Monument for the flooding of Royal Park
This monument is a starting point.
20 August 1860. An expedition led by Robert O’Hara Burke and William J Wills departs form Royal Park, a vast park in Melbourne’s inner North. It is a vision from Melbourne: to traverse the interior, first to cross the continent, from south to north.
"We reached the sea, but we could not obtain a view of the open ocean..."
We know the sequence of their return: four men walking back into the interior; Burke, Wills, King, burying Gray; eating the carcasses of starved camels; Burke's hostility towards "the Blacks". "The old fellow who stuck his spear into the ground and threw dust into the air, when I fired my pistol, ran off in a most undignified manner".
"DIG 3FT NW APR 21 1861"
The Yantruwanta provide them with food. "They led us to a spot to camp on, and brought a lot of fish and bread which they call nardoo". "Mr Burke went out with his revolver. He knocked as many of the nets of fish out of their hands as he could and shouted out at me to fire. I did so. He was afraid of being friendly lest they always be at our camp".
They occupy these final days at Cooper's Creek collecting nardoo seeds, or sporocarps, grinding the nardoo sporocarps into a flour and eating the nardoo bread. "I have a good apetite and relish this nardoo but it seems to give us no nutriment". Nardoo sprouts when the desert floods; it dries as the floodwaters recede forming fields of red across the desert and leaving its spores in the ground where they can remain for up to thirty years to be activated by the next inundation. "King went out collecting nardoo. Mr Burke and I pounded the seeds. I still feel myself if anything weaker". Nardoo sporocarps contain thiaminase, which breaks down Vitamin B in the body and disables the digestive process. "I cannot understand this nardoo at all. It will not agree with me in any form". The Yantruwanta roast the sporocarps, eliminating the thiaminase; Burke, Wills and King do not observe this practice. "My pulse is 48 and very weak, and my legs and arms are skin and bone". They consume these final days stuffing themselves with nardoo but starving, their bodies riven by apoptosis, self-programmed cellular self-destruction: a state of emaciated bloatedness.
This monument is for the flooding of Royal Park: over the course of many weeks tens of thousands of nardoo sporocarps are sown across the expanses of Royal Park. When the Park floods, the nardoo blooms and covers the Park. The nardoo dries and the vast open spaces of Royal Park are filled with red: those expanses overlooking Melbourne's skyline fleetingly blanketed, a red wedge into the city, a monument which disappears, the spores hidden again in the ground for the next flooding.
Epilogue from a dust storm, 20 December
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