Carnivorous Nights Read online

  In between scheduling and finalizing appointments, we had attempted to make his pot connection several times. Through the grapevine, we learned of a dealer, a muscle-bound woman whose street name suggested a high-octane fuel. She would be easy to recognize we were told because she had a shaved head and tattoos. She was supposed to be at a particular bar at a particular time. But she kept not showing up. That night, we began to get desperate. Alexis's complaining was driving us crazy. Then as if we were being rewarded for paying homage to the bat gods, the mus-cle-bound dealer came through. We rushed over to the ritzy hotel where Alexis and Dorothy were staying and found them lounging on the deck by a saltwater pool. Alexis opened the bag, fingered the aromatic plant matter, and pulled out a pinch. “Oh yeah, baby,” he said, taking a whiff. Then he pushed the pot into a small, one-hit pipe with his index finger, flicked his lighter, and took a long drag. He looked relieved and then surprised. “This is strong shit,” he coughed. Sydney was coming through— at least for Alexis. But we were still jonesing. Our urge for even a tiny taste of the tiger was yet to be satisfied.

  A few days later, a man named Les Bursill was, with difficulty, navigating a boat we had rented. It was a houseboat, really just a raft on pontoons, with a 30 horsepower engine in the back. “This thing drives like a steamed pudding,” he informed us.

  As soon as we had left the dock, Alexis and Dorothy disappeared onto the boat's roof deck, stripped down to their bathing suits, and lay out in the sun. We had rented the boat out of Cronulla, a surf town on the southern edge of the Sydney suburbs, and were entering Port Hacking, an enormous bay with multiple arms and inlets. Million-dollar homes were built into the sandstone cliffs that rose up on either side.

  As we plied down the main waterway, we were accompanied by other party boats, heading out for a day of fishing, swimming, and picnicking. But our destination was different. “It's something few people on this earth have seen,” said Les.

  He spread out a map next to the wheel and indicated the southern section of Port Hacking. “That's Royal National Park,” he said. It was the second oldest national park in the world after Yellowstone, and it was filled with aboriginal artifacts, including ancient rock paintings. The native people who had lived in Port Hacking had vanished within a few years of British settlement in the early nineteenth century. The area around us was an aboriginal ghost town.

  Les, a heavyset man with a graying beard and mustache, was an expert on the park's aboriginal rock art, and he was part-aboriginal himself— though he had not discovered this fact until he was in his late thirties. When his grandmother died, he found some photographs that suggested his family—ostensibly white and European—had an aboriginal heritage. “I traced my lineage back to a man named Dr. Ellis. He was a full-blooded aboriginal and a kaditcha man, a medicine man or witch doctor you might call it. His daughter, Susan Ellis, married my great-grandfather—he was a convict who'd been transported to Australia from England for stealing linen. So I'm one of just a few people who can trace their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of this region, the Tharawal people.”

  That was saying something. “The last Tharawal people in this area were wiped out by disease by 1835, 1840. It's very sad,” said Les. “You'll find a drawing of a kangaroo that's half finished as if someone has put down their pen and never come back.”

  In 1985 while he was working on his master's degree in anthropology, Les was asked to do a complete survey of aboriginal rock art in Royal. When he and his team began their research, fewer than forty rock art sites had been documented. By the time they were finished, they had found more than one thousand. And there was one in particular that he wanted us to see: an aboriginal drawing of a thylacine.

  Although there is aboriginal rock art all over Australia, rock art depicting thylacines is rare. When the first aboriginals arrived in Australia about sixty thousand years ago, the thylacine was one of the fiercest predators on the continent. Over fifty millennia, aboriginals and thylacines lived together, and the thylacines were woven into aboriginal dreamtime stories and artwork. But then five thousand years ago, the dingo—a breed of domestic dog—was introduced to Australia (probably by Southeast Asian seafarers). Scientists believe that as the dingoes went wild, they killed off the thylacines in the same way that wolves will kill off coyotes in their territory to get rid of the competition. About three thousand years ago, thylacines disappeared from the mainland. They survived on the island of Tasmania only because dingoes never crossed the water.

