Reading the Landscape : A Celebration of Australian Writing 9780702261305

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First published 2018 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia uqp.com.au [email protected] Copyright in this collection © University of Queensland Press 2018. Copyright © in individual works remains with the authors. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Typeset in 12/16pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Melbourne This project is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. www.copyright.com.au The University of Queensland Press is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

The University of Queensland Press is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

ISBN 978 0 7022 6008 7 (pbk) ISBN 978 0 7022 6015 5 (hbk) ISBN 978 0 7022 6130 5 (pdf ) ISBN 978 0 7022 6131 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7022 6132 9 (kindle) University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests.The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

L I S T O F CO N T E NTS K E Y  F FI CTI ON   NF  NON- FI CT IO N   P   P O E T RY

BERNADETTE BREN N A N

Introduction 

IX

ALI ALI ZADEH

Hope? 

P  2

M I REI LLE J UCHA U

After the Strider, the Stranger 

F  1 1

LI LY BRETT

A Loud and Unruly Crowd 

NF  2 9

RODNEY HALL

Glimpses of Europe Lost 

F  3 8

M ELI SSA LUCASHE N KO

Border Protection 

P  5 4

GABRI ELLE CARE Y

Like a Love Affair 

NF  5 7

M ATTHEW CONDO N

Lotus 

F  7 2

J OSEPHI NE ROW E

All Things Once Molten 

F  8 7

LARI SSA BEHREN D T

The Smoke of Several Fires 

NF  9 4

DAVI D M ALOUF

Garden Poems 

P  10 8

v

KAREN FOXLEE

A Little Lower Than the Top of the Sky 

F  1 14

PATTI M I LLER

Icarus 

NF  1 2 8

SAM UEL WAGAN WATSO N

Temporary Ghosts 

P  141

J ULI E KOH

The Lion 

F  147

PETER CAREY

The Road to St Lucia 

NF  1 5 9

SARAH HOLLAND- BATT

In My Father’s Country 

P  1 6 5

STEVEN HERRI CK

The Taste of Blue 

F  1 8 1

NI CHOLAS J OSE

Beetroot 

F  19 1

PETER SKRZYNECKI

Red Cabbages 

P  2 0 6

JAM ES M OLONEY

What Ever Happened to Carl from Wiseman’s Cove?  JAYA SAVI GE

Credo, Décor, Coder 

vi

P  2 24

F  2 10

VENERO ARM ANN O

Black Cockatoos 

F  2 3 0

K ÁRI GÍ SLASON

Swimming Lessons 

NF  24 6

DAVI D BROOKS

The Touch 

F  2 5 8

ELLEN VAN NEERV E N

18Cs 

P  2 7 5

Acknowledgements  2 8 1

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Bernadette Brennan is an academic and researcher in contemporary Australian writing, literature and ethics. She is the author of a number of publications, including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections: Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice (UQP, 2008), and Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Vagabond, 2008). Her most recent book is A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text, 2017). She lives in Sydney.

Introduction In 1940 J.I.M. Stewart, the Edinburgh-born novelist and Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, was invited to deliver a lecture on Australian literature. In a breathtaking slight, he deemed no Australian book worthy of his time and chose to speak instead on D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Eight years later the University of Queensland Press (UQP) was established. Now, in celebration of the seventy years in which UQP has nurtured Australian writers and writing, the Press has given readers a rare gift. Reading the Landscape brings together generations of Australian writers whose new work showcases the rich diversity, quality and relevance of our nation’s literature. What images or ideas spring to mind when you read the words: Hope, Vision, Legacy? What stories might you imagine when you think about Origins, Country, Frontiers or Heritage? UQP Publishing Director Madonna Duffy selected these seven words as being reflective of the UQP philosophy and focus as it enters its eighth decade. She invited authors whose books have played a significant role in UQP’s success to use these themes as inspiration for the work collected here. The best anthologies – the ones we keep always beside our bed, in our bag, next to or tucked down the side of our reading chair – delight with their variation. They are equally satisfying when dipped into or read in sustained sittings. Reading the Landscape is such a book. Poetry, fiction, essay and memoir come together in this unique and timely

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collection; each piece complete and self-contained, yet also part of larger conversations and imaginative journeys. Since 1968, when it published Roger McDonald’s Citizens of Mist, and Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott’s edited anthology New Impulses in Australian Poetry, UQP has been a constant and invaluable promoter of Australian poetry. Then, as now, few publishing houses were prepared to take on the financial risk of producing expensive volumes of poetry for a small market. In 1969, David Malouf approached Frank W. Thompson, then publishing manager of UQP and its associated bookshop, with a challenging proposition. Malouf would deliver his manuscript – which went on to become Bicycle and Other Poems – but only on the condition that it was first published as a paperback, a publishing innovation that was considered radical at the time. The Paperback Poets series was born and heralded a new generation of poets. In Reading the Landscape, Malouf ’s newest suite of poems, ‘Garden Poems’, is infused with a sense of menace, ‘Everything in the garden/ is scary, a murderous/silent soft-kill epic’; melancholy, ‘so much flamboyance in the act of simple dying’; and quiet jubilation, ‘Tumbling in/and out under the radar, honeyeaters,/from hello sunshine to blanket show/rejoicing, as we do,/in the illimitable instancies’. It is always a source of joy to read new work by old masters; even more joyous to discover strong new work from younger generations. All of the poetry in this anthology is exemplary. Sarah HollandBatt’s extended elegy, ‘In My Father’s Country’, is exceptional. So too, Josephine Rowe’s ‘All Things Once Molten’, a lyric prose poem of radical being-in-the-world that reflects profoundly on creativity, sensation and loss. Kevin Gilbert’s poetry collection People are Legends: Aboriginal Poems (1978), was UQP’s first book by an Aboriginal author. Just over a decade later two significant books by non-Indigenous academics appeared: J.J. Healy’s Literature and the Aborigine in Australia,

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1770–1975 and Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988. By the mid-1990s UQP began in earnest to champion writing by Australia’s first peoples. In 1996 it published Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the next year Plains of Promise and Steam Pigs, debut novels for Waanyi woman Alexis Wright and Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage Melissa Lucashenko. In 1988 UQP established the annual David Unaipon Award for the best writing of the year by an unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander author. They have continued to publish the winner of this award since. UQP has an impressive list of Aboriginal authors. Four are featured in Reading the Landscape. Ellen van Neerven, of Mununjali and Dutch heritage, narrates the reality of lived racism. In her poem, ‘18Cs’, her ‘protection has gone’. She can no longer ‘skip home’. She’s ‘grown up to a world that was uglier than the one I was promised’. Yet she will not be cowed: ‘courage is telling them what you think of that play, that script they try and write us in will no longer contain us’. In ‘Border Protection’, Melissa Lucashenko draws authority from the songs of Archie Roach, the poetry of Tony Birch, and the words and counsel of Kev Carmody and Alexis Wright to assert defiantly an unassailable right of belonging. Samuel Wagan Watson, hailing from the Birri-Gubba, Mununjali, Germanic and Gaelic peoples, tells a more disheartening story. Feted around the world, he returns to Australia: ‘Back to being a ghost in a province that is home.’ He warns, ‘There is only one sure way to judge the words produced by black Australian writers and that is by recognising the ghosts that appear in their content.’ As this anthology goes to press, there is an increasing groundswell of support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for the establishment of a ‘First Nations Voice’ in the Australian Constitution and a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’ between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In a similar vein, in

