Amnesia Road: Landscape, violence and memory

By Luke Stegemann

'At both ends of the world, I have found confusion and profound disagreement about how to read the story of the past, about who should write or speak it, and what parts of it should be written or spoken about at all.'Amnesia Road is a compelling literary examination of historic violence in rural areas of Australia and Spain. It is also an unashamed celebration of the beautiful landscapes where this violence has been carried out. Travelling and writing across two locations the seldom-visited mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the backroads of rural Andalusia award-winning Australian Hispanist Luke Stegemann uncovers neglected history and its many neglected victims, and asks what place such forgotten people have in contemporary debates around history, nationality, guilt and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742244839

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There is an established tradition in European Australia of representing the continental landscape as a place not only of great physical size, but also of silence, deep and broad. Its towering beauty is undeniable, yet that same quality is said to hide spaces of mystery, fear and death. It is, in the original sense of the word, awful. It is stern and unfamiliar. Some landscapes, with their strident blues and benevolent greens and golds, are better known than others; they are sociable zones, well domesticated and for the most part polite. Others stand shyly, or privately, and observe the passing human traffic. Some regions and their landscapes are considered ugly, godforsaken and irredeemably plain. Others contain multiple threats: of terror, murder or extinguishment. In many parts of rural Australia a layer of unknowing exists, along with the uncanny sense that a second world, off to the edge of the actual, were attempting to make itself seen. There is a quiver of unease: what exactly happened here in the destruction first of an ancient culture, and then of the delicate environment upon which that culture lived and with which it productively interacted for millennia?

‘I have always been torn,’ remarks Wiradjuri writer and journalist Stan Grant, ‘between the sadness of my history and the beauty of my country.’ Grant insists – and many who have travelled the long reaches of the Australian continent will recognise this – that he can hear the land talking to him. But the voice is subdued. Australia is a place of profound subtlety and very beautiful shades of quiet. What is said to those who listen?

This book began, in part, as an act of listening, looking and recording. To begin to reconcile – not in the broader political sense, but at the level of the individual – that uneasiness experienced, that wondering amid the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and along the banks of drying rivers: what happened amid such insistently spectacular landscapes, and how much can we know? How to balance the beauty and the sadness, subjective and shifting though these might be? Along the backroads another question came, persistent: what does it mean to love an area of country that has been the sacred home of others – an area of country that has been little documented, and is mostly unloved by the arriving culture that displaced the original owners of the land – this moody pocket of the continent, a territory of wiry scrub, strutting emus and jealous dingoes, this place without indulgence or excess? Silence as a quality of remote landscape might only be metaphorical: a cultural invention. For there is always bellow, cry, crack and whistle; a tearing of bark and branches; the snap of a metal trap; the song of an opening gate. There is always the inch-work of root systems. At midday the world is at its stillest, but never for a second leaves off its pulse; at night the world is loud with stalking and flapping sounds, incessant burrs and buzzes, the hum of artificial light, the click-bolt-shot of a rifle, the crunch of dry sticks, the long call of the turning galaxy. Pumps are always at work in the middle distance, hauling water up from shrinking rivers; parents and children talk, argue and celebrate; the ignition turns on a semi-trailer; birds are ceaseless. If silence exists it might be the silence of loss, pain, loneliness and endurance – a stoic silence – for the living world, though quiet, is never silent. For all its surface appearance of size and emptiness, it never stops its bark and hiss, its millimetric wax and wane, its grunt and creak and very human sigh.

We might be wary of the process whereby landscape becomes writing – the elements lost in the transition, elements too garrulous or gossamer that will not pass into the realm of words. The non-urban landscape, passing from the farmed and sectioned semi-rural into the remote and apparently hostile country beyond not only becomes, in the popular imagination, more dangerous; it also becomes increasingly endowed with sacred qualities: wise trees and ancient rocks, the water of life, the rare intelligence of birds and animals. Landscape becomes a living being from which sustenance and nutrition is drawn, an energy that is not of the fabricated world: raw, undigested, a certain beauty in its possible brutality, a deep romanticism in its fragility. Yet nothing has taken up such firm residence in every landscape feature – mulga plain or wheat field, ironbark or olive tree – as the human past.

