At the dark end of the earth, the antipodes. A mountainous landmass separated by a slither of raging oceans; an ancient untouched place filled with the mournful cry of novel creatures that had no comparison upon this earth. A place forlorn and profound situated on the dim boundaries of the British empire, a reality splashed red by the despotic plundering of its people. Its history dressed in military blue tardiness. From dawn to dusk the soldiers of which you were one if you owned a gun walked the land, the reek of gun powder and Tabacco a heavy dangerous presence upon the air.
They were the keepers of the law and its new reality, roaming this new world, enforcing tradition with the proven reality of gunpowder and disease, these boat people vermin, scuttling off ships and consuming like a plague, subjugating, everything and misplacing anything. And as their misplaced fear swept out on an ocean of unfamiliarity and the burdensome rocks of their homeland’s absence split upon the waves of memory into redirected emotional chaos, the land fell into first level subjugation, its people the first to feel, rampage enforced law and ruin. like the flutter of the union jack upon a wind that swept sparingly over a broken battlefield they would roam this new world, its creatures and the lands people prisoner to their vision of raising a new England from the foreign fragments of these unfamiliar soils.
This place home now to despots and thieves and the desperate hearts of men who had at last found a place that mirrored their very conscious. Home now to the derelict rejects of prison ship vermin, cutthroat killer and turned to crime miller, laced up petticoat madams and slither eyed, beak nosed dames.
I’m a prisoner of this land because I am the property of this crown. This patch of earth, a mottled landscape of forests and crags and the slim rivers of khaki and quicksilver that bisected its depths. The biblical embodiment of thorns and spines and the place of the fall, re imagined upon the shores of this great southern continent, a biblical masterpiece remodelled into a vision of Eden, by our despotic saviour god the Governor.
This place the home of a culture that had dreamed the past into creation and wove the magic of the dream time into the formation of the future. They walked the present with the wisdom of the past, the land completely adapted to their ancient presents. They walked together hand in hand the harmony causing the land to become eternally motionless. A culture where change can be measured in climate fluctuations and in the geomorphology of the earth. Their bones lay with those of ancient extinct creatures. They were travelers of deep history eternal fluctuations accompanying their ancient passage through the land, cyclic in motion, they were to the land as the seasons were.
We its new citizens, its people. Us pale folk at times burnt red by the strength of the sun while at others we crawled forlorn and miserable into what crevice we could find in order to find solitude from the south westerly blusters that swept in, tearing across the mottled arc of rainforest splendour, full of the billowing snowy air from precipitous climbs and the eternal moisture from distant oceans.
We who huddled frigid and old, our bones full of the Southern Ocean and distant unknown landmasses built of ice. We who ate what miserable old mutton we could muster, as we drank accidental ferment and slept every hour hoping to dream of the old land. We were nothing, and yet the world sought to remind us at all times that we were alive, and this miserable existence was ours and ours alone to bare and it would expose every aspect of what could be uncomfortable to us.
Today was such a day, we knew naught of comfort, as it was every day. Our feeble prisoner’s garb having more to do with the wet clammy fern fronds that whipped past our faces with every step than any advantage owing to us because of the thickness of their weave. It would seem that clothes were an item of modesty and naught else, to shelter the eyes of Christians from the savagery of this land. We were the embodiment of civilization chained and manacled slithering in gangs across the land, creators of the slim regular shapes of civilization, roads, huts and dams, mines for we were the free work horse of the empire, the disposable and the damned. And yet they had given us a last chance at redemption, beyond this petrified world, there was the life of a free settler to beckon us along our enforced journey, beyond with the delinquents and the diseased. We made our way slowly through the thing we now called “bush” a very unromantic term to describe the hard prickly impenetrable impediment of scrub that stretched from the ground to overhead. This dense thicket made short work of our thin European skin, so that before long we were scraped and scared from head to toe, a bloodied blistered tapestry remodelled by spikes and spines swollen and putrid in this damp world.
