The Crying Place Read online

  Praise for The Crying Place

  ‘Lia Hills’ The Crying Place is a brave and devastating novel of grief, place and belonging. I was swept up in her voice and by her storytelling skills right from the opening page and I wasn’t released back into the world until I reached the end. Even then, the novel doesn’t let you go. Its grace, its compassion and its deep humanity make you see our country anew. This book is bracing and tough, kind and generous.’

  Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘The Crying Place is an impressive novel of friendship and the haunting contradictions at the base of Australian society.’

  Alex Miller

  LIA HILLS is a poet, novelist and translator. Her debut novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living, was released to critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Victorian, Queensland and Western Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards and the New Zealand Post Book Awards. It has been translated into several languages. Other works include her award-winning poetry collection the possibility of flight and her translation of Marie Darrieussecq’s acclaimed novel, Tom is Dead. She lives with her family in the hills outside Melbourne.

  By the same author

  The Beginner’s Guide to Living the possibility of flight

  The author claims no ownership over any Aboriginal cultural material referenced in the novel, including language. Every effort has been made to ensure that, at the time of publication, information in this book pertaining to Aboriginal cultural references is correct and permission has been sought where applicable. Please contact the publisher with any concerns.

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Lia Hills 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book, please contact the publishers at the address below.

  The publishers wish to acknowledge the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce material in this book:

  From Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood

  Copyright © John Harwood 2001

  First published by Halcyon Press 2001

  Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd.

  From Voss by Patrick White

  Copyright © Patrick White 1957

  Reprinted by kind permission.

  From Collected Poems by Judith Wright

  Copyright © Judith Wright

  Reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Australia.

  The lines of text from ‘One Land, One Law, One People’ by George Tinamin appear in Spirit Song: A Collection of Aboriginal Poetry (Omnibus Books: Norwood, South Australia, 1993).

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 371 0

  eISBN 978 1 92557 635 1

  Cover design: Romina Panetta

  Cover photographs: Australian Scenics/Getty Images (landscape), Patrick Ulrich (sky)

  For those who have lost their country.

  And for Patrick –

  dans le désert, l’amour trouve son espace.

  Nyangatja apu wiya, ngayuku tjamu.

  This is not a rock, it is my grandfather.

  George Tinamin, ‘One Land, One Law, One People’

  Last night a dog howled somewhere, A hungry ghost in need of sacrifice.

  Judith Wright, ‘River Bend’

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  TJUKURPA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  KULINI

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  ARA WANANI

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  TJUKURITJA

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  NGURA

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  ULANYI

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Half buried in the red sands of the Simpson Desert, they remained undisturbed for half a millennium, their resting place close to one of the songlines for the Two Boys, whose movements across the desert created life-sustaining wells. Some credit their discovery to Wangkangurru elders, who used old tales they’d heard as kids to locate them among the shifting sands. Others claim it was a stockman who, coming across them in his journeying, mistook them for dinosaur eggs and souvenired a couple. The desert is a place constructed of stories, every one of them true; stories that leave their traces as they travel across country – tjukurpa in the Pitjantjatjara language, the same as the word for birthmark.

  White and as porous as beached coral, what lay exposed on that dune was not the petrified remains of eggs, but something fashioned by human hands. Moulded from gypsum – collected either from a fabled quarry to the north or the salt-rich shores of Lake Eyre to the south – the recipe for their making was as old as grief itself. First, the gypsum was heated on a fire and reduced to a powder, then it was combined with precious water to form a milky paste: white, the traditional colour of the dead. Next, the hair was shaved off with a shell or chiselled stone till the skin was completely exposed, a net of spun grass or emu sinew placed over the bare scalp, a raw lattice. Finally, the paste was applied, layer upon layer, until a thick cap formed all the way down to the eyebrows, sometimes as much as ten centimetres thick and weighing up to seven kilos. All the while, people sang, the head steadied by sticks that shared the burden – one end wedged against the drying gypsum, the other
plunged into the red sand. Once dry, the bearer was free to go, though reminded day by day of the weight of their mourning bonds, sometimes returning to add an extra layer. As time passed, their hair grew back – the measured distancing of the event – till the cap fell off or was removed, the period of grieving over. It was then laid on the grave as a marker, a witness, the bearer finally released.

