THE CAVE AT TEMPLEBAR
“ … the air was dead cold … even though it was bloody hot outside… “
“Wanna hand, mate?”
The offer came from a bit of a kid, about 17 years old, wearing a broad-brimmed Akubra bush hat, his face and arms sunburnt and wiry.
A group of us in the Land Care association had volunteered to erect a wire fence through the Ilparpa Valley, south of Alice Springs, hoping to keep at bay the weekend hotrod cranks and motorbike nuts who used the countryside for weekend assaults on the rugged environment.
For years they had torn the country asunder, churning up tracks into dust bowls, endangering the habitat and its wildlife.
I was digging a hole in the stony ground to eventually establish a strainer post in concrete. It was hard going.
“Yes, thanks, mate,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”
Without a word, he took the shovel from my hand and started to deepen the hole.
His physical co-ordination was rhythmical, very practised, and I commented: “You look like you’ve done plenty of this type of work.”
“Yep,” he grunted. “My old man’s the fencer at Temple Bar Station, just up the road a bit.”
In plunged the crowbar, loosening the compacted soil, sparks sometimes igniting when the point glanced off rocks.
Each movement was methodical, economical, no energy wasted, no action superfluous.
I peering through the bush country to the west.
The Temple Bar Mountain reared up above the corkwood trees, its rocky spine prickling like an angry crocodile.
“Have you ever climbed up there?” I asked the fencer’s son.
“Just once,” he uttered laconically, “and I won’t be going up there again, that’s for sure.”
“Why’s that?” I enquired, alerted by his unusually blunt manner.
The kid stopped digging, resting on the crowbar, his eyes narrowing as he looked towards the sharply pointed mountain in the distance.
“It’s a weird bloody place,” he said, then continued his labour.
I waited expectantly for an extended explanation, but none was offered; he had seemed to banish the subject from his mind and renewed his energy level as he vigorously attacked the stubborn ground.
“Why is it weird?” I persevered. “Is it something to do with the blackfellas?”
He nodded briefly, saying nothing.
“Tell me about it,” I urged” I’d like to know why you say it’s weird. Did something bad happen there?”
“I reckon,” he nodded once more.
By now my curiosity was rampant.
His air of secrecy antagonised my patience to a point where I became fixated on that pointed mountain in the west.
“Have you ever climbed right up to the top?” I enquired.
“Once,” he responded. “Just that one time, as I said. That was enough.”
Again the mysterious silence, inciting my curiosity.
“What happened?” I wanted to know … “Jesus, getting information out of you is like getting blood from a rock.”
He paused to again rest reflectively on the crowbar.
“Better get the shovel and dig this dirt out of the hole,” he suggested.
As I obliged, the young bloke said: “There’s a cave up near the top. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. Did you go inside?”
Slowly nodding, he said: “We made a campfire and took in some firesticks so we could look around … Do you reckon the hole’s deep enough yet?”
“Buggered if I know … What did you find inside the cave?”
Reflectively, the kid thoughtfully picked up a piece of dried twig from the ground and started to chew it, his eyes glazed in thought.
“I don’t even like thinking about it,” he confessed. “Even now it gives me the shits.”
“What did you see?”
He threw aside the crowbar and picked up the shovel.
“Skeletons,” he whispered.
“True?”
He slowly and carefully filled the shovel with loose soil and dumped it beside the hole.
“Lots of dead people …
“All with broken skulls …
“Someone must’ve killed them there by bashing them on the head with a rock or something.”
“Crikey!”
“Yes, and the place stunk, too … and the air was dead cold … even though it was bloody hot outside …”
“Yes … What else?”
“There was strange sorts of writing on the walls and some funny sorts of drawings … You know, secret blackfella stuff.”
By now my interest was bubbling over into blatant excitement.
The flesh on the back of my scalp was being pricked with a hundred hot needles, rising up and down in waves of fear and intrigue.
“Look, mate,” I said. “I’d like to see that cave up on Temple Bar Mountain. Would you show me where it is?”
“No worries,” he replied. “But I wouldn’t go there if I was you. I still get nightmares about it.”
“Would you come with me, to look inside with torches?” I asked him.
Shaking his head, he responded: “No way. Even if you paid me a million dollars, I wouldn’t go within cooee of that bloody place.”
“But you could show me the way,” I said. “I don’t feel like going in there alone.”
Suddenly, from a short distance away, the boy’s father called him to help unload star pickets from a trailer.
As the lad worked, his dad came over to look at our freshly dug post hole.
“That should do,” he grunted. “Young Steve’s getting good at it now … He used to be useless as tits on a bull.”
“Your boy was telling me about the time he and his mates climbed up Temple Bar Mountain and found old Aboriginal skeletons in a cave …”
“What?” the fencer frowned. “Did he really tell you that?”
“Yes, he just finished telling me about it before you called him away.”
The fencer wiped his brow with a hairy forearm and sighed.
“Eh, Steve!” the old man bellowed. “Forget that … Come here! I want to ask you something.”
Confronting his son, the fencing contractor asked: “Now what’s all this bullshit about you finding skeletons in a cave?”
Steve dropped his gaze to study his boots.
“Did you tell this bloke all those lies?”
Young Steve, his cheeks flaming, nodded.
“You’d better stop telling people all those wild stories, boy, and try to stick to the truth.”
With which the father picked up the crowbar and stalked off to start the next post hole.
The youthful story teller blushingly waited for my reaction, steeling himself for an onslaught of indignation.
Finally, after a long suffering silence, I enquired: “Have … have you ever thought of writing … you know, writing stories?”
His eyes lit up.
“Yes,” he replied with enthusiasm. “That’s something I really want to do when I’m older.”
“Don’t wait,” I advised him, placing a paternal hand on his young shoulder. “Start this afternoon. By the time you’re twenty-one, you’ll probably have a bloody good novel finished.”
