Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part Four: Star Quality*
*Advisory: Parts Three and Four of the Theatre Chronicles contain references to places and people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tradition and ancestry and do this with the greatest respect for and recognition of their custodianship of the world now known as the Snowy Monaro region.
“Throughout Australia, contact with the white man, has involved the extinction of the aboriginal, and unfortunately the tribes of Manaro seem to have been no exception to this rule.”
“Years ago hundreds of them would come in and about the towns to share in the annual distribution of blankets. To-day, and for a number of years past one might search Manaro, and fail to find a full-blooded native. The last of these in Cooma was one known throughout the district as "Biggenhook." He was a son of Bony Jack, and though deaf and dumb from birth, was extraordinarily intelligent.”
“A good bushman and stockman, he attached himself to the family of Wallace, who at one time held Coolringdon, and though he would stay with them for months, the longing to get away would come upon him, and he would, without any explanation, go away to another part of the district where he knew he was welcome.”
“He made himself understood almost entirely by signs worked out by sketches in the dirt. His sign language was extraordinarily descriptive, and he picked out, with uncanny accuracy, any physical peculiarity of an individual, wherewith to describe him. He indicated cattle, sheep and horses, by drawing their brands, and in this way could give information of stock owners and stock movements.”
“After the Wallace family left the District, he attached himself to the writer, who was able to understand him, and thus had many opportunities of gauging in him, what it is asserted the Australian Aboriginal does not possess, a high degree of intellectuality. Biggenhook who, except during the last three or four years of his life preserved his extraordinary activity, died at about the age of 62 some ten years ago.”
Felix Mitchell, “Back to Cooma” 1926
I stand in near pitch darkness, hoping I’ve followed the instructions I’ve been given to the letter. “Get off the coach at Michelago Creek and walk 100 yards up the lane to a public phone box. Give me a call and I’ll come and pick you up.”
I am on my way back to Sydney from four days up in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, where I have been shooting a commercial on the top of Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak in continental Australia.
I now have six days to do what I like but when I tell the film crew that I intend to step off the bus in the middle of a vast emptiness, in the dark, in the hope of meeting a long-lost, in fact never-met distant relative to stay in their old home “out there somewhere”, they think I am mad and will never see me again.
Standing there, as the sound of the coach dwindles into silence and nothing comes and nothing goes, I am reminded of the poem by Edward Thomas about an isolated railway station in Gloucestershire called “Adlestrop”:
“No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name”
- only in my case, the name is “Michelago Creek”, a small sign marking where this tributary of the Murrumbidgee River crosses under the Monaro Highway. The station in this case is a homestead or sheep station somewhere out there in the darkness that has been lived in by the same family, part mine, since the 1850s.
I start walking up the lane off the highway as directed and after a good 100 yards or more, I stop. There is no telephone box.
I realise at that moment that all I have had to light my way since leaving the coach, are stars. No moon, just more stars, more brilliant, too impossibly many, more dazzling, than I have ever seen before. Even out in the bush in Africa, 10 years before, the night sky somehow never quite had this diamantine brilliance, to the point where, like a vast chandelier, you can almost hear the minute tinkle of unknown trillions of tiny crystals as the cosmic breeze imperceptibly wafts them in the wind-charm of the spheres.
But I am sucked up into it, this sky of stars, in a form of levitation that is almost alarming until the small snuffle of a creature somewhere to one side of me brings me back to earth. With the faint smell of creosote in my nostrils, I walk on.
I am conscious that I’m not only on my own in an alien world out here, in a way I have not been since arriving in Australia five days before, but – I am not alone.
Whether or not I find the phone box, whether it exists at all, with a phone that rings and someone to answer it and come to fetch me, is somehow immaterial. What is material, and yet equally utterly untouchable, is the sense, conviction even, that I am not alone out here in this darkness lit by a trillion trillion stars.
It is not the occasional snuffling, invisible creature I mean in terms of company with whom I share this space but a spine-tingling, scalp-crawling consciousness of presence. Not unlike experiences I’ve had elsewhere and described last year here, in remote places, in woods, on hills, mountains, even houses, over the course of my life. Presence then of past, present, even future, an underlying continuum on which you find yourself only consciously at times of acute awareness and the lack of noise – noise of all those elements imposed by our fear of silence, our disruption of the natural pace of things and separation from the earth and sky from which we draw all life. Only when the noise has gone can we see and hear and feel what is there, all around us, of which we are a natural part.
