Fourteen Fragments

I recognised these insignia of passage – minor rearrangements of the world, serving as temporary waymarkers – having encountered them often on my walks.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

I

In 1845, in one of Charles La Trobe’s final edicts, this land is named, its boundary defined. Yet does every territory require a map, a name, or can it be known simply by attributes both psychological and physical?

Perhaps it is only the wounds and scars you seek here. Perhaps it is a portal to an elsewhere, which is both lost and regained simultaneously, as is the case with any aperture, any mode of seeing: something always remains outside of vision.

II

Over the cycle of a year you have seen these structures - faux mia mias inclined against trunks - appear constantly, then disappear, only to be reformed elsewhere, or so you imagine. Perhaps they could be considered rooms within this ‘estate’. In the spring, their proliferation slowed, but then the signs and symbols in that sandy soil began appearing in their stead. You have never seen these structures inhabited, but you have seen traces: a black bra, a Gatorade bottle transitioned to a meth bong, an empty blister pack of painkillers. A later apparition of a blue and white tent, although you never saw its occupant, nor did you ever see the architects of the bricolages or their purpose. The rains and winds did not erase the structures as easily as the symbols written in the soil. Naturally, these structures would also be transformed or returned to a scatter of branches, unlike the words and symbols inscribed into boughs, which fade and alter, but remain until the trees ultimately fall.

Your mind also made images of kids with death metal t-shirts and long hair, videotape stereotypes. You hope for a collusion between sign and structure but any ritual remains elusive, as does any pact between them.

III

There are assemblages also: not just the rises and folds of Silurian geology (its earliest layers of lava now friable rock and sand) but those from twisted rebar, metal and concrete, the fragility of eucalyptus branches and their intertwined arrangements by human hands. Leonski’s hands would only unmake life here.

You remember the teenage girls had approached you, running even, waving a phone at you and asking, “have you seen this girl? She’s gone missing.” Of a similar age, dark-skinned, smiling perhaps. They departed as quickly, almost not waiting for your negative response, as if they had already known your answer. One of the teenagers dragged a branch behind her.

A branch, too, would be used against Courtney Herron on the night of May 24th, 2019. You have stood at this location many times, unable to imagine the violence; the cycle of branch against body for thirty minutes.

IV

The outcrop of granite boulders at first sight appear like a message from deep time, an ancient echo into the present. You know, however, that until thirty years ago the slope had been grassed. Perhaps prior to even the grass river red gums had existed here, magnificent in their dignity, each capable of benignly nourishing the earth for more than 500 years. Sitting on the boulders, you can glimpse to the northwest the brick structures of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory (CSL) in the mid-distance, the buildings’ existence on that site longer than these introduced boulders. From the early 1930s snake antivenins had been manufactured here, and during World War II, penicillin. Florey and penicillin; Cade and lithium. Now CSL manufactures Astra Zeneca under license, further north, elsewhere.

You cannot find Yauan on any map. This is the title William von Blandowski had given an engraving within his extraordinary book, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen; the curiosity of the term photographic. “Forty-five miles north by west of Melbourne”: Heathcote way, Toolorac even, where the boulders have been displaced from. You twin these boulders surrounding you with Blandowski’s rendering often. You feel certain, irrationally, that these rocks connect you to him, that by touch and vision, you have both encountered these same objects. The human figures - black and white - appear like scalar necessities only.

Blandowski would die in a Silesian psychiatric hospital in 1878.

V

Perhaps Ferdinand Von Mueller had walked over this land - where rock still had not been introduced - stooping to reach for a specimen, raising it to the sun to better identify it, to add it to his expanding taxonomy of Australian flora in Latin cursive. In Berlin, Karl Blossfeldt would - decades later - also stoop and collect; glass and emulsion, images written with light.

Ludwig Becker would be a delineator for von Mueller’s Fragmenta phytographiae Australiae, and would set out from here in 1861, never return to it. Becker had spent a night here even, on Sunday, 19th of August, the eve of the expedition, where he would be part of the following day’s nearly 500m long caravan. Often, you see his hand - the delicacy of his lines and marks - in the species von Mueller had collected, that exist on this land now; a calyx - for instance - you can touch, yet always twin with Becker’s drawings as the object before you.

Another German, Helmut Neustaedter, as a member of the Eighth Australian Labor Company, like Becker had slept here. You wonder what he saw through a viewfinder, several years before Camp Pell - as the U.S. forces stationed named their camp here during WWII - would be known as Camp Hell. Helmut Neustaedter would soon be known as Helmut Newton.

VI

Camp Pell is a grass circle now - a low yellow circle, the wallaby grass never still - screeded over a graveyard of Nissan hut asbestos beneath. Nimbus seldom pass over this circle.

After WWII, the camp would be written of as “a breeding ground of physical and spiritual disease”: until 1954 - the year of the Melbourne Olympic Games - it would be a temporary ‘settlement’ for homeless families. According to the then state government “the big problem was the provision of accommodation for habitual drunkards, sex perverts and sub-normal people living in emergency camps.”

