About Karta: The Island Of The Dead

This blog post is about Karta: The Island Of The Dead, both the physical place, known in English as Kangaroo Island, and about my as yet unpublished novel about it.

When I went to Kangaroo Island for the first time, in 2008, I wasn't planning to write a novel about it. It was just a fun trip, a time to get away from it all. Kangaroo Island, I was told, was still very much an unspoiled wilderness, still somewhere that animals roamed free, in pretty much their natural habitat. While there was a population of some 4,000 to 5,000 people, given the sheer enormity of the size of the island, it was basically unspoiled.

I had also heard that one of my ancestors had been the first white man to set foot on Kangaroo Island. I wanted to find out if it was true.

On the island, I went on a tour, a day trip which took me around the entire island, one of those things aimed at foreigners, not people who have lived in Australia all their lives. We went on a bus, some 50 of us or so, stopping off to see the seals, the penguins, eagles, and, of course, the kangaroos that the island is named after.

Most of them went back home, back on the ferry on the way back, oblivious to anything deeper than their little taste of what the island had to offer, but I had decided to stay a second night, to do my own thing, and see what was there.

I wasn't the only one with that idea, and there were four of us in total who arrived together the night before the tour. A couple from Italy had gone on the tour with me then were doing their own thing on the same day as me. Another guy, travelling by himself, had done his own thing on the day that we were on tour, then was going on tour while we did our own thing.

He told us that the lighthouses were something that had to be seen to be believed, and the museums offered incredible insight.

Museums seemed to be just about everywhere, with one right by the entrance, right next to the jetty. I went in there and there were books galore telling about tragedy on the island, shipwrecks mostly, but then other tragedies. They were supposed to be true first-hand accounts of people who saw the horrible tragedies, some who survived to tell the tale and others who witnessed what occurred.

I was surprised to see dolphins as the cause of the shipwrecks, not manatees like you normally hear. Of course, there were no manatees near Kangaroo Island, but it was a strange thing for me. The idea that dolphins had lured people to their deaths was incredible to me. The tales didn't say "mermaids" or "sirens" or anything silly like that: they said dolphins. Over and over again, it was said to be dolphins.

They were ridiculed, of course. They had survived terrible tragedies where 1,000 people died, but as soon as they mentioned dolphins as the cause nobody would listen.

Other books didn't mention the dolphins, for fear of ridicule, skirting around the issue, and simply saying how the lighthouses failed, how a fog suddenly arrived as if from nowhere, and people died in their thousands.

I decided to head up to one of the lighthouses and incredibly heard the tale of how lighthouse keepers died one after the other, pushed from the lighthouses to their deaths by some unseen force. They were forbidden from working any of the lighthouses yet had to keep them. Ships were banned from travelling nearby, as were planes. Only one plane and one ferry was allowed, and both were blessed meticulously each time. Without the blessing, they too would die.

I was shown newspaper article after newspaper article, and even one book by a lighthouse keeper. I was told it was the same in the other lighthouses too. I was even allowed to read the book, not being forced to buy it. It was the same in the museums - they didn't care about selling their books.

"So where is the ghost tour?" I asked, thinking that surely this was leading up to something.

"There is no ghost tour," the lighthouse keeper told me.

I was told about a cottage, one of three, Hope, Faith and Charity, where I could find out more about the history. They weren't museums so much as they were heritage buildings, kept in pristine condition.

On the way there I stumbled upon a statue. It was just kind of there, not marked, almost hidden, behind a bush. If I wasn't so clumsy I wouldn't have seen it. There was a man with three women reaching up to him, and many children behind him. I didn't know what it represented or who he was. There was no label underneath.

"That's Governor Wallace," they told me at the cottage. "He was the first man on Kangaroo Island - the first person."

I remembered that I was told that the first white man on Kangaroo Island was one of my relatives. Was Governor Wallace one of my relatives? Wallace Meredith?

They couldn't tell me for sure, but they told me what a good man he was, how his religion, that of the Freemasons, became the official religion of Kangaroo Island.

In a second cottage I was shown the religion, including the sacrifice room, where they had at one point conducted human sacrifices.

"He sacrificed two of his three Aboriginal wives," the caretaker happily told me, "and 23 of his 27 children."

He was a mass murderer but they were praising him? I had to look at them twice, to see if it was a joke. Apparently not.

"He saved the island, kept it safe. He still watches over us," they told me.

There was a third cottage, they told me, but I wasn't allowed there. That was the worship room. That was only for residents of the island.

"Move here and we will show you the third cottage," they told me.

I didn't think I wanted to move there.

I was shaken from my visit to the cottages, worse when I found out that only one cottage was opened.

But I had seen two.

The other two, I was told, were in disrepair. They weren't open to the public because they weren't safe.

