Australian May 6, 2009
Author: Peter Cochrane |

Seeking consolation in the 'truth of things', Nicolas Rothwell criss-crossed northern Australia, only to find many versions of himself, writes Peter Cochrane |

THE Red Highway is a memoir in the form of four long essays documenting Nicolas Rothwell's travels in the far north following his return in 2005 from a stint as The Australian's Middle East correspondent, during which time he reported from war-ravaged Iraq. The writing is driven by Rothwell's search for meaning, or consolation, in the history, the people -- select people -- and the landscapes of remote Australia. He writes of being "without mooring", "lost in life" and wanting to "leach" the experience of the Middle East out of himself.

The book is a weaving of travelogue, interior monologue and history, and it is clear from the outset that Rothwell's quest is romantic, almost Wordsworthian: a search for intangibles such as sweetness, beauty and grace, and for what he calls "the truth of things", in the far reaches of the far north. He senses these far reaches are "calling" him. He senses they will play some concealed role in the unfolding of his life. He ruminates on the idea that people come to northern Australia, or return to it, because they are lost, or searching, or on the edge of life, and silence, and they're chasing after some kind of pattern, some redemption they think might be lurking, on the line of the horizon.

Rothwell's northern travels, he tells us, are "just a longing to be elsewhere, to ease the burden of the self". And while the next horizon always lifts hope and expectation, it never quite delivers. Melancholy is ever his companion. The deepest truth seems to be that nowhere is pristine, that devastation in Western form has reached into and wrecked every nook and cranny of this vast land.

"The carcass of a dingo shot through the hips and scalped. That's the reality of life, out in these rangelands," one of his companions says.

Nowhere, it seems, is pure enough to save Rothwell from a yearning for the way it was, or might once have been, or for just the contemplative emptiness of the bush. When he wanders around Darwin on his return he suffers "brief stabs of pain" every time he comes across "some new building or construction site" that breaks the pattern of his memories. When he returns from the pleasure of some "subtle elusive hill country" to a motel in Alice Springs, he watches fellow guests "eating their meals of eggs and grilled sausages" and is compelled to contemplate "once more the noise and sword-clash of human life". Sword-clash?

In spite of the melancholy, Rothwell still manages to find great beauty in what he sees and what he reports and his faith in the consoling power of the landscape, the bush, silence, communion with nature however worked over, is unfailing. He is at his best when he evokes the landscapes of his travels and the layers of experience and change that weigh on these places and rest invisibly in their dust; or when landscapes spark in him the kind of meditations that stir memories, whether snatches from childhood or flashbacks to places half a world away. A Rothwell memoir is a little surreal at times and yet this very quality does seem to capture something of the way the mind can shift involuntarily and throw up understanding as readily as confusion.

Readers who respond to a romantic, secular spirituality, who like stories laced with dream or reverie or who thrill to the idea of "the strange, assertive harmony of chance" will probably enjoy this book. The right character for the moment does seem to spirit into this narrative quite regularly, as if summoned by the chance gods. The historical segments are also strong: Karel Kupka's struggle to understand the "dawn of art" in Arnhem Land, and the disastrous Calvert expedition into the Great Sandy Desert in the 1890s are perhaps the best parts of the book.

But much of The Red Highway consists of recent stories told by Rothwell's travelling companions, sometimes first hand, sometimes recounted by the author as they move through country or walk on a beach. If there is a method here, beyond "the strange assertive harmony of chance" (or its careful fabrication), then it is to report the ideas of his discussants and work them back into his own quest for "the truth of things". The book is filled and fuelled by the wisdom, the insights and, occasionally, the humour, of Rothwell's co-seekers on the road, and his own reflections in response. All of these people tell good stories and the book, if it were nothing else, would be a valuable compendium of far north experience. All but one of these named are male, white, articulate, freewheeling spirits like Rothwell, and yet it would be wrong to conclude that this cohort gives rise to sameness. Or, for that matter, that Rothwell had any real choice; one may sense him going to these people, in serial fashion, because they are his friends and thus part of his search for renewal or meaning.

The friends who serially chat and journey with Rothwell encompass a considerable range of life and work experience: a rock art expert, a curator of molluscs, a fellow writer, a famed inland photographer, a famed botanist, a famed kangaroo shooter with a very philosophical take on things and a Vietnam veteran and lawyer based in Darwin and recovering from liver cancer. All of them, along with the one woman who figures in his travels, are remarkable people, rich in northern experience, intelligent, reflective and a match for Rothwell. The conversation, at times, is enjoyable to read. But the cohort does give rise to a nagging irony: surely the search for the "truth of things" in the far north must go wider than this? If wisdom resides in sameness, what is the point of travel? Is plumbing the depths of one's own cohort as revealing as transcending those depths? Why not cast a wide net, and reach into realms and ranks, black and white, high and low, where strangeness or otherness is the spark for self-knowledge?

There is one occasion when Rothwell steps out of this fraternity plus one. It happens when he agrees to drive an Aboriginal girl to Wyndam. What Rothwell reports is her question about the music on the car radio and the rest of this encounter -- pages of it -- is a monologue in which the author tells the girl about Haydn and Vienna, about his own European origins and why he came back to Australia. She barely gets a word in. At one point, she mimics his voice. Rothwell reports the mimicry without reflection.

It is as if Rothwell's quest requires people who talk like him. Thus the roadhouse that features in his tale is owned by a former Country Liberal Party politico who is something of an ornithologist, and the customer with whom Rothwell engages happens to be a bikie, tall and blond, who turns out to be a disillusioned anthropologist who talks apocalyptically about the desert communities and rides a "machine of sadness down the open road".

