Those people go naked, wearing only a piece of cloth made of palm around their shameful parts. They have as many wives as they wish, but there is always a chief one. The males, both large and small, have the head of their member pierced from one side to the other, with a pin of gold or of tin as thick as a goose feather; and at each end of this pin some have a star-shaped decoration like a button, and others, one like the head of a cart nail. Often I wished to see that of some young men and old men, because I could not believe it. In the middle of this pin or tube is a hole through which they urinate, and the pin and the stars always remain firm, holding the member stiff. They told us that this was the wish of their women, and that if they did otherwise they would not have intercourse with them. And when they wish to cohabit with their wives, the latter themselves take the member without its being prepared or rigid, and so they put it little by little into their nature, beginning with the stars. And then when it is inside it stiffens, and remains there until it becomes soft, for otherwise they would not be able to withdraw it. And those people do this because they are of a weak nature and consitution.
from Magellan's Voyage, a Narrative Account of the First Navigation, Antonio Pigafetta, trans. & ed. R.A. Skelton, Yale, 1969
21.9.04
17.9.04
Convolutions
Had an email yesterday querying the statement in my title block: Luca Antara is provided etc etc. Was it a denial of those who believe Luca Antara is/was a part of Australia mapped in the early 1600s by Portuguese from Malacca or the Moluccas? Not at all, I said; rather, the sentence is there because of a felt analogy to the process of writing. But it sent me back to the source ...
I chose the quote at random: when I was setting up this site, I opened my copy of Eredia's Description of Malaca and my eye fell upon that sentence. It seemed apt. But I hadn't investigated its provenance. What it is, is J.V. Mills, the British civil servant who made the English translation of Eredia's book in 1920s Malaya, summarising the arguments of an earlier scholar, the Victorian R.H. Major, against Eredia's alleged discovery of a Great South Land.
It was Major who first proclaimed Eredia the discoverer of Australia, upon the basis of a map he found in the British Museum. He rushed into print with his find, then learned soon after that Eredia's official expedition never left Malacca because of the Dutch blockade of 1604. In a state of acute mortification, Major resiled from his claim then turned upon Eredia. It is no exaggeration to say the controversy ruined his life; in the process, he attempted to demolish the credentials of the man who caused his fall.
One of the many confusions that have arisen around this episode relates to the meaning of the Portuguese word descobridor. It doesn't mean what its English equivalent, discoverer, now does; rather it refers to the exploration and exploitation of a land, the discovery of its potential if you like, not of its mere existence. Eredia called himself the Descobridor because he had a commission from the King of Spain & Portugal to go to Luca Antara and find out what riches were there; of these alleged riches, a twentieth part would remain his personal property.
Noel Peters' work on the map found in 1946 in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro (alas, not Buenos Aires) by a Dr. Mota Alves suggests that the expedition stymied by the Dutch might have been the second in that time to that part of the world. Perhaps Eredia—or someone else—had gone earlier, on a smaller scale voyage, mapped the Tiwi islands, and now planned to return with greater resources; like Abel Tasman fifty odd years later, who took two voyages, several years apart, to complete his circumnavigation of the Great South Land.
Noel Peters thinks the confusion has arisen because the quote in the title block above is not ascribed to its source. I don't wish to weight the words with chapter and verse but, for the record, here is the detail: the sentence occurs at the bottom of p. 189 of J.V. Mills' 1930 translation of Eredia's Description of Malaca, Meriodional India and Cathay, reprinted (#14) by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1997 with a new introduction by Cheah Boon Kheng.
I chose the quote at random: when I was setting up this site, I opened my copy of Eredia's Description of Malaca and my eye fell upon that sentence. It seemed apt. But I hadn't investigated its provenance. What it is, is J.V. Mills, the British civil servant who made the English translation of Eredia's book in 1920s Malaya, summarising the arguments of an earlier scholar, the Victorian R.H. Major, against Eredia's alleged discovery of a Great South Land.
It was Major who first proclaimed Eredia the discoverer of Australia, upon the basis of a map he found in the British Museum. He rushed into print with his find, then learned soon after that Eredia's official expedition never left Malacca because of the Dutch blockade of 1604. In a state of acute mortification, Major resiled from his claim then turned upon Eredia. It is no exaggeration to say the controversy ruined his life; in the process, he attempted to demolish the credentials of the man who caused his fall.
One of the many confusions that have arisen around this episode relates to the meaning of the Portuguese word descobridor. It doesn't mean what its English equivalent, discoverer, now does; rather it refers to the exploration and exploitation of a land, the discovery of its potential if you like, not of its mere existence. Eredia called himself the Descobridor because he had a commission from the King of Spain & Portugal to go to Luca Antara and find out what riches were there; of these alleged riches, a twentieth part would remain his personal property.
Noel Peters' work on the map found in 1946 in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro (alas, not Buenos Aires) by a Dr. Mota Alves suggests that the expedition stymied by the Dutch might have been the second in that time to that part of the world. Perhaps Eredia—or someone else—had gone earlier, on a smaller scale voyage, mapped the Tiwi islands, and now planned to return with greater resources; like Abel Tasman fifty odd years later, who took two voyages, several years apart, to complete his circumnavigation of the Great South Land.
Noel Peters thinks the confusion has arisen because the quote in the title block above is not ascribed to its source. I don't wish to weight the words with chapter and verse but, for the record, here is the detail: the sentence occurs at the bottom of p. 189 of J.V. Mills' 1930 translation of Eredia's Description of Malaca, Meriodional India and Cathay, reprinted (#14) by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1997 with a new introduction by Cheah Boon Kheng.
16.9.04
What Harry Said
This research, if that isn’t too portentous a word, into the life of my friend Harry Graves, took place sporadically during the last decade or so in Australia and New Zealand. It was random and serendipitous, but one of the things I thought I’d do while in Auckland this year was to try to track Harry down again and find out the ‘real’ story.
I rang a mutual friend who lives on Waikehe Island—the oldest of the many extinct volcanoes on the Tamaki Isthmus—and asked her if she knew where he was. She said he lived out in the Waitakeres, the range of hills to the west of the city, themselves the remains of the second oldest and by far the largest of Auckland’s volcanoes. He has no phone, she said, or if he did she didn’t know the number; and no street address either. But she had visited him once and gave me directions as to how to get there.
It took me a while but I found the place in the end, perched up in the bush looking west over Karekare, the black sand beach where the opening scenes of The Piano were shot. The house was eccentric and charming, clearly home-made, built in a series of connected modular sections climbing up the steep section, with many curious little balconies, all made of timber weathered to a silvery sheen by the incessant winds of that wild coast. But there was nobody home. I peered through the window and saw a room set up as a home studio: piano, guitars, amps, mikes, recording equipment and so on, disposed as if part of a work in progress. What to do? I wrote Harry a short note, with my cell phone number, and suggested he give me a call; but he never did.
However, not long after this abortive visit, late one night as I was walking home along K Road, outside the Pink Pussycat I saw a sleek grey car pull up, with a sleek, grey-suited man at the wheel: that bullet head, that cropped hair, those faded eyes which did not want to look into mine. Harry said he was in a hurry, he had business to attend to, there was no time to talk. Come on, Harry, I said, we go back years. Surely you can spare me half an hour. He looked at his watch, looked up and down the street, looked at the red door of the Pink Pussycat, looked at his watch—a Rolex—again, sighed and said Alright.
We went to a coffee bar further down K Road called Brasil. It seemed appropriate. Harry had a short black while I had a Cascade. I was smoking Wee Willems but he said he didn’t smoke or drink anymore. Or take drugs. He seemed preoccupied, evasive, almost ... sad. He said he didn’t want to talk about the past, but agreed to answer a few questions. I asked, he gave his answers. Here they are:
He got the scar on his head when a piece of masonry from the Berlin Wall flew out and hit him during the celebration of its demolition.
He has never read any Wittgenstein.
Yes, he did once know some people from the Mr Asia syndicate and had I seen that one of them, name of Miles, had just been found dead in Bali? Another, name of Beri, died in a Christchurch jail a few years ago.
He once did own a copy of Robert Lowell’s Imitations and it could be the one that Ray has in Sydney. The annotations were part of an attempt to translate the poems back to the language in which they were first written. He said he thought his version of Le Bateau Ivre and some of his Villon pieces were better than the originals.
He never wrote any songs for Nick Cave, or gave him any words. The only song he could think of that he might have had an influence on was The Weeping Song. He and Nick were driving through the barrio of Rio when he, Harry, said something to the effect that the sound of the barrio was the sound of people weeping. He thought Nick might have picked up on that.
He still has his songbook and his current project, when he gets time away from his business interests, which are considerable, was to record a definitive version of every one of his songs for posterity. Including Dolores and Everything’s Everything. He would let me know when the cd(s) came out. I don't expect that he will.
The dog was a pure blood dingo, he had to put her down because her howling upset the neighbours. Her name was Azaria.
Afterwards I walked with him back up towards the Pink Pussycat. We barely spoke. Outside, he shook my hand and gave me a quick, almost apologetic look. Don’t tell anyone, will you, mate? he said, then turned and went inside.
Harry Graves is not his real name.
I rang a mutual friend who lives on Waikehe Island—the oldest of the many extinct volcanoes on the Tamaki Isthmus—and asked her if she knew where he was. She said he lived out in the Waitakeres, the range of hills to the west of the city, themselves the remains of the second oldest and by far the largest of Auckland’s volcanoes. He has no phone, she said, or if he did she didn’t know the number; and no street address either. But she had visited him once and gave me directions as to how to get there.
It took me a while but I found the place in the end, perched up in the bush looking west over Karekare, the black sand beach where the opening scenes of The Piano were shot. The house was eccentric and charming, clearly home-made, built in a series of connected modular sections climbing up the steep section, with many curious little balconies, all made of timber weathered to a silvery sheen by the incessant winds of that wild coast. But there was nobody home. I peered through the window and saw a room set up as a home studio: piano, guitars, amps, mikes, recording equipment and so on, disposed as if part of a work in progress. What to do? I wrote Harry a short note, with my cell phone number, and suggested he give me a call; but he never did.
However, not long after this abortive visit, late one night as I was walking home along K Road, outside the Pink Pussycat I saw a sleek grey car pull up, with a sleek, grey-suited man at the wheel: that bullet head, that cropped hair, those faded eyes which did not want to look into mine. Harry said he was in a hurry, he had business to attend to, there was no time to talk. Come on, Harry, I said, we go back years. Surely you can spare me half an hour. He looked at his watch, looked up and down the street, looked at the red door of the Pink Pussycat, looked at his watch—a Rolex—again, sighed and said Alright.
We went to a coffee bar further down K Road called Brasil. It seemed appropriate. Harry had a short black while I had a Cascade. I was smoking Wee Willems but he said he didn’t smoke or drink anymore. Or take drugs. He seemed preoccupied, evasive, almost ... sad. He said he didn’t want to talk about the past, but agreed to answer a few questions. I asked, he gave his answers. Here they are:
He got the scar on his head when a piece of masonry from the Berlin Wall flew out and hit him during the celebration of its demolition.
He has never read any Wittgenstein.
Yes, he did once know some people from the Mr Asia syndicate and had I seen that one of them, name of Miles, had just been found dead in Bali? Another, name of Beri, died in a Christchurch jail a few years ago.
He once did own a copy of Robert Lowell’s Imitations and it could be the one that Ray has in Sydney. The annotations were part of an attempt to translate the poems back to the language in which they were first written. He said he thought his version of Le Bateau Ivre and some of his Villon pieces were better than the originals.
He never wrote any songs for Nick Cave, or gave him any words. The only song he could think of that he might have had an influence on was The Weeping Song. He and Nick were driving through the barrio of Rio when he, Harry, said something to the effect that the sound of the barrio was the sound of people weeping. He thought Nick might have picked up on that.
He still has his songbook and his current project, when he gets time away from his business interests, which are considerable, was to record a definitive version of every one of his songs for posterity. Including Dolores and Everything’s Everything. He would let me know when the cd(s) came out. I don't expect that he will.
The dog was a pure blood dingo, he had to put her down because her howling upset the neighbours. Her name was Azaria.
Afterwards I walked with him back up towards the Pink Pussycat. We barely spoke. Outside, he shook my hand and gave me a quick, almost apologetic look. Don’t tell anyone, will you, mate? he said, then turned and went inside.
Harry Graves is not his real name.
15.9.04
Pigafetta meets the King of Zzubu
Diplomacy old style ... for Jean Vengua
When we had come to town, we found the King of Zzubu at his palace, seated on the ground on a mat of palms, with many people. He was quite naked, except for a linen cloth covering his private parts, and round his head a very loose cloth, embroidered with silk. Round his neck he had a very heavy and rich chain, and in his ears two gold rings hung with precious stones. He was a short man, and fat, and had his face painted with fire in divers patterns. He ate on the ground from another palm mat, and then he was eating turtle eggs on two porcelain dishes, and he had four jars full of palm wine, which he drank from reed pipes. We made reverence to him as we presented what the captain had sent him, and we told him, by the mouth of the interpreter, that it was not in return for the present which he had given to the captain, but for the love which he bore him. Then we clothed him in the robe, put the cap on his head, and kissed the glasses that I presented to him and that he accepted. Then the king made us eat those eggs and drink from the said reeds. And meanwhile his people told him all the good words and assurances of peace and faith that had been given to them. Then the king wished to retain us for supper, but we made our excuses, and on this we took leave of him.
The prince, nephew of this king, led us to his house, and showed us four girls who were playing on four very strange and very sweet instruments, and their manner of playing was rather musical. One played on a taborin after our fashion, but it stood on the ground. Another was striking, with a thick stick wrapped at the head with a palm leaf, the bottom of two instruments shaped like a long taborin. Another was striking another larger instrument in the same manner. And the last, with two other similar instruments, one in one hand and the other in the other. And they struck in harmony, making a very sweet sound. These girls were very beautiful, and almost as white and as tall as ours. They were naked, except that from the waist to the knees they wore a garment made from the said palm cloth, covering their nature. And some were quite naked, having long black hair and a small veil round their head, and they go always unshod. The prince made us dance with three of them who were quite naked. And we had refreshment there, and then we returned to the ship. Those taborins are of metal, and they are made in the country of Sinus Magnus, which is China. They use them as we do bells, and they are called aghon.
from Magellan's Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation; by Antonio Pigafetta; trans. & ed. R. A. Skelton, Yale, 1969
When we had come to town, we found the King of Zzubu at his palace, seated on the ground on a mat of palms, with many people. He was quite naked, except for a linen cloth covering his private parts, and round his head a very loose cloth, embroidered with silk. Round his neck he had a very heavy and rich chain, and in his ears two gold rings hung with precious stones. He was a short man, and fat, and had his face painted with fire in divers patterns. He ate on the ground from another palm mat, and then he was eating turtle eggs on two porcelain dishes, and he had four jars full of palm wine, which he drank from reed pipes. We made reverence to him as we presented what the captain had sent him, and we told him, by the mouth of the interpreter, that it was not in return for the present which he had given to the captain, but for the love which he bore him. Then we clothed him in the robe, put the cap on his head, and kissed the glasses that I presented to him and that he accepted. Then the king made us eat those eggs and drink from the said reeds. And meanwhile his people told him all the good words and assurances of peace and faith that had been given to them. Then the king wished to retain us for supper, but we made our excuses, and on this we took leave of him.