  When the mainland thylacines died out, so did the rock art. Now the only reminders of the mainland thylacines are fossilized bones, dehydrated body parts preserved in outback deserts, and a handful of ancient paintings.

  Les said his discovery of a thylacine drawing in the environs of Aus-tralia's largest city had been slightly controversial in archaeological circles. “There's actually some debate about whether it is a tiger,” he said. “The jury's about 60–40 in my favor. Some people think it's a kangaroo with stripes.”

  Les turned off the main channel, and we headed into a branch of the estuary known as the Southwest Arm that reached into the national park. The arm was lousy with sandbars, and at one point we ran aground. Les put the engine in reverse and it made a disturbing grinding noise. As the pudding chugged on, the hillside homes receded. Sea eagles circled in the distance. Pied cormorants, seagulls, and pelicans flew by. Climbing up the walls of pale gray sandstone were thin silver-barked, gray-barked, and red-barked eucalyptus trees, topped with tufts of brilliant green leaves. There were also native fruit trees: figs, wombat berry, and yellow-berried tuckeroo. Les estimated one hundred aboriginal people had lived in this bay. There were signs of aboriginal habitation everywhere: shell middens, fire pits, engravings of dolphins and whales, paintings of fish drawn in yellow ocher, drawings of flying foxes hanging upside down in charcoal.

  Les pointed out an ancient midden, an aboriginal rubbish heap of oyster and mussel shells that now formed part of the shoreline. “Some of these middens are dated to have been in use for six thousand years.” Les coaxed the boat into shallow water. It scraped against the rocky shoreline with a ripping sound and Les cut the engine. “I want to show you something up here. It's just a quick detour.”

  Sun-doped, Alexis and Dorothy staggered down the stairs and followed Les out of the boat. We hopped out, too, and scrambled up a short, nearly vertical trail, pulling ourselves along by grabbing on to the roots of eucalyptus trees. White shells crunched beneath our feet. Les led us to a narrow sandstone ledge surmounted by an overhang of dark rock.

  “What do you see?” he said.

  We peered at the rock. There was nothing there. It looked like any other outcrop, rough and streaked with age.

  “Give it a minute,” Les said. “It's like an optical illusion.”

  Then, like a photo in a developing bath, four black hands slowly emerged from the rock face. “Hand stencils,” Les explained. They were made by Tharawal people who lived here hundreds of years ago. Each was framed by a ragged halo of white.

  “That's intense,” said Dorothy. “It's like they're reaching out and grabbing us.”

  Alexis studied the pigments, black and white on gray rock. “How did they make these?” he asked.

  “It's sprayed on,” Les said. “They filled their mouth with water and chewed-up charcoal, and sprayed the rock in a series of short bursts. That created a black background. Then they would fill their mouths with white clay to make a white pigment, place their hand against the rock, and spray around it.” He pantomimed spitting out pigment with his hand flush against the rock.

  Les wasn't sure what the hand stencils meant—or if they had a meaning. Archaeologists have found similar stencils in radically different parts of the world: Africa, Europe, the Americas. The question was, were they signatures (an ancient “Kilroy was here”)? Messages? Les thought the positioning of the fingers might be some sort of signaling, or bush code. “In some instances, there's such a lot of effort that's
gone into the preparation of the surface and then the way the fingers are splayed. I think there are meanings we don't understand.” Hand stencils could also have a spiritual significance. Some archaeologists theorize the rocks used for hand stenciling served as doors to the spirit world. By covering a hand with dark pigment, it seemed to dissolve into and behind the rock, reaching into a realm beyond.

  We returned to the boat and continued down the arm of the bay. The water was becoming extremely shallow, shifting in color from electric blue to muddy green. “The tide's going out,” Les said. To reach the thylacine, he was going to anchor at an uncharted bay that locals called Tiger Shark Hole. “It's not exactly navigable,” he added.

  “Are there really tiger sharks in the water?” we asked. Suddenly running aground didn't seem like such a big deal.

  “Well, I used to put my boat in there, and I would swim and fish. I was telling an old-timer about it—and he said that back in the old days they used to fish for shark there because they loved that deep hole. They used to hang the sharks up from the gum trees, cut their throats, and let the blood run into the pool. Of course that would act as a lure …I never swum there again.”

