The Crying Place is a haunting, luminous novel about love, country,

and the varied ways in which we grieve. In its unflinching portrayal

of the borderlands where worlds come together, and the past and
the present overlap, it speaks of the places and moments that bind
us. The myths that draw us in. And, ultimately, the ways in which
we find our way home.

Cover design: Romina Panetta

Cover photographs: Australian Scenics/Getty Images
(landscape), Patrick Ulrich (sky)

FICTION

THE

CRYING PLACE

After years of travelling, Saul is trying to settle down. But one night
he receives the devastating news of the death of his oldest friend, Jed,
recently returned from working in a remote Aboriginal community.
Sauls discovery in Jeds belongings of a photo of a woman convinces
him that she may hold the answers to Jeds fate. So he heads out on
a journey into the heart of the Australian desert to find the truth,
setting in motion a powerful story about the landscapes that shape
us and the ghosts that lay their claim.

LIA
HI L L S

In the rear vision, the road was golden and straight and even,
its length making sense of the sky, of the vast black cloud that
was set to engulf it. I pulled over and got out. Stared at it,
this gleaming snake where Id been, where it was going.
The route that Jed had once taken.

LIA HILLS

THE
CRYING
PLACE
brave and devastating
CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS

an impressive novel
ALEX MILLER

The author claims no ownership over any Aboriginal cultural material referenced in the novel, including
language. Every effort has been made to ensure that, at the time of publication, information in this book
pertaining to Aboriginal cultural references is correct and permission has been sought where applicable.
Please contact the publisher with any concerns.
First published in 2017
Copyright Lia Hills 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
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Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information
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The publishers wish to acknowledge the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce material
in this book:
From Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood
Copyright John Harwood 2001
First published by Halcyon Press 2001
Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
From Voss by Patrick White
Copyright Patrick White 1957
Reprinted by kind permission.
From Collected Poems by Judith Wright
Copyright Judith Wright
Reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Australia.
The lines of text from One Land, One Law, One People by George Tinamin appear in Spirit Song:
ACollection of Aboriginal Poetry (Omnibus Books: Norwood, South Australia, 1993).
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For those who have lost their country.

And for Patrick
dans le dsert, lamour trouve son espace.

Nyangatja apu wiya, ngayuku tjamu.

This is not a rock, it is my grandfather.
George Tinamin, One Land, One Law, One People

Last night a dog howled somewhere,

A hungry ghost in need of sacrifice.
Judith Wright, River Bend

alf buried in the red sands of the Simpson Desert, they

remained undisturbed for half a millennium, their resting
place close to one of the songlines for the Two Boys, whose
movements across the desert created life-sustaining wells. Some
credit their discovery to Wangkangurru elders, who used old
tales theyd heard as kids to locate them among the shifting sands.
Others claim it was a stockman who, coming across them in his
journeying, mistook them for dinosaur eggs and souvenired a
couple. The desert is a place constructed of stories, every one
of them true; stories that leave their traces as they travel across
country tjukurpa in the Pitjantjatjara language, the same as
the word for birthmark.
White and as porous as beached coral, what lay exposed on
that dune was not the petrified remains of eggs, but something
fashioned by human hands. Moulded from gypsum collected
either from a fabled quarry to the north or the salt-rich shores of
Lake Eyre to the south the recipe for their making was as old
as grief itself. First, the gypsum was heated on a fire and reduced
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Lia Hills

