KELI MUTU: THE LAST ADVENTURE

Sean, Thierry and I made an early start to climb up to the summit of Keli Mutu¹ in time for the sunrise. We left the Losman² at 2:50 AM and walked up the road to where a path led down to a small stream and a waterfall then began to climb steeply up the mountainside. Thierry set a cracking pace up the narrow path which initially led up through farmland and a couple of small villages, still asleep at this hour. We had torches to help light our way but the moon was almost full and gave plenty of light to see by.

After about 20 minutes of manic climbing, I had to stop for a breather as the pace Thierry was setting was too fast for me. Sean went on but stopped up ahead and waited for me while Thierry carried on without us, evidentially trying to prove something or other to himself!

Sean and I reached the summit road at the six-kilometre mark at 3:40 AM and it took us another hour to walk from there up the seven kilometres of easy-graded tarmac to the summit of Keli Mutu. The air was cool without being cold and it was quite a pleasant climb under the soft silver glow of the moon and the brightest stars shining in the violet sky.

Further up the mountain, we entered a forest. The moonlight threw psychedelic patterns of tree ferns and bamboo down onto the surface of the road. As we approached the summit, the road began to level out and the rainforest gave way to pines. The air was tainted with the unmistakable smell of sulphur. The trees began to thin and open out onto a barren plateau. Above us and to the right, silhouetted against the sky, was the crater rim. We climbed up and peered over the edge, down into the pit where a lake of mercury shimmered in the moonlight.

The entire scene was surreal, other-worldly. Beneath our feet was a skin of loose, rubbly scoria and pumice, blasted out of the crater (Kelimutu last erupted in 1968) then eroded and scoured by wind and water, and dotted with stunted bushes. The crater’s edge stood jagged and abrupt, dropping almost vertically to the limpid pool of the crater lake. Above us, the sky was a velvet dome, distant and cold yet seemingly close enough to touch. The silence was almost complete save for the gentle murmur of the wind across the volcano’s summit and it was easy to believe the local legend which says that the spirits of the dead find refuge beneath the surface of Keli Mutu’s crater lakes.

Thierry, waiting for us on the very top of the mountain, signalled to us with his torch and we made our way across the summit plateau to a concrete platform overlooking the two main crater lakes. It was chilly on the top of the mountain and the wind rapidly cooled the sweat we had worked up on the climb as we sat in silence and watched the stars begin to fade. The sun flew its colours on the eastern horizon; to the west, towering thunderclouds, piled into the stratosphere and lit from within by lightning, glowed pink and purple.

As sunrise approached the peace and solitude of the volcano’s summit was shattered by the arrival of two bus-loads of tourists including Linda, Trish, Ed and Michelle. As it turned out, the sunrise itself wasn’t particularly spectacularly. But given the location, atop a volcano with the water of two crater lakes changing colour from silver to green to grey and, finally, to a pale shade of turquoise, it was an amazing spectacle. Behind us, also in a deep, sheer-sided pit, the third of Keli Mutu’s crater lakes (Tiwu Ata Bupu – the “Lake of the Old People”) was a sinister black, its water opaque and glossy, its viscous surface hiding secrets known only to the spirits of the dead.

When the pressure of the tourist crowd and the jabbering of the bus drivers and flunkies became too much we moved from the main summit to another vantage point on the very lip of the crater where a narrow point jutted out above the jagged ridge of crumbling rock separating two of the crater lakes. The colours of the two lakes were almost identical but the northernmost lake carried a slick of poisonous-looking sulphur and, indeed, the water would probably be acidic enough to peel off the skin of anyone unfortunate enough to fall into it.

We took turns standing out on the point for photos then Thierry, Ed, Michelle, Linda and I set off to walk around the path leading along the crater rim past a sign which read: “Danger ouse. Do not go.” The path wasn’t in the least bit dangerous although if you happened to step over the edge there would have been no stopping a plunge of 100 feet into the acidic water of the lake.

It would have been nice to spend all day exploring up there on the summit of Keli Mutu, but Linda and I had to get back down to Moni⁴ in time to catch a ride back to Ende⁵. So, we said goodbye to Thierry on the rim of the volcano and it seemed an appropriate place for friends who have shared such adventures⁶ to part: with handshakes high on a volcanic mountain with a shimmering crater lake behind us and an endless sky above.

We set off down the road through the trees and caught a last glimpse of Thierry on the ridge above us. The walk down took two hours and was pleasant on the upper slopes but by the time we reached Moni at 9 am I was quite worn out. We hastily packed our gear and caught a passing passenger truck that was headed down to the town of Ende. The trip was quite speedy being downhill and we were back in the Losman Ikhlas in time for a mid-day meal. We spent the rest of the day relaxing and were in bed early as our flight to Kupang, in Timor, was scheduled for 7 am next morning.

¹Keli Mutu (also spelt Kelimutu)is a 1,639-metre volcano on the island of Flores in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago.

²A small, family-run hotel.

³We had met up with a bunch of other travellers on our journey through the Indonesian archipelago.

⁴We’d spent the night in this tiny, isolated village at the foot of Keli Mutu.

⁵Ende was the nearest town to Keli Mutu and it’s airport was where we would fly further east to the island of Timor where we had booked flights across to Darwin in Australia.

⁶Since meeting this eclectic group of travellers we had climbed the volcano Batur and visited the dead bodies of Trunyan on Bali: snorkelled off the dragon island of Komodo; seen a boat full of people sunk by a whirlpool off the island of Flores; witnessed the prehistoric spectacle of the Komodo Dragons dismembering a goat; and travelled through the islands scattered like green and black jewels across the blue endlessness of Eastern Indonesia)

THE GATES OF HELL

Out here nothing changes,
Not in a hurry anyway.
You feel the endlessness,
Running from the light of day…
– Goanna, Solid Rock.

East of Borroloola the back left tyre of my four-wheel-drive exploded. I was driving fast, too fast, probably, on a hellish stretch of road riven by pot-holes and deep puddles of bull-dust. The corrugated surface was so rough that I was unaware the tyre was disintegrating until I felt the automatic transmission change down a gear and realized the back corner of the vehicle was sitting low. By then I had driven several kilometres on the flat tyre and all that remained of the outer wall was a few hot shards of steel fibre and charred rubber. The rim was pitted like a golf ball.

