A Sand Archive Read online

  About A Sand Archive

  Long before I ever met him I knew his name from the leaky dessicated type of a grey-brown slim volume, cheaply printed but essential to my research . . .

  Seeking stories of Australia’s Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road’s history, FB Herschell. It is a volume unremarkable in every way, save for the surprising portrait of its author that can be read between its lines: a vision of a man who writes with uncanny poetry about sand.

  And as he continues to mine the archive of FB Herschell – engineer, historian, philosopher – it is not the subject, but the man who begins to fascinate. A man whose private revolution among the streets of Paris in May 1968 begins to change the way he views life, love, and the coastal landscape into which he was born . . .

  Contents

  About A Sand Archive

  Title Page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About Gregory Day

  Also by Gregory Day

  Copyright page

  for Jane Honman

  What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

  The future lies with what’s affirmed from under.

  Seamus Heaney

  One

  1

  Change

  Long before I ever met him I knew his name from the leaky desiccated type of a slim grey-brown volume, cheaply printed but essential to my research: The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties by FB Herschell.

  When inspecting the boxes of his papers that were deposited in the university library later on, I came to know that the grainy photo on the cover of the volume was in fact taken by him in the early days, in 1966. He took quite a few other photographs at the time as well, mostly of hummock and shoulder, camber and heath. He certainly chose the most charismatic one for the cover of his book. Even so, it was hard to make out exactly what the image on the cover was depicting. In the background there was the forest-clad cove of Lorne across Louttit Bay. In the foreground a car tyre skid in deep sand. It was clear that at least one driver had had trouble getting through. With two men in overcoats standing not far from the skid it looked a little like a crime scene, which, in a subtle way, only made my urge to investigate the contents of the book even stronger.

  So, the early world of the motor car, sand drift, the problems posed by dune shifts, roadmaking in the wind shadows. That gives you some idea of the spectrum. The poles of his range. Well, almost. This little book he wrote, the only one he ever published – and with no help from his boss Gibbon at the Country Roads Board, I might add – is so unassuming that you have to be seriously interested to notice what it actually contains.

  What I was looking for when I first opened the book was narrative momentum. I had an idea that I wanted to write the largely untold history of the building of Victoria’s Great Ocean Road in short historico-poetic vignettes, in the manner of the great Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano. I saw each hard-won detail of my research as the potential kernel for a historically accurate but dreamlike prose, an imaginative route back through time. And I soon had the sense that FB Herschell had been there before me.

  Some of the other black-and-white photos the book contained were:

  An old bridle track through a windy foredune.

  The seaweed-dotted sand along the Eastern View beach.

  Traxcavators on the cretaceous headland above the St George River.

  The graphic vertical shadows of the slats of a ‘Gascony palisade’.

  A group of headscarved women planting in sand.

  FB Herschell himself in the field, on the heath, amongst the controversial marram grass, his jacket flapping in the seeding wind, in tweeds and tie, in tam-o’-shanter, in deep Victoria. In 1970.

  †

  I was working at the bookshop in James Street, Geelong, when I met him. A long time after I’d finished my work on the history of the road. Like so much that went on in that bookshop, FB Herschell’s presence came as a stimulating intersection between what is written on paper and what is actually breathing and alive. Suddenly those fusty initials on that slim grey-brown volume had become a living man standing in front of me, chatting with my fellow staff members. And rather than that leaky desiccated type on a dun background, his eyes gleamed with the freshness of ongoing life, his mouth constantly finding shapes of dry appreciation, his pleasure evident at finding other people who dwelt deep in the nourishing but often overlooked vanishing points of beauty and knowledge.

  To be honest, though, the most important thing for me was this: he had liked one of the books I had written and in his understated way wanted to make that clear to me.

  After the initial conversation, he’d drifted further into the shop, into the narrow space between European History and Modern Lit. I remember him standing there, like a swimmer gone into the waves. He had his back to History, scanning what we had of Proust. The usual translations, yes, and the first volume of the recent Prendergast edition, Swann’s Way translated by Lydia Davis, but also the small book by Proust’s maid, whose expertise was to read the sallow pouches under the writer’s eyes like a diagnostic parchment, so that she could attend properly to the routines of his exquisite retrospection. There was also a volume called The Book of Proust on the shelves at that time, a blue-and-white hardback published in London in 1989, which surveyed the great writer from some stimulating and pithy angles. I had taken an interest in this book myself – it felt to me a bit like what Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet might have written on Proust had they been invented after Proust rather than, through the stubborn linearity of time, before him. I’d always loved those two idiots from the last unfinished work of Flaubert. It being unfinished may have been partly why, but like so many great, and not so great, works of foreign literature, from Tolstoy right across to Enid Blyton, I had pictured all the action taking place in an Australian – or, to be more specific, a south-west Victorian – landscape. Thus, when Bouvard and Pécuchet sit on a Parisian bench and decide to move to the country with Bouvard’s sudden inheritance, I have them sitting in my mind’s eye on a bench in the Botanic Gardens in Geelong. And when they finally move to their country house to pursue their lifestyle fantasies I have them taking up their rural dwelling not in Normandy but in a house on Lardners Track on the Gellibrand River in the Otway Ranges.

