Nicolas Rothwell’s love for his indigenous wife and her remote desert country
Could Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson build a life with the writer Nicolas Rothwell? In the early days of their courtship she took to country, and the advice of her ancestors, to determine their future.
Nicolas Rothwell is unquestionably one of Australia’s finest writers, having won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature not once but twice. He is not as prominent as some of our other superstars, and that’s probably because he hasn’t been interviewed all that often. It’s not that he’s grumpy. He can be a little hard to find.
Now, though, he has written a graceful new book with his wife, artist Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson. He would be pleased to talk about it, provided I’m up for the challenge of finding his place – which is where, exactly? I’m not sure the property has an actual address. The title includes 250 acres of land atop a hill to the north of the Atherton Tablelands, on a spur of the Dividing Range. Mail goes to a PO Box. There was a house on site when Rothwell bought the place. It had no walls. He moved in anyway.
Only three people have ever visited, and none has stayed the night. That is largely because while there is an unmade road up the hill – cleared 80 years ago, he tells me, by a mighty dray horse called Clara – it tends to wash away. By chance, the trail is currently passable, but Rothwell has no faith in my ability to traverse it, and so we arrange to meet in the valley below, so he can take me up.
He arrives before I do, behind the wheel of a monster truck, with a makeshift dog cage in the back. He is wearing yoga pants with zips at the ankles, a Puma singlet and a rather hip pair of blue suede sneakers. His hair has gone grey in the two decades since I last saw him, but then, so has mine. His eyes remain bright and kind.
Grasping the strap above the passenger seat, I haul myself into his vehicle. His border collie Ilkari – the Pintupi-Luritja word for Heaven – sticks her nose, then her face, then her whole wriggling body between us. Rothwell will later explain that she has helped lessen the intense grief he has felt since another dog, Tjintu – the Pintupi-Luritja word for Sun – was killed by “forces of darkness” on the property (coastal taipans, among the most venomous snakes in Australia, were nesting under the floorboards).
Rothwell is confident behind the wheel, pointing out brush turkeys and Brahman cattle as we bounce over the rocks and grates. It takes probably 15 minutes from the nearest stretch of asphalt to reach his writer’s cabin, which is separate from the main house and furnished with the most magical bookshelves you are ever likely to see. A friend made them from polished, recycled timbers. Between the shelves, the hardbacks gleam.
This, then, is where he writes?
Rothwell hesitates.
“I come here every morning,” he says, eventually. “And I pace. I fret. I fidget. I don’t know how it is for other people, but for me, writing is like catching a wave. I have to wait and then, when it comes, I very quickly write whatever words have come into my mind before they disappear. Longhand. I always get the first draft down in longhand. I get seconds, maybe a minute. And then it’s gone, and I have to wait until the next wave comes. It’s a very long process. Very difficult.”
Exercise helps to keep his jangling limbs under control. I notice hand weights on his desk, and, later, a treadmill on the patio. God alone knows how he got it up here.
We step from the cabin onto the veranda of the main house, where the dogs – Ilkari and his cousin Waru (Fire) – are dancing for their master. Anderson comes out, in a brightly patterned skirt, to say hello. Her face is so pretty, and her smile so gentle, she reminds me a little of a forest creature: shy, with twinkling eyes.
It is cool on the mountain this morning and she is using both hands to hold the collar of her jacket together. She has lately been in mourning for the last of her siblings – at the age of just 65, she is now all that remains of the infants born to her mother on a dry creek bed at Haasts Bluff, west of Alice Springs – and she won’t chat as much as she normally would but she is very welcoming, urging us to come inside, where two astonishing silk carpets from Rothwell’s time as a war correspondent in the Middle East stretch out across the floor.
The living area has only a small amount of furniture – two chairs, a table and a small sofa – and there is no TV, and nothing at all on the walls, which is perhaps surprising. Anderson is a distinguished artist, and many of her close relations – among them Albert Namatjira, who was her grandfather – were part of the original Western Desert movement, which opened their quiet world to an urban audience.