We rarely saw relief from this bitter tangle and when the sun did occasionally rise above this merciless thicket it was always cloaked within the confines of thick clouds and seemed a million more miles away. The bush was always wet from dawn to dusk it refused to dry so we were as well, our feet and hands confined in the watery grasp of primitive shoes, sloshing around with the last of our self-respect against our shrivelled souls. It was such as we travelled today miserable pilgrims of construction and creation, some scientific court dandy had found signs of ore, a thin thread of richness in the wild and we were there to continue the considerable excavation that would free it from the earth. Of course, we would be doing this with the most primitive tools imaginable and while the trek to the work site was depression in itself, the work when we got there would be worse.
I confess this world was not without wonder, perhaps it was only when our bodies knew the most of what was considered discomfort that the wonder would find us. Sometimes when the distant light managed to break through it would gather with such intensity upon the simpleness of a moss lined log and we would stare transfixed as the light seemed to bring forth the richness of a green that even the green of the trees of old England would fall pale against. Sometimes the streams and creeks would cascade with such clear crispness that it would seem the pure waters of Eden were passing through this world and into the next and us as mortals only had to surrender ourselves to this current to find our way there too. At other times the mists would clear, and we would see around us giant escarpments of ancient rock rearing silently and forever by our side and all of us would feel the weight of that stone in our minds as we pulled our consciousness back from the edge of those dark precipitants and at night fell into the carouses of wilderness filled sleep.
We were here I knew this as I bumped and muffled a curse into the dank material of the person in front of me who had stopped suddenly. I felt his body tense just as mine would soon do, we were here, the place of our laborious imprisonment.
Whether it was our imagination, but the world around us appeared different. Was it the slight feel of apprehension for the day ahead in the air, or something deeper? The soldiers motioned us forward a little more impatient, a little crueller with their words and gestures, of course they felt it to, in a sense they were prisoners such as ourselves in this land, a little better dressed, a little more cleanly shaved, yet slaves of the empire non the less. Of course they sensed it, there song and conversation had pitted out long ago, their voices more silent and muffled in the morning gloom, each did not want to be here and the distant solace of a warm bed and warm lips, the cold thirsty burn of rum and food appeared to do little to warm their spirits, it was only the cruelty directed towards us that seemed to keep their spirits alive, for who is truly suffering if there is someone suffering more than themselves.
We soon stood before our destination the gape of the earth opening up before us. As always, the darkness was of an intensity that seemed to eclipse the darkness of a star devoid sky. It seemed two dimensional its dim dimensions as though someone had painted three-dimensional reality with a brush of blackest pitch. We all stood momentarily lost in our own vague interpretations, at some level the darkness called to us like death might, a sweet call of tender surrender to come in, at other times as though our conscious overrode this sweet whisper of seduction, we were gripped with a revulsion that swept down our spines to our toes. Each of us had spoken about this darkness at night to our brothers and to ourselves we had tried to rationalize it and many times we had until we found ourselves back here and then the alien amenity of the place stole our souls anew.
Our tools as they were stood against the earth near the entrance, hastily covered in waterproofed hessian sacks to protect their edges against the forest’s dampness. The all too familiar feel of their poorly turned handles finished smooth by the sweat of ours. We hefted their familiar weight as though they were talismans, weapons against the gloom, though what were such weapons if their only purpose was to dig us deeper into our dark prison. And deeper we immediately descended; the rifle butts pressed into our backs to motion us forward. Torches were at once lit and we all felt that sense of relief that their sparkling consuming fire brought us as the light seemed to consume small part of the darkness before us. Even with the torches is full light the darkness was still absolute beyond the limited spread of the flames and as always, we attempted to stay within the limited halo of the light.
We shuffled forward our weary thinly clad feet perfect for feeling the slope of the ground, down we went slowly at first, small scone light fixtures flared up behind us as the smell of combusted whale oil cloaked the air. We had made good progress over the months but sadly for the keepers of the great British empire little in way of precious metals and yet on and on we were instructed to dig, for what for we did not know and did not care, it mastered nought to us we were searched thoroughly at the end of each day. Soon we began to approach the end of our tunnel as I felt Peter in front of me curse under his breath as he unknowingly met the resistance of the wall in front, the sound was of course absent aside from the muffled breathing of my labouring companions and their perhaps elevated anxious heart beats, we were here a midst our previous progress and as the torches sputtered onto light and we could at last bear witness to the feeble progress of our picks stamped like a beggars pocked mask skin against the rear wall of the tunnel we contemplated our foreseeable progress upon the dim dank darkness of the rock.
