Glenville Pike’s books preserve pioneering past of northern Australia

We should treasure the literary legacy of Glenville Pike, chronicler of forgotten places and abandoned time.

Glenville Pike on his property near Mareeba in Queensland in 1996.

When Glenville Pike retraced the path of the old Byerstown Road up Cape York by four-wheel-drive in 1993, exactly six decades had passed since he first rode that way as a child, together with his literary-minded mother and his aunt, camping with their packhorses at creek sides where the peninsula drovers camped. At that late stage in his long, tormented life, Pike, born in Toowoomba in 1925, had already written the lion’s share of his 26 books and numerous articles on Cape history. He was the guardian of the pioneering past, the recorder and reteller of its memories — and at last he was coming back to his own.

Spread out before him was the old Normanby Range section of the road and the notorious “Gentle Annie” steep grade climb. He could see the wide valleys stretching inland, and the milkwoods and the mango trees. There were the old bamboos in their thick stands, creaking and snapping in the Cooktown wind. Middle Oakey Creek: home, as it once was, a thousand scrub acres (405ha), leased from “Strike-Me-Lucky” Jack Thompson for the equivalent of $1.50 a month — a slab house, half-burned stockyards, fence lines of broken post and rail.

“There was pioneering history before my eyes every day,” Pike writes on the last, nostalgia-laden page of his Palmer River gold rush history, Chasing the Rainbow. History was all around him, still intact, but fading fast: “I grew up with it.”

Close by the house, on the goldfields track, were the remains of a hotel, and store; a blacksmith’s shop, too, and the adjoining yards where Cobb and Co had changed their horses. Pike used to ride bareback into Cooktown and bring back the food supplies in split-bags on his saddle: 32 miles (51km) all up in a single day. It was in this landscape, he writes, “that I absorbed a love for the history of my own land” — a fascination with the past that drove him to re-create it in his mind, to write about it in detailed narratives from his 12th birthday onwards, to frequent bush archives and make the deserted backblocks his constant hunting ground.

Why, though, should we read him, or even remember him, this obscure provincial chronicler? Pike’s shortcomings as a writer are very evident. His style is at once gruff and monotonously prolix; he had no sense of narrative structure, no real grasp of history’s motive forces, no interest in probing the hidden wellsprings of events. He idolised the first explorers and the goldfield diggers of the north in blanket fashion. He was an amateur, and often a self-publisher, quite innocent of the editor’s instinct: he quotes liberally from his own backlist and repeats himself from page to page. Indeed, a good number of his books are, in truth, the same book revised, repointed and represented.

His output, in short, is a mess. And yet there is something worth preserving, and treasuring, in Pike’s literary leavings. He loved details and atmospherics, and he had a democratic eye that saw and gave due attention to each one of the many stories he alighted on. There is a poetic touch that surfaces from time to time amid the more baroque and overwrought of his descriptive passages. Above all he has a striking capacity to convey the look and feel of abandoned places and long forgotten times.

Here he is, on song, vivid, imagining old Port Douglas, in the most fully realised and frequently reprinted of his titles, Queensland Frontier, which was a near-bestseller for Rigby Books when it first appeared in 1978: “Three ships were discharging cargo, and although unsurveyed the town was rapidly taking shape as a bustling goldfields port. Storekeepers Thompson, Thredgold and McMahon were in business, and a baker brought out the first batch of bread at the high price of a shilling a loaf.’’

Calico hostels, new trading houses, stores selling iron bedsteads and hurricane lamps and lengths of timber — these are the kinds of things Pike thrilled to list. The deserted diggings of the Palmer were his favourite haunt: the ruins of Maytown, where there had once been 35 hotels and a score of gambling dens, and miners with a strike would buy tub-fulls of champagne and invite the crowds in the streets to dip their pannikins and share. He turned the gold rush story over from every angle, even imagining the thoughts of the Aboriginal warriors looking down on the river valley “lit by a thousand flickering campfires and pinpoints of light from kerosene lanterns, and the air heavy with wood-smoke”.

Pike made his research pilgrimages repeatedly into the backlands, and these too were episodes to be recorded: “In September 1948 I followed the old wagon road down the Hodgkinson as far as the Mitchell River junction in a Four-Wheel-Drive Blitz truck — the journey was accomplished only with great difficulty because of the very deep rocky gullies.”

How he would have loved to experience the old days on the Cape diggings, when the camps were full and the hills shook from the muffled detonation charges in the deep shafts underground. There were horse thieves, opium smugglers and teams of Chinese workers; there were newspapers such as the Golden Age, and bush geologists and brokers; there was every trade and profession money could attract and buy. Pike paints the scene:

Buildings of bark, slabs and canvas were erected in the dense ironbark forest. There was a rough hospital and two doctors, Callaghan and Dawson. Patients lay on straw mattresses on the antbed floor. The doctors operated — mostly amputations without anaesthetics — on a table of rough-hewn planks in an adjoining bark hut that also served as the kitchen. Water was boiled in one of the two iron boilers over a smoky open fire a few feet away. The second boiler contained the patients’ staple diet — soup. Flies hovered in clouds, and patients were tormented by meat ants. Fowls and stray dogs fought amongst the refuse outside the door.

Such was the world Pike’s books and essays brought back to life, again and again: a world much like the scale-model gold rush towns he used to build for himself in the back garden dirt as a child. That world had its heroes, such as the prospectors Hann and Mulligan, and its strange bit-part players, like the cooks and mail coachmen, or the “scholastic miner” found dead on the Palmer road, a volume of Cicero in Latin secreted in his swag.