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her essay, ‘The Smoke of Several Fires’, Larissa Behrendt makes a plea for non-Indigenous Australians to respect and learn from the land management practices of traditional owners, but moreover insists that we as a nation must move beyond the paralysing ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset that polarises Australian history to find a ‘more sophisticated, nuanced and inclusive national narrative’. The contemporary relevance, as well as the outward vision, of this collection is manifest in the way these writers address pressing issues such as robodebt, rental prices, asylum seekers and climate change. Characters negotiate traumatic, and sometimes restorative, forms of dislocation and connection as their worlds collide across time and space. Some have lived through bombings in Baghdad or Syrian warzones, others have fled revolution, others again strive to find and preserve the vanishing links to family murdered in the Holocaust. Repeatedly the questions arise: What does it mean to belong? To speak of home? Kári Gíslason writes poignantly about his ‘patterns of migration and return’ from Australia to the country of his birth. As he explores the relationship between writing and swimming, he discovers that both activities have become integral to the way he understands his heritage: ‘writing about Iceland had become an act of the water, connecting islands that lay far apart – between them, the light blue sea and the dark waves, handfuls of water just beyond the fingertips’. His memoir, ‘Swimming Lessons’, made me want to rush out and buy a ticket to Reykjavík, having packed goggles and a volume of the great Icelandic sagas. Julie Koh and Gabrielle Carey also examine the practice of writing, particularly the existential crisis brought on by a loss of faith in creative capability and, even more disorienting, the vocation of a writer. As Carey asks in her essay, ‘Like a Love Affair’: ‘But if all writing is an effort to find that which has been lost, how do I go about finding my lost faith in writing itself? How do I write myself back into writing?’ Her answer is to go back to the book that set her ‘on the path to

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becoming a writer’: Ivan Southall’s To the Wild Sky. She immerses herself in Southall’s archive only to discover that as she relates her ‘adventures’ to us she has, of course, regained her ‘writing mojo’. Koh is a little more playful. Her short story, ‘The Lion’, begins: ‘Guy de Maupassant lives in a shed at the bottom of my garden.’ De Maupassant fills the narrator’s world. She makes him peanut-butter sandwiches and becomes ‘preoccupied with writing to impress him’. When he eventually vanishes, she is ‘struck with an immeasurable sorrow’. Her description of the inevitable let-down that follows creative production is searing. It was never going to be possible to include all of UQP’s best-known authors in one anthology. Fortunately, two hugely popular authors for children and young adults have delivered new fiction. James Moloney responds to the years of questioning about what happened to Carl after the conclusion of his best-selling novel, A Bridge to Wiseman’s Cove (1996). And in ‘The Taste of Blue’, Steven Herrick delivers an unsentimental tale of survival in the face of catastrophic destruction. Each of the twenty-five contributions to Reading the Landscape is introduced by a short author biography. Taken together, they narrate an important, celebratory story about UQP’s history and demonstrate the role that this well-respected publishing house has played in launching and nourishing the work of some of Australia’s finest writers. Peter Carey explains in his memoir, ‘The Road to St Lucia’, how crucial it was that UQP was prepared to back him when he was youngish and unknown to the industry: ‘I had been so often nearly published, and regretfully rejected, so frequently not acceptable at this present time. I was, in one instance, insufficiently distinguished.’ Reading the Landscape appears in 2018 at a time of deep national and global anxiety. These poems, essays, fiction and memoir bear witness to the strength of Australian literature and encourage us to engage with the most serious issues of our time. In her essay, ‘A Loud and Unruly Crowd’, Lily Brett writes: ‘Indifference has always

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frightened me. Indifference is a perfect breeding ground for hatred. Indifference allows politics of hate to flourish.’ She implores us, ‘polish your conscience. The world needs it.’ Seventy-eight years after Professor Stewart’s calculated disregard of Australian writing, we have an anthology, bookended by two charged and brilliant poems, that demands attention. The opening line of Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Hope?’ sets the tone: ‘And what can we do about it?’ The challenge is laid down. The conversation has begun. The poem’s speaker no longer believes in ‘the promise/of art, because in our situation/as you know, art is either pretentious/wank, or shitty/entertainment’. He does not believe in ‘the beauty of nature’ or ‘the magic of family’. But he thinks there is hope and it is to be found in the collective, in us, who ‘will/resume history’. Similarly, Ellen van Neerven’s final words call proudly for ‘a new coat of oppression. this one’s wearing thin.’ Reading the Landscape bears witness to the strength and importance of Australian writing. Fortunately, UQP is now one of a number of publishing houses working to ensure the health of Australia’s literary landscape. This anthology showcases how twenty-five writers respond to the challenges and beauty of their world; hopefully but a glimpse of what we may come to expect from Australian writing of the future. Bernadette Brennan June 2018

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Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976 and migrated to Australia in 1991. In 2011 UQP published his poetry collection, Ashes in the Air, which went on to be shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Transactions (UQP, 2013), a narrative of perverse and satirical interconnected stories, was published to rave reviews. His other books include Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006), The New Angel (Transit Lounge, 2008), Iran: My Grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010), and The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (Giramondo, 2017). He is a senior lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Monash University, Melbourne.

Hope? And what can we do about it? About what? Who’s we? You know what is the only thing I can talk about. Sorta abstract noun, sorta impossible to ignore these days. Whose days? Ours. I was thinking about it this morning, dreamt about it last night, came across it today at the shopping centre. Money? Well, that’s only the universal measure of an exchange-value. No. Something lost in money. Labour –time? Yes, maybe, no. Not per se. Of course I’m worried about losing my job. I know you are too. (And can I just mention in passing, this worry is the foundation of you and me becoming we.) Production? Sorta, but that’s READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 2

neither desire nor drive. The banality of being human, making things to use or swap, a precursor to a situation. And what’s our situation? I saw it ten minutes ago when I was afraid of deleting my boss’s email. I heard it two days ago when the management launched another pilot program. What we can (will?) do about it is not akin to impulsive rebellion against mundane authority. It’s when the quotidian becomes cannibalistic when things become as they are now: when, say, at the shopping centre I realised I couldn’t really buy my son a book. When rental prices are so high the employed can’t afford housing, welfare agencies send debt notices to the poorest of the unemployed. When the democratically elected vote to scrap casual workers’ entitlements, people are fired to be rehired at a lower salary. Listen. It’s not just economic our situation is historical part of a sequence will lead to the thing we’ve gotta talk about and isn’t really an abstract common noun. A LI A LI ZA D E H 3

If I’d wanted to spook you I’d speak apocalyptic Vlad the Putin, global warming or sensory horror (children in Syria, Syrian children in hellish refugee camps here) or, say, trigger warning for moral outrage à la racism, fattism, ableism etc. But the thing we’ve gotta talk about can’t be avoided, can’t be corrected by progressive ideology, ethical niceties of, say, reducing carbon footprints or marching against misogyny. Listen. I’m not sorry. I’m sorta obsessed with history I can’t help cringing when I hear food revolution, IT revolution, fashion revolution, AI revolution.

There’s only the Revolution. It had (has?) roots only in the soil of life’s basics. In the material of producing things (food, shelter, mainly) in a situation where production is owned by the few who live very nicely, off the labour and lives of the many. The year READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 4

1789 – peasants, labourers, urban workers, artisans, journeymen, market women, slaves on plantations, Paris’s 25,000 prostitutes, lower ranking soldiers, lay clergy, minor officials all in all the poorest group = the largest stratum in ancienne France still only a population of individuals fearful, angry, underfed.