to a powder, then it was combined with precious water to form

a milky paste: white, the traditional colour of the dead. Next,
the hair was shaved off with a shell or chiselled stone till the
skin was completely exposed, anet of spun grass or emu sinew
placed over the bare scalp, araw lattice. Finally, the paste was
applied, layer upon layer, until a thick cap formed all the way
down to the eyebrows, sometimes as much as ten centimetres
thick and weighing up to seven kilos. All the while, people sang,
the head steadied by sticks that shared the burden one end
wedged against the drying gypsum, the other plunged into the
red sand. Once dry, the bearer was free to go, though reminded
day by day of the weight of their mourning bonds, sometimes
returning to add an extra layer. As time passed, their hair grew
back the measured distancing of the event till the cap fell
off or was removed, the period of grieving over. It was then laid
on the grave as a marker, awitness, the bearer finally released.
Thaddeus told me the story of the discovery of the caps in
the Simpson when I most needed to hear it. Ididnt realise it
at the time, but it has become clear to me over these last few
months. He told it standing in the doorway of the Silver Bullet
carriage in which he lived, eyes fixed on the ranges to the west.
During his years spent navigating the borderlands where two
worlds overlap, Thaddeus had amassed tales like most people
collect scars and regrets, his guiding principle in that moment:
even a seed laid in seemingly barren soil will respond to the
first rains.
The way he told it, the sighting of the mourning caps caused
a hell of a stir. There were almost sixty in total, and never had
so many been found in one location, particularly as far north as
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The Crying Place

the Simpson. In the autumn of 2008, an expedition had set out

from the one-pub town of Birdsville, the exact location of the
site still a well-guarded secret. Ascraggly caravan of camels and
loaded four-wheel drives, the party included a Wangkangurru
ranger, journalists, archaeologists, ethnographers, artists and
two living legends, both women. One had crossed half the
continent solo on camelback and lived to tell the tale. The other,
an octogenarian linguist of German descent, was afriend to the
last songmen and women of the Simpson.
The magnitude of the discovery rippled through the party
as they traversed the dunes, the pockets of water trapped in
recesses from the recent rains deceptively comforting in a place
that in another season the explorer Sturt had referred to as the
entrance into Hell. The closer they passed to desert wells and
soakages, the more remains they came across. Ancient middens
of freshwater mussel shells. Grinding stones. Basalt axe heads.
Glass spearheads. All abandoned or left behind for later, their
owners waylaid by history. Once they were close, they made
camp, some positioning themselves around a gidgee-wood fire,
the embers imprinting themselves on the retina in the same way
as stars do out there, aiding perspective, the camels farting and
sifting in the outer perimeter.
In the morning, they walked out to the site, coolabah trees
leaning over the waterhole like knowing elders, apair of gibberbirds cocking their heads in unison as the party arrived. Its
akin to finding the Elgin Marbles, said one of the archaeologists,
the swelling sun causing him to squint, the linguist dipping
under the wire to get a better look. Unlike the Elgin marbles,
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Lia Hills

the national treasures before them would be left where theyd

been found.
As the members of the party stared and corellas circled, two
theories did the rounds. Some believed it to be an increase site,
created to signify and perpetuate the mourning process, to carry
it through time and space in a world where the two were often
interchangeable. Others argued it must be the burial place of
a man of high degree, whose importance could be measured
by the quantity of gypsum caps laid on his grave; not to be
properly mourned was a terrible thing the spirit still knew
hunger beyond the f lesh.
Either way, akind of crying place.
The site had been fenced off in an attempt to protect it from
the herds of wild camels that roamed the Simpson and any
collectors who might stumble across it. Thaddeus had laughed as
he told me this, though it took me a while to work out why. He
knew all too well the fine line between preservation and theft.
When Thaddeus was done telling the tale, he descended
the steps out the front of his carriage to the rock garden, araw
assemblage of specimens from the desert and automotive flotsam.
Picking up a split geode, he balanced it in his palm, the rough
crystals of its interior sparking in the sun. Saul, he said, remember:
no man burdened with guilt ever put a sure foot into the future.
I knew nothing of all this before I set out on my own
journey, one that began with a phone call, the kind that cuts
through your life. Knew nothing of the layering of gypsum as a
mark of grief, or how some deserts absorb sound so perfectly that
all echoes must be excavated. That there are many ways to make
amends. Ithought I knew deserts: the Thar, the Taklimakan,
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The Crying Place

