The Hands of Heavitree Gap
If ghosts exist, it's not as we usually think of them. Ghosts are not out there but inside us. They are unquiet memories that belong in the great unknown and intrude into our imaginations, begging our attention.
In 2007 I moved to Alice Springs in the central Australian desert. Also known as Mparntwe by the local Arrernte people, Alice Springs is the unofficial capital city of the arid Australian interior. The town runs largely on government money, including a secretive joint US and Australian spy facility, known locally as 'the base'. Tourism and mining supplement the subsidized economy.
Alice Springs was settled relatively late in the colonial timeline, in the early 1870s. Its position was chosen for its central position between Adelaide, on the south coast, and Darwin in the far north, at the site of a gap wide enough for a road and a telegraph line in the MacDonnell Ranges, a low mountain range that runs east-west for a couple of hundred miles. It had the twin advantages of being an opening through the mountains as well as a place where water gathered and lingered. The settlement would act as a supply point for the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line that was to connect the Australian colonies with England in a matter of hours rather than months. Although has come to loom large in the Australian psyche, these days Alice Springs is an ugly little town of about 25,000 locals. Its natural locale, by contrast, is breathtaking.
I came to live here for the same reason many white southerners come here: to experience a different side of Australia, what many would call the 'real Australia', which is otherwise a largely affluent, suburban society. I moved in with a high school friend who worked as a lawyer. Soon after my arrival, he took me to a party. It was just to the south of the town, in the gap between the mountains for which the town's position was originally chosen. Anyone who enters Alice Springs by road or rail from the south, including the airport (and that’s almost everyone) enters through this naturally-occurring gap in the mountain range that is some one hundred yards or more wide. It is known as Heavitree Gap.
Heavitree Gap has always been a place of strategic significance, long before the arrival of Europeans. For the same reasons it was chosen by the first Europeans, it was a sacred place for local indigenous people. When passing through it, some of the older indigenous women still close their eyes, out of respect for the ban that once existed on the presence of women here. These days, a four-lane road and a railway line pass through the Gap, as does the bed of the Todd River, usually dry unless it rains, at which times it becomes a raging torrent.
Near the Gap, in the shadow of the western side of the red rock mountain, still stands one of the oldest buildings in central Australia. It’s a rectangular structure with thick bluestone walls, which makes the house impossible to heat in winter, as well as a tin roof on which the leaves from overhanging gums swish in the wind. This was Alice Springs' first police station and prison, and it was here that we drove, my friend and I, to attend the party.
Things might have changed in the years since I was there, but the Old Police Station was, in those days, rented out by the National Parks Service to its staff. At the time, it was inhabited by a couple of young southerners, the kind that come here to kick-start their careers. The husband was a national park ranger, and his wife was a lawyer. It was, as I recall, late May, and the nights were already getting chilly (it’s rarely cold during the day, but in winter the nighttime temperature usually hovers near freezing).
Parties in Alice Springs usually involved sitting around a big pit fire in a backyard, and so it was that on this night we were all seated on folding chairs around a backyard fire when, perhaps inevitably, we began to speculate on the horrors that might have occurred on these grounds. Someone wondered how Heavitree Gap had acquired its name. There were, someone else ventured, two theories. The official version went like this: the line surveyor of the expedition plotting the telegraph line’s course, a William Mills, named the Gap after a place in Devon, England, where he had gone to school.
The unofficial explanation for the name was, needless to say, far more interesting. There was ancient river gum tree that still stood in the mostly-dry riverbed that runs through the Gap. One of the chief causes of tension between indigenous people and colonisers, after first contact, was over resources. When Europeans initially ventured into the interior, indigenous people, whose lives were so intimately connected with animals, were often impressed by the livestock that came with the intruders—and the Europeans' mastery over them. But this admiration soon soured.
Firstly, there were the inevitable differences between the two cultures about the distinction between individual and collective property. Secondly, not only were cows, sheep, horses and camels easy to hunt, they were an unimaginably abundant source of protein—and thus energy. Previously, the largest mammal available to indigenous people was the kangaroo. Last but not least, at a time when indigenous communities began to be decimated by new diseases, their environment also began to be transformed. European livestock, unlike the indigenous fauna, tended with their cloven hoofs to foul the precious drinking water on which humans and animals alike relied. But, unlike the Europeans, indigenous people didn’t have the tools to dig deep bore wells. They relied entirely on water on or near the surface.
For the Europeans, livestock losses were more than a nuisance. They represented substantial losses for pastoralists whose investments were often nothing short of a wild gamble. All this at a time when being hung or transported for stealing a loaf of bread was still fresh in the collective memory. In the absence of courts on the frontier, there is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least some of the more psychopathic representatives of frontier justice did not hesitate to resort to extra-judicial killings to quell poaching.