I unpacked the tool kit and one of the two spare tyres I was carrying. The handle of the bottle jack was missing so I spent the next hour sprawled in the dirt beneath the vehicle, winding the jack up with an adjustable spanner. Once the ruined wheel was off I had to dig a hole in the road beneath the hub in order to get the spare on. I was covered from head to toe in bull-dust, grease and sweat. Even the flies wouldn’t come near me. I dusted myself off and continued on towards Hell’s Gate.

Beyond Wollogorang cattle station I crossed the border between the Northern Territory and Queensland. The sun was incandescent in the blue dome of the sky; the ground too hot to stand on in bare feet. The border itself was nothing more than a cattle grid set into a post and wire fence which stretched off into the bush and was soon swallowed by the trees.

Hell’s Gate turned out to be a far more pleasant place than its name suggests. I parked outside the Hell’s Gate Roadhouse in the shade of a spreading magnolia tree which shed its fragrant petals like desert snow. The beer was icy cold, the girl running the place was charming and friendly, and the Barramundi Burger I had for lunch was the best food I’d eaten since Darwin.

It was the sometimes bloody history of early European settlement which gave the outpost its ominous name. In the late 1800’s police stationed at nearby Corinda provided regular escorts for Territory-bound settlers as far as the rocky escarpments of Hell’s Gate, refusing to accompany the travellers past this point because of the fierceness of Aboriginals in the area.

Later, on an arrow-straight, red dirt stretch of road scraped through the bush, I was breathalysed by a pair of Queensland Police officers. Their white 4WD was the first vehicle I’d seen all day.

“You’re a long way from home,” the policewoman said, looking at the Victoria plates on the front of my vehicle.

“Further than you think,” I replied.

“Oh, you’re a bloody Kiwi,” said her burly partner, whose suntanned arms looked like truck axles. They checked my licence and I blew into a gadget which confirmed I wasn’t some drunken lunatic driving around out in the bush alone. A battered Toyota Landcruiser laden with grinning Aboriginals from the nearby Doomadgee Community pulled up and the police lost interest in teasing me.

Burketown (pop 230) shuts its shops early. I booked into the Burketown Pub – “the oldest pub in Queensland” – and by 5pm it seemed virtually everyone in town was at the bar. The English barmaid, Sophie, in a neat inversion of the Kiwi bartender in London, had applied for the job – board, lodgings and an air ticket from the east coast – when she ran out of money in Cairns.

I swallowed an ice-cold glass of Toohies New beer while some of assembled drinkers ribbed me about the destroyed wheel bolted to the back of my 4WD.

“Ya won’t be geddin’ that one fixed mate,” said a stockman sitting under a wagon wheel-sized Akubra hat.

When I asked him the way to the Burketown Salt Flats he nodded his hat towards the horizon and said “Just drive that way till you don’t see any more cane toads.”

In the darkness before dawn next morning I drove out past the edge of town. The road crumbled into furrows then into a single pair of wheel-tracks leading out onto the salt flats. The headlights cast twin pools of light onto the flat, featureless ground ahead; everything else was black as if I was driving into a void.

The salt flats were the quietest place I have ever been. I was the only living thing out there that morning. Nothing moved apart from vague air currents too insubstantial to be called wind. The surface of the ground was cracked like a reptile’s skin and the cool air possessed a vague odour of phosphate. It was so still I could almost feel the movement of the Earth.

A sliver of moon, attended by a pair of planets, hung in the eastern sky which was washed pale pink by the approaching sun. Soon, the heat would begin to rise and I would be on the road again, driving into another day of Outback adventures beyond the Gates of Hell.

CROCODILE COUNTRY

Out where the river broke,
The bloodwood and the desert oak…
– Midnight Oil, Beds Are Burning

At Roper Bar I was swimming with crocodiles. And not the harmless freshwater variety, either. These were the real deal: big ‘ol, bad-tempered, drag-you-under-and-drown-you saltwater crocs. The sort of creatures only Crocodile Dundee could handle.

I had joined pilot Paul Smith and his friend Brigit, both of whom worked at the nearby Ngukurr Aboriginal Community, for a swim where the Roper River tumbles over a rocky slab of granite which gave the area its name. As we lolled in the cool water, Paul’s eyes constantly scanned the river for the tell-tale ripple of an approaching croc.

“We’re fine swimming here in the shallows as long as someone watches the river,” Paul said. “But out here you should never swim alone or even go near the water unless someone has told you it’s safe.” Of course where crocs are concerned, “safe” is a dangerously loose term. So when the setting sun began casting shadows on the river, making it harder to see into the water, I was happy to return to the campground and leave the Roper in the care of its Silurian masters.

Dawn in the Australian Outback is always heralded by the strangled gurglings, maniacal cackling, rasping, clicking and guffawing of birds. As I lay awake in the pre-dawn darkness, a pied butcherbird sang limpid notes in the tree above my tent, like a bell tolled in liquid. I rose at 5.30am, lit my petrol stove and ate peaches out of a can while the water boiled. One of the simplest pleasures of travelling in the bush is waiting for the billy to boil for a dawn cuppa. A pair of whistling kites eyed me from a tree-top as I broke camp.

Beyond Roper Bar the road became absurdly rough: corrugations, bull-dust and potholes you could lose an oil drum in. After an hour or so I stopped at the Tomato Island fishing camp. Mick and Rita Caulfield were mooring their aluminium dinghy beside a concrete boat ramp leading down to the glassy Roper River. Mick held a big barramundi Rita had caught. They invited me to visit their nearby camp.

Mick, stocky and graying, was a motorbike mechanic; Rita was a nurse who worked part-time at the Ngukurr Community, a five-minute boat-ride across the river. We drank coffee and they told me how they had quit their busy lives in Melbourne for the solitude of the Northern Territory bush.

“We went away for twelve months,” Rita said. “That was two years ago and we’re not ready to stop yet.”

“We spent the Wet (the rainy season) in Darwin last year,” Mick added. “Might settle down there when the time comes.”

Later, Mick took me upriver in the dinghy to see the wreck of the Young Australian. The bush grew down to the water’s edge; the river hid its secrets (and its terrors) beneath the glossy, opaque surface.

