The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly uncompromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before I saw ahead only another plain, level and bare and daunting.
Gerald Murnane, The Plains (1982)
The ghost town of Dawson certainly wasn’t a place I expected to visit following the death of a family member. It was April 2013 and four of us arrived by car a little after noon: myself, my brother (Sean.L), his girlfriend Jess and our defacto-brother-in-law, Sean.C. Sean.C’s father and my mum’s long-term partner, Frank had died two days prior in Peterborough, a larger – mostly inhabited – town that was about 25 kilometres south of Dawson.
The four of us were far from our homes. I had driven up to Peterborough from Adelaide the previous day, pacing out the 250 kilometre drive with several stops along the way. I wasn’t particularly accustomed to drives of three-digits on a regular basis. My brother and Jess were a little more used to it. Their home base was Melbourne, but in the preceding months had taken up work at a remote truck stop in Yunta, about 60km northeast of Peterborough. Sean.C had come the furthest of us all, travelling from London a few weeks prior when he had learned that his father’s condition was terminal.
A series of unsealed roads lead to Dawson. On our way there, the car made contact with the road like a stylus attempting to find a groove on a battered record, finding rough purchase on its surface, rumbling through the interior of the car. The radio was on for perhaps no other reason than to provide a vague focal point, a distraction from the journey and the noise of the road. Conversation was minimal, so we watched the landscape as whatever passed for meagre vegetation thinned out into saltbush. As we came over a hill, the road brought us down into a flat expanse where Dawson was. The car slowed as we entered the town and pulled up opposite to what remained of the town’s pub. The rumble of the road diminished, the engine and the radio ceased and a stillness set in.
Along with the ruin of the pub, a few buildings remained in Dawson. A small church on the main road, the local school at an intersection, another church on a distant knoll, and further afield two abandoned homesteads. One had no roof, the other with a roof, but looking as though it had a huge boulder thrown into it. In spite of the general abandonment, we had passed an outlier a little further up the road. This house appeared to be occupied, with solar panels fitted and a pair of cars in the driveway. There wasn’t any indication that anyone was home, but it occurred to me that its inhabitants were probably townsfolk that had stuck around following the town’s abandonment and performed the role of Dawson’s ad hoc caretaker. They might have been grazers too but I didn’t see any livestock in surrounding paddocks. The school – on appearance – seemed like a similar outlier, since it was largely intact and gave off the impression that it was still a functioning school. At the corner of the road’s intersection a modest wrought-iron arch stood. It had been painted white and on the upper and lower parts of the arch the town’s name was spelt out in upper case with a hundred year period bookended: “1881 – 1981”. It was unclear what the purpose of these dates were, but it was likely this had commemorated the hundred years since the town was founded. I also speculated – morbidly – that the latter date was when the town ‘died’ and officially attained ghost status.
No records accurately indicate when the exodus from Dawson began, though it’s probable that it gathered pace at some point in the latter half of the 20th Century, when its inhabitants accepted that the rain wasn’t ever coming and gradually filtered away south to Peterborough. Dawson sits in the lower Flinders Ranges, a vast arena of ochre-coloured earth surrounded by distant bare hills. This location is just above Goyder’s Line of Rainfall, an eerily accurate and exhaustive ecological survey undertaken on horseback in the 1860’s by George Goyder. Goyder was South Australia’s Surveyor General and had been tasked with the duty of mapping the boundary between areas that received regular rainfall and those that were prone to drought. Based on Goyder’s Line of Rainfall and the subsequent reports detailing his findings, farmers were discouraged from planting crops north of the line. At the time, Goyder’s research was widely dismissed and in most instances, his advice was not heeded.
As we wandered around and explored the pub’s ruins, the township’s unique qualities gradually revealed themselves. Aside from the crunch of our footsteps on the baked earth, a subtle scent of eucalyptus was carried on a breeze that sent a rustle through dry leaves, a droning buzz of busy insects, cries of small birds, a temporal respite from the sun arrived in the shadows of high clouds passing slowly overhead.
