Os Sacrum

Months before the fracture opened up between us, S— and I were trampolining on the elastic algal crust of a hypersaline lagoon, a one-time salt pan on the Cheetham Wetlands at the mouth of the Skeleton Waterholes Creek in western Melbourne.

It was the middle of the day. Warm February. We stopped to watch a fleet of pied cormorants that were clear-spiralling on the updraft from high over the nearby air force base. Out the birds meandered over the bay, ten or twenty of them, further and further toward the horizon until, inevitably, I lost sight of them and needed S—’s sharper eyes to locate them for me again. They were so far out now that they appeared to be almost at the Heads some fifty kilometres away, though at that distance it would, of course, have been impossible to actually see them. Nonetheless, I indulged the illusion that I was far-seeing and watched them for as long as I could, crumbs on the horizon, until I finally lost them again in the distraction of a formation of aircraft that was coasting in across the sky in pale acrobatic mimicry of the birds.

S— and I walked deeper toward the centre of the salt pan. We’d both been reading Cortazar so we scratched a game of hopscotch – rayuela – with our toes into the surface of the encrustation and, barefooted, we played. Afterwards, I leapt into a fluid sprint across the firm, flawless expanse. A hundred-yard dash to nowhere and back. We sat then to eat, and I pointed to the underside of my foot, to the pseudopod nodule that protruded from it – a local outgrowth of connective tissue that had sprouted some years earlier and which I had come to think of as a novel type of bone whose purpose, if it had one, had not yet been found.

S—, without knowing anything of the material-medical facts of this growth, predicted to me that it would, in time unmeasured – years perhaps, decades certainly – come to undercut the possibility of my repeating a freewheeling run such as the one I had just completed. I supposed it was a truth. Nothing can continue as it is.

We continued our walk by way of a sluiced channel, shoes in hand, until we reached another lagoon, this one closer to the final blade of ephemeral shore, beyond which the tides never subsided and the sea floor proper began. This lagoon was smaller than the one in which we’d been playing, maybe the size of a suburban football oval, and was cool and damp underfoot. Where the first lagoon was crystal-bright sterile, this one was darker, more fecund. We soon noticed that strewn across its surface, partway embedded in the silt, there were many small bones. Judging from their shape and size, they appeared to us to be the slight ribs of what must once have been scores of individual animals that, from their dimensions, we surmised to have been sheep.

We padded about the bones carefully so as not to disturb them and wondered out loud to each other by what fluke process of selection it was that they had come to be accumulated here. Had they arrived under the momentum of their weight and dimension in water? Had they been scattered here by design? Why ribs? Why sheep’s ribs, if that was what they were?

To recover the story of the origins of these bones would have required not only the reconstitution of each of the hundreds of disintegrated vertebral columns into which they had once been articulated, but also the summoning, from the scant clues before us, of the lost fabric of time in which the living animals had once been embedded, the way they were now embedded in the almost-mud.

It was from here, with these ribs underfoot and the problem of raising a bridge into time past in mind, that I remembered that at the end of the previous spring, some kilometres further along the coast toward the city, I had come upon a curious interpretive sign.

The sign stood at the entrance to another rehabilitated urban wetland and recalled that more than a century earlier there had ‘in this once remote area’ stood a desolate smallpox sanatorium and, nearby, an even more desolate cemetery into which the sanatorium’s dead had once been received. As an addendum to its remembrance of the long-forgotten graveyard, the sign also made passing reference to what it called the ‘small number of Muslim cremations’ that had also taken place there.

When I recounted my having come upon this sign to S— there on the lagoon, amid the spectacle of the arrayed ribs, she immediately seized on the oxymoronic concept of a ‘Muslim cremation’. For Islam, she reminded me, as for the salvific traditions in general, at least historically, the practice of reducing the human skeleton to ashen powder in the ritual of cremation is deeply troubling. The sign was clearly wrong. She reminded me as well, in the tangent that followed, that in these traditions no bone is more sacrosanct than the complex of vertebral bones at the base of the spine, which, through the years of maturation that follow adolescence, fuse into a single mass named the os sacrum.

While the historical and theological origins of the veneration of the os sacrum are diffuse, there’s little doubt that it is by way of the bone’s reputation for immense resilience that it has come to be understood in these traditions as being the seed and root of the resurrected body. To destroy what resists destruction is to fundamentally disrupt the peace that is due to it in its wait of the hoped-for reconstitution of the living body that underpins the eschatologies of the Abrahamic religions.

