Chapter 2 — Forty-Five Geologists

Before I had travelled very far at all, geology began opening the country to me. First through a Canadian stranger looking for fossils near Yea, and a few years later through a coach carrying forty-five “ologists” whose classroom became Australia itself.

Looking back, I realise how little of Australia I had actually seen before the journey that changed that.

I had been as far as Albury, Mount Buffalo and Kosciuszko.

Those had seemed substantial journeys.

Then suddenly I found myself driving a coach carrying about forty-five specialists through huge areas of a continent that, for me, had previously been mostly names on maps.

But my introduction to geology had begun several years earlier.

The Man Who Came Looking for Fossils

I was about sixteen and working at the local newspaper, The Yea Chronicle.

Late one Friday afternoon a man came into the office.

By then I was the only person there.

He was Canadian, perhaps about thirty, and he was looking for a reserve where some famous fossils had been found.

I told him I didn't know anything about anything famous.

But I did know where there were some very old fossils of the leaves of some sort of tree.

He grinned.

That's got to be it.

Then he wanted to know how to get there.

As far as I was concerned there was nothing particularly grand about the place. It was a gravel pit where the local council was digging up material for road base.

I showed him the way.

It was what he had been looking for.

By the time he had finished there, it was getting dark. I had been asking him questions, and he offered to take me home. He said that, if I liked, he would pick me up again the next morning and tell me more about what he was doing and why they were so important.

When we reached home I invited him inside. He stayed for dinner.

He talked at length with my mother and father. Then he stayed the night.

I remember him telling us about Canada.

He had grown up on the edge of the plains in Alberta with the Rocky Mountains in full view. He spoke about being born near Calgary and told me about Canada's great rodeo.

That conversation lodged somewhere in memory.

Years later, when I was travelling in Canada myself, the story about the rodeo brought Calgary back to me.

I remembered what he had told me.

So I went there.

I wanted to see the country he had described: the plains with the Rockies rising beyond them.

That is one of the strange ways memory works in my life.

A place mentioned over dinner when I was sixteen could return years later, on another continent, because something prompted one part of the old story and brought the rest with it.

At sixteen, though, there was no grand significance attached to any of it.

A Canadian had walked into the newspaper office looking for fossils.

I happened to know where some were.

That was enough.

Then Came the Ologists

A few years later geology returned on a vastly larger scale.

This time it came in the form of about forty-five people and a coach.

I tend to remember them collectively as the ologists.

Everybody seemed to be some kind of ologist: geologists and people in fields related to geology, together with others who had accompanied them.

There was even a psychologist, the wife of one of the geologists.

They were associated with a university in New York.

I was the driver.

Their itinerary was unusually open.

That turned out to be important.

The journey was extended three times after telephone calls back to New York.

They kept finding reasons to continue.

Or perhaps more accurately, Australia kept giving them reasons.

A Country I Had Barely Seen

We began in Melbourne.

From there my memory gives me places much more confidently than it gives me a precise sequence.

We travelled through Geelong, the Otways and the volcanic country of Victoria's Western District.

There were the You Yangs and Mount Leura, and other volcanic and geological features that meant far more to the people behind me than their names alone could have meant to me.

Then came South Australia.

Mount Gambier.

Wilpena Pound.

Towns and features between them.

Later we travelled up the Oodnadatta Track and into the sand country.

Uluru.

The Olgas, now Kata Tjuta.

Kings Canyon.

Chambers Pillar.

Places along Larapinta Drive. Hermansberg, the Finke river.

Alice Springs and the original springs.

Then north again, across other new to me parts of the country.

Eventually Cairns, with the volcanic lakes of the hinterland, the Barrier reef, salt water crocodiles, collecting shells and a Canadian Clam Chowder with Australian Pippies.

There were journeys through northern country, across to Normanton, onwards towards Darwin, through western country and back towards major roads by routes I had certainly never imagined myself driving when my previous travels had reached no farther than places such as Albury, Buffalo and Kosciuszko.

The journey crossed its own tracks several times.

That matters when trying to reconstruct it now.

Some places I remember from the outward journey may actually have been visited when we came back through the same country.

At night the group would meet and decide what they particularly wanted to see the following day.

Sometimes a route would change because one of them wanted to inspect a particular new feature they had discovered in conversations or something they were reading.

Sometimes we would travel back over country already crossed.

Sometimes the road decided for us.

The Classroom Had Wheels

The coach became a classroom.

