Where has all the sound gone?

The road to the North Head Quarantine Station is rimmed on either side by trees. Rugged and coastal – low, crouching. Hardy patchwork, greens and yellows, tiny white flowers. Occasional bone-grey branches, jutting out like witches fingers. There are dry weeds sticking from wrinkled sand, and ant-holes. Birds flicker. A wing, a leg, singing – invisible. It feels like a far longer walk than it is. For a moment you find yourself trapped in it and all that’s around you are the trees and the dust on the road and the wide sky. The wind is humming. Rustling leafsong swirls from the canopy, the walls. The ocean faintly crashes, somewhere far away. The rest of the planet has sunk into the distance and you suppose that if you had a machete, cut through those trees, you’d find yourself at the edge of a cliff falling into nothingness.

This country is built of layered strata. Stories on stories. Cultures dropped on cultures. In places like this, liminal, where the world is thin, the deeper layers seep in, wispy, through cracks in the earth. Dull reflections.

Where has all the sound gone?

Legends are classically fertile things, leaping forth from the merest blurry photograph or mistranslated phrase – monsters in Hawkesbury river, Min Min lights stealing people off the Outback, huge black cats in the Blue Mountains. In places like Sydney, they’re born by the dozen. There are ghosts all over the place. Seeping like water down the gutters, breaking out of weetbix boxes and being sucked into the air conditioning. A blood-splattered lady in white screaming on the Macquarie Fields train station. The Street With No Name at Annandale, which dogs are afraid of. Wakehurst Parkway, where an apparition will appear in your back seat and drive you off the road. Even Central Station has its own ghosts. Voices resounding in the dust and concrete where platforms 26 and 27 plowed through a graveyard. The sound of children playing, deep underground, in the buried darkness.

And then there’s Q Station. It’s argued by some to be one of the most haunted places in Sydney. It’s got everything. It’s got a buffet. Hands and figures captured in photographs. The inexplicable movement of objects. Sudden nausea. Localised temperature drops, even on hot nights. The sensation of being clasped by cold hands. Disembodied voices asking: ‘who are you?’ ‘why are you here?’ Nurses, a top-hatted mortician, a Chinese fisherman, wandering. A deeply morbid and highly depressing abundance of dead children – up to twenty of them, crowding each other out.

And older spirits, too. Buried deep, wistful scraps. Rising up between rocks older, far, far older than the First Fleet.

If death breeds folklore, it goes without saying, then, that a Quarantine Station would be crawling in the stuff.

The transfer from Manly to Q Station is uncanny. It’s a sunny day, the kind with an icy blue sky and clouds in tiny fat clumps. The sunlight is hot but the wind is cool. It’s enlivening. It’s the sort of day tourists crawl all over. The ferry’s drenched in them. Jutting out the rust-smattered pipes, breaking out of cracks in the lumpy green paint. Children, too, either shrieking or preparing to shriek. An island is sliding by, ringlets of blue-green waves sweeping, washing white against its grey sides.

‘An island! An island! An island! An island!’

So on. I have never felt more intensely aware of the presence of an island in my entire life.

And off the ferry, too. Slogging in a seeping mass of people, wiping salt spray from my face. Shuffling and chattering – somebody asking someone else about the numbness in their legs. Even past the gate, a slow bumpy trickle. And into the sunlight – spreading out, finally. But still, people, people! Noise, sound! Life and sentience reverberating from the tiles, shaking in the hardy sunlight.

Such is Sydney. Vibrancy. Life upon life, folded atop like geographic strata. A whole lot of death layered in between.

 

So comes the uppermost stratum of the history of Q Station. It’s the August of 1828 and the Bussorah Merchant has docked at North Head. It’s a ship with snow white sails towering into blue skies on masts ingrained with salt and seawater. The smell of fish rising from its soaking planks, snippets of wind playing in the rigging. It’s long as a shore. It’s sailed for more than eight months across wild seas, hauling convicts and the hardy folk to keep them in check. It’s huge, and invincible.

It’s spilling over with smallpox.

It’s the first of many ships quarantined here. Official documentation suggests 1300 people arrived – archeological research suggests 1600. Gravestones piled on gravestones, some torn out, some buried by drunken labourers who were paid in rum. 572 people died here, so it’s said. Nobody’s really sure. Here’s a metaphor for you: even to this day, researchers refuse to dig up bodies on the site. The diseases, so they say, still live in them. Poisoning the soil, burgeoning in bones like moss. The plague. Scarlet fever. Smallpox. Typhoid fever. Stains. Dig them up, and who knows what will come rising back out?