When the king threatened mutinous, bribed legislators (under the influence of aristocracy, with the blessing of the upper clergy) and when he sacked a pompous, popular minister

so many of the anxious, enraged, hungry rallied. Nothing amazing yet. Noisy protests come and go. The Bastille was almost derelict, a mostly disused prison. No doubt a terrifying icon of ruling class dominion. When those gathered outside the very tall towers requesting gunpowder, so that they could counter the threat of the king’s army, if need be and the Bastille’s governor huffed, opened fire around 100 civilians A LI A LI ZA D E H 5

died not as civilians they died as the first Revolutionaries. Their blood soaked the site of a new event. Suddenly, abstractions (the progressive philosophy of the Enlightenment, human rights, free speech, religious tolerance, etc.) became trivial contra the explosion of life’s basics: ordinary civilians getting cut down by cannon shots and mortar fire from the walls of the hated fortress. Multiple needs coalesced, changed into the Common Will. Isolated persons became a political class. Identities fused into universality. The Bastille was stormed. The Revolution was here.

How do I convince you that I’m not mad? That it’s not idiotic to talk about it. I’ll give you four reasons (four as good a number as any): 1. The more profit is made via booms in the market the more is produced READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 6

with excess capital, prices of products will go down, profits will go down, wages will shrivel, many workers will be fired and who will afford all the excess products then? Markets bust. And so 2. The obscenity of titanic wealth at the very top, struggle for the rest of us. The split between the moneyed (say, the upper middle class with investment property portfolios) and the rest of us becomes an absolute divide. Irreversible. And so 3. Crises in democracies that have become plutocracies, so many of the angry malnourished ‘deplorables’ will no longer vote for elect elites. Populism? Fear it if you must, decry demagogues, it won’t make a damn difference, because of 4. The collapse of the ideological: liberalism meritocracy, equity, inclusivity have finally A LI A LI ZA D E H 7

lost their shine. Xenophobia? Terrorism? Rape culture? Just the tips of a colossal iceberg. But don’t panic. Listen. The choice has always been between barbarism and what I’m talking about, something I actually sorta really believe in (and I don’t believe in a lot these days, e.g. in the promise of art, because in our situation as you know, art is either pretentious wank, or shitty entertainment. And I don’t believe in the beauty of nature anymore, because as you know, in our situation nature is either eco-tourism or eco-tragedy. And I don’t believe in the magic of family these days, because in our situation as you know, home is often the battlefield of beloveds, bruised by life in a loveless world). So listen. Our situation is self-annihilatory. An event looms on the horizon of our very greatest

READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 8

expectation. Don’t be afraid comrade. The Revolution never ended. Were the governor of our prison to huff, open fire at us, would we not come together again? I think we would. I think we will resume history. I think there’s hope.

A LI A LI ZA D E H 9

Mireille Juchau is a critically acclaimed Australian novelist. Her first novel, Machines for Feeling, was published by UQP in 2001. Her most recent novel, The World Without Us (Bloomsbury, 2015), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Stella Prize, and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She is also the author of Burning In (Giramondo, 2007), which was shortlisted for four awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Described by The Guardian UK as ‘a writer of great poetic power’, Mireille is also known for her short fiction, essays and reviews.

After the Strider, the Stranger Six months after the hold-up, they sold the house. The men who’d stolen her bag had her keys, her phone, her address. A sign went up in front of the weatherboard, so passers-by could see from outside what was in. Strangers came to divine the worth of the house, tapping walls and pacing distances, cocking their ears to local noises. After the viewings, evidence of who’d been through. Human shapes pressed into the bed, cupboards ajar, kitchen that belonged to no-one. As Samara prepared the house for sale, she tried imagining it as a loved body – a body they’d each wrestled with, then given in to – laid out for final viewing. But deep in domestic drudgery, she felt herself shrink, grow desiccated. Since then, they’d moved four times. Better to live in a state of impermanence than one of finality. She’d copied this into a midnight text but now, in the merciless afternoon light, wondered how Raf would read it. A message about the futility of searching? It was three months since he’d left for Iraq and she’d managed this latest move alone. Here she was in the musty rental, hemmed in by asbestos sheeting and storage boxes. She had no idea where he was. With Karrar on Mutanabbi Street, crossing the Tigris, or following a cold trail through Adhamiyah? Longing and doubt came in waves since he’d left. How to balance the smallness of her home life with his majestic story? Some mornings she was epic and martyred as Penelope waiting for Odysseus. Other days, walking their son to school, or lugging an Aldi bag of bargain M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 11

dairy, she felt so landlocked and local she could barely breathe. Samara stood in the kitchen with its small doors and sliding cabinets. Along the benches were cartons of food bought weeks back. She still couldn’t guess what each cupboard was for. And yes, she felt safer with everything boxed and the house lighter, less burdened. She forced herself to do the five senses scan, to reel back into the present. Today’s mental inventory: ibis honking, the piss scent of mown grass, a white, abrading light. Still, the judgements fell. Should’ve stayed in the previous house. Ought to have finished her thesis by now. How much damage had they done to Jude, with their restlessness? She frowned at her Stuyvesant. People didn’t smoke anymore. They did high-intensity training, for high-intensity cell renewal, or something. And who knew who was young and who was old and what they’d done to themselves to look the way they did? Her friends, immersed in forms of self-help, had all evolved beyond her. She waved the cigarette but didn’t draw back. A ritual, space clearing. In the sunroom, Raf ’s last painting. Today it was a sign. Yesterday, hypnotic strokes of orange and red. He’d titled it Ghorbeh. Now, the doorbell. Through the tinted glass, a man with one shoulder jerking. ‘Masa al-khair,’ he says as she opens the door. On the mat, his patterned socks, one toe protruding. On the step, worn, familiar looking shoes. A small, carved box under one arm. Beside him, tugging at a makeshift lead – her dog, missing since three days before. As she makes tea for this stranger, she examines herself. Combat pants and Raf ’s navy painting shirt, no bra. Toes with peeling red varnish. The kelpie sits close, giving her a baleful, human stare. Then stands on hind legs at the sink. A dog can smell sadness and pregnancy, a dog can sense cancer and fear. She wonders what her guilt smells like. One day the mechanism that allows a dog to detect these things will be built into your phone. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 12

He’d found the dog after midnight. By the river, he tells her. Then followed the creature across the empty park, the tennis courts and oval. She pictures those evening fields with their white rime. Framed by straight dark trees, the goalposts and houses like scenes in a negative strip. The suburb, still new, as filmic and unreal as she feels living in it. He shadowed the dog for three hours until, tired and hungry, it was ready to heel. Who’d spend their night that way? Dog lover, wanderer – who had so much time? Samara listens, picking dried paint off Raf ’s shirt. Something about the man’s accented vowels, the circular way he tells the story, turns it into myth. He keeps one hand on the box, which he’s placed carefully on the dining table. His wrists bare and narrow, nails bitten clean. It was the neighbour’s fireworks that had scared the dog, she tells him. She hadn’t been able to go searching because Jude was asleep and she didn’t know the locals well enough to ask for help. The next day, she’d put up posters. ‘Ali,’ he says and holds out his cup as one side of the room begins to waver. Samara hears Jude’s tread on the porch. The man swings around, his glazy eyes very alert as Jude careens in, knees crusted with dirt, glasses smeared, shirt chewed at the neck. Before she can introduce them, Jude shouts the dog’s name and they run into the yard. Her son’s return, the daily event that obliterates all thoughts about his father. When she returns from the kitchen with fresh tea and fruit the man and his box are gone. Outside, each thing is a paper cut-out. Distant forms sputter in the dusk. No shoes out front, no sign of any man on the path or road. On the poster she and Jude had made, Oscar’s photo, her phone number, the offer of reward. The stranger hadn’t called her. So how could he have known their address? Still no movement on the road. In the palm trees the ibises, digesting the day’s rubbish. M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 13

