They seemed to have no beginning, the Flinders Ranges. No definable scope or boundary of duration. The ruffle of a hilly rise languishing into decline; its reemergence further on, as if some subterranean force bumped up into visibility its energetic tunnellings through the earth.

As I gazed out of the schoolbus window at the road, the broken white lines, rushing past us to no destination, shone like minus signs in the sunset. My stare dissolved into a hypnotic blur. And suddenly I was in the distant Grampians Mountain Range again, connected in memory by a parallel rift in time, an energy of frozen motion that locked me out from the tinny sound of a radio and doused me with the fluid gold of relived Dreaming.

In the Grampians, in the neighbouring state of Victoria, a blunt yet forceful slice of timelessness had angled in upon me like an overheard secret. I have always loved those Ranges, their compact blot of rugged beauty rising in a defiant bastion of unreason out from a vast surrounding plateau. Their dark mystery tugs at my shadow when I wander there like a severed fragment of their own stony selfhood. Several years before this trip to the Flinders Ranges, I had gone there for a summer holiday with a friend. One drowsy afternoon, we sat in the shade in a grassy reserve where the air singed with the hypnotic drone of insects. A background wall of cliffs, suggestive of dens of giant goanas, shimmered as if it were about to dissolve. My imagination stretched out its claws, eager to fasten onto fabulous prey. I felt as if I were about to fade, while everything else grew more solid, more dense with depths of meaning.

The feeling merged into a sense of being tugged, unfocused, and helpless to resist. Everything became glazed with symbol, heavily laden with a shroud of mystique. The air grew confining and imploding as each blade of grass turned into a secret word. The message eluded me, became a swarm of receding dragonflies, scintillant in the merciless sun. I felt certain I was about to see my double image walking across the hazy lawns. Vision blurred and pulled relentlessly, like the lure of sleep. I knew neither fear nor wonder, neither sentiment nor hostility. And suddenly I was released and saw only the forms of Nature around me, heard only sounds once more. Time flowed past once more undistorted, uncompressed into a pinpoint moment. The imposing wall of cliffs shimmered, but I knew they moved in the rising air of a heat-induced convection easily explained by elementary physics.

When I grope back to that memory, it is as if I am viewing myself through the wrong end of a telescope, seeing myself as a character in a twice-removed tale of uncertain ending. I recall no precise sensations, but rather the certainty of moving inward toward a central point where appearance takes on a more transparent, less restrictive role, and perception flows down new energy gradients to empty into seldom-sailed yet beckoning streams of consciousness.

"Did you bring your Black’s Flora?" The voice, near me yet distant in its mere factuality, snapped the unravelled thread of recollection. The teacher sitting next to me on the bus, newly awoken from dozing, was fanatical about grasses. I assured him that I had Part 1 of said text, which covered the grass family, neatly packed away somewhere. The same volume dealt with orchids, about which I ventured a discussion. I told him how two years previoulsy I had done a distribution study nearby on the pink orchid Caledenia carnea. He told me he liked comparing the spikelet morphology of different grass genera. And so the words flowed on through a neat channel of concise detail.

A few hours later, as we turned off the main highway and headed down a rough dirt road toward the Flinders Ranges, it was as if our bus had suddenly become a stranded island of surface appearance. Since the onset of night, our journey had been interspersed with the occasional dull thud of a hit kangaroo, the comet-like approaches of oncoming headlights, the obligatory stops for toilets and light refreshments. We were on the senior school science expedition, a venture that held the promise of little sleep for any of us. I had come along to help with the running of some botany and astronomy sessions and, anticipating some crisp black nights of telescopic viewing, had spent the latter part of the trip with my contorted gaze glued to the window, peering up at the stars. Now as we edged our way toward the looming shadow of the Ranges, the jolt of the road made my steady gaze waver and I mused upon it as a metaphor of life’s tendency to toss into our path boulders and immovable objects that force us to shift our angle of perception, as we climb over, tunnel beneath, or circle them as one might a labyrinth with an elusive core.

