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The Pilgrims Books by Chester Eagle Hail and Farewell! An evocation of Gippsland (non-fiction, 1971) Who could love the nightingale? (novel, 1974) Four faces, wobbly mirror (novel, 1976) At the window (novella, 1984) The garden gate (novel, 1984) Mapping the paddocks (non-fiction, 1985) Play together, dark blue twenty (non-fiction, 1986) House of trees (reissue of Hail and Farewell! 1987) Victoria Challis (novel, 1991) House of music (stories, 1996) Wainwrights’ mountain (novel, 1997) Waking into dream (novel, 1998) didgeridoo (stories, 1999) Janus (travel pieces, 2001) The Centre & other essays (essays, 2002) Love in the Age of Wings & other operas (librettos, 2003) Melba: an Australian city (essays, 2004) The Wainwright Operas (librettos, 2005) Oztralia (essays, 2005) Cloud of knowing (novel, 2006) Benedictus (essays, 2006) Central Station Sydney & other operas (librettos, 2006) The Sun King & other operas (librettos, 2007) The Well in the Shadow (literary essays, 2008) All the Way to Z (memoir/essay, 2009) This Enchanted World & other operas (librettos, 2009) Running The Race (novel, 2010) A Mob Of Galahs & other operas (librettos, 2011) Brighter Than Black (libretto, 2012) The Pilgrims (novel, 2012) (See also mini-mags over the next page.) If you would like to know more about the books listed above or to download any of them for yourself, FREE OF CHARGE, visit trojanpress.com.au. The Pilgrims Chester Eagle The Pilgrims is published by Chester Eagle, 23 Langs Road Ivanhoe 3079 Australia, operating as Trojan Press. Phone is 61 3 9497 1018 and email address is [email protected] Copyright is held by Chester Eagle. First published electronically in 2012, design by Vane Lindesay, DTP by Karen Wilson. Cover photo taken by C.B.Green and published in No End To Walking: One Hundred Years of the Melbourne Walking Club, by Alan Bridge. Copy on cover from Ian Stapleton of Feathertop Track, Harrietville, Victoria. This book is dedicated to the memory of Thornton Wilder author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey Mini-mags Escape (story, 2004) One Small Step (memoir, 2011) Hallucination before departure (memoir, 2006) Castle Hill (memoir, 2011) Mozart (memoir, 2007) Chartres (memoir, 2011) Travers (memoir, 2007) The Plains (memoir, 2011) The Saints In Glory (story, 1991/2009) Four Last Songs (memoir, 2011) So Bitter Was My Heart (memoir, 2008) The Camera Sees … (memoir, 2011) Keep Going! (memoir, 2008) Freedom (a reflection, 2012) Who? (memoir, 2008) Men In White (a reflection, 2012) At Baldy’s Feet (memoir, 2008) World Cities (a reflection, 2012) Othello’s Rage (memoir, 2009) Mountains Australia is strangely made. Mountains run down the eastern side, then turn the corner. Rivers flow out of them, to the sea at their feet, and to the inland. The inland rivers are tedious, straggling, in the habit of forming billabongs. Between their origins and their end, they have only a little way to fall. It’s an eroded country, but such mountains as it possesses are full of character. Anecdotes abound; this book hopes to present a few of them, not so much as they happened but as they might have happened. The consciousness of earlier genera- tions is something we can only guess at, and our need to guess, the reasons impelling us to guess, will make themselves inherent in what we say. This is a book about men who called themselves pilgrims: journey- makers to holy places, holy regions, where their minds, their souls if they believed in them, might be changed en route. It’s the journey, rather than the end-point, that gives rise to mean- ings. I invite you to come on a series of journeys, to see what happened when, where and to whom. The pilgrims we will come to shortly. Let me introduce you, first, to their guides. Bill Gillio led the Skyline Tours. He was a bushman and an ex-soldier, two of his country’s strongest traditions. He was big, strong, loud, and practical. He was thoughtful. He saw the need to be organised. If you wanted something done well, you planned. To delegate, you needed good people. You had to trust them, and you couldn’t do that unless you trusted yourself. Everything started from the self. It had to be without flaw. Bill could ride, he could build, he could explain. Above all, he could lead. deCourcey was something else. Nobody understood him. He was a tall man, of French and Irish descent, quite unworldly. It was said of him that he wanted to fly like the birds, but whether he said this himself we cannot know. He died of cancer a little after fifty: not a long life. He was a great runner and a fast walker; he played the violin. He was at home in the bush but got lost at times, something that never happened to Bill, whom he revered for possessing a certainty impossible for one who sought spiritual states that could never be taken for granted. Some people are proudly human; deCourcey was an escapist, too conscious 1 of humanity’s failings to be comfortable. He loved the mountain bush because it could be inhabited without looking into the self. What he saw within rarely pleased. The mysteries of the mountain world made him free. Did he really want to fly like the birds? Riding in the forest, walking, sitting and observing, were just as good. Contemplation meant looking outwards rather than in. He needed an ‘other’, and the world around him supplied it. He followed social rules because it was safer to do so, rather than from an instinctive wish to be like other people. He loved Bill because he never felt questioned by him; Bill accepted him as he accepted everyone else. Bill had the common humanity deCourcey never possessed. He was an average horseman, an average handler of cattle, a poor-to-middling farmer, someone who intuitively misread social situations as barriers separating him from the world where he belonged. He took up Bill’s offer to join the Skyline Tours with enthusiasm because he would surely know better than the pilgrims, as he called them, and taught them to call themselves, what to feel in the presence of the mountains. These too are characters in our story – Mount Wellington, Trapyard Hill, The Pinnacles, the Crosscut Saw, Bennison’s Plain, Mount Howitt, Wonnangatta Station on its river of the same name, Lake Tarli Karng, Spion Kopje, the Snowy Range, right out to Mount Hotham and the long descent to the inland, where there were no magic mountains and the stories that grew on the flat had a different character from those conceived in the hills. Erosion confirms the character of mountains even as it flattens them. The mountains, abraded as they may be, cling to things that have happened in their secret places. Mountains recall. They don’t let memories die, though they kill off careless travellers. Bill told his pilgrims they’d be safe if they did what he told them, and anyone who didn’t wouldn’t be coming back. Bill was the guardian of experience, memory, of proper bush ways for dealing with the dangers of getting lost. He knew where he was, while deCourcey had sometimes to climb trees to find out. Bill had only to see a distant peak to know, by its shape, the angle he was seeing it from, and therefore where he was. On the very first of the Skyline Tours a pilgrim said to him, ‘You’re different from us. We need to be told where we’re going. You know where you are wherever you are. In a way, you’re not going anywhere because you’re already there.’ Bill nodded to this as to 2 everything people said. He rarely disagreed, but then he rarely let the observations of other people affect him. He knew who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. Didn’t everyone? The first day Jan and Tommy Burke ran the Briagolong Hotel, and they’d supple- mented their rooms with tents, and put up a marquee because their dining room was small. Bill told the men from Melbourne that if they wanted a bath they should have it before they slept because breakfast would reach the tables at 6.30. ‘By 7.30, we’re off! Any packing, do it tonight. First day’s an easy one, but we’re hitting the road early. We’ve got distance to cover, and we’re not going too fast because I don’t want you breaking down on the first day. We’re taking it nice and easy, and that means getting started so we’re not in any rush!’ Geniality shone out of him, but they felt his force. Tiger Rowe, the cook, had gone on ahead, with Billy Dibbs, the hut man, who had to have their second night’s accommodation organised and firewood cut for billy-boiling, companionship, warmth, and meals. ‘deCourcey,’ Bill announced, ‘will be leading the horses, so everything has to be in a stack ready to load. That’ll start the moment we finish breakfast. You can help him, but don’t get in his way. Just do anything he tells you to. If he doesn’t need you, keep out of his way. He knows what he’s doing, or so we like to think.’ The birdman, the famous runner, was unaffected by this jibe. ‘Every horse,’ he said, ‘will carry four men’s packs. You’ll be free, when you walk, to look at the world.’ The men from Melbourne sensed something unusual in these simple words.

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