A Sand Archive Read online

  But the bluff doesn’t stop the road. On the contrary. With the termination of the dunes and the rising, albeit temporarily, of the limestone cliffs, the road has a safe and stable base on which to travel.

  It has been suggested to FB by his superiors that the dune is the problem. Putting a road amongst it has turned it from an ephemeral manifestation of nature into a site of possible danger. Just ask the couple of blokes who nearly met their maker in the EH Holden. If they had been killed in their fall, would they have been killed by a collapsing dune or a collapsing road?

  FB considers the problem. There is a typical southerly wind on the beach, flinging sand at the land. He stands on the hummock by the road; below him it is low tide. He considers the action of the wind on the grains of sand on the beach and concludes that they are lifted from the beach, carried by the wind at a low altitude, until they collide with, and settle on, the dune.

  A collapsing dune or a collapsing road? Was nature to blame, or culture? Which is at fault? In a single moment, a moment which will shape the rest of his life, FB Herschell becomes captivated by the question.

  Half an hour later, standing on the beach below with Gibbon, his immediate supervisor at the CRB, FB is made to narrow his horizons. Gibbon has the data. In 1926 an early motorist (perhaps a friend of Mr Lane’s?) broke the axle of his Buick on the subsiding roadway. In 1949 the road became impassable due to the formation of a dune slack, which induced slope failure in the limestone and left the unsealed road crumpled for sixty-eight yards. In 1951 a hole the size of a large water tank appeared overnight and unannounced. The milk truck, which also carried the daily newspapers along with morning bread and coffee scrolls to the coast, only managed to brake before it tumbled into the cavity because a kangaroo hopping on the road up ahead had suddenly, inexplicably, disappeared. Then, in 1954, a Bailey bridge had been erected due to intense flooding. Further problems had occurred every couple of years or so until this latest incident with the EH Holden.

  Half an hour later again Gibbon and FB stand just a few miles further along the road, on the western side of Split Point, where the road runs along the low duney shore through Eastern View before rising into the Otways. The problem here is the sand on the road. Slippery sand. Constantly scoured by the tides and the southerlies it is strewn over the road and presents an intermittent danger. Now, Gibbon announced, was the time to fix all these problems once and for all.

  Listening to Gibbon’s research being relayed in his husky cigarettey voice, FB felt the light pouring up out of the sea. He had read recently of an approach to music which decreed that if you wanted to understand sound you should study not the bell or hammers or strings of an instrument but the ear which hears what it plays. He had already spent hours, months, years, studying built structures: roads, bridges, all the physics of engineering pathways and crossings, in order to get his degree and a good position. But now, he realised with an instant swerve of relish, he was starting to think about what was under the roads, what perceived the roads, what came first; he was going to study the ontology of dunes.

  †

  Rising to the challenge, he decided to camp on site. This gave him an excuse to be on his own while workers wheelbarrowed the sand from the road at Eastern View and filled in the slip on Mr Lane’s road with local gravel from the pits back towards the small farming settlement and railway siding at Moriac. The dynamic mix of dune and low cliff became a brindled thing at that spot. A smear of ochre interrupted the tints of limestone pink and sandy cuttlebone-white. It was like a carpenter thumbing putty into a cavity, except what surrounded the cavity would not necessarily hold.

  He was away from his mother. Camping like the returned diggers who built the road running further along the coast. Breathing a sigh of relief.

  For company he had the kangaroos and plovers. The gannets wheeling above porpoises out to sea. And Salisbury’s Downs and Dunes. A bright grass-green, cloth-bound hardback. There had been next to nothing in the CRB library in Geelong, so with Gibbon’s permission he had travelled to Melbourne and borrowed it from his old haunt, the Baillieu Library at the university.

  His mother had both berated and mollycoddled him as he packed his tent and gear. That was no surprise. Gibbon too considered him decidedly odd for actually wanting to camp on site, but it was the weekend and he couldn’t control him. If FB wanted to understand the situation better by boiling his billy there for a couple of days, then so be it.

  For FB Herschell that brief time away from the floral-patterned bulk of his mother, camping alongside Mr Lane’s old road with only the thrumming of his tent flap in the wind to bother him, made for an unusually enjoyable situation. There was the dune, the complexities of the brindled hole in the road, his diary, the explanatory paragraphs and diagrams of Salisbury’s book, and the sun and moon going about their business in the autumn sky above the sea and shore. It was – atmospherically, personally, intellectually – perfect. Bliss.

  But he said his prayers. Yes. And he sized up the constellations. His brain had got him this far, got him to the point where Gibbon had singled him out, almost daring him with the task ‘of saving lives’. This gave him confidence, of course, but nevertheless he filled the dark space between the constellations with Our Fathers for the saving of his own soul. He would be missing mass on Sunday morning. He prayed for himself, for his father’s eternal rest, and for his mother’s back pain to cease in time for her solo game on the Monday night.