At the same time as these questions of clouded histories were troubling me, restlessly wishing for some exploration (if not resolution), I knew how pressing similar questions were in my beloved second patria, Spain – a country that, in common with Australia, is vigorously debating the shape and place of its history. There too, the veins of dialogue are webbed; the contours rise and fall between triumph and bloodshed, between pride and guilt, between the permanence of the granite monument and the fragility of unfinished business. There too, rural landscapes hold the dead to their earthy chests – the dead of whom it is uncertain how, or even if, to speak. Paradoxically for a nation of inveterate conversationalists, a reticence to speak of these matters blanketed much of Spain during the middle and latter part of the twentieth century, only for that reticence to break over recent decades as, post-dictatorship, the second and third generations on have insistently demanded an explanation for absences in the nation’s history. Unsurprisingly, both crimes and absences are more complex than popular opinion tends to prefer. Working through the debates in both countries around those multiple historical absences has helped me to consider each in a new light, for the cliché holds true that there is nowhere like elsewhere to make sense of one’s home. I continually asked myself a question that is both simple and bewilderingly complex: where did the present come from?

Exploring these questions, I have travelled the vast, neglected acres of south-west Queensland, backwards and forwards, in all seasons. Furthermore, my position as a boxing referee on the state amateur tournament circuit has taken me into the furthest rural expanses, from Cairns to Mount Isa, from Bundaberg to Cherbourg, from Barcaldine to the Darling Downs, officiating athletes at the grassroots, young men and women of every possible racial background. Queensland is where I was born, and the south-west contains the landscapes – from brigalow downs to mulga plains, then sweeping out to Channel Country – to which, in all the world, I feel the closest and deepest connection. Albeit in relation to a different part of Australia, artist and writer Kim Mahood has described this intense feeling: ‘the passion and hunger of an affair of the heart – a physical sensation in the body … a disorder of mind’. Certainly, obsession is involved, and love. Landscape is also psyche and self-portrait; it is what we project on to it, mirroring our mood, and mind, and the fashions of the day.

Most Australians know nothing of south-west Queensland, or are dismissive of its unschooled, unpolished prospect. Even amid the great restorative project of recent decades, the literary and historiographical renaissance that has brought European settlement and its frontier conflicts with Indigenous peoples under a forensic light and recast our national history in what most agree is a more just and balanced frame, this corner of the country has been largely overlooked. Contemporary national historians such as Tom Griffiths and Mark McKenna have built on foundations laid by Raymond Evans, Judith Wright, WEH ‘Bill’ Stanner, Pamela Lukin Watson, Inga Clendinnen, Henry Reynolds and Eric Rolls, to name a few. These in turn drew on the work of earlier observers from a range of disciplines: anthropologists AP Elkin and Charles Mountford, zoologist Francis Ratcliffe and writer Bill Harney; authors Colin Simpson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Arthur Groom, Ernestine Hill, Mary Durack and Alice Duncan-Kemp. Most of these relied, in greater or lesser measure, on a more direct and less mediated contact with Indigenous Australians than is usual today; some drew, too, on the layered and often beautiful writings of nineteenth- century explorers. The contemporary descriptive and analytical environment is both more politically charged, and constantly framed with procedural caveats; the result is a cultural landscape rich with writing that attempts – sometimes cautiously, sometimes boldly – to fill with meaning and compassion what were previously great absences in the divergent narratives of Indigenous history. Such efforts are led, naturally enough, by Indigenous writers themselves. Yet while much is known, and has been written, on the singular tragedy of Indigenous Tasmanians, or the infamous expansion of colonial settlement in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and other parts of Queensland, in the south-west of the state, moving from the Maranoa and Balonne regions further out, or in, through the Warrego, Paroo and Bulloo river systems, towards the halt and flow of Cooper Creek, there is mostly quiet even now.

I have also travelled the backroads of southern Spain, into still villages beyond the tourist routes, past goat tracks and sanctuaries, through the vast mosaic of olive groves and rural industry, from the Atlantic-blue perspectives of Cádiz to the glittering and holy streets of Seville. I have sought to understand what lies below the surface of the present, and to know the moments that trouble the recent past. What itches have not been scratched, what skeletons not becalmed? I have found towns and rural landscapes at either end of the world uncomfortable beneath an apparent shine. Sites of spectacular modern tourism, along with others of complete abandon, sit atop terrible body counts. Thousands lie, uncelebrated and undocumented, under foreign or native soils. I have come across unspeakable pain and cruelty buried in the back corners of rural cemeteries. Some resting places are covered with weeds and broken concrete, some with fresh roses; some carry no recognition at all. Some are marked by stones, or a rusted bed frame. Countless bodies lie beyond the cemetery gates, in gullies and dry rivers, in sand hills, under ancient trees. At both ends of the world, I have found confusion and profound disagreement about how to read the story of the past, about who should write or speak it, and what parts of it should be written or spoken about at all. I have found, in both places, a clear though by no means universally accepted charge of genocide laid at the feet of governors, generals, soldiers, mercenaries and settlers. Strange parallels abound in histories of killing and incarceration, of political tyranny and, not least of all, of institutional forgetting. In both places, I have found people of undeniably good faith for whom these considerations have no daily relevance whatsoever, while others have made the resolution of these questions their life work.