That night, Samara phoned Raf ’s sister. Hanni was expiring on the couch after the gym. They had a long-playing joke about Anytime Fitness because Hanni took the name so literally. ‘Last night, 11.47, I was cycling through the Pyrenees,’ Hanni said. ‘I can go anywhere while going nowhere. When I got home though, cockroaches eating my soy chai candles! But tell me, how’s the new suburb?’ ‘Everyone hates trees,’ said Samara. Since moving in, she’d watched a row of old figs felled for a new development. In the afternoons neighbours whirred from their cuckoo clock houses to hose their entombed gardens or chainsaw the living plants back to their barest nub. Then slid soundlessly behind blockout shutters. As she described this she realised what she was trying to say: there’d been no welcome. ‘A neighbour comes before the home,’ Hanni said in that way she had, calling up another time and place, the mother Samara had never met. Hanni lived in a flat from which she could hear the orphaned sounds from an amusement park, sounds that reminded her of childhood. In Baghdad it had been haram to go most places, but perhaps because government guards patrolled it, Hanni’s father had considered Zawra Park safe. ‘America destroyed us, then imagineered our childhoods,’ Hanni had told her. ‘They gave us skateboards, roller-coasters, artificial rivers, waterfalls. Shukran jazilan.’ Even the zoo had a medical clinic and generators while the hospital, where their father worked, lacked walls and electricity. Each morning, he’d lie under his car, his surgeon’s hands in the dirt, searching the vehicle for sticky bombs. One day Raf showed Samara the letter left by the militia at their door. Inside, a bullet. Their father stayed when the rest of the family fled – he wouldn’t abandon his patients. An unasked question still haunted his children: had he abandoned them? For years the children kept in touch. Then, eight months ago, he went missing. Raf took leave from his gallery job and returned to find him. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 14

With Hanni, Samara compares news and messages, weekly Facetime in which Raf appears more dishevelled. But no matter how much Samara consults the map, she cannot picture his searching. Iraq exists only in her imagination. For Raf though, it’s Sydney that remains unreal. ‘Last week I called all the contacts in Raf’s old phone,’ Hanni said. ‘I took notes. The man in their stories of my brother isn’t recognisable to me.’ Samara thought of Raf, playing up his exiled status at art school, then passing as Australian at Jude’s soccer games. He transfigured in every fresh environment. Like Houdini, he made all his escapes in broad daylight. ‘Was there anyone called Ali in Raf ’s contacts?’ Samara asked. ‘This guy turned up today, I thought …’ ‘Lah,’ said Hanni. ‘Ali? Who is he when he’s in his home?’ Samara struck a match, watched smoke climb the air. ‘That’s a no then?’ ‘I heard,’ said Hanni. ‘I won’t tell Raf you’re smoking again.’ That night, Samara wondered, what if the dog had not fled but been taken? How else could the stranger know where they lived? In Iraq a dog was a guard or a pest and Raf had resisted all Jude’s requests. But soon after he left for Baghdad, Samara drove to the pound. ‘I aggressively bought a kelpie,’ she told a friend over university coffee. She took out the photo of Oscar, chewing a deer’s ear in the yard. ‘A dog isn’t just for Christmas,’ Yasmin replied, singsong. ‘What happens when Raf comes back?’ ‘I’ll hide it,’ Samara said. ‘We have a lot of empty cupboards.’

When Samara was young, she was taught to make noise when arriving home to scare off potential burglars. An only child with an inflamed imagination, she’d beat on the door then sit, barely moving, at the front of the house until her parents arrived. Her mother had not instructed M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 15

what to do if an intruder entered another building while you were inside it. Since the post office hold-up, this had become her fate, and the shame of her inaction, her reckoning. It was Oscar who made noise now when she and Jude came home. And the neighbours who yelled, ‘Quiet you mongrel!’, then suggested, in a note of red capitals, that she have the animal debarked. Samara checked the doors and windows. How must she look from the outside, pressed like this to the glass? After witnessing this routine, Yasmin started joking about Samara’s Jewish paranoia, texting her Gladys Kravitz memes from Bewitched. She’d phone, asking, ‘What’s the news on the street, Kravitz?’ But it’s Hanni’s question that replays as Samara twists in bed, takes another pill and waits for sleep to obliterate what her mind believes is coming for her. Who is he when he’s in his home? A question about a stranger that makes her think of Raf.

‘Edward has a living nanny,’ says Jude as they pass a man with a sheep carcass over his shoulder. ‘Live-in,’ says Samara, pulling the kelpie closer. ‘The nanny stays in your friend’s home.’ They’re walking by the dollar shops, the windows of oozing cakes, shaved ice and discount shoes. ‘The whole time?’ Jude marvels, taking the leash. ‘A person you don’t even know?’ They cross a wet pavement smelling of fish and she has a flash of all the animals shipped from elsewhere twitching on the plates of her neighbours. Jude races ahead with the dog. They’re halfway now, to the school. ‘Only the beginnings are hard,’ his father said when Jude started at the new primary. But there’ve been so many, they had to invent reasons for their moving. She hasn’t told Jude about the robbery, the gun, the aftermath, how far their personal information might have spread. She READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 16

hasn’t mentioned the child at the hold-up who she’d failed to shelter or comfort. Lately Jude had been asking if he, too, was going to be an only child. When they reach the school, a preschooler hands her a white balloon. Another mother, in sheeny work-out gear, shoots a greeting, then runs off. A man cycles by, leading a pony by a rope. She thinks of Baghdad, so purely imaginary, of incomparable childhoods in Iraq and Australia. She’s lost count of all the times she’s moved. With her parents she’d lived in five countries. After leaving home she’d followed whatever took her elsewhere – work, men, the promise of uncovering some new part of herself. The trick to belonging, Raf told her once, is not to let any one place take root in the mind. Not long after they’d met, Raf described the passage from Baghdad to Indonesia, the boat to Australia. At first he’d thought of the sea as benign, protective, and he’d reassured his sister, bent and queasy in her worn lifejacket, as they crossed the Indian Ocean. Imagine it as a current of the Euphrates, he told Hanni. Think of the Shatt al-Arab, Razzaza Lake. When they left Iraq they were young adults. On the sea, they reversed into children. In Sydney, their uncle and cousins were waiting. They’d sent photos of themselves, drinking thickshakes in a franchise café. Hanni couldn’t tell from these pictures if her cousins were happier, or richer, drenched in the same neon found in every mall around the world. ‘Gorbeh means estrangement,’ Raf had told her. Whenever she looked at his painting Samara imagined that journey, the three oceans between their old life and the new. In Baghdad Raf had borrowed his friend’s old Saipa, he was driving past T-walls and checkpoints. He was eating grilled river fish and drinking Balango with Karrar or Huma. Soon it would be Nowruz and in the north his Kurdish friends would buy hyacinths and coloured eggs. There was no news yet, of his father. ‘Don’t fight with me while I’m away,’ he said in their first phone call. After that Samara felt M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 17

muzzled. Her body itched with desire, or rage. After that they evaded all the immensities of his situation, and she, recounting her days down the line, cauterised every festering thing. She didn’t tell him the men were out on parole. What could he do after all, from that distance? Instead, she told Raf ’s friend, Matthias.

