A Long Walk Through a Short History

By Ian Hamilton

In the summer of 1981 Will Traverse set out to walk across the city of Brisbane; a journey that took him from an Aboriginal bora ground in the Samford valley west of the city, through the city centre, and on to a midden on Stradbroke Island.
At that time Brisbane, a small city under the yoke of an ultra-conservative state government, was transitioning from what many called that great big country town into what would become the two-hundred-kilometre city. Wills journey, through time and space, maps a unique portrait of a city and its people during this time of change.
Along the way he met many characters, including the last Samford dairy farmer and his dog, a woman who told him things shed held secret for too long, and an American soldier whod been stationed in Brisbane during the Pacific Campaign. There were many strange encounters, including a drunken game of racing peanuts, a conversation with six cane toads, and monsters in the night.
As he walked Will sometimes recalled events from his own past. Sometimes these memories were pleasant, some bitter-sweet, but there was one, concerning a visit to a place of evil, that haunted him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514497616

Ian Hamilton

IAN HAMILTON is the acclaimed author of sixteen books in the Ava Lee series, four in the Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung series, and the standalone novel Bonnie Jack. National bestsellers, his books have been shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada Award (formerly the Arthur Ellis Award), the Barry Award, and the Lambda Literary Prize. BBC Culture named him one of the ten mystery/crime writers who should be on your bookshelf. The Ava Lee series is being adapted for television. 

Book preview

A LONG WALK

THROUGH A

SHORT HISTORY

Ian Hamilton

Copyright © 2016 by Ian Hamilton.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016910730

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-9763-0

                Softcover        978-1-5144-9762-3

                eBook             978-1-5144-9761-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/15/2016

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

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CONTENTS

PART 1

1.   Ancient Pathways

2.   The Valley’s Gone to Pot

3.   Out of the Valley

4.   The Old House

5.   The Winding Road

6.   Racing Peanuts

7.   Mephisto

8.   The Empire

PART 2

9.   Cathedral of the Holy Name

10.   Encounter by the River

11.   Old Soldiers Die

12.   Woolloongabba

13.   Regret

14.   Last Tram to Belmont

15.   The Scream

16.   The Lonely Road

PART 3

17.   Quandamooka

18.   Where the Dead Lie Buried

19.   Midden

For Raymond Hedley

Also by the Author:

The Ceremony of the Golden Bowerbird: Playground for Paranoids, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 1983

Heart of the Country, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1996

Meanjin Crossing, Xlibris, 2014

PART 1

image002.jpg

Hand-drawn map showing the route of the walk.

Will’s journal.

Ancient Pathways

That old cowdungpossum smell! It hit me as soon as I got out of the car. That and a host of other aromas emanating from remnant forest, pastures, ploughed paddocks, and tangled creek-banks remembered from earlier visits to the valley. After the humid heat of the city I’d left only an hour ago, it felt good to be back. It was late afternoon and the sun was already sinking behind the western ranges. Lengthening shadows of trees fell darkly across the road.

The cab driver eased himself out from the car, stretched his tall frame and yawned. We stood there, me on one side of the car, he on the other, breathing in the surprisingly cool country air.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

I pointed to a gate in the barbed wire fence that ran alongside the dirt road. Beyond the gate lay the bora ground that was to be the start of my journey.

‘Mind if I have a look?’

‘Guess there’s no harm,’ I replied. ‘But first we need to make a noise.’

‘What for?’

‘To warn the ancestral spirits we’re coming,’ I replied, straight-faced.

He looked at me sceptically for a moment then offered up a high-pitched yell that startled me, and, possibly, any spirits who might have been watching. I waited until the reverberations from his call had died (cue the sound of ancestral spirits sniggering from their hiding places) then went through the gate towards the ring. The driver followed close behind.

‘Not quite what I expected,’ he said, gazing over a low earth wall that enclosed a flat circular space some thirty paces in diameter. ‘Way you talked, Will, I had visions of some grand historic site.’

