tapeworm of crumbling bitumen, empty save for Sonja’s red hire car. In that year of revolutions, she was driving through a time grown momentarily molten. In a growing gyre, she felt time circling her, at first slowly, as if waiting. And though it seemed dreams were being born within dreams, it was not so. It was only Tasmania in spring.
When at length light returned—strangely, as if curious—it was to a land at once alien and familiar. Bearing the bruised country into hamlets’ hearts, slow rivers carried broken willow and bastard gorse—those new Australians of the bush—into old convict towns now unravelling like used newspapers in the wind. Sonja Buloh drove through them and into the sheep country, in which occasional ancient gum trees stood as if brooding survivors of some terrible massacre, sharing their melancholia only with the rainbow-coloured rosella parrots that briefly called in upon the trees before flitting off elsewhere, as though unable to bear the tales told them by those aching branches.
Once this weary pastoral land had been open forest through which blackfellas hunted and camped and of a night filled with their stories of which one had no end: that of their fierce war against the invading whitefellas. Then the surveyors came with their barefooted convict track cutters and they gave the land strange new names and by their naming and by their describing they announced the coming of a terrible revolution. Where their indian-inked maps cut the new country into neat counties with quaint reassuring English names such as Cumberland and Bothwell, the surveyors’ successors, the hydro-electricity engineers, made their straight lines reality in the form of the wires along which the new energy, electricity—the new god—hummed its song of promise, its seductive false prophecies that Tasmania would one day be Australia’s Ruhr Valley. The island busily, almost hysterically tried to bury its memory of a recent, often hideous past in a future of heavy industry, of gigantic furnaces and enormous machines that were to be powered by the huge resources of water energy that the place possessed in abundance, and for a time the island was falsely praised as a virgin land without history.
There was in this nothing new: it is said the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti ordered both the construction of the Great Wall of China and the destruction of all books preceding his reign, so that history would henceforth begin with him and his wall. And if the history of the place the migrants had come to live in was so completely denied, then that was only the rightful corollary of their ambition: to leave their own individual pasts behind. So for a time the goals of the state and of the capitalists and of those unfortunate enough to labour at turning such visions into reality seemed to have fused into one.
By such alchemy the dull fear of the past was transformed into electric power, the coveted gold of the new age, and at the bottom of the alchemists’ distilling flask all that remained were the pestilential by-products of that magical process for which nobody cared: the cracked natural world and the broken human lives, both dregs easily discounted when their insignificant cost was tallied against the growing treasure of the burgeoning hydro-electricity grid, and no-one counted the growing cost and no-one thought that tomorrow might be worse than today, least of all on that day so long ago when Sonja’s parents had steamed into the port of Hobart with their sixteen-month-old daughter, at what they thought was the end of their long flight from Europe.
As Sonja drove past the electricity transmission towers, strutting across this forlorn land like giant, musclebound warriors, she drank it all in, immersed herself in that world beyond the windows. She always did this: immerse herself in surfaces. In the appearance of things. She had succeeded in turning what was once a simple desire into a forceful habit that had now obtained for the greater part of her adult life. For which people liked her. She did not trespass upon their hearts or memories. Nor did she reveal hers.
How could she? How could she?
My friendships are gone and my memories broken, thought Sonja, gone and broken.
Beyond this dead land of towers and sheep Sonja drove, into the highlands, only recently cleared by the woodchippers, leaving the land as if after war: a shock as far as the eye could see of churned up mud and ash, punctuated here and there by a massive charred stump, still smouldering weeks after the burn-off of the waste rainforest that could not be made into tissue paper for Japan. Parts of me are dead, Sonja thought. Her stomach knotted. Ashes and tissue paper, Sonja thought, looking at the wastelands around her. She drove on.
You are not your past, Sonja counselled herself, can never be reduced or explained by the past. You are your dreams, which is why Sydney—that sly city of alluring promise—is the place for me. I am what I am now. I lived here once, true, but that was then, and this is now. That’s all. That’s all there is and ever will be. I am my dreams of tomorrow. The past is not your fate, and you make your chances like you drive a car, either slowly, risking nothing, gaining nothing, or fast, where all that matters is just what is in front of you at this moment, and everything that is behind you is totally irrelevant.
As she turned off the main road onto a rutted gravel road, Sonja pressed her foot down as if in affirmation of these thoughts, but the car, a four cylinder, was sluggish in response. She drove along the road through the broken bush that arises after logging and fire until she came over a crest beyond which she saw the top of a dam giving way to an expanse of water so vast that it appeared an ocean. She halted, looking out past the wave-torn waters, to where rainforest and moorland and snow capped mountains merged into a single wild land stretching away as far as the eye could see.
That land did not welcome her or care for her, any more than it had welcomed or cared for her parents who had come to live here so long before. And yet this land had shaped her, shaped them all.
And they it.