The prince, nephew of this king, led us to his house, and showed us four girls who were playing on four very strange and very sweet instruments, and their manner of playing was rather musical. One played on a taborin after our fashion, but it stood on the ground. Another was striking, with a thick stick wrapped at the head with a palm leaf, the bottom of two instruments shaped like a long taborin. Another was striking another larger instrument in the same manner. And the last, with two other similar instruments, one in one hand and the other in the other. And they struck in harmony, making a very sweet sound. These girls were very beautiful, and almost as white and as tall as ours. They were naked, except that from the waist to the knees they wore a garment made from the said palm cloth, covering their nature. And some were quite naked, having long black hair and a small veil round their head, and they go always unshod. The prince made us dance with three of them who were quite naked. And we had refreshment there, and then we returned to the ship. Those taborins are of metal, and they are made in the country of Sinus Magnus, which is China. They use them as we do bells, and they are called aghon.
from Magellan's Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation; by Antonio Pigafetta; trans. & ed. R. A. Skelton, Yale, 1969
Lords and Retainers
Dave the Rave put me on to a guy called Ray who used to be in Dragon before they got famous. He’d lived in that house in Double Bay, he remembered things nobody else knew about any more because they were all crazy or drug-fucked or dead. Ray was a second-hand goods dealer who had a house down the bottom of Erskineville full of baroque clutter. Searchlights, dentist’s chairs, bathroom tiles. He moonlighted as a stage hand at the Opera House. He was bitter about Dragon because he’d left before the money started coming in. But my question was: did he jump or was he pushed?
Anyway he said what happened was they did a gig in Melbourne, in St. Kilda, the pub down there near the pier where there used to be a gig, and the support band was The Birthday Party. In their early punkoid phase. And Harry just went, fuck! these guys are amazing. And rocked up afterwards and said he wanted to work for them. Of course they already had roadies plus plenty of wanna-bes so they told Harry to fuck off. It was too late, he’d already told Dragon he was leaving, he didn’t even go back to Sydney to get his stuff, he just stayed in Melbourne.
Ray said what Dave said about Harry reading poetry was true, because he had the actual copy of Imitations which Harry left in Double Bay along with all his other stuff. He showed it to me—a little Faber & Faber paperback with wine stains and cigarette burns on the cover and the most amazing inscriptions all the way through, tiny little runic marks made with a pencil, more or less unreadable ... Ray said I couldn’t take it away and study it, it was too valuable, one day when people realised who Harry was the book would be worth a lot of money.
Ray said the way Harry got to work with The Birthday Party was by getting them drugs which they couldn’t get that cheap or in such quantities anywhere else. That’s how he penetrated the inner circle, hitting up with Nick and the others or at least being there while they were hitting up. Loyalty is what makes a good roadie, absolute fealty both to the music and those who make the music. A band and its roadies are like Lords and their Retainers. Harry became a Retainer to Nick. That’s what Ray said. They were like that, he said, holding up his thumb and his second finger and clicking them.
Anyway he said what happened was they did a gig in Melbourne, in St. Kilda, the pub down there near the pier where there used to be a gig, and the support band was The Birthday Party. In their early punkoid phase. And Harry just went, fuck! these guys are amazing. And rocked up afterwards and said he wanted to work for them. Of course they already had roadies plus plenty of wanna-bes so they told Harry to fuck off. It was too late, he’d already told Dragon he was leaving, he didn’t even go back to Sydney to get his stuff, he just stayed in Melbourne.
Ray said what Dave said about Harry reading poetry was true, because he had the actual copy of Imitations which Harry left in Double Bay along with all his other stuff. He showed it to me—a little Faber & Faber paperback with wine stains and cigarette burns on the cover and the most amazing inscriptions all the way through, tiny little runic marks made with a pencil, more or less unreadable ... Ray said I couldn’t take it away and study it, it was too valuable, one day when people realised who Harry was the book would be worth a lot of money.
Ray said the way Harry got to work with The Birthday Party was by getting them drugs which they couldn’t get that cheap or in such quantities anywhere else. That’s how he penetrated the inner circle, hitting up with Nick and the others or at least being there while they were hitting up. Loyalty is what makes a good roadie, absolute fealty both to the music and those who make the music. A band and its roadies are like Lords and their Retainers. Harry became a Retainer to Nick. That’s what Ray said. They were like that, he said, holding up his thumb and his second finger and clicking them.
14.9.04
Et j'ai vu quelques fois ce que l'homme a cru voir
I was actually more interested in finding out how a guy from the remote King Country ended up mixing with international rock stars than I was in Harry Graves' reading habits. Then I met Dave the Rave at a party in Bellevue Hill. Dave was a roadie from Auckland who ended up in Sydney; we had mutual friends. I didn’t get much out of him at the party because, while we were standing in a line leaning against a fence sampling the joints that were being passed along, Dave took an enormous toke on one then fell over flat on his face on the concrete path and split his head open. There was lots of blood but when he woke up Dave said he’d had worse things happen and just kept on partying. He was that kind of guy.
We met up a few weeks later at gig in the Darlinghurst Squats—it was Vix’s band of the time, MX Warheads—and had time for a bit of a talk. Dave said Harry came up to Auckland in 1971 was it? to the Led Zeppelin concert at Western Springs and just never went home again. Somehow or other he ran into Jenny Tits, as she was known, and started sleeping on her floor in the flat she had in St. Kevins Arcade overlooking Myers Park. She took him around to Mandrax Mansion in St. Mary’s Bay one day and he ending up getting a room there. And it was there, Dave said, that he met the guys from Dragon who’d come up from Hamilton to do a gig in the big upstairs room in that house.
He followed the band to Sydney and got peripherally involved in the Mr. Asia thing, Dave said, which intersected at various points with the Dragon extravaganza. There was this house in Double Bay where the band lived, to which guys like Greg Ollard, if that was his name, used to come. Some of the Dragon boys were notorious users of hard drugs, as everyone knows, though I don’t think Harry was. Anyway Dave said an interesting thing, which was that, when he got to know Harry at Mandrax Mansion, he always carried around a book with him. What book? I asked. It was a poetry book, Dave said. Imitations. By Robert Lowell.
Well that seemed like an odd thing for Harry to have been reading, a book of translations of various foreign, mostly dead, mostly European poets by a mid-twentieth century vaguely aristocratic American from New England, also dead. It was the 19th century stuff he liked, Dave said. Heine dying in Paris, Baudelaire, the Rimbaud poems ... knew them all by heart, could recite some in the original French. Le Bateau Ivre, for instance: Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles ...
We met up a few weeks later at gig in the Darlinghurst Squats—it was Vix’s band of the time, MX Warheads—and had time for a bit of a talk. Dave said Harry came up to Auckland in 1971 was it? to the Led Zeppelin concert at Western Springs and just never went home again. Somehow or other he ran into Jenny Tits, as she was known, and started sleeping on her floor in the flat she had in St. Kevins Arcade overlooking Myers Park. She took him around to Mandrax Mansion in St. Mary’s Bay one day and he ending up getting a room there. And it was there, Dave said, that he met the guys from Dragon who’d come up from Hamilton to do a gig in the big upstairs room in that house.
He followed the band to Sydney and got peripherally involved in the Mr. Asia thing, Dave said, which intersected at various points with the Dragon extravaganza. There was this house in Double Bay where the band lived, to which guys like Greg Ollard, if that was his name, used to come. Some of the Dragon boys were notorious users of hard drugs, as everyone knows, though I don’t think Harry was. Anyway Dave said an interesting thing, which was that, when he got to know Harry at Mandrax Mansion, he always carried around a book with him. What book? I asked. It was a poetry book, Dave said. Imitations. By Robert Lowell.
Well that seemed like an odd thing for Harry to have been reading, a book of translations of various foreign, mostly dead, mostly European poets by a mid-twentieth century vaguely aristocratic American from New England, also dead. It was the 19th century stuff he liked, Dave said. Heine dying in Paris, Baudelaire, the Rimbaud poems ... knew them all by heart, could recite some in the original French. Le Bateau Ivre, for instance: Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles ...
13.9.04
Vix
The girl’s name was Victoria Lake. Well, she wasn’t a girl, she was a woman, and everyone called her Vix. Vix had been in and out of bands in Sydney for a long time. Everybody knew her. She was tall, blond, striking ... I mean six feet tall, a big woman with big hair, lots of make-up and a thrilling voice. She was in love with Harry, had been for years. Probably the only reason she took up with me—we were never more than friends—was because she knew I knew Harry, had known him since five years old or whatever it was.
I haven’t described Harry yet. He was tall, lean, rangy, with faded blue eyes and yellow hair which he always wore short, accentuating his bullet head. He went grey early, as yellow-haired people sometimes do, but it didn’t make much difference because he always got a number one anyway. There was something about his mouth, forever framing words he never actually spoke. When he did speak it was in short, abrupt sentences like from the bible. The time I asked him about the scar above his left eyebrow he said: That was when I was in Berlin, as if that explained everything.
Vix said she knew the story of the scar. She knew all sorts of things about Harry, some that she got from him, some from other people. She was like a walking compendium on Harry Graves. I used to tell her she knew more about him than he knew about himself. She’d smile this slow smile and shake her head. No one knows that much about Harry, she’d say.
She told me about his songbook. His legendary songbook, full of words and music he’d written over the years. She’d seen it: an old red foolscap hardback notebook which was originally meant for double column accounting that Harry had written all over. She’d heard him play guitar and sing, which he hardly ever did, at least not in public. She said there was no-one like him. He’d traded licks with Nick and Dave and JJ and all these guys and they all thought he was great too. She hinted that some of Nick’s songs weren’t really Nick’s at all, they were Harry’s. But Harry doesn’t mind, she’d say wistfully. He doesn’t care.
He didn’t care much about her either, which was a great sadness to Vix. Why not? I wondered but never asked. I thought she was great. I would have done anything for her. She knew that of course. The world’s full of people who love other people who don’t love them, she’d say. Vix had a couple of stand-out tunes she always did in whatever band she was singing with. They were Harry Graves songs. One was about a hooker who used to stand with the other girls out on the Canterbury Road just down from the big Mobil gas station. This girl called Dolores. She was Spanish, from South America, Peru. She got murdered. The song was a ballad, it was just called Dolores, it was a song made out of a name, the grief of a name.
The other song was kind of metaphysical. A soul song, simple words that made a complex meaning. Vix used to belt it out at top volume with the band roaring behind her. She could play sax and did her own solo so that her big deep rich voice and the big deep rich notes she blew sounded almost alike. That song was called Everything’s Everything. Vix used to say that Harry copped the lyrics from something written by Wittgenstein but I didn’t believe that. Harry wasn’t a reader.
Or was he ... ?
I haven’t described Harry yet. He was tall, lean, rangy, with faded blue eyes and yellow hair which he always wore short, accentuating his bullet head. He went grey early, as yellow-haired people sometimes do, but it didn’t make much difference because he always got a number one anyway. There was something about his mouth, forever framing words he never actually spoke. When he did speak it was in short, abrupt sentences like from the bible. The time I asked him about the scar above his left eyebrow he said: That was when I was in Berlin, as if that explained everything.
Vix said she knew the story of the scar. She knew all sorts of things about Harry, some that she got from him, some from other people. She was like a walking compendium on Harry Graves. I used to tell her she knew more about him than he knew about himself. She’d smile this slow smile and shake her head. No one knows that much about Harry, she’d say.
She told me about his songbook. His legendary songbook, full of words and music he’d written over the years. She’d seen it: an old red foolscap hardback notebook which was originally meant for double column accounting that Harry had written all over. She’d heard him play guitar and sing, which he hardly ever did, at least not in public. She said there was no-one like him. He’d traded licks with Nick and Dave and JJ and all these guys and they all thought he was great too. She hinted that some of Nick’s songs weren’t really Nick’s at all, they were Harry’s. But Harry doesn’t mind, she’d say wistfully. He doesn’t care.
He didn’t care much about her either, which was a great sadness to Vix. Why not? I wondered but never asked. I thought she was great. I would have done anything for her. She knew that of course. The world’s full of people who love other people who don’t love them, she’d say. Vix had a couple of stand-out tunes she always did in whatever band she was singing with. They were Harry Graves songs. One was about a hooker who used to stand with the other girls out on the Canterbury Road just down from the big Mobil gas station. This girl called Dolores. She was Spanish, from South America, Peru. She got murdered. The song was a ballad, it was just called Dolores, it was a song made out of a name, the grief of a name.
The other song was kind of metaphysical. A soul song, simple words that made a complex meaning. Vix used to belt it out at top volume with the band roaring behind her. She could play sax and did her own solo so that her big deep rich voice and the big deep rich notes she blew sounded almost alike. That song was called Everything’s Everything. Vix used to say that Harry copped the lyrics from something written by Wittgenstein but I didn’t believe that. Harry wasn’t a reader.
Or was he ... ?
11.9.04
9/11
In one of Ralph Hotere's paintings we are shown a square which is not / a square. Is a diamond. In which there is a square. The painting is orange, but some parts are more orange than others. A green plastic strip is attached, in which there are numbers. 3 2 1—the countdown. The painting is ZERO. Or is it the square? Either way, it is where we take off from.
Mark Young, Ascent Vol. 1, No. 3, 1969; quoted in Ralph Hotere: Black Light, ed. Mary Trewby, Ian Wedde et al, Dunedin/Wellington, 2000.
When Mark was in Auckland in July we found a set of Ascent magazines in Jason Books but #3 was missing. I've since learned that it is extremely hard to come by—others have looked for it without success. The painting Mark's talking about is illustrated in Black Light but I haven't been able to find an electronic image of it. Nor is much else of Hotere's extraordinary oeuvre available on the net yet. That will surely change ...
Mark Young, Ascent Vol. 1, No. 3, 1969; quoted in Ralph Hotere: Black Light, ed. Mary Trewby, Ian Wedde et al, Dunedin/Wellington, 2000.
When Mark was in Auckland in July we found a set of Ascent magazines in Jason Books but #3 was missing. I've since learned that it is extremely hard to come by—others have looked for it without success. The painting Mark's talking about is illustrated in Black Light but I haven't been able to find an electronic image of it. Nor is much else of Hotere's extraordinary oeuvre available on the net yet. That will surely change ...
10.9.04
More about Harry Graves
Harry Graves was just a guy I went to school with. He used to give me cigarettes behind the bike sheds ... Pall Mall Filter, in the red packet. He sometimes pulled the buttons off my shirts in fun fights that were fun for him I guess but to me were more like real fights. He was stronger than I was and liked to let me know it; he’d stop short of causing real pain but I always knew it was there, trembling just beyond the scissors, the headlock, the half Nelson.
We moved away from that town when I was ten but a few years later I ran into Harry again. He was doing a course in metal working at the Mechanics Institute in the town we lived in then. He wore blue jeans, a white t shirt with his cigarettes folded into the sleeve, Beatle boots. We stopped on the bridge and talked for a while. I was still a schoolboy but he was already a man. He was into Country music.
There was a dance at the local Leagues Hall I went to with Julie Till who was a farmer’s daughter from out of town. Harry was there with some of his mates from the Mechanics Institute. He had his eyes on Julie and she on him; but she was a good girl (as opposed to a nice girl) and anyway her father was picking her up in his car after the dance. The band was called the Sapphires; later on they changed their name to the Surfires, wore Hawaiian shirts and covered Beach Boys songs, as well as making up a few of their own. Harry reckoned they could play alright but their music was shit.
Harry finished his six week course and went back to the King Country. We didn’t keep in touch or anything like that but I bumped into him years later in Australia. It was at a gig in Sydney, at the Tivoli. This band from Melbourne called Hunters and Collectors. There were about ten of them on stage, chanting and beating on big metal drums with iron sticks, while the back projection showed rare old footage of stone age tribes picking their way across the gibber plains.
Harry was one of their roadies. He still kept his cigarettes in his sleeve but he was into drugs now. We snorted some speed backstage while the gig was still going on and later went up to Arthur’s in the Cross. Beautiful women gathered around Harry but he was more interested in talking than fucking. He was going to Berlin. He knew the guys in the Bad Seeds and reckoned he would be working with them. He was into Gospel music, white soul, all that religious shit. Preacher man don’t tell me/Heaven is under the earth/I know you don’t know/what life is really worth ... they’re lines from a Bob Marley song but reggae is faith music too.