During the long drive out from the city, we’d exchanged names. His name was Drago, which, he claimed, meant ‘precious’. Drago was anything but precious; he was a tall, big-boned Eastern European with a face like a rock who’d come to Australia a few years back, bringing with him far-right political opinions and a supercilious attitude towards anyone who wasn’t European, especially Aboriginal people, who, he claimed, lacked culture. This set me off on a defence of Aboriginal culture, about which I was no expert.

We drove through the last of the suburbs in silence, Drago possibly mulling over what I’d said. It wasn’t until we were into the hills that he broke the silence.

‘Where are we heading for?’

I told him we were going to a bora ground, which necessitated an explanation. I might have raised his expectations too high. To the casual eye there wasn’t much to look at; just a low mound of earth surrounding a flat open space. I could see why Drago wasn’t impressed. I tried to explain that there was more to the place than met the eye, but he wasn’t listening. After muttering something inaudible, and maybe even derogatory, he set off on a slow circuit of the ring. I watched with amusement as the big man went loping away, stepping round cowpats and stopping every now and then to examine various features, as if in the act of uncovering long-lost items of archaeological importance. Drago returned and stood beside me, puffing but clearly more impressed than he had been.

‘It is big,’ he offered. ‘And, well, it’s a bit like a circus ring, isn’t it?’

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but had to admit that he was right.

‘Hey!’ he called, pointing to the southern arc of the wall, ‘there’s a gap.’

I told him it was the entrance to a pathway.

‘Where’s it go to, the pathway?’

‘Leads to a smaller ring down that way,’ I replied, pointing towards the south.

‘Still there, the small ring?’

I told him I wasn’t sure, but that I was about to find out. This elicited a series of questions. How old was the place? When was it last used? Were there other rings like it? I didn’t know how old the site was, told him it could be hundreds of years, maybe more, that there were written records of white settlers attending bora ceremonies at the invitation of local tribes well into the 1860s, and that there were remains of other bora grounds in and around the city. He seemed impressed.

The afternoon was drawing to a close. I’d had enough of Drago and his questions, needed to be alone, to get on with what I’d come to do. I crossed over the wall and went into the centre of the ring, stood there taking in the surroundings. The ring was situated towards the southern extremity of the valley, not far from the base of a spur of the main range, whose pale blue peaks I could see, through breaks in the surrounding forest, away to the west. Far to the north, across the far side of the valley, another spur ran east before curving south at its eastern extremity. The undulating valley, criss-crossed by countless creeks and watercourses, was almost entirely surrounded by densely wooded hills, dark patches on the higher slopes indicating remnant rainforest.

I took out my journal and began a plan-drawing of the ring and its surrounds, including a large tree that stood just beyond the northern arc of the wall that looked old enough to have been there when the bora ground was last used. I paced out the site and entered the measurements into the drawing. Drago stood watching me, his big hands on his hips, his legs splayed. In the fading light, in his crumpled taxi-driver uniform, he looked like some cheap-to-hire security guard.

‘Guess I’d better be off then, mate,’ he called across the distance that separated us. Was there just a hint of sarcasm in the ‘mate’ bit? I packed away my journal and walked with him to the car. Drago opened the driver’s door, but didn’t get in immediately, just stood there looking at me in an odd way. There we were; two men about the same age, men with completely different backgrounds and attitudes, facing off beside a taxi on a lonely dirt road. Drago’s face, despite its chiselled features, was surprisingly youthful looking. It lacked the damage that the sun had inflicted on my own Irish-heritage mug. But beyond that relatively youthful façade, and the rugged toughness I’d noticed earlier, his eyes seemed to contain a deep well of pain, as if at some stage he’d suffered or witnessed great tragedy. For just an instant I felt empathy for the big man.

‘Sure you don’t want a ride back?’ he asked. ‘It’s a long way.’

I shook my head. Drago eased himself into the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘Mad bugger!’ he called as he swung the car around and sped off. I watched until the car had disappeared, then walked back to the ring.