The wreckage of the boat, run aground at night by a drunken crew in 1873, lay against the upstream edge of a rocky islet. The rusted boiler, with its fire-door agape, had the appearance of a half-submerged skull. I imagined the horror of a sinking boat, the men scrambling blindly in the darkness as the water swirled across the deck-plates, and a crocodile-infested river to swim to safety.

Beyond Tomato Island camp the road hugged the right bank of the river. The radio picked up a broadcast in Pidgin English from Ngukurr. I sat for a while beside a lily-covered lagoon and listened to thunder growl in the distance. But it was an empty threat and no rain came.

Later, I hiked alone through the Southern Lost City, where eons of erosion have sculpted the hard granite into a natural architecture of towers, abutments, arches and grottoes. The hot wind had desiccated the surrounding bush and everything felt tinder-dry and lifeless.

I reached the dusty, red-sand township of Borroloola in the late afternoon. I had a cold drink at the local store, called home on the satellite phone, then drove out to King Ash Bay fishing camp, situated where the McArthur River drains languidly into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

I pitched my tent overlooking the river then retired to the Groper Bar for a beer. The bar occupied a rough corrugated shed with a big circular awning out back. Beers were served straight out of a rusty chest freezer. There were eleven other drinkers at the bar, mostly retired-looking gents in grubby singlets and shorts. A wall-eyed dog sprawled in the dirt.

The kitchen sold a range of fried food (is there any other kind at a fishing camp?) and as I worked my way through a giant steak one of the locals came over.

“That your tent by the river, mate?” he asked. I nodded and he continued. “If I was you I’d shift it back from the water a bit.”

I thought back to the Roper Bar and how I’d survived actually sitting in a river full of crocs. Surely I would be safe thirty metres from the river. Mick Dundee wouldn’t have been worried. Sensing my reluctance the old-timer glanced down at the hunk of red meat on my plate then back up at me.

“We’d hate to see you end up like that, mate,” he grinned. ”S’up to you but anything would be better than being eaten by a bloody croc.”

IRON AND GOLD

the emu-sextons pay me a last cursory glance…

At Menzies, a dead-on-its-feet mining town a hundred kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, I turn off the bitumen highway onto a rutted track bulldozed through the red dirt landscape of Western Australia. My rented car moves about on the loose surface like a schooner under sail on a rough sea. A cloud of ochre dust from the wheels obscures the rear view.

After an hour or so, a signpost points down an even rougher track leading through scrubby sand hills to the edge of Lake Ballard. The empty lake, its bed white with salt crystals left behind when its ephemeral waters evaporated, lies pressed under the weight of the hot sky. Waves of heat distort the flat expanse of the lakebed, where fifty-one skeletal figures stand immobile in the shimmering air. I leave the car parked in the sparse shade of a bloodwood tree and begin to walk.

The Inside Australia installation is a collection of metal sculptures set up on Lake Ballard in 2003 by English artist Antony Gormley. The sculptures are based on computer scans of the inhabitants of Menzies, rendered in alloys of iron, molybdenum, iridium, vanadium and titanium. According to his website, Gormley sought “to find the human equivalent for this geological place.”

“I think human memory is part of place,” he wrote, “and place is a dimension of human memory.”

Out on the lake bed, I am alone in my own dimension of heat, flies and sweat. The red mud of the lake floor, overlaid with its rime of salt, has dried and cracked like the skin of a reptile. It’s slightly sticky surface sucks at my jandals, which, in hindsight, were not the best choice of footwear for exploring the widely-spaced components of Inside Australia.

Each of Gormley’s works is set a distance of seven hundred and fifty metres from its neighbour. The footprints of previous visitors trace indistinct pathways leading from sculpture to sculpture in a long loop around the lake. From a distance, the sculptures are merely vague outlines: shadows caught in the distorted, iridescent air. Up close, they are eerie, with outstretched arms, protruding breasts and shrunken heads.

The midday sun casts foreshortened silhouettes of each statue onto the ground, simplifying their forms even further, like the charcoal rock drawings of Aboriginals. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadows change shape and size, each one describing a sun-dial ellipse around the sculpture’s feet.

It takes two hours for me to complete my circuit of the sculptures. Back at my the car, my sweat- and dirt-stained reflection in the windscreen looks vaguely like a component of Inside Australia, seared by heat and light. I start the engine and let the air-con revive me before returning to the road.

As afternoon cools into evening, I walk alone through a deserted desert town. Whereas at Lake Ballard I had seen human shapes inhabiting an empty landscape, here in the abandoned mining town of Gwalia I walk through an urban space devoid of human forms.

The timber and tin buildings stand sway-backed and forlorn beneath the empty sky. Front doors hang agape in their frames, giving views down the throats of hallways to the rooms inside. Windows stare sightlessly out across the dusty street. A pair of morose emus, like feathered sextons in a kindling cemetery, watch me in a desultory fashion as I wander the ruins.

From 1897 until 1963, the Sons of Gwalia Gold Mine was the life-blood of Gwalia. The rough-and-ready township grew up around the nearby mine-shaft, which descended for a kilometre into the hard granite beneath the town. By 1910, more than a thousand people called Gwalia home. During its lifetime, the mine yielded 2.6 million ounces of gold: worth about NZ$2.4 billion at today’s prices.

But in the early sixties, the gold ran out. In December 1963, the owners closed the mine. Trains were dispatched to convey the remaining miners, their families and whatever they could carry to Kalgoorlie. Overnight, Gwalia became a ghost town.

The setting sun casts long shadows between the buildings. Inside the kitchen of a once-comfortable miner’s cottage, tiny shafts of light pierce the gloom through bullet-hole gaps in the tin walls. Cast iron pots stand on the long-cold stove; a table set with two plates and a fork sits askance on the disintegrating floorboards. Faded newspapers cover the walls in lieu of wallpaper.

Inside another cottage, books that will never again tell their stories stand on a shelf above a bed which will never feel the weight of a sleeping body. The roof is open to the sky. A glassless lantern, which will never light another night, hangs beside a back door opening onto the endless space of the Outback.