Sonja switched the car radio on, lighted a cigarette. A radio newsreader was talking of bewildered border guards who, only a few months before, had shot dead a man trying to escape to West Berlin, and who were now waving huge crowds of East Berliners into the west through holes made by cranes. ‘The Berlin Wall,’ said the newsreader in a flat voice, as if doing a promo for a pizza parlour, ‘the great symbol of the Cold War, has fallen.’
It meant nothing to her, this news, that history, and she sat there enveloped in smoke, both part of and beyond history, forgotten by history, irrelevant to history, yet shaped entirely by it, unintelligible without comprehending its frontiers and those, like her and her parents, who had come to live beyond them. Because in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love. But all this lay before Sonja like the waters held back by the dam: immense, mysterious, waiting.
Sonja switched the radio off, stubbed the cigarette out without having drawn upon it, turned the car and drove slowly down the hill to the bottom of the aged dam.
THE CORROSION OF the years made it difficult to tell where the dam’s concrete ended and the rock of the gorge in which it was built began. But there was no denying its power, its scale: she knew her hire car would appear only as a miserable, minuscule scratch of red at the base of the huge black dam wall. The mossed and slimed dam seemed to her a relic from another age—an historical oddity as curious and as inexplicable as a Mayan temple in a Mexican jungle—part of a dream that sought to transform the end of the world into a place just like all others, and failed. She switched off the engine, and summoning a breath and with it her courage, stepped out of the car.
There gathered in the pungent damp air about her the sense of imprisoned souls that clusters in the shadowed bases of such vast wet edifices, and that pressing dankness heightened within her a feeling of premonition.
She fingered an aged bronze plaque she found bolted onto the slimy black concrete wall, felt each upraised bronze letter with her fingertips. It read—
FOR THE MEN OF ALL NATIONS
WHO BY BUILDING THIS DAM
HELPED HARNESS NATURE
FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MANKIND
1955
—and Sonja felt the emptiness of each word, the utter insignificance of each bold upright shape, and wondered if they were ever anything other than hieroglyphics which none divined.
A memory suddenly burst upon Sonja and she abruptly butted her forehead into the dam face to force it all back down. Then as the memory receded and her fear abated, Sonja slowly turned her face to one side of the wet concrete and looked to the west, her cheek pressing upon one of the numerous cream-coloured stalactites that formed from leaching calcium to roll like tears down the face of the dam. As if trying to comprehend the cold dam’s unfathomable mystery, Sonja stretched her arms out to embrace the bottom of that vast curved concrete wall—an engineer’s grotesque pot belly that hummed and vibrated with the power of the swollen mass of water imprisoned upon the other side. She felt the dramatic raking angle of the dam, its curvature at once strident and restrained, its ongoing desire to render everything around it as industrial—even nature itself. But she could see that the ageing dam was decaying back into the natural world, rather than, as its makers had intended, the other way around.
She felt the power that still remained within the huge structure, the power not simply to make electricity but to summon visions of another time, a distant time of triumphant belief and total confidence. She felt all this through the damp, chilled flesh of her cheek, all this and more.
She felt the power pushing upon her skull, wondered what would happen were the dam suddenly to burst and its waters, so many years trapped and waiting on the other side silent and black and falsely still, to surge forth in monstrous cascades and carry her away.
Children grow frightened at such places. Unlike adults who have a faith in the infallibility of engineers’ calculations, children unerringly know that what is made by people can break. Children know that ships sink, planes crash and dams burst. Adults, by and large, do not. At that moment Sonja felt herself a child once more. A child on a cold, snowy night. Leaning against the dam, spreading her arms out along the dam wall, she felt as a child searching for reassurance, as if the huge construction were some long lost parent.
She did not mean to do such a ludicrous thing, to be there looking such a fool hugging the wet black dam, an aphid upon a boulder, but as she clutched the dam so, she once more felt the strange sensation gathering her guts together, and the memory burst upon her again, like a skyrocket breaking a black night into a million fragments of colour. And Sonja Buloh knew without having words for knowing why she had not before allowed the scraps of memory shape and form, those ashes and shadows of the past that it was becoming increasingly difficult to turn away from, that in the soft mist of that afternoon were turning themselves from broken bush into saplings and the saplings into trees and the trees into a forest.
And in the midst of that forest grew a small rude town of long ago, and in one of its rough shacks, behind a white tablecloth, sat a small child playing with her mother once upon a time.
CAUGHT BETWEEN PLAY and enchantment, it all returned to her mind now as something akin to a magician’s set. There was a table made from an upturned wooden box, down the side of which ran a single word stencilled in fading red paint: GELIGNITE. Upon it sat the white lace tablecloth that ought to have been crisp as it was freshly washed, but the all-pervasive dampness had overpowered even the stiffness of the starch and left the lace beautifully soft. And on the tablecloth sat a toy china teapot, small and delicate and elegantly circled with a motif of scarlet brambles, and around it three similarly decorated tea cups on saucers.