This is the biggest problem with the The Red Highway. Talk is the main medium of the book and, to my eye and ear, it seems all too literary, too contrived. It is impossibly sustained, impossibly fluent. All too often conversations sound like pristine prose. Who was it who said people don't talk prose? She was right. Conversations maunder and meander. They don't regularly throw up poetic aphorisms or epiphanies. All too often these people sound like Rothwell. The end result for this reader was distraction. I found myself wondering about the protocols of memoir -- a controversial issue in recent times -- and questioning the authenticity of what I was reading. I looked for endnotes that explained how such masses of conversation might have been recorded or written up, but there aren't any.

In one instance, I was able to put Rothwell to the test. He reports on his visit to the University of Sydney archives to read the Kupka correspondence in the Elkin papers.

He reports that as he read his tears fell on the papers. An archivist came and "almost" knelt beside him and a conversation followed on the subject of crying in the archives. She had seen his grief, apparently. She told him

"We can't have tears falling on the page ... it's not allowed."

"Not allowed?"

"You're not allowed to be sad, in a library, or archive. Didn't you know?"

"I know some," I said, "where sadness seems to be obligatory."

"On the contrary: that's not the way it's meant to be. Archives are where things live on, and memories triumph. This is where the pain of the past is redeemed -- and sadness falls into its place."

None of the staff at the archives remember Rothwell's visit, though it is not in dispute that he did visit. The reference archivist who would have dealt with him told me she has never encountered crying in the archives and had she encountered someone crying she most certainly would not have spoken about the pain of the past and memories triumphing. The other archivists who were present at the reading of this passage from The Red Highway found it surprising.

Several points arise. First, if Rothwell's account of his visit to the archives is true it might be poignant, but if it is not true then the account itself cannot be divorced from its fabrication and that is, indeed, amusing. Why this implausible nonsense? And what does the taking of such liberties mean for the venerable art of memoir?

Are the literary tricks -- the polishing, the inventions, the self-mythologising -- all now acceptable if they happen to lead to some deeper "mystical" truth, a truth so delicate and deep it cannot be interrogated?

Second, one has to ask how often does Rothwell put his own words into the mouths of other figures in this book, in particular the more or less anonymous acquaintances who move in and out of the story. At one point the tall, blond, anonymous bikie at that roadhouse tells him about a startling encounter with a desert nomad: "He looked at me with the eyes of love so deep it made nothing of everything," says the bikie to Rothwell. After that look of love, by the way, the nomad runs off, fast. Too often Rothwell fails to pick up on this sort of dissonance. The poetic collapses into the comic. You read gush like that and you have to wonder that bikie's poetic extravagance sounds very Rothwellian.

Memoir is not, strictly speaking, history. There is a certain latitude in the genre: recall Alec Guinness's Blessings in Disguise (1985), which permits the telling of even long gone conversations to the best of one's recollection or from verbatim diaries that here and there might fold into summary points requiring faithful restoration. But if the genre of memoir is to have any integrity at all then that is surely the limit. Concocting events and conversation for dramatic purposes is not on. Rothwell is too good a writer to be doing this, no matter how marginally, and certainly not in a book aiming for some sort of deep truth through the medium of conversation on the road.

Which brings me to a final poin that may not surprise anyone: the good writing in this book is not sustained. All too often the prose collapses into the purple. Rothwell's half-page account of a certain Karen's beauty on page 91 is simply Mills &Boon. And his inclination to ask, every time a woman is mentioned, "Was she beautiful?" is plain cringeville. Strangely, his travelling companions want to ask this question too.

Reaching for profundity can too easily sink into the banal. Repeatedly, Rothwell's earnestness overshoots the mark and just seems funny. If there is a case for the importance of not being too earnest, then The Red Highway is it. Examples abound. Of Karen's beauty we are told: "She was becoming increasingly immured within herself, hemmed in by her mounting awareness of man's fate."

It's all rather breathless.

At other times, Rothwell lets his archaic romanticism carry the prose into silliness. Thus, on the terrible death of Jones and Wells on the Calvert expedition he is inclined to write:

I imagined too, that the desert claims those of sweetness and kind temper, for they alone can soothe the clang of its stillness; that it needs them, and they belong there.

What? The unrequited poet figures far too often for my liking.

Rothwell has come back from the Middle East disturbed by his experience there and in need of solace. This is the premise of the book, but we are not helped by its sustained obscurity. We are told nothing of this experience save for one Middle Eastern digression that is anything but traumatic. It is in fact more of the same: chance, epiphanic encounters with sweet people, in this case in the Church of St Anne in Jerusalem, where beauty and grace seems to shimmer, like stardust, in the air.

It seems that Rothwell's malaise is also confined to after hours. Nowhere does he situate his "Red Highway" travels in the context of his working life as a Darwin-based correspondent for The Australian. How did that work figure in his search for solace? Was it a help or a hindrance? Not a word. Was there no consolation, no wisdom, no truth to be found in the subjects of his journalism, or just in the doing of it, the sheer busyness, the focus it routinely provided? The Red Highway experience seems like a life apart, a parallel life, strangely segregated from the day-to-day things.

At that seminal roadhouse, the manager-cum-ornithologist apparently asked Rothwell if he was an insurance valuer and Rothwell replied, rather clunkily: "I'm not a valuer, but I value things." Then one of the bikies asked him if he was an ABC reporter and, again, Rothwell parried the question: "Do I look like an ABC reporter?" And the bikie apparently said: "No, you don't have the kind of easy, open face one associates with a public broadcaster."

Now, I've stopped at a few roadhouses in the far north over the years and I do wish that just once I might have fallen in with a crowd as eloquent, and as good at reading faces, as this.

I might add the obvious point that it is lack of speech -- the blunt laconic -- that defines so much of genuine interaction in the far north. But Rothwell, clearly, is searching for his truth with another mob entirely.