Back towards the entrance we could hear the grinding rolling progress of the mining trolley as it began its infernal journey towards us. Loud in the darkness and to the sensitivity of our ears. We began digging in earnest at once the Empire had not the time for us to gather our strength. For some time, the only sound was the clank of our picks around us, the scrape of shovel and the heave of exertion as we all to pass the time sunk each into our own pasts.
Back as though skimming upon and over a vast motionless ocean my mind fled, great swaths of islands exotic and bright under a Capricornia sun reared like Atlantean civilisations below me, the sharp sickly tang of some tropical fruit lodged in the back of my throat like a memory as my mind crested and fled over the curved horizon and the sound of seagulls echoing hope somewhere in the distance accompanying me. Then below me a great spread of sail cloth filled with the bellow of the oceans, breath, a white as bright cut from the deepest blue as the stern crashed a watery symphony from the hidden dimensions below and weaved it at once into delicate white whispery wake that spread behind the ship before the ocean rushed in to close this seamless secret between worlds.
Salt like I had been doused in it, my body braised in the depths of the ocean by Atlantis. Bathed, baptised by salt and the spread of unfamiliar stars, born again of battered decks and held manicured against the throw of the ocean and yet even here washed again and again the trappings of a distant civilisation would not wash away and I smelt again the sickly smell of braised mutton and old sweat, the stench of bodies born in the dark silence of the hull prisoners to the future and crimes of the past, we were many but one in that hull, a writhing, despairing mass of sores and suffering, limbs creaking and crawling like a great many eyed spider married to each other by our manacles and for months we pleaded for our gods to deliver us anywhere but the abysmal passage of pain and purgatory that was this ship.
Long before we were the sons and daughters of the kingdom and not their cast into the sea orphans, and what a kingdom, for most of us a ratbag bunch of hovels squeezed between tanneries, slaughterhouses and the rotting reeking spread of sewer-tinged waters that was the Themes. Of course, nearby, if we raised our necks higher enough, we could see over the distant roof tops to the place of lords and the tall, spired towers that they dwelt in, majestic symbols of our empire that reassured us that we were still an empire. We scratched out a meagre existence between poverty and the sea, supplementing our meagre incomes with the proceeds of petty crime, dodging the law and the hard-skinned career criminals that worked the ally’s and narrow streets and thought nothing of dispatching our kind. I like my fellow English men were despite the obvious destitution of our current state a proud lot, things could have been worse, the gnarled weather beaten carcasses of prison ships slowly sinking in the river and the puerile sounds of human anguish emanating from their battered cargo reminded us of that and of course we were constantly reminded what life was like on the edge of the empire, the picked clean carcass colonies with one foot in old fashioned English providence and the other foot up to the ankle in savagery I had been a ship wright in those distant days and despite the ménage of underfed whelps that my shallow pockets were accountable for life was worse than some, but better than most, but like all stories that begin with a contented soul reflecting on his good fortune things didn’t stay that way. Like most tragedies it began rather innocently a stray flash of amber eyes and the gentle sweep of ivory linen accompanied by the sweet remanences of spring, like a vase of uncut flowers had been tossed upon a dry morning breeze, of course it was to her perfume I elude to for nothing was as to our existence a greater reminder of the cost of urbanisation and mechanical, industrial production than this potent arcadian signature. In one motion we were gathered up into a reflection of pastural reminiscence spell bound and dizzy in remittance until it was gone, and the mud sloshed, smoked stained reality contracted around us again. I would follow her in those early days, perhaps too fearlessly for she was not one of us rather a high born who occasionally made errands to the lowlands for her father of whom I have much to say on later.
