Robert Hahn
Thro' our whole gazing lives, Venus has been a tiny Dot of Light . . .ever
against the black face of Eternity. But on the day of this Transit, all shall suddenly reverse,- as she is caught, dark, embodied, solid, against the face of the Sun, -a Goddess descended from light to Matter . . .
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
1.
The Cherwell curved around the edge of the park, bearing lazy swans and
laboring punters down the stream of time, but slowly, so slowly that as
metaphor the river suggested idle dalliance more than inexorable destiny. And yet it moved. In its own eddying and sluggish manner,
it wound inevitably onward, past drooping trees that dragged their leaves in
its flow, through placid meadows, and into the Thames, that "great waterway"—in
the rhetorically-rumbling words of Conrad's Marlowe—"leading to the uttermost
ends of the earth." Marlowe, the
brooding narrator of Heart of Darkness, who never met a sonorous phrase he didn't like, saw the Thames as a
repository of intricate history and a swelling source of heroic, if ambiguous,
enterprise. And to be sure, there
was a time when ships had embarked from the mouth of that river for the far
side of the world, on stirringly intrepid and epochal missions, among others
the subject of these reflections, the Transit of Venus. Voyages to observe the Transits of
Venus were obliged to set their courses for far-away places indeed: South
Africa, India, Tahiti: remote and exotic locales that were, from an
Anglo-centric perspective, the very ends of the earth.
The Oxford park that morning was hardly exotic. On the contrary, its mise-en-scene was
a domesticated, all-too-familiar green-world, where as the day wore on
picnickers would spread their blankets, bowlers spin their looping pitches
toward the wickets, and croquet players bend to align their shots. The pock of bats would be heard,
followed by the click of mallets, sending balls caroming off in oblique
directions, and Frisbees rise in the air, whirling down in elliptical
arcs. Overhead the sun burned
brightly. On its face, off to one
side and toward the bottom, at a 4:00 o'clock position, was a black dot, the
planet Venus, in the process of one of its rare visible trajectories between
the earth and the sun. For the few
hours it took to complete this passage, Venus, normally seen as the bright
morning star, or the luminous star of evening, was "dark, embodied, solid,
against the face of the Sun, a Goddess descended from light to matter."
Although Transits of Venus are governed by laws of the solar system, they can feel like random events, so irregular and asymmetrical are the intervals of years between them (105, 8, 122, 8, 105, and on and on, infinitely), and in the history of observations, the longer-than-life delays have been compounded by hazards of travel and weather, and by contingencies from human error and faulty equipment to the course of wars and the fate of nations. Voyages to observe the Transits are therefore generous in their provision of symbols: for human endeavor in the face of universal indifference, for the interplay of will and chance.
Guillaume le Gentil was on his way to observe a Transit in the South Pacific, in 1761, when he sighted a display of flags on the island where he planned to make port, revealing that his destination had changed from French to British hands. Because he was thus unable to land, at the crucial moment he found himself in a moving ship, making accurate observation and recording impossible. Crestfallen but still obsessed, he vowed to stay in the southern hemisphere until the next Transit, in 1769, and view it from India, but skies would turn out to be overcast that day, the Transit invisible, and the next opportunity more than a century in the future. So le Gentil returned to France at long last, only to find that there he had been given up for dead and his estate dispersed.
Conrad's Marlowe, a narrator who thought "the meaning of an episode was outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze," is the ideal raconteur for such sagas. A connoisseur of patterns of convergence and divergence, mirror-images and counter-motions, misdirections and surprises, he could divine that the apparent heart of the matter might disclose itself, later on, as only a subplot or a prelude.
For Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, observing the Transit was a prelude to the American surveying adventure (the Mason-Dixon Line) that made them famous; for Captain James Cook, it was a prelude to Australia. The Royal Society of England, having sent Mason and Dixon to observe the 1761 Transit from South Africa, commissioned Cook to see the next one, in 1769. His orders: proceed to Tahiti, make his observations, and sail on, reporting useful discoveries along the way and keeping an eye peeled for the still-unseen, possibly mythical Great South Land. This loose and generous charge, read in light of his abiding curiosity, led to the achievements we associate indelibly with Cook, the charting of the coasts of the Antipodes and the colonization of Australia.
Cook was of course not the discoverer of Australia. Its Aboriginal population had been there 50,000 years or more, the Portuguese and Dutch had often bumped into its west coast (by accident, blown off their trade routes), and the French had their eye on it. But Cook's arrival was the immediate and requisite precursor of British colonization, setting in motion a chain of events that give us the Australia we know today, a yeasty compost of broad accents and jangling slang, and a fertile source of world-class wines, swimmers, and tennis players, to say nothing of Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson: an Australia where the Great Barrier Reef is no longer a locus of mystery, fear, and near-disaster (Cook's Endeavor stuck fast and nearly sunk there) but a hot snorkeling spot for those with the time and cash and jet-lag-tolerance to make the trip. For all this to happen, the precondition was the Royal Society's decision to fund Cook's voyage to the South Seas—a major expense but one it was happy to bear, since at the time a Transit of Venus was not merely a subject of fascination, but a matter of great scientific consequence.
2.
Galileo knew that Mercury and Venus periodically crossed the sun, but he thought their diameters too small to be observed. He was wrong, as Pierre Gassendi would demonstrate in 1629 by using a telescope to observe a transit of Mercury; ten years later, in a village near Liverpool, Jeremiah Horrocks made the first observation of a Transit of Venus. Grasping its scientific potential remained to Edmond Halley, who proposed that if a Transit were observed at various spots throughout the world and precise measurements taken, the data would provide the basis for measuring the sun's distance from the earth—the so-called Astronomical Unit (a key to the size of the universe). But no Transit would occur in Halley's lifetime. In a striking mix of
scientific passion and dispassionate planning, he urged the world to mount a concerted campaign to observe Transits of Venus. And so it did.
Cook completed his Tahitian observations and sailed on, hoping either to find the Great South Land or prove it did not exist. It might seem that Australia itself would fit the definition, but the searchers had something larger in mind, believing (or as some believed and others with equal fervor doubted) that the globe's southern hemisphere must have, somewhere, a landmass equal to the north, since otherwise the imbalanced earth would spin out of control. (If such surmises strike us as quaint, consider that our current beliefs, about what is out there, based on the abstractions of astro-physics, may suffer a similar fate a century or so from now.) What Cook found was not the Great South Land but something marvelous in its own way: the welcoming harbors of south-eastern Australia and what looked like a fruitful, well-watered country, peopled only by what he saw as a few scrawny black people, naked, skulking along the shore.
In a conqueror's vision of imperial destiny, Cook's arrival could be cast as inevitable; how chance-determined it was becomes clear when we rewind his journey and re-examine its contingent links. Ben Franklin composed a jingle-like adage ("for want of a nail .. .") about history's delicate, shifting balance of intention and luck, planning and accident: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse, for want of a horse the rider"—and by extension, the message, the battle, and all that hangs on its outcome. A similar perspective is offered by Yeats' poem "Long Legged Fly": it proposes that if we could revisit fateful turning-points in our collective destiny—or more precisely, the moments just before, their indispensable preludes—we would need to keep very still, and hold our breath, so that nothing is altered, to let history take its determined course. (Do not disturb the silence—the first stanza warns—where Caesar sits in his tent, bent over his maps, "That civilization may not sink,/Its great battle lost").
For Australia to become what it is today, England's First Fleet must land in Sydney Harbor at the end of the 18th century, with its cargo of convicts, and as the precursor of their arrival, Cook needs to get there two decades before. Cook's landfall in Australia is, in its turn, dependent on his being sent to Tahiti for the Transit of Venus, a prize assignment that would go to one of the world's most advanced navigators and mapmakers. Cook's acquisition of these crucial skills, at just the right time in his career, is a by-product of the British-French conflict in North America, requiring the presence in Quebec of the British fleet, one of whose ships was under Cook's command.