But not a classroom in the ordinary sense.

The geologists were not simply lecturing me.

They were explaining the country to one another.

Someone would come to the front while we were driving, take the microphone, and begin talking about what we were approaching or what could be seen outside.

Many of them appeared to have selected particular features before the journey and had done considerable homework on them.

Then we got there.

And the thing stopped being academic.

An anticline wasn't a drawing in a textbook.

It was there.

We could walk through it.

We could walk over it.

They could point at the real folding in the rock and explain what had happened.

Volcanic remnants were not diagrams.

We stood amongst them.

Block uplifting was not a phrase to memorise.

Somebody could point across a landscape and show what uplift followed by millions of years of erosion had actually produced.

Fossils were not photographs.

You could pick up a piece and have somebody standing beside you tell you what species of tree it had come from.

One person would know the structure.

Another its age.

Someone else knew the plants.

Another understood the volcanic history.

Expertise travelled with us.

And because the experts were talking to one another, I was able to listen to conversations that were very different from lessons simplified for a beginner.

I didn't understand everything.

That didn't matter.

I understood more each day than I had the day before.

Seeing It for Themselves

Something else impressed me.

The experts themselves could be astonished.

Somebody might have selected a particular feature because it was in their field and because they had read about it, studied it or perhaps even taught about it.

Then they saw it.

Actually stood there.

I remember occasions when somebody spoke afterwards about how surprising it had been to see the real thing.

They had known what it was.

They had done their homework.

But being physically present with it had brought it home in a way they had not expected.

The others would cheer them.

I liked that.

There was no embarrassment in admitting that reality had exceeded the academic description.

Quite the opposite.

The discovery was shared.

These were knowledgeable people discovering that knowledge did not exhaust experience.

The country could still surprise them.

The Petermann Ranges

One explanation has stayed with me particularly strongly.

We were looking at the Petermann Ranges, they were a series of low what seemed to be large reddish mounds.

They explained them as the remnants of one of the Earth's great ancient mountain systems.

Most of that enormous structure had been eroded away over immense periods of time.

What we were seeing, as they explained it to us, was essentially what remained of its old core.

That idea was extraordinary.

I was looking at mountains.

They were asking me to imagine what was no longer there.

The landscape in front of us was evidence not only of what had survived, but of what had disappeared.

Millions upon millions of years of erosion were embodied in the difference between what that mountain system had once been and what we could see.

That expanded the idea of time for me.

A human lifetime became very small.

When the Route Didn't Work

The journey was exploratory enough that things did not always go to plan.

In South Australia on one occasion we travelled several miles up into a gorge expecting to find a route or feature that proved inaccessible.

It then became my problem to turn the coach around.

That was not always a trivial exercise.

Eventually we had to find our way back to a major road.

On another part of the journey flooding prevented us crossing a river.

I think it may have been the Darling, but I am not certain enough to state that as fact.

There were other excursions in which we went looking for geological features and simply did not find what had been expected, and times when we found the unexpected.

One of those took us back across some of the country we had previously travelled to a railhead whose name I remember as something like Kurdimurka.

That spelling, and perhaps the exact sequence, is something I may eventually be able to recover more confidently. Found it - Curdimurka, South Australia.

For the moment, I would rather preserve the uncertainty than polish it away.

The Professor's Bargain

Normanton produced one of the stories that survived because it was funny.

We went into the local fish-and-chip shop.

High on a shelf were a number of large ammonites.

To me they might initially have been unusual objects on display.

To the geologists they were something else entirely.

There was considerable awe and interest.

Eventually I was asked to find out whether the owner might sell one.

So I asked.

He agreed to sell them.

All of them.

For the next few days we were making wooden crates, filling them with sand and carefully packing the fossils for transport.

Then the little professor disclosed what he had paid for them.

And also disclosed something else.

He had thought he was buying just the one.

Somehow the negotiation had resulted in him buying the lot.

The story that travelled around the group was that New York was delighted with his extraordinary bargaining skill and the first-class fossils he had acquired.

He knew rather more about how the bargain had actually happened.

So did we.

His reputation as a negotiator improved considerably.

The Woman Who Listened

Not everything important on that journey was geological.

Among the group was the psychologist who had accompanied her geologist husband.

At some point during that long journey I spoke to her, in some limited way, about my childhood.

I cannot reconstruct the conversation word for word.

What I remember clearly is her response.

