Thomas Keneally: ‘At North Head I hear the song of the dead and relish my place in the human stream’

The North Head of Sydney Harbour, named Car-rang-gel according to the Sydney Northern Beaches clan, happens to be my book of daily delights. My wife and compadre, Judy, loves this great block of fissured sandstone and heath above the Pacific too. She's angry at me when I write about it because she fears the place may become too popular for its good. Its coastal heath went up in prodigious flames above the sea two years back, in a fire of such latter-day intensity many thought there would be no regeneration on this plateau of vistas. But it's all come back, a little differently.

The flannel flowers, the glorious punks that eschew polite gardens and only grow on depleted sandy headlands and in the face of salt gales, have asserted themselves and are now visually dominant. Their lovely green-tipped white petals feel just like flannel, a trick that fascinates children, and me for that matter. Then the banksia serrata, are back with their gloried big candles, the ones that shine with nectar and attract rainbow lorikeets before degenerating into furry Daleks.

But the first species to recover in the blackness and ash were the grass trees, the robust, Gondwana-bushes with their central black stalks. They are ancient, as old as 400 years, and they carry minute but glorious flowers on their stem. There was a time, a month or so after the fire, when only the grass trees granted their sprays of deep green into the landscape of ash and hellish burnt limbs. And as I boasted, they live for hundreds of years, these grasstrees. To move among them is to say, "Goodbye Da Vinci, hello Freud." Or, "Goodbye el Greco, good day Picasso!" Each tree carries, like a parachute beneath its feet, a package of renewal that will burst forth from fire-savaged earth. What a stunt!

The occasional Gondwana animal makes an appearance here. North Head is the best place to see echidnas in the wild (don't hit me, Judy!). All through Covid I would run into them, these animals named after the Greek goddess of chaos, with their egg-laying, and their milky pouch for maturing their egg-hatched young, the puggles. They carry greetings from the ancient Gondwana too, and from the oddities of dinosaur time. Sighted by walkers, they continue on their work of finding and devouring termites and endlessly ploughing the continent's topsoil with their leathery snout. They seemed, post-fire, far too numerous to have lost population in the cataclysm. Somehow, in their deep burrows borrowed from other animals - the echidna is a squatter! - could they have waited out a fire that was believed to have reached 800 degrees?

The thinned-out landscape of post-fire revealed the sea in fresh form as the vast plain of vivid blue Pacific. On many mid-year days, if you look for the whale-watching boat to move out of the harbour you will also pick up pods of whales breaching and leaping on their grand migrations, Antarctica to the tropics of Queensland and then back again.

Now there is something about the headland in its human history that puzzles me. This is a landscape, like all accessible landscapes, eloquent of death as well as the transits and manifestations of the living. These are the honeyed and chocolate-clay cliffs where occasionally people choose a tragic death, and at Blue Fish Point there was murder too.

There are old artillery emplacements everywhere, eloquent of the scare the Japanese gave Australia in the second world war. To Judy and I it offers unparalleled views of the 1942 attack line of the Japanese subs on the USS Chicago docked at Garden Island just up-harbour, a memorable night in both our houses, of air raid shelters, crockery broken in panic, of hiding under tables with a mattress on top to absorb shell fragments, of unexplained gunfire, American, Australian and Japanese, that occurred one Sunday night when we were both six.

But the deaths North Head bespeaks are more numerous than those of Japanese submariners. The repatriated bones of the Indigenous Eora folk, also known as the Sydney Basin people, stolen away to foreign places since 1788, are re-buried here, in this traditional meeting place.

Then, just below the cliff, in the same deep channel the Sydney to Hobart yacht race fleet pursue out of the Harbour mouth each year, Captain Traill of the Second Fleet's Neptune (1790), a former slaver captain, dumped the bodies of convicts, dead on arrival by his psychopathic negligence. These souls sing morning and night of the hinterland they never got to beach themselves on. The Irish rebels of the 1798 were dumped here too from ships named Hercules and Atlas, so there is Gaelic in the mix. The choirs of jettisoned northern European convicts sing to us, and their tragedy is wistful but does not sicken my joy.

So I am forced to ask, as well as joie de vivre, is there joie de mort? To know and accept one's place in the great chorus. To sing along?

It is in among these dead that I have found my place in the human stream. Somehow I am consoled, not threatened, by the human voices who speak of these streams of time, and amid the tragedies I relish my deliciously contingent place in it all as a brief householder and temporary resident of North Head. On a cliff at the world's supposed ending.

In all this I do not strike myself as notably inhuman. I suspect these feelings are characteristic of the aged and part of the privilege of it all. As I stand knee-deep in the flannels and cry out to southern right whales or migrating humpbacks, I feel gratified beyond my deserts.

Thomas Keneally is the author of Schindler's Ark, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and The Dickens Boy