  Les saw our eyes popping and told us not to worry. There had only been one serious shark attack in Port Hacking's history. “In 1927, a young boy dived off a boat and was eaten amongst his friends. By the time they got him ashore, he'd lost an arm and a leg and a large lump out of his side. He died on the way to the hospital.” The attack had inspired a Sydney balladeer to write a verse about it:

  The day was fine, the water clear,

  And as smooth as a pond;

  But the surfers never thought of

  What danger lurked beyond.

  It was a shark, some twelve feet long

  And in shallow water,

  His eyes were bulging from his head,

  Anxious for the slaughter.

  Water/slaughter. We had to admit it was a good rhyme. By the time we reached Tiger Shark Hole, the little engine had begun to complain and spew smoke fitfully. “I'm just going to try and get us anchored here,” Les said. The shallow green water was full of jumping fish. We scanned the surface for fins.

  The tide was so low that the exposed part of the sandstone shore was covered with clumps of live oysters. Les jumped out of the boat, pried one loose with his pocketknife, and ate it raw. “This is gorgeous real estate,” he said surveying the scene. “There was so much game here.” Les delighted in the idea of living off the land. “When I was a kid, my family would do that for a month every year.” And when he was working on the rock art survey in Royal, he had spent months camping out beneath the stars, hiking to his heart's content, paddling a canoe, and dining on fish.

  We all walked along the rocky shore, stepping over fallen eucalyptus branches. Though Dorothy was wearing a sarong, she seemed to maneuver over the obstacles with ease. Les turned up a wisp of a path—it was wide enough for a dunnart (the marsupial version of a mouse) to pass through easily—and we climbed two hundred feet up the cliffside through tangy-smelling eucalyptus and red-barked Angophora trees. Near the top, we reached a long sandstone shelf paralleling the ridgeline. It gave us a bird's-eye view of the flat, blue-green waters below. Across the inlet, a mangrove swamp shimmered in the light.

  We followed Les along a sandy track covered with broken shells. The yellowish gray cliffside curled over our heads.

  “Talk about Picnic at Hanging Rock,” said Alexis.

  For a natural area, it seemed strangely barren. “Where are all the animals?” we asked.

  Les pointed out tracks in the sand, impressions of little claws and long feet. “Wallaby,” he said. “They're active at night.”

  We walked beneath the hanging cliff for about a quarter of a mile. Then Les stopped and gestured toward the underside of the shelter. The rock was stained pink, brown, and white, and it was covered in dark, swirling lines. “This is it,” he said.

  At first we couldn't see anything. But then the dark lines seemed to shift and reassemble themselves. They formed a picture of three animals: a menagerie à trois.

  We could make out a python with a thick, coiled body, its head pointed upward, its tongue in mid-flick. There was a kangaroo that had a long muzzle and short, pointed ears. It was looking to the right with an almost arrogant expression on its face. The third animal was Les's tiger—was it a tiger? It had a big, doggy head with triangular ears (one facing forward and one back), a skinny neck, two stumpy front legs, and dark stripes across its elongated body. It appeared to be speared through by the tail of the haughty kangaroo.

  The drawings were made using charcoal. Les showed us a large oval of ash on the ground. It was an ancient fire pit, one of three in this rock shelter, and it was thousands of years old. Les thought two, maybe three aboriginal families had spent their evenings at this spot regularly. “These fire mounds were used for cooking large animals. They would have dragged a kangaroo up here and covered it over.” Then he added, “Pythons have a lot of meat on them, too.” We began to wonder if the rock art was actually an ancient menu.

  The python was probably a diamond python, a species that grows to about six feet and still lives in Royal National Park (it eats bats, other small mammals, birds, and lizards). The wallaby was probably the brushtail rock wallaby, now an endangered species. All, including the thylacine, were nocturnal.

  We began to look for something besides the stripes that might indicate this drawing was a tiger, rather than a crosshatched kangaroo. Its eye was a deep black almond, which gave it a slightly savage appearance. Very thylacine-y. Then again, from different angles, the animal looked more like a kangaroo than a tiger.