One morning, after the bullet in the letter, Raf’s father said if the worst should come he wished to be buried beside his wife in the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery. ‘This was how we spoke about death – over breakfast,’ Raf told Samara. His father continued slicing cucumbers, the knife in his long, clean fingers so Raf thought of his father’s patients pointing to parts of themselves and crying, waja, waja – pain here, here and also here. Raf was so young when his mother died, he couldn’t trust his memories of the funeral, the salah at Najaf. But years later, in Sydney, words came to him, Wash her with water and snow and hail … give her a home better than her home … make her grave spacious and fill it with light. He painted them on a canvas, he painted doors standing in a limitless field, like burial stones. After exhibiting them in the art school show, Matthias said, ‘These are very bad. Zey are zo incurably serious!’ His faux German accent was designed to soften the blow. The two men had continued drinking in the gallery courtyard while Samara smashed a glass in the kitchen. She strode out and told the story by Hannah Hoch about the male artist who extolled equality but refused to wash dishes because it would enslave his spirit. Raf shot her a sly look, took a call and wandered off. ‘Surprised you approve of Hoch,’ said Matthias, crushing a can in his broad, beautiful hand. ‘Didn’t she sit out the genocides in a German cottage?’ Samara stepped back. ‘Raf told me about your thesis,’ Matthias said, moving close. ‘Is it really still au courant to write about the Second World War?’ READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 18

Matthias had just returned from Syria. His work was also about war, but he was better than Raf at describing his large oils, in suspenseful anecdotes to art patrons, one hand pressed to the small of their backs. A red sticker throbbed beside his portrait of the keeper of antiquities at Palmyra, who was later beheaded in a public square. Raf ’s paintings remained unsold. That night spun out as the three of them ate and drank and crossed the city on foot. As Raf grew silent, Matthias, buoyed by the show, was jittery and talkative. Samara walking between them, her hands in each of their hands, wondered who mattered more to who. Just before dawn Matthias veered off near the Botanic Gardens. ‘He’s jealous of your work,’ she told Raf. ‘What would his paintings be without the macho backstory?’ Raf put his hand ambiguously on her leg, ‘And why do you think he so loves to argue with you?’ Their art, she saw, was propelled by different forces. Matthias was strategic. Raf ’s work hurtled out of inner compulsion. Raf had lived through the Baghdad bombings, Matthias was ’coptered into military zones, untouched, but no less altered by war, or so he claimed. Samara’s supervisor had once warned her never to juxtapose the epic and the quotidian. When she’d tried describing the notes Walter Benjamin made about his infant son in a chapter about the Holocaust she received a single margin note: no. But the only things that interested her were the ways life unfolded in times of upheaval. Raf ’s journey across three continents did not fade when buying bread or joining the library. Everything for him was a state of emergency, or else a numbed dream. History flowed, an unearthed current, through them both. It’s Raf who really knows what it is for a world to end, how it feels to start again. This is what she tells the counsellor when he asks, ‘Why keep moving house?’ She’d pointed the men out in the line-up. The stocky one who’d taken her bag, who might have committed all her life’s information M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 19

to memory. The one with the gun who paced while she knelt with the other customers and watched as a father let go of his child. By continually moving, isn’t she still held captive by the men she wishes to escape? As the counsellor spoke Samara tried deciphering the messages in each insipid watercolour on his walls. She attempted to ignore the voice that said: Anyone in possession of such bad art couldn’t possibly have insight. With every visit the paintings morphed, producing new meanings, just for her.

Hanni arrives with powdered incense to smoke the house. She strolls about. ‘Such storage! Aren’t you going to use it?’ Samara cannot tell her that the cupboards give her the creeps, that she doesn’t want to open them, to invite whatever’s inside, out. ‘I sense it Samara,’ she says, reclining on the couch. ‘Your house is not manzil.’ Hanni recites a dua, something about taking refuge from evil. ‘A’oodhu bi kalimaat-Illaah it-taammaati min sharri ma khalaq.’ Samara narrows her eyes. Hanni, pixie-haired, long-limbed in faux leather pants, usually scorned tradition. Like Raf, she was thoroughly secular. She only wore the scaled down hijab, knotted at the neck, to honour their late mother. ‘Why give me this look?’ says Hanni. ‘It’s mustahabb. Throw a dinner party – that will warm the house. And why not invite the handsome artist friend?’ Before Samara can register this, Jude begins playing a syrupy piano tune with dramatic maestro gestures. The two women sit, speechless, and watch the boy’s hands make music. After lunch, Hanni stands suddenly. She has to visit the bone broth guy. She doesn’t have time to gather bones, she says, unlike Samara who’s home all day, who could do a twelve-hour stock between research contracts and finishing her thesis. Hanni’s always READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 20

hitched to the latest craze: bikram yoga, jade eggs, double denim, turmeric lattes. Samara grabs Hanni’s arm, a question burning. ‘Is Raf really searching?’ Was there something more to his leaving? Asking brings the bile into her throat. It isn’t that she’s helpless without him, just dangerously open. Hanni bites her lip, then says, ‘In Iraq when you forget something after leaving your house, it’s bad luck to go back for it. Focus on your work. Try not to think about it.’ But what’s the it Samara isn’t supposed to contemplate? Or is she the something Raf is forbidden to retrieve? Samara doesn’t tell Hanni that she stopped working on the thesis weeks ago, stumped on a title and how to connect six disparate chapters. She’d lost momentum writing about her trip to Berlin, the houses once owned by her greatgrandparents. Since her mother’s death she was the only remaining link to this history. She dreams of the houses over and over, of rooms full of familiar things and others cleared out. How can she describe this to Hanni, whose Insta documents all the buildings destroyed in Iraq? Mosul minarets, archways and courtyards; the deep cellars and wells of Najaf. At Schlachtensee and Krumme Lanke Samara had stood, a radioactive stranger, eyeing what was owed her. She thought of Rilke, It is not a building, but it is quite dissolved and distributed inside me, then sent photos of each door to Raf. Her lack of belonging had disturbed her, or maybe it was disappointment. What would it be to feel German, given her history? At a Kreuzberg dinner, held by a university colleague, a sinewy woman had taken Samara’s hands and said, ‘It is becoming almost normal these days to be meeting Jews!’