This book employs two scenarios – the mid-nineteenth- century pastoral frontier of south-west Queensland, and a series of early twentieth-century civilian massacres in southern Spain – as pathways towards examining the ways history is turned over and inspected, sometimes with fascination, sometimes with disgust, and its angles then polished for specific cultural and political purposes. Both scenarios are at the centre of contemporary debates around the need to tell, and approved methods of telling, troubled – perhaps better to say infamous – aspects of national history. The accounts given herein of violence and dispossession in both places are by no means exhaustive – even were such a thing possible – yet they do presume to be representative.

For all their distance in time and space, the two scenarios have much in common: the use of indiscriminate violence; the widespread murder of people of all ages, including children; the rape and systematic humiliation of women; the destruction of resources, be they hunting grounds, fishing lagoons, fields, workshops or cottage industries; the application of hunger, whether directly or indirectly, as a weapon; the constant threat of disease; the use of victims in what could be described as slave labour; a forced diaspora with the near-impossibility of return; the poverty of the temporary camp, be it behind barbed wire or under the tin and sackcloth humpy; the emptiness of exile; the abandonment of uncounted dead, many of whom were anonymously buried and have remained anonymous ever since. When historian Raymond Evans refers to ‘scores of skeletons … bleaching in the noonday sun … in the scrubby coast ranges adjoining the scene of that awful murder’, this description of a mass killing in 1850s Queensland could just as readily cover one that occurred on an Andalusian hillside in 1936. In both cases, history has mistakenly referred to the victims of these atrocities as victims of war, for most of those who fell were innocents and bystanders, guilty not by process of law – no matter how loosely understood – but by spurious associations: of skin colour or political creed. Or they were killed, quite simply, out of capriciousness, the term ‘war’ serving as an alibi, as it so often does, for random acts of violence and murder. In both scenarios a proposed salvation (and greed) were at the root of conflict: bringing the footprint of civilisation to ‘savages’, as in Australia, or the wisdom of political common sense and stability to the ‘red hordes’ of rural Spain. ‘The beacon flame of knowledge’ was ‘meeting and dispelling the darkness of lower superstition’. Here, ‘lower superstition’ can be read as either Indigenous ritual knowledge, or the attempts to implant a local form of Marxism among the often anarchistic and despairing Andalusian rural proletariat. In both cases, darkness was to be dispelled.

Exile has been such a common human experience that its rigours and injustices lie at the heart of foundational stories, cultural legends and ongoing political grievances. From the lonely human with crumpled cardboard suitcase in hand, or wrapped chattels balanced on the head; to boats packed tight on swollen seas; to thousands in lava flow, streaming towards gates, fences, razor wire, rivers and the vigilance of border posts. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, thousands of Indigenous Australians went, or were forced, into internal exile, a national diaspora along the old rivers and new roads of a fast-changing continent. For many their destinations, while still nominally ‘Australia’, must have been the equivalent of a foreign country. Behind them were homelands ruined and property stolen, a trail of largely unrecorded and quickly receding massacres, and a slaughter of innocent peoples using often unrecognisable weapons and tactics. Throughout the years 1936 to 1939, some of Europe’s most quickly forgotten mass exiles took place, as hundreds of thousands of Spaniards trudged away from persecution towards what, they were not entirely sure. They too left behind them homelands ruined and property stolen, a trail of largely unrecorded and quickly receding massacres, and a slaughter of innocent peoples using often unrecognisable weapons and tactics.

Much of this book is about forgotten people, the forgotten acts that engulfed them and, just as crucially, the landscapes in which they found themselves overwhelmed. For our soils are full of human bones whose exact location no-one any longer knows. Little by little, massacre sites on the Australian frontier, and mass graves in the Spanish countryside, are mapped; digital markers point to excavation sites where, one by one, the workers from this future world uncover the latticed arms and femurs, the intricacies of hands and feet, the objects that pertain to ritual or murder. In Australia, while sample bones of Indigenous people were shipped across the seas for scientific observation, or boxed up in museum basements, the remains of all the other murdered were, most often, lost forever, under tree roots, at the bottom of bonfires or lagoons. So too all the children – both Indigenous and settler – at the bottom of brown rivers or obscure sand hills. Thousands are still resting in rural Spain, in olive groves, gullies and ditches, or thrown beyond the cemetery walls. Entire groups of people – families, tribes, political allies, the innocent – have vanished in the making of the present. What cultural and political practices – and, indeed, what technologies – have assisted in constructing the long quiet in which they have been buried?