  Thaddeus told me the story of the discovery of the caps in the Simpson when I most needed to hear it. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it has become clear to me over these last few months. He told it standing in the doorway of the Silver Bullet carriage in which he lived, eyes fixed on the ranges to the west. During his years spent navigating the borderlands where two worlds overlap, Thaddeus had amassed tales like most people collect scars and regrets, his guiding principle in that moment: even a seed laid in seemingly barren soil will respond to the first rains.

  The way he told it, the sighting of the mourning caps caused a hell of a stir. There were almost sixty in total, and never had so many been found in one location, particularly as far north as the Simpson. In the autumn of 2008, an expedition had set out from the one-pub town of Birdsville, the exact location of the site still a well-guarded secret. A scraggly caravan of camels and loaded four-wheel drives, the party included a Wangkangurru ranger, journalists, archaeologists, ethnographers, artists and two living legends, both women. One had crossed half the continent solo on camelback and lived to tell the tale. The other, an octogenarian linguist of German descent, was a friend to the last songmen and women of the Simpson.

  The magnitude of the discovery rippled through the party as they traversed the dunes, the pockets of water trapped in recesses from the recent rains deceptively comforting in a place that in another season the explorer Sturt had referred to as ‘the entrance into Hell’. The closer they passed to desert wells and soakages, the more remains they came across. Ancient middens of freshwater mussel shells. Grinding stones. Basalt axe heads. Glass spearheads. All abandoned or left behind for later, their owners waylaid by history. Once they were close, they made camp, some positioning themselves around a gidgee-wood fire, the embers imprinting themselves on the retina in the same way as stars do out there, aiding perspective, the camels farting and sifting in the outer perimeter.

  In the morning, they walked out to the site, coolabah trees leaning over the waterhole like knowing elders, a pair of gibber-birds cocking their heads in unison as the party arrived. It’s akin to finding the Elgin Marbles, said one of the archaeologists, the swelling sun causing him to squint, the linguist dipping under the wire to get a better look. Unlike the Elgin marbles, the national treasures before them would be left where they’d been found.

  As the members of the party stared and corellas circled, two theories did the rounds. Some believed it to be an increase site, created to signify and perpetuate the mourning process, to carry it through time and space in a world where the two were often interchangeable. Others argued it must be the burial place of a man of ‘high degree’, whose importance could be measured by the quantity of gypsum caps laid on his grave; not to be properly mourned was a terrible thing – the spirit still knew hunger beyond the flesh.

  Either way, a kind of crying place.

  The site had been fenced off in an attempt to protect it from the herds of wild camels that roamed the Simpson and any collectors who might stumble across it. Thaddeus had laughed as he told me this, though it took me a while to work out why. He knew all too well the fine line between preservation and theft.

  When Thaddeus was done telling the tale, he descended the steps out the front of his carriage to the rock garden, a raw assemblage of specimens from the desert and automotive flotsam. Picking up a split geode, he balanced it in his palm, the rough crystals of its interior sparking in the sun. Saul, he said, remember: no man burdened with guilt ever put a sure foot into the future.

  I knew nothing of all this before I set out on my own journey, one that began with a phone call, the kind that cuts through your life. Knew nothing of the layering of gypsum as a mark of grief, or how some deserts absorb sound so perfectly that all echoes must be excavated. That there are many ways to make amends. I thought I knew deserts: the Thar, the Taklimakan, the Grand Ergs of the Sahara, their dunes like the waves of an inland sea. But like so many of my generation, I’d travelled the world without ever placing a foot in the sands that lay at the centre of my own country. Never questioned why it was once referred to as the ‘Dead Heart’.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, trying to give the slip to that old belief: that the end of a story is encoded in its beginning. Sometimes I wish it had been laid out like a songline, etched into my cognitive mapping of the world so that it would not be possible to stray from it. I wish for that degree of certainty. But this is the story of a whitefella – a piranpa in the language of the Pitjantjatjara – full of wandering and, at least at the outset, the belief that all you need is the right question.

