Wings of the Kite-Hawk      

Wings of the Kitehawk is published by Picador at $30

an extract

   BushMag thanks Nicolas Rothwell for permission to reproduce extracts from his new book, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, a set of linked journeys into the Outback, following the trails of past explorers. Referring to the journal of one old pioneer, Rothwell calls it “as much self-portrait as record of travel and topography” and this is true of his own book too. Rothwell, a journalist for The Australian newspaper, spent many years in Eastern Europe and there are echoes of that haunting world in his contemplation of the desert.

          Rothwell says he was drawn to the idea that “the landscape can bear the imprint, the resonance of those who have gone through it before, that one can tune in to their feelings and their thoughts”. Each chapter is a variation on the theme of “European arrival, the collision of the Western eye with a foreign landscape”. He says he wanted to “play off my own experiences of this against those of three romantic explorers (Leichhardt, Sturt and Giles) and also against those of three rock art pioneers, each of whom, in his own fashion, sought to recreate their dream-European homeland in the rocks of the Outback. I look back now and see this pattern in the book: it begins with a very European eye and by its end, it is largely at home in the Australian world and has come up against the threshold of Aboriginal Australia.”

           In this extract, the hero has just arrived in Mt. Isa:

           “I approached the town by dusk, at speed, straining to catch a glimpse of its tall smelter chimneys against the last streaks of sunset, but all I could make out when I drove in was the red lights that flash constantly upon the smoke-stacks in the night. It was only in the morning, when I checked out of my motel room, that at last I saw the town stretched out before me, and, high on the hillside above it, the smelter buildings and their cantilevers, the tailings dumps and ore stock-piles, the exhaust-plumes spreading in the sky. There was something about the shape and curve of the hill, about the picturesque confusion of its buildings, that was familiar to me in a distant way. Not until I was walking up the main street, navigating the town’s thickly-clustered system of roundabouts, did I place the memory. It was of one particular castle: Hunedoara, in Romanian Transylvania, the stronghold of Janos Hunyadi, set amidst rich, ore-bearing mountains, where the communist authorities had built a metallurgical complex I visited once, a kingdom of green, billowing toxic clouds, deep excavation pits and funicular ore-transports that passed like chairlifts just above the castle’s courtyards and crenellated walls.

          So dear was this fortress to the romantic intelligentsia of neighbouring Hungary, for whom it represented the spirit of their eastern provinces, that it was recreated in scale replica in the main park of Budapest, amidst duck ponds and ornamental gardens, so that passing strollers would be reminded of their heritage as they made their way towards Heroes’ Terrace and the Museum of Fine Arts. I allowed myself a little inward smile at this memory: I could be confident, I decided, as I sat down in the only coffee shop I found open so early in the morning, that no one had drawn that comparison before.

          After some minutes a middle-aged man with a distinct Central European accent came to take my order. He had been born and brought up, he told me, in Deva, an obscure Transylvanian town. Repelled and drawn at the same time by the force of coincidence in life, I could not refrain from asking him if he had ever been reminded of his homeland by Mount Isa; of Hunedoara itself, for example, which I was careful to give its Magyar name.

          ‘I have made the parallel often in my mind,’ he answered. ‘And perhaps now, with all my family gone, that is the reason why I stay on here.’

          Almost at once he returned, bearing a plate of toast and a cup of coffee, which he laid in front of me in ceremonious fashion before sitting down, folding his arms, and giving a sigh: ‘If I tell you something of my story now, it is not because I flatter myself at all that it may be of some vivid interest to you – or that it will remain with you in your memory for its own sake – but because, in a place like this, stories need to be told, and told again. They need to stake their claim on life, you could say, otherwise what do we have? My name is Szelenyi Sandor’ – he showed me a laminated business card, and this, indeed, was the name that figured on it in italic type – ‘I come, as I mentioned to you, from Deva, it is true, but my background was mixed. My mother was a Romanian woman, and my father was Hungarian by nationality. Communism was living its triumphant years when I grew up there. My father was a party member, and I was in the youth brigade. We young aristocrats of the working class were escorted on journeys all around the country, to the mines, and to the construction camps where the railways and the roads were being built, so we could be filled with consciousness of the labours undertaken on our behalf, and the splendours of the future awaiting us. One result of this indoctrination is that I know my country well. But I am unsure whether I should speak of it that way. It was not from there, you see, that I came to Australia. I had made a visit to my father’s relatives in Budapest – this was early 1956, when I was not quite fifteen years old. I stayed in their family apartment, high up in a grand building on Castle Hill; there were long, dark corridors; the rooms were panelled, and from them there was a view across the river; you could see the long barges making their way up and down. All through the uprising I remained in the city, and afterwards as well, although my father sent me urgent messages to come home, but he had not the faintest notion of the things I had seen: the massed crowds in the streets, young men shot down, their skulls smashed in; faces that were known to me. I can still hear the echo from the gunshots ringing around our block. I can see the bullet-holes – see them as they were being made, exploding in straight lines, like sewing stitches – and that experience is one that has stayed with me through the years. Whenever they blast, here, today, deep underground, I can feel those bullets. I feel the pulse go through me, I feel it in the soles of my feet – just the way they say the Kalkadoon people who once lived here could feel the coming of a stranger far distant from where they stood. So if you ask me whether I remember the scenes of my childhood, and the castle, and those mines, my answer is that there are other memories that have come to fill my thoughts. Not that these things prey upon me: but I said to myself when I came to this country that I would never go back home. You have to choose your ground…but please…’

          His voice, which had been low and even, took on a note of concern; his face became solicitous.