So Harry went to Berlin, he went to São Paulo, he went to Boston, he went everywhere. I heard from a girl I knew who’d had a scene with him that he was running cocaine from Tahiti into Sydney, the mule on the last leg of a journey that started in Bogotá. One day I saw him up the Cross, he was in a bad way, trembling and paranoid. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase which fell open while we were talking in the street. Inside there was bottle of Johnny Walker Red and a carton of cigarettes. Gauloise. Nothing else. He said he’d made a lot of money but people were after him and he was going back to Auckland to invest in the property market.
Next time I saw him was in the corner bar at De Bretts. He had a beautiful white dog; he said she was part dingo. She sat under the table while we drank single malt whisky and smoked cigars; you could buy slim Dutch cigars for six dollars from the humidor. Harry had bought some warehouses in West Auckland. He was a developer. He was back wearing t shirt and jeans, a leather jacket, was into fitness now, swam two kilometres a day in the Olympic Pool.
He was remote from me in the old familiar way. He’d come a long way, he had a long way to go; this was just a station on his way. He talked about Nick Cave, Van Morrison, hearing Loretta Lynn live at the Ryman. He said it was important to distinguish between Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck. When he left the bar it was just getting on to evening. The dog got up and followed without him having to say a word or even look at her. I saw him pause on Shortland Street to re-light his cigar, in black silhouette against the yellow sky, a man and his dog. And his peculiar fate.
There’s more to Harry Graves than this.
We moved away from that town when I was ten but a few years later I ran into Harry again. He was doing a course in metal working at the Mechanics Institute in the town we lived in then. He wore blue jeans, a white t shirt with his cigarettes folded into the sleeve, Beatle boots. We stopped on the bridge and talked for a while. I was still a schoolboy but he was already a man. He was into Country music.
There was a dance at the local Leagues Hall I went to with Julie Till who was a farmer’s daughter from out of town. Harry was there with some of his mates from the Mechanics Institute. He had his eyes on Julie and she on him; but she was a good girl (as opposed to a nice girl) and anyway her father was picking her up in his car after the dance. The band was called the Sapphires; later on they changed their name to the Surfires, wore Hawaiian shirts and covered Beach Boys songs, as well as making up a few of their own. Harry reckoned they could play alright but their music was shit.
Harry finished his six week course and went back to the King Country. We didn’t keep in touch or anything like that but I bumped into him years later in Australia. It was at a gig in Sydney, at the Tivoli. This band from Melbourne called Hunters and Collectors. There were about ten of them on stage, chanting and beating on big metal drums with iron sticks, while the back projection showed rare old footage of stone age tribes picking their way across the gibber plains.
Harry was one of their roadies. He still kept his cigarettes in his sleeve but he was into drugs now. We snorted some speed backstage while the gig was still going on and later went up to Arthur’s in the Cross. Beautiful women gathered around Harry but he was more interested in talking than fucking. He was going to Berlin. He knew the guys in the Bad Seeds and reckoned he would be working with them. He was into Gospel music, white soul, all that religious shit. Preacher man don’t tell me/Heaven is under the earth/I know you don’t know/what life is really worth ... they’re lines from a Bob Marley song but reggae is faith music too.
So Harry went to Berlin, he went to São Paulo, he went to Boston, he went everywhere. I heard from a girl I knew who’d had a scene with him that he was running cocaine from Tahiti into Sydney, the mule on the last leg of a journey that started in Bogotá. One day I saw him up the Cross, he was in a bad way, trembling and paranoid. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase which fell open while we were talking in the street. Inside there was bottle of Johnny Walker Red and a carton of cigarettes. Gauloise. Nothing else. He said he’d made a lot of money but people were after him and he was going back to Auckland to invest in the property market.
Next time I saw him was in the corner bar at De Bretts. He had a beautiful white dog; he said she was part dingo. She sat under the table while we drank single malt whisky and smoked cigars; you could buy slim Dutch cigars for six dollars from the humidor. Harry had bought some warehouses in West Auckland. He was a developer. He was back wearing t shirt and jeans, a leather jacket, was into fitness now, swam two kilometres a day in the Olympic Pool.
He was remote from me in the old familiar way. He’d come a long way, he had a long way to go; this was just a station on his way. He talked about Nick Cave, Van Morrison, hearing Loretta Lynn live at the Ryman. He said it was important to distinguish between Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck. When he left the bar it was just getting on to evening. The dog got up and followed without him having to say a word or even look at her. I saw him pause on Shortland Street to re-light his cigar, in black silhouette against the yellow sky, a man and his dog. And his peculiar fate.
There’s more to Harry Graves than this.
9.9.04
Harry Graves
The need for self expression is one of those pieties we grew up with. That there was such a thing as a self, and that it needed expression, were taken for granted. Most of us began early, in the primers, writing compositions with titles like What I Did On The Weekend. It was natural to write these pieces in the first person singular, the tense we use to narrate the day's adventures or misadventures, to describe the progress of a work project or a love affair, to tell the tale of a trip somewhere.
When we tell stories about things that have happened to others, we naturally use the third person: he or she or they. The equivocal second person, singular or plural, can be used to refer both to self and other, sometimes so ambiguously it is hard to know exactly who is meant: It isn't good for you to smoke cigarettes.
Narratives can be constructed out of each and every one of the voices we use to describe real life experiences. If you (who?) use the first person, there are certain presumptions a reader will bring to your narrative: that it is true, that it really happened, that another participant/observer of the same events would tell essentially the same tale.
These are not the same assumptions a reader will bring to something written in the second or third person, although they still pertain to some degree. To say When I was eight years old I started smoking cigarettes is not the same as saying When Harry Graves was eight years old he started smoking cigarettes. Is one more an act of self expression than the other? Perhaps only if we know that Harry Graves is talking about himself.
In the second formulation, there are questions we will immediately want to ask: Who is Harry Graves and why did he start smoking so young? These questions do not arise in the same way in the autobiographical version, in part because the use of the first person singular suggests that such a statement will not be made without a (probably immediate) qualification. We confidently expect the autobiographer to explain why he or she did what he or she did. Otherwise why tell us?
But Harry Graves ... who is Harry Graves?
When we tell stories about things that have happened to others, we naturally use the third person: he or she or they. The equivocal second person, singular or plural, can be used to refer both to self and other, sometimes so ambiguously it is hard to know exactly who is meant: It isn't good for you to smoke cigarettes.
Narratives can be constructed out of each and every one of the voices we use to describe real life experiences. If you (who?) use the first person, there are certain presumptions a reader will bring to your narrative: that it is true, that it really happened, that another participant/observer of the same events would tell essentially the same tale.
These are not the same assumptions a reader will bring to something written in the second or third person, although they still pertain to some degree. To say When I was eight years old I started smoking cigarettes is not the same as saying When Harry Graves was eight years old he started smoking cigarettes. Is one more an act of self expression than the other? Perhaps only if we know that Harry Graves is talking about himself.
In the second formulation, there are questions we will immediately want to ask: Who is Harry Graves and why did he start smoking so young? These questions do not arise in the same way in the autobiographical version, in part because the use of the first person singular suggests that such a statement will not be made without a (probably immediate) qualification. We confidently expect the autobiographer to explain why he or she did what he or she did. Otherwise why tell us?
But Harry Graves ... who is Harry Graves?
8.9.04
3.9.04
More goldtops
That was the autumn of the goldtops; but none of my subsequent experiences with mushrooms was as intense or as revelatory as the first. There was a gradual diminution of the power of the intoxication, unarrested by a steady increase in the dosage. I found I needed to eat two or three or four to feel even mildly stoned and, eventually, reached a point where the amount I ingested began to make me feel ill before any sensory or psychic alterations took place. Regretfully, one day I gathered up all those that remained in my favourite field by the clay pans, took them home, put them in a blue glass flask with crenellations all round the bulb, and filled it with vodka: this, my friend assured me, would provide a stimulating drink in a few months time, when my rapidly acquired tolerance for the drug had faded and I could once more appreciate the reiterated mysteries of psilocybin.
Nevertheless, during those few weeks I walked all over the local landscape, and found many wonders: a shelf of grey sandstone overlooking the Hawkesbury, where the outlines of dolphins and turtles and whales had been pecked into the rock, which I have never found again; a fish—probably a taylor, or kahawai—similarly pecked into the rock at the entrance to a dry cave high up in the cliffs at the southern end of the beach; the sunfish I found another day on the furtherest seaward edge of the great tessellated shield which, bisected by the Patonga Road, stretches across the top of the ridge near the Trig Station.
My favourite carving was one of a man on a flat shelf of sandstone on the way to Flathead Beach, a small cove around the rocks from Pearl Beach. This man has a crescent shaped headdress; he lies on the rock with his arms and legs outspread, a spear in one hand, fish in his armpits and another between his thighs, just below the end of his pecked pecker. Long lines in the rock emanate from these fish, one pointing up towards the mouth of the great mangroved and islanded estuary of Brisbane Water, the other out to the rocky tip of Lion Island: surely two very rich fishing grounds. There is also, another friend told me, an image of a wallaby carved next to where the man’s spear point is, but I have never been able to see more than a few vague lines there.
It was as if, when I was on psilocybin, some veil drew back and I saw further and more than I ever would have seen straight; or that the richly inscribed landscape of that place could only be read by one whose gaze was untrammeled by day-to-day concerns; but whether this drawn-back veil was in my mind or a distinct quality of the land itself was never clear to me. All I knew was that a characteristic of these rock engravings is that they are sometimes as clear as the lines on the palm of your hand and sometimes not just inscrutable but well-nigh invisible.
Some of this has to do with natural conditions of course: whether it has been raining or not, whether it is morning, noon or night, overcast or sunny, the way the light falls at different hours of the day. The best time for seeing rock carvings is early or late on a sunny day, when the slanting light picks out their shapes; or, alternatively, on an overcast day after rain, when the freshly watered grooves gleam under a white sky. That said, there are still times when viewing conditions are ideal and yet the images will not appear, seeming to have withdrawn themselves into the rocks, as shy as some wild creature, reticent as a child, perhaps, or cunning like some ancient gnome.
Nevertheless, during those few weeks I walked all over the local landscape, and found many wonders: a shelf of grey sandstone overlooking the Hawkesbury, where the outlines of dolphins and turtles and whales had been pecked into the rock, which I have never found again; a fish—probably a taylor, or kahawai—similarly pecked into the rock at the entrance to a dry cave high up in the cliffs at the southern end of the beach; the sunfish I found another day on the furtherest seaward edge of the great tessellated shield which, bisected by the Patonga Road, stretches across the top of the ridge near the Trig Station.
My favourite carving was one of a man on a flat shelf of sandstone on the way to Flathead Beach, a small cove around the rocks from Pearl Beach. This man has a crescent shaped headdress; he lies on the rock with his arms and legs outspread, a spear in one hand, fish in his armpits and another between his thighs, just below the end of his pecked pecker. Long lines in the rock emanate from these fish, one pointing up towards the mouth of the great mangroved and islanded estuary of Brisbane Water, the other out to the rocky tip of Lion Island: surely two very rich fishing grounds. There is also, another friend told me, an image of a wallaby carved next to where the man’s spear point is, but I have never been able to see more than a few vague lines there.
It was as if, when I was on psilocybin, some veil drew back and I saw further and more than I ever would have seen straight; or that the richly inscribed landscape of that place could only be read by one whose gaze was untrammeled by day-to-day concerns; but whether this drawn-back veil was in my mind or a distinct quality of the land itself was never clear to me. All I knew was that a characteristic of these rock engravings is that they are sometimes as clear as the lines on the palm of your hand and sometimes not just inscrutable but well-nigh invisible.
Some of this has to do with natural conditions of course: whether it has been raining or not, whether it is morning, noon or night, overcast or sunny, the way the light falls at different hours of the day. The best time for seeing rock carvings is early or late on a sunny day, when the slanting light picks out their shapes; or, alternatively, on an overcast day after rain, when the freshly watered grooves gleam under a white sky. That said, there are still times when viewing conditions are ideal and yet the images will not appear, seeming to have withdrawn themselves into the rocks, as shy as some wild creature, reticent as a child, perhaps, or cunning like some ancient gnome.
2.9.04
A man in search of his soul
A friend told me there was a mushroom containing psilocybin which grew locally; he described this fungus in detail—small, with a dusty gold skin and, underneath, yellow-green gills tending towards cyan blue; the stems were slender and fragile, and they arched outwards at the bottom to make a characteristic pediment where they entered the earth. These mushrooms, called goldtops, tended to be found after rain where small impromptu streams carried the spores down forest paths; or under trees, also after rain. There was a particular spot in Patonga, the next village to ours, where they grew thickly in the park that runs along the shores of the estuary as the creek broadens among mangroves before narrowing again as it comes down from Patongalonga.
I was never able to find this particular spot, but I did identify the mushroom itself. My friend only ever ate the stalks, throwing the heads away because he thought there might be too much toxicity in them; but when I came to try them it seemed a waste to do that, so I would eat the whole thing. They had a pleasant taste, slightly nutty, inevitably mixed in with pieces of sandy grit adhering to the stem. I had my first one at the beginning of the path to the waterfall, where there is the remains of an old saw pit and a deep deposit of yellow clay, on the margins of which the goldtops sometimes grew. This day there were a couple of others I also picked, dropping them into my shirt pocket for later, then carrying on into the bush.
The sky was overcast, full of soft grey clouds moulded by wind currents into smooth creamy swirls. Below, the still, slate-coloured sea was cut through with purple lights like mica glints. Apart from the cries of birds sounding loudly, intermittently in the inert air, it was quiet as I walked up the path to the waterfall, which at this point runs past tennis courts and parallel to the road to a rich man’s house. You cannot see house or courts, but the concrete block fire station could be glimpsed through trees on the left, with a wide patch of burnt ground around it from when the Bush Brigade’s last barbecue got away on them. Then all of that, the rutted, clay road, the acrid blackened ground, the weeds encroaching from suburban gardens, fell behind as I entered the hushed green shade of the bush.
The path winds along the side of a ridge until it reaches the Ochre Caves, a massive outcrop overhang within which the orange and white sandstone, sculpted by wind and water into filigrees and curlicues like those in the morning's sky, is graffitied with names and dates of otherwise forgotten visits. Here there is a place where you can stand and hear the falling water echo from the rockface, very loud, right next to your ear, sounding much closer than the real waterfall chinking and glinting through the trees. I climbed up the damp slippery rocks to one side of the wide lip of stone over which the water cascades, and came out into a broad basin where the stream runs into a shallow pool. Water boatmen sculled the meniscus, their blurred shadows flitting behind them on the rust orange bottom. I crossed over to the other side and climbed up a sandstone shelf to the next level.
Here the stream meanders along a narrow causeway, with bush close on either side, the eucalypts leaning their still leaves over, the wattles dropping golden pollen down. Tiny beaches, miniatures of those on the sea shore, gather at the margins of the flow. I kept on walking up until the path faded to stepping stones in the creek, then went along a low sandy bank flanking a wide, deep pool with a rope swing hanging over it from the branch of a leaning tree. It was warm, and there was no-one around, so I took off my clothes and slid naked into the brown water, letting the encrusted salt from my last sea swim wash away. Then I climbed up over another smooth rock shelf to Pearlie Ponds.
Pebbles of red and yellow ochre lie in the water of the ponds, and people use them to draw with on the flat or sloping stone faces of the stream bed. There were fish and birds and trees, a rainbow, hearts with arrows, names, initials, dates, spirals, chevrons and random other marks. When it rains, the pigment washes off, leaving vague, faded outlines behind and sending coloured streams down over the rock. Sometimes charcoal from burnt trees is used, and then the black, too, runs down to darken the water. Impromptu fireplaces were scattered about the gallery, so it resembled a primitive campsite. Where the water pours over the shelf into the swimming pool below, the soft sandstone has been carved by hands or worn away and then it seems that this place is neither ancient nor modern but one where time has gone so far it curls around and finds itself back at its source.