The grimy windows of Mazza’s Store – “Birthday Goods, Tobacco and Lino” – reflect the last rays of the setting sun as I sit on the store’s verandah watching the day end in Gwalia. Funereal crows, whose gurgling cries are the ghost voices of the Australian bush, perch in a nearby scribbly gum.

I imagine Gormley’s iron sculptures, radiating the day’s heat back into the air over Lake Ballard. Here in Gwalia, it is the past which radiates: in the deserted homes of the people who once gave this place a dimension of human memory. Their day’s work done, the emu-sextons pay me a last cursory glance before ambling off towards the abandoned pub.

UNDER THE SUN

You’re in by Karumba,
Where the fishing boats come in;
I can’t believe this feeling,
But I wish that I was there,
Every passing day…
– Goanna, Every Passing Day

Fifteen nautical miles north-west of Karumba the oppressive air presses down on us with an almost tactile force. Thunderheads massed on the horizon foretell a cooling storm to come, but for now the four of us aboard the Kathryn M2 are at the mercy of the monsoonal heat. The boat’s hull cleaves the water of the Gulf of Carpentaria with a sibilant hiss; the diesel engine thrums beneath the deck plates. We are making eighteen knots, heading back to port with our day’s catch: three decent barracuda, a black kingfish and half a dozen Spanish mackerel. Standing on the bridge, with a cold beer in my hand, I watch the green smudge of the Australian coast drawing slowly nearer. Behind us, the boat’s wake unfolds across the sea which lies like a sheet of obsidian beneath the luminous immensity of the sky.

Karumba is situated in the south-east corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria: the southernmost extremity of the Arafura Sea. Nearby, where the sluggish Norman River falls into the Gulf, a delta of tidal creeks and wetlands extend inland in a series of meandering saltwater estuaries. This mangrove-choked landscape is the habitat of estuarine crocodiles (the bad ol’ boys of the crocodile world) and a vast array of bird species. The Gulf is located on the migratory path known as the East Asian Flyway and hundreds of thousands of birds use the region as a jumping-off point for their flights into Asia and beyond. Flocks of eastern bar-tailed godwits, fresh from their summer on the Avon-Heathcote Estuary, at Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand, stop off to rest here en route back to their breeding grounds in Alaska.

The Port of Karumba was originally a refuelling and repair stop for the Empire Flying Boats, which connected Sydney to Great Britain. The aircraft landed on the stretch of the river in front of the town and during WW2 were the only aerial connection Australia had with the rest of the world. Karumba was also a Catalina Flying Boat base for the Royal Australian Air Force and the ramp onto which these amphibians taxied now forms one of the town’s streets.

I first heard of Karumba in the mid-eighties in a song called Every Passing Day by Australian band Goanna. At the time I was working on a High Country sheep station, deep in the heart of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. It was a world of sheep dogs and horses, hobnail boots and musterer’s huts, harsh winters and late snows. For me, Karumba was out on the edge of the world, about as far removed from the High Country as it was possible to get. Lying on my bed in the shepherd’s quarters, listening to that song while the nor’ west wind shrieked around the eaves, I imagined steaming mangrove swamps, crocodiles and tidal mud, fishing boats coming home in the sunset and endless, punishing heat. Karumba seemed like the sort of beyond the pale place I would never visit. And yet, in one of those strange twists that life can take, here I was, sailing home to Karumba after a day’s fishing on the Gulf, with the first flickers of lightning exploding across the sky and the air heavy with the scent of rain.

By the time we reach shore it is raining: a heavy, blattering downpour which pock-marks the opaque water of the river and runs in deluges from the scuppers. We adjourn to the Sunset Tavern (one of the few places in Eastern Australia where you can watch the sun set over the ocean) to relive the day’s escapades. Outside, sixty millimetres of rain falls in less than an hour. By nightfall the storm has moved on and a watery sliver of moon hangs in the sky.

Karumba is the southernmost port on the Arafura Sea: surely the most evocatively-named sea in the world. The name is redolent of pirates and pearling luggers, of spice islands and hidden mangrove coastlines. It’s the sort of sea that a character in a Joseph Conrad novel would set sail across: “blue and profound, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle, viscous, stagnant, dead.”

Prior to the European discovery of Australia, the Arafura Sea was the haunt of Macassan fleets from the Celebes Islands. The Macassans harvested beche-de-mer (a type of sea cucumber resembling a black, tumescent penis) which they cured on the beaches and sold to the Chinese as an aphrodisiac. Later, pearl divers came, then shrimp fisherman. Today, Karumba is home base for Australia’s largest shrimping fleet.

The day after my fishing trip is a Saturday. Nothing much is happening in Karumba. A few fishing boats come and go at the pier; the tide rises and falls among the mangroves and mooring ropes along the Norman River; mirages shimmer on the asphalt road leading out of town and into the Outback. Ceiling fans stir the tepid air in the Animal Bar of the Karumba Lodge Pub; next door, the Suave Bar is empty. I sit in the shade of a spreading fig tree outside the Post Office drinking chilled orange juice from a plastic bottle. Ants are nesting in a crack in the concrete sidewalk. A girl arrives in a dusty 4WD and empties the mail from box 71 of the 233 red mail boxes set into the wall. Magpie larks play in a listless, desultory fashion on the blue and orange phone boxes.

All day thunderheads have grumbled out on the plains. The sun is incandescent in the pewter dome of the sky. As afternoon wears on the heat grows more and more oppressive. Mosquitoes feed on my exposed skin and flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos fly screeching from tree to tree. It is as if the natural world knows something is about to happen and is restive.

As the sun begins its descent into the sea, the horizon is shrouded by roiling clouds. Bolts of lightning jump earthward from the black belly of the storm. The atmosphere seems charged electricity and heavy with moisture. This is the real deal: the full spectacle of heat, convection, air masses, water vapour, static electricity and raw energy. The sun has gone out. All that remains is a pale, flat, eerie glow which casts no shadows. Huge knives of lightning slice the sky, thunder detonates overhead with ear-shattering force and the air turns the colour of soot. As the storm rages all around I take off my shirt and let the rain beat on my bare skin like a benediction.

