Tag: Outback

In search of ‘nothing’… Part 2 

angela findlay4 Comments

(You can find Part 1 here)

Roughly 220 miles east of Perth, beyond the salt lakes of the Western Australian Wheatbelt and within the remoteness of Hyden’s various outcrops of mineral-striped granite, the mouth of Mulka’s Cave opened just enough to allow us to clamber inside. With the brash sun denied entry, it took time to adjust to the dimness of leaked light… and silence. That’s when we saw them. 

A few miles away, Hyden Rock, more famously known as Wave Rock, buzzed with flies and visitors posing for selfies and family snaps. It is better served than the cave with a visitor’s centre and trail signs tasked with the nigh on impossible endeavour of condensing 4,500 million years of evolution into digestible snapshots. Like the constellations of night skies, how do you explain the making of some of the oldest exposed rocks anywhere on earth? 

Well, with a little appropriation, I am going to give it a go. For to travel in Australia is not only to experience the elements as art forms of uncompromising intensity and beauty. It is also to engage with Australian history. And that involves confronting another story of darkness that relates to the pitch dark episode of more recent times that many people will be remembering this Saturday 27th January… Holocaust Memorial Day.

Approximately 2,500 million years ago, a mass of granite rock known as the Yilgarn Block was intruded into the earth’s crust right across the southern half of Western Australia. It remained below the surface as the first plants and trees emerged, as the first amphibians, reptiles and insects moved, as the dinosaurs came and went between 230 and 130 million years ago. Meanwhile, hidden out of sight, a process of sub-surface weathering was occurring in three massive phases of erosion. 

Water that ran off Hyden Rock seeped into cracks and nibbled away at the structure of the granite. While winds and heat would dry the upper layers of soil, deep down it remained wet and salty, rotting the rock face and breaking it down. When natural erosion finally lowered the surface level of the surroundings, the crumbled rock also washed away leaving a 25-meter-high and 110-meter-long crest rising from the darkness of geological history. To put humans into perspective, if the whole evolution of the earth was reduced to a single calendar year, modern man would make his entrance onto the world stage in the final half-second of December 31st!

The palette of coloured stripes is created by water’s impact on the tiny lichens (the first plant form to colonise granite), mosses and blue-green algae that stain and streak the stone with shades of black, orange and silver.

Similar processes occurred at the nearby domed granite ‘Humps,’ one of which houses Mulka’s Cave. Crafted over millions of years by salt, water and wind and painted in strokes of ochres, greys and pale cobalt dotted with small green shrubs, they were home to the vital gnamma holes. These were Aboriginal people’s natural water holes capable of storing rainwater run-off and replenished from underground stores. From the 1890s, the influx of thirsty new arrivals made these already vital sources of water even more precious than the gold they came to mine. The sacred gnamma holes became scenes of conflict. Many were drained, destroyed or polluted, others were lined and claimed as the gold diggers’ own. 

The pattern from there on is all too depressingly familiar. Domination, subjugation, exploitation, cruelty, destruction, suffering, death. A particular human / inhumane trait prevails the world over when man is consumed by greed and a sense of superiority and entitlement. But is that our true nature or an aberration of what we are designed to be?

One could say that since 1633 when Galileo was convicted of heresy for upending almost 2000 years of western scientific thinking by claiming the sun – rather than the earth – was the centre of the universe, there has been strong resistance, especially by the Catholic Church, to the ensuing demotion of man’s position in the world. 

Behind this refusal lies the still-existing widespread conviction of alpha male’s rightful position at the pinnacle of nature. In the mid 19th century, a complete misinterpretation of ‘survival of the fittest’, the catchphrase that became shorthand for Darwin’s ground-breaking theories on evolution, conveniently advanced his apparent confirmation that physical dominance triumphs. 

Such misunderstandings and claims of man’s importance and right to dominate have had devastating consequences, most recently seen in the ideologies and doctrines such as Nazism, eugenics, racial and gender discrimination and society’s policies on and treatment of the ‘weaker’ more vulnerable in society – the elderly, sick, poor, lesser-abled, foreign… and, in Australia, the indigenous Aboriginals and their descendants. (Hmmm… I can feel a Part 3 to this blog might be needed.)

Fortunately, countless scientists of different disciplines are finding that it is not physical dominance that assures survival but the human traits of friendliness, kindness, generosity, sacrifice, empathy, cooperation.

Compassion, for example, stems from a really old part of the brain. It activates the vagus nerve – the longest bundle of nerves in the human parasympathetic nervous system. Research shows how feelings of caring for someone in need activate the vagus nerve. Have a listen to this. It’s not my area of expertise, but it feels all too relevant to some of the problems in the world today. 

When I left England at the beginning of December, I realised I felt saturated and helpless in the face of the wrongness and tragic outcomes of human actions, both past and present. (For background you can read my November Blog.)

Travelling through the landscape of the Western Australian outback washed, warmed and blew the density away creating endless space… a blank inner canvas. It was a form of recalibration and alignment with nature. A state of empty ‘nothing’ full of potential and hope. And that’s what I saw in Mulka’s Cave when I saw ‘them’.

As my eyes acclimatised to the dipped light, I found myself surrounded by the traces of 3-4000-year-old, possibly much older, hands waving gently from the walls.

Some printed, others stencilled, they revealed the inextricable interplay of positive and negative space, of simultaneous absence and presence, the creative dance of inner and outer. The entirety of the world quite literally in the palm of a hand. 

These early displays of human creativity seem to bridge the synthetic divisions of secular modernity and the differences that lead to wars. They close the false divides between past, present and future to depict human beings’ true position in the scheme of things. As part of a greater whole.

To me, those ancient hands that refused to spoil or damage what their ancestral deities had made in the Dreamtime prove that we are both the created and creators. That we are both all and nothing. 

