The Beauty of Loneliness

Last week I went to Canberra for a day and a half. I was there for two reasons. I went to interview the Bosnian Ambassador to Australia for my translation project. An amazing woman, Ambassador Kapetanovic was the official translator for the Bosnian contingent at the Dayton Peace Talks and translated the new constitution for Bosnia Herzegovina from English into Bosnian. I also went to visit Kim Rubenstein and her family. Kim is the person who first invited me to Australia, who facilitated my visit at Melbourne Law School, and who, sadly for us, then moved to Canberra.

Because of the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, Canberra was created to be Australia's capital. Much like Washington, D.C., Canberra is a highly-designed city placed in the middle of inauspicious physical surroundings. D.C. was built on a swamp and Canberra in the bush. Unlike D.C., however, the architecture of power here doesn't manage to dominate and displace the nature landscape. For all its sweeping vistas and high-modern government buildings, one has the distinct sense in Canberra of being in the country, of being witness to either the disinclination or the inability of urban planners to fully make over the environment. There is something about the clean modernist grandeur of Parliment House (see above) and the High Court coupled with the scarcity of people that makes this quiet, lovely, parched city feel the tiniest bit lonely.

It was odd that while I was in Canberra, staying with Kim and her exceptionally warm and convivial family, I was most struck by two small monuments to loneliness that I came across. One was a monument to the loneliness of loss, and the other an ode to the loneliness of landscape. The first was a monument to the Stolen Generation, which is the term used to describe the Australian government's policy during much of the 20th century of removing aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in state orphanages or with white foster families. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1970 the government took well over 100,000 aboriginal children away from their parents. Between one tenth and one third of all aboriginal children living during that period were forcibly removed without warning and without a legal proceeding of any kind. Most of the children taken were mixed race because the rationale of the policy was to ensure that aboriginal children would assimilate into white society and that the black population would eventually die out. While some of the children ended up among loving caregivers, many of them were subjected to neglect and abuse, and all of them were stripped of their families, their culture and their identity. The grief of the children and especially of their parents is well-documented in Bringing Them Home, the report from the government inquiry begun in 1995. The monument in Canberra is a simple and powerful stone slab from which water falls like tears, where music plays and on which are etched many quotes taken from the inquiry, quotes which capture the heartbreak of the policy and the unutterable loneliness of loss.

The other monument that caught my attention is not really a monument at all, but a small framed quote, tucked into the corner of the foyer of Parliment House, that comes from the preface to a 19th century book of poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon entitled Sea Spray and Drift Smoke. The preface, written by fellow Australian poet Marcus Clarke, captures something of the wilderness which Canberra has only partially transformed. It reads: "In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charms of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the heiroglyphs of the haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than the bountiful richness of Egypt."

The Red Center

The enormous central Australian desert is aptly named, being as it is in the center of the country and very red. And something about the name also captures the quality of the color--a searing orange-red that can be arresting in its intensity. It is a landscape as demanding as it is beautiful. It is hot, cold, dry, and full of strange, scrubby bushes and little, skinny, wispy trees that look as if they have been hastily drawn by children. This unforgiving scenery is almost unpopulated by humans but is home to 25 species of mammals, 74 species of reptiles, 178 species of birds and 4 species of frogs. There are also vast populations of bugs, ants, enormous grasshoppers, venemous insects, and this time of year, flies. These flies look exactly like the common house fly but there are about a billion more of them and they are assertive. There are 20 or 30 of them on your clothes at any given moment and they don't hesitate to land on your face. Archeologists think that the humans who do live here have been in the area for at least 10,000 years. It takes that kind of tenacity to make it in the outback.