What happened, and more importantly for what reasons, and where responsibility might lie, and how it might be shared, are all difficult questions to answer at a time when grand narratives have first been mocked, then sent to the gallows. So many previous certainties around the sway and flux of history have been lined up against the cemetery wall just as, across the humanities more broadly, the Enlightenment itself has been taken to task. The very nature of history and its practice – no longer premised on the demarcation of culture and nature – bends to new ideological shapes according to the times: away from classical notions of linearity and sequence towards more circular and integrating practices, allowing for the wild diversity of views and experiences that shape human society and its development within a more encompassing environmental context.

At the same time, underlying these questions about the past is a growing concern – broadly more sociological – that historical debate and discussion are being replaced, in this fractious digital age, by argument from entrenched, inflexible positions. One consequence of the overturning of grand narratives is we are left without effective, common understandings of how to communicate. A space opens up where past certainties once were, or agreed notions; that space becomes filled with chat – the froth of a weightless dialogue – or a cross-purposed shouting from positions ever further apart. In mainstream public fora, where professional or academic work is largely unknown, or from which it is increasingly estranged, national histories are told as adamantine conflicts that will not admit of nuance. As with any area of expertise, popular perceptions have overtaken the conversation.

There is an important caveat, and paradox: questions of history – no matter how simple or complex, how linear or circular, how elitist or broadly inclusive in their scope – are of little interest to the general public, and this is increasingly so. No matter how well meaning or brilliantly constructed the argument, vexatiousness about the past, and concern over how its meanings inform the present, is a limited, professional pursuit of insubstantial echo. Against the great majority of people who neither think, nor care, about history – the present is always taxing enough – there are the cadres of competing stripes, looking to guide – if not dictate – how history should be framed, taught, discussed and understood. Assaulted by the fractional demands and constant distractions of the digital present, a fragmenting human attention, knitted tightly to new forms of tribalism, begets amnesia. Overarching narratives of history are the subject of critique – until supplanted by more suitable overarching narratives; private versions of history are attended to with ever greater fervour. Fundamentalism about the past becomes yet another form of belonging – and forgetting – and in this environment one walks fretful and blind, looking for a way to understand events below the surface of the present.

When we look up into the night sky, at the field of stars, we are looking back in time. It is one of the paradoxes of this form of observation that we cannot know the universe in real time, for it comes to us late. At the speed of light, but always emerging from the past. What we decipher is how things were, the better to appreciate how to manoeuvre our way through now.

How vast then is forgetting – of language, of places, of the dead? Are these even things that can be measured?

They are not – but they can be described.

RAISING THE DEAD

South-west Queensland. Cunnamulla, on Kunja Country, 4:00 am.

A small motel room: flower-patterned bedspread, instant coffee, Anzac biscuits. The red blink of a smoke detector. Without, the Australian night swells beyond measurement: past the fragile rim of light where rural towns begin and end, the long deep dark is all, with its chattering and ghosts, its tenderness and violence, its open fields and banks of stars, its million beings moving on and about, and doing what they do – their constant acts of birthing, killing and survival – invisible to human eyes, while human eyes are shut, and blind. Everywhere is vast, obscure, swimming in chill air.

Outside, sensed but for the moment invisible, runs the Warrego River. A gentle voice, with a thick and dusty smell as it makes its slow lope along the edge of town, full of leaf mould and particulate. True to its task of transmission and displacement, the river carries one part of the continent away to another; it adds and subtracts, gives and takes. The river feeds the young, just as it carries away the dead, downstream.

Dawn is more than an hour away. In the wide acres around Cunnamulla, in darkness, are the many dead: in sand hills or untended graves, under old logs and bonfires; bodies broken apart by illness and violence, bones sucked at by animals, or melting under the stinking water of the lagoon; bodies pulled to pieces by time and yabbies. Also in Cunnamulla, as in any rural town, there are the regular graves in their regular rows, tight and quiet. Not divided in sectarian fashion here; or at least, not any more. The cemetery lies south of town, at the base of sand hills by the Yumba Reserve: concrete headstones rain-stained, sun-dried and windworn; plastic flowers, fallen crosses. Tufts of unruly grass, empty vases. A three-day-old sister, buried; a one-year-old son: ‘God needed one more angel child / Amidst his shining band / And so He bent with loving smile / And clasped our darling’s hand’. We know the names of the serried dead, for they are chiselled and placed before us. Even when forgotten, or untended, they continue to speak. Beyond the rural cemeteries lie the uncounted.