The time is the mid-1750's. Fort Louisburg has just fallen, beginning the collapse of the French in North America. Cook is 30 years old. In Quebec, with time to spare while the fleet is waiting for the next shoe to drop, Cook becomes acquainted with a fellow captain who is already an innovator in the nascent field of navigation and surveying—an encounter whose significance depends on chance, to be sure, but also on intention and will, since Cook's fascination with the new technology, and his imaginative grasp of its importance, make him determined to acquire the expertise himself. And then the next twist of this particular fate: For Cook's on-the-job training to be completed, his emerging skills must be urgently required by a general at that very moment devising a plan to seize Quebec. The general, 32 years old, is James Wolfe.
3.
Outside Quebec City there is a grassy bluff overlooking the St. Lawrence River known as the Plains of Abraham. Marlowe, our guest-narrator, would have enjoyed the Biblical ring of the name, although it simply echoes a fact of ownership (the fields once belonged to a French farmer named Abraham), and for a site that shaped the future of the British Empire and North America, it is unremarkable—visually dull, little known, seldom visited. A few scattered stone markers indicate where two armies were deployed that morning in 1759 when the British defeated the French in the Battle of Quebec.
The plan of attack was the creative and controversial invention of Wolfe. It called for a landing to be feigned north of the city while he—undetected, to the south, under cover of darkness—led his troops up a set of cliffs and onto the Plains. Success of the audacious idea would depend not only on surprise but on navigational charts and a map of the shoreline, which is where Cook came in, prowling the river in a small boat night after night, taking soundings and scouting the coast. Meanwhile, as the paths of Cook and Wolfe were thus being drawn into conjunction, the orbit of another career was intersecting theirs: Louis Antoine de Bougainville, captain of a French ship, was tracking British movements in the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence (and being artfully deceived). Bougainville, like Cook, was a young man honing his seamanship, and he as well, under a different flag, would go on to adventures in far-flung places, preceding Cook to Tahiti and searching vainly for the Great South Land. (Their paths crossed more than once, in both hemispheres, but Cook and Bougainville were never to meet.)
While Bougainville reported that a group of English ships was threatening a landing to the north, Cook's Pembroke among them, Wolfe moved toward the southern bluffs in a flat-bottomed boat. As the prow ground onto the pebbly shore, he was reciting Gray's "Elegy" to his men (the poem, only recently published and given to Wolfe by his fiancˇe, would prove to be a treasury of memorable lines, like "The paths of glory lead but to the grave"). Wolfe turned to his men as he prepared to step from the boat and said, speaking softly, "Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec." It is unlikely that the soldiers, up all night and facing the prospect of violent death, rum rations finished and the effect wearing off, found this pronouncement inspiring. It seems to have been a spontaneous expression of intricate and conflicting emotions, mixing heroic bravado with brooding reflection. The timing was surely inopportune, although most of us have, some time or other, had similar feelings, wondering what might have become of us if the paths of our destinies had forked differently. The Australian poet John Tranter, for instance, muses on what might have transpired if, instead of being raised on a farm in Victoria, he had been born into the circumstances of Frank O'Hara. Would he have written O'Hara's Lunch Poems? Would he have been struck and killed by a speeding dune buggy one summer night on Fire Island?
Gray was meant to write a quotable poem, and Wolfe, to take Quebec. He led his troops up the cliff, pulling canon behind them with ropes, and onto the Plains of Abraham, where at first light they appeared, arrayed in a double row (the first instance of the thin red line) in the telescope of the amazed French general, Montcalm. The main exchange of gunfire lasted only ten minutes, but the devastation was horrific and both generals, Wolfe and Montcalm, were fatally injured. The French were routed. Montcalm, informed that he could not be saved, replied, "Good—then I will not live to see the British enter Quebec." Wolfe, not to be outdone in famous-last-words, declared that he died a happy man, knowing North America now belonged to the Crown .
