Stories and Sketches

Lizzie

Her brother Stuart stood behind me in the tall room – the same room in which we had all sat and watched her die. I walked up to the bed and passed the flat of my hand lightly across her tight forehead. Lizzie possessed a serene and effortless beauty which left its mark on everyone she met, and which remained with her until the end. I looked at the empty husk before me, and realised to what extent her life-force had animated this beauty. Someone had combed her hair in a way she never would have. I pointed this out to Stuart who was standing against the wall, and he went up and ruffled it with his hand. ‘That’s better,’ he said through a savage grin.

One sunny day a year before this, I had taken Lizzie to the upper reaches of the Colo River for a picnic. I knew at the time that it would probably be our last day-long outing together – she said she was feeling good that day, but she often appeared healthier than she really was. The bearing of the car’s water pump was making a lot of noise on the way up, and I wished I’d fixed it before we left, nonetheless we arrived safely and pulled up on the narrow floodplain between an eroded cliff and the river. At lunchtime it was very hot and so we sat in the shallow water to eat. Lizzie’s small terrier, Teddy, was busily rooting around in the flood-bearded foliage of the bank. Every now and then he let out a short bark. We floated the Tupperware container of smoked cod and rice between us, and when it was finished, Lizzie let it drift away in the current until it lodged in the branches of a fallen tree. ‘We’ll get it later,’ she said, and lay back resting on her elbows. I put my head under and looked sideways through the water at her languorous body stretched out on the rippled sand, and up at the wobbling sky.

Suddenly, Teddy splashed into the river and waded out to us, holding a half-dead skink in his mouth. ‘You horrible dog!’ screamed Lizzie, standing up. Teddy dropped his bounty in front of her and splashed around in circles barking and snarling. The lizard floated on the surface downstream to where the cliff passed a shadow across the water. Lizzie sluiced after it until finally she was able to scoop the damaged body into her cupped hands. She retrieved the Tupperware container and put it in that; but then she realised that the lizard was dead. She slumped down into the water and wept.

We packed up and left soon after that. Half-way along the dirt road that winds above the river, the water pump fell apart and sent the metal fan spinning into the gills of the radiator. We could drive no further. I pulled the hissing car over to the edge of the track and stuck a note under the wipers – ‘Broken down, back tomorrow’. Then we had to walk slowly out to the main road with Lizzie stopping apologetically every few hundred metres to rest. Finally we reached the bitumen and hitched a ride in the back of a transit van stacked with Space Invader machines that slid against us as we rounded the corners. At Windsor Station we hid Teddy in my rucksack and took the slow train back to the city.

I keep a photo of that train ride tucked into the corner of a picture frame above the mantelpiece – Lizzie, with Teddy perched beside her on the bench seat of the old carriage, blurred late afternoon paddocks outside; her hair blows away from her face in a breeze that comes through the window ratchetted part-way up. She looks beautiful and defiant, and this is how I want to remember her.

The Blowhole

Late one Summer afternoon I took my friend Shelley to see the Blowhole at Kiama. It was Sunday, and we had been driving back up the coast.

We walked down from the carpark, over the litter-spotted basalt rocks. A big crowd was gathered around the Blowhole, and the rocks all round were shiny and wet with its last efflorescence.

The crowd was mostly Asian and there were a couple of tourist coaches parked up above. Standing by herself to one side of the Hole, outside the safety fence, was a girl in a black one-piece swimming costume. She stood at the edge of a rock outcrop above a deep ravine between the cliffs that fed water into the Blowhole. Someone was treading water in the turbulence down below.

The lady standing next to us said we had ‘missed the excitement’. A young man had jumped down the Blowhole itself, just after it had blown up its spume, and emerged seemingly unscathed in the ocean below. And now he was encouraging his girlfriend to jump down to him from the cliff.