The track leaves the course of the stream here and follows the contour of the ridge, but I continued in the bed itself, climbing up over massive tumbled boulders to another, smaller pool and then on past two huge rocks with the gap between them dammed by the flood-borne debris of fallen trees. The bush on the banks thinned to scrub and the sandstone outcrops showed pink and white and grey through the sparse tough vegetation. The ubiquitous grey-green was lit here and there with tiny trails of intense purple, or the bright crimson spider crouch of a hakea or grevillia, or the soft lavender of a small shrub with almond-shaped leaves. I began seeing spiders.
The first one was enormous, at least two hand widths across, poised on the underside of a great rock protruding out over a still black pool. Its reflection—attenuated thorax, bulbous abdomen, great jointed spindly legs—rose to meet it from below, like its Siamese twin, joined at the tail. A rock spider, I guess. Perhaps they stalk their prey across the quivering meniscus of the water, or perhaps they wait for some unwary creature to come down under on their rock. This one was immobile and anyway on the far side of the pool from where I was; the only way to approach it was through the dark water and, though it was not cold, I could not even imagine doing that.
Further on, as the slopes above get drier and harsher, the slit of the creekbed becomes even lusher and I stepped ankle deep in grasses which released a delicate fragrance as they were crushed beneath my boots; hearing the falsetto creaking of frogs stop as I came near, I began to run into the webs of golden orb weavers. These are large grey spiders with yellow and black legs, which spin an intricate web out of a tough and elastic thread of golden silk. They are complex, three dimensional webs around which, when they are established, gather the smaller subsidiary webs of smaller, subsidiary males, poised in their suburban outposts waiting for the opportunity to visit the centre and consummate their longings.
What is remarkable about the female golden weaver is the black and white pattern she bears on her abdomen. As I continued my walk, and found more and more webs blocking my path, slung between walls of greenery which, by now, almost met across the creekbed, these abdominal patterns seemed more and more like masks. Each one was different, yet each conformed to the primeval pattern of our kind: two eyes, a nose, a mouth, with tattooed or painted chin, cheeks and forehead. I did not feel threatened by these beings grimacing up at me; it did not alarm me to find, as it were, a sprite on the back of every spider: rather it seemed as if the richness of the world had disclosed another detail of itself, beyond, or behind which there were more, as yet hidden revelations to be had.
Deep in the valley, near the cliff face at its head, the big trees returned, with their smooth grey or white trunks, their gouts of red or amber gum oozing from wounds in the bark, their immemorial presence. Here the scrub was so dense on either bank that it literally joined above the surface of the water in a thick mass I had to push apart in order to go on, and there was no place for spiders to spin their webs. The stream was a tiny trickle, a mere thread of liquid in the electric green swampy grass where the sticky tendrilled red beaded pods of tiny carnivorous plants lay open.
At length I came to a deep, dark cleft in the rock, full of black water, with a mossy brown shelf at one end and a little stone bud at the other. Ferns and grasses leaned over the still surface. The silence of the afternoon was a deep bass hum under everything. I bent and saw my own face rising towards me. My lips touched the surface and the cold, colourless, sweet tasting water flooded into my mouth. I felt myself falling forward head first into that fissure and disappearing forever ...
The water dissolved the unspoken words of thought off my tongue, the voices in my head diminished and faded and a profound emptiness, echoed in the stillness of the grey green trees and grey tumbled stones on every side, took their place. It was as if I was myself at the heart of a web made, not out of golden silk or silver thought, but from the very silence itself. It was profound, by which I mean depthless; it was endless, by which I mean that everything there was, was underpinned by that silence, even the intermittent birdsong or the returning creak of the frogs; and as I moved it moved with me.
I left the source of the stream, climbing directly up one side of the valley, following the sandstone scarp around until I met the path, going on to the top of Gad’s Hill, then walking eastward along the Hope Range, that line of cliffs which defines the northern bank of the Hawkesbury River as it flows into Broken Bay. From there, you can see the whole panorama of the river system, with its humped bush-covered headlands, its long snaky inlets, its wide blue waters crossed by random white lines of boat trails and deeper, more subtle flows of tidal warps or riverine currents.
Coming down from the Hope Range, just past the massive orange overhang where pieces of chert and flint lie in fine sand by a cave mouth, a tree had fallen across the track. It was an old dead grey spike with its roots still clawed into the sandstone, charred black along one side in a bushfire, which probably became waterlogged in a storm and collapsed. The trunk split as it fell, scattering comb from a beehive across the brown metal and red clay track. I picked up a piece of it and sniffed the faint honey aroma rising from the waxy hexagonals. In some of the cells there were dead bees; they were the native kind, stingless, with striped conical abdomens. A few live ones were still clinging to the pale golden brown of the newly fractured comb left in the stump or hovering confusedly above the deep ebony of the old. Someone had been there before me, clearing debris from the track, taking whatever honey there was.
I went on, walking back down the fire trail with the piece of honeycomb in my hand, and saw a honeyeater singing on a branch, its neck taut and elongated, its throat swollen to squeeze out the liquid notes, in black silhouette before the yellow atrocity of the sky. Goldtops, I thought, over and over; golden weavers; golden sky: it seemed there was a perception behind every perception, the way on a sunny afternoon there is a shadow behind every tree. This regression is infinite in the merest sense of the word. It goes forever. The feeling of a moment draws back to reveal a glade beyond which comes the song of a lyre bird imitating a car alarm before the black buzzing of an aeroplane in the depthless blue of the sky. A line from Illuminations came: Arrivée de toujours, qui t'en iras partout. Arrival of always, which will go everywhere.
I was never able to find this particular spot, but I did identify the mushroom itself. My friend only ever ate the stalks, throwing the heads away because he thought there might be too much toxicity in them; but when I came to try them it seemed a waste to do that, so I would eat the whole thing. They had a pleasant taste, slightly nutty, inevitably mixed in with pieces of sandy grit adhering to the stem. I had my first one at the beginning of the path to the waterfall, where there is the remains of an old saw pit and a deep deposit of yellow clay, on the margins of which the goldtops sometimes grew. This day there were a couple of others I also picked, dropping them into my shirt pocket for later, then carrying on into the bush.
The sky was overcast, full of soft grey clouds moulded by wind currents into smooth creamy swirls. Below, the still, slate-coloured sea was cut through with purple lights like mica glints. Apart from the cries of birds sounding loudly, intermittently in the inert air, it was quiet as I walked up the path to the waterfall, which at this point runs past tennis courts and parallel to the road to a rich man’s house. You cannot see house or courts, but the concrete block fire station could be glimpsed through trees on the left, with a wide patch of burnt ground around it from when the Bush Brigade’s last barbecue got away on them. Then all of that, the rutted, clay road, the acrid blackened ground, the weeds encroaching from suburban gardens, fell behind as I entered the hushed green shade of the bush.
The path winds along the side of a ridge until it reaches the Ochre Caves, a massive outcrop overhang within which the orange and white sandstone, sculpted by wind and water into filigrees and curlicues like those in the morning's sky, is graffitied with names and dates of otherwise forgotten visits. Here there is a place where you can stand and hear the falling water echo from the rockface, very loud, right next to your ear, sounding much closer than the real waterfall chinking and glinting through the trees. I climbed up the damp slippery rocks to one side of the wide lip of stone over which the water cascades, and came out into a broad basin where the stream runs into a shallow pool. Water boatmen sculled the meniscus, their blurred shadows flitting behind them on the rust orange bottom. I crossed over to the other side and climbed up a sandstone shelf to the next level.
Here the stream meanders along a narrow causeway, with bush close on either side, the eucalypts leaning their still leaves over, the wattles dropping golden pollen down. Tiny beaches, miniatures of those on the sea shore, gather at the margins of the flow. I kept on walking up until the path faded to stepping stones in the creek, then went along a low sandy bank flanking a wide, deep pool with a rope swing hanging over it from the branch of a leaning tree. It was warm, and there was no-one around, so I took off my clothes and slid naked into the brown water, letting the encrusted salt from my last sea swim wash away. Then I climbed up over another smooth rock shelf to Pearlie Ponds.
Pebbles of red and yellow ochre lie in the water of the ponds, and people use them to draw with on the flat or sloping stone faces of the stream bed. There were fish and birds and trees, a rainbow, hearts with arrows, names, initials, dates, spirals, chevrons and random other marks. When it rains, the pigment washes off, leaving vague, faded outlines behind and sending coloured streams down over the rock. Sometimes charcoal from burnt trees is used, and then the black, too, runs down to darken the water. Impromptu fireplaces were scattered about the gallery, so it resembled a primitive campsite. Where the water pours over the shelf into the swimming pool below, the soft sandstone has been carved by hands or worn away and then it seems that this place is neither ancient nor modern but one where time has gone so far it curls around and finds itself back at its source.
The track leaves the course of the stream here and follows the contour of the ridge, but I continued in the bed itself, climbing up over massive tumbled boulders to another, smaller pool and then on past two huge rocks with the gap between them dammed by the flood-borne debris of fallen trees. The bush on the banks thinned to scrub and the sandstone outcrops showed pink and white and grey through the sparse tough vegetation. The ubiquitous grey-green was lit here and there with tiny trails of intense purple, or the bright crimson spider crouch of a hakea or grevillia, or the soft lavender of a small shrub with almond-shaped leaves. I began seeing spiders.
The first one was enormous, at least two hand widths across, poised on the underside of a great rock protruding out over a still black pool. Its reflection—attenuated thorax, bulbous abdomen, great jointed spindly legs—rose to meet it from below, like its Siamese twin, joined at the tail. A rock spider, I guess. Perhaps they stalk their prey across the quivering meniscus of the water, or perhaps they wait for some unwary creature to come down under on their rock. This one was immobile and anyway on the far side of the pool from where I was; the only way to approach it was through the dark water and, though it was not cold, I could not even imagine doing that.
Further on, as the slopes above get drier and harsher, the slit of the creekbed becomes even lusher and I stepped ankle deep in grasses which released a delicate fragrance as they were crushed beneath my boots; hearing the falsetto creaking of frogs stop as I came near, I began to run into the webs of golden orb weavers. These are large grey spiders with yellow and black legs, which spin an intricate web out of a tough and elastic thread of golden silk. They are complex, three dimensional webs around which, when they are established, gather the smaller subsidiary webs of smaller, subsidiary males, poised in their suburban outposts waiting for the opportunity to visit the centre and consummate their longings.
What is remarkable about the female golden weaver is the black and white pattern she bears on her abdomen. As I continued my walk, and found more and more webs blocking my path, slung between walls of greenery which, by now, almost met across the creekbed, these abdominal patterns seemed more and more like masks. Each one was different, yet each conformed to the primeval pattern of our kind: two eyes, a nose, a mouth, with tattooed or painted chin, cheeks and forehead. I did not feel threatened by these beings grimacing up at me; it did not alarm me to find, as it were, a sprite on the back of every spider: rather it seemed as if the richness of the world had disclosed another detail of itself, beyond, or behind which there were more, as yet hidden revelations to be had.
Deep in the valley, near the cliff face at its head, the big trees returned, with their smooth grey or white trunks, their gouts of red or amber gum oozing from wounds in the bark, their immemorial presence. Here the scrub was so dense on either bank that it literally joined above the surface of the water in a thick mass I had to push apart in order to go on, and there was no place for spiders to spin their webs. The stream was a tiny trickle, a mere thread of liquid in the electric green swampy grass where the sticky tendrilled red beaded pods of tiny carnivorous plants lay open.
At length I came to a deep, dark cleft in the rock, full of black water, with a mossy brown shelf at one end and a little stone bud at the other. Ferns and grasses leaned over the still surface. The silence of the afternoon was a deep bass hum under everything. I bent and saw my own face rising towards me. My lips touched the surface and the cold, colourless, sweet tasting water flooded into my mouth. I felt myself falling forward head first into that fissure and disappearing forever ...
The water dissolved the unspoken words of thought off my tongue, the voices in my head diminished and faded and a profound emptiness, echoed in the stillness of the grey green trees and grey tumbled stones on every side, took their place. It was as if I was myself at the heart of a web made, not out of golden silk or silver thought, but from the very silence itself. It was profound, by which I mean depthless; it was endless, by which I mean that everything there was, was underpinned by that silence, even the intermittent birdsong or the returning creak of the frogs; and as I moved it moved with me.
I left the source of the stream, climbing directly up one side of the valley, following the sandstone scarp around until I met the path, going on to the top of Gad’s Hill, then walking eastward along the Hope Range, that line of cliffs which defines the northern bank of the Hawkesbury River as it flows into Broken Bay. From there, you can see the whole panorama of the river system, with its humped bush-covered headlands, its long snaky inlets, its wide blue waters crossed by random white lines of boat trails and deeper, more subtle flows of tidal warps or riverine currents.
Coming down from the Hope Range, just past the massive orange overhang where pieces of chert and flint lie in fine sand by a cave mouth, a tree had fallen across the track. It was an old dead grey spike with its roots still clawed into the sandstone, charred black along one side in a bushfire, which probably became waterlogged in a storm and collapsed. The trunk split as it fell, scattering comb from a beehive across the brown metal and red clay track. I picked up a piece of it and sniffed the faint honey aroma rising from the waxy hexagonals. In some of the cells there were dead bees; they were the native kind, stingless, with striped conical abdomens. A few live ones were still clinging to the pale golden brown of the newly fractured comb left in the stump or hovering confusedly above the deep ebony of the old. Someone had been there before me, clearing debris from the track, taking whatever honey there was.
I went on, walking back down the fire trail with the piece of honeycomb in my hand, and saw a honeyeater singing on a branch, its neck taut and elongated, its throat swollen to squeeze out the liquid notes, in black silhouette before the yellow atrocity of the sky. Goldtops, I thought, over and over; golden weavers; golden sky: it seemed there was a perception behind every perception, the way on a sunny afternoon there is a shadow behind every tree. This regression is infinite in the merest sense of the word. It goes forever. The feeling of a moment draws back to reveal a glade beyond which comes the song of a lyre bird imitating a car alarm before the black buzzing of an aeroplane in the depthless blue of the sky. A line from Illuminations came: Arrivée de toujours, qui t'en iras partout. Arrival of always, which will go everywhere.
1.9.04
Buddha's Tooth
During the Governorship at Goa of that priest-ridden bigot Viceroy Dom Constatino de Bragança (1558-61), a sacred relic, a tooth of the Buddha, was captured at Jaffnapatam in Serendip (Sri Lanka, that is, Ceylon). The King of Pegu (Myanmar, that is, Burma) offered to ransom the tooth, but the Viceroy refused. He had the tooth publicly pounded to pieces with a mortar and pestle by the Archbishop of Goa. Later it was said in Serendip that the tooth the Portuguese destroyed was a fake, and that the real tooth still resides at the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy. Bragança is quoted as saying that he would prefer for the honour of the royal estate and the glory of His Highness, the conversion of the poorest Canarim in this island to all the profits of the land thereof and carracks laden with pepper, and that he would risk everything for the salvation of a single soul.
31.8.04
Wektu Telu
On the island of Lombok, east of Bali, on the other side of the Wallace Line, there exists a religion called Wektu Telu. Devotees think of themselves as Muslim, but aspects of their practice vary considerably from orthodox Islam. For example, they don’t pray five times a day, they don’t make the haj to Mecca, they fast only three days at Ramadam instead of a month, they will eat pork.
Wektu Telu is an amalgam of Islam, Balinese Hinduism, and the animism of the Sasak people who are native to Lombok. Wektu Telu is Sasak and means result (of) three. This refers to the three religions, but also to a series of related trinities: Allah, Mohammed and Adam, who are analagous to the sun, moon and stars, which are in turn related to heaven, earth and water.