Page by page, this panoply of scenes and sounds and characters builds gradually into a portrait of the old bush. It also underpins Pike’s grand theory of Australia, which he sketches out in gilded words. It is, of course, an Australia based squarely on mateship, the trait in the national character he sees as born on the early goldfields, and to be found in its purest form among “all bushmen of frontier days” — found perforce, since without it there would have been no survival for these venturers into an unknown land. “If two men, upon a handshake, agreed to stand by each other, come what may, they were as powerful as an army,” he writes. “The mateship shown years later in wartime was born in Australia’s pioneer days.”

Fine thoughts, grand words, the swell of patriotic fervour — but there is a melancholy lurking here, a sadness at the heart of the narrative. For Pike’s beloved past is constantly receding, it was always fugitive — even when he was a boy he was chasing after it, dreaming of it. He saw the Cape York drovers on the main street of Mareeba, “sunbronzed men in worn leggings, stained moleskins, blue shirts, and battered sombreros”. He longed to emulate them, but it was not to be. “That era passed, and the piles of worn stock saddles and packsaddles for repair that regularly appeared in Mareeba saddlers shops disappeared. Instead, massive road trains reeking of cattle manure and coated in peninsula dust came to be parked in Byrnes Street or out at the saleyards at intervals all the dry season.”

Pike’s love for the old north extends to, and explains his extraordinary sympathy for, the fate of the Aboriginal people of Cape York, which he recounts in frank, unsparing detail. For much of his life he had worked alongside indigenous men. He and dealt with them as equals; looked them in the eye. He knew the stakes of the frontier struggle, he had it very clear: the victors, the defeated and the price exacted. He describes the Palmer Range cliffs where the north’s last great battles were fought:

Up there among the conglomerate crags and boulders are caves and almost inaccessible eyries that sheltered a primitive race; a hundred and ten years ago they saw the white men come with horses and guns; they put up a hopeless resistance. Though a people without literature and regarded by the newcomers as less than human, they managed to leave a record of the rape of their country: huge paintings in the caves tell a poignant though highly stylised story that has amazed anthropologists and delighted all those determined to preserve Aboriginal lore and culture.

This is a note struck repeatedly and emphatically in Pike’s writings. The passing world, black or white, natural or human, is his world: old cattle runs and palm plantations, quiet, soft, deserted, all with their stories. His last long field trip to the Wenlock River, described in a late appendix to one of the many “revised and enlarged” editions of Pike’s works, contains his authorial envoi: “I was glad I had seen Cape York Peninsula when it really was the Last Frontier.”

The life that underlay this prodigious output is, in some sense, the great story Pike spent decades avoiding, before he took the plunge and confided its most intimate details to print in the final, confessional work he produced while suffering from Parkinson’s disease and awaiting the end. My Yesterdays was published in 2007 by Central Queensland University Press, a now-mothballed operation that must have seemed to Pike like a blue-riband outfit.

It tells the bleak story of his relations with his parents. His mother, Effie, a would-be poet, was abandoned by his father early on. She took her only son on endless travels, to the Cape, down south, back up.

Pike had little fondness for Effie; by contrast, he loved and doted on her cousin and lifelong companion, Dorothy, his “auntie” and in his eyes “the most wonderful mother in the world”. It was a lonely, uneasy bush childhood. The boy retreated into his mind. He began writing items for the children’s page of the North Queensland Register, Effie’s chief employer. He could type well by 11; he even started up a “news magazine” for his little wooden model town in the garden at Oakey Creek: this was “Benson’s Northern Monthly”, he was “Benson” and the tiny wooden buildings were the capital of the state of Northland, comprising Cape York.

His future course was set: in early adulthood he was taken on by the Register and began writing a weekly column under the nom de plume “Sundowner”. At the peak of its success Pike was fielding memories and memoir essays from about 400 old bushmen, he was writing for national titles, and travelling back roads far and wide. He had an entrepreneurial streak: as in childhood, he set up his own magazines.

But childhood’s yoke was still upon him. Effie was possessive: so paranoiacally possessive, he barely spent a single night away from her until her passage into post-operative dementia, a nursing home and death. Pike’s “auntie” followed in her wake. Pike was at last free — “my own man, and it felt good”.

At this point, late in the piece, real life enters. He embroils himself in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, meets an educated American woman, falls for her and, at the age of 55, marries. “The honeymoon was not without difficulties for me,’’ he writes. “Carolyne had to introduce me to sex of which I was ignorant, and though we became passionate eventually, I could never quite satisfy her. Later on, she did not refrain from using it to ridicule me to some people we met during the next five years.”

Things go downhill pretty quickly: divorce, financial and emotional travails. Eventually Pike remarries, more happily, and settles into his block at Mareeba for a long recessional, writing, revising, re-inhabiting the past. “Oh, the vain thoughts of what should have been and what could have been! But what is the use? Money is nothing … I have wandered far, but I feel I have come home even though I have been cheated out of something better. I can see the Granite Range, and, from another position, see Mt White and McLeod Hills in the misty distance, an area so full of memories of my youthful days.”

It is the true Pike note, sounding on the last page of My Yesterdays. He was still writing his regular “Around the Campfire” column on the day he died, aged 86, in May 2011. As his obituaries noted, rather grimly, “he had no living relatives”, even if the whole old Cape lived most purely in his mind.

But he has an afterlife of words: books, piles of books, Cape York and Territory tales and histories, all being gradually sold off by his best friend, the tall, gaunt Reg Starkey, his publisher and literary executor, and the continuator of Pike’s own favourite magazine, The Northern Sun, launched 30 years ago, “a periodical published in the interests of the Far North of Queensland — we welcome short articles and stories about the North”.

Nicolas Rothwell is a senior writer on The Australian.