Hollow Earth Read online

  Hollow Earth

  John Kinsella

  Hollow Earth

  In the Public Domain of Hollow Earth:

  … of Manfred (of the surface world) and

  Zest and Ari (of Hollow Earth) and their

  ménage à trois inside the skull of the planet

  – long (but not so long) before the time of the

  Underworlders’ invasion of Hollow Earth –

  and their arrival on the surface

  John Kinsella

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2019 John Kinsella

  First published 2019

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose

  of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

  Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written

  permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Stephen Kinsella

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A pre-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-27-9

  for the believers

  What was it that drew you into the cage,

  gently shooing the quails away from sitting,

  studying their small ground-hollow nests

  and speckled eggs with care and patience,

  canaries and finches crazy overhead –

  churning hot air and driving dust

  into pores, through hair,

  swirling up into noses

  and scouring throats?

  After your clothes were washed,

  Mum scrubbing hard at the stains,

  the man repeated over and over,

  ‘They were prize birds,

  not just any old eggs!’

  with Mum’s coda:

  ‘Prize birds or no prize birds

  you shouldn’t have done it.’

  You still fear the moment

  when you reached down

  and grabbed a handful of those

  beautiful and delicate eggs –

  ignoring the frantic quails at your feet –

  and hurled them at the hollow world,

  without knowing why.

  You can’t forget. Can’t

  forget the world’s reply.

  Preamble

  Which he is it, is it he we’re talking about? Whose I think? Whose unconscious are we delving into, ladling out, scooping to fill with forest run-off, or toxic tailings from the mining operation that is deleting the forest? Whose history of dammaking and inheritances? The engineering that shows us the way through to what came before the now?

  What the hammer? what the chain,

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp,

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

  This intuition that will become, as he shovels aside the black sand to make a dam in the back garden – a garden of hedges and creepers, of saplings where great and ancient trees whose hollows had housed possums and owls have been removed – but the sand can’t hold the water in its cradle as it is just sand with no vegetable matter in between particles, no cohesion no repellence, and the water soaks through deeper than the bottom, soaks through like the earth is hollow, waiting to be filled.

  But running the hose for hours, draining the reservoir’s scarce supply in such a dry place, he couldn’t get his dam to hold. Then he found some plastic sheeting in the garden shed and lined the sand dam and filled it and the water brimmed and overflowed, and downriver the empire of cars and dirt and twig buildings was washed away.

  But whose early childhood development are we talking about? Truth is not always experience, is it? Whose, and when? Not now, but it seems eternally present. He did it and does it, the water soaking through. Into the hollow. The scarecrow head. Later in life he will drive past a hay shed every day and see it empty then filled with lozenges of frayed grass, dried yellow and glassy. An architectural paradox, picked away at to feed the stock whose paddocks have been emptied. Whose paddocks, as if owning their prison. He will think this, on a road notorious for accidents, for car smashes leaving many dead, the injured flown out in helicopters. The authorities call it a Black Spot. Make hay while the sun shines, the surface burning, all red on the maps now, the old pink recolonised by the horror of scorched earth.

  Manfred – for that is one of his names, and the name we will most and mostly know him by – needs the female to understand why he has been made. Mother. His neighbours. Zest and Ari. At eleven he is wandering bushland and wheatfields, city blocks and the long silver beaches of the west coast, uttering his Fall, his confusion, his desperation:

  I ach’d to see what things the hollow brain

  Behind enwombed: what high tragedy

  In the dark secret chambers of her skull

  Was acting, that could give so dread a stress

  To her cold lips, and fill with such a light

  Her planetary eyes, and touch her voice

  Suddenly, he can hear a voice through the fence pickets. He knows who possesses the voice but he won’t turn around, nahhu! She likes him because she told him so and it’s embarrassing. He calls over his shoulder, Go away, I’m making! You are making a great big mess! she says, indignant. On the other side of the yard, from over the peaks of that new fence – the new house, the new fence, the new people – another she is thinking out loud. That she might be talking to the other girl all that way away across, over his head but at an angle, as one girl is high and one is low or level with him, with him and his dam, bursting down, the walls breaking down with the pressure on the plastic, the rapid flow through the hose nozzle, Do you want to come over and play? the new girl is thinking and scaling her side of the fence ... He’s boring and stupid. And then he yells, with a vehemence that makes both onlookers shudder, the girl perched on the fence gripping harder, If I don’t concentrate all the water will soak through and drown the world that is under us. They believed him as much as they believed immateriality, incorruptibility and personality gift us spirituality. All three children were beings of substance, and none could escape the other, for the time being.

  *

  There was a family friend. That family friend had built dams – hydro-electric dams. He subscribed to Scientific American and took them – who? mother and son? – for drives in The Hills where the reservoirs intercepted the creeks and streams and rivers. He told them about his conversion to another religion, he told them about being in a prisoner-of-war camp, he told them about digging holes that had to be filled in again.