I’d discovered the qualities of the os sacrum for myself over a decade earlier when, on the first sub-zero morning of a northern winter in the east of England, I’d rushed out onto the iced-over top step of a brutalist block of university flats and felt my feet skid out from under me. I’d pitched almost horizontally onto a cold concrete edge four steps below, cracking the full plummeting weight of my being square onto my lower back. When I picked myself up and limped into the university clinic, the doctor marvelled at the fact that no matter how violent the accident, the bone upon which I had fallen – the os sacrum – was the one bone that refused to break.

Later, I would come to learn that the fault in the sign about the ‘Muslim cremations’ lay with an uninformed contemporary interpretation of a historical source that referred specifically to the 1902 cremation of what it called a ‘Hindoo-Mahomedan’ man, meaning, in fact, that he had been Hindu, or, perhaps more likely, Sikh. This man, who’d died in the middle of the autumn of that year, had been attended to by some sixty of the men with whom he’d shared the language and life of faith and the business of itinerant, solitary hawking in the towns and hamlets of south-eastern Australia. His mourners had gathered together in Melbourne, some coming from hundreds of kilometres away, to carry his deal coffin across the grasslands from the North Williamstown railway station to the desolate grounds of the sanatorium where they’d set his remains onto a wooden scaffold, opened his butter-smeared breast to the sun and set a vented flame through the pyre.

—

The walk across the Cheetham Wetlands with S— was near the beginning of a months-long, piecemeal odyssey I had set out on by foot across the basalt volcanic plains that give to the western suburbs of Melbourne its distinctive geological character – a landscape whose high ground at the peak of its dormant lava shields is only ever a couple of hundred metres above sea-level and which is otherwise almost uniformly level, even as it tapers off to the coast of Naarm–Port Phillip.

I was guided across this landscape by the course of five of its waterways: the creeks that begin as catchment capillaries to the northwest of the city and find their way on a south-easterly bearing into their more certain arteries downstream. While on maps they are each presented with the deceptive continuity of single names, they are often incoherent, hidden and inaccessible. Their waters move in both ephemeral and abundant moods in open creeks, concrete channels and subterranean drains before they empty out through swamps, wetlands and wide-open mouths into the sea. And while I say that I walked the course of these five waterways, I might more properly say six if I count the long-abandoned nineteenth-century outfall sewer that cuts an east-to-west swathe through them all. Seven, thinking as well of the unimaginatively named Kayes Drain at its confluence with the Laverton Creek. Eight with the wetland meeting of the Paisley and Challis stormwater drains to which I’d dashed having caught news of an oil spill there. And then there was Cheetham.

As I walked through this territory, crossing industrial and suburban estates, sneaking into brownfield sites and stepping across its native and exotic grasslands, its pastures, parks and paddocks, I saw a landscape that was riddled with evidence of the abrasions of human waste, contamination and inattention.

At Rockbank on Melbourne’s outer-western suburban fringe, a rutted gold-rush-era track to the Kororoit Creek that runs through abandoned paddocks was littered with dumped mattresses and old sofas. The entire unwanted contents of a faraway household had been shaped into an occultish pyramid – a twist of metal, scorched wood, bricks, silver foil heating ducts and laundry baskets – that was crested with a spooky human effigy made out of a hoodie and a child’s pink plastic baby doll. At a ford beyond the low bridge that had collapsed into the ephemeral trickle of the creek decades earlier, the water was choked with ruptured sacks of cloth and clothing, mud-grey and steaming in the morning sun.

On another back track between the Main Outfall Sewer and a tangled freeway interchange, I found a high-school-level textbook opened to a page about the human body that had pictured in it a pair of almost-naked sunbathers alongside text about Kinsey’s sexuality studies. Nearby was an album of photographs, some of them clear and bright, others falling away into dark, scorched corruption. In them it was possible to recognise a couple posing at the Victor Harbour Horse Drawn Tram in South Australia, and in another, two women, one of them the youthful bride in her red dress at the wedding feast.

In Laverton North, the waters of Cherry Creek were sunk into a deep concrete channel that cut through the heart of a vast zone of industry and waste. In it, ducks and gulls took refuge from the unceasing boom of truck traffic overhead. On the road, Cyclone fences and roadwork barriers crowded out the walking path so the only way to safely navigate the endless jam of traffic to where the path restarted a hundred metres ahead outside the cemetery, was to wait in a bus shelter for a service that was still an hour away.