And arising out of the Simpson Desert is this magnificent, startling rock that changes color with the light, but which is mostly the same orange-red as the soil. At sunrise and sunset it glows, and anytime of day it has an uncanny presence to it. White settlers named it Ayers Rock, but it is now mainly called by its older Aboriginal name, Uluru. Forged by geological forces of arkose sandstone and exposed by erosion, it is maybe a quarter of mile high, and is thought to extend underground for 3-4 miles. Uluru is also a sacred site of the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara peoples, local Aboriginal groups who call themelves Anangu. Uluru is central to Anangu law and legend (Tjukurpa). The Anangu believe that at the beginning of time the world was flat and formless, but very powerful ancestral beings (tjukuritja) travelled across the land and their movement and activity formed the landscape. Among the most important ancestral beings were the woman python (Kuniya), the poisonous snake (Liru), and the rufous-hare wallaby (Mala), all of whom came to Uluru, their rites and battles shaping the rock. Most of Uluru's countless crevices, caves, and undulations have an aboriginal backstory. For example, on one section of the rock there is a dark vertical line and a squiggly horizontal line that mark the site of a great battle between Kuniya the python and Liru the snake (see photo, and along the path is my dad shrouded in fly netting). Kuniya had travelled a great distance to Uluru carrying her eggs around her neck like a necklace. Setting her eggs at the base of Uluru (still visible as a mound of boulders), she set off in search of Liru, to avenge the death of her nephew who'd been killed by Liru. She found Liru by the water hole (still known as Kuniya) and did a powerful and magical dance. She spat poison at him, so that all the plants that grow there became poisonous. She threw her spears so forcefully that they created two large cracks on the other side of the rock. And Kuniya and Liru's forms were seared into the face of the rock. An ancient oral tradition is written into the landscape at Uluru and even if you don't know the stories, which mostly we don't, the place feels sacred, scarred and magical.

We also drove three hours north to Kings Canyon, a beautiful canyon formed 400 million years ago from compressed sand dunes. We did the Kings Canyon climb, hiking up to the rim and all the way around it. The 6-kilometer, 4-hour hike on rough terrain in 95-degree heat with a 1 year old, a 7 year old and a 71 year old was, in retrospect, foolhardy. Actually we realized it was foolhardy about halfway through when Matt left us for an hour to help the rangers carry an injured tourist back to where the helicopter could land. But miraculously Lucy mostly stayed in the backpack, my dad stayed upright, Jake proved to be an excellent hiker and we all made it down unharmed. We drove on to a camel ranch for gas, camel burgers and a fortuitous dingo sighting.

The funny thing about the intense climate and physical grandeur of the outback is that those weren't the things that most impressed Jake. When we asked him what he liked best about the red center, he said it was the mirages. He'd never seen a mirage before, and there in the heat, the road always appeared to be covered in water up ahead. For all the magic in the culture and landscape around us, he loved best the magical effects of light and heat on an ordinary asphalt road.

The Tallest Trees in the British Empire

Not long after we arrived in Melbourne, Matt and I saw a vintage travel poster for Australia that boasted the "The Tallest Trees in the British Empire" in a little town not far from here. Matt has wanted to see them since then, and this weekend, after my dad arrived for a visit, we all went out to the Yarra Valley. About an hour outside Melbourne is a beautiful valley of farms and vineyards that grows some of the best wine grapes in Australia, and just beyond the valley is a small range of mountains where you can still find miles of Mountain Ash trees. They are incredibly tall and straight, and while they were mostly chopped down to build ships and towns, some stands still remain and they are magnificent. My photo does not do them justice. There are enormous ferns growing around the base of the trees and it makes the landscape look prehistoric. Jake kept exclaiming that this is what it looked like in the time of the dinosaurs.

It was a lovely weekend. We stayed in the quaint town of Healesville, not far from the spectacular Healesville Animal Sanctuary, in a little cottage on the edge of cow pasture that had a trampoline in the back yard. Jake and Lucy were thrilled by the trampoline and had to be pried off of it so that we could go do all the fun things we had planned. They would have been just as happy to spend the weekend on the trampoline.

Jake and I took a hike across the cow pasture (being careful to avoid the cow patties) and up a hill that overlooked valley, vineyards, cows and sheep. We took pictures of each other, of cows, and a couple of us together. I had such a good time walking and talking with him. He really thrives out in nature.

We also went back to the animal santuary, where I first fell in love with the wombat. It was a warm day and my wombat was sleeping in his burrow.

But out in the open was another wombat named Maggie, who did us the favor of sleeping in such a way that we could get a good look at her. There are heaps of wombats roaming the countryside, what Australians call the bush; so many that there were a number of road signs alerting drivers to their presence.

On Sunday it was chillier and every half hour it would rain for 5 minutes, so we got soaked a few times, but we managed a couple wine tastings and a disorienting walk through a giant hedge maze that Jake loved. My poor jet-lagged dad hung in there and Lucy was a champ. As long as she is with Jake and doing the exact same thing as Jake, she is generally happy. We are thinking of enrolling her in second grade with him when we get home. We think she'll do just fine.