We were taken hostage by the Ranges, engulfed with a ravenous swallowing. Jagged waves of blackness slid past the window, solid as an abysmal ocean floor. At times they seemed like humped and sleeping, prehistoric monsters that stirred out from the Dreamtime in the sudden glare of lights. A brooding air seeped into the bus like a stain. Through creek beds and over boulders, we edged our way cautiously into that slumbering yet alert heart of darkness.

It seemed a hypnotic eternity of shaking before we came to our allotted campsite. It was midnight, minus four degrees Celsius, and we had tents to erect. It was no easy matter dragging students from the buses, for each of them felt as relucant as I to venture out. Most of the students arrived in a larger bus that had followed the smaller one containing myself, a few students and other staff members. I had stepped outside just before the big bus arrived and so was in time to see its oncoming headlights illumine the vast flatness that for the next two days would be our home base. The sky, painfully resplendent with stars, beckoned to me with a paradisiac glare that distracted me from the mundane tasks ahead. By the time we had settled in, the tail sting of the constellation Scorpio was setting in the west. I could not sleep, for I was a prisoner. We had not been allowed the dignity of a slow venturing in, but had been snatched up, rendered helpless. There was an immensity of life here; I could feel it. An untamable yet dignified centrality. I looked forward to the dawn . . .

That afternoon as I pointed out to a group of students the rusty flowers of the Casuarina, I realized that these small hardy buds of life enlosed a potent sense of soil-breathing slowness, a dark disdain of time so uniquely Australian. Morning had brought no brisk alertness but rather a pondering assertiveness, etched into every grain of the land in an overtone of meaning. It was like the Grampians again, that feeling of being near a point where myth blends into fact. Always it seemed as if some solidity were about to break through, some crumbling summit of lone splendour, some decayed fragment of a lost horizon, an echo from an evasive reality. As we had bustled about at breakfast with our tins of water and plastic bags of bread, we had had maintained the illusion of being an oasis of life scratched onto a russet-hued surface of seeming. But the dust seeped into everything, until we breathed it and patted it in clouds from our hair. We existed, while everything else seemed about to die and be born anew. I pointed out to the students the tiny, circularly arranged teeth that were the Casuarina leaves. Someone pointed out another botany group travelling up a distant hill like a cluster of bright insects about to disappear into a queer distortion of time. When we returned to the campsite, we wrapped up vegetables in alfoil and tossed them among the hot coals of our fires.

Later in the afternoon I wandered off alone toward the Heysen Range, following a dirt road that stretched out before me like the decayed body of a great serpent. Time vanished and I felt certain as I rounded each new bend, that I would meet my double image coming from the opposite direction. As I walked on, the Heysen Range came suddenly into view, eerie in its distant haze of beauty. For one could see it as rudimentary beauty, or as beauty so earthily subtle as to appear harsh and gritty, as would a huge, textured diamond to the undiscerning observer. And always there pressed on me the sense of a secret retreating before my advance. What went on there, in that sun-dazzled stillness, when no-one was there to observe? Something went on, I felt sure, but nothing of set image or substance, rather a hushed, ritual communion that pushed one outside through the sheer pressure of its centraility to - what? That mystery uniquely Australian; the shimmering vigil of ageless, ever-watching detachment. Like the Dreamtime Nargun, hard, alone and slow as stone, put together not with an engraver’s delicacy, but as one might erect with blind devotion an earth-cemented monument to heat-infected time.

I had never seen there the sudden, breathless spring-burst of colour. I had seen photographs of it. Photographs! What power had they to convey such splendour, freed for its allotted time to the gaze of a sky less dense than its summer oppression? What a jubilant farce that upper etching of colour would be; the brief overlay, the ironic surface stretched like a gaudy mantle across the great-humped back of a dust-bellied interior. In spring, as I envisaged, the Ranges would confront one like time-frozen, tossed waves in a heavy sea of colour, while in summer they would become again the dust convulsions of a sunburnt land. Both faces would be masks to one another and decoys to the outside world.