For him it was all over; for Cook it had just begun. In Quebec, if Wolfe was the sun, Cook was a speck crossing the periphery of his brilliance, but now their roles reverse. The prelude ends and what seemed an opaque background is revealed as a scrim, where light floods up, disclosing a deep stage and the set of a drama whose acts lie ahead. Today Wolfe has begun to fade into anonymity, and Bougainville is largely forgotten, the memory of his adventures in the north reduced to a footnote, and of his journeys in the Antipodes, to the chime of Gallic place-names left by explorers, like a quiet cove in New Zealand called Coquille Bay. Cook remains renowned, his fame secured by voyages around the world, and above all by his explorations of the eastern Australian coast.
4.
Manley, the headland rounded by the First Fleet when it sailed into what would become Sydney Harbor, is today a bumptious mˇlange of Lido and Jersey shore. But if you walk out from the town, past a 19th century castle housing a Hotel and Hospitality College, and onward, up to the top of the headland, you will be rewarded with a bracing view of Sydney's modern icons, the white shell-and-sail cluster of the Opera House and the heroic-laborer ironwork of the Harbor Bridge. Wave all this away—bridge, opera house, high rise condos, trendy restaurants, and hyper-kinetic ferry terminal—restore some trees and shrubs and sandy banks, and it is possible to imagine what Cook saw as he cruised by the headland, peering through his telescope and drawing maps, his delicate, precise lines noting each promontory and indentation.
Later, having escaped the near-fatal maze of the Great Barrier Reef, as he rounded the northeast corner of Australia on a course set for the equator and home, Cook was ever more convinced that the Great South Land did not exist. Others held on to the idea, much as Australian settlers would cling to the belief that in the interior of their new country there was a Great Inland Sea. Such beliefs could be dangerous. Explorers would lose their lives trying to find what wasn't there, the most tragic of these being Robert Burke and William Wills, opportunists who became symbols of thwarted ambition and dreadful luck, but who, had things gone differently—and only slightly differently (if just one horseshoe had not been missing its nail)—might have been heroes.
In 1860 they led an expedition out of Melbourne, riding on imported camels, their goal to become the first white men traversing the continent from south to north, and to find out if the inland sea was real. They established a base camp halfway into the interior, at a place called Cooper's Creek—a name, like Gallipoli, that would resonate with tragedy in the tortured Australian psyche—and there they waited for supplies and reinforcements. Impatient when these failed to arrive, four of the party—Burke and Wills, with two others, King and Gray (leaving the camp in the hands of a man named Brahe), struck out for the north coast. They never quite made it. But when they found a salt-water inlet, they decided (dangerously far from the base camp and fearful of never getting back) they were close enough, and turned around, beginning the fraught and arduous return to Cooper's Creek.
Their intended destination on the north coast had been the Bay of Carpentaria, where the city of Darwin is today, and where locals join tourists in the late afternoons, bearing picnics and bottles of wine and cameras, for the famous sunset at Fanny Bay. As the sun grows fat and red and ponderous against the horizon, about to be extinguished in the equator, cameras click and whir, and toasts are offered to the dying splendor.
Travelers now use Darwin as a jumping off place for treks into Kakadu National Park, one of the world's few areas entitled to be called wilderness, since its appearance is little changed from what the first human residents saw when they arrived. In Kakadu, if you find your way to a marshy lake thronged with waterfowl (it is called Ann Bang Bang Billabong), and clamber up on a nearby cluster of boulders and look out, on the other side of the water you behold an empty savannah, undulating formlessly as far as the eye can see, dotted with numberless, indistinguishable bushes and small trees, blending and fading into itself. From these rocks (the site of an Aboriginal creation myth whose characters are wallabies and snakes), if you visually excise some concrete picnic tables and a four-wheel drive track, you see what a tribesman wandering by centuries ago would have seen—a land unmarked and unmeasured: an earth not hostile but resistantly unfamiliar, a wilderness with no trace of the personal. It is not hard to imagine explorers wandering hopeless and aimlessly out there, losing track of where they had been, of where they were, of themselves.