“When I do my paintings, they are like prints of what I have seen, the women’s law, in the desert,” she says. “I would not put them on the walls.” (Her husband will later explain that the ritual of painting is important, but the works themselves have no intrinsic value.)
Sunshine is yet to penetrate the house, so I settle with Rothwell on a timber bench on the back veranda, with the rainforest just below our dangling feet. Together, we try to separate fact from fiction. Because stories about him, they abound! Did you know that he was born in New York, or was it actually Berlin? That he did not speak English until he was eight, but French and German, and Latin as well as Greek? That he attended elite boarding schools in France or maybe Switzerland from the age of four? That – to borrow from Gatsby – he’s an Oxford man?
Gatsby again: could it all be true?
Some of it, yes. That said, a good slice comes straight out of Melbourne.
His grandfather, Herbert Rothwell, owned unsuccessful racing papers (are there any other kind?) in Richmond. His father, who went by the perfectly Australian name of Bruce, worked first for the Sun News Pictorial in Melbourne, then as a war correspondent in the South Pacific for The Age, and then for the international press from his base in Berlin, where his beat was the slow choke of Eastern Europe.
It was in Berlin that Bruce met Nicolas’s achingly beautiful, complicated mother.
“My father was a foreign correspondent, and my mother Anna was Czech,” Rothwell says. “It would have been natural for someone with that background – a refugee from shattered cities – to cling onto a Westerner at a time when it was nearing midnight in Europe’s heart.”
In the new book, Rothwell describes a boy whose “conception place” was Berlin, and whose “borning place” was Manhattan, and it seems this is also true of him. His parents moved to New York City, where he was born in 1960, just months before the first bricks to cleave Berlin were concreted into place.
In the book, the child’s father races through the night to register the arrival of a new Australian infant before the consulate closes for the day. Rothwell says his own father ensured that he, too, was immediately issued an Australian passport, mainly because “my father was straightforward, and my mother was complicated, and he wanted Australia to always be a safe landing place for me”.
It was Anna who decided that young Nicolas should be educated in Europe, and he was sent to boarding schools in Switzerland from the age of four, while his father worked, variously, as founding editor of The Sunday Australian, editor-in-chief of The Australian, and as the London correspondent for the New York Post.
“I didn’t see a lot of my father, and I was very fond of him,” Rothwell says. “I remember when I met him once, in an arrivals hall, we did not really recognise each other. I was perhaps eight or nine, and I didn’t speak much English [lessons at his Swiss school were in French and German]. But we made a journey into the bush together when I was a child and it had a profound effect on me.”
As a young man, Rothwell went up to Oxford, where he read Latin and Greek. “It’s been useful,” he says, thoughtfully. “It’s a nice thing to have those languages in one’s heart.”
He was only 23 when his father died, suddenly, in New York. The memory causes his blue eyes to fill with tears. He declines to say more, but an obituary in The New York Times, dated October 17, 1984, says: “Bruce Rothwell, the editorial-page editor of The New York Post, died yesterday at his Manhattan apartment, apparently of a heart attack. He was 61 years old.”
Rothwell doesn’t say when his mother died, except that she is “a long time gone”, leaving him “without a strong sense of coming from anywhere in particular. And journalism was beneficial to me, because the great privilege of journalism is being able to go and see people, and talk to them”.
He was hired by The Australian, and for a time worked in the Sydney office. Old chums recall a sharp dresser, with pinstripe suits and silk scarfs, drinking endless cups of rank coffee from the plasticky Cafe Bar while producing the most elegant prose.
He was lucky, he says, to have entered the profession at a time when “you could just pretty much force your way into foreign postings … they gave me a sort of travelling brief, so while they had an office in London, I didn’t really spend much time there, because it was very quickly apparent when I was starting out that Eastern Europe was the deal.”