Allah is the one true God, Mohammed the link between God and human beings and Adam a being in search of a soul; a further elaboration of threes represents the human head, body, and limbs as creativity, sensitivity and control. Three main duties are encouraged: belief in God, resisting the temptations of the devil and co-operating with others by being helpful and loving people.
A temple at Lingsar, built in 1714, combines both the Balinese Hindu and Wektu Telu faiths. It is divided into two sections on two levels. In the Hindu section, a shrine faces towards Gunung Agung, the sacred volcanic seat of the gods on Bali. In the Wektu Telu section, a pond is home to a population of sacred eels. Visitors make offerings of hard-boiled eggs to these eels. Nearby on an altar there are numerous mirrors donated by Chinese business people to bring good fortune. A number of stones wrapped in strips of cloth, connected with Sasak animism, rest here also.
Wektu Telu believe that during birth, four siblings escape from the womb: blood, egg, placenta, amniotic fluid. The afterbirth has to be treated with care and respect, or else the four siblings might harm the child. Offerings are made and the afterbirth buried, then the child is scattered with ashes. When it is 105 days old there is a ceremony for the cutting of its hair. Later, between the ages of 6 and 11, the boys are circumcised and carried through the streets on wooden horses or on lions with tails made from palm fronds.
After death Wektu Telu bodies are washed in the presence of a holy man, wrapped in white sheets and sackcloth then placed on a platform while the Koran is read and people pray to the spirits of ancestors. In the cemetery the body is interred with the head facing Mecca, while the Koran is read first in Sanskrit, then in Arabic. Carved wood, for a man, and decorative combs, for a woman, are placed on the grave. There are ceremonies on the 3rd, 7th, 40th and 100th day after death. After 1000 days, holy water is sprinkled on the grave and the wooden offerings removed and replaced by stones.
Wektu Telu is an amalgam of Islam, Balinese Hinduism, and the animism of the Sasak people who are native to Lombok. Wektu Telu is Sasak and means result (of) three. This refers to the three religions, but also to a series of related trinities: Allah, Mohammed and Adam, who are analagous to the sun, moon and stars, which are in turn related to heaven, earth and water.
Allah is the one true God, Mohammed the link between God and human beings and Adam a being in search of a soul; a further elaboration of threes represents the human head, body, and limbs as creativity, sensitivity and control. Three main duties are encouraged: belief in God, resisting the temptations of the devil and co-operating with others by being helpful and loving people.
A temple at Lingsar, built in 1714, combines both the Balinese Hindu and Wektu Telu faiths. It is divided into two sections on two levels. In the Hindu section, a shrine faces towards Gunung Agung, the sacred volcanic seat of the gods on Bali. In the Wektu Telu section, a pond is home to a population of sacred eels. Visitors make offerings of hard-boiled eggs to these eels. Nearby on an altar there are numerous mirrors donated by Chinese business people to bring good fortune. A number of stones wrapped in strips of cloth, connected with Sasak animism, rest here also.
Wektu Telu believe that during birth, four siblings escape from the womb: blood, egg, placenta, amniotic fluid. The afterbirth has to be treated with care and respect, or else the four siblings might harm the child. Offerings are made and the afterbirth buried, then the child is scattered with ashes. When it is 105 days old there is a ceremony for the cutting of its hair. Later, between the ages of 6 and 11, the boys are circumcised and carried through the streets on wooden horses or on lions with tails made from palm fronds.
After death Wektu Telu bodies are washed in the presence of a holy man, wrapped in white sheets and sackcloth then placed on a platform while the Koran is read and people pray to the spirits of ancestors. In the cemetery the body is interred with the head facing Mecca, while the Koran is read first in Sanskrit, then in Arabic. Carved wood, for a man, and decorative combs, for a woman, are placed on the grave. There are ceremonies on the 3rd, 7th, 40th and 100th day after death. After 1000 days, holy water is sprinkled on the grave and the wooden offerings removed and replaced by stones.
30.8.04
Topasses
About this time last year I became interested in the question as to how the Muslim expansion into South East Asia happened. I found the answer (I think it was there) in C.R. Boxer’s The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; it was relatively straight forward. Arab trading vessels would sail east on the monsoon; wait for the pancoraba or change of monsoon, then sail back with their cargos of Japanese silver, Chinese silks, Indonesian spices, Persian horses, Indian pepper. In the time they spent ashore the sailors would form liaisons with local women; children would be born; and, on some subsequent voyage, an imam would be brought east to educate these children. Mosques were built and Muslim communities thus grew up naturally around trading ports, without any need for aggressive proselytizing or military conquest. The seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor are essentially a history of this early period of Arab voyaging into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Later, Gujarat merchants, also Muslim, continued to transplant their religion into the trading lands.
Something similar happened with the Chinese, who seem to have sailed in southern waters intermittently over a period of a thousand years or more. Zheng He, the 13th century voyager, was of course Muslim himself, but culturally he was Chinese, he was representing a Ming Dynasty emperor, and was in the habit of placing shrines to Tianfei, the Taoist Sea Goddess, at the places he or his admirals touched. There is said to have been one of these shrines at the site where Darwin now stands. Chinese communities grew up around trading ports in the same way the Muslim communities did, with the other religions – Hindu, Buddhist, Animist – accommodating the new faiths. It is fascinating to learn that the port of Malacca which, when the Portuguese took it in 1511, they accounted the richest city they had seen, was at that time only a hundred or so years old; and that, politically, an alliance between the first rulers of Malacca and the Ming Empire was of crucial importance to the survival and growth of the entrepot.
The Chinese voyages ended abruptly about 1433; seventy odd years later, the Portuguese learned how to navigate the Indian Ocean from a renegade Muslim captain on the east African coast and a quite extraordinary campaign of violence was unleashed in an area which until then had remained relatively peaceful; for trade took precedence over every other activity, and religious tolerance was the rule, not the exception. But even the Portuguese adapted. For example: during the 16th century the Dominicans established missions on the island of Solor, off the east coast of Flores in Nusa Tenggara. Communities of Christianized locals who married Portuguese grew up around the Dominican Missions, becoming the people known to themselves as Topasses and to the Dutch as Black Portuguese. The Topasses were active traders, especially in sandalwood, throughout the archipelago and were particularly successful in Timor, where descendent populations survive today, as they do in Darwin itself, which has been a haven for Timorese exiles since 1975.
The derivation of the word Topasses is a matter of some complexity. Tupassi (Topasses), purportedly comes from the Hindu word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves as Gente de Chapeo - People of the Hat. They were also known as the Larantuqueiros, from the islands of that name off eastern Flores. The Dutch, whom they fought for several hundred years, called them Swarte Portugueezen in all official documents. In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, they were known as Sobe Kase - Foreign Hats. Yet another variant, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo - Black Hats. Topasses were multilingual. Portuguese was their status language, also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade; and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.
Something similar happened with the Chinese, who seem to have sailed in southern waters intermittently over a period of a thousand years or more. Zheng He, the 13th century voyager, was of course Muslim himself, but culturally he was Chinese, he was representing a Ming Dynasty emperor, and was in the habit of placing shrines to Tianfei, the Taoist Sea Goddess, at the places he or his admirals touched. There is said to have been one of these shrines at the site where Darwin now stands. Chinese communities grew up around trading ports in the same way the Muslim communities did, with the other religions – Hindu, Buddhist, Animist – accommodating the new faiths. It is fascinating to learn that the port of Malacca which, when the Portuguese took it in 1511, they accounted the richest city they had seen, was at that time only a hundred or so years old; and that, politically, an alliance between the first rulers of Malacca and the Ming Empire was of crucial importance to the survival and growth of the entrepot.
The Chinese voyages ended abruptly about 1433; seventy odd years later, the Portuguese learned how to navigate the Indian Ocean from a renegade Muslim captain on the east African coast and a quite extraordinary campaign of violence was unleashed in an area which until then had remained relatively peaceful; for trade took precedence over every other activity, and religious tolerance was the rule, not the exception. But even the Portuguese adapted. For example: during the 16th century the Dominicans established missions on the island of Solor, off the east coast of Flores in Nusa Tenggara. Communities of Christianized locals who married Portuguese grew up around the Dominican Missions, becoming the people known to themselves as Topasses and to the Dutch as Black Portuguese. The Topasses were active traders, especially in sandalwood, throughout the archipelago and were particularly successful in Timor, where descendent populations survive today, as they do in Darwin itself, which has been a haven for Timorese exiles since 1975.
The derivation of the word Topasses is a matter of some complexity. Tupassi (Topasses), purportedly comes from the Hindu word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves as Gente de Chapeo - People of the Hat. They were also known as the Larantuqueiros, from the islands of that name off eastern Flores. The Dutch, whom they fought for several hundred years, called them Swarte Portugueezen in all official documents. In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, they were known as Sobe Kase - Foreign Hats. Yet another variant, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo - Black Hats. Topasses were multilingual. Portuguese was their status language, also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade; and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.
27.8.04
The Dutch Discover Australia
It is not a very interesting story. It is, in fact, a story of unsurpassable dryness. We have been told that 'it was the spirit which had cut the dykes that gained the Spice Archipelago for Holland'. But there was very little of 'the spirit of the dykes' in the use which the Dutch made of their gain. The trail of business is over the whole story; indeed the whole story is nothing but a trail of business. Complete and singular is the contrast between the Spaniard and his successor. It is the contrast of the Cathedral full of men with all human virtues and vices, and the Factory wherein is neither virtue nor vice, nor even men, but one thing only, desire to make money. In place of Don Quixote we have a bagman, and by no means an 'inspired bagman'. In place of voyages of knightly mariners, following the gleam of a golden continent, we have a dull story of the gropings, along rocky and barren shores, which cut the utterly uninteresting continent of New Holland out of the beautiful Spanish dream of Terra Incognita. In place of quest of a great 'mine of souls' we have long inventories of things for barter for 'the benefit of the Company'.
from The Discovery of Australia (1922), by G. Arnold Wood, revised (1969) by J. C. Beaglehole
from The Discovery of Australia (1922), by G. Arnold Wood, revised (1969) by J. C. Beaglehole
26.8.04
The Island of Gold
The Lamacheres Fishermen of the Island of Solor, while engaged in fishing, were caught in a storm so fierce that they were quite unable to return to land; so they yielded to the force of the storm, which was such that in five days they were carried to the Island of Gold, which is situated in the Sea off the opposite or outer coast of Timor, which is properly called the Southern coast.
And so the Fishermen reached the land of Gold and attempted to find food, as they had eaten nothing during the period of the storm. They enjoyed such excellent good fortune that while they were raking the earth in search of Yams and Potatoes, they found so much Gold that they filled their Boat until it could carry no more cargo.
After taking in water and provisions necessary for the return journey to their native Country, they waited for another storm in the opposite direction, and when the storm came they went from the said Island of Gold until they reached the Island of Ende Grande, where they discharged all their Gold, much to the envy of the Endes.
In consequence, these same Endes and the Lamacheres Fishermen determined to repeat the voyage, and when they were all about to set out both the Endes and the Lamacheres were overtaken by a fear so great that they did not dare, owing to ignorance, to cross the Sea of Gold.
And it may well seem that the Almighty God desires to entrust this work to Manoel Godinho de Eredia, the Cosmographer, by Order of the most happy Lord Count Admiral, Viceroy of India intra- and extra-Ganges, that the said Eredia may be the instrument of effecting an increase in the new Patrimonies of the Crown of Portugal, and of enriching the said Lord Count and the Lusitanian Nation.
from: Report on the Golden Chersonese or Peninsula and on the Auriferous, Carbuncular and Aromatic Islands, drawn up by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, Cosmographer, 1597-1600.
And so the Fishermen reached the land of Gold and attempted to find food, as they had eaten nothing during the period of the storm. They enjoyed such excellent good fortune that while they were raking the earth in search of Yams and Potatoes, they found so much Gold that they filled their Boat until it could carry no more cargo.
After taking in water and provisions necessary for the return journey to their native Country, they waited for another storm in the opposite direction, and when the storm came they went from the said Island of Gold until they reached the Island of Ende Grande, where they discharged all their Gold, much to the envy of the Endes.
In consequence, these same Endes and the Lamacheres Fishermen determined to repeat the voyage, and when they were all about to set out both the Endes and the Lamacheres were overtaken by a fear so great that they did not dare, owing to ignorance, to cross the Sea of Gold.
And it may well seem that the Almighty God desires to entrust this work to Manoel Godinho de Eredia, the Cosmographer, by Order of the most happy Lord Count Admiral, Viceroy of India intra- and extra-Ganges, that the said Eredia may be the instrument of effecting an increase in the new Patrimonies of the Crown of Portugal, and of enriching the said Lord Count and the Lusitanian Nation.
from: Report on the Golden Chersonese or Peninsula and on the Auriferous, Carbuncular and Aromatic Islands, drawn up by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, Cosmographer, 1597-1600.
23.8.04
Mabo (Un)Explained
Dampier’s Cape Mabo is a misreading of Tasman’s Cape Maba, derived in turn from the 1616 voyage of Le Maire and Schouten which rounded and named Cape Horn and then crossed the Pacific looking for islands of trade outside the voracious purview of the Dutch East India Company.
Their ships were sequestered by said company upon arrival in Batavia, en route to which they passed along the north coast of New Guinea and saw the northern and eastern coasts of Halmahera, where Cape Maba is, or was. There is still a town, and a provincial district, called Maba on Halmahera and the people of this area – the northern coast of the south eastern peninsular – speak an Austronesian language also known as Maba. The name of the cape would thus seem to originate in local usage.
The Mer Islands, where Eddie Mabo came from, are a world away to the east; they are in fact the most easterly of the Torres Strait Islands, volcanic remnants where the people speak a non-Austronesian language related to those of mainland eastern Papua to the north. There is a form of ancestor worship in the Mer, or Murray, Islands called the Eastern Malo Cult after the originating ancestor; but it is a long stretch to imagine how the labial could have morphed into a voiced plosive.
The Celtic goddess Mabo Mabona, the ‘true lost word’, is in some recensions identifed as masculine, the Irish Apollo, god of music, sports and sex, named in ogam, like his female equivalent, as Mabo or Mabona. In this version of the tradition, his symbol is the phallus, and he is a god of youth. Lost word, god of youth, ancestor, precursor of justice, name, name ...
Their ships were sequestered by said company upon arrival in Batavia, en route to which they passed along the north coast of New Guinea and saw the northern and eastern coasts of Halmahera, where Cape Maba is, or was. There is still a town, and a provincial district, called Maba on Halmahera and the people of this area – the northern coast of the south eastern peninsular – speak an Austronesian language also known as Maba. The name of the cape would thus seem to originate in local usage.
The Mer Islands, where Eddie Mabo came from, are a world away to the east; they are in fact the most easterly of the Torres Strait Islands, volcanic remnants where the people speak a non-Austronesian language related to those of mainland eastern Papua to the north. There is a form of ancestor worship in the Mer, or Murray, Islands called the Eastern Malo Cult after the originating ancestor; but it is a long stretch to imagine how the labial could have morphed into a voiced plosive.
The Celtic goddess Mabo Mabona, the ‘true lost word’, is in some recensions identifed as masculine, the Irish Apollo, god of music, sports and sex, named in ogam, like his female equivalent, as Mabo or Mabona. In this version of the tradition, his symbol is the phallus, and he is a god of youth. Lost word, god of youth, ancestor, precursor of justice, name, name ...
20.8.04
non
Last night a bookseller told me that, when the current scandal broke, Norma Khouri had just delivered a second book to her publishers; this book will not now be published, at least not by Transworld. What kind of book is it? I asked. In the style of the last one, she said. Non fiction.
19.8.04
Is that 'oui' or 'non'?