With this blog and in a very different way to usual, I acknowledge Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday 27th January and remember the millions of people who were brutally murdered by those who could not see that ultimately, we are one.

In search of ‘nothing’… part 1

angela findlay3 Comments

My yearning for ‘nothing’ has been growing incrementally over the past few years. I have alluded to variations of apparent nothingness in my book and previous blogs when I discuss ‘negative space’, ‘the feminine principle,’ the vital pause at the start of Beethoven’s 5th, all expressions of that immaterial level of life that evade measurement or proof by current instruments of science. It is space, in every sense of the word.

Ever since my first and only trip there in the mid-eighties, Australia’s unique form of emptiness has tempted me back. Its vast cobalt-domed red plains sealed by 360˚ of horizon and uncluttered by physical landmarks of human endeavour older than 235 years. Here the world could well be flat. For the mind expands unhindered in all directions, stretching until the last strands of taut linear thought surrender their elasticity to slip like well-worn pyjama bottoms into a useless pile around the ankles.

The island continent is a landmass that cannot be understood with the brain. It must be embodied, felt. Having travelled there between the wars, a confounded D.H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo (1923): “You feel you can’t see, as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape.” 

The Western Australian novelist, Tim Winton, expands on this inability to process what is around you in his book Island Home. It requires time. Duration and experience. Submission and waiting. ‘Space was my primary inheritance,’ he writes of his upbringing. ‘I was formed by gaps nurtured in the long pauses between people.’

I recognise the impossibility of putting the sensory vocabulary from the 18 months spent here in my early twenties into words. And yet, a residual, visceral resonance with the land, aboriginal culture and those ‘gaps’ remained through the decades despite my disproportional terror of almost every native creature that swims, slithers or hops. 

One of the aims of this trip to the inland and coastal terrain of Western Australia was to visit old housemates who shared that vibrant formative period in Sydney. Other motivations came from a need to escape the increasing compactness of a busy work schedule and a head filled to the brim with daily horror stories of escalating conflicts, the non-sense of current politics and power struggles, the dreaded false Gods of ‘economic growth’ and technological ‘progress’ and the cold soggy winter shades of grey. I wanted to blow my mind wide open in order to (re)connect with a more primal relationship to space and time. And life itself.

Departing from Perth on 15th December, a friend from Melbourne and I loaded fuel, water and food into a 4WD Toyota Landcruiser ‘troupy’ converted into a camper van clearly designed for a contortionist. Heading north-east we followed the Sat Nav’s increasingly sparse instructions until a lazy voice told us to just ‘drive straight for 280km.’ And then another 250. And then another.

Barely turning the steering wheel except to overtake 60-meter-long road trains bearing heavy loads of ready-made houses or industrial monsters destined for the mines, we watched as the golden fields of the wheat belt dried and darkened into the deep ochres of the outback. The green foliage and white trunks of swaying gum trees gradually gave way to more sclerotic scrubland as earth and sky baked in the unrelenting rage of 44˚ sunrays. With rivers and gorges evaporated and all sensible holidaymakers having headed south, meet-and-greet parties of thirsty flies eagerly awaited us at each stop to feast on our eyelids, nostrils and lips. 

“One seems to ride forever and come to nothing and to relinquish at last the very idea of an object.” Anthony Trollope in the 19th Century

While indicators of bush fire risks threatened, the surreal warnings of floods made us salivate. It was only when we reached the white sand shores of Cape Range that we were introduced to the element of liquid. Turquoise waters busy with turtles and unfazed multi-coloured fish that populate the coral of the fringing Ningaloo Reef.

Water, water may have been everywhere, but there was not a drop to drink. No taps, no showers, no quenching glass to fill. Here the elements don’t provide a mere backdrop to human dramas. They are the drama. And they rarely disappoint. The very molecules that make up earth, sea, air and heat seem packed more tightly to consolidate into physical entities that vie to destroy each other in fierce games of rock – paper – scissors. 

As we travelled southwards down the coast we passed orange monuments of termite mounds, the jagged teeth and rounded limestone phalli of the Pinnacles Desert. We looked down from heady heights onto a mottled green lagoon in which spooky shapes of sharks and stingrays silently moved about their day isolated from the inky depths. We shuffled along eerie beaches made from deep swathes of white shells emptied of their inhabitants and lined by water too salty to enter. We climbed ragged gorges shaped by cyclonic rains and wind and home to black-flanked rock wallabies, paddled in silver-pink salt lakes and swam through mazes of coral. Each scene could have been a movie set… and a sci-fi one at that.  

It’s not surprising that three weeks on I am still feeling the ever-changing landscape whisper its secrets into the spaces within my mind and body. With both deliberately denied all news, social media and the familiarities of home, it is easier to hear.

For many visitors and natives, the landscape is daunting, monotonous, melancholic, ugly. But for some it is an acute experience. I find myself inspired by the clean-cut lines of the horizon that stretches in all directions as far as the eye can see dividing opaque blocks of cobalt and red ochre or bleached cerulean, salted turquoise and pristine white into the containers of empty space. 

Much of Western Australia is made up of a landscape where the marks of two centuries of colonial successors appear to merely scratch the surface with straight asphalt lines and low-lying bungalows ducked under corrugated roofs in an attempt to escape oppressive heat and excess cost. To the trained eye, however, non-indiginous man’s marks are much deeper and more destructive… in places devastating. But there is no getting away from it, we are a mere blink in the long timeline of this ancient geology. 

There were moments I too longed for the containment of four solid walls, a chance to withdraw from the wild and hibernate, as I am accustomed to doing at this time of year. And it was indeed within the cool damp walls of a dimly lit sacred cave that I found stunning evidence of the nothing I have been seeking…

To be continued… Part 2 will follow soon!