On the first morning in town I visited the cemetery. Beverley has three cemeteries, Narrogin just the one, which says something about where power lies in both communities. Beverley was emphatically Anglican, when such distinctions mattered, while in Narrogin the locus was elsewhere, but it was a bigger place. Even in the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the farming boom, Beverley was a railway station between Northam and Albany, Narrogin an interchange for five lines spreading out through the south. Which may explain why the visit to the cemetery felt so insufficient. In Beverley a history of the town was etched in names that repeated through the decades, Narrogin’s story was more scattered, it wasn’t formally gazetted until 1906 and the people who lived here, railway workers, sandalwood cutters, cartage haulers, tended to be transient, fitting in with the seasons rather than the culture.
In the afternoon I wandered through the park over the road from the residency, vaguely troubled by this absence of focus. The stories hidden behind Narrogin’s exterior appeared to be the same as those on the surface, much the same as every wheatbelt town: the empty shopfronts, the halcyon past, the commemorations of fallen soldiers, long dead farmers, and women, not so much individuals as types, women who came out, raised a family, ran a shop, lived a life of virtuous pragmatism yet didn’t require a name so much as a face. I was looking for portals that would lead away from the commonplace to the unique, and on day one I was already thinking that approach was wrong.
Four days before coming to Narrogin, I was in Tokyo. The hotel I was staying in, the Washington in Shinjuku, could accommodate more people than all of Narrogin. At a bookshop behind Shinjuku Station (the world’s busiest) I bought Sei Shonagon’s A Lady in Kyoto, extracts from The Pillow Book, which she wrote at the end of the tenth century. I also read Diary of Lady Murasaki, by her contemporary and apparent rival at the royal court in Kyoto.
The two women inhabited a strange, denatured world where beauty in very specific manifestations was valued above all practical matters. Lady Murasaki can spend pages recalling the precise shades of colours and patterns in the Empress’s costumes worn to successive events through the New Year Festival. Sei Shonagon’s experiences of the world beyond the palace walls are brief, often unpleasant yet ephemeral; her real life is indoors, literally and figuratively removed from ordinary society. Within the palace walls her task was to compose poems, to celebrate auspicious events like the Emperor’s birthday, and minor ones like the change of seasons, to respond to others’ responses to moments both shared, to capture a view through a window in precise allusions. Meter is everything, it distinguishes the artist from the mere practitioner. After a man, a courtier or a high ranking soldier, visited Sei Shonagon’s bed chamber and left before dawn, her measure of the success of the night would be in the poem she expected from him later that day. As a courtier he ought to have been a skilled poet, also a musician and sword-fighter, and her expectations were high, nothing beyond a few lines mind you, but showing a knowledge of meter with plays on language and innuendo. She doesn’t single men out for personal criticism, rather she detests certain types, like those who rush off before dawn insisting they have a meeting, with barely enough time to say goodbye. Could an elegant poem really salvage that relationship?
The book shines a narrow beam of light on what mattered in Kyoto, which was little it seems beyond the glimmer of the surface of beauty. A woman in the court had little to do, except maintain a state of unflinching affectation, itself requiring a level of self-discipline well above what mere clerks were expected to achieve. The way Sei Shonagon and Lady Murasaki describe their daily lives, there’s nothing beyond parades, rituals and ceremonies, but only mentioned obliquely are those rigid formalities and precise rules of social etiquette every woman at the court had to pay allegiance to. Failure could result in being cast out among that world beyond the palace walls, inhabited by various ghosts and demons, and worse, the rough and vulgar ordinary people. Like learning to read music, the details she had to attend to went beyond committing to memory the processes of ritual, what colour robes, how hair should be held up, what type of poem each performance required. She had to understand how aesthetics kept the court together.
“Why so quiet?” inquired her Majesty. “Say something, you’re looking too forlorn.”
“I’m simply immersing myself in the spirit of the moonlight,” I replied.
“Beautifully put,” remarked her Majesty.
The Pillow Book is the musings and idle reflections from which Sei Shonagon composed lists, of beautiful things, dispiriting things, flowering trees, things with terrifying names, one hundred and forty eight of them among longer reflections on the seasons, festival dances, the strange behaviour of some men, birds seen around the palace. These lists read like frivolous distractions but they are exercises in structured thinking, a way to relax a mind already crammed with information, to take the tedium of memorizing detail down a level without sacrificing its importance.
It occurred to me that while searching for the stories that gave the Narrogin residency purpose, compiling lists the way Sei Shonagon had was a good way to exercise the mind and keep it focused so that when, if, stories made themselves available, I would be ready. List making should direct thinking to the observation of salient details and editing ideas to enhance their potency.