On one such day I recall following her petite footprints as they skirted the mud as mine obliterated hers in fowl splashes. She was ever graceful, an angel light of step and light of mind, a marvellous miracle, a transparent glass filled with the promise of heaven as I stomped behind her through hell. Her dark tresses flowed behind her and how I wished I had been able to apply just one of the 100 strokes that made them shine like the alabaster lustre of sun warmed toffee. It was on such a day that I first made her acquittance and for that one moment none of the following story would have been. She was moving on her normal route to the tannery when a sudden commotion on the road behind her caused an ancient anxious mule to panic and make away from the comforting hand of its owner into the marketplace fray around her. I had acted instinctively and reached for her to move her from danger and in so doing snagged my great clumsy fingers in the fine brace of pearls that languished peacefully against her breast it was when I felt the delicate broach break and watched with wonder as the pearls like tears from heaven cascade through the air and like rats the close by street urchins rushed in to make them theirs. I of course was left with the string and as the owner of the mull gained control it was too I that she turned her gaze. For the longest time I have tried to discern with what expression she held me captive, and I still wonder does her mind ever replay that instance as mine did and though I often paint the scene with a romantic tinged generosity I cannot especially in winter deny the cold hard reality. Of course it was I that was guilty. Things happened rather quickly, and it was safe to say that heroic recognition and titles were not thrust upon me for my heroic efforts, instead the soldiers were summoned, later they testified that I had been following her and after that well it could have not gone any other way. Her father being a despotic protective bitter man thought nothing of sacrificing a small amount of doubt for the honour of her daughter and while at every step I imagined her as the symbol of spring to deliver me into her arms of summer, she was to me my winter and though I escaped the hulks in the bay and new reservation was put aside for me in this hell.
This father this despotic deliverer of my reality and my grief, a business tycoon, his pockets thick with reported slander attributed to men in power, a wristwatch gifted to him from a distant duke and a castle in France. He had helped coax the empire into reality, a two-way road where funds were sucked in from the colonies, wrung dry by his capitalistic hands and spewed out on an extra ugly extravagance, a putrid paraded symbol, an algorithm of wealth and poor taste, everything he owned a gift from someone more important. Which is why his daughter was such an enigma. And yet maybe she to was just a gift from her mother, in beauty and character and they were both yet another biological status measure to impress and tempt the better looking, less wealthy citizens of London town. We knew him, we all knew him and yet it was of course only I who had the foolish fascination with his daughter, only I who had tempted those that delivered two way luck. Of course, the irony, or more likely tyranny being that my very destination was to his very own Van Diemen’s economic venture and there I would spend a decade approximation of my days diligently digging for his daughters new set of pearls.
As all musings can’t last forever and the relevance of all this must have some sort of demented future. I must continue
Well today it seems you have caught me at a good day. Like any other our bodies both accustomed themselves to the discomfort and grew weary upon the burden of the past. We collapsed after a while into a type of therapeutic silence, marred and interrupted by the sound and strike of metal upon mineral. We sank despairingly and eagerly into our own forms of individual silence. Scarecrows with pickaxes gathered in the shadows, it progressed like this until lunch, in adverted commers, and yet after lunch this time something was different, there was now a slight urgency around us. Something quick, darting and miscible, something that tugged on our attention and yet sharpened it at the same time, the guards noticed it too, they nervously shuffled forward with us, eager to share our vantage, and yet they had never shown any inclination before. We moved as though sensing our impending punishment, we could feel the soldier’s anxiety quickly switch to violence as their fragile already damaged psyches patrolled despairingly through the dark seeking a meaning in this twisted cocktail of anxiety and despair. Their anxiety of course won, their whips and cursed began descending yet again, feverish, sweat exerted acceleration and the tang of blood in the darkness. We fell into the merciless repetition, our picks beating a crescendo, a primitive tattoo upon the earth, within the earth and It was I of course who found it first.
There were 8 of us that day. There was only one who returned that night…
It was within the darkness as though darkness could sparkle, as though something could be both a black hole and a star. It was in the darkness cradled within the earth as though it to wished to both give it up and possess it forever. The earth both protected and accepted my sovereignty of it, maybe it sensed in those early times what we were and what this gift would do to us. And as I brushed blood or strawberry blonde hair from my face , in the darkness I made it mine.
