Cold Heart Country
“I was there ya know … when it happened … when everythin’ stopped burnin”
It took a minute for the words to sink in.
Gaz was my escort into the Snuff Zone, a boundary rider of about 65 and looking every inch of it. I suddenly felt a wave of guilt for having been so tuned out on our drive. I’d been in my own head this whole time, and here I was, alone in a car with a man who’d apparently witnessed The Deadening.
“Sorry … you’re saying you were there that night? You saw it?” I spoke louder than necessary. Gaz turned his right ear toward me; the left side dampened by a twenty-two-year-old concussion.
“My oath I did! I was out back of the pub takin’ a slash! I mean you could call it a pub but it was just one of those bloody boxes they put out here and fill with piss for the workers. You know, those demountable jobs? Where the whole thing smells like stale beer and desperation even when the taps are off? Anyway, I was havin’ a quiet moment to meself and that’s when the whole bloody world changed.”
"Can you tell me about it?"
"Not much to tell really, it was over so quick. It was late. One, one-thirty. Dark as a dog's guts and I started to feel like my head was gonna pop. Like a big wet blanket got chucked over the whole place. Squeezed the wind right out of yer lungs … there was a flash. Proper blinding light outta nowhere. Like someone flicked the sun on and off again. It was dead quiet. Not a peep. Then bloody BOOM! Next thing I know I'm knocked on me ass twenty feet away, covered in piss with me left ear busted and half me teeth missing."
"What do you remember after that?"
"After that I was just tryin' to get me bearings. Blokes were runnin' around, bleedin' and cryin' ... I remember the heat of it then just as quick the place was stone cold. And the air just felt wrong. Thought it was the mine explodin', or maybe a plane crash or somethin'. But when I couldn't strike a match to light me smoke, that's when I knew somethin' weird had gone down … bloody curious thing, isn't it?"
But it wasn’t a plane crash or an exploded mine, it was a meteroite that we now call the Cold Heart. Nobody knows where it came from but it fused with the earth around it, into what scientists called the Pyrolysis Inversion Field. A patch of earth that made it impossible to create fire. To some it was a miracle, to others it was a curse, but to me it was the single, unyielding fact that defined my entire existence.
“So what are ya here for anyway? Ya don’t look like a Jiffy.”
A Jiffy was what people like Gaz called the researchers and amateurs who would come throughout the year trying to ignite the unburnable land.
“No, not a Jiffy. I’m from Forestry.”
“Ah, fair enough then. Well let me tell ya, I’ve seen some Jiffies in me time. One bloke came in, set up all these weird antennas and speakers and stuff, said he was gonna undo what the big flash did. Ended up just turnin’ on this contraption and pukin’ his guts out and leavin’ in tears. Said he spent 125K of his own money on the thing. Another bloke I saw didn’t even get inside the Snuff Zone. Watched him mix up his chemicals and blow himself up. Just a pink mist and a couple of plastic bottles and jerry cans. Brings out the weirdest mob this place does.”
We arrived at the outer ring just after midday, a garrison designed to keep everyone out, some 55 km before the impact site. The place was serious: all concrete blast walls, watchtowers, spotlights on gantries, like a prison only the inmates were on the outside. I was surprised by how many people were camped out here. The land was choked with them. Gaz told me they were a mix of religious zealots in revival tents who were there to preach about the end of the world, families who had lost homes and loved ones to bushfires seeking some sort of solace, and assorted revellers who were just there to “tap into the weird vibes.”
We slowed at the checkpoint and the plume of red dust behind us began to settle. The guard at the barrier was a massive man with an odd smile that seemed to go in two directions at once, one side lifted, the other sloping down. On closer inspection I noticed that it wasn’t a smile at all, just a deep scar on one side of his face holding the left side of his mouth up. I imagined that’s why they had him at the gate - his was a face that kept you in suspense.
“Good afternoon gentlemen and welcome to the Snuff Zone. I’m Sergeant Kitschin. Can I see some identification please?”
Gaz tapped the sticker on the windscreen, while I handed over my Forestry lanyard. Kitschin looked them both over and entered a few details into a beaten-up tablet.
“Thank you. Now that we’ve got the standard pleasantries out of the way, I need to run through the rules for entering this federally mandated area of ecological significance. Any questions before I begin?”
Both Gaz and I responded in the negative.
“Righto then. Under the Pyrolysis Inversion Field Containment Act of 2004, you may not bring in or activate unapproved ignition sources. You may not remove unapproved soil, vegetation, or wildlife. You must remain on established paths, report all ecological anomalies without engaging them, and report any symptoms of thermal instability: getting too hot, too cold, or noticing a climatic shift. Is this all understood?”
Both Gaz and I responded in the affirmative.
“Enjoy the serenity, boys. It’s the most unnatural peace you’ll ever find.” He waved us on.
As we barrelled through the final stretch before our destination, I watched the bright, brittle red dirt give way to an abrupt, black loam whose scent started to come through the Jeep’s air-conditioning. Thick and fungal, the last thing you’d expect to smell in the desert. The closer we got, the more surreal and disquieting the place became. A humourless parody of the Australian interior. The sparse, flat landscape encircling a dense green forest of aberration. I had seen seen in photos and videos, but nothing prepared me for the feel of it. The wrongness. The absurdity.
Unlike the military fortress that we had just passed through, the Snuff Zone itself was un-patrolled and contained with a flimsy patchwork of cyclone fence, most of it half-swallowed by vegetation. Gaz pulled open the gate that led to the cleared pathways.
“Ya know it rains sometimes for months just in this one spot, not a drop of water outside.” He shook his head as he began to lead me through. I imagined he must have done this walk thousands of times now. “Bloody curious.”