It is beautiful the way the water drops hang so thick and dripping on the garden plants after a night of rain in the ninth month.
As the sun rose on the second day, the fog that settled over Narrogin was thick enough to reduce everything in the distance to a mystery. All country towns look haunted in the morning fog, everything hidden except that which cannot be. Houses look closed up, not abandoned but absent any human energy. Fog can give the most ordinary object, a trailer, a picket fence, the quality of mystery.
The best time to photograph fog is right on the cusp of dawn, when the mist still wraps around the streets and before the morning sun warms the air enough to dissipate it. Before six I rode around the residential area, thinking in my way I was mirroring Sei Shonagon, who make have taken a pen out rather than a camera to compile lists of what the weather creates, but was after the same thing; the fleeting moment preserved on the page until the last person ever reads it.
In the afternoons I crossed the four lane bypass into the park and followed the stream snaking through it. I did this every afternoon.
Things Found along the Stream
An old and rusted rail spike with a rounded head.
A French five Franc coin from 1972.
Scraps of iron left from the railways, now buried in the ground.
Nests, everywhere. burrowed into clumps of dead and dying balga that have caught among the winding banks. I can’t tell if they belong to bird, reptile, rodent or small marsupial but they are all along the stream bank, obvious by the holes and scratchings around the doorway. The frogs are quiet but it’s cold enough here for them to hibernate, like the tiger snakes, who must find this some playground for the rich in Summer.
An abandoned wasps’ nest in the hollow base of an old and resilient marri. No idea if the wasps were native or feral.
Wild celery with pencil thin stalks and leaves as broad as an open hand.
A dried brown oak leaf, blown over from the gothic giant across the tracks.
Things which are beautiful to the ear at night.
The sound of semi-trailers, slowing down to pass through town. Their engines hiss on the tarmac.
A dog barking in the distance, momentarily disturbed by some small incident, itself inconsequential but for a few seconds the natural order of things is disrupted.
Mysterious sounds: the muffled creaking of old steel, a disembodied thump, snatches of conversation on the wind as people pull up to the Chicken Treat across the tracks.
List-making is never absolute when Sei Shonagon is talking about nature. A dew drop hanging from a cedar in late winter may be a thing of extraordinary and delicate beauty, but only for a moment, a whim; feeling is for now and soon it will not be.
List-making is the key to musing. Without it the thoughts tumble out, inevitably becoming a paranoid mess. Muse with a purpose to keep the mind in shape.
Things that cannot be compared.
The distance between Kyoto in the tenth century and Narrogin in the twenty first is too far to measure.
In every wheatbelt town you walk past empty shopfronts that once sold something useful, manchester and haberdashery, hardware, videos for rent, “We sell Kodak film.” In Narrogin, where it snows every fifty years, used to anyway, empty shops have fireplaces, boarded up long before the last tenant handed back the keys but once part of a civilized shopping experience, where you tried on shoes while sitting beside a crackling fire. Barbers survive, cafes, maybe. Parry’s does because everyone who grew up here grew up with Parry’s and don’t need anywhere else for clothes. Parry’s sells flannel shirts, stretch jeans, proper socks for winter, jackets and coats designed for winter, not a fashion sense. Dress sensibly, the shopfront says, and you’ll still look good.
This was a railway town and the railway divides the town, the old commercial centre on the west side, and the old residential on the east, one barely alive, the other downbeat but kicking. Back when there was a lacework of ten tracks alongside the station, across the tracks meant something, but Narrogin wasn’t dying in those days. The railway spidered out to Albany, Collie, Northam, Merredin and Pinjarra (linking to Perth). The passenger trains had to wait in line, grain and stock carriers came first. At midnight the Albany express to Perth creaked in and people who’d been waiting two hours for it to arrive lurched off their bar stools at the Hordern or the Duke of York and ambled over. A slow pace, but functional.
I had not heard of Enkū until I saw some of his sculptures in the Folk Museum at Takayama. They were Buddhas, about thirty centimetres tall, made from roughly carved and splintered cedar, more like studies or sketches than finished works, and the little didactic panel said he had created thousands of these in his life, from roughly 1632 to 1695. Subtract from that his very early and unformed years, and the time spent as an ascetic, a yamabushi, meditating in the mountains, and the activity of carving so many figures is compressed into about four decades, as many as a hundred and fifty a day. Enkū used his little figures as currency, creating them in exchange for food or accommodation, transactions his providers were more than happy to agree with because they recognized he was a holy man.
This is alien to a modern world where material wealth is promoted as the source of all happiness. We’re expected to praise philanthropy, even when we can see the cynical ruthlessness behind it, while actual generosity passes unnoticed.