Strata extends further down. It’s uncertain, the significance of North Head to the Indigenous Australians. They’ve been there for a while, of course. Saw the coastline form, over centuries. Sculpt and erode and shift. It’s a burial ground, some have supposed. A religious site, with ceremonial significance, other suggest. A special gathering place. Shelters and middens and rock engravings and art sites, hidden in the scraggly coastal trees. This is where the First Fleet met the Aboriginal people. The place is now named after the meeting, in fact, when Captain Philip decided the behaviour of the natives was particularly ‘manly.’ This did not prevent him and his mates from kidnapping a few of them, of course. But you know how it is.

So goes the history of Q Station. Or the shallowest, thinnest layers of it, barely beneath the sand and gravel. The grass in Sydney is grown on human bonemeal.  

Where has all the sound gone?

It’s been stripped away in that manner uncanny to abandoned places. It’s like that, even here – even this tourist centre, a single bus off the ferry terminal, the shrieking children and bumping elbows and flowing cars and grease-smells of fish and chips. Like some thick sheet is over the place. The air feels close. Blades of grass are quivering. The trees to the right widen a bit. Taller, twistier ones, gnarled and less close together. You can see the ocean below, can hear the distant waves crashing. The stretching blue, lapping, little white lines forming, unforming. And the rest of Manly, a crescent along the horizon. Fluffy green with blocks of bright white and red and blue, buildings looking like they’d been spilled from above. Lego blocks littering a grassy knoll. You can see the vague shadows of streets – look hard enough, you can see the cars. The glint of light off their hides.

It’s a nice place to die, really.

It goes down a green slope to where a swathe of tall trees, all twisted trunks through shrubbery and little white flowers, cuts a long wall between the outlying staff cottages, and the station itself. There’s a map set up on a pedestal by the side of the road, bleached so that it’s nothing but scratches and black spots and names on a white background. Q Station goes in levels, like decorations on a cake. This place, where the staff once were, is the top level. Below that, the first class, second class, and third class precincts. And then, below that – the hospital and isolation precincts. The word ‘Former’ lunges. ‘Former’ Third Class Precinct. ‘Former’ Hospital Precinct. The finality of it is brutish. Mortality, pounded with a maul. An epitaph in one word.

‘Former’ cottages run opposite to the treeline. Small and square, roofs running up in low slopes. Bright red bricks with bright white plaster. Plastic signs with their building numbers, the names of their dead owners. They’re cleaned up, as would be expected on a tourist site. The fencing is bright white, the wood walls yellow and lumpy, like custard. There’s a low stink of familiarity in this place – that with only a few more components, this could be any other street. The sides of roads could be lined with cars with glinting windows, and the noises of lawns being mowed, somebody vacuuming, somebody’s too-loud radio swirling in the air. But the windows are dark. The brick chimneys are cold, empty. The wind is singing and a single tiny tour bus slides along the road. There’s a driver, an old man, an old women. Silent.

 

A long staircase in the First Class Precinct goes down to the dock. Framed in grey branches, silver sides licked by the sun, leaves glowing gold. The water, dark, mouldy, lapping. Turning deep green by the shore, caressing blocky stones, chalk-white, flat tops gleaming. Patchwork shrubbery flowing over it as a veil.

The dock is entanglement. Suspended in a glistering webwork, time and place zig-zagging in a floating, manic mess. Old bricks, old corrugated roofs for containing old things. The cliff face, scratched with ancient graffiti. It’s easy to believe those ships still come here. That you’d look far away and see the great white sails, the salty wood. Except, look far away, and you’ll just see more of Manly, lego bricks on a stretching crescent. The great building by the pier is now a museum, with a small cafe. Little plastic brochures detailing ghost tours and local restaurants and events. Another one is a restaurant. Another has the bathroom – too-bright lights and white walls and screaming hand dryers. The shore is cut off with a wire fence. The waves breathe, lazily toy with a yacht. At night, it all catches fire. The sea chokes, coughs, hacks. The tips of waves glisten with starlight and the fiery wobbling refractions of far-off Manly – Manly, gold squares in stacks, in hefty silhouettes, cutting out the sky. The stink of fish, a row of lights rumbling off the pier.

Crouched in the shadows, opposite to the lapping shore and the darkened buildings encrusting its sides is the shower block. It’s horrible in there. The two worst things in the dark are hallways and small hidden nooks. The shower block represents an exercise in maximum efficiency that contains them both, under a yawning blackened roof with crisscrossing rafters. Blue moonlight sliding on grey edges, and splotches of blackness thick and heavy like pools of dust or water. The crooked doors, swinging, angular, the concrete floor stretching fathomless in darkness. An emptiness is here. Deep, heavy. A coldness.