He had sensed the “clear tensions” in the region since 1985, and he was in Berlin in 1989 when the Wall came down. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m in the carnival’, you know? But then came the reality of Europe being reimagined, and I found that, essentially, my lights had been blown out. Because nothing would ever come close to the magnitude of what I witnessed that first night, or in the years that followed.”
Uncertain about his future, he recalled the journey he had made into the bush with his father as a boy. In the book, the father says to his son: “You’re going to spend the next few years far away from me, dragged like some glorified piece of cabin baggage from East to West … Your mother might believe it makes you international and cosmopolitan, but that’s not such a good thing to be. It’s nothing like a home for you … Australia is your home.”
Rothwell says his own father never managed to find his way back to this continent, because “like many Australians at that time, he thought the world was elsewhere. And that decision shaped their lives forever”.
Rothwell made the move decisively in 1996, as a “real return to paradise”. He tried to live in the urban centres – Sydney again, and Melbourne – but quickly saw that wasn’t where “the gold country was. My fate lay in the Western Desert”.
On his first solo travels into the region, he “realised several things at once. First of all, it was not empty. It is more full of life than any crowded city centre”. Listening closely, he could hear the shuffling of goannas and beetles in the undergrowth. He also had a sense of spirits unbound, “silently watching and listening and knowing” as he passed through.
Over time, he began to appreciate the desert as a teeming place, “as overwhelming and complex as I’d imagined, but also subtle and beautiful, and inhabited by desert people who were quite different from the popular image of Aboriginal people. Their societies were contemptuous of material things, and at the same time full of complex roles and rules. The old people, in particular, were very similar to the European aristocracy, in the sense that they would sit around all day talking about things that could not be seen.
“There was this sense that the culture in Australia had not been overwritten so much – there wasn’t Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy above you – and so if you ventured out, you actually had fresh trails for thought. I made it a private mission to see as much as I could.”
At times, he travelled with joy in his heart. Other times, he felt the ghosts of old regret. One day, a magic man detected a melancholy in him, and Rothwell was not surprised when the man suggested “a healing of a kind. You know, they can provide you with a kind of X-ray of your spirit, and then they can respond appropriately. And that experience, it was not a minor event for me. Indeed, it was completely shattering.”
In the years that followed he returned many times to the Western Desert, while also covering Indigenous politics, and, when called upon, conflict in the Middle East. “But that really was the last gasp of my career as a foreign correspondent,” he says, because on the Darwin Esplanade in 2006, he met Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson. She was then a politician (having served her home council for many years, she joined the Labor Party to contest the central desert seat of MacDonnell in the 2005 Northern Territory election, and won), and he was working as a journalist. “I wanted to have a talk with her about something and then, when I met her, I forgot what it was. We went for a walk, and I was completely overwhelmed by her combination of authority and beauty. I could not remember what it was I meant to say.”
Had he had much experience of romance before that? “Nothing that would compare with my feelings on that day. I think it would be fair to say that while I was certainly not a completely solitary person, I’d come to accept that my path in life was going to be a solitary one. My parents were no longer alive. I had no brothers or sisters, and no children, and so my family tree, rather than spreading out beneath me, was more speared into the ground.
“Now, suddenly, I just wanted to spend time endlessly with Alison, and it was an anxious feeling because I just didn’t see there was any path ahead with her – because, you know, we occupied very different worlds.”
Anderson will later tell me that she, too, had her reservations, saying: “I was very cautious in our courtship. I was scared, petrified … I sort of had to run away, into the desert, to get my thoughts from my ancestors.”
In the end, they had no choice but to try to be together, and it seems that their differences were only ever temporal. Spiritually, they were deeply connected. As a Luritja-Pintupi woman, Anderson had attended boarding schools (hers were not in Switzerland, but in Alice Springs) and, like him, she speaks many languages (Anmatyerre, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara, Warlpiri, Western Arrernte, Yankunytjatjara, and English), and both have lively minds, concerned with things beyond the material.