  Peering around a tall display vitrine and across the spines in our travel literature section I saw FB taking The Book of Proust down from the shelf. He would know it was a book originally ordered into Australia on indent, in the days before the internet. Whoever had ordered it had looked after it well, and as soon as it came into the shop we had covered it
in clear mylar to keep it in good nick. I knew intuitively that its condition, as well as its content, would appeal to FB. Why wouldn’t it? I felt sure also that some of the categories of interest marked out in the survey would capture his lively, polymathic mind. For instance, there was a Dictionary of Places in À la recherche, beginning with Balbec and ending in Vivonne. There was also a separate passage on Proust and music, which talked of Marcel and his mother playing piano together (a little like Jean-Paul Sartre and his mother) and how one of his relations, Louise Cruppi, introduced Russian music to Paris and was a friend of Fauré. It also talked of Proust’s love for the organ music of César Franck, which I also enjoy. But the ingredient I suspected might appeal to FB the most was how Proust had discovered Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande through the agency of a near-mystical contraption called a ‘theatrophone’. This theatrophone was a telephone connected to a microphone in the Paris Opera which allowed the agoraphobic Proust to listen to a concert at home, a little like we might live stream a concert via the internet today. I hoped, as I watched the elderly bibliophile flicking through the pages, that he would find that anecdote and be stimulated by this convergence of technology and desire. But when he put it back on the shelf I felt sure he hadn’t discovered it.

  A good bookseller might then have made his way across and struck up a conversation, in order to swing things around to the subject. But I was never that, never a good bookseller in that way, and there was something about this unexpected entry into my life of the real man behind that inky name – FB Herschell – that had me far more concerned with letting any potential friendship form slowly rather than with selling him the book.

  The Parisian theatrophone has always struck me as the kind of improvised ingenuity you find amongst people living by their wits in the outback. I marvel at that old geography-bound music being allowed to travel through the prehistory of a live stream. I crane an imaginary ear to hear what Proust heard: the scratchy, tinny notes from the Paris Opera clouded and fizzed by the thinness of the phone line and the microphone but nevertheless intact in each note’s relationship with the other. The timbre would be more implied than anything else but the beauty would still be transmitted. The lack of sound fidelity would confirm that the process between the music composed and the listener experiencing it was as important as any reproduction of the originally played notes. How Proustian! Strange as it may seem, it was an experience like that for me just to have FB Herschell in the little shop. I could not quite believe the man behind the scratchily printed name was real and whole, and yet, like Debussy’s opera for the Parisians in the seats of the auditorium that Proust could not bring himself to attend, there he was before me.

  †

  I should explain that back when I was doing my work on the history of the Great Ocean Road, useful published material was hard to find. It was not so much that there was a shortage of publications on the subject, it was just that they had nearly all been garbled by the often disingenuous impulses of tourism. Most of the material turned the heroic story of how the road was built by soldiers after the First World War into a trinket, a textual equivalent of a snow dome or a key ring, complete with commodified slouch hats and oversaturated vistas. As I read these publications I had the unsettling feeling that somehow the historical narrative of the returned diggers living in tents and hand-building the road in all weathers was being used only to get travellers to spend more money at the cafes. But the copy of The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties I had borrowed from the library was an exception. There was no schmaltz, no spin, only knowledge, technique, experience, and, every now and again, an unexpected glimmer of poetry.

  At the time I was renting a weatherboard cottage in Lorne. Apparently the cottage was once used by the botanist Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, when he was down here on the coast collecting new plant specimens for his collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. I worked with my laptop on the top of an old upright Waldmann piano, which I liked to think had been installed in the cottage before von Mueller’s arrival and never removed. There was only a dial-up internet connection at the time that I was living there (this was in the year 2000), which allowed for much intermediary time waiting for relevant pages of my research to appear. Sometimes that would frustrate me, but more often than not I found the miracle of being able to receive such information without setting foot outside an old Otways weatherboard easily outweighed the frustration. These long waits also gave me time to think, to follow thoughts in a way I might not have otherwise, also to noodle and try out chords on the piano.