A typical tourist itinerary, these days, leads south from Darwin and Kakadu, across preternaturally flat deserts and mountain ranges so raw-edged they seem recently thrust up, and into the parched red heart of the country and the great rock of Uluru. This route describes a circle around the interior that Burke and Wills wandered through, in heat soaring to 115 degrees, struggling back to the base camp, shooting and eating camels as they went. Gray died of dysentery on the way and the others were desperately ill when they reached Cooper's Creek, only to find that Brahe had left (just eight hours before), leaving supplies buried under a tree, on which he had carved the word DIG. Their story gets worse: exhaustion, hallucination, re-circling wanderings, close encounters only a few hours or miles apart, but all unaware—a frayed pattern of near misses and agonizingly-near connections. Of the four who went north, only King made it back, to die shortly thereafter in Melbourne. Burke and Wills starved to death in the wilderness.
The date was June 1861, the same year and month that the English surveyors Mason and Dixon were eating and drinking handsomely and with gusto, as was their wont, courtesy of generous hosts in South Africa. On the sixth day of that June, thanks to clear weather and the precise and reliable instruments they had carried with them, out of the mouth of the Thames and half-way around the world, they completed a successful observation of the Transit of Venus. The Royal Society was royally pleased. Mason and Dixon began to acquire a modest but significant reputation, and their emerging expertise would soon be called upon to assist with the charting and measuring of a new world.
The doleful events at Cooper's Creek, so deeply imprinted in the national angst, are recalled in a number of schmaltzy but touching genre paintings to be found in Australian museums. The most powerful images of the saga, however, are not in these heart-string-twanging chestnuts but a pair of harrowing expressionist works by the mid-twentieth-century painter Sydney Nolan. The first of these shows Burke on his camel about to leave Melbourne, a city by then grown prosperous, although in the painting he seems to be at the outskirts of a rough frontier town, on the edge of a dusty wilderness, a zone of margin, transition, and dissolution. The essence of the painting is disorientation. Yet, at the same time, it essays an image of the explorer-as-hero, at least potentially, and however tenuously: a rugged individual about to enter the wilderness he intends to explore, to map, to conquer.
"Without the hero," Sidney Nolan wrote in his notebooks, "you end up with anonymity," a notion linked to his paintings of the outlaw Ned Kelly, the brightly-colored, almost cartoon-like renderings that made him famous. But in all of Nolan's work, if the heroic figure is meant to save us from anonymity, the menace of that anonymity remains ever-present, pervasive, and erosive. In one series of Australian paintings, Nolan includes no human figures at all, only raw, livid hills and empty, glooming skies, where nothing stands for us or speaks for us. The sequence expresses one half of the dialectical tension—between a delineated individual and an obliterating indifference—played out in Nolan's second painting of Burke, done fifteen years later, showing the explorer at Cooper's Creek at the end of his journey. The first painting's mix of real and symbolic has given way to a fever-dream: the camel seems to be melting into swamp or quick-sand, its spindly shape dissolving in browns and burnt umbers, and the figure of Burke has lost its distinctness, becoming more pigment than person, as if he too were returning to an elemental, non-human substance and form. The top of his head is oddly distended, shapeless, and vague, as if it were already half dissolved in a background of mountain, storm, and nothingness.
In their blur of ambition and delusion, heroic endeavor and hopeless outcome, Nolan's images of Burke embrace a paradox: the human figure, with its dramatic and heroic potential, its hope and its tragedy, is essential to our sagas; yet that figure is constantly at risk of dissolving into indifference, a universe whose patterns are random and senseless. His two images of Burke—the would-be-hero, embarking on his trek, and the hapless wanderer, deluded and lost—form a diptych, a comment on the accidents of destiny and the ambiguities of the protagonist. The human figure is central to our stories, but the meaning of the figure is often different—less clear, more ambiguous—from what we supposed. The figure is ambiguous, in part, because its meaning changes depending on where we are, in time and space, when we make our observations.
