The Year is Almost Over

How the Stone Lost its Soul

Author's note: the following story is adapted from my father's actual experience in Brachina Gorge in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges, South Australia. While he and a friend were oil painting near a boulder known as the Fossil Rock, they both became aware of a sensation of being watched. On returning to the town of Hawker for supplies, they related this to an Adnyamathanha woman they met in the store, who told them they were near an ancient aboriginal burial ground, and they certainly were being watched.

Apart from the above, this story is fiction. It is not meant as a faithful depiction of the rich reality of Indigenous Australian culture and the Dreaming, and nothing but the utmost respect is meant to the Adnyamathanha people, the native people of the Ikara-Flinders Ranges.

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The memories of my travels, the sights, the people, the mysteries, are always with me, like the gifts from friends that live on the mantelpiece. Although they are old memories, I think of them often, with fondness, with gratitude for the richness of my experience. Yet every so often I have a nightmare, the same nightmare, repeated even now, a long time after this story happened. It watches me, I suppose, though I don't know why I use that word. Perhaps, somehow, it comes from what happened in Strasbourg.

My cousin Nelson Ponsonby owned a house there, and I hadn't seen him for a while. We weren't close. He had suffered a rather difficult time at school - if his rather stuffy name wasn't enough, he was quite small, with two preposterously large front teeth, and had a tendency to make extravagant boasts about what he was destined to do in life, such as prime minister, lion tamer, conqueror of Mount Everest, and so forth. This led to frequent ragging from his classmates, a state of disrespect which seemed to follow him for the rest of his life. But he did in fact make something of himself, and by the time he was approaching middle age, whenever he was introduced to people he would tell them he was an explorer. It came across as rather an ambitious self description - in fact he was a palaeontologist. In 1921 he had obtained a research position with the University of Strasbourg, and had spent most of his later years in the more desolate parts of Australia, immersing himself in the gullies and deserts where the rare signs of primaeval life were to be found. His obsession with the fossils of his area of research had led to his wife leaving him, (a fact he seemed only vaguely aware of), and over the years he had turned his comfortable home into a large warehouse of rocks of all shapes and sizes. I had written to him of my travels across Europe, and he had extended an invitation to me to visit him at home on my way through. He had also invited one of his old school chums, Boyd Andrews, who was travelling through France. Nelson had just returned from one of his expeditions to South Australia, and promised he had stories that would fascinate us.

Boyd Andrews was a large man with short arms and legs, who introduced himself as a 'painter to the gentry', a slightly abstruse title which brought to my mind the self promotion that Nelson had been known for. After a simple dinner of cold meats and cheeses, we sat by the fire, drinking light wine and smoking cigars. Then, in our mind's eye, our friend took us to places far from the snows and green mountains of the continent, and the cottages and schools where we had grown up. He described a hard land, deserts that go on forever, streaked with the hard, dry, dusty colours of the artist's palette, birds calling to nothing except the dead bones of the trees and the stones, long towering gorges pitted with holes like yawning faces, an empty world, still and dead for millions of years. He told us of the black fellows, who survive on nothing that can be seen, who sing gnarled stories of the Dreamtime, of animals, birds, the rivers and the rain, stories that had been handed down to them, since the beginning of the world. He told us that they have open hearts, he believed that if their race had lived where the white man had, there would never have been any wars.

"I can't agree with you there, old chap," said Andrews. "A man is a man. There'll always be bickering over who owns what."

"What is there to own, in such a place?" replied Nelson. "The only thing they own is the land. But they don't own it in the way that we understand. No, they are part of the land."