KING OF THE STONE GARDEN

The Return by Tony Convey

I first saw the light of day in Stonyrises, a settlement of granite and marble. The old streets laid with blocks of basalt glistened in the morning light and I loved sliding my hand over the marble on the staircase rails and walking on the beautiful agate tiles. On walks to the Brown river I passed outcrops with shiny streaks which were usually copper or silver but sometimes consisted of rose and amethyst crystals which threw the sun’s rays back into space.

We saw little birds flying and speckled fish swimming in the walls of the caves which were scattered on the sides of our path. It was hard to resist their vaults but the jagged cliffs and deformed banks of the Brown river had an even greater magnetism. After a downpour there was the chance of seeing a giant shark exposed in the cliff face or a petrified tree washed into the river where it sat and made its new home in the river’s ribs. Once we stumbled on a huge diprotodon pushed out of the banks and dropped by a cyclone onto our path.

The Black Night Gold Grubbers by Tony Convey

When night’s black curtain fell and the gold grubbers emerged from their huts and trampled the new shoots and buds before they could flourish they quickly crawled into their mines and started ripping the golden veins out of the iron stained quartz. Sometimes we watched them from a distance but they were greedy creatures deeply suspicious of anyone who wasn’t part of their company.

My friend Sunny showed me an opal and I melted. Where did it come from? It had to be fire I pondered and drifted into a reverie with rainbow flames all around me. Later I picked up some lumps of quartz and dropped them into the kitchen stove. I was disappointed in the morning when the quartz had not been transformed into translucent rainbows. I never stopped looking for opals and once or twice found them.

We picked up the broken crystals on the track and held them up to the sun’s rays as we skipped over the tiny volcanic eruptions intent on barring our path. The facets embracing the glassy reflections of the sun engendered an iridescent spray of laughter as we sprinkled sand over the swamp and cast a glance towards the distant Blue mountains. Once I slipped and fell face down onto the rough rocks decorating the paths and found myself staring in amazement at a tiny crab encased in an opalised shell beneath my bloody nose.

I am not sure why I was expelled from Stonyrises but I suspect it was due to the gold grubbers who did not approve of me taking fossils from their realm.

The morning it happened I had banged my head on a low wall and I was listening to the slow rattling sound of scree falling into place. I was grabbed from behind and pushed into a wet box which had odd markings on its sides and aided by the wind and rough handling it hurtled down a green ramp which was speckled with pieces of garnet which shone in the morning light. I took it all in but as my breath was impaired and my hands were tied I was captive to my fate.

On the first night in my new abode I was dragged through a dirty bubbling stream into a wet structure with ugly pictures on the greasy walls. There were beds made of spongy grass along the walls and I was pushed into the one furthest from the barbed entrance. In no time my memories faded and I was consumed by the sinister rituals of this dank place.

In this wet walled room the stench of death seeped from the mud beneath us. It was lubricated with last gasp pleas, ruthless denunciations and a sickly sweet odour that hung in my nostrils like spider webs. I knew this was the end and it got closer by the day. This wet world drowned me by degree. Drop by drop. Everything was slippery and clung to your hands and the harder you tried to unstick your fingers the more viscous they became. There was never enough wet for the masters. Every loose structure had at least five running tunnels funneling wet into all their spaces. The one redeeming wet was the early morning slide onto the soggy sand and then the warm waves which embraced me lifted my spirits with some semblance of the now faraway world I once knew.

I lost all sense of time so I cannot recall how long it was after my imprisonment that I found the little lump of azurite which tumbled through a tunnel one evening. I could see a woman’s face in the rock and I looked around for something I could use to make the face more obvious. I pulled a piece of hard wood from one of the walls and carefully enhanced the lines outlining the face.

Within an hour I had created a beautiful little figure of a woman out of the blue mineral. One of the masters saw the piece and demanded I make one for him. He went outside and returned with a piece of malachite and demanded that I make him a similar figure. After looking carefully at the banded green rock I saw a man’s face emerging and within a few hours I had created a green man to accompany the blue woman. This changed everything for me and soon all the staff came to me with their lumps of stone demanding I turn them into figures of people, animals and birds. I was now sought after and my creations were scattered around the dripping structures where we ate and slept.

I had found my vocation and it was all around me – rocks, minerals, precious stones. I could transform them into images of living creatures. I now had a way of releasing the spirits imprisoned in the geological wonders which surrounded Stonyrises if I could ever get back there.