the Grand Ergs of the Sahara, their dunes like the waves of an
inland sea. But like so many of my generation, Id travelled the
world without ever placing a foot in the sands that lay at the
centre of my own country. Never questioned why it was once
referred to as the Dead Heart.
But Im getting ahead of myself, trying to give the slip to that
old belief: that the end of a story is encoded in its beginning.
Sometimes I wish it had been laid out like a songline, etched
into my cognitive mapping of the world so that it would not
be possible to stray from it. I wish for that degree of certainty.
But this is the story of a whitefella a piranpa in the language of
the Pitjantjatjara full of wandering and, at least at the outset,
the belief that all you need is the right question.
Unlike Thaddeus tale of the mourning caps, this one opens
at the edge of the continent, not its centre. In Sydney, acity
pressed against the Pacific, an ocean tamed as much as any great
expanse can be by words like beach and surf and lifeguard and a
deep nostalgia for summer holidays. Acity like so many of this
coast-hugging nation that has relocated its foreshore, adotted
line of plaques at Circular Quay proof of where the original
tidemark once lapped, the sails of the tall ships evolved into
architecture.
Surrounded by safer sands.
The only white caps in sight the ones lifted by the wind
across the surface of the bay.

tjukurpa
story; Dreaming; Law; message; birthmark
Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert

ike all beginnings, it had its own sound. My phone ringing.

Afaltering announcement. The squawk of fruit bats brawling
in the trees. And the echo of what shed just said casing the
room as if words had an afterlife.
You still there? she asked.
Yes.
I thought maybe ...
What?
That you didnt hear me.
I heard you. Its just ... not possible. Fuck.
Saul, theres no need.
I almost laughed it seemed the only response to this
madness, to her reining in but duty caught my breath.
Dead, she repeated, pronouncing it with reverence.
She exhaled, waited for me to say something, but words were
refusing to line themselves up. Icould see the TV, its relentless
action, adust ball collected against the skirting board, stirred
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Lia Hills

by unseen forces. Through the window, the stacked lights of

the CBD signalled through the gaps between the houses leading
down to Blackwattle Bay.
Hed been living in that place, she said, like it was some
kind of explanation.
Sorry?
In Melbourne. You know the one by the beach ... God
knows, not the kind of place ... though it wasnt there, not
there. Elaines beside herself. They called her, the police, only an
hour ago. She was in her kitchen, cooking chops of all things.
The line faded, like our conversation belonged to the past,
and I thought about hanging up, shed understand, but one
question was tapping against the edge of my skull, the bats
screeching like banshees in the tree outside my window.
How?
What?
How did he die?
Saul, its better ...
I need to know. The details.
She paused. Breathed in sharply. By his own hand.
No! Idont believe that. Not Jed.
I swallowed hard. Through my phone, background noises
pushed to the surface. The ordered drone of a lawnmower. My
parents television perpetually on. The threefold caw of a crow,
ending in a plaintive wail. All of it a kind of anthem to the
place where I came from. Where we came from.
You boys, you and Jed, you were like brothers.
I ... Icant.
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The Crying Place

Bats shrieked. An ambulance siren. The mercy of the beep

as I hung up.
Breathing heavily, Istared at the screen of my mobile.
19 April it said, unblinking.
7:18.
They always call it, dont they? The time of death. And the
cause. The alleged aff liction or weapon.
By his own hand.
I turned mine over. Scrutinised the thin white ridge on the
back of it from a run-in with coral on Ko Tao. And below that,
the edge of the tanless mark from my wristband, the last man
in the world to still wear a watch. Quarter past seven it said
with its approximate dashes, caught in an earlier era maybe
the instant when Id heard my phone ring and lowered my
fork to the plate, the edges of the microwaved lamb curry like
the banks of a creek receding into drought. Id reached for the
remote first, the mute button, before answering.
On the silenced TV a woman scowled, her face the colour of
soot. People rose to their feet and hugged, bright dresses, white
beards, arms stretched around broad backs. Behind them, ared
ridge that looked like a spine exposed, asleeping desert creature.
I turned away, no appetite for news, for what moved others.
Took in the place Id been living in for the last eight months,
since Id come to Sydney to take on that job for Andy. It was
more a studio than a f lat, its smallness emphasised by the fact
that it was lit mostly by the streetlamp outside.
By his own hand.
A warm wind rattled the cedar blinds. Entered the room
tracked by the buzz of a fat f ly and a memory. Jed and I at the
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Lia Hills

