I wrote an essay about researching the life of Sarah Brooks and the insights from being out in the disarming landscape east of Esperance. It is now published in the Landscapes journal.
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I am on the trail of a ghost, the ghost of Miss Sarah Brooks, who died almost one hundred years ago. I first heard the bare bones of her story a decade ago from a friend, Marcus, who flew me and my husband in a light plane from Esperance, on the southeast coast of Western Australia, out to Israelite Bay. This evocative biblical name is embedded in the memories of most of us west of the Nullarbor after a lifetime of weather reports on crackly ABC local radio. A gale force warning is in place for Albany to Israelite Bay.
Marcus flew his plane low for the 150km out of Esperance, skirting the quietly dramatic coastline, where low-slung, grey-green folds of land meet rounded and weathered granite monoliths, which, in turn, meet startlingly white beaches that blend into the shimmering turquoise water. The granite islands of the Recherche Archipelago are scattered across the deep ocean of the most resonant blue. I remember a perfectly clear day in an immense arc of sky and the rare vulnerability of flying in a light plane. The colours were luminous and the visible signs of humans imperceptible. Marcus told us stories of the earliest settlers, including Sarah Brooks, who came out into this country in the 1870s. Even from a vantage point one thousand feet above, this looked like the ‘strange and difficult country’ described by 1840s cross-continental explorer, Edward John Eyre.