I have no recall of the circumstances which led to my liberation and no memory of leaving the wretched place but one morning I awoke on a hillside and saw Stonyrises laid out below. My heart pounded with excitement as I scrambled down the slope and walked into the settlement. I barely recognised the place as it seemed as if more marble and granite had been brought into the gardens and parks of the community. Everything seemed fresh and renewed and as I walked through the door of our home I was overwhelmed with joy.

The others looked at me as if I had never been away as I glanced at my favourite chair. By the time I reached it beams of light were pouring out of every surface. My beloved fossils and stones were on top of the bookcase and I basked in the golden light. The walls around me dissolved and instead of sitting in a chair in a house I was seated on a lichen speckled boulder in a landscape of stone, crystal and ferns. Gentle hills undulated and birds sang in flowering trees. Pools of water gleamed like silver spoons in the folds of the hills and iridescent streaks stained the sides of the rocks. At my feet a bubbling stream seeped from a crystalline crevice and intricate clusters of blossoms covered the earth like carpets. Benign creatures grazed the verdant slopes and their fleeces shone with a metallic lustre and as they moved trails of light shone in their wake. I had become the king of a radiant stone garden.

Tellurian by Tony Convey

I spent my time wandering through the landscape picking up the stones which called out to me. Some were humble country rocks and others precious jewels, while some contained imprisoned fossils which I could now free and allow them to take up their long passed lives again.

That was many years ago and now Stonyrises is known far and wide for the extraordinary stone sculptures which enliven every street and building within its rugged boundaries. My work is celebrated by people I have never met and my name is associated with the splendour of the mineral world by connoisseurs of art and geological wonders. Those busy years have left me tired and my arms ache as I remove the flakes and slivers to release the life within the minerals and stones which people bring me.

As I contemplated putting down my tools and going back to a quiet, reflective life I began to plan a final masterwork to complete my life’s work. I thought about what stone or mineral materials would be appropriate for my final piece. Agate was my first choice but over the years I had depleted the amount of the stone available in the region and I did not wish to travel to acquire my materials. I then recalled the story of the Haunted Stream mine which few remembered and even fewer knew its location. I had a vague memory of an old blacksmith, whose forge I often visited, telling me that the beautiful blue green stone that he used as a flux was fluorspar from the Haunted Stream. He had long passed and the others I asked all described different locations for the mine. I thought the mine was in the upper reaches of the largest tributary of the Brown river and I set out to find this lost place. After hours pushing through scrub and being distracted by glittering stones in the banks I turned onto an overgrown track. I soon saw little lumps of galena and fluorspar scattered in the soil and I knew I was nearly there. I almost tripped over an iron pipe which had been concealed by the weeds and I then saw old ivy covered huts ahead. The stories about this ghost town focused on a particularly brutal murder and the subsequent haunting of the place by the murdered miner.The company could not get miners to stay in this isolated place and the mine was eventually abandoned.

Haunted Stream by Tony Convey

The entrance of the main adit was choked by a flowering wattle which I pushed aside. I was immediately dazzled by the extraordinary walls of the tunnel which glowed with seams of silver streaked with blue and purple veins of fluorspar. I sat down entranced by the luminous wonders on both sides. I then began looking for a suitable slab of the minerals which I could turn into a statue. I noticed a large bulge a bit further inside. It jutted out for a couple of feet and I decided to look around for any old tools which could help me prize out my treasure. In one of the huts I found picks and hammers and I soon had a mass of mineral about six feet in length lying at the entrance to the mine.

I made my way back to Stonyrises and soon one of my associates hauled the shining lump back to my studio. I spent several days examining it from all angles before I began exposing the figure I could see imprisoned inside the minerals. As I worked away engrossed with revealing the hidden figure I began to feel a stiffness in my arms and legs which made my task very difficult. I spent more time just looking at the emerging figure puzzled by the face. It was a face which I knew but I couldn’t remember who it was.

The day the new work was to be unveiled I had great difficulty getting out of bed and when I looked in the mirror I wasn’t there. I rubbed my eyes and thought it was some passing aberration and prepared myself for the launch. My outdoor studio was full of my friends and the many art lovers from the town. Strangely no body came up to congratulate or even acknowledge me and when the Mayor removed the sheet from the statue I gasped! He told the excited onlookers that the artist could not be here today as he had been called away. I walked up to the statue and touched the radiant face. It was my face and my body. I then realised that I was still and always would be the King of the Stone Garden.

King of the Stone Garden by Tony Convey