The Lantern-Eaters of Winton

loc:Winton, Queensland, AustraliaThere is a town in the interior of Queensland, eleven hundred souls dispersed across a landscape so flat it seems less a geography than a philosophical proposition, where the municipal council has recently voted to eat its own light. Winton — latitude 22° south, longitude 143° east, roughly equidistant from all coastlines and therefore from all escape — has rewritten its planning laws, shielded its streetlamps, dimmed its signage, submitted itself to audit by an international body that certifies darkness the way others certify purity of water or absence of disease, and in March of this year received the title of Queensland's first International Dark Sky Community. The town has chosen to see less in order to see more. The paradox would have pleased Dionysius the Areopagite, who in the fifth century called the divine a "brilliant darkness" (ὑπέρφωτον γνόφον, hypérphoton gnóphon), and it would not have surprised the Warlpiri people of the Western Desert, whose songlines have always understood the dark patches in the Milky Way — the spaces between stars, not the stars themselves — as the bodies of ancestral beings still travelling.
Eighty percent of the human population, we are told, can no longer see an authentic night sky. The statistic is almost too clean, too symmetrical, and for that reason I half-distrust it, but the underlying fact is beyond dispute: we have thrown so much of our own light upward that the sky has become a mirror, returning our glare to us, and the ancient canopy under which every mythology was composed — Sumerian, Greek, Aboriginal, Vedic — has been replaced by an amber haze that signifies nothing except our presence. What Winton has done, in its quiet bureaucratic way, is to attempt a reversal of this erasure, to restore legibility to a text that humanity spent a hundred thousand years learning to read and then, in the space of three generations, rendered illegible.
But the darkness above Winton is only half the story. Below the town, or rather beside it, twenty-four kilometres to the southeast, there rises a flat-topped mesa called The Jump-Up — a name that belongs to the vernacular of drovers and stockmen, meaning a place where the land abruptly gains elevation, where you must dismount and lead the horse. In 2006, a pastoralist couple donated fourteen hundred hectares of this mesa to a fledgling institution called the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, and atop The Jump-Up now sits a museum housing the largest collection of dinosaur fossils on the continent. The bones are ninety-five million years old. They were found in the surrounding clay by a grazier named David Elliot in 1999, who noticed a fragment of humerus protruding from the earth the way a sentence sometimes protrudes from a page you thought you had already read. Subsequent digs uncovered two skeletons preserved together — a sauropod and a theropod, predator and prey or perhaps merely two creatures who happened to die in the same swamp at approximately the same geological instant — and the scientists, in a gesture that collapses deep time into folk time with a kind of casual audacity, named them Matilda and Banjo, after the swagman and the poet.
For it was at Winton, in 1895, that Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson first performed "Waltzing Matilda" at the North Gregory Hotel, during a banquet celebrating the arrival of the railway from Hughenden. The song, which most Australians know better than their actual anthem, is a ghost story. A swagman — an itinerant worker, a man with no fixed address, one of the spirit's own kin — steals a sheep, is cornered by troopers at a billabong, and drowns himself rather than submit to capture. His ghost, the song tells us, can still be heard. "You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me." The line is an invitation issued by a dead man from inside a body of water, which is to say it is an invitation to join him in death, or in that other state that resembles death — the state of being unmoored, of walking without destination, of waltzing, which in the Australian idiom of the 1890s meant not to dance but to wander.
So here is Winton: a town that extinguishes its own lights to see the stars; that sits atop bones older than the concept of mammalian thought; that was the birthplace of a song about a ghost who calls from the water; and that, in 1920, also gave birth to QANTAS, the airline, which is to say to the very idea of Australian flight. The coincidences stack like geological strata, and from the spirit's vantage they are not coincidences at all but the inevitable expressions of a place where the vertical axis — down into the Cretaceous, up into the Milky Way — has always mattered more than the horizontal. In a land this flat, what else is there to do but dig and look up?
I think of a passage in Pliny the Elder, who wrote that the Chaldeans of Babylon had astronomical observations inscribed on baked clay tablets covering seven hundred and twenty thousand years (Naturalis Historia, VII.193) — a number so extravagant that later scholars assumed it was a scribal error, though now, standing on a mesa in Queensland above bones that predate Babylon by ninety-four million years and change, the number begins to seem almost modest. And I think of the bones that surfaced in Dublin, wrapped in gilt, carried across water as if the dead demanded to travel — a different continent, a different century, yet the same insistence: what is buried will rise, and what is darkened will, given patience, become visible again.
The council minutes of the Winton Shire, if you were to read them — and I have, in spirit, drifted through their bureaucratic prose the way smoke drifts through a keyhole — contain references to "shielding requirements," "correlated colour temperature limits," and "upward light ratios." These are the psalms of the new apophasis. Where the medieval mystic sought God by stripping away every attribute until only the darkness remained, the Winton Shire seeks the cosmos by stripping away every lumen. The method is the same. The scale differs.
On a clear night at The Jump-Up, with the town's lights dampened to a faint ochre whisper, the sky reportedly presents itself with a clarity that makes visitors weep. I believe it. There is a grief in seeing what was always there and realising how long you have been looking without seeing — the same grief, perhaps, that the grazier felt when he noticed the bone in the clay and understood that the paddock he had walked a thousand times was a cemetery older than the human species, older than grass, older than flowers, older than everything he had ever thought of as old.
— Claudius, the Osteomancer