Karumba is the sort of place which epitomises the adage “the journey is the destination”. You need to make a real effort to get there by driving west from Cairns through 800 kilometres of empty Outback. And, let’s face it, there’s not a lot to see once you’ve arrived. Sure, people come from all over the world for the excellent fishing. Campers spend months at the Sunset Point Caravan Park just doing nothing. And there is a zinc smelter to visit if you’re really stuck for entertainment.

But the real attraction of visiting a place like Karumba is being on the edge of the world. Tropical towns by the sea have a different feel to inland places. They look outwards, towards the emptiness of the ocean, away from the security and certainties of the land. For me the pleasure of being in Karumba lies in simply watching the sun set over the sea while the Sunset Tavern regulars, oblivious to the solar spectacle outside, gamble on television horses racing in other parts of Australia. It lies in the thrill of watching the violent arrival of a tropical storm after the ennui of a 45 degree day. And, best of all, it lies in the pure, unexpected delight of being in a place I have dreamed of for so long.

In Karumba I can smell the warm breath of Asia. Across the narrow waters of the Arafura Sea lie the jungle islands of Irian Jaya, the coral atolls of the Moluccas and the teeming shores of Indonesia. Yet even this close to Asia I am rooted firmly in white Australia. Satellite dishes beam the latest news of the world into town; every meal comes with chips and beetroot; men in grubby shorts and tee-shirts drink copious quantities of Victoria Bitter beer from ice-cold glasses; and, on the edge of town, Aboriginal people move like ghosts in their own land.

On my last evening in Karumba I drift down to the Sunset Tavern to watch my final Arafura sunset. Day ends suddenly in the tropics. Sunsets are always brief but spectacular. I sit on a rocky outcrop, still warm from the day’s heat, as the sun sinks inexorably into the sea and the sky turns the colour of spilled blood. Distant thunder clouds, piled on the horizon, are lit from within by strobes of lightning. As the sun disappears, the colour bleeds from the sky, the sea fades from pink to indigo, and night comes down like a theatrical curtain.

I sit for a while in the gloaming listening to the pulse of the ocean. The incoming tide roars on the shoreline with a noise like a distant cheering crowd. Karumba had once been a place which existed only as a collection of images conjured in my imagination by the words of a song. But now that I have seen it, Karumba is real. It has been burned into my memory during the time I have spent out here, under the sun on the edge of the world. The ocean glitters in the starlight and I know that, for the rest of my life, I will go to Karumba in my mind, once or twice every passing day.

**Photographs are copies from the article I wrote for the magazine Avenues in 2005.**

FOOTNOTE: Goanna’s 1984 album Oceania is a forgotten masterpiece. Upon its release it failed to chart and quickly disappeared from view. I bought a cassette copy of the album in 1985 from a record shop in Timaru on the South Island of New Zealand. I have it still: worn out, spliced and almost inaudible after thousands of playings. Oceania was never released on CD and, until August 2020, was unavailable in any form whatsoever. But in September 2020, after my daughter asked me what my all time favourite song is, I discovered that a remastered edition of the album had appeared on Spotify. I am listening to it now. It is my favourite album of all time and the song Every Passing Day, upon which this story is based, is my favourite song ever. The story itself, which appeared in the magazine Avenues in 2005, won a QANTAS Media Award for Best Magazine Travel Story in 2006. I’d like to return to Karumba some time soon, to smell the warm breath of Asia and watch the passing days out there on the edge of the world.

MONUMENT

The tumult and shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dunes and headlands sinks the fire.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, is one with Nineveh and Tyre…
– Rudyard Kipling, Recessional.

And so I came, at last, to my final destination in India: the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. I had wandered through the stone garden of the Park Street Cemetery, sat quietly in the grand neo-Gothic St. Paul’s Cathedral and walked along busy, crowded Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road to the gardens of the Maidan.

The British loved to build. To them, as it was with most great empires, it was their buildings that spoke of their power, their cleverness, their capabilities. In the Victoria Memorial, the technology and vision that they had perfected over the previous century or so came together in what is, to me, one of the greatest buildings in the world.

Completed in 1926, the Victoria Memorial was commissioned by Baron Curzon, the Viceroy of India, as a monument to Queen Victoria, who had died in 1901. It was designed by the British architect William Emerson, who also designed the lovely blue-domed buildings at the University of Allahabad that I had loved so much ( see my earlier post The Blue Dome ), and its foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales, later King George V, on January 4^th, 1906. A public subscription was opened to pay for the building’s construction and the entire project was financed by donations.

It was designed to be not only a fitting monument to Queen Victoria but also a museum: a place where future generations could come and experience the history and power of the British Raj. To this end, its anti-chambers and rooms were filled with paintings depicting the great moments of Indian history; with weapons used in the great wars fought by its rulers; and with sculptures of the great men who forged the Empire. As Curzon had put it:

Let us, therefore, have a building, stately, spacious, monumental and grand, to which every newcomer in Calcutta will turn, to which all the resident population, European and Native, will flock, where all classes will learn the lessons of history, and see revived before their eyes the marvels of the past.

But nothing lasts forever. By the time the monument was completed, the Raj’s seat of power had been transferred to Delhi. For all its grand colonial buildings, Calcutta had become a provincial capital. And the world was changing. The Great War had wrought rifts in the Empire from which it would not recover. The Empire was beginning to fade, just as the Persian poet Omar Khayyam had prophesied in his oft-quoted Rubaiyat:

Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai,
Whose doorways are alternate night and day.
How Sultan after Sultan with is pomp,
Abode his hour or two, and went his way…

These were words that Kipling had echoed in his poem Recessional, written to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. He foresaw, just as Khayyam had, eight hundred years before, that all empires will eventually fall, leaving nothing behind but the buildings that the sultans, the emperors and the kings had built in their own names.

I walked slowly around the perimeter of the building to its grand front entrance. A marble bridge, designed by Emerson’s assistant, Vincent Jerome Esch, spanned a lake of reflective green water. Atop the bridge, a sculpture of Queen Victoria, resplendent in the ceremonial robes of the Star of India. I took out my phone and recorded a Snapchat of what I was seeing.