The fight was quick and brutal, Like wolves around a carcass, guns didn’t matter in the dark close confines of the earth, fear didn’t matter when all attention was focused. Strength was just an extension of will and my will happened to be the strongest on that day and it was I alone who fought with and against my brethren for the thing now only I possessed.
I emerged from the darkness with the darkness within my grasp. Stumbling into the crisp cold daylight, the sun streaming like heaven around me I fell to my knees, disoriented, the journey to the light a forgotten blur, the gentle rise of the earth before me guiding me on towards the light. Momentarily paralysis as to what I had done, they were, they had been my friends, remorse all the more pallid in the warm reality of the afternoon as the memories of what had transpired performed a swift cascade of still life’s before me, blood and desperation cradled in the cold earthly darkness as we succumbed to the greed of our ancestors as we each attempted to choose the darkness over death.
I was too scared to check it, even though I could feel its cold reassuring unimaginable weight, pressing delicately against my labour roughened skin. It seemed to throb gently aligning its energies to my own pulse, although this too may have been my imagination. When I opened my hand there it sat, like a hole in the day, it appeared 2 dimensional against the stark contrast of the world around it, a fragment of another dimension that had fallen through some celestial crack in the world, a sliver from the wing of a fallen arch angel left on earth after some lonely recognisance, a piece of the primordial darkness that had persisted since the birth of time itself, a small piece of gods ungodly clay that he had used to fashion our reality. It had no detail, no texture and its overall shape was blurry as though light behaved differently around it, When I rotated it, it lacked any form of symmetry seemingly it had no top, no bottom, no length or breathe, and its weight seemed significant and after it stayed in one place for too long it seemed to get lighter. Was this the mineral we searched for? Was this why we paced for miles and plundered these ancient mountains in search of this? What would it be worth?
I though then back to ancient days as we had begun passage to Van Diemen’s Land, when myself had sought a moments rest above deck, a moment to glimpse the stretch of endless oceans encapsulated by an even great sky, a sickening merging of light and infinity, a moment to glance at the free folk, who huddled like frightened sheep sharing secret whispers and secret eyes amongst themselves. Too see women, no matter how uncommonly and to peer in our direction with the hope to see land, any land. It was then that I had glimpsed a document, dark and worn with use, a fabric scrawled with arcane symbols and science. To me it was nothing more than a novelty, nothing meant nothing and yet this Mathematica seem to prescribe something that I was now familiar with, of course I was torn from further investigation by a rough collared hand at the nape of my neck, the rip of canvas and the affirmation that I had indeed viewed a document which held some importance.
I had little time, our party were due back soon and any delay would result in a giant influx of soldiers and militia scouring the forests for escapes. I was keen to avoid detection until I had at least taken the small ketch somewhere further south where I could plot a trek inland and loop back towards human habitation, if my face wasn’t recognised amidst the small community, I might govern the opportunity to return to Hobart Town and from there I would have greater opportunity and a greater opportunity to off load my prize.
As I stumbled through the forest I was forced to give some thought to my cargo. I had neither gold nor silver in my possession and yet I had seen the men around me descend upon me like vultures upon carrion. Even now I could feel some wicked form of desperate desire for this thing, clawing itself into my consciousness, taking possession of a small part of my mind and yet what value did it possess? Beyond the hopeless desire to possess it, If I threw it into the tangible market of miscreants and thieves that inhabited the back water bog of Van Diemen’s the best I could hope for would be a quick and merciless death at the hands of someone similar to myself. Except if the words of my deliver and jailor came back to me as they become my liberator.
The ketch sat mirrored in the mill pond that was the bay almost levitating upon a silent sanctuary of gentle abode, an Arthurian legend, wrapped in antipodean splendour, a worthy talisman to secure the strange destiny of this endeavour. I pulled the boat to the shore, weak, but some new strength upon me, easily climbing aboard. I moved the sail into its position, a gentle zephyr being my reward, it took the vessel with a slow if not steady ease towards the ocean.