  Then we saw something. It could have been just a fold in the rock, but there it was, a charcoal line, the tiger's mouth. We had spent too much time at the museum looking at the tiger to miss it. Tasmanian tigers have a wicket-shaped grin. The line of their mouths extends far back into their heads toward the ears and turns up at the corners—a feature that allows them to open their mouths in an unusually wide gape. When we saw that crafty grin beaming out at us across the millennia, we knew we would join the 60 percent crowd.

  “It looks like I have another convert,” Les said.

  We looked at the charcoal lines marking the sandstone. What made this thylacine drawing all the more remarkable was that it survived when so many aboriginal drawings had been lost.

  At one time, Les explained, every inch of this rock shelter would have been covered with paintings. In fact, in the background behind the python-wallaby-thylacine were the faded or partial beginnings of many other drawings—the un-filled-in outline of a disembodied head, a featureless kangaroo in mid-leap.

  These three charcoal drawings had survived because they were protected from the fading rays of the sun and covered with a clear skin of silica that had leached out of the rock face and formed a protective sheath.

  “The wonderful thing about this drawing is that it's no longer on the surface of the rock. It's in the rock. It's probably preserved forever now.”

  “How old is this drawing?” we asked.

  Les borrowed one of our notebooks and drew three kangaroo heads. On one, he drew two stick ears—just two lines. On another he drew triangular ears, and on the last one he drew rounded ears. Stick ears were used on the oldest Tharawal drawings: 4,500 to 8,500 years old. Triangle ears dated from 3,500 to 4,500 years ago. Rounded ears were the most recent, disappearing only with European occupation less than two hundred years ago.

  He circled the kangaroo with the triangular ears. “That's what we're looking at, and I reckon it's about four thousand years old.” The date fit. Thylacines were still living on the mainland then.

  “Why did aboriginal people draw the thylacine?”

  “Oh, there could have been lots of reasons,” Les said. Sometimes animals were drawn to tell a story or they could be totem animals, drawn to call on their spirits. In rock shelters like this one where families gathered for warmth and sh
elter at night, the rock art is often diary-like. “It's sort of Days of Our Lives,” Les continued. “They're keeping a record. ‘I saw a thylacine today.’ That would be a remarkable occurrence, I think, even for an aboriginal person. They're such a cunning and secretive animal. When you saw one, it was an event.” We imagined a thylacine passing unseen in the night and the drawings of the animals moving and dancing in the light of the flickering fire pits.

  It was tragic that the thylacine was extinct on the mainland. But had it completely vanished from the earth? We asked Les what he thought. Les said he believed the thylacine survived in Tasmania. “They say there are no dingoes in this park, but I've seen them,” he said. “Tasmania's a big place with many untouched wild areas. The thylacine is out there. It has to be.”

  As we were talking, Alexis had begun collecting chunks of charcoal left over from a recent bushfire and bits of yellow ocher. He planned to use them as drawing materials. He hadn't said much while we were looking at the ancient animal triptych, though he had photographed it with his digital camera and made a quick sketch.

  “Do you think it's a thylacine?” we asked.

  “Maybe,” Alexis said. “But it could be a rabbit for all I know.” Then he looked admiringly at the work of these long-vanished artists. “I know one thing. I hope my shit's still around in four thousand years.”

  By the time we got back to the boat, it was nearly beached. With some difficulty, Les extricated the pudding from Tiger Shark Hole and anchored in the main part of the Southwest Arm. In the distance, we saw the tiny figures of water-skiers, swimmers, and numerous pleasure craft. Alexis and Dorothy decided to go for a dip and leapt into the green water. We advised them to watch out for tiger sharks, but they paid no attention.

  Les pulled out a cold can of Victoria Bitter and popped the top. “Nothing I like better than a day on the water, good conversation, and a good beer,” he said. Then he began telling us about his day job. It turned out studying rock art was a sideline for him these days. He worked with the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services, counseling prisoners and parolees with drug, alcohol, mental health, and violence problems. Some of his work was profoundly gratifying, helping people get straight, putting their lives back together. But in the criminal justice system, he also encountered some hard nuts—murderers, serial killers.