I am slowly waking into this motel room darkness. I am remembering: a body, two bodies, four bodies, all a messed geometry of bones, emerging from the soil in eastern Spain, rising from where they had fallen after execution. Remembering the strange yellow of the thigh bones, the mottled skulls each with its bullet hole – a grim and constant signature; the way the arms seemed to embrace the orange earth. The weight of three metres of soil pressing down upon the skeletons, the winding roots of plants, the disruption of the peace.

I am wondering, what good is served by the raising of the dead?

An hour or two further west from Cunnamulla – down seldom- travelled roads that twin the Paroo River, along the edge of Budjari Country, by fragile mound springs, through tangles of mulga and grass – lies Catherine Elliott. She died a century ago, at the age of nineteen, and remains completely alone. For thirty-five thousand nights she has lain in the soil, indicated simply by a cross. There is no information available as to who she was, or how she died. She lies in the harping dark, and is mineral now, and has become of this land, at once so ancient, strange and loving.

Catherine Elliott is only one of those buried in the mulga beds and sand hills. The early Europeans left a trail of lonely and forgotten dead through this region, expediently roomed in makeshift graves. Of the Indigenous peoples who formed the other half of the frontier, there is barely count. Not the Indigenous people who came and went for millennia, circling through this rich landscape and given ceremonial burial, but the more recent dead: of gunshot, poison, alcohol, disease; of those who fell resisting the theft of their land. A single example may serve for openers: in 1862, at the very beginning of European occupation of these western regions, on Coongoola station north of Cunnamulla where the traditional Kunja lands meet the Kooma, the Williams family of pastoralists had one day been out mustering. Upon returning they were ‘surprised to find it in a state of siege, surrounded by hundreds of blacks, creeping through the grass …’. Both those ‘besieged’ within the station dwelling and those returning from the muster were well armed with revolvers; there followed ‘an exciting cavalry pursuit where the assailants obtained such practice experience of the prowess of their intended victims that it obviated any further attempt on their part [to] exterminate them’. Somewhere beneath this stack of dated language, awkward syntax, boasting and euphemism, a truth burns: dozens – perhaps more – of local Indigenous people were murdered that day. There is no record of how their bodies were disposed of, if at all. We do know, however, that over two or three decades in south-west Queensland thousands of Indigenous people were killed, their bodies often left – as we shall see – for birds, ants and dingoes.

It is not just the act that is now incomprehensible. The beguiling nature of the landscape where these killings took place makes these histories confusing. Whatever hells it has witnessed, Coongoola might now be paradise, with its well-grassed plains, river frontage and stands of magnificent trees. On the afternoon I drove out along its dirt roads, bodies of dark cloud had gathered, shouldering each other in and out of the sun; occasional bright rays of light picked out yapunyahs with their coppery arms, or a gully of wildflowers in purple, rose pink and white. Recent rains had left pools of muddy water standing in any hollow, where galahs and swift curving hawks dipped in and out; a family of emus pecked at their grassy plate, which was infinite and good. How could this possibly be a massacre site?

Some months earlier, I had been standing in the cemetery of Paterna, a small town in eastern Spain that has with time developed into a semi-industrial extension to the city of Valencia. A resurrection of sorts was taking place: bodies returning to visibility, a backwards-running film lifting the dead up from their graves. ‘Memory is stubborn’, wrote historian Francisco Moreno of contemporary Spain, ‘and bones reclaim their rights with ever greater strength’. Bones had never been more important, moving to the centre of a web of cultural and political claim and counter-claim. These anonymous victims had fallen into a mass grave, unaware their bones would be at the centre of a national debate a century ahead.

Bones can be war loot, colonial plunder or magical objects. They serve to protect and to curse, for nothing is so sacred, so of the essence, as the marrow. Human bones can be buried or burnt, stacked, left under the sky; stolen, carted off to foreign lands, to museums, or simply left in boxes, uncatalogued, unobserved. ‘Monks were killed, tombs were desecrated and macabre scenes took place, as when workmen danced in the street with the disinterred mummies of nuns’, wrote Hispanist Gerald Brenan of events during the great civil unrest of Barcelona in 1909. Such scenes would be repeated in the early stages of the Spanish civil war, as clerics were attacked by mobs, church property defiled, artworks slashed and burnt, skeletons dug up or torn from niches and then, vaguely reassembled, led out to dance a paso doble with drunken militiamen. How easy it is to mock the dead. For years the apparently ‘uncorrupted’ hand of Teresa of Ávila, stolen from the Barefoot Carmelites of Ronda, accompanied that ghastly provincial