  I had been given a CD of photographs of the soldiers building the road back in the 1920s and 30s by a kind man at a local historical society, and as I waited for various internet pages to appear I would open one or another of those images in Photoshop and begin to type lines on top of them. Some of these lines were triggered by small details buried amongst the material I’d found on the Ocean Road; others were just my own character imaginings from looking at the faces of the diggers as they swung their mattocks and pegged the route between, say, the S bends on the western end of that section of the road they nicknamed ‘the Somme’ and the incline past the now-popular surf break at Cathedral Rock. But one day, while I was looking at a scratchy image of the Devils Elbow – a hairpin bend that wraps around a dramatic point before curling onwards past the old tollgate at Grassy Creek on the way to Lorne – some lines of FB’s from The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties popped into my mind. In the background of the image of the Devils Elbow was a wedge of ocean in greyscale, and it was as I was considering the similarities between the photographic flecks of the poorly printed image and the real-life gannets that wheel and soar past that very spot, that I recalled FB’s lines:

  Time passes, nothing stays still. Out there, in the ephemeral velocity of the high wind, what can be called a natural system? Likewise, in the transience of nature, what can be said to constitute a plan full of function? How, indeed, can we ever ascertain a real live measure?

  Here, I realised, was an engineer-cum-historian reflecting on the essentially impossible nature of his craft. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me. His questioning, his seeking through science and nature to approach more difficult and majestic truths than those materially available, seemed itself to come from the very space between those tiny photographic flecks and the ‘real live’ gannets that were their source.

  I typed an abbreviated version of FB’s words across the wedge of ocean in the image. Then I placed my foot on the sustain pedal of the piano, lowered my hands from the laptop keyboard to the ivory keys, and began to play.

  The song the lines triggered was eventually called ‘Theodolite’, and by the time it was written and recorded many other songs had followed on its heels. My intended book had transformed into a musical project. And that, in no small part, was thanks to FB.

  ‘Theodolite’ had been ignited by something both present but also buried in his words. I felt that despite the pertinence of the questions he had asked in the passage, something else beneath the words, something untold, something as mysterious and invisible as the watery ocean world beside the road, had actually propagated the song.

  Proust had written long ago: ‘The essence of music is to awake in us the mysterious depths of our souls, which begin at the point where the finite, and all the arts that have a finite objective, ends, the point where science ends, and which one could call religious.’

  I felt sure there was something hidden, something almost religious even, in FB’s words that resonated through his book and helped him speak of more than just engineering difficulties. I could not put my finger on it, but I knew that whatever it was that was buried there had given me better access to those ‘mysterious depths of our soul’.

  2

  Slacks Between Ridges

  Dunes in the distance. In the 1920s a man by the name of Lane had had the six-kil
ometre stretch of coastal road built from Point Roadknight, at the western edge of the present-day coastal settlement of Anglesea, to his Sunnymeade estate, on the eastern side of where I live here in the river valley at Split Point. Lane had had a car, and he wanted to drive it. On the other side of Split Point, where the upthrust of the Otway Ranges meets the coast to form the headlands of the Devils Elbow and Big Hill on the way to Lorne, returned World War I soldiers had begun work under the aegis of the Great Ocean Road Trust, carving a path into the hills above Bass Strait. Mr Lane’s frustration was the roadless mix of dune and low cliff that ran the other way, east of where the soldiers’ work had begun. If there were a road linking the dirt track that wound out from the rural port of Geelong as far as Anglesea to the point further along, where the soldiers’ mattocks had begun to pierce the shore, then from his property he could drive to the east as well as to the west. There were already bridle tracks in the area – old horse paths that ran easily enough across the dunes and further into the Otways – and so the sight of the winding bridle track running along the coast from Point Roadknight towards his house at Sunnymeade became the kernel of his idea. Surely it was just a matter of widening it and firming it up?

  Four decades after Mr Lane had his idea, FB Herschell stands in tweeds and waistcoat on that very ridge of dune, considering the problem. Somewhere between the dribble of limestone and sandstone rocks at Point Roadknight and the rising cliff of brick-red clay at Urquharts Bluff there has been another subsiding of the ground, and therefore of the road. An EH Holden with a boat on its roof has had a very close shave. It is the 1960s and the surf-loving holidaying traffic is, for the time being, increasing gently. What was once Mr Lane’s private road is now the responsibility of the CRB, or Country Roads Board, and there is most definitely a problem.

  FB stands beside a blowout of the dune. He looks east, all the way down the long moonah-green and cuttlebone-white littoral. Then west along it too, until the stern red brow of Urquharts Bluff stops the low foredunes in their tracks.