And so, we were told as we sat around that fire, it is believed that the name Heavitree Gap might refer not only to the ancient river gum that stands so close to the old police station but perhaps also to the strange fruit it may have borne. This version of events is speculative and anecdotal, but it is very possible, if not probable, that in the first years of colonization local people were hung from the tree's branches, not just to dissuade poaching, not even just as a demonstration of power, but perhaps also to symbolically desecrate the law that had once invested the site with such symbolic potency.
At this point in the conversation, someone remarked, 'This place must surely be haunted.' Sitting among us before the fire was the couple who rented the house. The husband said that his partner, S, had a story to tell on that very subject. She didn't say anything in reply and in the darkness it was hard to figure out what the expression was on her face. Once more her partner prompted her to tell the story, and this time she agreed to tell it.
Soon after moving in, S told us, by which she meant just days after moving in, her husband had gone away for work days. He'd drive hundreds of miles—as people in Alice Springs often do—to work for several days in the national park where he was stationed. It was the first time S was left alone in the house, but she was not one to be easily frightened. She was a criminal lawyer who defended indigenous people in court. She had lived in several isolated places and witnessed at first and second hand many strange and bewildering events.
On the first night, she said, she had a nightmare. She dreamed of a terrible storm, with torrential rain and howling winds, the kind of storm that rages through the vastness of central Australia from time to time. In her dream, the riverbed that passes so near the house, usually dry, began to flow and soon was over-spilling its banks, the water level rising ever higher, threatening—all at once, as can happen in the desert—to engulf the house.
So frightening was the dream that S was startled awake. She opened her eyes to stare out into a middle-of-the-night darkness in which nothing was visible of the unfamiliar room in which she was sleeping alone for the first time. She heard the leaves of an overhanging tree brushing up against the tin roof. Her sleeping mind had transformed their swish into the storm of her nightmare.
S turned on the lamp beside the bed. In the shadows at the end of the room she now saw, standing by the wall, a black-skinned woman dressed only in a white hemp dress, the kind worn by indigenous women in photographs taken at the old Lutheran mission. In silence, the woman approached the bed, stretched out her hands, leaned over S and, when they had reached her throat, began to suffocate her. S gripped the woman’s wrists but the stranger's hands, attached as if soldered to her throat, would not be moved. Overcome with terror, S awoke once more, and found that her own hands were wrapped around her own throat.
In 2007 I moved to Alice Springs in the central Australian desert. Also known as Mparntwe by the local Arrernte people, Alice Springs is the unofficial capital city of the arid Australian interior. The town runs largely on government money, including a secretive joint US and Australian spy facility, known locally as 'the base'. Tourism and mining supplement the subsidized economy.
Alice Springs was settled relatively late in the colonial timeline, in the early 1870s. Its position was chosen for its central position between Adelaide, on the south coast, and Darwin in the far north, at the site of a gap wide enough for a road and a telegraph line in the MacDonnell Ranges, a low mountain range that runs east-west for a couple of hundred miles. It had the twin advantages of being an opening through the mountains as well as a place where water gathered and lingered. The settlement would act as a supply point for the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line that was to connect the Australian colonies with England in a matter of hours rather than months. Although has come to loom large in the Australian psyche, these days Alice Springs is an ugly little town of about 25,000 locals. Its natural locale, by contrast, is breathtaking.
I came to live here for the same reason many white southerners come here: to experience a different side of Australia, what many would call the 'real Australia', which is otherwise a largely affluent, suburban society. I moved in with a high school friend who worked as a lawyer. Soon after my arrival, he took me to a party. It was just to the south of the town, in the gap between the mountains for which the town's position was originally chosen. Anyone who enters Alice Springs by road or rail from the south, including the airport (and that’s almost everyone) enters through this naturally-occurring gap in the mountain range that is some one hundred yards or more wide. It is known as Heavitree Gap.
Heavitree Gap has always been a place of strategic significance, long before the arrival of Europeans. For the same reasons it was chosen by the first Europeans, it was a sacred place for local indigenous people. When passing through it, some of the older indigenous women still close their eyes, out of respect for the ban that once existed on the presence of women here. These days, a four-lane road and a railway line pass through the Gap, as does the bed of the Todd River, usually dry unless it rains, at which times it becomes a raging torrent.
Near the Gap, in the shadow of the western side of the red rock mountain, still stands one of the oldest buildings in central Australia. It’s a rectangular structure with thick bluestone walls, which makes the house impossible to heat in winter, as well as a tin roof on which the leaves from overhanging gums swish in the wind. This was Alice Springs' first police station and prison, and it was here that we drove, my friend and I, to attend the party.