edge of the Derwent, the wind off the river tugging at the
flames of a fire lit to give some kind of focus to the beach party,
the silver sky with only a few scraggly gum trees for a frame.
Behind us, the water bellyached while Jed, half tanked already,
held forth with some argument about the forms submission
could take in the world, agroup hanging off his words with
the earnestness of the pissed. His eyes were squally as all hell,
his blond hair harried by the wind. Scratching his throat as
if trying to peel back the skin, hed urged with the f lair for
aphorism that surfaced when he drank, You have to understand
the ways of the river.
My mobile rang again.
I put it down.
Saw my mothers name appear on the screen like a
cautionarytale.
I needed to ring someone. Tell them what had happened.
Someone who didnt know yet, for who it wasnt yet true.
But who? Ella had known him pretty well. In the eighteen
months we were together, she met Jed several times, said we
were like a couple of old war heroes when we got together,
always mythologising the past. But over the last year or so, since
shed moved up to Cairns with that restaurant guy, Ellas emails
had gone from sparse to seasonal to non-existent. People from
back home most of them were ancient history or elsewhere,
their lives, their loves, no longer aligned with mine.
No, there was only one person Id call at a moment like this,
and that was no longer possible.
I picked up my mobile and scrolled through my messages
to the last one Id had from Jed.
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The Crying Place

Hey Saul. Where are you?

It had felt good to hear from him. Every time I saw his
name in my inbox or on a text there was that small thrill, that
tension, which comes from reconnecting with someone whose
presence has been so constant that you risk being brought face
to face with old versions of yourself your success and failure
in fulfilling them. That sudden reminder that there are those
who help to give your life momentum.
Sydney. Why?
No reply.
Id checked my phone on and off that day, but figured hed
answer when he knew what he wanted to say. Sometimes it
would take him weeks, even months, to get back to me, though
his messages would read as if thered only been a minutes pause.
I verified the date again, just to make sure. Both texts, his
and mine, had been sent around lunchtime only three days
before. Thumb hovering over the keypad, Ifought the urge to
send him one last message. Afutile cry into the ether.
Shit, Jed. What the fuck happened?
Only the bats answered, their febrile screeching close as I
paced the room.
My phone rang again, nagged at the blinds, at the walls. But
I let the call go through, because I already knew: that it was
not words that were required now, but movement.
I killed the TV. Tossed the remote into the corner of the
couch among the sprawled pages of the newspaper Id bought
on the way home from work, an evening that had begun like
so many others. Headed for the door, scratches at its base from
a dog once forced to live where it didnt belong. Outside, at the
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Lia Hills

bottom of the street, the shore stretched. Thered be joggers and

kids on bikes, asemblance of normality. Icould follow the bay,
keep going till the night started to make some kind of sense. But
to where? If there was one thing wed learnt from all those years
on the road, it was that movement without a guiding principle
was like food stripped of its taste.
This was not Jeds city, never had been, not even for a brief
time.
No answers were to be found here.
There was only one place I needed to go.
The simplicity of it struck me as I recalled what my mother
had said: that place ... by the beach. Struck me with such force
that I laughed out loud, though the tone was high-pitched,
reckless, as if seeking out the company of the bats.
From under the bed Idragged my old backpack, arip in the
side from when itd got snagged on the roof railing of a bus in
Pakistan as wed slalomed the hairpin bends of the Karakoram
Highway. I stared at the ragged tear. Felt my knees start to give.
Gotta keep moving, mate. Keep moving.
Ishoved things into the pack. Aspare t-shirt. Jumper. Jocks.
My old toiletries bag, always on the bathroom shelf, never quite
ready to commit to a drawer.
By the front door, Iplunged my hand into the coin bowl
and felt for my keys. Rummaged a little longer than I needed
to, possessing the clink of metal against glass, two substances
so capable of injury. Then, pack slung over one shoulder,
Iwalkedout.
The curry I left to the f ly.

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