In Arabic there are many words for house. Bayt means sanctuary and refuge. And also, Raf told her, a line of poetry. M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 21

‘How many places,’ asked the counsellor, ‘have you lived since the incident?’ In Berlin she told him, so far from the scene of the hold-up, she’d had six weeks without anxiety. She inhaled the city and something inside her ignited. There she was tethered to nothing but an almost obliterated past and she understood that she came from a long line of people who were not permitted to belong. If this was her fate, then all right, wasn’t belonging overrated? What she did not say, eyeing a whisky swirl in the counsellor’s watercolour, was how much she drank in Berlin. To be free of fear, she had to become numb, and a stranger. While she was away, Raf had returned to painting. His abstract style changed to a flattened realism. ‘Edward Hopper goes to Mesopotamia, and meets Colin McCahon,’ diagnosed Matthias. In Raf ’s first acrylic, the bullet-ridden door of Sayidat al-Nejat Cathedral, where suicide bombers killed fifty-eight people. He’d passed this building often, delivering parcels in Baghdad. Beneath the door, he’d painted the words of a woman who’d lost almost all her family in the attack, I wasn’t hurt but I wish I’d been killed. He began to talk of returning. There’d been no news of his father. When Raf said, ‘My body is here, but my soul is in Baghdad,’ Samara seethed. This language was strategic, she thought. It disguised the abandonment in his leaving. Then she hated herself for being pissy about it. So she’d spread the guilt around. ‘Your son lives here,’ she said. ‘Isn’t Jude also body and soul to you? What if something happens?’ ‘I’m the son to my father,’ Raf said carefully, ‘who feels the same for me.’

That afternoon, Samara sits at her desk, flicks through one of Raf ’s notebooks. At the back, a list: READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 22

al-Shuhada Bridge – 9 al-Hadi Centre – 250 Sadr City – 55 al-Shorjh – 76 Abu Cheer market – 4

Searching the facts on her phone Samara realises these are tallies of the dead. She scrolls her local Facebook page, her Instagram: an escaped chicken on Warren Road, a generous act in a supermarket car park, a supermoon sighting at 8.44 p.m., a female Alexandrine parrot flown away from Farr Street, a photo of someone’s sourdough crumb, of a decorative swirl in a flat white, of painted toenails and a beach. A Polaroid of a child with eyes shut, lying in a large cardboard box and the caption, Gone so soon! Just before bed, she types her epigraph: For the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality.

In Berlin, the artist Ai Weiwei has wrapped 14,000 lifejackets around the Konzerthaus columns. As she cooks eggs and toast, Samara shows Jude the images online. ‘They all survived,’ he says when she explains where the lifejackets came from. ‘Like Dad when he came,’ he says, ‘like Hanni.’ She allows a faint nod, because how can she say that lifejacket now connotes the drowned. Jude comes close, searches her face. He knows when she’s withholding something. When he came to her room that morning he asked, ‘Who was the girl?’ She looked at him blankly. In the night he’d seen a sleeping shape beside her, someone else’s hair on the pillow. ‘No, not a dream,’ he insisted. Together they searched for evidence, for a single long brown strand. M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 23

Today he’ll walk to school alone. Usually he joins the caravan of older children who pass the house, but they’re on excursion to some mountain caves. She goes over it again, stranger danger, what to do if you’re approached, or lured away. But he isn’t listening. ‘Adiós Mum,’ he says sharply, grabbing his bag. Then turns and slams the door. Samara looks again at the Konzerthaus wrapped in emergency orange. She recalls the Kreuzberg dinner and the night that followed at the Berghain nightclub, drunk on vodka with the woman who announced to each passing stranger that Samara was Jewish. No-one had ever called her this at home. As the Germans drank and danced, and tried overhard to make her welcome, she felt dragooned into some old, redeeming rite. After that trip she began to experience rents in reality. Walking through a park or deserted tract of the city, trees and buildings would recede into chasms of air. Scintillating scotomas, the neurologist called them. Samara traced the hallucinations to the night at that club, the journey home. At Ostbahnhof, waiting for a train with another clubber, she’d been overcome with vertigo and blacked out on the platform. Before bed, she calls the cousin Raf stayed with when he first arrived in Baghdad. But Huma is so unworried about his whereabouts, that Samara feels hysterical or suspicious. ‘Maybe,’ says Huma, an edge in her tone carrying all the way from Iraq, ‘he is ghosting you.’ Samara struggles, her jaw gone to glass. ‘If you see him, tell him his son is waiting for his call.’

Tonight she’ll dream of people burying needles in the ground. Then wake in total dark, a human weight on the end of her bed. The sound of sweeping from somewhere near, smoke coming through the high window. She’ll sit, shirt drenched, then fumble for the light. When she reaches Jude’s room, she’ll call his name, then louder. His bed will READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 24

be empty, his glasses on the nearby table. On his wall, a poster of the nervous system: The sympathetic division forms the body’s fight or flight response to stress … increases respiration and heart rate, releases stress hormones to cope with these situations. She’ll take the stairs two by two. These situations. She’ll list her symptoms: loss of sight or blurred vision, the feeling of a small creature crawling under the skin. In the kitchen, a cupboard door flings open, its rusted hinges whining as she passes. Remember, she’ll tell herself as she runs into the lounge, as the dog starts barking and the neighbour’s lights blink on. It’s happened before. Jude, sleepwalking whenever his father goes away. One evening she found him asleep in the bath, another, the built-in wardrobe. Tonight, he’s bathed in TV phosphor on the lounge room floor. As she leads Jude to bed it comes back to her – the sound of the father calling out as his daughter lurched about the post office and the man trained his gun on her body. Ally, Ally!

At 4 p.m. the next day, the doorbell. At the threshold, Ali. Behind him, passing pedestrians pull their long shadows along the road. He casts no shape. His shoes are off and his feet in her hall cause something within her to plummet. She looks into his desperate face. ‘I’m lonely,’ he says. The dog barks in the garden. It hasn’t rained and the uncut grass is dry and golden. Where the dog has rested there are flattened nests. The hostile neighbours have begun throwing burning cigarette butts over the fence. One afternoon she’d had to beat out a grass fire in the yard. She lets him in, though her eyes are red and swollen and her chest so tight she feels she’s sucking air through a straw. His need, so naked, makes her queasy. Ali spreads a map on the table. He describes a government form, half filled out by a volunteer. Beside the map is the carved box. It looks like a decorative door. She touches it lightly. M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 25

‘Not for you,’ he snatches it back. He taps the form. ‘If I cannot prove, they send me back.’ He won’t return, this would mean death for him, for his family who remain. Instead, he tells her, crossing the room and slamming a cabinet door, he plans to hide. Jude calls out from the lounge where he’s reading about vugs and thunder eggs. ‘Oh-hi-o! Mum, can we go to Ohio? Home to the world’s largest crystal cave, to a celestine geode.’ Ali walks over to the boy. It occurs to Samara that he’s not here to visit her, but her son. Each time he turns up, it’s four o’clock when school’s out. He begins speaking, very dully. ‘There was a time when I started to think of myself as a suitcase. I’m moved so often, but no-one is ever asking me, where do I want to go?’ Jude continues reading. ‘What can a suitcase do? I am useful to other people. I carry things for them. In a suitcase you put the things that you don’t want to hold.’ Samara stops breathing. Half the room disappears. Is a scotoma a phenomenon of sight or of mind? Her phone vibrates. Three texts. One from Matthias, asking not whether, but what day he can come over. Jude wanders upstairs and Ali follows. On the walls of the small attic bedroom, stars and planets. At night their lunar light on Jude’s sleeping face makes Samara imagine his father on the sea. Raf and Jude have the same broad bone structure, the same inescapable eyes. It’s painful now to see Raf in the face of the boy, as if Jude belongs to Raf more than her. When he’d first met Jude, Matthias had asked, in front of Raf, if the boy was really hers. Jude is moving near the foggy window, his slender limbs rubbing shapes on the glass. How much longer now? he’ll ask each night. On his wall calendar, the marked-off days since his father left. Samara can only see half of him. The other side of her son, and the room, undulating like mercury. ‘What do you keep here?’ Ali points to the long low cupboard. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 26