Doctor Reed, unaware of his death in a ferry accident, is here. He’s lead to one of the site’s most curious legal threats, when he scared a pair of kids out of the block, to the fury of their parents. He presumably spends most of his unlife in a state of angered confusion as to why his place of employment is invaded nightly by unfamiliar people in tacky shirts leaping at shadows.

And there’s Trouble.

He lives in the rafters. In the milky light, hanging upside down, shadowed. Long locks of trailing black hair. His arms are longer than his legs and he crawls above the stalls. Silent as cinder blocks. Like a daddy long legs. He’ll reach down, stroke your hair. Feel the curve of your head. And move on. He’s an old spirit – an indigenous one, supposedly. Some tour guides suppose he’s a yowie. One wonders what his actual name is. What he climbed on, before the rafters were installed. What his role was – I assume it went somewhat deeper than ‘hair stroker of tourists’. All that died to create Doctor Reed was the doctor himself. What died to create Trouble? How old? How much is really left behind?

The isolation precinct is above the hospital precinct. It’s up a set of blocky stairs, smattered with pebbles, dust, weeds. A grainy, sun-bleached quality. Made for convicts – just a bit too tall, just a bit too wide. Small buildings with corrugated roofs crowned with scraggly branches rising into the deep blue. Wicker chairs and overhangs and wooden walkways between them. Nested in a little corner in the trees, facing a wall of ragged shrubbery and then – the ocean. Calling out. Manly laid across the skyline like a curtain. Little white flowers, little yellow flowers – hanging lilies. Huge stones in long piles looking like fallen gravestones, striating rubbly colours, hardy green lichens. And the great bare limbs, bone-white and curving above the verdancy like huge broken fingers. Curling and twisting and collapsing wavelike, skeletal, cephalopodan. The boughs make loops. Draw strange runic patterns in the air, in their rotund curves. Don’t look into the branches. Spirits live in them, and they’ll take your soul.

This place was thought to be an Indigenous meeting place, for the secret business of men. Tatters of it hang around, invisible to all but Indigenous visitors. A woman who paused, and stared between the trees. The splotchy darkness and the blue shadows in the boughs. A chanting, thumping between the foliage. Ringing. And a pressure in the skull – an unwelcomeness. She is a woman, and this is a place for men. So on. Tatters, is all. The tour guide I talked to admitted that these were not stories, really, for him to tell – at least in any greater detail. They’re not mine, either. Tatters, is all – and not our tatters.

The path from the isolation precinct leads to the third class precinct. It’s all construction work, there. Safety signs, fences with green fabric. Scaffolding and dust. There’s a cabin, on the very edge. The tour guides hate it. Some refuse to enter it. Samuel the Gravedigger is one of the many spirits inhabiting it. Nobody’s really sure who he is. A doctor, some suppose, or an officer, or a boatman, or the subject of some older grave deep beneath. Layers, layers, layers. Stories refracting against stories. Not one theory actually involves any gravediggers. Where his name came from is a mystery. I don’t think Sam cares very much, really.

Suppose the milky moonlight scrawling patterns in the dust on the table. Suppose the window frame outlined in silvery gleam, and the blue-grey shadows from the chairs and cabinets and handles and other cramped things in that tiny room. EMF detectors clicking to themselves, blinking – bright eyes. The ceiling’s corners thick and heavy with shadows, and dark mould spreading. The floorboards creaking and thumping, bending and bowing with a vigour unlikely even for a whole tour group. Sam, running laps. I imagine him chuckling to himself, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. I imagine him leaping, flat and pale and silver light cutting through his nothingness like blades. In another room, in a corner, is a cupboard. Shadows hang over it like stains – an inky solidity, like your hand could brush it away, or get caught in it like web. It’s shut tight. If you ask nicely, and Sam figures your reaction will be funny enough – it will swing open. A rising creaking. Like a sloughing dream, slipping open – slowly, slowly, so you don’t notice it until you’re gazing widely at shadows so deep it’s like looking into a hole. And the floorboards go mad beneath, rattling and creaking. Singing.

 

Q Station gives the sensation of a place hollowed out. Wide and unlit, and old echoes ringing off cold heartless walls. There are tendrils that reach out in the cracks in the dry dirt, between the dusty floorboards or breaks in the foliage. The burnt smoke of old stories drifting off to be forgotten. Most have been, already. All that can be gathered from beneath this piled strata are tatters. Tatters shared, tatters collected. Dull reflections, endlessly distant from the kernels of truth at their centres. That’s really all this is, in the end. To collect the tatters and present them as they are.

 

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