Along Stony Creek in Tottenham, at the postwar suburban-industrial interface, the banks of the waterway were utterly barren, scoured of life, soil and sediment. A year earlier, a mammoth blaze had broken out in an adjacent industrial warehouse where chemicals had been illegally stored. The firewater, a cocktail of fire retardants and other contaminants from the blaze, spilled in vast volumes back out of the warehouse site and into the creek itself. Its residues and the creek’s banks had to be scraped entirely away. Now, hoses diverted the storm water drains, discharging them hundreds of metres further downstream beyond the few remaining oily and stagnant stands of water. A once-robust bankside tree had been chainsawed back into a tangle of wooden fists and a crushed rock access track had been laid across a new culvert to bear the weight of the tippers that had carried away the layers of toxic sludge and sediment. The incinerated remains of the warehouse itself at the top of a gravel embankment were nothing but heat mangle.

It was on nearing the mouth of the Kororoit Creek in Altona, close to the site of the cremation pyre, that I thought on Derrimut, the mid-nineteenth-century arweet of the coastal Yalukit-willam clan of the Boonwurrung, who had spoken once to the Vandemonian settler John Pascoe Fawkner of the coal to be found on his Country. The coal was evidence of a seam of lignite some fifty kilometres long, known now to geologists as the Parwan Trough, that burrowed through the earth from Altona, on the coast, to Ballan, close to the headwaters of the Werribee River. By the end of that century a string of companies had been formed, each of them sinking boreholes and shafts in and about the industrial suburbs of the coast from Newport to Altona. They mined there for fifty years, some of them almost down to the foreshore, struggling against complex geology, inundation and the uncertainties of war and commerce, until the last shaft was abandoned in 1931. By then, Australia’s first oil refinery had already been in operation for seven years on the banks of the creek. Eventually, the refinery and the industries of the carbon economy would swallow up a vast swathe of the surrounding saltmarsh and grasslands. The grounds of the nineteenth-century smallpox sanatorium and its cemetery were buried under a field of crude oil storage tanks which, at their peak, supplied a refinery that produced 90,000 barrels of fuel a day.

When I looked upon that refinery through the fence of a car wrecking yard, I imagined the arweet as the unintended author of this theatre of combustion, of the desperate atmosphere of carbon that came to adhere to the place like so much dogshit to a boot. I’d once thought a lot about Nina Simone having wondered out loud to an audience whether time was alive. It was there in the shadow of the crude oil tank that I remembered again that the answer was yes; that something of the old sanatorium persisted in the place from where the holy bone ash of the dead man, his final truth, was gathered up and carried away; a place where birds startled and, like T.S. Eliot’s tongues of in-folded flame, his crowned knot of fire, the refinery flare breathed hot carbon dioxide into the sky.

I’d set out to journey this landscape by way of seeking to stitch together some idea of the discontinuities that had beset it since its industrial occupation. It was the work of encountering place as the culmination of a process of history. I imagined my movement through it to be a type of inscription that would not only account for what the landscape had become, and how it had become that way, but that also served as an act of attentive reconstitution in the present. The movement was an emulation of the encounter with place as I imagined it through Walter Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s angel of history, who, with its back turned to the future, keeps an exhaustive inventory of spent catastrophe. The angel, supremely dispassionate, does not – cannot – intervene in all it knows. Total history, the staggering fullness of time past, is, to the angel, pure object.

But as I moved through the landscape, it became increasingly obvious that achieving the objectivity of the divine historian was an impossibility. The certainty of dispassionate knowing was an illusion. At the human scale, a landscape and its history are never encountered neutrally. It is felt through the veil of one’s own blind and anxious psyche as it hurtles into the face of oncoming time. I became aware that I was wilfully insinuating my own logic and moods into the landscape, finding in it an ugliness that corresponded with the conclusion drawn by Simone Weil, who, with her hand set as always on the thudding pulse of the real in the very present, writes: ‘We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say “I am suffering” than “this landscape is ugly”.’ She means by this that to say that something is ‘ugly’ is to will upon it what it is not. The ugliness of the landscape I encountered was not a quality of the landscape itself but of the exercise of my will, but I experienced it as if it were not will at all. When I examined it, I understood that the texture of this will was that of my own particular suffering; a colouring haunted by my own dread of what Anne Dufourmantelle calls ‘the “last” secret before which every human life falters’.

—

I had, around the time of these walks, been dreaming a lot of my elderly and physically frail and failing father. In the most powerful of them, I’d come upon a Lear-ish king who, under his toppling crown (see: elderly father), had been reduced to his second infancy, sprawled and begging in harsh and glaring daylight on the broken tarmac and concrete of an abandoned industrial site near the trickle of a contaminated waterway. It was a cruel dream and in it I was cruel. The landscape too was cruel. It was saturated with the exposure of harsh truths, a landscape in which no illusions could be harboured.

While the psychodrama of my confrontation with my father’s suffering and with mortality was clearly being played out in the foreground of the dream, what remained with me just as powerfully was the ruined industrial landscape onto which I had set the ruined king as he inched toward death. There seemed little coincidence that it was through just these same kinds of places that, in my waking life, I had set out to walk. I had, in fact, on more than one occasion, become overwhelmed by the uncanny moment of recognising the landscape of my dream in places I had never before set eyes on.

While the landscape insinuated itself into my dream, the dream, or the anxiety from which it emerged, had also insinuated itself back into my journey through the landscape. This symbiosis pronounced itself through my peripheral but persistent perception of a hidden threat in the landscape – the ancient and not unreasonable suspicion that it was to what I could not see that I was most vulnerable. It was in the grip of this paranoia that, on a stretch of the Stony Creek where the grey water was an inch deep under a carpet of grass, I sensed the quick, blind slithering of something ungraspable that was moments from being under my feet. Later, it was with a terrifying panic, while I was in the thick of a thigh-deep grassland of serrated tussock between Kayes Drain and Laverton Creek, kilometres from any path or road, that I remembered another dream in which the monstrously wide open maw of a serpent, its head swollen with glandular venom, struck out at me from within the open-fanged jaw of another snake. He shed his scales, goes the Cohen lyric, to find the snake within. In my panic at what I could not see but believed to be writhing under every stand of sharp-bladed grass I stamped on, I half-bolted, stumbling further and further away from any legible path and deeper into danger. I finally found relief by wriggling under a fence flat on my belly – snake-like – from out of the construction site in which I’d inadvertently become trapped.

My paranoia culminated, finally, on another back-track rubbish dump on the red earth further along Laverton Creek, which was also tangled with the shedding of snake-like things – sticks and thin plastic pipes – and where, by a muddy ford, blankets were tented in a tree, a dirt bike rasped, and a police helicopter pushed hard into the wind of the darkening sky, circling over my head. It was there on the path that the menace finally showed itself. A tiger snake – Notechis scutatus – real and whole, undulating and certain of its venomous place in the world, oblivious to my metaphors. It unravelled from the grass, and I stopped just as it stopped, thrilled and in thrall, until seconds, years later, and all at once, I stepped forward and the snake moved. It crossed the path into the grass again, down toward the water, having made enough of its having revealed itself to me. And in high false confidence, forgetting that what was truly hidden remained hidden, I walked on.

—

When the wonder of the day I’d spent with S— at Cheetham had dissipated, I continued to search around for answers to the puzzle of how the ribs that were arrayed across the lagoon had come to be where they were. I first asked Gary, an archaeologist whose understanding of these reclaimed industrial sites in this part of the world is second to none. I wondered to him whether the ribs might somehow have been a remnant of the vast saltworks that had stood on the site from the 1920s until it had been rehabilitated into a Ramsar-listed wetland twenty-five years ago. He suggested instead, though without certainty, that they could have belonged to the many sheep that had, in times of drought, been abandoned to starvation and dehydration by delinquent farmers along the often-ephemeral Skeleton Waterholes Creek upstream. I imagined the perishing of these animals, caught in barren, grassless creek bed bogs, the easy raven-picking of their flesh, and their clean bones flushed downstream in a later flood of rain. Gary’s theory sounded plausible, but it didn’t immediately solve the mystery of why the bones that had collected in the specific lagoon S— and I had come across were limited so exclusively to ribs.

It was as if in echo of the question of the ribs that I came on another day altogether with Gerard, who tends to the health of the waterways through this landscape, to a dry paddock at the headwaters of the Skeleton Waterholes Creek. Close to where the property boundary intersects with the dry creek bed, we came upon a circle of stones that opened into a deep and long dried-out well. When I looked inside, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim ambience of light that barely reached into the long drop into the void. Eventually, I made out that there was, lying at the bottom of the well, an animal. It was a lamb, grabbing for breath and twitching in the dark. I thought to my teenage son who I knew would fret with compassion when I told him of the lamb’s afflictions. He would seek truthful reassurance from me that I had not forsaken it. I knew, though, that all I would ever be able to tell him was that Gerard had contacted the land developer who had put a call through to the property owner who had said that he would not be able to come out to the well to investigate the lamb’s fate until the evening, and I suspected that he might not come at all.