But here there is also something else – almost a music, like a song one might hear in wind or water, that is at once all around me and out of reach. As if sung on or at a frequency or pitch I am not privileged to hear, yet know it is there.
Perhaps this is what Bruce Chatwin explores in his book The Songlines, his quest to understand how the Australian Aborigines dreamed the World into existence and mapped it with “Dreaming-tracks” that covered the entire continent. In this way, a member of a tribe from anywhere in Australia could follow her ancestral songline – sung into existence by her ancestors at the Creation – knowing that, as long as she adhered to this line, she would be welcomed by those who shared her dreaming along the way as she travelled perhaps hundreds of miles to her destination.
Indeed, if there is a song all around me to whose live, vibrating wire I am somehow connected – whose songline am I on? Am I, in fact, trespassing on another’s sacred ground? Or, just possibly, could it be in some way mine? The answer surely has to be: yes. To both. And I am at risk of sacrilege either way.
To claim a personal connection to this world feels permissible by the fact of my father’s mother’s place of birth not five miles from here, in land I stand on which her family like many others from another world settled and have farmed now for 150 years. Against that must be set the fact that, over those 150 years, the original, indigenous inhabitants of this same land, here or hereabouts for 50,000 years before that, have been systematically estranged and, in many cases, eradicated, through more or less violent means, by those same other worldly settlers, not just trespassing but trampling on their dreams.
How can I be welcome here? I ask myself.
I fly here defying everything that is natural to the walking man. I stay in the big city at a posh hotel eating food that comes from everywhere but where we are. I am taken to a bastion of white settler tradition and prejudice that excludes all except some insane delusion of a Master Race. To play snooker. And behave badly and get extremely drunk with my long-lost friend.
To feed my family, I do this job for a company that extracts oil and gas from the earth and uses it to poison the air we breathe, trash the ground we walk on, pollute the sea we fish and swim in, in the quest for power and wealth for people like me and the preservation of our status quo, rather than the planet.
I am seduced by the romance of an amazingly adventurous family with whom I share one quarter of my blood, who live in a wonderful old house in the middle of the bush and I am far too polite and compromised and weak-minded to make any stand that might challenge or question or cause embarrassment to those who have invited me to join them out of kindness, generosity and kinship.
I drink a bottle of Tyrrell’s 1979 “Vat 47” White Pinot Chardonnay in the Hunter Valley vineyards to accompany the tenderest ducks’ breasts you can imagine and think I have gone to heaven.
And underneath, I see barely a sign of the Aboriginal world that I know is still there somewhere but hidden from me. Unlike, surely, the member of my family who I discovered on 15 February 1840 found himself in the Snowy Mountains on the very same day as one Count Strzelecki and his companion James Macarthur.
On that day, my Great-Great-Uncle Stewart, surveyor and sketcher, aged 28, crossed the Crackenback River and climbed the Rams Head Range to the point where Kosciusko Chalet stands today. There, where I had my hair bleached ash blond, he recorded in his “Journal of a Certain Tour”, 145 years earlier: “on gaining the summit saw one of the highest points covered with snow to be distant to North West about three or four miles, but finding it too late to reach that point, turned S.W.” So, by a bee’s whisker, my ancestor missed climbing to Australia’s highest point, on which I had found myself standing three mornings in succession; missed giving it a name, after his mother, a Stewart, perhaps, or some Scottish hero, or his native Caithness, even, on the very day Count Strzelecki claimed he had ascended and consequently named Mount Kosciusko.
But what he must have known, in a way none of us can now, is an Australia beyond the reach, never touched even, by other than the indigenous people of that land.
Captain Cook had claimed it in 1770 and convicts had been arriving at Botany Bay from 1788. By 1868, when the last shipment disgorged its load, some 160,000 were passing or had passed their sentence, settled or returned, if they survived, from their brutal incarceration here in New South Wales.
My ancestors arrived, voluntarily in their case, with a job lined up, on the SS Triton on 28 October 1825, along with many other settler families, a large proportion from Scotland, many intent on “squatting” as the “pastoralists” they were, determined to stay and make their way in this new world.
Over time, my family established themselves both as land-holders, owning almost 100,000 acres at one time, and in the military and political spheres, garnering honours and titles along the way. They became very much the New Australians of the colonial times and passionately proud of their country.