‘Too old,’ I called to a cow grazing just beyond the far wall of the ring, ‘for this sort of thing.’

The cow mooed a tired reply then went back to eating grass. Strange things, cows; all that weight and strength just from eating grass! I was reminded of an occasion, many years ago, when I was with my father in the family Austin, driving along a narrow country road. At one point he pointed out the window and said, ‘See that lump of grass over there?’. I looked but couldn’t see any lumps of grass. All I could see were cows munching long grass in a wide paddock. I couldn’t work out what my father was on about. Then he chuckled, slowed the car, pointed to a cow chewing grass near the fence and asked, ‘What came first, the cow or the grass?’ So much for my father and his stupid jokes!

The heat from the day had gone. The birds, which had been noisy, were quietly settling in for the coming night. Cool air drifted down from the escarpment. Long shadows of trees fell across the earth and over the mound of the ring, emphasising its height. In that half-light the outline of the ring’s embankment was perfectly clear. I marvelled that something so old had survived for so long. With the land hushed to evening, with fence posts and wires faded into the background, it was easy to imagine a world before the coming of Europeans, to imagine men coming through wild and unpolluted country searching for a site on which to build a ceremonial ground like the one I stood on.

As a Boy Scout, I had hiked some of the back trails of the valley, including the higher slopes of the surrounding hills where leeches and snakes were plentiful. I knew how rugged and difficult that country could be. Much of the lower country had been cleared, making access to places like scouting campsites (our own initiation places) relatively easy, but when the bora ground was first laid out the undulating valley floor would have been covered in dense forests and criss-crossed by swift streams that ran year long. There would have been few cleared areas, except where the old people had burnt what flat ground they could find to flush out game. Standing beside that ring of earth, I tried to imagine what it would have been like for an Aboriginal boy from a distant tribe to have journeyed through such country on his way to this place of initiation. Unlike my own journey into the valley as a thirteen-year-old, there were no railways to carry him from wherever he’d come, no paved roads upon which to trek towards his initiation site.

While much of the valley had been cleared, the densely wooded hills along the valley’s eastern rim still formed a natural barrier between the valley and the city. But the city was growing fast. It would not be long before new suburbs eased their way, amoeba-like, through the lower foothills and into the valley. How long could what remained of the bora ground survive the onslaught of that looming development? How long would it be before that once-sacred site would be sold off for housing estates or hobby farms and the ring itself levelled? How long before there would be nothing left, apart, perhaps, from brief mentions in ancient documents hidden away in obscure library reference sections, the bora ground become just one more victim to progress? How long before imported lawn covered once-sacred ground, lawn kept neat by landowners on ride-on-mowers who had no idea that the property they so lovingly maintained had no lasting economic foundation, that the land they cherished would succumb, over time, to a returning bush that would, in some undreamed of variation of what had been there in the first place, reclaim the land?

Night came quickly, as it does in this part of the world, leaving me with an odd sense of foreboding. I was a long way from home, and with no means of communicating with anyone. Everything I had, apart from the clothes I was wearing, was in my backpack. This amounted to a water canteen, a spare pair of socks and underpants, some basic toiletry items, my journal and a few pens, some dried fruit, biscuits, a tube of condensed milk, a light sleeping bag, and a lightweight rain jacket; enough, I hoped, to get me through the first stage of my journey.

On a flat bit of ground just outside the ring’s embankment, I spread out my thin sleeping bag and lay down. I was tired and looked forward to sleep. But sleep didn’t come. The ground was hard, lumpy, and damp, the night cooler than I’d expected. I lay there listening to the sounds of the night: owl hoots, grunts and hisses of possums, the sigh and snap of dry branches, and other unidentifiable noises. And, at one point, an unnerving sense that I was being watched.

