Nicolas Rothwell - Journeys to the Interior

YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS FIRST travelling through the remote reaches of the inland, I embarked on long bush trips with a sense of anticipation at the forefront of my mind. Each expedition was a narrative unfolding: the landscape would reveal itself, its order and its patterns would speak in their own language, at every campsite new intuitions and promptings shaped themselves inside my head. But today, as I go down old, familiar tracks dirt roads into the far desert, creek crossings that lead the way into Arnhem Land a different emotion wells up inside me, an emotion which many explorers and travellers of the past seem eventually to have encountered and which they describe in their reports with a single, faintly misleading word: fear. It is fear, of course, but it is also exaltation, urgency, the dread that comes from being at the core of life. It is a fear that goes far beyond the anxiety of the solitary voyager, beyond the sense of conscious isolation that descends when the lights and signs of settlement drop beneath the horizons line. This fear has a glamour about it, a wild intensity it is linked to death, it feeds on silence, it is half in love with itself. How not to connect it with the scale of the bush, the colours there, the heat and wind and sun? It is the way that we reply to the stillness in the landscape; it can be deepened by the slightest incidents; it is fanned, almost insensibly, by mysterious sights and half-caught, unfamiliar sounds.

It was only after I had made a series of protracted journeys through the desert centre, the Pilbara and the savannah country of the Top End and Cape York, only after several seasons full of travels, that I began to feel this variety of fear, whispering, murmuring inside me, coming into clarity, composing itself and now as I glance back, it occurs to me that its arrival coincided with a number of striking experiences.

I remember climbing up, in the heat of noonday, to a rock cave entrance on a ledge above the Walsh River, north of Chillagoe. I reached the overhang and turned around to stare out across the valley: scrub, stone outcrops, gum trees, sand riverbed. In the recess of the cave was a human skeleton, with utensils, a revolver and a billy-can laid out neatly at its side.

I remember travelling soon afterwards with a friend of mine through distant desert, far from any tracks or traces of human presence. We camped in a gorge. The red ramparts rose above us on either side. There had been rain the grass, high and green, was swaying in the wind. Zebra finches flew close over our heads. I walked out, at evening, up the gorge and found a passage there, no more than a fissure in the rock. It led through the rampart of the range. After several steps I stopped. There, on the red wall, was a painted snake in white, blazing ochre, its body winding loosely, a painted black spear thrust through its neck.

And I remember also with great precision another trip I made And I remember also with great precision another trip I made in those days, out through the rock-platform country round Woodstock station in the far north-west, a region famous for its ancient rock art: an art of figures and maze-like geometric symbols, an art upon which fresh marks have been traced by weathering, rock cracks and deep, oxide stains. But that afternoon I went a long way past the platforms. I walked on for hours, over ridges, down creek lines, across claypans, until I came to something very like a natural amphitheatre. Every inch of the surface had been incised with patterns: the outlines of boomerangs and spearthrowers, ceremonial emblems, vast, detailed designs of animals. It was close, by then, to sunset. Smoke plumes hung low in the sky. The suns beams picked out the marks on the rock; they shimmered and abruptly there was movement everywhere. Fear held me; fear so deep I feel it still as I bring those moments back, in thought, to life. I retreated. Time passed, and gradually, once that journey and its events formed themselves into a shape inside my head, I came to realise what that fear was. Not just fear of the unknown, the strange, the sacred. No, it was an awareness of the landscapes depth and the presences that rest within it and as I look back, it seems clear to me that whenever I came close to such places in the inland, I could feel those presences nearby. There would be a shift inside me; I was less myself, less conscious of my own ideas and ways of seeing.

The same species of fear not terror so much as exaltation swept through me often when I was a child. I used to spend long summers in an alpine valley and explore there alone for days on end, up steep slopes, through mountain clearings, towards the tree line and beyond, where rock screes stretched away and peaks gleamed against the dazzling sky. That landscape was filled with its own presences; there were medieval castles, observation platforms with sharp gables, wooden huts for climbers seeking to scale the highest peaks the Bernina, the Bellavista, the cloudcovered Chaputschin. But I felt the pull more strongly of the pine forests and the valley floor. I was drawn into that world of filtered shadow, through which endlessly branching pathways led and in those shadows, when the sun was at a certain angle in the sky, I could see faces, figures, darting through the half-dark, moving stealthily about: companions, but also vengeful spirits, watching for any sign of weakness or alarm. To run, to hide, that was the natural thing but even then, in the gloom, with my fear at its height, I knew that I was looking into the heart of life, that there were codes and patterns before me, just out of reach clues to golden secrets, if only one could be brave enough to see.

All that was plain enough then, but schools and the grind of years and adulthood took it away. I still dream of those sights and intuitions now; indeed it seems to me we spend half our time on earth painstakingly retracing our paths, attempting to unlearn all we have learned, restoring the settings of the mind to the contours of our childhood and the best chance of insight comes precisely if we loop back to recapture our youthful selves and seek, as much as we can, to know with our experienced minds what we once instinctually knew.