Samara glances at the painting Raf had given Jude. A reproduction of a child-sized door. The door had belonged to a house Raf had played in as a child. It was elaborately carved by a friend at al-Shorjh Market. Samara notices that this door, unlike the others Raf painted, has a lock. She squints, as her vision warps. How many locks has she changed? The men in the post office knew she’d seen them. Their faces had not been masked. In the week Raf boarded his flight to Iraq, both men were released on parole. At the airport, when Hanni used the words going home, Samara left the concourse to retch in the toilet. War was always elsewhere, for Raf war was also home. The next week Matthias appeared, for company, he said as if Jude did not count, as if she were living entirely alone. After he left, she found the small oil propped on the table. A woman at a window, in the distance, lights in the sky, or explosions. On the back the word, Abandonment. She gave it to Hanni. ‘Sell it,’ she said. ‘Make a small fortune.’ Inside Jude’s room, Saturn teeters on its circuit. Al-Shorjh, Samara remembers, was bombed by an Australian teenager. She looks from the painted door to the wooden box. The carvings are identical. She recalls the stranger’s shoes on the mat. But aren’t they Raf ’s shoes, worn through in all the same places? Ali’s story, for a while confusing, suddenly seems implausible. Has Raf left those shoes behind? Then why is Ali wearing them? On the opposite wall, in the mirror, her son’s narrow back. Beside him, white space. Beside him, no Ali. Jude isn’t wearing his glasses. She has tried to imagine what he sees without them, uncertain shapes, fugitive lights. On the window, where his body has rubbed away the condensation, a portal to the upper air. The stranger, standing close to the boy, walks to the bedroom cupboard built into the side of the roof. When they’d first moved in she’d found odd things in there, a snakeskin purse of folded notes, human hair, a persistent earthy smell. Samara squints, expecting darkness, and sees a blinding whirling. Together, the boy and the man step in. M I R E I LLE JUCHAU 27

Lily Brett is an internationally acclaimed author of six novels, four collections of essays and nine volumes of poetry. Her first collection of fiction, Things Could be Worse, was published by UQP in 1990 and went on to be shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. With haunting illustrations by the renowned painter David Rankin, it introduced the world to Lola Bensky, the eponymous heroine of Brett’s 2012 award-winning international bestseller. She is the recipient of many literary awards including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for The Auschwitz Poems (Scribe, 1986), the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Just Like That (Picador, 1994), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Too Many Men (Picador, 1999), and France’s Prix Médicis Étranger for her novel, Lola Bensky (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

A Loud and Unruly Crowd

I left Germany, where I was born, when I was almost two. When I arrived in Australia as a refugee, I was a small child, a toddler, someone who was not old enough to know what country I was living in or what country I was leaving. Yet I grew up with a feeling that there was another world, a world I was inextricably tied to, a world I belonged to. I didn’t know how I was tied to that world. Was it through love, through blood, through history? I had no idea. In Australia, we lived in peace in a country my father called Paradise.  In this paradise, my father worked double shifts, behind a sewing machine in a factory and my beautiful  mother, who had dreamed of being a paediatrician, worked in another factory behind another sewing machine. We lived in one room in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. We shared a kitchen and a bathroom with four or five other Jewish refugee families.  The single most defining aspect of my life is the fact that I was born to two people who had each survived years of imprisonment in Nazi ghettos, labour camps and death camps. My parents were a rare statistic – Jewish people who were married to each other before the war and who each survived death camps. My mother married my father because her mother thought she would be better off being with my father’s wealthy family when the Nazis invaded Poland. My father married my mother because he LI LY B R E TT 29

was madly in love with her. My mother was seventeen when she was imprisoned in the LódŹ Ghetto. My father’s family’s wealth soon evaporated. When I was growing up, the worlds of my mother’s and father’s pasts hovered over me. There was the world in which my mother and father each had parents, brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. And then there was the other world. The world of my parents’ dead. It contained almost everyone they had ever loved. All of them murdered. I could hear the dead. At night they sniffed and sighed and shifted around as though they were in constant discomfort. A discomfort we couldn’t ease or relieve. I knew that every other family in our shared house had their own loud and unruly crowd of dead. In Australia, a country  of blue  skies and  sunshine and  fish  and chips, we formed small pockets of Europe. We held on to each other and to whatever fragments remained of our once normal lives.  We spoke Polish, German, Russian, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Yiddish. But not English. We ate kosher dried sausage and fat and thin frankfurts. We bought rye bread and ate it with pickled herring, smoked fish and chopped liver. I longed  to eat the sliced white bread that Australians around me were eating. Especially after I saw the mother of a school friend toasting slices of bread over an open fire, in the fireplace. I also lusted after baked beans and peanut butter and apple pies. But I didn’t get to eat anything like this until I was much older. I went to a Jewish kindergarten. In every kindergarten class photo, we look like a misplaced group of European children. We are wearing European clothes. We small girls all have big bows in our hair and some of us are wearing cardigans, even in summer. The bright sunshine looks at odds with the more melancholy expression on many of our faces.  We all know we are out of place. We know we are new to this country and that we belong somewhere else. We just don’t know READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 30

where that somewhere else is. We are almost all the children of Holocaust survivors.  Too many of us have dead siblings. Siblings who came from our parents’ pre-war marriages. Too many of us have ill-matched parents. Marriages made in haste and out of a desperate need to have someone to touch, someone to hold and someone to love. Most of our parents are still in shock. And all of them are still grieving. It is a grief that will never end.  Many of us children were the first in our families to learn to speak English. We became indispensable to our parents. Quite a few of us grew up to resent the responsibilities with which we were burdened. We all knew that our parents were in pain. We were not sure if we caused the pain, but we were very sure that it was our job to fix it. Sometimes, our parents had little or no sympathy for our problems, which paled next to the pain they had endured. We understood that their pain outweighed anything we would ever experience. We were  remnants of European Jewry. Ashkenazi Jews who were  dispersed all around the world.  Dispersed through almost any country that would take us.  When I was thirteen, my mother insisted that I study German. I hadn’t spoken German since I was two or three. I was annoyed. ‘Why do I have to study German?’ I asked my mother. She explained that if the Nazis ever turned up in Australia I would be able to talk to them. ‘So, I will be able to say Willkommen  Herr Nazi?’ I said to my mother. She didn’t reply. And I studied German at high school for four years.  I won a Goethe Society prize for my poetry recital. My mother was very pleased. ‘I’ll be able to recite “Der Erlkönig” to the Gestapo when they arrive in Melbourne,’ I said to my father. He stifled a smile.  Although my mother feared the return  of the Nazis, I never heard either of my parents say a bad word about German people. My mother talked about Goethe and Schiller and my father talked about LI LY B R E TT 31

German bread and German cars.  ‘The Mercedes is the best car in the world,’ he said, repeatedly, as he drove around Melbourne in his second-hand, enormous and enormously cumbersome American car.  At eighteen, I went to Paris and saw a world that made sense to me. An old world with old buildings. And walls and streets that felt layered with lives and steeped in hundreds of years of thoughts and declarations and discussions and passions. Streets and buildings that were marked and moulded by the memories they were storing and the secrets they were keeping.  I travelled to Germany, to Dachau, and cried and cried and cried.  So much of what I saw at Dachau was so familiar to me. I couldn’t understand why. I had never been to Dachau or to any other concentration camp. I think it is highly likely that I had absorbed all of these images from shards of conversations and revelations that I heard before I could walk or talk.