I moved away from the road and sat down in the shade. A large, serpentine beetle crawled in a trance across my path. There was no other movement, except for the sly dash of a rabbit and the hazy speck of a hawk, slowly stitching up the sky with a thread of air. No sound except the occasional cracking of a piece of bark and the rustle of a mercenary breeze. The silence, so hotly pregnant with life, evoked the sense of a united focusing in solemn concentration, as if the entire landscape fought to remember its dream origins in an insubstantial place of rugged carving. A shimmer of unreality danced about the Ranges in a compressed veil of air as I caught sight of a fox slinking up a distant hill and fading into a haze of heat. The wave of distortion lured me into furthering my pilgrimage as the air changed and became suffocating, imploding. I could no longer think clearly but felt as if I was not there at all, or as if a second self had split off quantally into another choice of direction.

I heard some sticks cracking behind a nearby clump of Acacias. An old man appeared, like a desert mirage, carrying a long stick and wearing faded breeches and a khaki shirt. A lanky old dog, splashed with patches of greying fur, followed him distractedly with nose to the ground. Something had been hounded, literally it seemed, out of its tranquil niche behind the trees.

Had the old man been expecting me? He looks at me with no surprise.

"No escaping a nose like that!"

A gruff laugh to round off the statement nicely. The gaze shrewd, reserved,

and faintly sarcastic. My appearance is clearly strange to him.

"You down from Blinman?" He sits down on a nearby rock and out comes the gleam of a switchknife.

"No - staying down the road a bit - at a campsite with a school group.

Thought I’d go off by myself for awhile - get some peace and quiet."

I edge a little closer. Of all things I see a gumnut sprig tied to the band of a wide-brimmed hat. Beneath it a face in shade, charred and lined with the parched stare of many summers. My answer seems to surprise him . . . He squints sideways at me and seems about to ask something. The stick he is carving begins to take on the cruel aspect of spear.

"You’ll find that here enough, peace and quiet. Too much at times." A pause, then, "Emus been getting at the corn."

He knows I am wondering about the stick.

A distant cry fades in on the wind, sounding for all the world like a child’s voice. Like a flash of premonition, it melts and does not return.

"New mine just opened up in Blinman. My two boys gone there till summer."

Surely he couldn’t be that old, able to recall the copper days of the 1880s?

He works on assiduously as the blade glints in the sun. The haze makes me yield to the pressure of possibility. The weaving hawk has drawn closer, enscribing its careful yet illegible message across the sky. Or is this another hawk, the two of them mirror images, each tugging at one end of a thread that links discrete times together? The dog is sitting near the old man now, panting in the heat. The suffocation in the air has lifted, but a distant haze still smothers the Heysen Range.

"How old is he?" I can think of nothing else to ask. The old man pauses and glances sideways at his dog, as if reaffirming the existence of a kindred soul.

"Ten summers now, but by no means ready to call it a day. Better ‘an a mouser in some ways - more life in ‘im, too." And as if in the same sentence, "Tom McAffrey’s the name."

He lays down the knife to hold out a hardened, agile hand, squinting at me from under his hat with a wary scrutiny. I tell him my name, but with a false and awkward distractedness, I avoid shaking his hand.

"Where’s your place from here?"

"Place?" he says. "I got no one place. Always on the move ‘ereabouts." Then as if having second thoughts, "About a mile due south."

The knife-hand jerks vaguely in the right direction, the eyes fastened once more to the stick. Had they traversed that steep gorge spanning the southern horizon? The old hound, as if scenting something, bounds up and heads for the Acacia stand. He returns almost at once, barking in an urgent, beckoning way.

"You’d think ‘e was a pup," the old man states half-apologetically. "Won’t give me no rest till I go."

The knife went away and he took the stick, shambling off at a sprightly pace to disappear into the Acacias. The barking ceased. I heard the drone of insects, the faint moan of a breeze; nothing more. As I glanced back toward the road, a small whirlwind of dust came dancing silently down it before veering off into nothingness. I turned and made my way back to the school crowd.