The girl was plump and pale-skinned and had long dark hair. She looked about fifteen or sixteen. The late sun gave the rocks a glowing warmth and her shadow a dark intensity. She was pacing back and forth, hanging at the edge, looking down, and then stepping back, sitting down on the rocks with her face in her hands. Her boyfriend (I assumed) had managed to clamber up onto a rock ledge just above the foam, and with his head tipped back and his hands cupped about his mouth, shouted encouragement to her. His pleading voice came up to us faintly through the roar of the swell.

By now the crowd had forgotten about the random spurtings of the Blowhole, and was caught up in this tense love-pact – the manoeuvres of the girl on the rocks had united their attentions. They had stopped taking photographs.

For ten minutes she paced, and hung on the edge, and then retreated. She seemed so frightened and yet so determined. Then, as the sun cast its last orange rays on the cliff’s edge, she jumped. The watchers gasped as she fell awkwardly down into the waters below, then erupted in cheering when they saw her head bob up. The boyfriend reached out and pulled her up onto his ledge and they disappeared out of sight. I assumed they were local, and knew a route around the base of the cliffs.

People suddenly remembered their cameras and lined up for shots at the railing, against the ocean’s pre-sunset opalescence. We looked out to sea for a while, strangely moved by what we had seen; then joined the others straggling back to the cars and coaches.

Ludwig Becker

Bravery comes in all forms, and is especially virtuous when it doesn’t drag others down with it.

The artist and naturalist Ludwig Becker was one of the oldest members of the Burke and Wills expedition that crossed the continent in 1861. He was a diversely talented man whose wide-ranging enthusiasms sometimes threatened to overwhelm any singular purpose. He was rather like a bus that loops off down all the side streets looking for passengers. As a younger man in Germany he had liked to collect things, and discovered what was thought to be the only death mask of Shakespeare. He left it behind when he came to Australia.

Burke, the Irish policeman, didn’t want any time-wasting on his dash to the north – another explorer was attempting the same thing from a different direction – and it gave him delight to make the frail German work like the others, lugging heavy packs onto the camels before dawn. Becker then had to walk rather than ride, leading one of the camels with a heavy rope digging into his shoulders. ‘You should have seen old Becker’s face when I told him,’ wrote Burke to a friend. Apart from when they were delayed at Menindee, almost the only time Becker had to make his notes and drawings was when everyone else was asleep, by candlelight, in his tent. With an open-eyed romantic exactitude he tried to record everything they encountered: birds, fish, animals, insects, shells, rock formations, meteorological data, the night sky, Aboriginal songs, and the landscape through which they passed. These night labours made each new day’s march a torture to his weary flesh.

Eventually Becker and some others were left behind to wait, falling back like the mid-section of a rocket, as Burke and his chosen few headed desperately straight up the map, into the drylands.

When Becker’s paint supplies ran low he made up washes using a mixture of gum and ochres that he found. He had more time to paint now, but the temperature hovered around forty degrees and rats attacked everything remotely edible in their campsite. As his physical condition deteriorated Becker’s paintings retained, undiminished, their Germanic precision and intensity. Towards the end he suffered terribly from dysentery and his legs and one hand were swollen with beri-beri. A rat had bitten his finger, his teeth became loose, and flies sucked at every damp spot on his painting.

He died near a body of water at Bulloo aged fifty-six. A leather satchel containing his watercolours and drawings was kept by the survivors and brought back – ‘Border of the Mud Desert…’, ‘Portrait of Dick, our Brave and Gallant Native Guide’, ‘Parasite found in the Armpit of a Gecko’, “Meteor seen by Me…’ are some of the titles.

His small landscapes are filled with the clear light and deep space of the Inland – they glow like opals when compared to the history paintings that emerged from the studios of Sydney and Melbourne, in which Burke and Wills act out their drama before a dark and topographically obscure landscape.

Becker’s last surviving watercolour was finished on March 23, 1861, thirty-seven days before his death. It depicts a whiskery-mouthed fish called ‘Silurus’—a sort of cat-fish that finds nutrition on the muddy bottom amongst what other fish leave behind.