In Narrogin, Morrie Russell built a diorama of the town from balsa, ply and various cast off scraps of wood. He worked patiently but quickly, happy to cut a short piece of dowel, glue it to the back of a Matchbox lorry and call that a petrol tanker. Measuring about fifteen metres by two, the diorama sits in the Railway Heritage Room at the train station, which is where it may have been originally intended, but cuts were made to fit it into the room and it became easier to add a hill rather than keep accurate topography of a very flat town. The diorama shows shops, the hotels, old petrol stations, the train-yards in detail though, because this town represents his memories rather than the facts of Narrogin, the buildings exist in a vague time frame extending over half a century. Some shops standing next to each other ignore the twenty years that separated them.
This was a group project, others contributed their ideas, though he speaks of a couple with passing regret, as though disputes over what stood where and when have never been fully resolved.
The diorama also tells people passing through town something of what Narrogin looked like, and people who grew up here can remember sites, which leads them to recall incidents. Historians would find it baffling as a record, a clamour of voices when just one is required. At the back of the diorama, where the town runs out into farm and bushland, Morrie Russell added a gutter showing a country road, a kangaroo struck by a car, another car in a rollover with driver sprawled out on the tarmac, bright red blood like the Kensington gore in old vampire films splattered about him. It’s a joke only Narrogin residents will understand.
If detail is sparse, first time visitors to the town can still identify landmarks, the seven palms, the Town Hall, the Hordern Hotel the way they could looking at a quick sketch of the town. It isn’t the type of diorama built over decades by curious obsessives, where every fire hydrant, every advertisement painted on a brick wall has historical veracity on its side, and it isn’t a map for those who might get lost or want to find the location of a past business. It is, first of all, a gift to the town. Like Enkū, Morrie Russell used what was at hand, putting intent before accuracy. For both men the act of giving meant more than the gift itself.
The original house at 18 Glyde Street is long gone, the block cleared of every memory. There’s not so much as a blade of grass left and the sand has been graded to an even level. Presumably, (depending on council approval, the owners’ finances and the availability of builders, none of them guaranteed) a new house will go up soon. Though nothing remains of the old one, being Narrogin it was likely to be weatherboard, with a galvanised tin roof, a verandah at the front and a sleep-out at the back, an outdoor toilet and probably a laundry too.
In 1918 Chris and Grace Burkitt lived at 18 Glyde Street. He worked in gold extraction, a loose term in itself but the sense from the story that unfolds here is that he was testing materials, a position that required knowledge of organic chemistry and gave him access to equipment.
The story, the one he told anyway, was that his daughter came to him with a broken doll and asked him to fix it. The details are sparse, but the doll’s injuries must have been serious, a cracked porcelain head can turn a young girl’s best friend into a one eyed monster, enough that replacement was the only option.
There was a worldwide shortage of dolls that year (also a lot of daily essentials like food and clean water) so, without any chance of buying one, he had to make his own. He began experimenting with a papier-mâché base, applying solutions to harden the skin he knew could work until he found one tough enough to survive being dropped on a wooden floor. Once again the details are sparse, but deliberately so. Chris Burkitt took his secret recipe to the grave. It probably wasn’t that mysterious, he was restricted by cost and materials, but secret recipes always have an allure. In any case, the doll he made his daughter was such a success he made some more and took them into Perth to talk to potential investors. He immediately had a few orders, then he had a lot.
Grace ran the factory floor, employing six young women from around town on a production line. It started with the head, a flesh coloured, featureless bulb given life by painting lips and eyes then a wad of hair was glued to the top, and it was fitted into a hastily sewn dress. The Burkitt dolls were not pretty, you could say they had faces only their mothers could love, but the orders came in from Sydney, and then London, and suddenly thirty women were working on the production line.
Hal Colebatch was only Premier of Western Australia for a month, in 1919, but in that time he paid a visit to Narrogin, and like other politicians who did, he made a point of singling the Doll Factory out for praise. The Burkitts were just the people he thought the state needed more of, entrepreneurial, self starters, employers, visionaries: did they haver the biggest doll factory in the world like someone claimed? Well, there were some bigger Japanese factories, and post-war competition wasn’t yet fierce, but these were mere details. The idea that a small factory in Narrogin was exporting dolls around the world was both strange and thrilling.