  He listened also to what he called in his diary ‘the unconditional love of Mary in the waves’. The way it came in a moonlured rumble, crashing softly in its frequencies against the tight resistance of the ground, displacing stubborn ledges, stiffened banks, wedges of sand, opening, freeing, clearing. Exposing sharp roots too. He had never before strung a line in his mind between Jesus’s mother and his own but now he did. His own mother made him feel both safe and insecure, volatile, scrambling about between judgement and the search for some small cleft of approval. He would be assembling bits of coloured paper on a board in one room and feel her eyes watching him from the next, so that his hand hovered, hesitated, a scissored hemisphere of an orange dune in his fingers. Or he was in the little scullery kitchen, where there was never any light. He climbs the blackwood stool to watch his mother bake. She wears a brown apron over a grey frock, and he wears a brown jumper, knitted for him by Aunt Lyn from Forrest, above grey shorts. He watches as she puts the ingredients into the heavy pink ceramic bowl: butter, flour and sugar, with a measuring jug of milk ready off to one side. She is baking the cakes for the wake of his father the next day. Then something occurs to her, she seems to get a fright. She goes to say ‘Blast!’ but refrains, and, telling him to keep a close eye on the ingredients (in case someone steals them?), says she’ll be back in a minute. He hears her possum-hustle in the hallway, hears the back screen door slam. It’s the washing, he thinks, as simultaneously he registers the dabs and pitter-pats and pings of rain on the iron roof. The washing will be mainly overalls, his dead father’s body hanging upside down, and frocks, her living frocks, plus his school shorts and shirts, and their underwear. He wishes it could be otherwise. He wishes his dad had not slumped beneath the machine bench at Fords; he wishes the ingredients in the cake bowl could be otherwise too. While she’s gone he kneels on the stool and wonders why those four things – butter, milk, flour and sugar – always made a cake. A brown cake. The potential of the ingredients in his mind is endless. The ingredients of the world. He peers over the bevelled lip of the bowl and his tongue slips out the side of his mouth in concentration. He puts his hands in, feels the butter weight, the way it sticks to his palm but is greasy at the same time. He watches the flour fall. The sugar is white soil, the milk white water. If these four things can be squished about to make cake, then what else can they make? How about a model train track?

  When his mother returns, she finds the bowl sitting neatly to one side, its ingredients spread over the b
ench. Three-quarters of the butter has already been rolled into definite lines, the flour is grouped in small triangular piles of freight, the sugar spread flat in a white field between them.

  She does not notice the orderliness of the arrangement; sees only a mess. He is cuffed off the stool, gruffed to the bathroom to wash his hands, lectured to about waste.

  For the rest of the morning he sits on his bed in disgrace. He’d been surprised by how stubborn the ingredients had turned out to be; he expected them to transform more easily. But he’d kept at it, as the rain grew heavier on the roof, and he became lost in creation. Now in his room, he is fingering a football card. Carlton. Centre half-back. Bert Deacon. He smiles to himself as he imagines Deacon lining up not at centre half-back but at full forward, on a wing – or, even better, wearing the priest’s collar and vestments the next day as they all say farewell to his dad in the church.

  All that anxiety was not a part of these white waves tumbling towards him in the dawn. That anxiety was more like a hurtling train of fear. He was in a carriage of cold stitched-leather seats. Yet he was nowhere; it was all in his imagination, of course. On the canvas stool beside the breezy tent on Mr Lane’s ‘long beach road’ he was as still as a hawk on a hillside. He remembered how when the Colemans came, the cousins on his mother’s side, all that anxiety had somehow mobilised. His dream’s wide gauge – so rare, so inventive, so expensive – had narrowed back to the size of sausages and scones, narrowed to the pecking order at Cheetham Salts, narrowed to thin smiles with thin bakelite lips. Morris Coleman, Uncle Morrie, had no lips at all. Nothing to run on, just duty, small-town approbation, Pivotonian crumbs.

  The violin was taken down from the top of the bookcase in the hall. The big dark shelves almost to the ceiling. He was not yet tall enough to reach the violin case up there so his mother did it. She was taller than his father, who, if he had not died, probably wouldn’t have been there to help anyway. His dad had avoided the Coleman cousins like brussels sprouts. He had always been doing overtime.

  And do you think the Colemans were interested? They were looking out the window, through the leadlight, out through the referred frown of the eaves to the bare street. As if they longed for that bareness. Where no-one was feeling anything. As the strings of young Francis’s violin began to resonate, the bareness was cultivated like vines by a vintner, a vintage bareness following the protocols of the vines. Bad habits were reinforced daily, as his mother so often said.

  He played ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in the front room. Such a show from a boy so young. As he played he tried to think only of the notes. Tried to stop seeing things. Though the bank of the billabong was sandy, though there was a slug travelling across the bark of a fallen log, though the flames of the fire under the blackened billy had orange tips, he averted his eyes. Thought of the notes. As the Colemans looked out at the street.