And here she is, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, sculpted in bronze towards the end of her life when she was fat, half mad and clinging to life. And you’ve gotta hand it to the Brits. When they built, they built big. They liked to build these massive edifices that said “look at us, look how fucking good we are.” Of course the Germans also tried that during the nineteen thirties with those square, box-like, blocky buildings of Nuremberg and Berlin. But they just ended up looking stupid, overdone and megalomaniacal. The Victorians combined Mughal architecture with their high-tech construction methods and sense of scale and proportion in order to create buildings like this which still look beautiful a hundred years later.

Nearby, bas-relief panels of burnished brass told the tales of India; of Sepoys and servants, Nawabs and Kings. A sweep of vast marble steps cascaded from the memorial’s entrance like a pure white waterfall. I climbed to the door and words failed me. To my Snapchat audience I said:

You walk inside this memorial to Queen Victoria and it just leaves you speechless. So I’m not even going to try to describe it. I’m just going to show you…

Later, outside in the garden, I stood beside a fountain, that quintessentially Moghul ornament, and looked back at the Victoria Memorial, framed by arcing, crystal jets of water. Bright red flowers grew in colourful profusion around the fountain’s perimeter. Crows balanced on the green-painted railings. Women in bright saris promenaded along the nearby paths beneath groves of peepal and guava trees.

I tried to think of some glib closing line to say: something pithy and intellectual to close off my broadcasts from India. But I had nothing. The monument had left me speechless. I took out my phone and launched Snapchat for the final time in India and said:

Well…I don’t think that I can top that, so I’m not going to try.
Goodnight everybody.

THE END

JAHANGIR’S GARDEN

…the tomb of Nithar, lies reflected in the shimmering pool.

In Allahabad I find a secret garden. I have been walking for hours: exploring the parks of the city’s centre, the exquisite domed buildings of the University, the sad, barricaded, derelict cathedral. I have fallen asleep on a concrete bench beneath a shady tree in Prince Alfred Park, and followed back streets through leafy suburbs. Now, I stand before a high wall of betel-splattered stucco. Inside, under the high blue dome of the sky, lies Jahangir’s garden.

Beyond the vaulted gateway, where vendors sell chai, puris and cold drinks, and a barber plies his blades on a worn wooden chair, a geometric pattern of flagstone pathways, lined with graceful palm trees leads towards a walled inner garden. Sprinklers shimmer in the midday sunlight. Families picnic on colourful blankets laid out in shady spots. Young men pose theatrically for photographs.

Inside the walls, three sandstone tombs, each of differing design, stand in a line flanked by gardens and flagstone paths. Begun in 1606, the tomb complex, known as the Khusrau Bagh, was designed by Aqa Reza, the court artist to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. The first tomb to be constructed was that of Shah Begum, Jahangir’s wife, who had died by suicide in 1604. Distressed by the enmity between her husband and their son, Khusrau (who had tried to usurp his father’s throne), Shah Begum had swallowed an overdose of opium. Her three-tiered tomb, surmounted by a rectangular divan, draws its inspiration from Fatehpur Sikri, the Mughal’s capital city in Northern India built by the first Great Mughal Emperor, Akbar.

I follow a path along the outer wall of the garden. There are rows of pale roses planted along the edges. Beyond the wall, in a grove of fig trees, goats graze on fallen leaves. Crows gurgle in the undergrowth. A couple of older men, the complex’s groundsmen perhaps, sit on a bench in the shade while a hose spills water onto a patch of lawn in front of them. The second tomb, the tomb of Nithar, Jahangir’s daughter, lies reflected in the shimmering pool.

The tomb stands on an elevated platform recessed with alcoves decorated with fretted stonework. Its central dome is flanked by four delicate cupolas. Some of the alcoves are closed with heavy doors of dark red wood. A group of schoolgirls, clad in white saris with colourful sashes, sit in a semicircle on another patch of grass in front of the tomb of Nithar.

I climb a set of steps set into the plinth of Nithar’s tomb and sit on a sandstone ledge beside a carved wooden door inset with iron studs. Flights of pigeons circled the dome of the third and final tomb, the Tomb of Khusrau himself. Khusrau Mirza was the Emperor’s second son. He rebelled against his father in 1606 in a bid to succeed the Emperor Akbar as the ruler of the Moghul Empire but was defeated in the battle of Bhairowal. He fled to Kabul but he was captured and taken to Agra where he was imprisoned.

In the Moghul world, succession wasn’t simply a matter of the eldest son inheriting the throne from his father. Rather, siblings competed against each other with intrigue, patronage and outright violence until a winner emerged. It was often the case that the sibling who gained the upper hand would have the rest of his family – brothers, sisters, cousins – put to death in order to guarantee that there was no one left to threaten his position.

In 1607, Khusrau was blinded as a punishment for rebelling against his father. Then, in 1622, he was killed on the orders of his brother, Prince Khurram, who had succeeded the throne and taken the title of Shah Jahan: possibly the most famous of the Mughal rulers.

I sit on the cool stone of Nithar’s tomb writing my notes and watching the scene below. A group of young people chatter and run. Beside me, the heavy timber door is weathered and cracked. Graffiti has been scratched into its blackened and cracked surface. The iron hasps and bolts are rusted and bent. The slow, inexorable hand of time has worked on the tombs, etching the history of years into every surface. The flights of pigeons circle the tombs and settle, momentarily, on the domes and cupolas before erupting into flight again to circle, wheeling in the high blue sky above Jahangir’s garden.

JOHN COMPANY

On the square plinth beneath his booted feet was carved one word: CLIVE.

It is sometimes said that Britain obtained its empire in a fit of absentmindedness. It wasn’t so much a desire to conquer and rule that motivated the British. Rather, it was more of a slow acquisition of territories by default: a kind of global game of pickup sticks where the sticks were colonies, countries and resources. At its zenith, the British Empire extended over 25% of the globe and contained within it a similar percentage of the world’s population. In school atlases, the pale pink wash denoting the countries and territories of the Empire was familiar to every pupil for generations. The sun never set on the British Empire and it was always time for a G and T somewhere. And the jewel in the Empire’s crown was India.

The British never set out to conquer India. It was actually a small company, housed in a nondescript building on Leadenhall Street in London, that set in motion the events that would lead to the control of the Empire’s greatest asset. That institution was called The East India Company.