          ‘You won’t have any…?’

          While giving this account of himself, he had contrived to eat his way through most of my breakfast; a lone piece of half-charred buttered toast remained, and when I shook my head he pounced on this last survivor and it too vanished, stage by stage, into the corner of his mouth.

          ‘An unusual tale for the morning in Outback Queensland,’ I said.

          ‘But there are hundreds of us, you know, refugees of 1956, scattered throughout the bush. I can give you addresses – in Quilpie, in Newman, or Broken Hill. Come back tomorrow and I may even tell you the story of how I reached Australia.’

          As he left me, he extended towards me a folded slip of paper.

          ‘Three dollars and sixty cents’ he had written out at the foot of the itemised account, which was signed with a little flourish:

‘Szelenyi S., Prop.’ ”

           Earlier in the story, we learnt how kite-hawks swooped down on the explorer Leichhardt’s companion, ornithologist John Gilbert, in what seemed to be an omen of his subsequent death at the hands of Aboriginal tribesmen. In this extract, the hero has followed Leichhardt’s trail to the bank of the Lynd River, where we again meet the birds of Fate.

         “In the shade of some flowering grevilleas and ancient paperbarks I lay down on the thick sand, which had been churned up everywhere by cattle-hooves. Great dragonflies, with shimmering wings, hovered in pairs before me. There were few signs of civilisation in the riverbed; scoured and flattened aluminium cans, a shard or two of dark brown bottle-glass and in the undergrowth close by a discarded cigarette pack, lying beside a new-spun spider’s web. Along the causeway, ribbed iron side-struts had been laid down to strengthen the concrete against the force of wet-season floods – but these had long since been twisted out of shape. Upon the far bank, a herd of Brahman wandered listlessly; at a bend in the river, a half-rotted bullock carcass was outstretched.

I was turning, disconsolately, to climb the bank, when I had the sense of someone watching me – or so I imagined for an instant. I shook my head – all day, all through that drive in vacant country, when I should have been most at peace and free from thought, I had been uneasy, on some edge inside myself.

It was then that I heard a mewing call from one of the highest gum-trees above the river: a quick, falling scale of notes, and a kite-hawk soared above my head into the sky. Doubtless, I decided at once, it was a descendant, many generations distant, of the birds that had followed Leichhardt, and that were ever-present as the harpies of his imagination. How, though, to make true contact with the thoughts of those, like him, who have gone before us, whom we have lost, and those still living, those passing from our lives, as all passes – ideas, impressions, memories – until no solid thing remains? It was on the Lynd, as I liked to read the story, that Leichhardt had gone through his own stage of crisis and decision: had staked his life, right there upon the river where I stood, in return for fame, for glory, and intimations of the inland.

And what would I have wagered in his place, I wondered, as the kite-hawk flew above me, then came to rest again, and gave its whistling, yelping cries. What would have been dear enough to me for me to give my life?

I heard the bird’s calls, in their sharp, repeated pattern – a soft note, and a series of falling cries, always three or four of them. Then, at once, as if the landscape had just confessed its deepest secret to me, I knew: I knew the wager, the game that the explorer played, a game with the kite-hawk, of life and death. Three calls from the fatal bird meant No to one’s desire; and four, Yes. Three calls, and he would throw himself down; four, and he would live. He had made his pledge, then listened for the kite-hawk: and the bird called out those four cries, and cast its boundless shadow over him.

Even as these intuitions were running through my head, I had climbed my way up the Lynd’s bank to the crest of a sand-cliff, where I paused, with a steep drop to the rocks and pools below me, to catch my breath. My heart was pounding; sweat dropped from my eyebrows; I was dazzled by the sunshine, dazed from the heat, and from so long spent in that landscape, driving, staring out at the horizon. This, then, was what I had been journeying towards: the ragged bush; a silent river-channel; the explorer’s trail of emptiness. I closed my eyes; the light was pulsing against my eyelids. A pleasant, hazy faintness was stealing over me – it strengthened. After a while I became conscious of a sound, like the dry breeze inside the paperbarks. It came from a great distance, and it was close beside me, a soft voice, murmuring the same words over and over: ‘Your life is spread before you,’ it was saying – and as I heard this, and made out the words, I felt a wave of sadness overwhelm me. ‘All you ever wanted,’ it was saying. ‘Your life itself.’

Judgement being passed on me. But whose – and why? Why now, so deep in the stream of life; why here, out in the backblocks? How ridiculous the whole thing was, how arbitrary.

In a calm, dismissive way, out loud I said: ‘With one thought, I could do away with this’ – and even as I spoke, and heard my voice, and heard the fear inside it, I understood the danger.

Then, very clearly, came the kite-hawk’s whistling call: that first call – it seemed full of every warm and tender feeling I had ever felt, hope, care, forgiveness – and, in quick succession, the short, descending cries, one, two, three of them – only three – then nothing. Three calls, for nothingness. ‘Three calls, and he would cast himself down.’

I listened, in the sudden silence, full of regret. And so, I whispered, this, now, is the end of my journey. I closed my eyes, I leaned into the bright abyss, and then above me, a fourth time – there had been, in fact, only the briefest of intervals – the kite-hawk cried.”              

Nicolas Rothwell