I’m currently fascinated by three stories running in the press, all with a characteristically Australian ambiguity with regard to the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’:
The first is the Norma Khouri saga, which gets stranger and stranger. I heard her publisher at Transworld, an Englishman, say this morning on the radio: You know, if the book is non-fiction, everything within it has to be true. Whereas Norma herself was quoted in yesterday’s press saying that, although her book included inventions, she would never call it a fiction or a novel. There’s a huge area for speculation here. My question is: what does the ‘non’ in non-fiction actually mean? (NB Khouri’s book was withdrawn from sale in Australia; in France, the publishers ordered the printers to prepare another edition.)
The second is the latest twist in the Children Overboard imbroglio, wherein it seems John Howard (aka Little Johnny Jackboot) may finally get some sort of comeuppance for lying to the Australian people in the cause of his re-election in 2001. Photographs of refugees in the water after their ship had sunk were said to be pictures of children thrown overboard from a different ship by other refugees as blackmail for getting entry into Australia. Howard and his cohorts milked this issue for every last vote, despite advice from both military and civil service personnel that the claims were false.
The third is the on-going story of the outback murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, whose body has never been found. Various people – about ten in all – have claimed to have seen the missing man since the murder. In a section of committal hearing transcript published in today’s NZ Herald a policeman asked a defence counsel if any of these people had also spotted Elvis. We have no reports of Elvis sightings, he replied.
The first is the Norma Khouri saga, which gets stranger and stranger. I heard her publisher at Transworld, an Englishman, say this morning on the radio: You know, if the book is non-fiction, everything within it has to be true. Whereas Norma herself was quoted in yesterday’s press saying that, although her book included inventions, she would never call it a fiction or a novel. There’s a huge area for speculation here. My question is: what does the ‘non’ in non-fiction actually mean? (NB Khouri’s book was withdrawn from sale in Australia; in France, the publishers ordered the printers to prepare another edition.)
The second is the latest twist in the Children Overboard imbroglio, wherein it seems John Howard (aka Little Johnny Jackboot) may finally get some sort of comeuppance for lying to the Australian people in the cause of his re-election in 2001. Photographs of refugees in the water after their ship had sunk were said to be pictures of children thrown overboard from a different ship by other refugees as blackmail for getting entry into Australia. Howard and his cohorts milked this issue for every last vote, despite advice from both military and civil service personnel that the claims were false.
The third is the on-going story of the outback murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, whose body has never been found. Various people – about ten in all – have claimed to have seen the missing man since the murder. In a section of committal hearing transcript published in today’s NZ Herald a policeman asked a defence counsel if any of these people had also spotted Elvis. We have no reports of Elvis sightings, he replied.
18.8.04
Cabo Mabo
Have been searching for other early references to Cape Mabo, so far without success. The word does not appear to be Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French. Dampier, who says the name was Dutch usage, was following charts laid down by Abel Tasman. Tasman made two voyages through the northern Australia-New Guinea area, one in 1642-3 (when he 'discovered' Aotearoa), which took him, on his way back from Tonga to Batavia, along the north coast of New Guinea, and another the following year, when, coming from the west to seek a way through to the Pacific, he assiduously mapped the coast of northern Australia from the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria as far as Port Hedland, without, however, sailing through Torres Strait or perhaps even realising the passage was there. If he originated the name Cape Mabo, it was likely that he did so on his first voyage, since it appears to be (or to have been) on the western extremity of the north coast of New Guinea. Andrew Sharp's 1968 edition of the Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman apparently includes a detailed concordance of Tasman's place names; but both copies are presently out of the library. Like this blog, my search is frozen or at least on hold.
14.8.04
Mabo
Was browsing last night through William Dampier's account of his 1699 visit to west Australia and parts north and east when I came across this sentence:
"We passed by many small islands, and among many dangerous shoals without any remarkable occurrence till the 4th of February, when we got within three leagues of the north-west cape of New Guinea, called by the Dutch Cape Mabo."
Mabo in Australia has a significance equal to that of Waitangi in Aotearoa; it was a case pursued through the courts by one Eddie Mabo, a Murray Islander from Torres Strait, for ten years which finally saw the overthrow, in 1992, of the British doctrine of terra nullius, which alleged the whole country to be empty of civilized humans and therefore denying Aborigines land rights.
What kind of word is Mabo, I wonder? Surely not Dutch: is it then one they picked up from local usage? Eddie Mabo grew up as Eddie Sambo, but took the name of his Uncle and Aunt who adopted him during his adolesence. But the word ... where does the word come from?
"We passed by many small islands, and among many dangerous shoals without any remarkable occurrence till the 4th of February, when we got within three leagues of the north-west cape of New Guinea, called by the Dutch Cape Mabo."
Mabo in Australia has a significance equal to that of Waitangi in Aotearoa; it was a case pursued through the courts by one Eddie Mabo, a Murray Islander from Torres Strait, for ten years which finally saw the overthrow, in 1992, of the British doctrine of terra nullius, which alleged the whole country to be empty of civilized humans and therefore denying Aborigines land rights.
What kind of word is Mabo, I wonder? Surely not Dutch: is it then one they picked up from local usage? Eddie Mabo grew up as Eddie Sambo, but took the name of his Uncle and Aunt who adopted him during his adolesence. But the word ... where does the word come from?
13.8.04
friday 13th
something weird going on here - have recovered my blog but find that all my links are in limbo, frozen in the state of my last visit to whichever one it was ... some hoodoooooo
What's going on?
My latest post refuses to appear on the main screen ... but it's up there somewhere. Will see if this one makes it ... how distracting!!
12.8.04
A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident.
W.N.P. Barbellion
I’ve always felt a special relationship with the Tangiwai disaster, merely because it happened not far from where we lived. We knew people who died. My father went out to see what he could do to help – he was waiting at the station for a family friend, Bruce Tabb, to arrive from Auckland on the south bound train and heard the news there. When he got to Tangiwai, he found the road bridge had gone down as well and that all those who needed helped were on the far bank of the river. His contribution was to drive a local doctor, Doctor Jordan by name, right around Ruapehu via National Park and the Desert Road to Waiouru and thence to Tangiwai, a journey of some fifty miles in the middle of the night. I often wonder what he did then, but have no way of knowing now. I think I must have forgotten to ask him. I still feel I ‘own’ the disaster, but in fact it had nothing to do with me. I was not even two years old at the time.
W.N.P. Barbellion
I’ve always felt a special relationship with the Tangiwai disaster, merely because it happened not far from where we lived. We knew people who died. My father went out to see what he could do to help – he was waiting at the station for a family friend, Bruce Tabb, to arrive from Auckland on the south bound train and heard the news there. When he got to Tangiwai, he found the road bridge had gone down as well and that all those who needed helped were on the far bank of the river. His contribution was to drive a local doctor, Doctor Jordan by name, right around Ruapehu via National Park and the Desert Road to Waiouru and thence to Tangiwai, a journey of some fifty miles in the middle of the night. I often wonder what he did then, but have no way of knowing now. I think I must have forgotten to ask him. I still feel I ‘own’ the disaster, but in fact it had nothing to do with me. I was not even two years old at the time.
11.8.04
Waitangi / Tangiwai
The stream is called Waitangi, my friend said. Later I asked him what the difference is between Waitangi and Tangiwai? He replied obliquely, writing in the subject line of the email: waitangitangiwai.
Waitangi and Tangiwai are both words with a certain resonance for Aotearoans; the first because that is the name of the place where the Treaty between Maori and the British Crown was signed in 1840, the second because of the railway crash at the place of that name on Christmas Eve, 1953.
The Treaty of Waitangi was honoured more in the breach than the observance until, in the late 1980s, as the government attempted to alter the legal status of various crown assets (privatisation), a court challenge established that the Treaty does in fact have force in law. The ramifications of this are still unfolding.
Tangiwai was one of Aotearoa’s biggest civil disasters. The water in the crater lake on Ruapehu heated up, melting ice caves on the south eastern rim, which collapsed, discharging tonnes of ice, boulders, silt and mud into the Whangaehu river.
The lahar carried away a pylon on the rail bridge at Tangiwai just as the northbound limited express was approaching. The rest of the bridge disintegrated as the train moved onto it. 151 people died that night. Some twenty bodies were never found; it was presumed they were carried out to sea, many miles south.
Wai = water; tangi = weeping; hence, water weeping / weeping water; though it may be the association here is less with grief than with the sound water makes as it runs over a stream or river bed. Or is the sound of water running over stones always the sound of people crying?
To tangi is to cry out, to mourn; a tangi is a funeral; whether it is Waitangi or Tangiwai, the mourning in the words, in the water, will not go away. Yet Tangiwai always seems to have the sadder sound.
Waitangi and Tangiwai are both words with a certain resonance for Aotearoans; the first because that is the name of the place where the Treaty between Maori and the British Crown was signed in 1840, the second because of the railway crash at the place of that name on Christmas Eve, 1953.
The Treaty of Waitangi was honoured more in the breach than the observance until, in the late 1980s, as the government attempted to alter the legal status of various crown assets (privatisation), a court challenge established that the Treaty does in fact have force in law. The ramifications of this are still unfolding.
Tangiwai was one of Aotearoa’s biggest civil disasters. The water in the crater lake on Ruapehu heated up, melting ice caves on the south eastern rim, which collapsed, discharging tonnes of ice, boulders, silt and mud into the Whangaehu river.
The lahar carried away a pylon on the rail bridge at Tangiwai just as the northbound limited express was approaching. The rest of the bridge disintegrated as the train moved onto it. 151 people died that night. Some twenty bodies were never found; it was presumed they were carried out to sea, many miles south.
Wai = water; tangi = weeping; hence, water weeping / weeping water; though it may be the association here is less with grief than with the sound water makes as it runs over a stream or river bed. Or is the sound of water running over stones always the sound of people crying?
To tangi is to cry out, to mourn; a tangi is a funeral; whether it is Waitangi or Tangiwai, the mourning in the words, in the water, will not go away. Yet Tangiwai always seems to have the sadder sound.
9.8.04
Utamaro at Waitangi
There’s one other part of our trip up the North Island I want to write about, while at the same time feeling nervous about doing so ... identities need to be protected here, there are equivocal events involved, perhaps the story is not mine to tell. But I will give a version of it anyway.
We were staying with friends in the Thermal District, so called – that part of New Zealand where the crust of the earth thins and hot mud, hot steam, hot water, geysers erupt or seep or bubble from underground. Our friends live in a small village at a bay on one of the lesser lakes. Near their place is a hot stream, where we went to bathe the night we arrived.
A house used to stand here, and the residents had partially walled the deepest pool; below that is a race of smooth rock with hot water running over it. You can slide down this on your back, on your front, facing forward, facing backward. Jesse did it again and again – at the end you just splash into yet another warm pool.
Further down is a pool with a bottom of hot mud which we scooped up and slapped on our bodies; further up, the water becomes so hot you can scarcely lie in it. This is where I went, crawling like a lizard in the shallow water, to soak, while Jesse played on the slide and my friend looked after Liamh.
The stream, which seemed empty when we got there – it was a cold, dark, starry night – was home to loving couples, sitting face to face, speaking softly and embracing just like the couples you see carved here and there in wood or jade. There was a sense of antiquity, lovers have been coming here at night like this for hundreds of years.
Afterwards we went back to the house, put the kids to bed and sat up talking and listening to music for a couple of hours. I was to sleep in a small guesthouse halfway up the hill at the back. A bare wooden hut with a bed, a candle, a bookshelf, an old school desk, a chair – and an Utamaro print on the wall.
This print, showing a kneeling woman combing the hair of another woman kneeling in front of her, had been stolen out of a touring exhibition of Japanese art from a New Zealand gallery some fifteen or twenty years before. It was taken for a particular reason. The thief had recently seen, in company with several other radical Maori, Kenji Mizoguchi's film Utamaro and his Five Women.
They had all felt a sense of identity with the artist, whose censorship by the Japanese authorities in the early 1800s seemed to them reminiscent of the ways Maori have been treated in this country; they felt that Utamaro was a kind of Maori, or perhaps that they, as Maori, were a kind of Japanese (the reasoning may be dubious, the power of the emotional identification cannot be doubted).
Therefore, when one of these saw, just a week later, the exhibition of Japanese art, he felt he had a right to take an Utamaro. He chose the one he wanted, removed it from its frame, threw the frame away, folded the print, concealed it under his clothes and left with it. Later he gave the print, which still has fold marks on it, away to an artist friend. She had just given it to my friend and only that week had it found its home, pinned on the wall of the whare manuhiri where I was sleeping.
I won’t try to describe it; I couldn’t do it justice. All I can really say is that its beauty and subtlety, especially of the colours, was of an order you simply do not see in reproductions in books. To sleep with it over the bed was to dream in another world – Ukiyo-e, the floating world, but equally, the hot pools at Waitangi where lovers murmured to each other.
When I woke at dawn next morning, everything outside was white with frost, there was ice on the small veranda of the hut and I could hear the children crying out from the house: Dad, dad, the grass is frozen!
We were staying with friends in the Thermal District, so called – that part of New Zealand where the crust of the earth thins and hot mud, hot steam, hot water, geysers erupt or seep or bubble from underground. Our friends live in a small village at a bay on one of the lesser lakes. Near their place is a hot stream, where we went to bathe the night we arrived.
A house used to stand here, and the residents had partially walled the deepest pool; below that is a race of smooth rock with hot water running over it. You can slide down this on your back, on your front, facing forward, facing backward. Jesse did it again and again – at the end you just splash into yet another warm pool.
Further down is a pool with a bottom of hot mud which we scooped up and slapped on our bodies; further up, the water becomes so hot you can scarcely lie in it. This is where I went, crawling like a lizard in the shallow water, to soak, while Jesse played on the slide and my friend looked after Liamh.
The stream, which seemed empty when we got there – it was a cold, dark, starry night – was home to loving couples, sitting face to face, speaking softly and embracing just like the couples you see carved here and there in wood or jade. There was a sense of antiquity, lovers have been coming here at night like this for hundreds of years.
Afterwards we went back to the house, put the kids to bed and sat up talking and listening to music for a couple of hours. I was to sleep in a small guesthouse halfway up the hill at the back. A bare wooden hut with a bed, a candle, a bookshelf, an old school desk, a chair – and an Utamaro print on the wall.
This print, showing a kneeling woman combing the hair of another woman kneeling in front of her, had been stolen out of a touring exhibition of Japanese art from a New Zealand gallery some fifteen or twenty years before. It was taken for a particular reason. The thief had recently seen, in company with several other radical Maori, Kenji Mizoguchi's film Utamaro and his Five Women.
They had all felt a sense of identity with the artist, whose censorship by the Japanese authorities in the early 1800s seemed to them reminiscent of the ways Maori have been treated in this country; they felt that Utamaro was a kind of Maori, or perhaps that they, as Maori, were a kind of Japanese (the reasoning may be dubious, the power of the emotional identification cannot be doubted).
Therefore, when one of these saw, just a week later, the exhibition of Japanese art, he felt he had a right to take an Utamaro. He chose the one he wanted, removed it from its frame, threw the frame away, folded the print, concealed it under his clothes and left with it. Later he gave the print, which still has fold marks on it, away to an artist friend. She had just given it to my friend and only that week had it found its home, pinned on the wall of the whare manuhiri where I was sleeping.
I won’t try to describe it; I couldn’t do it justice. All I can really say is that its beauty and subtlety, especially of the colours, was of an order you simply do not see in reproductions in books. To sleep with it over the bed was to dream in another world – Ukiyo-e, the floating world, but equally, the hot pools at Waitangi where lovers murmured to each other.
When I woke at dawn next morning, everything outside was white with frost, there was ice on the small veranda of the hut and I could hear the children crying out from the house: Dad, dad, the grass is frozen!