5.
Captain Cook and General Wolfe, for example, appear differently as our assumptions change. Cook can be regarded as a paradigmatic hero-adventurer, innovative explorer, and promoter of the cause of science, but dissenters can see him as a compulsive, risk-addicted wanderer, lucky to find a mˇtier that cloaked his obsessions in the garb of good works and high ideals. In a politicized critique, despite his apparent interest in cultural anthropology and his occasional sensitivity, Cook can be indicted as a willing tool of imperial expansion, complicit in the vanguard of exploitation and oppression. From this perspective, he got what he deserved in Hawaii—stabbed to death in a fracas with natives, he was roasted and ceremonially eaten (a few charred bones, returned to his fellow officers, were buried at sea.)
Young General Wolfe, in the canonical version, looms large and bold against the horizon, the poet-in-action every Byron and Shelley dreams of being; alter the assumptions and he reappears as a hyper-aggressive military careerist lucky to find an arena so well suited to his personality. And within an ideological framework, he is one more tool of the Crown, which understood how to exploit such men. (Told by one of Wolfe's detractors that the young man was "quite mad," George II said, "If he is mad, I hope he will bite some of my other generals," foreshadowing Lincoln's astute judgment of Grant: "Find out what brand of whiskey he likes and send a case to each of my other generals.") And in a psychological analysis, he is a fatalist who could buoyantly lead men into mortal peril because he knew he was already dying of consumption.
Or he is a child of fortune. His dash up the Quebec bluffs would have been doomed, except that the French were crippled by poor communications and their ranks depleted; supplies and reinforcements had failed to arrive, and the men were hungry and cold, demoralized and ill. For Wolfe, everything that day went right. (Hold your breath and hope—for his sake, assuming you believe in his cause, assuming you are not French—hope the configuration remains unchanged, "that civilization may not sink, its great battle lost"). Had Wolfe been born under the baleful sign of Le Gentil—who missed two Transits of Venus and was declared dead—he might better have stayed home in England, a flower born to blush unseen, to sit in the garden and be nursed by a loving fiancˇe, writing an occasional line of verse in emulation of Thomas Gray.
If we seek the real Cook, the true Wolfe, we will find them not in any one of these portraits but somewhere among the shifting lights and shadows, in what Wallace Stevens called the moving contour. If truth is available, it lies in patterns emerging as we weave among possibilities and sift through overlapping interpretations: that web of truths Conrad spins so intricately (in Lord Jim as well as Heart of Darkness), thanks to the author's exploitation of his narrator's personality: Marlowe's natural tendency to be a gregarious, garrulous traveler, forever running into people who will listen to his tale, give him their reactions, and tell stories of their own. As his narration accretes layers and accumulates new supporting players, it becomes an exploration whose meanings circle each other, converging and diverging like parts of a sculptural mobile, wheeling through space, changing shape as they spin near us or circle away into the distance.
The images change as they move through time and space, but the final revision of the figure, as Nolan reminds us, is always anonymity, and the final change in perspective is the inhuman one: to lose definition, blurring into the sand of the desert and fading into a darkening sky, to be no longer recalled one way or the other. It is this eventuality that makes the image of the adventurer and the hero so crucial: because he keeps anonymity at bay, or delays its arrival, we continue to project his figure on the screen. Beguiled as Marlowe may be by the glow of a saga's surrounding haze, he needs a narrative to wrap his tales around, and the narrative needs a protagonist. Otherwise we are left with endless savannahs, cracked deserts, and arid mountains; otherwise, our landscape not only lacks figure, scale, and proportion, it is hardly recognizable as landscape.
6.