Despite the apparent parallels in the circumstances of the lamb in the well and the bones on the lagoon – they were both epiphenomena of any number of shared primary phenomena, not the least of which was the force of agricultural industry that almost two centuries ago had introduced millions upon millions of sheep to this country – it was clear that the lamb was not the route to the answer to the problem of the ribs. The lamb would almost certainly die in the well and there, intact in its form from skull to sacrum, its bones would lie until human hands either lifted them out or covered them over with rocks and dirt.

The two phenomena were not so much synonyms as rhymes.

Yet, while the lamb lived, and in that individual living continued to twitch and gasp at its shallow hold on time, it remained embedded in the mysteries of its own existence. By what violence, the lamb’s being asked, by what love, by what momentum of force have I been delivered up to the present? What end is there to this pain, to this thirst and hunger and fatigue? Asked another way, it asked the same simple questions begged by the ribs on the lagoon – How did I get here? Where am I going?

While the immediate cause of the lamb having come to be in the well appeared clear, I understood that the logic and evidence of history that would explain how the ribs had come to be where they were would remain buried in a generous mystery. I took some uneasy pleasure in letting the question rest, unresolved.

We tell history as a way of overcoming our discomfort with the unscientific reverence for mystery. Yet there remains in mystery a wisdom that acknowledges that historiography itself is never entirely reliable, never without its subjective texture; that even to know the origin of the ribs would be to know them through the veil of individual being. It takes a certain, almost impossible attentiveness to disentangle wilfulness – no matter how well-meaning – from knowledge. And still then, mystery remains.

All that would remain of the day on Cheetham was the fact of the presence of the ribs: that their shedding had marked the transition of the animals in which they had once been housed from a vertebrate to an invertebrate state, their bodies metamorphosed into an afterlife that had relieved them of the terrestrial necessity of the backbone, that careful and complex structure of gravitational resistance. Still now, I can only imagine it as a kind of relief.

—

I returned to Cheetham some months later, on the shift of seasons and late in the day. I was seeking to feel again some of the wonder and mystery that had shimmered about that day in summer with S—. I conceived of this return as a kind of science, a test of how repeatable the encounter with wonder was as it adhered to this place.

By this time, the remaining life of my friendship with S— was still silently expiring. I would experience the time that remained in it, even though it could be counted in mere months, with an intensity that swelled the days into the volume of decades.

It’s possible that at the root of our fracture was the divergent attitudes we took to the horror of being confronted by the ribs as an instance of what Daisy Hildyard might describe as ‘the second body’. The diffuse state of the physical body, the consequence of its expended force, no longer singular and intact, but separated, dispersed and uncannily sorted, presented a mystery that to S— was tinted by taboo. The ribs were where the de-individualised, non-human became a localised fact. They were life’s boundaryless, permeable interface. To disturb the ribs would be to risk making contact with the dangerous site where the coherence of our own individual beings was dissolved into chaos. Unlike S—, I suppose I did not respect the authority of that taboo, nor the ancient wisdom in which it was rooted.

On the day of my return to Cheetham, I walked a path that ran along the boundary line and watched a magpie soar by and gently alight on a rotted fence post near a mound of dirt. I relinquished to the bird the decision I was seeking to make about where it was I should sit. In the nearby boxthorn, a thumbnail spider, Austracantha minax astrigera, a spiked and resplendent jewel of a creature, served up its orbital web. I stole from it a thorned branch that I bent into a crown and set over the woody stub of the post. When I sat at the foot of the mound, the magpie, which had hopped from post to path, winged across to it as well, settling in at my shoulder. As I watched the post and its crown through the sunset, the distinct thickness of the world emerged. Nothing moved – not the stands of grasses, nor the florid growth all about me. A flame robin, its bleeding hot breast aglow, landed on the crown, tilting it. I sat like this with the birds until the sun fell away entirely, completing the tenebrous hour at this longitude. And when I eventually stood again, I turned to the bay behind me to find that the Paschal moon and its red swelling, bellying and magnificent, had risen and poured itself out across the water.

Years have passed now since the improbable day S— and I spent on Cheetham and, perhaps remarkably, I still run, just as fluidly as I did then. Perhaps the decades S— anticipated for me, with their debilitating ossification, still lie in wait. Perhaps not. For the moment, I’m still not much different to that lamb in the well, gasping at the atmosphere of the present, still blind to my final place in the backbone of time.