Mia Sacra Collina
My grandmother took me searching for the hermit’s cave the year I turned twelve.
At that age I was sponge-like in my desire to know and understand all of the world’s curiosities, and growing more and more suspicious that it was a much crueller, more disappointing place than a childhood spent immersed in the works of Enid Blyton had led me to believe. For these reasons the idea of a trek to find the home of a man who turned his face away from the world was appealing to me.
Valerio Ricetti was born in the Lombardy region of Italy, and at the age of sixteen immigrated to Australia on the brink of war in 1914. Like so many others, Ricetti escaped a Europe that was crumbling under the weight of itself, and followed the promise of work to the burgeoning towns of inland Australia, which were doing the lion’s share of nation-building and needed all the help they could get. Ricetti worked in the mines at Broken Hill, until a barmaid broke his heart in the first of a series of episodes that would eventually convince the already-insular Ricetti that the world was not meant for the likes of him.
The straw that ultimately broke him was the theft of his most valuable possession, a good woollen coat. With this, Ricetti seemed to give up: leaving behind his life, he walked a last pilgrimage away from the world, from Hillston to Griffith, a journey of one hundred and twenty kilometres. In a final cruel joke, he arrived just as one of the Riverina’s customary late-afternoon summer storms split open the skies. Luckily, Ricetti found makeshift shelter in a cave located high above the town, in the hills on Crown land. That cave would become his home for more than twenty years, and write for him a chapter in Australian folklore.
At twelve years old, I worshiped my grandmother and would have happily searched the world over for the cave if it had pleased her. As it turned out, we did not have to go far.
Griffith was the town in which my mother had been born and grown up, and we returned there often to visit family. As we climbed through scrub and stringy-barks on our way up the hill, my grandmother told me she recalled seeing the hermit as an old man, shuffling down the main street to buy his groceries. Later I would discover that the anecdote was almost certainly untrue: Ricetti died aged in his early fifties in his native Italy, not long after World War II and much before my grandmother would have had the opportunity to spy him buying groceries in Griffith, if he ever even did such a thing. It seems likely that my grandmother, perhaps aware that her young granddaughter was already prone to the macabre and the morose, wished to paint the hermit in such a way as to make him more lovable eccentric than half-crazed recluse, or worse still, sad cautionary tale of life’s many vagaries.
I remember very little of the actual complex of caves and structures that became Ricetti’s home, although by all accounts they are a minor miracle of engineering and architecture. I remember the smell of eucalypt, and great outcroppings of rock eating sky like gaping mouths. I remember the careful dry walling that Ricetti completed by hand and at night to avoid detection, with the same skill that when he was interred as an enemy alien during World War II, would see him teach his captors more about masonry and road building than any engineer could.
Most of all, though, I remember the image of the town as I looked down upon it from the peak of the hill: I could see it whole and complete, something which no vantage point below space could allow me to do of Sydney, my own hometown. I thought it remarkable, and I wondered whether Ricetti had ever looked down upon that view, or if he regularly had to resist doing so for fear of having his heart broken all over again. I wondered if he had no desire to look upon the world at all.
**
What is it about Australia that inspires so many to attempt to prove themselves against it, alone?
Is it that the country itself sits marooned away from the rest of the world, and we are inspired by the life that has thrived for millions of years on this island of mainly inhabitable desert? Is it the lingering ghost of the colonial within us, compelling us to prove that we are this land’s champions, stronger alone than the worst of its whole? Perhaps given enough time here, this land’s aching, stretching emptiness begins to seep beneath the skin, until we are infected with it, until we too become like islands, hungering for isolation? Personally, I believe we remain still so unsure of ourselves on this borrowed land, our collective psyche still so guilt-ridden, that some part of us wishes to see ourselves exiled at home, made strangers in this strange land.
Whatever it is, there are so many stories of the wilfully alone—the hermits and recluses and desert adventurers and early explorers, William Buckley to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly to the Eternity Man—that in the narrative of our nation’s inception and development, ‘the loner’ has reached near archetypal status.
Whatever it is, Valerio Ricetti’s lonely Garden of Eden high above the Murrumbidgee is a minor national treasure and a still-viable tourist destination in the Riverina. Whenever I return to Griffith I try to make that same hike up the hill, look down upon the world from that same spot.