  It was nice in the hills with the jarrah trees and red-capped parrots. The dam walls felt funny as he walked over them, like they were wobbling. He heard motorbike frogs revving up around the slipway. Sometimes the dam overflowed and the old river ran again, but not often. Inside the turret on the dam wall was the machinery that ran the gates. The wall is mostly solid, but not entirely, he thought.

  The man who said he was a good friend of the boy’s (Manfred? or someone else, someone with engineering skills as vision for a constructive future?) father, who was somewhere else, said, Your mother says you’ve been digging tunnels in the sand in your back garden. You shouldn’t do that – they’ll collapse on you and you’ll drown. Like if I jumped into the water here? he asked. Yes, you can drown in sand too, said the man. It’s all suffocation. I use props and make walls inside my tunnels, said the boy – I have studied tunnelling. I like ambition in a lad, said the man. Then he lost the boy when he said, You like it when I give you my old Sci
entific Americans – though you won’t be able to understand them for a few years yet, they’ll give you the feel of science. An investment in the future. The boy resented it. This man didn’t know either. He wouldn’t tell him about hollow earth. He wouldn’t tell him about his dams in the back garden that collapsed or let the water through to hollow earth if he didn’t line them with plastic.

  *

  Each of their fathers went ‘up north’ to the mines, though not each of the fathers was intimate with his family at the same time. One of the fathers was long gone; another had just arrived. It wasn’t straightforward, and behind new and older doors, all sorts of stuff was going on. Three houses in a row, where until recently there’d been two and a vacant block, then two and a building block, then two and a house without occupants, then three houses with bits and pieces of families. Three fathers who had been, at one time or another, in extraction industries hundreds and hundreds of kilometres away. Over a thousand kilometres away. This combination of experience didn’t mean like minds. At school, the girls were best friends, as they were out of school. At school, they never spoke to the boy. Never, not once. One father mined asbestos, one father mined iron ore, and one father worked at a salt mine. The salt grew in pans and ponds. Their mothers met up in each other’s houses for cuppas and ate slices of Swiss roll and Madeira cake. None of them wanted to live in the others’ pockets, but needs must.

  *

  What is a church? A place with an underground vault. If it doesn’t have a vault and a crypt it’s not a church. Who told him that, when he said he went to the local church that looked like a suburban house? But none of the houses around here have basements, he said. But you know about basements? Without vaults and crypts there are no dead to support the living, said the man, who had a vicious streak. The man was talking to boys from the church group down by the river. He stood there in his blue paisley Speedos – budgie smugglers – on one leg, propping himself up with a water ski. His speedboat was just off the river beach, with his mate idling the engine. Smoke billowed, and spume spat from the boat’s rear. You church boys should come out with us and give skiing a burl, he said. The budgie seemed to be trying to escape. There was an osprey overhead – it had been flying across from the marri trees and banksia bushland on the limestone promontory on the far side of the river for years. When he was a toddler, paddling at the dirty river’s edge, a man, maybe his father, had hauled in a grey nurse shark on a long bamboo fishing pole. It was such a noticeable catch it made page five of the newspaper. And to think, where toddlers splashed and swimmers swam. And to think, he would dig into the white sand and hit layers of black and grey and water would flood in and he’d cut his fingers on mussel shells and pipis and razorshells and cockles. A refrain for life, a refrain to run through all the writing he would do. The need to articulate.

  *

  The girls. The girls are with him down at The Nexus. That’s what he calls it, being slightly older now. He reads sci-fi bought from the second-hand bookshop down near The Bridge – a second-hand bookshop many narratives are familiar with. The Nexus is the murky bit of the river where a creek runs through swamp and joins an inlet, a dead end of the river full of reeds and black silt that will suck you down. It will make a bog mummy of you if you wade out there – it will never let go, he says to the girls, trying to terrify those who cannot be terrified. Who terrify him. They have shared their secrets and he has shared his, and they have all laughed and vowed never to do so again. But he says, Come down and see the egret in his breeding plumage – his gape is green – see, see the beak – and he’s firing on all cylinders, luring the females to his qualities. They watch on in amazement. It is far more interesting than their own bodies. In the same place they light a cigarette butt and each inhales and coughs and vows never again. One of the girls says, My dad is coming down from Wittenoom and he’ll be taking us on a holiday down south. We’re going to visit the caves. The other two know envy but don’t know how to deal with it. The boy and one of the girls share something deeper than the girls had shared together up to this point. It destabilises. Upsets the equilibrium. Makes for desire.

  *

  He didn’t like the girls ignoring him at school, but knew there was nothing to be done about it. It was like he was invisible. Even getting together at The Nexus and other special places, he had to go there separately, winding his way down via another route, and meet them there. All the planning was done through or over the fence. It was a fragile alliance that had to break down. We have to keep up appearances, a she said to he. And then the secret society broke up, one moving away, the other two lost, disorientated.