When I finally did begin to fall into a pre-dawn oblivion of deep sleep, the birds began, starting with the raucous laugh of kookaburras, followed by crows, magpies, butcherbirds, parrots, whistlers, whipbirds, and a dozen other species that at another time I might have taken an interest in. Beyond all that call and chatter, like some hardly perceptible but insistent bit bass player in a madly out of tune and misdirected orchestra, from out of the thickets along the creek, came the deep booming grunts of the pheasant coucals.

I rose from the hard ground, breakfasted from my meagre supplies, repacked and, steeling my resolve, walked into the middle of the ring. The same feeling of being watched that I’d felt during the night returned. In the early light, the large gum that stood close by the ring’s northern rim, which did indeed seem old enough to have stood witness to the last bora, assumed the form of a watching giant.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘I am the guardian of the ring,’ the tree replied.

‘So it was you watching me during the night?’

Silence!

I stood facing the guardian tree, waiting for some sign, some indication that what I was doing at the bora ground was acceptable to whatever spirits guarded the site. A waft of early breeze stirred the leaves of the tree. The sun rose from behind the eastern rim of hills. The first shadows of morning spread across the ground and over the ring’s encircling wall. I waited. Eventually, a call came from the tree, a loud falsetto cry that seemed almost human. The call rang in the air for a moment then declined to silence.

I had always thought there was something special about currawongs. They were birds of the high country, representatives of a pure and unpolluted world. I called up at the tree in a pathetic imitation of the bird’s call then waited for a response. After a long silence, an answering call came clear through the morning air, a long drawn-out and high-pitched note, seemingly of warning. Then the bird flew out and away, calling as it went. I watched the great black bird grow smaller and smaller against the blue, kept watching until it vanished into air.

I turned then and went through the narrow gap in the wall and onto the path. I hadn’t gone far when I was stopped by what felt like an invisible barrier. I recalled reading a description of a bora ceremony in which it was claimed that, following the rituals of the large ring, the boys were led by their guardians onto the path only to be confronted by women who blocked their path, that a great struggle ensued between the boys and their guardians and the women who tried to stop their progress, that it was only after much wailing and tearing of hair that the boys were freed from the women and allowed to continue their journey. The sense of being watched I’d felt during the previous night returned. I half-expected someone to appear and try to stop my progress, just as those women had appeared to momentarily impede the boys’ progress.

There were certain women who had tried to impede my own progress along the pathway through adolescence—people like my grandmother who sometimes saw shortcomings in my character. My mother, too, had sometimes tried to put barriers in my way. There were also teachers (not always of the female kind) who made things difficult. I did eventually break away from those women, just as the boys on their journey through the bora were able to break away from the women who would otherwise have held them back. There was a time, during the sometimes difficult passage through my early teens, when I looked for guidance almost entirely from male figures, just as the boys going through the bora looked to the men during and immediately after their own coming-of-age ceremonies.

There was, of course, no one on that bora path and no real impediment to my progress. In an odd way, I found that disappointing. Was I really looking for some sort of resistance? The ghost of my long-dead grandmother perhaps, urging me to be more sensible? My mother urging my pre-teen self not to be late home from one of the many sojourns on my battered bicycle into dangerous places.

With a shrug I pressed on along the pathway, trying to imagine what the bora ground might have been like when it was first laid out, the ground partly cleared, with rows of tall trees on either side of the path giving the impression of a cathedral aisle down which one might walk as to some sacred altar. While most of the older trees had gone, enough remained for an imaginative mind to picture the scene as it might have been when the silent boys were led along it.

Sunlight fell through the leaves, spotlighting clumps of grass, fallen twigs, wildflowers… Dark shadows fell across the path, creating cool lees where dew persisted. In more open parts the rising sun drew moisture from last night’s fall of humid air. Cicadas buzzed and small birds tweeted from the surrounding forest. Parrots shrieked from the taller trees. Coucals drummed from thickets. A breeze whispered through the treetops, a soft voice…

Once this was a vast and godless land without ceremony or ritual, without the necessary markers by which people could make sense of it; a world without definition, with nothing to define or