Out in that country, if you owned a sheep station the size of a European principality you stood tall. If you were a rent-paying public servant, like Hirsch, you stood on the summit of Desolation Hill.
Not much of a hill—but it was desolate. It overlooked patches of saltbush and mallee scrub and a broad, red-ochre gibber plain that stretched to the horizon; wilted wildflowers here and there, deceived by a rare spring shower.
It also overlooked an image of Wildu, the spirit eagle, carved into the plain: spanning three kilometres from wingtip to wingtip and poised to strike. And Desolation Hill was one of the last places Willi Van Sant had visited before he disappeared.
‘The urge to launch oneself,’ Willi’s mother said, hugging her daypack to her thin body, ‘is irresistible.’ Hirsch agreed and they stood silent at the guardrail for a while, that Thursday morning in spring. The urge to launch oneself and ride the air currents above the plain— as an actual wedge-tailed eagle was doing just then, along with a distant, buzzing ultralight plane that Hirsch guessed was photographing the geoglyph for some calendar or postcard publisher.
He was reading a sun-faded sign bolted to the rail— Wildu is a Ngadjuri word referring to the stars of the Southern Cross, their arrangement here represented by the tips of an eagle’s talons—when Dr Van Sant gave a dismissive sniff and pointed to the carven eagle below them.
‘Appropriation?’
‘Sure is,’ he agreed cheerily, wondering if her son had expressed that thought in an email home.
He gazed again at the geoglyph—or artwork; or graffiti, homage to the Ngadjuri or instance of cultural appropriation, depending upon your point of view. Some hero with a grader had scored the eagle into the ground in the mid-1980. No one had ever said who; the overseer, station hands and absentee property owner denied all knowledge.
When Hirsch first noticed it, on one of his long-range patrols of the rain-shadow sheep stations, it was obscured by decades of sand drifts, desert shrubs and the churning tyres of hunters’ four-wheel drives. Then last year a grazier named Russ Fanning had bought the place, restored the motif with a pair of GPS-guided excavators and created the lookout on the peak of Desolation Hill…
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