My brother and Jess had visited the town a week prior and he mentioned that some unique acoustic phenomena could be found within the roadside church. Access could be gained through a battered rear door that didn’t latch. He explained that wasps had nested within a stack of oil drums lined up against a wall and that their resonant buzzing was pretty interesting. I would have probably already brought my portable audio recorder along for this trip, but the prospect of resonant wasps certainly made it worth my while. Unfortunately, on this day the wasps were far more subdued than when Sean was here. The recorder was mounted on a tripod in the centre of the church interior facing the front doors. Eventually, the wind picked up and coursed and whistled through the space, coaxing out vague tones from its surfaces and cavities. In front of me, the church’s pews had long since been cleared out and stacks of wood were scattered in their place. Behind me was a low-lying platform where the pulpit had been and on the wall, a crumbling mural depicting some religious iconography of angels and clouds. Intense afternoon light slanted in from the rear doorway and stretched across the dusty floor.
Following my time in the church, I trailed behind everyone else with the recorder and its tripod, setting up in the middle of a paddock, beneath a juddering windmill, at the doorway of one of ruined homesteads, beneath the canopy of scrawny trees. For the most part – when I was in the open – the sound of wind shearing across the recorder’s fuzzy mic protector dominated. Interior spaces at least afforded some respite from the wind’s influence. On one recording that I’d archived as, “4-Dawson Ruin” I wander around a large room of the roof-less homestead. The uneven floor buckles, dirt grinds beneath my shoes, a distant plane drones in the sky and my companions share an indistinct conversation nearby. Where I remained still and nothing audibly suggested its presence, silence weighed in; straining itself against the recorder’s preamp – a limbo space of audible nothingness and digital self-noise.
I hadn’t listened to these field recordings of this visit to Dawson in a very long time. I can recall listening back in a cursory manner following this 2013 trip, regarding them as ‘documentation’ and not being anything more than that. They represented markers in time and of place, an occasion of respite from the events of preceding days, yet inescapably imbued with the disquiet of grief. Now a decade on, these recordings are easier to listen to, yet possess a greater charge; instantiated by the passage of time, moments of introspection, the colouring of memory and a more perspicacious appreciation of life and death. The recordings – however vivid or nebulous – situate me in that broken zone. The accompanying photos I took in-situ, occasionally compensate for elements which might not have been present in the audio. With headphones clamped on, I look at a photo I took of a twisted fence line foregrounded against the arid landscape and in spite of the dominant wind shear in this recording, my imagination parses out some obscured detail – such as the rattle of the fence wire in the breeze. In this instance, distinguishing the boundaries of what’s real and what isn’t becomes redundant. What’s important is having a locus (recording, photo, a note) that situates and orients, drawing back the memories – panoramic, fuzzy and granular.
With the recall of memory comes the emotional wallop. I was surprised how much the howl of the wind within the church is unnerving to listen to. Whereas my aimless wandering within the ruined homestead in “4-Dawson Ruin” brings on a deep melancholy. I think about the poetic meaning of the silent moments in some of these recordings, where the recorder attempts to coax something out of the acoustic blankness. I raise the volume and hear the hiss of noise; nothing there but a vast incomprehensible ocean of static. It leaves a strange feeling, but it’s recordings such as “4-Dawson Ruin” where I’m hearing myself as a presence in these ruined, abandoned spaces that really jostles me. Much like the physical space of the ruin itself, the soundscape is uneven, disjointed, uncertain and fucked up. What am I or my companions doing out here? This trip out to Dawson felt particularly odd at the time, but now – ten years on – I do understand our motivation a little better. We’d found ourselves together, far from home, wandering around in states of emotional ruination, within physical ruins; sounding them out, attempting to locate some meaning against an emptiness, the absence of other human beings. Space for reflection, a place to be.
The image used in this post is courtesy of the author.