  1

  As complete as absolute can appear

  the holes in ourselves others have dug

  and we dig ourselves hoping each other will fill

  2

  We divide absolute

  parts of his

  or her one and only self

  appearing

  to each other

  3

  An absolute sunset

  arising cavity

  appears as mine site

  river clauses or dams

  in The Hills

  4

  All these completed memories

  depend on our moving apart

  so it appears we were never together.

  *

  The invaders cart pathogens around on their wheels and boots, he told the girls. They hadn’t seen each other for two years. He had visited one mum with his mum and the two girls had been in the one house. He went to a bedroom he’d never seen before. There was a poster of Leif Garrett on the wall and lots of biology books on the shelves. Both girls wore mascara and had spiky gelled hair. He said, The dieback is spreading through the jarrah forests of The Hills. David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ is on the cassette player and he’s telling them about Phytophthora cinnamomi, that’s what’s happening. That’s it. He is lonely, deadly lonely. But he shares what he knows. Don’t you want to ride scramble bikes too, says the she whose room it isn’t. Nah, they’re wankers. They don’t give a shit about anything but adrenaline. Adrenaline is getting off, says the she whose room it is. Their mothers are eating slices of cinnamon cake and having cuppas, but there are no subtexts, there’s no diminishing of female solidarity, which is the only hope in the face of the horror. The only hope. Men have abdicated responsibility since their pillaging. He knows, and the shes know. They still have stuff in common, in the room, not messing about. They circle each other sitting at far points of the room. They ripple in the face of adversities. One of them has pills and shows and tells but one of them doesn’t sample, doesn’t commit to the experiment. Remnants and decayed orbits.

  *

  They are building a new rail line under the city. The tunnelling machine is called Sisyphus. He (Manfred?) knows someone who is working with the machine, in an unqualified capacity. A labourer, really. But not marvelling at the technology – just doing something so s/he can do something else. He or she, tunnelling out from under the city, now tunnelling under the river. The river of black swans. The river so bullied and pummelled. But the river, run-off meeting tidal push, then flowing down with its red tides. Its cockles and mussels and fizzing nutrients from ag-chemical run-offs up in the wheatbelt catchment, up where the paddocks are enslaved to wheat and canola. Up where hay sheds line and buckle under the fiery eye of the sun.

  *

  All these precedents, all these motives, all these initiations. All these stepped leaders. All these lightning events over The Scarp. All these wheatbelt summer extreme weather events. The smell of induction and electricity down in the car-heavy city, storm warnings. All of this, and inland seas and caves and workings in the limestone warrens and labyrinths and US military bases and British atomic tests and Australian government desperation to collude with the Apocalypse part of the mix of personality traits, the little cults, the folie à trois that leads to revelation and exploitation and the newest colonialism. That’s commen
tary, that’s marginalia spread out like an undersheet, the mattress cover to catch the spillings, the stains. The gross fallout, the hail that dents an insurance company’s faith in absolute profits. Smell the charge in the air. Gunpowder, load your own ammo. All of that too in the background. And peace marches. The grand narratives of the outer edges of known worlds. Sites of trade. And unlikely friends – the peace marcher chatting to the technician who will welcome the submarines when they take over the harbour of the garden island, will open themselves up for a refit. How to find common ground, listening to Pink Floyd? The weaponry of percussion on the airfield. All wanting peace. Working that into the future as well? In the contradictions Manfred says to his new friend, I feel more like a robber baron than a poet, more like an invader than a pacifist. It’s as if I have been splayed open like a piece of fruit and my cyanide and arsenic truths have been released from the seed. I go down into my hollow self, straw man, and then strain to prevent what I find getting out, strain to prevent anyone else seeing what’s inside. His new friend says, Let’s go and listen to the Push Rods down at the Swan Inn – when the crowd is pumping, who gives a shit? No one can tell what you’re thinking when the band is going off.

  1.

  The future: the invasion of Hollow Earth by the colonisers: the Underworlders

  Underworld tunnels inevitably went deeper and when they broke through into Hollow Earth the game plan changed. This new space had been opened to colonisation, to exploitation, and The Robber Baron (aka Hume Locke Hobbes – or HLH as he was known to his mates) was there at the point of contact, raring to go. An instigator. A Big Australian with strong interests in the American resources industries. He had long conjectured that deep earth surveys were showing what they were meant to show us – that is, myriad false images that perpetuated the solid earth, molten outer core sun hot sold core diagnostics of the planet – and that this was the effect or result of a technology far in advance of our own. Mantle pulled over our eyes. He argued for a Bletchley Park configuration of cryptographers to break the enemy’s Enigma machine code – for already he had painted these unknown and unseen and imagined thwarters as antagonists of cult-like proportions and intention, greedy to keep the fleshy and luscious parts of the planet for themselves. The code for keeping the wealth of an ‘Underworld’, as the Robber Baron and his code breakers called it, from surface dwellers. A manipulation of the materials of earth itself. It’s a form of state totalitarianism, the Robber Baron warned, gathering his corporate cronies to the cause.