That night, as darkness encroached on our bustling, camp-fired circle, I assembled the telescope and soon had magnetized an eager group of students to me. I taught them how to locate the South Celestial Pole using the stars of the Southern Cross. We focused on some other of the brighter stars, Deneb, Arcturus, Fomalhaut, and the red giant Antares coming up like an ember in the east. Shooting stars flashed down like short-lived fireflies. I spent much of the remainder of the night cleaning out dust from the telescope, wondering as I did so whether the settling dust of time would obscure my own view of the recent encounter I had known.

The next day, as making our way homeward we passed a creekside hill, the sedimentary strata of its rocky side seemed like layers of interpretation in a work of art. I wondered whether I would return here again, or whether I would need to. For in a sense I took it with me, or rather had left myself behind, as I had in the streets of my childhood days. When time had once more been stitched with a thread of air to timelessness.

I remembered as I looked out at the scabrous hills and hollows, as the drone of the engine took me back to the time I had gone to live with two people I love. They gave me space for the quietude I’d needed then. I began working part-time at the school whose bus I now rode in, an ideal situation that left me with time for anointing with an inner salve certain gashes in my soul. I spent much time in the garden, pottering among its unaffected simplicity. I found no exoticism there, only plain green blocks of growth and a jasmine bush whose perfume drove me wild.

Always in such times came the sense of centrality to me, the awareness of being at a focal point, the heart of the matter in a union of silence and song. That double-edged reality, as strong there as in the Flinders Ranges and the Grampians, confronted me when outer seeing faded and I would grope my way into the breathing metaphors of life. There sight seeded renewed visions of the underlying rhythm of life. For at the heart of the flower is its secret, its place of surrender and sacrament of silence, the fruit born of submission. At the centre where all memories and times collide was the repose of the marble tomb, the waiting friend, the bridging of souls, the released and resting ecstasy, the communion of mutual loss. And from the centre spread the ripple of life, the bustle of the crowd, the overlapping of countless stories, the openness to the sky, the joining of self to the world. One went into and out of the centre, or one did not move at all.

And only in the present can we overhear the stretched chords of the tunes from which we glean our silent rhythms. I stared from the island bus of substance out at the passing trees, whose dreamlike passivity stood as the surface reality for trails of rushing ants that clung onto the flaking bark for safety. As we headed back down toward Oraparinna, our last couple of stops contained a graveyard dissolving with a helpless dignity into the earth, and an old, decayed settlement, a relic of the mining era refined by time into crudely textured stone. We all trailed out to look at it, poked around with sticks and took some photographs. The roof was gone in places from that cracked shell of a place and the light streamed down in dusty spears that jabbed at the floor. I felt there the presence of memories that had seeped into the walls like a stain, forming a cementing strength that helped combat the ravages of elemental extremes. As I climbed back into the smaller bus, I noticed that a couple of the older students had come aboard to chat with one of the teachers. One of them held open a travel guide from which she read with dutiful interest facts concerning the homestead. I took my seat at the window and began to remove dust from my camera lens with some cleaning tissue.

"Belonged to the McAffrey family until 1892."

Jolted into a chill of remembrance, I heard no more. I supposed to myself that if one searched hard and long enough, one might find buried beneath the rubble of that yolkless shell of a place the rusted remains of a well-used switchknife, That, and perhaps some fragments of chewed bone.

As we continued our journey, I sensed an untightening of the grip of the Ranges as they began to release us onto the sandy plain of transition to the outer world. Looking back on that imposing bastion of stone, I saw it suspended close behind us in a perpetually falling tide, poised in unseen motion like one seen falling at the event horizon of a black hole. As I stared back at last through the haze, the distant Ranges frowned at us like overly protective sentries at the gates of a slumbering secret. And as we turned onto the straight and narrow bitumen road, the broken white lines, soon rushing past us, shone like minus signs beneath the sun.

c. 1998 by Maureen B. Roberts

Darknight Publications

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