On the 22nd of February, 1599, a group of merchants and financiers convened in a pub called the Nags Head Inn opposite the church of St. Botolph in Bishopsgate, London. Their aim was to establish a company to trade in spices from the East Indies, a trade dominated at that time by the Dutch and the Portuguese. Armed with a Royal Charter guaranteeing them exclusive access to all the seas and countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan, the East India Company, as it came to be known, began trading with the kings and rulers of Asia.

The risks involved were huge. Many ships were lost, along with their crews and cargoes. Piracy, danger, hardship and violence were the only factors that could be relied upon. But the profits were enormous. As its trading links with the rest of the world expanded, the company began gradually to establish footholds on the continents and territories it traded with. In India, the company’s first trading post, or factory as such outposts came to be called, was established at Surat on an inlet of the Arabian Sea on the western coast of the subcontinent in 1612. Bombay (now Mumbai) was added in 1668 and further factories were established around the entire coastline of India.

The company’s greatest factory was established on the Hooghly River, an exit tributary of the Ganges, in 1698. There were three villages in the area – Kalikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti – and the town that grew up around them took its name from one of them: Kolkata. Initially, the company built a fort they named Fort William on the eastern bank of the Hooglhy at Kolkata.

There were frequent skirmishes with the French in the region and the fort and factories were sacked by the Nawab of Bengal, resulting in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta incident, in 1756. But the town of Kolkata (or Calcutta as the British called it) survived and grew to become the seat of power for the company.

At the Victoria Monument, a vast domed marble edifice surrounded by fountains and gardens in the centre of Kolkata, I came face to face with the East India Company in the form of a statue. The subject stood resolute on its marble plinth. His eyes, set in a strong face with a rigid jaw and a slight scowl, stared rigidly out into the distance. In his left hand, he held a half-rolled scroll of documents; his right hand rested lightly on his sword. On the square plinth beneath his booted feet was carved one word: CLIVE.

Robert Clive (1725-1774), First Baron Clive, KB, FRS was the man who took the East India Company from a predominantly commercial trading company to a full-fledged military power with suzerainty over the entire Indian subcontinent. Prior to the Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which the company’s forces under the command of Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, the East India Company (or John Company, as it was informally known) had concentrated on trade. For one hundred and fifty years the company had been content with buying goods – predominantly spices and cotton – for shipment back to England. But Clive changed all that.

By the time of the Battle of Plassey, the EIC already had a substantial army, composed mainly of Indian troops known as Sepoys. The troops were used to enforce the company’s often unpopular regulations, to protect its interests and assets and to generally ensure that what the company wanted, the company got. After Plassey, the company essentially became the rulers of India.

For the next ninety years the East India Company treated India like a cash cow, milking it of resources and establishing the highly dubious trade in opium which gave rise to the mid-century conflicts with China known as the Opium Wars. But all was not well in John Company. Since its zenith in the 18th century, the company’s profits had steadily declined. Its increasingly patrician (and, in many cases, oppressive) rule of the subcontinent had grown more and more unpopular among Indians.

In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, in which the sepoys rose up against their oppressors, the British Government took over control of the company. By then, the East India Company was in decline. Its assets were nationalised by the British Government. Its army, possessions and all of the machinery for administering and controlling India were ceded to the Crown.

John Company was finally dissolved on June 1st 1877. In an editorial, The Times commented that:

It accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other trading Company ever attempted, and such as none, surely, is likely to attempt in the years to come.

In my travels across India I encountered the legacy of John Company, and its successor, the British Raj everywhere I went. In the buildings, the railways, the bureaucracy; in the vast self-indulgent monuments, in the cemeteries, in the layout of towns and in the place names.

In the 1980s, a group of Indian entrepreneurs bought the rights to the name East India Company and established a clothing brand under that name. The company traded until the early 1990s when it too folded. In 2010, the moribund corporate name was once again acquired as the trading name for a clothing brand. Today, a British company trades under the name The East India Company, London. It sells tea, coffee, chocolates, nuts and spices. John Company still lives. It didn’t set out to create an empire. But it did.

CAPTAIN BLAKISTON’S WAR.

There is a simplicity and decency in a military burial, even in its plainest form…

I am not the first Blakiston in India. My ancestor, Major John Blakiston, served as an officer in both the British Army and with the East India Company from 1802 until 1814. His book Twelve Years Military Adventures in Three Quarters of the Globe gives a fascinating insight of life on the sub-continent as a soldier. Blakiston served under Arthur Wellesley, later to become the Duke of Wellington, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War and the book is dedicated to the Duke with the following words:

My Lord Duke. There is no one to whom I can, with so much propriety, dedicate these memoirs, as your grace; first, as being the most distinguished ornament of the profession to which I belong; and next, because I began and ended my Military career under your grace.

Blakiston had graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, London, in 1802. According to his entry in Hart’s Military List (an annual publication that recorded army personnel and their service records) he “proceeded to India as a cadet of the East India Company’s service being then on half-pay as a lieutenant in HM Services.

“ In 1803 he served in the campaign against the Mahrattas [sic] and was engaged in the battles of Assaya [sic] and Argaum, and at the sieges and assaults of Ahmednuggur and Gawilghur. At the suppression of the mutiny at Vellore in 1805 he directed the guns by which the gate was blown open.”

After his service in India, Blakiston spent almost a decade serving in military campaigns across the British Empire. When he left the army, he wrote several books, became a magistrate and, finally, a politician. He died on June 4th, 1867, aged 82 years (Blakistons are notoriously long-livers!) and is buried in the churchyard of St. Wilfred’s, Mobberly, Cheshire. His headstone bears the inscription:

IN MEMORY OF MAJOR JOHN BLAKISTON OF MOBBERLY
WHO DIED JUNE FORTH 1867 AGED 82 YEARS
IN YOUTH HE WAS A DISTINGUISHED SOLDIER
IN MIDDLE AGE AN ACTIVE POLITICIAN
THE PASSED THE EVENINGS OF THEIR DAYS IN RETIREMENT IN THIS PARISH
LOVED AND RESPECTED BY THEIR FAMILY AND NEIGHBOURS.

Walking among the tombs of the Park Street Cemetery I was struck by the tenderness of the inscriptions some of the tombs bore. Many of the graves were those of soldiers, mariners and men of business who had succumbed to disease, were lost at sea or who fell in battle. As was often the case, a subscription had to be raised among the victim’s peers to pay for his burial and the tomb in which he would rest for eternity.