The one I saw wasn't in disrepair. Why were they lying? The third one they didn't say was in disrepair either.

Perhaps the most shocking thing was when I went to get dinner at the local Fish and Chips shop, and I got to talking to one of the owners about what I had seen.

"We don't want to be here," she told me, then smiled and laughed with customers as if to hide the secrets she was telling me. I didn't know her either so why did she trust me?

She told me how house prices are cheap there, and a lot of people, who can't afford the prices on the mainland, moved there, sometimes to retire, or sometimes thinking they can make money from the tourist trade, but it's blood money.

"Not everyone makes it back from those day tours," she told me.

I remembered having to sign a waiver that if we died on the tour that we wouldn't sue the company. One of the tour guides even joked about it.

"How many people die exactly?" I asked her.

"Each day people die. Every day. Not a lot. Sometimes one, sometimes two. Sometimes tourists, sometimes locals. Enough for them to hide. Always accidents. The kinds of things that happen anywhere. Only they happen more often here. And they are not accidents," she told me.

Accidents that are not accidents. So like that movie "Final Destination", I mused.

"Final Destination was probably based on what really happens here," she warned me. "Only they aren't dying because death wants them. It's evil spirits. They kill good people to try to follow them into the afterlife."

She was serious. She looked scared, like she was worried that she might die any moment.

"I can't get off here. The island won't let me go. I've tried so many times. We've both tried. Just about everyone on the island wants to leave. It's terrible here. But we can't leave," she was almost crying.

She tried to explain it to me, but it was too hard for me to understand. She told me that when I make it back, and she was sure I would, that I should research it, but don't type in Kangaroo Island. "Type in Karta," she told me. "That's the real name of this place."

We all talked about our experiences when we were back, the four of us. The Italian couple had travelled to the far end of the island, and had been to all four lighthouses, all telling the same chilling tale. They were convinced that it was to sell books, or for some ghost tour.

But they let us read the books for free. We could buy them if we wanted to but we didn't have to. Nobody bought the books.

I got home and looked it up.

Karta was the Aboriginal name for hell.

Or close enough to it.

In Aboriginal beliefs, in their religion, they believe that when you die you go to a special island, to Karta, where you are judged as to whether you were good or evil. If you are good, you go up to the afterlife, to the Milky Way, where you live forever in the stars. If you are evil, you stay on Karta until you have paid for your crimes. How long you stay on Karta depends on how good you are.

So everyone goes to Karta, not just good, not just evil. Everyone.

It went on about how, if you are really evil then they give you a second chance, to live as your totem animal. If your totem was a kangaroo, then you would be reborn, on Karta, as a kangaroo. Then, if you lived a good life as a kangaroo, then, once you died, you could go to the Milky Way.

No human is meant to go to Karta, not while alive. To do so is to corrupt the process. They might try to kill you, to follow you into the afterlife, and never learn their lessons.

We weren't meant to be there. Those animals were not animals. They were people trying to make amends for living a wicked life.

The funny thing is that there were many Kartas, not just this one, but all of the others had no real place. In the north, Karta was an imaginary island in the middle of the sea, one that nobody could visit. The only Karta that could be visited was Kangaroo Island. For the others, you could only go there when you were dead.

Books had been written about Karta, not just about the Kangaroo Island one, but about the others too.

Wikipedia claimed that there was proof that Aboriginals had lived there at one point, but Aboriginals themselves disagreed.

The evidence of tools did not prove anyone living was ever there, they told me. It just proved that the dead could manifest, that the animals were really people. It did not prove what Wikipedia said it proved.

Then I found out that Governor Wallace's real name was George Meredith, and he was one of my ancestors. My great-great-great-great uncle.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out it was indirect, not direct. There was a George Meredith who was a great-great-great-grandfather, but it was a different George. This one was an uncle.

"That's why most of the Merediths in Australia are black," I was told.

Most, but not all. But, as with most families who have been in Australia for as long as our family had, there was a good smattering of Aborigines in our gene pool, and not just from Governor Wallace.

I wasn't going to write a book about it. I don't have anyone's permission. I could get permission, perhaps, but only some will give it. The people who run the museums might give it, but some say things that others contradict. Some want things to be told, others don't. The lighthouse keepers want it to be told, but not the people who run the cottages. They don't want anyone to say a single bad thing about Governor Wallace.

You'd think that a mass murderer would be thought of worse than that, but he actually isn't. Even Aborigines were sympathetic. They blamed the evil spirits, not him. He was a nice guy before he went to Karta. That's why you shouldn't go to Karta, I was told.

It's hard to know what to believe and what not to believe, but it makes a good story, a really good story.

I have only written a short story version of it, 20,000 words, a novella they tell me. It is not yet ready to be made into a novel.

A lot of people want to read it, though. I'm even tempted to release it before Children of the Crescent Moon.