By 1923 the factories in America and Europe had restarted production and the Narrogin Doll Factory quietly shut its doors, which was the end of the story. Record books, which could have told us how many dolls were made, who made them and where they went, were stored away until someone thought to throw them out. When Grace Burkitt died in 1930, the town newspaper, the Narrogin Observer, praised her social engagement with the golf and tennis clubs and her “bright and sunny disposition and ready help”, but made no mention of the Doll Factory. When Chris Burkitt died twenty years later the paper spent most of its obituary praising his work as town clerk, a position he took on after the factory shut. It did acknowledge that his brief time as doll-maker was the thing he was best known for around town, adding that it was his time on the council for which he deserved greater credit. Maybe; it’s pointless criticizing small town newspapers for being so parochial they miss the bigger story, that’s what they’re supposed to be, still, there’s the feeling an opportunity was lost because others couldn’t see it.
‘Narrogin’ comes from ‘Gnarojin’, a Noongar word meaning ‘place of water’. The only natural source of surface water close enough to the town is the stream running alongside the railway line. Before colonization and the damming and redirection of water courses, it was a different shape, but judging from the depth and angle of the banks today, it was never conspicuously wider or deeper. A lot more water flowed through. Where the stream passes through town, either side along its length was a ceremonial or a camping ground for generations before the settlers arrived, so it wasn’t just water but some other quality that held people to it, maybe the way ‘home’ has one basic definition and a myriad of allusions attached to it.
Every afternoon around three I crossed over the truck by-pass to walk along the stream, also mornings under a heavy fog, any time a storm was passing, but whatever the weather, always around three in the afternoon. Lining the riverbanks is a sequence of public artworks designed and (mostly) constructed by local Aboriginal artists and inhabitants. Some works have solidness and durability but the most interesting, ideas-wise, are in a state of decay. Nothing is permanent, everything returns to the soil.
I went for a walk along the stream with Ross Storey, who is either a creator or a consultant for all the Noongar artworks along the stream, and the Indigenous art in the commercial district. There are gestures among the very old marris, here long before settlers arrived. The way they have grown out, like mallee, with several trunks emerging from a single root system, they look like they are ready to embrace. A pregnant woman could sit here confident she is being protected by a force bigger than human intervention, but these are not the birthing trees the women came to. The original ones along the stream have gone, replaced relatively recently. Something has been broken, but something also survives, a clue or a feeling.
Outside the town is an old well covered with sapling branches. Ross Storey walks away from it and points through the scrub to an area behind. There are a lot of graves there, he says. In the early part of last century, influenza, typhoid and other epidemics swept through the Wheatbelt. In ten years five outbreaks: 1909 Dysentery, 1913 Typhoid, 1916 Measles, 1919 Typhoid, 1919 Influenza. Every time the sickness arrived, the Aboriginal reserves were quarantined, no one allowed in, or out. In the towns the fear was electric when one person fell ill. At the Quairading reserve, one hundred and thirty kilometres north, twenty people were struck down at first count, when the roadblocks went up. At least there was a count; there had to be, it was the only way to measure the pathogen’s virulence. There may be sites like this all over the Wheatbelt; how would we know?
Narrogin is at the edge of the Yilgarn Craton, a granite crust that extend north beyond Meekatharra and runs eastward nearly to the state border. It is the fact from which all others begin, the one that determined what vegetation could survive, how the water ran through the landscape, what animals would thrive, and what the human inhabitants could eat. Every granite outcrop has significance, or as Ross Storey put it, every one of the granite hills has ancestors living on it. That’s why he calls out whenever he approaches one, though I’m not sure whether that’s because he doesn’t want to catch the spirits unaware, or because they are watching and waiting for proper protocols to be observed. And if it’s the second, they can only be watching me with either indifference or contempt.
Things about Narrogin that ask for but do not offer explanation.
On the west side of the tracks, the commercial sector, a lot of street names begin with the letter F: Fathom, Falcon, Furnival, Forrest, Felspar, Floreat, and on the east side, the residential, they begin with H: Horace, Hope, Hartoge, Hive, Hansard, Havelock, Homer. This is deliberate, but the motives are hazy.
Stand beside the old traditional ceremonial grounds across the road from the station and look southwards alongside the creek towards the totem poles. The branches of the ancient marris create a natural passage. Rationally, the effect is pure coincidence, move to the left or right just a metre and the effect is lost. Privately, you know it is not just chance.
By eight at night the town is so quiet that gusts of wind pick up disembodied voices or dogs barking blocks away. Around this time I walk along the platform to sit on one of the old benches where passengers used to wait for the Albany Express and listen for them. I felt this chill before, in Canada, always a sign that snow was on its way. Somewhere on Federal Street a light switches on, then off. Someone with a view of the railway platform has flicked the switch, wondering when this figure sitting alone on an abandoned platform at night will vanish.