  Unlike Thaddeus’ tale of the mourning caps, this one opens at the edge of the continent, not its centre. In Sydney, a city pressed against the Pacific, an ocean tamed as much as any great expanse can be by words like beach and surf and lifeguard and a deep nostalgia for summer holidays. A city like so many of this coast-hugging nation that has relocated its foreshore, a dotted line of plaques at Circular Quay proof of where the original tidemark once lapped, the sails of the tall ships evolved into architecture.

  Surrounded by safer sands.

  The only white caps in sight the ones lifted by the wind across the surface of the bay.

  tjukurpa

  story; Dreaming; Law; message; birthmark

  Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert

  1

  Like all beginnings, it had its own sound. My phone ringing. A faltering announcement. The squawk of fruit bats brawling in the trees. And the echo of what she’d just said casing the room as if words had an afterlife.

  ‘You still there?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought maybe …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you didn’t hear me.’

  ‘I heard you. It’s just … not possible. Fuck.’

  ‘Saul, there’s no need.’

  I almost laughed – it seemed the only response to this madness, to her reining in – but duty caught my breath.

  ‘Dead,’ she repeated, pronouncing it with reverence.

  She exhaled, waited for me to say something, but words were refusing to line themselves up. I could see the TV, its relentless action, a dust ball collected against the skirting board, stirred by unseen forces. Through the window, the stacked lights of the CBD signalled through the gaps between the houses leading down to Blackwattle Bay.

  ‘He’d been living in that place,’ she said, like it was some kind of explanation.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In Melbourne. You know – the one by the beach … God knows, not the kind of place … though it wasn’t there, not there. Elaine’s beside herself. They called her, the police, only an hour ago. She was in her kitchen, cooking chops of all things.’

  The line faded, like our conversation belonged to the past, and I thought about hanging up, she’d understand, but one question was tapping against the edge of my skull, the bats screeching like banshees in the tree outside my window.

  ‘How?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Saul, it’s better …’

  ‘I need to know. The details.’

  She paused. Breathed in sharply. ‘By his own hand.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe that. Not Jed.’

  I swallowed hard. Through my phone, background noises pushed to the surface. The ordered drone of a lawnmower. My parents’ television perpetually on. The threefold caw of a crow, ending in a plaintive wail. All of it a kind of anthem to the place where I came from. Where we came from.

  ‘You boys, you and Jed, you were like brothers.’

  ‘I
… I can’t.’

  Bats shrieked. An ambulance siren. The mercy of the beep as I hung up.

  Breathing heavily, I stared at the screen of my mobile.

  19 April it said, unblinking.

  7:18.

  They always call it, don’t they? The time of death. And the cause. The alleged affliction or weapon.

  By his own hand.

  I turned mine over. Scrutinised the thin white ridge on the back of it from a run-in with coral on Ko Tao. And below that, the edge of the tanless mark from my wristband, the last man in the world to still wear a watch. Quarter past seven it said with its approximate dashes, caught in an earlier era – maybe the instant when I’d heard my phone ring and lowered my fork to the plate, the edges of the microwaved lamb curry like the banks of a creek receding into drought. I’d reached for the remote first, the mute button, before answering.

  On the silenced TV a woman scowled, her face the colour of soot. People rose to their feet and hugged, bright dresses, white beards, arms stretched around broad backs. Behind them, a red ridge that looked like a spine exposed, a sleeping desert creature.

  I turned away, no appetite for news, for what moved others. Took in the place I’d been living in for the last eight months, since I’d come to Sydney to take on that job for Andy. It was more a studio than a flat, its smallness emphasised by the fact that it was lit mostly by the streetlamp outside.

  By his own hand.

  A warm wind rattled the cedar blinds. Entered the room tracked by the buzz of a fat fly and a memory. Jed and I at the edge of the Derwent, the wind off the river tugging at the flames of a fire lit to give some kind of focus to the beach party, the silver sky with only a few scraggly gum trees for a frame. Behind us, the water bellyached while Jed, half tanked already, held forth with some argument about the forms submission could take in the world, a group hanging off his words with the earnestness of the pissed. His eyes were squally as all hell, his blond hair harried by the wind. Scratching his throat as if trying to peel back the skin, he’d urged with the flair for aphorism that surfaced when he drank, You have to understand the ways of the river.

  My mobile rang again.

  I put it down.

  Saw my mother’s name appear on the screen like a cautionary tale.