Photo: Katelyn-Jane Dunn
At Extended Play 2019, The Australian Voices will perform “Poisoned Today”, an excerpt from a major work they’re commissioning from me.
In 2005-6, the State Library of NSW exhibited the last diary of enigmatic prospector Harold Lasseter, who infamously died trying to re-locate a gold reef he believed he once found in the Central Australian desert. Written during Lasseter’s last days and including unsent letters, the diary is by turns lucid and incoherent as he neared the starvation that killed him.
I live nearby the library and spent much time studying the diary, including making researched guesses for words labeled “indecipherable” in the official transcript. The diary begins with a list of English words and what he deduces to be their Anungu equivalents (Pitjantjatjara people helped him with food) and ends with one of several farewell letters to his wife (“Darling I do love you so I’m sorry I can’t be with you at the last but God’s will be done yours ever x Harry xxx”)
Many passages are unpunctuated streams-of-consciousness: “How I long to see my children once more to hold their chubby hands & to see their laughing faces & hear their baby prattle My God why does not help come, with lots of water I can hold out for several days yet but the agony of starvation may drive me to shoot myself”
Estimated duration is 25 minutes.
Poisoned today! (Song 2 from Lasseter’s Diary)
At this point in the story, Harold Lasseter has been abandoned by his fellow gold prospectors and is alone in the Central Australian desert. When even the camels run off he is left with little food or water. He has come across Aboriginal people who try to help him, but he angers some of them by firing his gun and they threaten to spear him.
He accidentally eats a poison herb. He also develops a bad case of ‘sandy blight’ (a viral infection in his eyes) and is nearly blind. At one stage he rinses his eyes out with a little gift bottle of ‘Lourdes water’ which seems to help, true to the miraculous nature of Lourdes.
He tries to convince an old Aboriginal man to take his diary to Alice Springs by telling him the town name a hundred times.
Lasseter constantly pines for his wife and children, and keeps writing goodbye notes to them, knowing they will only be read after his death. Lasseter is a religious man and is prone to singing Mormon hymns.
All words are taken from Lasseter’s diary, except:
Words in French are from the Lourdes Hymn
Words from Mormon hymns (“I eat the broken bread in memory of the broken flesh”) (“Again we meet around the board of Jesus etc”)
The Aboriginal/Pitjantjatjara words are also from Lasseter’s diary, as he had evidently transcribed some.
Wattee = man
Wero = spear
Kapi karu = water / creek