6.8.04
Under the House
Later on our trip we visited my Uncle Brian and Auntie Shirley in Hamilton. I had not seen Brian since my father’s funeral in 1990, and Shirley for even longer. She found the cartoon channel for the kids to watch while we sat in the sunroom having a pre-lunch drink. It was a Saturday. Fine. Hot inside, but cool out.
Shirley told me a story from the late 1950s or early 1960s. They were driving down to Wanganui, and decided, on the spur of the moment, to drop in to visit us in Burns Street, Ohakune. They had not telephoned, telegrammed or otherwise said they were coming.
Our house had a big high hedge in front of it, an enormous beech tree, a beautiful overgrown garden, with fruit trees and vegetables out the back, the river running behind. I can see Brian and Shirley going through the gate, past the lilac and the snowball on the front lawn, down the side of the house where pansies and sweet william grew, and round the back.
There was no-one home. We had all gone away for our summer holiday. The washing machine was full of dirty water and half-washed clothes, the vacuum cleaner was sitting in the hallway, still plugged in, the back door was wide open and on the mat was the mummified body of a cat.
Shirley said that, afterwards, when she talked to my parents, she found out what had happened. Everyone was in the car, waiting to go, when they noticed I was missing. They called. And called. And then I crawled out from under the house with – the dead cat. I was a young boy, less than ten years old.
I can picture the scene. My father has packed all the camping gear into the trailer and is standing out by the car smoking, impatient to get going. My mother is part way through any number of mundane household tasks, also getting us kids ready but, beyond that, fatally distracted by some preoccupation of her own, some imaginative construction of events probably yet – or never – to happen. My sisters, all five of them, are somehow arranged in the car: three in the back and the two little ones in the front, perhaps. And I am under the house.
Though I have no memory of this event, I recognise myself in it. That fascination with dark places, the wonderful discovery of the mummy, the joy I would have felt in showing the others ... as I write I seem to touch again the fine brown dirt under my hands, feel the knobbly feeling of the floor beams and boards just above my backbone, smell the cobwebby, dry, dusty odour of under-the-house ... while ahead of me, just out of reach, there’s something lying, some marvel ...
Shirley told me a story from the late 1950s or early 1960s. They were driving down to Wanganui, and decided, on the spur of the moment, to drop in to visit us in Burns Street, Ohakune. They had not telephoned, telegrammed or otherwise said they were coming.
Our house had a big high hedge in front of it, an enormous beech tree, a beautiful overgrown garden, with fruit trees and vegetables out the back, the river running behind. I can see Brian and Shirley going through the gate, past the lilac and the snowball on the front lawn, down the side of the house where pansies and sweet william grew, and round the back.
There was no-one home. We had all gone away for our summer holiday. The washing machine was full of dirty water and half-washed clothes, the vacuum cleaner was sitting in the hallway, still plugged in, the back door was wide open and on the mat was the mummified body of a cat.
Shirley said that, afterwards, when she talked to my parents, she found out what had happened. Everyone was in the car, waiting to go, when they noticed I was missing. They called. And called. And then I crawled out from under the house with – the dead cat. I was a young boy, less than ten years old.
I can picture the scene. My father has packed all the camping gear into the trailer and is standing out by the car smoking, impatient to get going. My mother is part way through any number of mundane household tasks, also getting us kids ready but, beyond that, fatally distracted by some preoccupation of her own, some imaginative construction of events probably yet – or never – to happen. My sisters, all five of them, are somehow arranged in the car: three in the back and the two little ones in the front, perhaps. And I am under the house.
Though I have no memory of this event, I recognise myself in it. That fascination with dark places, the wonderful discovery of the mummy, the joy I would have felt in showing the others ... as I write I seem to touch again the fine brown dirt under my hands, feel the knobbly feeling of the floor beams and boards just above my backbone, smell the cobwebby, dry, dusty odour of under-the-house ... while ahead of me, just out of reach, there’s something lying, some marvel ...
4.8.04
Night in Ohakune
Ohakune is the town where I was born and grew up. It’s a small mountain village. Elevation 2000 feet, under a volcano. I go back there every chance I get. This time I came up from the south with my two sons, Jesse aged 7, Liamh aged 4. We arrived about 3.30 on a clear July afternoon and drove straight up Ruapehu. It had snowed on the weekend, the air was brisk and cold, the mountain a dazzled white jewel against the blue sky. We threw snowballs at each other and made a snow dwarf, with no arms and one eye, on a small hill where the drifts were knee-deep; then got back in the car with red chafed hands and sodden feet.
That night, after Liamh had gone to sleep, Jesse asked if we could go for a walk. We stepped out the door and heard music coming from the Waimarino Brass Band hall opposite the Mountain View Motel – a little old white wooden weatherboard building with a red peaked roof and frosted windows which have lettering and notes of music in the glass. I had never heard music coming from there before. This was free-form, unclassifiable, but brass – certainly brass.
As soon as we started walking towards the hall, the music stopped. When we reached the window, very quietly, I lifted Jesse - in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers - up so we could look inside. In the centre of the hall, surrounded by a clutter of chairs and music stands, three people sat close together facing one another. Two men and a woman, young middle-aged, wearing non-descript winter clothes. The men held a trumpet and a trombone, respectively; the woman a French horn. They were leaning forward, deep in thought, as if communicating telepathically. I put Jesse down and we tiptoed away.
We went the other way and, on the corner of Burns Street and the Tohunga Road, in a small grassy gully I’d never noticed before, Jesse pointed out a standing stone. This looked like it had been placed there a long time ago, like the kind of stone that might have a spiral carved onto it, like a mauri stone. We looked at it shining in the rainy night under the light of five tall streetlamps. We could hear the Mangawhero beyond, and the other river behind us. (Ohakune stands at the confluence of the Mangawhero and Mangateitei streams.)
We went back to check that Liamh was alright and then out again, this time to cross the road and hang over the white rail on the banks of the Mangateitei, running below us through a stand of remnant beech forest, black water shifting beneath black trees. While we were there the music started up again. It was indescribably beautiful, an improvisation around a theme, structured like a raga, full of invention, but, in its feeling, shy, wild, and yet somehow intimate as well.
They played for about twenty minutes without stopping; we listened outside until we got too cold, then went back to the motel and listened from there. Jesse, who often has trouble getting to sleep, dropped off while they were still playing. It was about half past nine on a Tuesday night. Slight rain drifted past the streetlamps. A big semi trailer with the word LILBURN on its side passed on the road, going north. Then another that said COMMERCIAL. For the moment, I was home again.
That night, after Liamh had gone to sleep, Jesse asked if we could go for a walk. We stepped out the door and heard music coming from the Waimarino Brass Band hall opposite the Mountain View Motel – a little old white wooden weatherboard building with a red peaked roof and frosted windows which have lettering and notes of music in the glass. I had never heard music coming from there before. This was free-form, unclassifiable, but brass – certainly brass.
As soon as we started walking towards the hall, the music stopped. When we reached the window, very quietly, I lifted Jesse - in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers - up so we could look inside. In the centre of the hall, surrounded by a clutter of chairs and music stands, three people sat close together facing one another. Two men and a woman, young middle-aged, wearing non-descript winter clothes. The men held a trumpet and a trombone, respectively; the woman a French horn. They were leaning forward, deep in thought, as if communicating telepathically. I put Jesse down and we tiptoed away.
We went the other way and, on the corner of Burns Street and the Tohunga Road, in a small grassy gully I’d never noticed before, Jesse pointed out a standing stone. This looked like it had been placed there a long time ago, like the kind of stone that might have a spiral carved onto it, like a mauri stone. We looked at it shining in the rainy night under the light of five tall streetlamps. We could hear the Mangawhero beyond, and the other river behind us. (Ohakune stands at the confluence of the Mangawhero and Mangateitei streams.)
We went back to check that Liamh was alright and then out again, this time to cross the road and hang over the white rail on the banks of the Mangateitei, running below us through a stand of remnant beech forest, black water shifting beneath black trees. While we were there the music started up again. It was indescribably beautiful, an improvisation around a theme, structured like a raga, full of invention, but, in its feeling, shy, wild, and yet somehow intimate as well.
They played for about twenty minutes without stopping; we listened outside until we got too cold, then went back to the motel and listened from there. Jesse, who often has trouble getting to sleep, dropped off while they were still playing. It was about half past nine on a Tuesday night. Slight rain drifted past the streetlamps. A big semi trailer with the word LILBURN on its side passed on the road, going north. Then another that said COMMERCIAL. For the moment, I was home again.
2.8.04
What I meant to say to the novel-writing class
Prose walks, poetry dances – Paul Valery
This was probably meant to be disparaging to prose but perhaps can be seen another way: when we dance, we usually dance, if not on the spot, then in a restricted space - unless we are dancing in the street.
But when we walk, we walk with purpose, we are going somewhere; even when we’re just going for a walk, we still have some kind of end in mind, some point where we will turn around to come back.
What is it about a walk? You have a destination, but unless you’ve been there before, you don’t know what it looks like and, even if you have, you still don’t know what you will encounter along the way.
A successful walk requires stamina, persistence, a goal, and also, if you are going to write about it, the ability to observe whatever happens along the way. This observation must also be directed at the self, even if you walk – or write – to forget yourself.
Afterwards you come back: that is the process of revision, of preparing for publication, the processes of publication itself.
Fiction writing is a journey in search of a world, which the reader can then enter. The best fiction is that which, in your recall, you think of as real, a place you have actually been, people you got to know, a story that is true.
How does fiction differ from, say, memoir? Memoir fulfils the primary criterion, it makes a world, even if that world is one of so-called facts.
What is the place of invention in memoir-writing? That is like asking what is the place of memory in writing. Memory is itself a kind of fiction, one we take to be real. Invention begins where memory fails.
Which leads to the question of voice. The voice of the author is the truest guide to the fiction, if fiction it be, just as it is to so-called non-fiction, at least as the term is used to describe memoir.
You must make a world and, however private that world is, it must be one others can enter, live in for a while, and then leave with memories of where they have been: reading, too, is a walk, but a walk with a guide.
This was probably meant to be disparaging to prose but perhaps can be seen another way: when we dance, we usually dance, if not on the spot, then in a restricted space - unless we are dancing in the street.
But when we walk, we walk with purpose, we are going somewhere; even when we’re just going for a walk, we still have some kind of end in mind, some point where we will turn around to come back.
What is it about a walk? You have a destination, but unless you’ve been there before, you don’t know what it looks like and, even if you have, you still don’t know what you will encounter along the way.
A successful walk requires stamina, persistence, a goal, and also, if you are going to write about it, the ability to observe whatever happens along the way. This observation must also be directed at the self, even if you walk – or write – to forget yourself.
Afterwards you come back: that is the process of revision, of preparing for publication, the processes of publication itself.
Fiction writing is a journey in search of a world, which the reader can then enter. The best fiction is that which, in your recall, you think of as real, a place you have actually been, people you got to know, a story that is true.
How does fiction differ from, say, memoir? Memoir fulfils the primary criterion, it makes a world, even if that world is one of so-called facts.
What is the place of invention in memoir-writing? That is like asking what is the place of memory in writing. Memory is itself a kind of fiction, one we take to be real. Invention begins where memory fails.
Which leads to the question of voice. The voice of the author is the truest guide to the fiction, if fiction it be, just as it is to so-called non-fiction, at least as the term is used to describe memoir.
You must make a world and, however private that world is, it must be one others can enter, live in for a while, and then leave with memories of where they have been: reading, too, is a walk, but a walk with a guide.
28.7.04
Barbellion’s Journal
One of the fascinating things about Barbellion’s Journal is that it is contemporary with two works with which it has affinities, but which Barbellion is unlikely to have known: Rilke’s Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge and Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Rilke’s book was published in 1907, when Barbellion had already begun his Journal; Pessoa’s began during the 1914-18 war but was then laid aside and not revived until the late 1920s. However, both of these other books are more displaced towards fiction and, perhaps for this reason, less urgent that Barbellion’s.
The book Barbellion related most closely to his own was I Am the Most Interesting Book of All by Ukrainian writer and artist Maria Bashkirtseff, about whom he wrote: Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! How we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate — ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heartrending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1884. I was born in 1889.
Another fascination with Barbellion is the way in which his Journal resembles a weblog, nearly a hundred years before the form was invented. It is this aspect of his book which makes it seem so contemporary because, unlike many diarists, he is writing for a contemporary audience, for now, since he knew there was no sense in addressing himself to posterity.
I had to break off my reading of his Journal the other night, first because of the weirdness of his entry on the Three Johns (see below) but secondly, and more particularly, because of what he has to say about himself in the next entry but one ... In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential. I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the poppy in many ways ... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my flower! I am the poppy!!
This was written in May, 1911, before the Great War, before Flanders, long before the poppy became the symbol of the dead in that war. It is – not only in this entry, but throughout the book – as if the war is taking place in Barbellion’s own body, not his body considered as metaphor, but in his actual flesh and blood; while his mind and soul rage against it.
from: The Journal of a Disappointed Man
There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit, they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an enthusiast.
W. N. P. Barbellion, 30th April, 1911
W. N. P. Barbellion, 30th April, 1911
27.7.04
Blind Willie McTell
This morning I woke from what seemed like a very long dream in which I was trying to prove to two friends that Blind Willie McTell is the greatest song Bob Dylan has written. I told them that, as I couldn’t sing well enough, I would have to show them by reciting the words aloud. Then I found that I could not remember them all – even though I memorised the lyrics some years ago, I could only get verses one, two, and five, with none of three and only fragments of four. I went over and over and over it, tediously, in the dream, until I was so bored and frustrated I woke up. Only to find that, waking, I could remember no more than I had in my dream. It wasn’t until I got in here and could log on to the relevant web site that I could get the rest. So. All day, in and out of the other things I do, I’ve been singing:
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem ... "
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem ... "
W. N. P. Barbellion
The name—the pseudonym—comes, in the case of the surname, from that of the proprietor of a chain of sweetshops with branches in South Kensington, Bond Street and elsewhere; the initials stand for the world’s three greatest failures—Wilhelm, Nero and Pilate. The announcement of the author's death at the close of The Journal of a Disappointed Man is premature, a joke. The fact is, he said later, no man dare remain alive after writing such a book. The Journal went through three impressions in six months. It was both praised and maligned. Some people thought it a ficcione written by H. G. Wells. During the middle part of 1919 Barbellion corrected the proofs of his second book, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, which he did not live to see published. W. N. P. Barbellion died properly on the 22nd October 1919.
26.7.04
An Unintended Consequence
I have been getting phone calls from a man called Peter Williams, an Anglo-Indian, as he calls himself, possibly of South African origin. His mission is to eradicate drug use in New Zealand and, to this end, he wishes me to write a book which will help accomplish this and, incidentally, make me a great deal of money. I told him that my already-published books do not make any secret of my own past and present drug use, but this seemed to make him, if possible, more enthusiastic—I could save myself while at the same time saving the country.
He has worked out an elaborate plan to organise the entire populace into hundreds which would then elect representatives to a larger council, which would then elect representatives ... and so on, a vast hierarchy based around threes, thirty-threes, ninety-nines. His last call, which I received as voice mail, really scared me. He said he had dobbed in a number of drug-users who are now sitting in gaol on remand and perhaps I could begin my research by interviewing these unfortunates. I did not reply, and have not heard from him since.
One interesting thing he said is that serious drug-importing into New Zealand was begun by a man called Frederick E Cumming-Bruce, an Englishman who was at Cambridge in the 1930s with Philby, Burgess, McLean and Blunt. Cumming-Bruce is said to have been posted to Wellington as a diplomat. When he was subsequently sent to India, he is alleged to have set up the networks for importing into New Zealand. Importing what? Williams does not say.
