Devotion(78)
German tongues laboured over the names of English landowners, English prices, English measurements, against cries of: ‘God will reward you, Captain!’ Dutton. MacFarlane. Finnis. ‘You are the Lord’s messenger!’ Poultry. Cattle. Pigs. Surely Flügel would see that this was God’s providence? Seven pound sterling an acre. ‘Let us prosper under Him. M?ge Gott Sie segnen!’
The sound of this country is one long sustained note that does not end. It is a humming that holds all the other music of this place in harmony. Every other sound is threaded upon it.
It was at the port that I began to curate new litanies. Between the bullock drivers that rumbled in from Adelaide, the sailors, the merchants, the English come in search of labourers, I found words given to the music I heard against the constant run of the wind amongst the rushes and sand dunes.
She-oak for the tree with long, scaled needles, whistling the wind in a way that made my skin lift.
Magpie lark for the two-shriek calling peep in changing hours.
Salt paperbark for the crooked trees groaning wooded, cupped fruit.
Mangrove, wattle, saltbush.
In the months that came afterwards I learned new words as the congregation did, as they crossed the dusty, ticking plains of Adelaide. I placed them next to one another upon the deeper vibration of this country.
Galah, cockatoo, lorikeet.
Kangaroo, wallaby, possum.
Emu, goanna, quoll.
Now, years later, sitting on the lip of this valley, I can make prayer beads of the trees that crown me, the small living things glimpsed if I am still and silent. Red gum, blue gum, quandong, stringybark. And the birds, ever here, ever singing, a liturgy to govern the hours towards gods of cry and shriek and call.
Kookaburra, magpie, shrike-thrush, wagtail.
Currawong, crow, boobook.
Scripture may no longer roll off my tongue in smooth certainty, but my mouth is still full of spirit. Holy Writ of living things, each one a prayer against the teeth.
The pilgrimage to the promised land took months. No family was able to carry all their possessions at once, and so were forced to trek back and forth, carrying what they could in a day’s journey, and then returning the next for another load. Sometimes it took two weeks to complete a distance that would otherwise have taken less than a day.
As the congregation slowly advanced forwards, following the dray tracks of the plains towards the lush blue-green distance of the Mount Lofty Ranges and its promise of cool, I sprawled on my father’s handcart, letting my head loll on its hard edge, and studied the sky. I could not fathom such impossible blue. The sky was higher, bigger, a cloudless wonder of vastness. Everything seemed small under its endlessness. Everything would die one day, but the sky would remain, and under such timelessness all time-tied things seemed sweeter for their impermanence. My throat tightened thinking about such things, and I slid myself off the handcart and walked from person to person, running my hands over their hot foreheads in wonder that they existed at all. You are all here, alive, all at once. What miracle, I told them. You will be gone one day. May the sky that has steepled over you hold you in its memory like a spark! I shouted this at Herr Pasche. Even dour-faced Christian seemed to me, in that moment, a marvel of life.
Nature had always been my whetstone, had always made me keener, and after the congregation reached the foothills, I felt myself sharpen to life. The landscape on the ascent to the ranges was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I had thought the pine forest back in Kay a place of divinity, but this country was infinitely more sovereign. Each morning, while it was yet dark, the birds filled the air with singing so that the sun, when it rose, brought light as symphony. The birds were everywhere: hosts of raucous angels, black-bodied, yellow-topped messengers of shrieking delight. Soot-streaked choral masters. Feather-fat kookaburras suddenly, alarmingly, proselytising to the dawn. Even the trees grew in such a way as to welcome the sun to the world. In Prussia canopies were dense and thick. Forest floors were deeply shadowed. Here was a place of lightness. Leaves dappled thin and shiny, fluttered pink, grey, green. I crushed them in my palm and smelled medicine. Healing. Hot, still days dropped branches, all bone-crack, and brought the sounds of bees. Sometimes I smelled honey warming the air. Animals were muscled fur and liquid eyes, or scaly thicknesses, tongues darting. All of it, trees and possums and kangaroos and bright beads of ants circling trunks, veered from stillness to flashing movement in an instant. There was energy here. Rough-softness. Sometimes it rained and, when it stopped, the air was perfume, a clean scent of wet leaf and damp sweetness. I wanted to drink that washed summer air. I imagined it tasted of reprieve.
My father, too, was invigorated by everything he saw. He ran his fingers along the ground and filled his nails with soil. ‘God’s gifts,’ he said, smiling at Matthias. Papa’s voice in prayer was the first to interrupt the dark. He scaled the ridges with kingdom-come strides, and remarked aloud upon the extravagance of sunlight, the yawning orange of rock faces, the views that suddenly appeared, paradisiacal, when the trees fell away to vistas that stretched to a shining belt of sea. He wore the hardship of the journey like a hair shirt: the wonder and the deprivation and the physical toll were bringing him closer to God. It was all sanctification.
No one else seemed to find such joy in the journey; the to-and-fro soon became tedious. While the Pasches, Radtkes and Volkmanns had, like my own family, bought small barrows from workers at the port, other families from Kay had no choice but to carry their possessions on their backs, and as the journey grew harder and heat settled into the days, the trail of Old Lutherans thinned. I decided to leave Papa’s barrow to walk beside the Eichenwalds, and I soon noticed that some of the women seemed to be avoiding Anna Maria.