She listened.

And she spoke kindly to me.

That sounds simple.

For me it wasn't.

She was the first person I remember speaking to in any way about those experiences who simply listened and responded with kindness.

No theological explanation, no religious condemnation about me talking in the way I had about clergy and the abuses they forced onto me.

No condemnation. No blame. No eternal punishment, just a normal response.

No attempt to tell me what the experience ought to mean.

She listened.

Looking back now, that encounter has a significance I doubt I could have fully understood at the time.

There are events whose importance is obvious while they are happening.

Others become important only when enough of the later life has accumulated around them.

This was one of those.

Long Driving Days

Some of the long driving days were excellent.

There would be hours of country passing outside and, behind me, people discussing where we had been, what we had seen and what we were heading towards next.

If the day's objective involved volcanic geology, somebody with particular knowledge of volcanism might take the microphone.

Another day somebody else's specialty became the subject.

At the volcanic lakes of the Cairns hinterland, at Mount Leura, around Wilpena, through the centre and at countless lesser-known places, the landscape was constantly being interpreted.

I listened.

I asked questions.

That suited me.

Much of my education throughout life has happened that way.

Find somebody who knows something.

Listen.

Ask.

Look up the language you don't understand.

Keep going until yesterday's strange terminology begins describing something you can actually recognise.

The coach was an extraordinary university.

My classroom had a steering wheel.

Gondwana Had Started Earlier

For a long time I associated this great journey with my developing interest in geology and in Gondwana.

Writing it now has reminded me that the story actually began earlier.

It began at sixteen.

At The Yea Chronicle.

With a Canadian asking for famous fossils and a boy telling him that he didn't know about anything famous but did know where some very old fossil leaves could be found.

That gravel pit contained a connection to a world unimaginably older than the council machinery digging road material from it.

Later, fossils, plants, geology and the history of Gondwana became parts of a larger curiosity.

The distribution of plants and fossils could reveal relationships between places now separated by enormous distances.

Things that appeared disconnected in the present could make sense when their earlier history was understood.

Again, I have to be careful not to make the young man's life too tidy from the perspective of the older one.

At sixteen I did not stand in a gravel pit and formulate a philosophy about evidence.

At twenty-one I did not drive forty-five geologists around Australia thinking that geological strata would one day become a useful metaphor for memory.

That would be literary invention.

What actually happened is more interesting.

I encountered things.

I became curious.

I listened.

I learned.

And much later I began to recognise relationships between some of those experiences.

More Than Survival

There is another reason this journey belongs in the story.

A life like mine can easily become organised retrospectively around what was done to me.

Abuse.

Religion.

Trauma.

Psychiatric records.

Hospitals.

Complaints.

Survival.

They all belong.

But if they become the whole organising principle, another person disappears.

At sixteen I was working in a newspaper office.

When a stranger came looking for fossils, I could help him.

A few years later I was entrusted with a coach carrying forty-five specialists around a continent I had barely seen.

I could drive.

I could handle responsibility.

I could improvise when a route failed.

I could deal with people.

I could stand among people with vastly more formal education than I had and respond to their knowledge with curiosity rather than intimidation.

And I enjoyed it.

There was pleasure in competence.

There was pleasure in movement.

There was pleasure in country opening ahead through a windscreen.

There was pleasure in discovering that something I had driven past in ignorance yesterday could become intelligible today.

I survived things.

But I also did things.

They are not the same statement.

The Country Itself

What remains most strongly from that journey may not be a particular road.

It is a way of encountering the world.

The academics could prepare for a feature.

They could read the literature.

They could know its age and structure.

Then they could arrive and discover that standing on it changed something.

The real anticline was different from the drawing.

The volcanic landscape was different from its description.

The Petermann Ranges could be understood intellectually as the remnants of something vastly larger.

But then there they were.

The remnants themselves.

The experts sometimes came back to the coach excited by what reality had added to what they already knew.

And the others cheered.

I think there was a lesson in that which stayed with me.

Documents matter.

Knowledge matters.

Preparation matters.

But sometimes you also have to go to the thing itself.

Look at it.

Walk through it.

Pick it up.

Listen to people who know more than you do argue about what it means.

And be prepared for reality to be more complicated than the account you carried with you.

At the time I was simply the young man at the wheel.

There were forty-five ologists behind me.

Australia was outside the glass.

And from one day to the next, a country I had barely known was becoming something I could begin to read.