This is where my story took a mighty turn for the worst. The mouth of the bay appeared with a horrible certainty, here I would be exposed to scrutiny by an outpost positioned to survey the bay and to act as a basic transfer station for goods and services for the surrounding remote colonies, it would be here that I would be at my most vulnerable, cannon fire would quickly decimate my vessel leaving me no option but to swim back to my captures amidst a forthcoming clatter of musket fire.
I sailed in towards the headlands, freedom easily within sites, a strange elation filling me, as the wind seemed to fill the slack cloth of the sail with an unexpected breeze. At first, I thought I had escaped detection and yet I also knew that amidst this baron coastline little out of the ordinary was missed, the soldiers were well prepared for the type of incident that had proceeded my desperate escape. A flurry of movement made itself apparent. The distant alarm of red backed soldier ants converging in panic, desperately preparing the single cannon that manned the rugged headland. In any other place the cannon could be left ready to fire indefinitely, not here, moisture had a way of quickly penetrating the powder, it all had to be completed from scratch. I knew they had all but 3 shots before this breeze took me out of range. The first one came as I knew it would, whirring overhead to strike a place west 25 m west of my position, the next would strike its mark, I knew because I had seen these men train before.
The powder was loaded, I could see each step in agonising slow motion, the shaking of the soldiers’ hands and their eyes already full of victorious elation. The sweat cooling upon their furrowed brows in the cold afternoon light. It was then that the impossible seemed to occur, from the distant dark confines of the sky a swarm of deeper darknesses swept through, carrying the wisps of cloud born rain on the tips of their darkling wings. 9 of them they cried in unison together a tumult of sounds that was almost human in their avian like violence, as though some magical merger had once happened between the two and some despotic visual remained. They descended quickly and at first, I believed I was the target of their malevolent intent until at the last they swept away with truly terrifying speed and fell upon the soldiers who quickly abandoned their cannon to turn their attention to this ferocious foe. It was all I needed, and the boat surged forward quickly closing the gap until the first touch of the open sea hit forcefully the bow of my small boat. In the distance I could still hear the sound of the birds, and some primitive part of me wished to join their song in unison, as they tore the flesh from those less fortunate than myself.
In the days that followed I took the boat North, tracking close to the coast, confident that my lead would remain so and sure that a land pursuit through this terrain would remain improbable. During the day I came ashore to capture sea creatures from the shallows feasting upon raw flesh, at night I curled into a likeness of safety upon the boats floor, my pale skin turning red from the sun, as my hair became bleached by the sun. In those strange days I felt the invasion of alien dreams, my body and mind no longer my own. Each day I required more flesh from the shore quickly strangely outgrowing my clothing, which I eventually tore from me, the stone my confessor as I mumbled stories to it at night.
Weeks went on like this and I descended into more devilish dreams, my body not satiated by seashells any longer. On the 9 day I spotted a cove, sheltered between the buttresses of 2 sentinel like cliffs, a narrow strip of sand that disappeared into a small expanse of windswept vegetation. This place would serve. I immediately lept from the boat the ocean seemingly more familiar than the land, and began to guide the boat in, I would use its structure to construct my new abode, what did I want of the civilisation that no longer beckoned me from across the wilderness and I felt at once elated in my freedom and yet that otherworldly hunger still persisted.
It was there that it happened, a slight misjudgement and the rock fell from my pocket, how, I still wonder to this day. I felt it leave like a mother feels the absence of her child, a severing of a bond stronger than life. I immediately dived to recover it, my strength prodigious amidst the surf and yet it was gone! Again, and again until my energy was expended, and the stars awoke amidst the night, I cried tears and raged at this empty land until at last I fell exhausted into a long sleep. I did the same as the days progressed, searching near and far, my hands moving through the water like sieves drawing the sand apart desperately waiting to feel its familiar touch. I did this for days, then months and finally years, returning to my beach shanty in exhaustion each night, and each night ever since I have followed that same desperate routine until I and my presence became immortalised in the tales of these wild lands to appear through history as just another enigmatic feature of this strange place.
CRAG CRY DARKNESS 