We stepped through the sagging wire and into the Snuff Zone. The ground was thick with organic litter, a spongy, dark mattress of leaves and twigs where nothing ever dried, let alone burned. An inland swamp, all stagnant chlorophyll and eternal decay. A land that was dead but refused to decompose.
Familiar plants seemed unfamiliar here. Trees were cocooned in decades of unburned bark, sheathed in a velvet, algae-slick patina. Wattles and banksias choked one another, growing spindly and pale, fighting for light. Seed cones, designed to open only in fire, hung in clusters of hundreds, unopened and rotting on the branch, a grim display of failed reproduction. Without fire to reset them, the lignotubers at the base of every gum had swollen into grotesque wooden tumours. Off the paths, the composting mulch ran three feet deep and exhaled methane when you stepped on it. Bracket fungi jutted from every dead limb in overlapping shelves, some as wide as dinner plates. The ghost-white fingers of dead man's fingers fungus pushed up through the mulch. You could hear and feel the slurp of the understory with every step.
“Christ, it’s thick,” Gaz muttered. “Worse every time I come through. Or maybe I’m just gettin’ worse at walkin’ in it. Gotta say a dart would be nice right about now.”
“How far are we from the impact site, Gaz?”
“We’re gettin’ close, mate.” Gaz adjusted his pace. “Feel that? Hard enough to smash a crab on.”
I felt it. The dense, composted litter began to thin out, revealing a dark, unnatural substrate beneath. Then it disappeared entirely. We were walking across bare, lithified ground, the area where the meteorite's immense, instant heat had flash-fused its unknown element with the earth. The trees were gone here. Just grey, horizontal trunks laid out in radial lines, blown flat by the shockwave and pointing away from the centre like compass needles. They'd been there for over twenty years, stripped bare and slick with biofilm, never rotting, never burning.
We stepped into the central clearing and the temperature dropped. The blast zone was perhaps a hundred metres across, a perfect circle of nothing. The ground was not soil, but a flattened, purple-black sheet, glossy like obsidian after rain. Seamless and fused. When I crouched and touched it, the surface was cold and slightly tacky, like touching a scar that had healed wrong. In the centre, embedded deep into the surface, was the meteorite itself: a massive, jagged piece of blackened material, easily three metres across. Around it, the fused ground bore faint, radial grooves, the shockwave's last signature spreading outward in frozen rings.
I stopped breathing.
“This is it then. The Cold Heart.” I whispered, running my fingers over the surface. This thing that had possessed my imagination for all of my young life was under my hand.
“Yep. This is the old girl. Slapped the cheek off the whole place she did.”
Gaz leaned against one of the dead monument trees, watching me feel my way around with a new sense of suspicion.
“What is it that you’re ‘ere for again? Ya don’t act like Forestry.”
"I am Forestry, but not the way that most people are. I'm here by fate. By design. I'm not here for the job, I'm here for the access. Level four clearance. You don't get that without the credentials, without the years. So I did the work. Studied my way through. I’ve spent years in sterile labs earning my stripes. I’ve sat on every governmental oversight committee for Hazard Zone Classification. Laser focused on my goal of getting here. Just to stand on this ground."
I turned my head from the ground towards Gaz. “When you worked out here, in the mines, did you know a man named Warren Hall?”
“Yeah mate. I knowed him. Good bloke” A twinge of recognition ran over his face and his voice dropped low. “How’d you know him?”
“He was my father.”
Gaz turned pale “He died out here. That night.”
“I never knew him, not really. I was three when he died and he was out here half the year anyway. He was a driller. Would have been on the night shift, working the deep seam, running the jumbo drill. Noise and dust everywhere, a hundred metres of solid rock over his head. He would have felt safe.”
I pressed my palm hard against the cold ground. “They told my mother he would have vaporised. Turned to dust. But I learned the truth. When it happened, The Deadening, the blast energy would have instantly sealed him within. He was compressed, chemically saturated, trapped within the rock and soil.”
I turned away from Gaz again and back down to the earth. “That’s what this place is to me. A final resting place. A headstone.”
Gaz was finally speechless and in his silence I waited for something to hit me. But nothing came. The clearing remained cold, silent, and indifferent. I pressed my weight against the rock but felt nothing other than cool, unyielding surface. Just the weight of my choices and the growing sense of disappointment at the end of my journey.
After some time, Gaz finally spoke again. "That's the thing about this joint. They call it the Cold Heart for a reason. It's not a place where things are, it's a place where things are not. Your dad was a funny bloke, always good for a laugh. I can tell ya that about him. But there's nothin' funny about this place." Gaz looked back out towards the path that brought us in, peering beyond the Snuff Zone. "I reckon you'll find more of him out there than in here."
I thought about his words, playing them over in my head. I thought about my father, trying to conjure him in my mind, trying to draw some purpose out of it all. And then it dawned on me.
"You know Gaz, he came out here to pull black rocks out of the earth, and here he is, buried and preserved under the weight of a giant black rock from another world. I'd say that's pretty funny."
Gaz paused, then laughed. "I reckon it is, hey. I reckon he would have appreciated that too."
"I'll tell ya what though. Whatever it means to ya, ya've done good to get here. Not a lot of blokes get to stand where you're standin' and see what you're seein' … bloody curious thing, isn't it?"
"It is, Gaz. A bloody curious thing."
"So where to now, mate?"
"I guess we'll go back to the world that still burns."
Once we’re back outside the Snuff Zone, I feel the warm wind on my face and the smells of rust and eucalyptus fill my lungs. I pick a single grey wattle seedpod off the ground, feel around its hard dry shell with my fingertips, then mindlessly put it in my pocket. I watch Gaz pull out a cigarette and light it up. The small orange flame catches on the first try.