I googled the name and came up with a few hits: there was a Cumming-Bruce advising Harold Wilson on Britain’s Gibraltar policy at the time in the mid 1960s when Wilson and Ian Smith of Rhodesia were about to meet on board HMS Tiger at the Rock; the same, or another, is cited in a footnote regarding Botswana in an academic paper written by an Australia historian; another is quoted in a long judgment by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority granting refugee status to two Malaysians in Auckland in the mid 1990s.
But none of these is Frederick E. There is however—or was—a man called Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English naturalist who wrote under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion. His The Journal of a Disappointed Man was published posthumously in London in 1919, with an introduction by H. G. Wells. Barbellion died on the last day of 1917, the victim of a creeping paralysis whose inexorable progress he documents through the years of the Great War. He was 28 years old.
It is a beautiful book. A sample, his entry for February 7th, 1917:
The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further round the horizon was another moon—the full moon itself—yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all round the horizon.
In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides—pat-pat-pat—wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns the people of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?
He has worked out an elaborate plan to organise the entire populace into hundreds which would then elect representatives to a larger council, which would then elect representatives ... and so on, a vast hierarchy based around threes, thirty-threes, ninety-nines. His last call, which I received as voice mail, really scared me. He said he had dobbed in a number of drug-users who are now sitting in gaol on remand and perhaps I could begin my research by interviewing these unfortunates. I did not reply, and have not heard from him since.
One interesting thing he said is that serious drug-importing into New Zealand was begun by a man called Frederick E Cumming-Bruce, an Englishman who was at Cambridge in the 1930s with Philby, Burgess, McLean and Blunt. Cumming-Bruce is said to have been posted to Wellington as a diplomat. When he was subsequently sent to India, he is alleged to have set up the networks for importing into New Zealand. Importing what? Williams does not say.
I googled the name and came up with a few hits: there was a Cumming-Bruce advising Harold Wilson on Britain’s Gibraltar policy at the time in the mid 1960s when Wilson and Ian Smith of Rhodesia were about to meet on board HMS Tiger at the Rock; the same, or another, is cited in a footnote regarding Botswana in an academic paper written by an Australia historian; another is quoted in a long judgment by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority granting refugee status to two Malaysians in Auckland in the mid 1990s.
But none of these is Frederick E. There is however—or was—a man called Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English naturalist who wrote under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion. His The Journal of a Disappointed Man was published posthumously in London in 1919, with an introduction by H. G. Wells. Barbellion died on the last day of 1917, the victim of a creeping paralysis whose inexorable progress he documents through the years of the Great War. He was 28 years old.
It is a beautiful book. A sample, his entry for February 7th, 1917:
Chinese Lanterns
The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further round the horizon was another moon—the full moon itself—yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all round the horizon.
In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides—pat-pat-pat—wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns the people of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?
25.7.04
Another Darlinghurst Memory
I was walking that road which runs along the long west wall of the old Darlinghurst gaol, going towards Oxford Street. It was a fine afternoon, blue sky and the sandstone of the prison walls drinking the sun, when I entered one of those still and empty moments you get sometimes even in big cities. Nobody around, a hush in the traffic noise, even my footsteps faded. I looked ahead and saw two people coming toward me, a man and a girl. At first I thought it was a hippie guy with one of those fantastical kids hippies used to have, but as they came closer they looked stranger and stranger, he with his leather waistcoat, Ned Kelly hat and nineteenth century boots, she in her dress of motley and her bare feet. She was a child-woman, a sprite, and he was some kind of desperado, probably with a knife in his boot. By the time we drew abreast of each other my heart was hammering and I couldn’t look at them, though I could feel their eyes glinting at me. I let them get at least ten paces past before turning around to look after them, but – and I knew this would be as I turned – there was nobody there. Nobody in the whole wide street, nobody on the footpath, nobody crossing to the other side. They had been there but now they were gone. And there was nowhere they could have gone except into thin air. I kept on walking, no longer afraid, past the gates of that gaol, now an art school, and on into the 1990s.
22.7.04
The Last Time I Saw Adam
The last time I saw Adam, years ago today, was in Hyde Park; at least I think it was him coming slowly toward me down one of the long diagonals, pushing a shopping trolley full of junk. His head was down, his hair was completely grey, and he seemed many years older. I paused. He did not look up. I passed on, not wanting to disturb him on the long shamble graveward. I have since heard it said that once those men and women of the street begin to carry things, it is rare for them to speak to anyone much any more.
21.7.04
The Last Time I Saw Jimmy
Jimmy’s eyes bulged like Marty Feldman’s; perhaps he had some kind of thyroid condition. The skin of his face was pitted and worn, and there were enormous blackheads in his nose. He usually wore an old checked jacket, a grey shirt, and nondescript trousers held up with string; a spotted handkerchief knotted round his neck; and socks and roman sandals on his feet.
I don’t know if Jimmy was his real name. I called him that because Iris did. Iris was the Cypriot woman who ran the corner store in Womerah Street, a blonde with enormous dark eyes which filled with tears at the least provocation. That’s where I first met him - he used to hang around the steps of the shop, chatting to Iris. She liked his company I think, and maybe used to dispense a little charity in his direction as well, although there were other times when she would lose patience and chase him away.
Jimmy never offered any information about himself, and if you asked him a personal question was liable to change abruptly out of his engaging, companionable self into someone both reticent and deeply ashamed; he might even, head down, wounded and sorrowing, turn and walk away. He was not an alcoholic or even a drinker; he would sometimes ask for cigarettes, but never money; and he remains the only street person who ever gave money back to me, as he did one lucky day by the El Alamein fountain, taking a two dollar coin from one of his pockets and pressing it upon me.
I remember him talking about Ford motorcars that day, and this was also the occasion when he delivered a particularly inspired rave, most of which I have unfortunately forgotten, apart from one blazing image, which was that he could see the iridescence of his thoughts turning in the hubs of the wheels of cars passing in the street.
The last time I saw Jimmy was beneath the Coca Cola sign that stands at the top of William Street at the very place where Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road intersect to make Kings Cross. He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase such as children used to take with them to school, painted all over with cloudy yellow dots. We had not met for a while, and greeted each other with pleasure: Gidday Dutchie! Hi Jimmy!
At that his face clouded in the familiar sorrowful way; but instead of turning and walking away, he held up one finger to me, like a mime, then ceremoniously took the case and placed it carefully upright against the wall of the building before which we stood. Next, drawing himself up to his full height, with his feet in second position, standing beside his suitcase and indicating it with a graceful theatrical gesture of his hands, he said: My name is Adam.
I don’t know if Jimmy was his real name. I called him that because Iris did. Iris was the Cypriot woman who ran the corner store in Womerah Street, a blonde with enormous dark eyes which filled with tears at the least provocation. That’s where I first met him - he used to hang around the steps of the shop, chatting to Iris. She liked his company I think, and maybe used to dispense a little charity in his direction as well, although there were other times when she would lose patience and chase him away.
Jimmy never offered any information about himself, and if you asked him a personal question was liable to change abruptly out of his engaging, companionable self into someone both reticent and deeply ashamed; he might even, head down, wounded and sorrowing, turn and walk away. He was not an alcoholic or even a drinker; he would sometimes ask for cigarettes, but never money; and he remains the only street person who ever gave money back to me, as he did one lucky day by the El Alamein fountain, taking a two dollar coin from one of his pockets and pressing it upon me.
I remember him talking about Ford motorcars that day, and this was also the occasion when he delivered a particularly inspired rave, most of which I have unfortunately forgotten, apart from one blazing image, which was that he could see the iridescence of his thoughts turning in the hubs of the wheels of cars passing in the street.
The last time I saw Jimmy was beneath the Coca Cola sign that stands at the top of William Street at the very place where Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road intersect to make Kings Cross. He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase such as children used to take with them to school, painted all over with cloudy yellow dots. We had not met for a while, and greeted each other with pleasure: Gidday Dutchie! Hi Jimmy!
At that his face clouded in the familiar sorrowful way; but instead of turning and walking away, he held up one finger to me, like a mime, then ceremoniously took the case and placed it carefully upright against the wall of the building before which we stood. Next, drawing himself up to his full height, with his feet in second position, standing beside his suitcase and indicating it with a graceful theatrical gesture of his hands, he said: My name is Adam.
19.7.04
Jimmy: a memory
Jimmy was a man of indeterminate age and culture, with long flowing grey hair, dark, dirty brown skin, brown eyes, broken teeth, a skinny body which gave off the rank odour of one who sleeps under bridges, on park benches or in doorways, and spends his days trawling the streets of the city. A clochard, the French would say and like one of Beckett's immortal pair, he had a line in existential talk which brought the brevity of time and the darkness of space into annihilating collision with the quotidian. Often, too, he bore marks of a recent beating on his face or body, but if I attempted to find out who was responsible, he would only ever identify his tormentors as those big people.
One day when I was in town I saw him on Liverpool Street and stopped to ask him how he was. He looked away into the distance and in his soft voice said: Legally dead, mate. Yeah, they've just about abolished me. Jimmy's particular obsession was with the chemistry of the body, which he investigated exhaustively for clues to his errant state of mind. I used to see him sometimes in the Kings Cross library reading medical texts, or flicking through periodicals, scanning the mysterious symbols of the psycho-biologists. This day he was inquiring into the scientific status of the resurrection of Christ. How did he get himself to rise up? Jimmy wanted to know. Something magnetic in the blood? What do you think? Or is it just a story they made up to keep us guessing?
What could I say? I felt my own mind tipping as I entertained the possible mechanism of a 2000 year old confidence trick. Yeah, I said, probably. Jimmy nodded, looking away down the street into the warp of Einsteinian space-time. Probably the iron in the blood was magnetised, he said, and that's how they did it. Where you going, Dutchie? (Jimmy, for no reason I know, always called me by this name. The closest he ever came to an explanation was the day he told me: You know, Dutchie, you're half Holland, half New Guinea, and half New Zealand; that's why you're more than a hundred percent!)
I wasn’t going anywhere except to the Green Park, so we walked a couple of blocks down the road together, making desultory conversation. Outside the fashionable Robin Gibson Art Gallery he stopped suddenly and began rooting around at the base of an iron fence bordering the palm garden until he came up with an audio cassette, battered, unlabelled, unplayable, and spent some time turning it over in his hands, wondering what was on it, before explaining he didn't have a cassette player anyway and hiding it again in a chink in the sandstone wall outside the Church of Christ, Scientist.
At the corner where we parted, I felt in my pocket for a coin and came up with a dollar. Jimmy was scrupulous where money was concerned. He always refused the first time I offered, and paid me back whenever he could. I urged the gold piece onto him a second time and he took it. Thanks, Dutchie, he said. I can buy four smokes with this. See you ...
He went on and I turned in to the pub, to that anonymous corner table where I sat and drank until I had no more money left to spend. It seemed incredible that the glittering Darlinghurst life I had once led, in and out of beautifully lit rooms, serenely appointed and full of the latest music, the latest clothes, the latest talk, had disappeared like some childlike vision creeping out of view, leaving me companionable only with myself and dossers like Jimmy. I could not understand how it was I had lost the key to that party world, nor could I quite believe that it continued, presumably, to exist in ghostly parallel to the derelict streets of the uninvited.
Driving north on the freeway later, drunk and more or less anaesthetised against the cold, I watched my breath steam inside the car as if the freezing element without had colonised the interior. The engine wheezed like an emphysemic because the water pump was going and it was a toss up, as always, whether the part or the journey lasted longer. I was so hungry I could feel the sides of my stomach flap sourly together. Outside, the eucalypt and sandstone rolled away glimmering under a boneyard moon, seeming the domain of a people who have become, like Jimmy, shadows, legally dead yet still existent, living their spectral lives in a wilderness of speaking rocks, under sighing trees, beneath the incessant silver of the stars.
One day when I was in town I saw him on Liverpool Street and stopped to ask him how he was. He looked away into the distance and in his soft voice said: Legally dead, mate. Yeah, they've just about abolished me. Jimmy's particular obsession was with the chemistry of the body, which he investigated exhaustively for clues to his errant state of mind. I used to see him sometimes in the Kings Cross library reading medical texts, or flicking through periodicals, scanning the mysterious symbols of the psycho-biologists. This day he was inquiring into the scientific status of the resurrection of Christ. How did he get himself to rise up? Jimmy wanted to know. Something magnetic in the blood? What do you think? Or is it just a story they made up to keep us guessing?
What could I say? I felt my own mind tipping as I entertained the possible mechanism of a 2000 year old confidence trick. Yeah, I said, probably. Jimmy nodded, looking away down the street into the warp of Einsteinian space-time. Probably the iron in the blood was magnetised, he said, and that's how they did it. Where you going, Dutchie? (Jimmy, for no reason I know, always called me by this name. The closest he ever came to an explanation was the day he told me: You know, Dutchie, you're half Holland, half New Guinea, and half New Zealand; that's why you're more than a hundred percent!)
I wasn’t going anywhere except to the Green Park, so we walked a couple of blocks down the road together, making desultory conversation. Outside the fashionable Robin Gibson Art Gallery he stopped suddenly and began rooting around at the base of an iron fence bordering the palm garden until he came up with an audio cassette, battered, unlabelled, unplayable, and spent some time turning it over in his hands, wondering what was on it, before explaining he didn't have a cassette player anyway and hiding it again in a chink in the sandstone wall outside the Church of Christ, Scientist.
At the corner where we parted, I felt in my pocket for a coin and came up with a dollar. Jimmy was scrupulous where money was concerned. He always refused the first time I offered, and paid me back whenever he could. I urged the gold piece onto him a second time and he took it. Thanks, Dutchie, he said. I can buy four smokes with this. See you ...
He went on and I turned in to the pub, to that anonymous corner table where I sat and drank until I had no more money left to spend. It seemed incredible that the glittering Darlinghurst life I had once led, in and out of beautifully lit rooms, serenely appointed and full of the latest music, the latest clothes, the latest talk, had disappeared like some childlike vision creeping out of view, leaving me companionable only with myself and dossers like Jimmy. I could not understand how it was I had lost the key to that party world, nor could I quite believe that it continued, presumably, to exist in ghostly parallel to the derelict streets of the uninvited.
Driving north on the freeway later, drunk and more or less anaesthetised against the cold, I watched my breath steam inside the car as if the freezing element without had colonised the interior. The engine wheezed like an emphysemic because the water pump was going and it was a toss up, as always, whether the part or the journey lasted longer. I was so hungry I could feel the sides of my stomach flap sourly together. Outside, the eucalypt and sandstone rolled away glimmering under a boneyard moon, seeming the domain of a people who have become, like Jimmy, shadows, legally dead yet still existent, living their spectral lives in a wilderness of speaking rocks, under sighing trees, beneath the incessant silver of the stars.
18.7.04
The Fortunate River
There is an infinity of other islands. There is no reason to say more, only that all have gold and slaves and trade with one another, and the small ones do this in the larger ones that have been mentioned, and the larger ones trade with Malacca, and Malacca with them, spending and bartering the merchandise. Most of these islands have gold, and they also have corsairs and robbers who live by that alone. The corsairs only sail in light paraos and therefore they do not attack junks. And the corsairs who are nearest to Pahang make in Pahang their trading ports, and those near the Moluccas and Banda trade in Bima and Sumbawa and Sapeh, and those near us hold a fair and trade in Aru and in Arcat, Rupat. They bring countless slaves, and therefore a large number of slaves are used in Malacca, because they all go there on account of the great trade it has, more than all the kingdoms and ports over here; and so it is called the fortunate river. There are certainly great sailings from here; no trading port as large as Malacca is known, nor any where they deal in such fine and highly-prized merchandise. Goods from all over the east are found here; goods from all over the west are sold here. There is no doubt that the affairs of Malacca are of great importance, and of much profit and great honour. It is a land [that] cannot depreciate, on account of its position, but must always grow. It is at the end of the monsoons, where you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Vol. 1, p. 228
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Vol. 1, p. 228
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