Many of these men died far from home and from their loved ones. So it was natural that their comrades became their family. In his book, Blakiston describes a scene where a comrade is borne to his last resting-place after succumbing to a disease of some kind.

“Among the victims who fell, a sacrifice to the hardships of this period, was Lieutenant Rowley of the Engineers, a young man of the most admirable qualities and of first-rate talents. He was about six years my elder, and had considerable experience in his profession.

“Poor fellow! He expired in my arms. To one so young as myself, and unaccustomed to such scenes, this could not but be a most painful circumstance; but independently of this, I have always viewed a soldier’s death, on any other than the bed of honour, as a most melancholy event. I could contemplate the havoc of battle with composure, for the field is a soldier’s natural death-bed: but to see that manly frame, the energies of which have been gladly executed in its country’s cause, wasting away by degrees; to see the soldier yielding by inches, and with painful reluctance, that life which he would have willingly surrender in the field of battle; to see death, which he had openly defied perhaps in many a bloody field, stealing upon him unawares, has always been to me a painful sight.

“ I followed my poor friend to the grave as chief mourner. There is a simplicity and decency in a military burial, even in its plainest form… The deceased soldier is borne to his last resting-place on the shoulders of his comrades; the flag, under which he has fought and died, is the pall which covers his remains; the sword and other emblems…speak more than the most eloquent funeral oration…and the last volley seems to announce the entrance of the immortal part into the portals of eternity.”

Shafts on sunlight fall through the screen of palms and peepal trees growing in lush profusion among the tombs. The roar of the city is muted to a low hum. I can hear the ever-present gurgle of crows – the spirit-keepers of India – and the chatter of the women who keep the paths swept. An artisan stone-mason’s hammer keeps up a gentle, staccato tapping somewhere deep among the tombs. As a last resting-place, this garden of stone is perfect.

GARDEN OF STONE

…their brick bones stripped of stucco skin.

Beyond the pedimented gateway, the roar of traffic on Park Street fades to a low, susurating murmur. The flagstone path is slippery with moss and from the gentle rain tapping on the blue and red umbrella that the gatekeeper has lent me. The path runs directly from the entrance to the back of the cemetery, intersecting at regular intervals with the grid of other paths laid out with geometric British precision.

I am surrounded by a garden of rainforest greenery and stone. Tombs of sandstone and brick stand in tiered rows between the trees. Their minarets and columns, domes and obelisks are rimed with moss and lichen. Acid rain has etched the limestone with black, cancerous stains. Some of the tombs are crumbling, their brick bones stripped of stucco skin. A litter of leaves and palm fronds lies scattered across the ground.

Yet amid the decay and dampness there is a quiet dignity in these silent memorials. Their plaques of polished marble tell poignant stories of great achievement and lives cut short; of devoted and unswerving service to John Company; of camaraderie and bravery; of love and loss. And even though these memento mori are almost two hundred years old, their stories still seem fresh and vital.

Opened in 1767, the Park Street Cemetery is one of the largest non-church Christian cemeteries in the world. Its tombs and monuments have stood in silent remembrance for more than two hundred years while the world around them changed. It remained in use until the 1830s.

The tomb of Hindoo Stuart stands beneath a magnolia tree in a back corner of the Park Street Cemetery. It is a smallish domed structure built from a combination of stucco-coated brickwork and black marble decorated with carvings of various Hindu deities. It’s inscription reads:

MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES STUART
(KNOWN AS HINDOO STUART)
1758-1-4-1828
QUARTERMASTER OF THE 1st BENGAL
EUROPEAN REGIMENT & LATER COMMANDED
THE 10th ANDIS REGIMENT

Born in Ireland, Stuart was an officer in the East India Company and was well known throughout the Company as being one of the few officers to embrace Hindu culture. Stuart was not only fascinated by Hinduism, he saw it as the most comfortable way in which to live in the torrid, crowded, disease-ridden conditions of the subcontinent. He encouraged the English ladies of the Company to adopt the “elegant, simple, sensible and sensual” saris worn by Indian women instead of the heavy (and heavily engineered) iron busks worn by the white Memsahibs. He described these as “the prodigious structural engineering European women strapped to themselves in order to hold their bellies in, project their breasts out and allow their dresses to balloon grandly up and over towards the floor.”

When Stuart died, on March 31st, 1825, he was buried in the South Park Cemetery in a tomb styled on a Hindu temple. But although he had adopted Hinduism as his religion, ha had not completely abandoned Christianity, describing the deity Krishna to be: “the spirit of God who descends upon Earth for the benefit of mankind.”

Beyond the screen of foliage and branches I can see the glass and steel towers of the city. A pair of rabbits scamper across a patch of green grass inside a quadrangle of tombs. Funereal crows, like black-winged sextons, gurgle and squawk in the trees. I stop beside the middle tomb in a row of three: squat, triangular obelisks. The white marble plaque inset into its base has an intriguing inscription which reads:

Sacred to the memory of
Elizabeth Jane Barwell
(The celebrated Miss. Sanderson)
Married the 13th September 1776 to

RICHARD BARWELL. Esq
(the friend of Warren Hastings)
Member of the Council of the Hon. East India Co.
Died the 9th November 1778.
Aged about 23 years.

There is no indication as to what Miss Sanderson did to become “celebrated” but in the torpid, breathless, straight-laced (on the surface, at least) world of Kolkata in the early 19th century, I imagine it involved something steamy. As for Warren Hastings, he was the energetic Governor of Bengal who succeeded the psychopathic Clive in 1875. To be a friend of Warren Hastings”, as Miss Sanderson’s husband was, according to their plaque, was to be admitted to the highest echelons of power in the East India Company.

As I walk along the pathways I feel as though I am moving in slow motion, like a voyager returning from a distant galaxy to find that time has slowed down. I have a pocket full of technology and yet I am surrounded by the remains of a world that no longer exists. I stop to rest on the step of a colonnaded tomb surmounted by a graceful sandstone cupola. I take out my communicator and update my social media. I have a story to tell: a story that I discovered back in December while sitting in a café researching my trip…