Ten days after Becker’s departure, he would make a watercolour from the Terrick-Terrick plains of a Fata Morgana. Again, you are reminded of the German’s hand when you see the circle on certain days: the emptiness, that summer heat slick tinctured with smog in the eucalyptus on the far side of the circle. The circle presents a kind of mirage, a kind of historical deceit to your mind.

VII

The absence of fire here. It is its absence - as trace, as element, as technology - you think, which separates this landscape from its past. 20000 years before Heraclitus, the humans who existed on this land had already understood how fire not only destroys but regenerates, how it makes and births. Humans 180 years ago had not understood this concept of the land. Their skin was white. They had English, Irish, Scottish, French, German and Dutch names. Like you - like Blandowski - some bore Polish names also.

VIII

In evening light and wind, you see the Manna gums flickering with intense light and speed, imagining their fuel combusting, imagining each shifting mass spreading its flame in enfilade.

Later you had seen a man in a silver gum. You watched him perched on the silver gum’s branch, perhaps in turn being watched by him. All silhouette against a paler sky like a negative. You thought of Tommy McRae’s drawings: figures in trees, hunting, a thicket of camouflage. It was night by then. The anxiety you feel in this place at night. Yet you are also haunted when the sun makes chimeras from the swell of ferny-leafed acacias or she-oaks. The site’s ghosts formed by daylight.

IX

Even the landscape’s tracts denominated as ‘indigenous remnants’ have been imposed, cultivated to appear as pre-Colonial artefacts rather than the fact - the honesty - of their simulation. The intent, in part, is to allow a certain wildness - not wilderness - to take hold. Perhaps these are Romantic ricochets, both a thread back to Repton’s eighteenth-century English landscapes, and to the artificial ruins savoured by the phantasmagoria of those minds. ‘Remnant’ invokes survival, but not necessarily an overcoming.

A car’s carcass, equally imposed like a picturesque folly, cannot be seen from any classical vantage point or perspective. Yet it equally appears to you as ‘natural’ as anything else within these boundaries: its existence is only partially constructed.

X

On August 20, 1860, the Burke and Wills expedition (Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills) would depart from within this boundary into the oblivion of the barely seen north, towards Carpentaria. Ludwig Becker was also one of expeditioners. Becker would die of dysentery, scurvy and exhaustion in April 1861 at Bulloo. He would never learn of the deaths of Burke and Wills - three months later - the deaths primary school children are taught.

The 1st AIF Expeditionary Force would also exit these grounds in October 1914 for the stalemate and slaughter of Gallipoli: another reification of folklore, myth and image.

Some of the Americans of Taskforce 6814 stationed here during WWII would also not return from Pacific theatre. Helmut Neustaedter may have known some of these men. Perhaps his portraits exist in an album, somewhere, unseen.

XI

Babyfaced and dark blonde, and unlike his fellow servicemen billeted here, Private Eddie Leonski would not leave for the Pacific theatre. He would would be executed at Pentridge Prison by rope on November 9, 1942. The location where the last victim of his fortnight of three femicides, Gladys Hosking, is unrecognisable now: younger eucalypts have now found home here above a platform of brush. He smiles within the archives - his future and eternal image - while his victims, Ivy McLeod, Pauline Thompson and Gladys Hosking remain - as archive - blurred and footnoted to his acts.

XII

From coroner’s reports from the former asylum you cannot compose a mental physiognomic image from each of their names or autopsies, nor the sensation of how a coroner’s stainless steel must feel against a spleen or pancreas. A disturbing denominator becomes a serial trope: “general paralysis of the insane”. Against a stump smoking, you watch a flickering line of ants duplicate anonymity.

XIII

John Cade, a psychiatrist, was one of the non-missing, having been a captive of the Japanese in Changi Prison after the fall of Singapore in 1942. In 1952 Cade was appointed to Royal Park Mental Hospital.

In 1949 John Cade would first trial the use of lithium carbonate for the treatment of “maniacal excitement” in Bundoora, a psychiatric hospital for war veterans. There, his first patient, his first human experiment, John Brand, died in 1950 from lithium toxicity.

Nevertheless, Edward Trautner, a German emigré and former lover of Georges Bataille’s mistress, Collette Peignot, would be one of the local psychiatrists who would champion the clinical use of lithium. Your friend, a writer, had introduced you to this name; it was by the cutting, where the pick marks depict not only their scars in the volcanic crust and cleaving, but also assign a socio-economic signifier to those who left the residues of this labour. These marks in the rock are as palpable as the hospital’s erasure.

XIV

You are amongst the she-oaks now, the casuarina. The myna is at home within this wire and cone - their small bodies an inverse ratio to the amplitude of their trills. The turmoil of history - and your mind - abates here. Needles underfoot - a soft gravel of voice - reassure you. Light splinters through the imbroglio of each she-oak’s spokes, patching the ground with a staccato of brilliant photons. It is good here, in this now, where history ceases to exist, if only temporarily.