The Red Highway by Nicolas Rothwell

Author:Nicolas Rothwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781921825521
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2009-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Vision

I

A FEW DAYS AFTER LEAVING Wyndham, I set off on a trip to Central Australia, in part to attend a native-title handover in the community of Mantamaru, in part because of an enduring, elusive sense of connection to that stretch of country. For ever since I started frequenting the Centre I have felt that there are certain sites in Alice Springs, and in the ranges reaching westwards, which play some concealed role in the unfolding of my life – and so much had this conviction strengthened in me over the year of my absence that I was almost living in that landscape in my mind during my last months away. I felt caught up, wherever I was, with the desert world, I haunted Alice Springs: it was part of me, like some perfect simulacrum carried in my head. Often the idea came to me that I should abstract myself from my hotel room in Beirut or Baghdad and travel in a sweeping instant, across oceans and continents, towards the red line of the MacDonnell Ranges, to the peak of Mount Gillen and down, until I was beside the banks of the Todd River, or in the shaded gardens of the Silver Bullet, beneath the grevilleas and the cypress pines. It would be still and calm there, the kites would be circling, and the zebra finches calling; I would fall into conversations with men and women whose company I felt myself deprived of, as surely as a patient knows himself deprived of some life-preserving medicine – and this imagined sense of closeness was enough to breed a distinct apprehension about what I might find on my return.

It was sunset when I arrived on the late flight from Darwin: the jet came gliding in through banks of cloud. I stared down through the aircraft window at the street grid spread out beneath me; the redness of the glow on the ground looked like a coat of fire. Early next morning, as my first port of call, I paid a visit to the Panorama Guth, an unusual structure on Hartley Street, set back, with a crenellated, white-painted central tower, which gave it the air of a hieratic temple, though it was designed by its creator, the Dutch artist Henk Guth, to serve as a tourist attraction and as a repository for his own renditions of the desert landscape.

Guth was born in 1921 in the city of Arnhem, on the lower Rhine. His training as an art student was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of his country. For some months he was active in the Resistance and worked in a little studio near the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Guth was a gifted draughtsman. This skill was put to practical use: he specialised in removing the incriminating yellow stars from the identity papers of Dutch Jews threatened with deportation to the death camps of Eastern Europe – but he was himself detained in the course of a Gestapo sweep,

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