  With a different audience, he realised, lying back in his tent in the dune, perhaps he might have dived, not into the billabong but into the billy itself. With a different set of relations, he could quite possibly have drowned in what he was cooking up. Or he could have cooked them all up in the music. He would have been freed then, to play in the waves, with Mary, whose love moved even the heavy sand.

  †

  In the dunes by Mr Lane’s road that night FB Herschell actually had two books with him. One was Salisbury’s Downs and Dunes, the other by Charles Baudelaire. I know this because he recorded it in his diary. Of Downs and Dunes he said nothing at this stage, but of Baudelaire he wrote down one single quote, and then a thought of his own about the dune, which, with the hindsight of history, seems to follow.

  Yesterday on the crowded boulevard, I felt myself jostled by a mysterious Being whom I have always longed to know, and although I had never seen him before, I recognised him at once.

  FB put the lines through the two hims.

  Below this he wrote:

  I wonder what happened to the kangaroo who disappeared down the hole in the road in 1951. Gibbon didn’t say, but whatever the case its fate was both the fault of the dune and no fault of the dune at all. Is this possible? I wonder what the milk truck driver thought?

  †

  We had our regular polymath customers in those days when I worked at the bookshop, but more often than not the polymaths were the quiet ones whom it was hard to get to know. The customers who spoke a lot, who went on and on about the size of their libraries and their love of books, generally turned out, when pressed, to be a bit of a let-down. With the shyness of polymaths, however, there were no shortcuts and you wouldn’t ever know the extent of their knowledge or the depths of their reflection until, purchase by purchase, you began to piece it together over the years. FB would turn up with that quiet twinkle in his eye, but never with that much to say. It was as if he presumed that we at the shop understood from personal experience that the rock Sisyphus pushed to the top of the mountain, only to watch it roll to the bottom again and again, was actually a book. It was not the same book every time, but nevertheless it was always a book. He’d pushed Proust up the hill, and Orwell, Musil, Cervantes, Dante, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Simone Weil, Braudel, Thomas Telford, Duras and Sarraute. There were so many different types of rock, from so many different periods, and from so many different sections of the shop. History, transport, poetry, drama, mythology, architecture, music, religion, philosophy. After his death, I had the chance to look through a portion of his library and was amazed by the detailed history of his voluminous overseas book ordering that I found between the pages of each volume. Our local bookshop was just that, his local, but FB Herschell shopped far and wide.

  For example, a ‘picking slip’ from an unknown source, typed out on a white sheet of paper folded to fit inside the pages. Dated 29 November 1995 it read:

  This picking slip was produced when we received your order. It may have been manually adjusted during the picking process. S/O next to a title means we have sold out of that title.

  It seems that on this occasion FB’s strike rate had been good. There were no S/Os on the brief list.

  1/417

  Mr FB Herschell

  33 Milipi Ave

  Geelong Vic 3220

  AUSTRALIA

  77

  1

  Foster, SE

  Colonial Improver

  7.95

  105

  1

  Steegmuller, Francis

  A Woman, a Man, and Two Kingdoms: The Story of Madame d’Epinay and Abbe Galiani

  14.95

  435

  1

  French, Marilyn

  The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses

  9.95

  500

  1

  Seidel, Michael

  Epic Geography: James Joyce’s Ulysses

  12.95

  4

  45.80

  Freight

  10.00

  55.80

  There was also this one:

  Invoice: Statement Fuller d’Arch Smith Ltd

  30 Baker St London W1M 2D5

  Tel. 01–722–0063

  Invoice No. 224802

  5. Nov. 80

  To

  Francis Herschell

  33 Milipi Avenue

  Geelong Victoria 3220

 
Australia

  Thomas Telford, Engineer

  9.00

  Postage .70

  Total £9.70

  Or this:

  Editions A et J Picard

  L’Oblat, Huysmans JK

  . . . and countless others.

  †

  Apart from his visits to the bookshop I only ever had two or three conversations of any length with FB, and one of those took place in the bakery-cafe just up from the shop. By that stage the area around James Street was becoming fashionable, but for many years – in fact, for the whole long life of the bookshop up until then – this part of Geelong was dotted with empty, unleased properties. It turned out that FB Herschell had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and its history and knew all about the evolution of the James Street area.

  We happened to be walking out from amongst the books and onto the street together – me headed for my lunch break at the cafe, he headed I know not where after his hour of browsing – when I made a casual remark about the possible pros and cons of the encroaching gentrification. The old man smiled knowingly – not as if to say, ‘I’ve seen this kind of thing attempted here before,’ but, it seemed to me, with an understanding of the essential innocence of human endeavours, how they come and go, rise and fall, like so much sand on the wind. And then, having smiled so wryly, FB suggested, with a hint perhaps of the lifelong public servant, that the coming change would be a good thing for the town, for its inhabitants, and particularly for the people who liked not to have to travel through to Melbourne to get their fix of good culture or coffee. In the tail of this reference of having to go to Melbourne for culture an ironic look crept into his eyes.