© 1978, 1995

When they got up, the color had gone from everything.
At first, of course, they thought something was wrong with their eyes.
Claud was watching his set when it went black and white. He fiddled with the color knob and noticed that it was black and white too. So was the lounge room. So was he.
Melanie’s set was black and white, so she didn’t notice for a while, till she raised her hand to her mouth to yawn during a commercial.
Sylvio was reading a blockbuster novel called Checkerboard Sky and shut the thing in disgust. The cover seemed less lurid than when he opened it. The carriage was sober in grey as well. The pylons flicking past were steel-grey, but so were the trees. His suit was shark-grey. But it had been tan.
The sky was grey, the white sun blazed remote from cloud. The rivers were grey as the silver carp that Tino caught. The road was unchanged but his car took on its starkness like a chameleon. The reeds lost their yellow-brown.
Rock videos switched to monochrome but not back again.
Blanche, writing a monograph on color-blindness, paused to gaze out of the window.
Phones ran hot. Optometrists listened with hands over eyes. Questions were asked in the colorless House. When they recovered from their matinal grief, people made jokes. “There goes the kaleidoscope industry.” said Senator Burke. “It’s a black (and white) day.” said Hugh. “He’s always seen things in black and white.” said Fatima. Petra announced that the parrots looked like magpies.
Most of the jokes were nervously fluffed. They were afraid something else would go. They wanted answers. Scientists could not explain it. Cults multiplied. Life survived, though, with ads and color-codes and flags modified. Camouflage was easier in the army, harder on snakes. Half-tone illustrations filled the glossies. Charcoal masterpieces flourished and Black Paintings were revived (to go with White). Chess sets sold out. ‘Contrast’ was the in-word, the buzzword, the universal substitute for thought. The ‘Age of Contrast’ had begun, achromatic as the print before you, visionless as divine justice.
Whatever color, most people were varying shades of grey. They and the landscape shrank. After the jokes they (if sighted) blundered around, drained, sullen. Autumn slipped by, in mourning. In spring, the broadbean flower was brightest.
In the end, they got used to it. Children were born who never knew the sharp color vision of anthropoids. Despite that, abstruse arguments about the source and nature of the change spread over the decades; then, when it was deemed metaphysical to speak of origins, about the nature of it alone. Hardly any of this seeped into the popular press after a bit. Philosophers built or broke careers with mathematically subtle diatribes on the perception of reality, as ever. Grants for Color Research diminished. The tenth incumbent of the once-radical chair in Colorifics at the A.N.U. declared that no more suprises were foreseen in his field. Claud, an old man by now with flecks of white in his black hair, watched his telly in the op art lounged. He still hoped that one day, all would just as suddenly ‘return to normal’. A few hours after the Change, he stared at his television, gulping down the frenetic news reports and interviews with leaders, etc; later he could scarcely bear to watch the mocking thing. A year into ‘albinegrescence’, he would turn it on now and then just to be sure … As his life unfolded in the accepted way, the hope sank from a fountain to a trickle, as if its water table had fallen. What did color matter? Yet he wondered what color dress the quiz show hostess had on, and what color she was.
Tino remembered a time when the birch trees wept yellow and green tears.

There was a war, of course, but there might have been anyway.

The bees and butterflies pollinated less flowers.

Life adapted as it had to industry.

The ecology changed.

Hugh yawned.

Why?

The hue and cry (said Fatima) had long died down. The Change remained wholly inexplicable. Totally. The sky of the first Aborigines was moon-blue, the grass after fire so green it took one’s breath away, the gumleaves blue-green, the banksia bloom red as fire, precious as water. Now it must be the same, somehow, covertly; unless the light-absorptive properties of objects had altered (but not, as tests proved, their composition). Theories explained the Change in terms that always needed further explaining: none put it beyond explanation.
“A theory that does not explain is no theory.” said Colorifician Professor Black, and her mortal enemy Professor White agreed.
The singular (if not naked) causelessness of the death of color bored the young generation. They neither accepted it nor sought reasons. Obsessed with surfaces, they dressed not in the muted greys of their parents but in deep-black stripes, with starched hair dyed pepper-and-salt. Some wore spots like dice and fought with the stripes. Spirals, from the new bold roses, made stripes obsolete. It was all so familiar. Nothing to worry about. Yet even this thought could not stem the anguish of the intellectuals. Color was, said Professor Black, an illusion, a response of human neurophysiology to given frequencies of visible light. Had not the human (and animal) eye degenerated? That was where the cause must lie. Eye and brain studies suggested otherwise. She denigrated them as biased, preset as crossword games.
Rubbish, said Professor White. “Obviously a red object, say, no longer absorbs all colors but red, but now reflecting no rays appears black. That is, things had turned black and white. Measurements of the light emanating from a tomato showed the bandwidths typical before the Change, however.
Most intermediate gradations of opinion rehashed the paradoxes and errors of these extremes. But rather than blaming matter or mind, they claimed that light itself had acquired ‘chiaroscuro’. No causal agent in air or sun could be adduced.
Then one discovery gave weight to White’s theory. In a dark cave of blind wan fish, a color was found. Blood had grown blacker, contrast deepening; but the blood of the entirely new species Rara colorosa was a very pale pink, so pale that the unaided eye did not detect it. Enhanced by speleorobot processor it was visible to all. (Claud, watching it splashed over his screen, died of surprise.) There was a color in the world that only the color-blind and the unsighted missed. Yet, apart from the Lurid Fish, as they called it, there was no color in the world.
White’s explanation (which I favor, though it is explanatory) is, with its shortcomings, now orthodoxy. Today we have grown accustomed to intrinsic paradox, even in pooular science. Regardless of the apparently subjective nature of the Change, our sense of color is unimpaired. If the sky were blue it would look blue. But it is blue and does not and we do not know why. It may be that we will abandon our search for the mechanism of the Change as we long ago (apart from diehard Marxists) set aside the question of its origins. Indeed, the two may relate. What is more germane, perhaps, is its meaning.

It seems to have no meaning.

Paradise is said to be colored. But no one alive recalls an objective hue, since the Lurid Fish failed to thrive in captivity. We have a few pictures and they are fading. In a millennium, humanity will forget color. And maye race and religion and the political spectrum generally. Instead, the world is dividing more than ever into Black and White.
When Tino died, black and white crysanthemums were strewn over his coffin. His friends made their bad jokes. Since he is arguably our greatest poet, and my main source of local color, it seems fitting to end with a fragment of his last, brief work:

I see you gasp on the shore
Leached of life
Your only color now
The color of my dreams

Why, indeed. If you see a green and yellow carp, it’s probably a pigment of your imagination.

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