Rothwell says “a new life took shape” as the relationship flourished, “and it was clear to me that I should no longer write about the Aboriginal world”. Why? “Because it was her world. And the magnitude of her knowledge made it clear how many things I will never know.”
In time, she abandoned politics, just as he abandoned journalism.
“I’d gone in with one purpose, to try to make a difference for my people, and I couldn’t find a way to make it happen,” she says. “That’s why I went all over the place – from the Labor Party to the conservatives, independent, and everywhere else, to try to find anyone that could help.” She now believes the quiet voices of the Western Desert, with their emphasis on song and story and language, were deliberately being drowned by urban bureaucrats, who “depend for their survival on our misery and poverty”.
When her husband suggested, some years back, that they write a book about the astonishing, incorporeal experiences that some can find in the Western Desert, she thought it would be “interesting – two people, two different worlds, trying to do something together”.
She had previously “only given crumbs” of Indigenous knowledge to Rothwell, to try to “enlighten him. Because you need to be cautious. There are spiritual people out there who can feel if you are not genuine. I had to ask him lots of questions before I agreed”.
He was concerned that the world she knew and loved was in danger of “passing into memory. Alison will always carry her stories and her culture. But her losses are tremendous.
“Her kinship group – in Western Desert society, her immediate family includes her own five children, and their children, plus all her siblings’ children, and so on – is at least 5000 strong and there is death every week. Premature, unnecessary death.”
Heart disease, diabetes? Rothwell nods.
Alcoholism, suicide? Near imperceptibly, he nods again.
Rothwell says he needed her to guide him through the desert, because he “never wanted to adopt the desert perspective. I am quite happy to wander through as myself. And the more I spent time with Alison, the more I realised it would never be possible to try to capture what is profound, what is holy, what is blessed, without her guidance”.
He was eager to be her scribe, and she wasn’t going to argue. “I do hard things, painting,” she laughed. “I don’t want to get into writing.”
The book is called Yilkari: A Desert Suite, and while it’s not going to fit into any handy literary category, it is to my mind a hegira, with the narrator (probably Rothwell) travelling with a busted Siberian composer (who may also be Rothwell); a magic man and desert sprites; and a woman (almost certainly Anderson) who can read the narrator’s thoughts before he speaks them.
Rothwell says the book is “largely based on journeys where Alison was the guide and interpreter. She’s also a character, both in her own right and veiled in other guises. And, perhaps most significantly, she’s the person who decided what to omit and what to include, and whose presence was responsible for bringing the spirits of the landscape somewhat forward”.
The book comes with a note to the reader, making plain that it is the product of two minds, and that it was written in tandem, by people who had “become each other’s authors”. It was completed well after they made the 2000km journey from the desert to Far North Queensland, in search of their new home, a place he now says he will “never willingly abandon”.
Anderson is still called upon to visit her ancestral lands, leaving him alone but for the border collies, butterflies and birdsong.
I venture: do you get lonely here, Nicolas?
Astonished, he says: “For what? For who?”
Well, perhaps for Alison, when she’s not here?
“I have been alone here for various reasons for most of this year,” he says, referring to his wife’s mourning, “and I haven’t been lonely. I miss Alison when she isn’t here, and I would rather she was here. The main disadvantage is that one can be plunged into melancholy and reflection and memory.”
Ghosts rise from the high shelves of his mind, in other words, and take their time to settle again.
And Alison, is she happy here? “I hope so,” he says. “I built it for her, and with her.”
And now that this great project – this gift, their book – is complete, does he feel content?
“I don’t think that would be the adjective that would leap to mind,” he says, softly.
Well then, peace?
“Peace is for the dead,” he says. “It is for those whose lives are complete. For me, the human condition is the search for comprehension – a struggle for insight – until the end.”
Which brings us to the most urgent passages of the book, in which the desert pilgrim strains to hear the gentle spirits as they call to him through the night. Listen closely as you read, and you too may hear them singing.
Yilkari: A Desert Suite (Text Publishing) is out on July 29
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout