Highway of Lost Hearts

On 1 May 2008, a boat accident on Sydney Harbour killed six young people. Darwin-based Savannah (Jessica) Holloway was one of them. She was 25 years old: a dedicated youth worker, passionate refugee advocate and head of Amnesty International’s NT branch. Savannah was a bright young woman with a strong social conscience, fierce intellect and irrepressible personality. She lived life to the full, and her death made no sense.

Savannah was a big part of Darwin’s close-knit social community as well as being my work colleague, and her death forced me to look at my own life. In the few years prior I’d lost both parents to cancer, separated from my husband and witnessed the death of my dog, Crumpet. I was utterly empty.

In December 2009 I packed up my van, hurled my new dog Piglet into the jumpseat, and headed south for Bradley’s Head—the point of Sydney Harbour closest to where the boat accident took place. I needed to see the point where Savannah had died; to witness something tangible.

I’d never done a road trip alone before, let alone a trip of the magnitude of 4,500 kms. I set off at the hottest time of year following a long drought, and death was everywhere along that highway: bleeding out of the roadside carcasses, fusing into the skeletal trees, winding its way along arid riverbeds and leaking out of the thick red dust. Piglet propped herself next to me; eyes fixed hungrily on the road ahead, or body curled up fast asleep. I remember envying her capacity to just live in the moment.

We stopped at remote little places: Wycliffe Well, the ‘UFO capital of Australia’. Kulgara, the ‘last pub’ in the NT (or the first if you’re heading north). Barrow Creek, its shameful history of Aboriginal massacres overshadowed of late by the disappearance of a single Caucasian tourist. And then other scabs of our history. Woomera, where 1,500 refugees were crammed into facilities designed for 400: razor wire around a concrete compound. Coober Pedy, where massive holes are still being carved into the earth to obtain opals to adorn rings or pendants.

Once, we drove for half a day and met no other traffic. Other days, road trains four carriages long swept past us; their latter carriages slewing sideways just enough to remind me that the difference between life and death can be the matter of a split second. Kangaroos and emus at dusk, skittish and unpredictable. Buffalo and cattle bolting onto the road. A wedge-tailed eagle, wingspan two metres across, swooping for road kill just metres ahead of my van; dipping upwards nanoseconds before I might hit it. (A party boat on a harbour in the dead of night: to get on it, or to go home to bed.)

We met the strangest people en route: alcoholics, lonely souls, hardened characters who seemed to have lost the capacity to care. And the incongruous ones: a massive truckie with an orphaned joey tucked carefully into his belly; him feeding and toileting it gently into adulthood. A toothless chef who handfed my dog scraps from his kitchen and told me he was stuck out here because he was lost.

We finally journeyed into Sydney’s urban sprawl, and reached Bradley’s Head. I sat there that night and thought of Savannah, and I remember getting an undeniable response: a strong sense of her in the water, right in front of me. Her presence was as real as the night. And I realised that although she was dead in the corporeal sense, bits of her were still here in some form or other: small bits of her DNA, swilling around in this massive body of water, becoming a part of the whole. I also realised that to all those she touched, she had left the legacy of a life fully lived. And what a gift that was.

I wrote up the events of our road journey in a workshop with the legendary playwright and director Jenny Kemp, and the character of Mot emerged. Writing from an outside character’s perspective enabled me to distance myself; Jenny’s lateral tasks helping me to lose the boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. Thirty-five pages of typed notes: scraps, scenes, diagrams and dialogue became a first draft, to which the road journey itself lent a certain structure—but I was still unclear of the central ‘human’ core.

Then Lee Lewis agreed to direct the work, and early in our working process she observed that ‘Mot’s journey to find her heart is a metaphor for a country which has lost its heart’. This gave me the core I needed, as well as a ‘bigger picture’ perspective. Highway of Lost Hearts became more than just a road trip, and turned into the very human journey of a lost woman crossing a lost country, trying to retrieve the pieces of her missing heart—and with them, the will to move on.

Mary Anne Butler

Postscript: Piglet let go of life on 9 September 2013. As she went under, my friend Huni and I fed her a bag of dried liver treats. She died smiling.

The text of Highway of Lost Hearts is available through Currency Press, and a new version of the script is now evolving into a book.

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