Things might have changed in the years since I was there, but the Old Police Station was, in those days, rented out by the National Parks Service to its staff. At the time, it was inhabited by a couple of young southerners, the kind that come here to kick-start their careers. The husband was a national park ranger, and his wife was a lawyer. It was, as I recall, late May, and the nights were already getting chilly (it’s rarely cold during the day, but in winter the nighttime temperature usually hovers near freezing).
Parties in Alice Springs usually involved sitting around a big pit fire in a backyard, and so it was that on this night we were all seated on folding chairs around a backyard fire when, perhaps inevitably, we began to speculate on the horrors that might have occurred on these grounds. Someone wondered how Heavitree Gap had acquired its name. There were, someone else ventured, two theories. The official version went like this: the line surveyor of the expedition plotting the telegraph line’s course, a William Mills, named the Gap after a place in Devon, England, where he had gone to school.
The unofficial explanation for the name was, needless to say, far more interesting. There was ancient river gum tree that still stood in the mostly-dry riverbed that runs through the Gap. One of the chief causes of tension between indigenous people and colonisers, after first contact, was over resources. When Europeans initially ventured into the interior, indigenous people, whose lives were so intimately connected with animals, were often impressed by the livestock that came with the intruders—and the Europeans' mastery over them. But this admiration soon soured.
Firstly, there were the inevitable differences between the two cultures about the distinction between individual and collective property. Secondly, not only were cows, sheep, horses and camels easy to hunt, they were an unimaginably abundant source of protein—and thus energy. Previously, the largest mammal available to indigenous people was the kangaroo. Last but not least, at a time when indigenous communities began to be decimated by new diseases, their environment also began to be transformed. European livestock, unlike the indigenous fauna, tended with their cloven hoofs to foul the precious drinking water on which humans and animals alike relied. But, unlike the Europeans, indigenous people didn’t have the tools to dig deep bore wells. They relied entirely on water on or near the surface.
For the Europeans, livestock losses were more than a nuisance. They represented substantial losses for pastoralists whose investments were often nothing short of a wild gamble. All this at a time when being hung or transported for stealing a loaf of bread was still fresh in the collective memory. In the absence of courts on the frontier, there is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least some of the more psychopathic representatives of frontier justice did not hesitate to resort to extra-judicial killings to quell poaching.
And so, we were told as we sat around that fire, it is believed that the name Heavitree Gap might refer not only to the ancient river gum that stands so close to the old police station but perhaps also to the strange fruit it may have borne. This version of events is speculative and anecdotal, but it is very possible, if not probable, that in the first years of colonization local people were hung from the tree's branches, not just to dissuade poaching, not even just as a demonstration of power, but perhaps also to symbolically desecrate the law that had once invested the site with such symbolic potency.
At this point in the conversation, someone remarked, 'This place must surely be haunted.' Sitting among us before the fire was the couple who rented the house. The husband said that his partner, S, had a story to tell on that very subject. She didn't say anything in reply and in the darkness it was hard to figure out what the expression was on her face. Once more her partner prompted her to tell the story, and this time she agreed to tell it.
Soon after moving in, S told us, by which she meant just days after moving in, her husband had gone away for work days. He'd drive hundreds of miles—as people in Alice Springs often do—to work for several days in the national park where he was stationed. It was the first time S was left alone in the house, but she was not one to be easily frightened. She was a criminal lawyer who defended indigenous people in court. She had lived in several isolated places and witnessed at first and second hand many strange and bewildering events.
On the first night, she said, she had a nightmare. She dreamed of a terrible storm, with torrential rain and howling winds, the kind of storm that rages through the vastness of central Australia from time to time. In her dream, the riverbed that passes so near the house, usually dry, began to flow and soon was over-spilling its banks, the water level rising ever higher, threatening—all at once, as can happen in the desert—to engulf the house.
So frightening was the dream that S was startled awake. She opened her eyes to stare out into a middle-of-the-night darkness in which nothing was visible of the unfamiliar room in which she was sleeping alone for the first time. She heard the leaves of an overhanging tree brushing up against the tin roof. Her sleeping mind had transformed their swish into the storm of her nightmare.
S turned on the lamp beside the bed. In the shadows at the end of the room she now saw, standing by the wall, a black-skinned woman dressed only in a white hemp dress, the kind worn by indigenous women in photographs taken at the old Lutheran mission. In silence, the woman approached the bed, stretched out her hands, leaned over S and, when they had reached her throat, began to suffocate her. S gripped the woman’s wrists but the stranger's hands, attached as if soldered to her throat, would not be moved. Overcome with terror, S awoke once more, and found that her own hands were wrapped around her own throat.