Sometimes then, often, forever, it rained, hailed, sleeted, snowed. The smell of the damp eucalypt palings that clad the walls exhaling their aromatic resin into the house, mingling with the fragrance of the myrtle burning in the fireplace. Above the low cracking of the flames a child’s voice. The three-year-old child Sonja’s voice.
Saying: ‘Turska kava for Artie—turska kava for Mama—turska kava for Sonja.’ And punctuating each phrase she pretend-poured from teapot into cup.
An adult woman’s hand came down and its index finger rested on the spout of the teapot. The hand was young, oh so young, but rough, bearing already the marks of long years of harsh toil. And the voice somehow much older than the hand. Somehow more than a young adult’s voice.
Maria Buloh’s voice.
Saying: ‘Tea, Sonja.’ Her ring finger tapping the spout. ‘We drink tea now.’
Sonja’s fingers, still pudgy with the beautiful glowing flesh of small children, moved over to Maria’s ring finger and began playing with it.
Sonja saying: ‘Why Mama? Why we drink tea?’
And Maria wiggling her ring finger this way and that, that thin finger with the wedding ring loose upon it, Maria saying: ‘Because it is Tasmania and not Slovenia. Because our world is upside down.’ And as if to accentuate her point Maria grasped Sonja’s hand firmly and then slowly turned it over revealing Sonja’s palm. Maria ran her ring finger around Sonja’s small palm, raising white circles upon the child’s soft puffy flesh.
Maria saying: ‘Because to have a future you must forget the past, my little knedel.’
Then she took Sonja’s four small fingers in her hand and folded them shut over Sonja’s palm.
And with that gesture the smell of the palings and the fire began to dissolve into the past, the hish of the snow to fade, and the lace-covered magician’s set and the hope it promised was washing away with the memory and Maria was stepping outside into a snow-swept blackness and the door was already closing and it was the same as Sonja always dreamt: the lace was disappearing forever.
AND THEN THOSE fingers, those same elegant fingers with the chewed nails that had felt the smooth and sensual coldness of the stalactite-tears falling down the dam face, those fingers were scrabbling in the bush-covered peat in the middle of the rainforest, at a place only a kilometre or so from the dam site, where once stood a construction camp called Butlers Gorge and where there was now nothing called anything, only strange bird cries and wind and cold and ten elegant fingers with chewed nails clawing at the bleak earth at first slowly and almost respectfully of its secrets then with an urgency mounting into a fury.
The fingers momentarily stopped when Sonja spied something glinting white in the greasy loam. But only momentarily. Then her fingers lunged at this whiteness, ripped it from the loose ground, and rubbed the dirt away to reveal a shard of porcelain upon which was etched a scarlet bramble.
Though the clouds above had now stopped moving and had begun to empty their water upon the weird beautiful earth, the falling rain did nothing to impede Sonja. Tall manferns dripped rain upon the ageing stumps of huge eucalypts felled long ago to clear the site for the camp. Above the soft noise of the rain were the desolate, harsh noises of Tasmanian rainforest, the wind up high in the forest canopy, the cries of black cockatoos and crows. But Sonja paid no heed to any of it. Her frenzied fingers were ripping up large sods and flailing them to pieces, pulling the heavy soil apart and in the process finding other porcelain pieces, all similarly broken at odd, sharp angles.
Until the ten elegant fingers with chewed nails were digging beneath the peat and beyond the wild wet earth below and seemed so frantic and wild as though they were digging into a land within her own skull. As she dug so, Sonja did not scream nor say a thing other than grunts and brief pants.
As if trying to give birth to that land lost within her skull.
BOOKENDING EITHER END of the Tullah pub were two massive fireplaces in which huge logs were daily burnt in vain, for the pub was always cold and had the mildewy look of a building that, like many of its patrons, had never properly dried out. Sonja, still damp from being caught in the downpour at Butlers Gorge a few hours earlier, wisely bought a double vodka and found a table in a corner, where she sat and waited.
The pub’s future was as uncertain as that of the remote mountain hamlet it serviced, and perhaps this explained a certain melancholia Sonja felt as she sat there. It had taken all changes and all types in its stride: both the boom that came when Tullah was made the base for dam-building projects in the mid-1970s, and the winding down that was now under way. Every day more men were leaving, heading out of town early to avoid being caught on the winding mountain passes behind the semi-trailers slowly hauling the mobile homes and single men’s quarters away to be used as the new housing of the poor elsewhere.
A country band playing at the other end of the room competed, with little success, against the rain on the tin roof. Perhaps because of the noise of the rain the punters’ talk was desultory, reduced to a shrug, an ironic smile, a murmured laugh, a soft shake of the head, and there was in it all a strange tranquillity that Sonja had not expected.