But what is the “real” Australia? Is it that one time, lost under the stars, in which I was on my own and yet in the presence of everything – the ancestry of all who went before and, in some sense, perhaps, the presence of the Creation itself? Or is it the privileged world, hidden to many, I was given entry to by dint of the colour of my skin, the accident of blood? Is it, more now, the high-living, cosmopolitan world I won temporary membership of in the lottery of the commercial cattle-market, where one hotel is much the same as any other, whichever airport disgorges you wherever? Is it the world of the indigenous Aborigines like Biggenhook whose world that I can never know diminished around him until he died, the last of his kind in that place, where he had worked and lived and must have known my grandmother as a child. Is it all these things – or something else again?
After having finally come across the telephone box on my starlit lane, my cousin David picked me up in his battered old Alfa Romeo and drove me the five miles through what had been family land to the house – well, two houses. The “new” house, was where he and his family now lived, built nigh on 100 years before for his grandfather after he got married.
Nicknamed “Bull”, David’s grandfather, like his siblings, was expected to work in the stockyard alongside the men as a boy, which served him well as he literally fought his way up the Establishment ladder, famously challenging political opponents to fist fights to settle who should win the seat. He also used to spend weeks in the bush with the Aborigines, learning their bushcraft and, not least, a much admired skill with the boomerang. As a soldier, he fought his way through the Boer War, Gallipoli and the Middle East to be knighted as a general and eventually become High Commissioner to London for his country.
But it was Bull’s father who bought the old house. A simple “stringy-bark” cottage built by the exotically named Comte de Rossi in the 1830s, it was set in a holding of 35,000 acres with 9,000 sheep and by the time Bull came back to live there towards the end of his life, it was much the same as I saw it on that parrot-fluted, chilly morning after the sleep of the dead the night before.
It is a charming, ranchy place in the low, colonial style with small connecting gardens on all sides. An arched courtyard leads into wintry flower-beds edged with box. Elms, poplars, cypresses provide a startling contrast to the otherwise ubiquitous if much varied eucalyptus “gums”.
Entering by a small breakfast room, we plunge into the gloom of a grand dining-room. A vast Lely portrait of a Mrs Barrel dominates one end, with the side “fire-wall” sporting a suitably pugnacious portrait of Bull. At the other end of this maroon and mahogany expanse is a case of fine old drinking glasses, somehow surviving the rough and tumble of the last 250 years or so, and a great chest that dates from the Battle of Waterloo, where it contained the payroll, as managed by my great-great-grandfather, the Duke’s paymaster at the time.
The drawing-room, in contrast, is light and pleasant with fine Australian land- and seascapes and the comfortable furniture you would expect in such a room.
But it is outside that this world really shows its purpose – the old timber shearing shed with not a nail in its construction, the galvanised roofs of house and wool-shed, and all overlooking the wide-open landscape across the gum-treed bush towards the hills and mountains on the far side of the valley.
So perhaps this is another real Australia I am seeing for the first time, courtesy of my eleven words and bleached hair, paid for happily by the unreal world of those who took me there, which I will have to have unbleached at huge expense, paid for unhappily by the BBC, when I stagger off the plane back at Heathrow into the arms of my wife, Gill, who will come with me to White City where I will join the read-through of an adaptation of Noel Coward’s “Star Quality” for BBC TV with Susannah York, Ian “I couldn’t possibly comment” Richardson, David Swift, Sid Livingstone et al, and hope I don’t fall flat on my face come the crunch.
Or is it my taxi driver, that Sunday evening in Sydney, who bought himself into Australia from Lebanon for A$25,000 after two years “pressure” to persuade the authorities to let him in? All of which he described to me, sitting behind him in the cab with the engine switched off, entailed him losing his 18 years of Lebanese education and experience, so that he arrived in Australia “one day old”.
While the TWA hijack in Beirut was in full swing that night, he said: “There is no answer to the Lebanese war. A generation must burn itself out. The young ones don’t have the same sectarian hatred. I am a Muslim but that is not important in a political sense to me. I have a 3½ year old son who I have never smacked. I came home one night at 4 in the morning to find him doing the washing. Rubbing the clothes with soap, then throwing them out of the window ‘to dry in the sun’.”
“I have no hope in this country. Or anywhere. I wanted to make something of myself. To be a doctor or an airline pilot. I could have done this, if I had studied and stayed in the Lebanon. But now I am a taxi driver. I could have been a taxi driver in the Lebanon.”
He’d stopped outside my posh hotel. We sat in his taxi talking for twenty minutes. We wept together. I loved him. I shook his hand and, leaning forward, embraced his head and left.