But the Oxford park that morning—June 4, 2004, the day of the first Transit of Venus in more than a lifetime—could not have been more personable and agreeable. It was like the stage set for a period-drama, a Merchant-Ivory restoration, so familiar as to seem overly characteristic: copses and flowerbeds scattered among the looping walkways, greenswards and playing fields set among meadows where grazing cows added a requisite touch of Constable. A suburbanized version of the pastoral familiar to poets ancient and modern, where swans paddling by might be relatives of those Yeats had seen, and before him Spenser, and where a young man poling a punt with sweeping muscular motions could have been auditioning for a role in the opening scene of The Tempest.
It was past noon. Reaching the outer edge of the sun's disk, Venus paused, as if reluctant to detach herself, but then it did, and the show was over. While some of the watchers might live to see the next one, in 2012, generations will come and go before the Transit after that, in 2117, when patterns of the past will have altered again, with new occlusions and illuminations, with new horseshoes missing their nails unearthed to explain a battle's loss. Some things may be the same. In all likelihood, bees will still buzz and crickets jump in the tall grass, and flotillas of ducks advance on the rainbow bridge, where a gnome-like man will scatter crumbs on the river's slow, idling surface. Someone will hear the clack of a bat and the click of a mallet striking a ball, sending it scooting across the grass. Someone will see a yellow Frisbee whirl in its elliptical arc.
The Cherwell, having further enlarged its serpentine meanders, will seem to move ever more languidly. And yet it will move. It will advance toward the Thames, and the sea beyond, and onward, to "the uttermost ends of the earth": Marlowe once more, giving voice—a gravelly, well-weathered voice—to our Ptolemaic solipsism, a viewpoint regarding those ends of the earth as far off, like distant planets, but circling a center where we stand and take the measure of things.
Such a world-view was possible in England, at least in the heyday of its maritime empire; it would have been inconceivable to nomads, fifty millennia ago, eking out their lives in the red center of Australia, under the brooding presence of Uluru (which white Australians would re-name Ayers Rock). For the Aboriginal tribesmen, Uluru was the navel of the earth, and the surrounding desert was the whole of the known world. They had never seen the sea and had no reason to think it existed, although wanderers from other tribes, migrating from rainforests near the coasts, might have brought such rumors. If there had once been an inland sea out here, it dried up eons before they arrived: the incomprehensible designs it left behind, traced on its bed, were discernible to Sidney Nolan when he passed over in a plane: circles and swirls, random striations and directionless tracks—gray lunar scorches, dry rivers of iron rust, yellowish-brown fans and fronds—a senseless emptiness, where herds of wild camels gallop at will, still proliferating, descendents of beasts of burden imported by 19th century explorers.
It is wasteland now, a flat expanse stretching endlessly away. In its center the cathedral-sized monolith of Uluru rises each morning from the memory of the vanished sea. Each evening the sidelong rays of the setting sun, filtering their way through desert dust, turn the great rock red as a still-thudding heart, and then the scoured and gouged flanks modulate to violet, and then deep purple, and finally a whale-skin blue-black. After that the earth is dark, drained of metaphor; the white stars overhead, innumerable and unimaginably distant, have no patterns and no names.
Sources:
Collingridge, Vanessa, Captain
Cook (The Life, Death, and Legacy of History's
Greatest Explorer). London: Ebury Press, Random House. 2002.
Connell, Brian. The Plains of Abraham. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1960.
Hough, Richard. Captain James Cook, a Biography. London: Hodder and Staughton.
1994.
Lynn, Elwyn, Sidney Nolan, Myth and Imagery. London: Macmillan. 1967.
Moorehead, Alan, Cooper's Creek. London: H. Hamilton. 1963.
Osborne, Charles. Masterpieces of Nolan. London: Thames and Hudson. 1975.
Sellers, David. The Transit of Venus. (The Quest to Find the True Distance of the Sun).
Leeds, United Kingdom: Magavelda Press. 2001.