Part of the collateral damage of my parents’ past was, for me, a lack of religious belief. ‘There is no God,’ my mother said, over and over again, when I was growing up. ‘There is no God,’ she said, at odd times. And always out of the blue. ‘There is no God,’ she would say when she was washing the dishes, or hanging out the washing, or getting dressed up to go to a bar mitzvah or birthday. Both of my parents had come from religious homes. After the war, religion was a word they both scoffed at. They would not let me go to synagogue. My mother insisted that the only reason I wanted to go was to meet boys. That didn’t seem, to me, to be such a bad reason for wanting to go to synagogue. After all, they had made it clear that I was expected to marry a Jewish boy – I disappointed them. Twice. This lack of religious belief is not uncommon for the survivors of catastrophes or their children. Many survivors expressed a rage at God or a fear of God. Some survivors were almost fanatically observant, READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 32

convinced that they had been saved because they remained observant even under the most brutally inhumane circumstances. This certainty was not backed up by statistics. The religious and the non-believers were murdered with equal amounts of enthusiasm and abandon. My father was utterly adamant in his rejection of God. My father would press his foot down on the accelerator pedal of his car when he saw Orthodox Jews, in their black hats and suits, crossing the road. He would curse about how stupid they were. His anger was probably directed as much at their attention-getting attire as their strong belief in God. On high holy days Jews are forbidden to work, drive or even switch on a light. There is a prohibition against eating ham on any day. My father ate ham with relish. He knew where to get the best ham in Melbourne and savoured every mouthful. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar and a day when all Jews are required to fast, my father would drive slowly past our local synagogue waving his ham sandwich. I may not go to synagogue but I go to Auschwitz. I have been there many times. I go to Auschwitz in the same way that other people go to church or to synagogue. I go to be connected to another level of life, connected to something intangible. It is the only place on earth where I feel deeply connected to the mothers and fathers and children who were part of my family, part of me. When I am in Auschwitz, I feel joined to them. And, non-believer that I am, I feel as though I am showing them that they are not forgotten, that they are loved. I have rubbed soot from the walls of the Auschwitz crematoria on my face, on my chest. That soot contained parts of someone or parts of more than one someone. It is the closest I will ever get to the dozens and dozens of members of my family I have never met. In Birkenau I visited the women’s barracks where my mother and the other women were so jammed into the two-by-two-metre wooden LI LY B R E TT 33

bunks that none of them could move. The barracks my father was in were built to house fifty-seven horses and often accommodated – although accommodated is not quite the right word – 900 men. About thirty years ago, I went to Birkenau with my father. He stood in his former barracks with an expression of disbelief on his face. And then, in a move that was typical of my father, who preferred to remember good times rather than bad, he talked about a young Jewish boy who had a beautiful voice and who would sing every night and soothe everyone with his singing. I could see that my father was hearing the young boy’s voice again and was again transported by its beauty. The barracks and the gas chambers and the ovens, and the murder of almost all of Europe’s Jews, was not just a German issue. Those railway lines to Nazi death camps branched out into almost every part of Europe. There were Polish train drivers. There were French police who helped in the deportation of over 76,000 Jews to extermination camps. Three Greek prime ministers cooperated with the axis powers – Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Japan. The Latvian Auxiliary Security Police murdered about 26,000 Jewish men, women and children. Lithuanian collaborators participated in the mass murders of Jews and Gypsies. In the Ukraine, whole towns greeted the Germans as liberators. The list of who else was involved is depressingly long.

The older I become, the more effects of the past I see. I thought it would be the reverse. I thought the effects would recede. I thought I would be calm, wise and at peace with myself. Instead, I am more connected to that past. More bewildered by it. More horrified. And, as for calm, no-one would mistake me for a Zen priest. The consequences of hatred don’t end with the victims of the perpetrators of this hatred and horror. I inherited my parents’ grief, their fear, their omnipresent sense of loss, their humiliation, their READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 34

understanding of the cruelty human beings can inflict on each other and their knowledge that, overnight, the world can change, spin on its axis and never be the same again. My parents lived with a grief that never left them. The horror and the brutality they lived through also never left them. Neither did the fear. All of this seeped through to me, as it has done for decades to the children and grandchildren of the survivors of catastrophes. My parents lost everything they could have lost – their families, their culture, their language, their youth, their education. But they didn’t lose the ability to love. And they didn’t lose their humanity, their compassion, their empathy. In his eighties, my father moved from Melbourne to New York. He moved to be closer to me and my husband and our children. He arrived with two suitcases and immediately adapted to his new environment. He retained his sense of humour, his mischievous spirit and his conscience. He is now 101 years old. He has always loved women. Especially big-breasted women. He has an aide, Elvira, a thirty-two-year-old, beautiful Nigerian woman who visits him regularly. She keeps him company and takes him for walks to his favourite ice-cream store. In good weather, they sit outside the store, Ice and Vice, on the Lower East Side in New York, and eat ice-cream. Recently, my father suddenly reached out in Elvira’s direction and said, ‘Can I touch your breasts?’ My father blushed and started laughing when Elvira told me about this. He knew he had done something that he shouldn’t have. He laughed even harder when Elvira, who also has a great sense of humour, said that if he touched her breasts he would have to marry her. At 101, my father still has a conscience. Even about small things like wanting to touch a woman’s breasts, which at his age doesn’t seem like a terrible transgression.

LI LY B R E TT 35

My mother and my father were left for dead by their captors and by the indifference of most of the rest of the world. Indifference has always frightened me. Indifference is a perfect breeding ground for hatred. Indifference allows politics of hate to flourish. And that lays the groundwork for bigotry, racism and hate to seem reasonable to ordinary human beings. The results of politics of hate are always horrifying and inevitably catastrophic. Empathy seems to be in short supply today. We are more and more politically polarised. There is hatred all around us. In all parts of the world. Refugees and asylum seekers are once again being treated as less than human even in the most comfortable, wealthy and underpopulated countries. We are again seeing prejudice, racism, bigotry. It is aimed at anyone who is different from us. Whether the difference is in the colour of our skin, our religious beliefs, our sexual orientation or the language we speak. This hatred is a straight path to disaster. Too many of us appear to have a diminished conscience. Please, polish your conscience. The world needs it.

My beautiful, darling father, Max Brett, passed away on 28 February 2018. He was 101. He died peacefully and painlessly and remained himself until the very end, loving his food, loving us and keeping his wonderful sense of humour intact. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 36

Rodney Hall began publishing poetry with UQP early in his career, including Heaven, in a way (1970) and A Soapbox Omnibus (1973). He was the influential poetry editor of The Australian from 1967 to 1978. UQP also published his early novels, The Ship on the Coin (1972) and A Place Among People (1975), which won a prize in the Bicentenary Literary Awards. Since then he has gone on to win two Miles Franklin Literary Awards – for Just Relations (Penguin, 1982) and The Grisly Wife (Macmillan Australia, 1993) – and State Premiers’ Awards in both New South Wales and Victoria. Many of his books have been published in the USA, UK and in translation into French, German, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish and Korean. Reviewing Captivity Captive (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988) the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung claimed: ‘He ranks with Garcia Marquez.’ Hall was presented with the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1992 and again in 2001. From 1991 to 1994 he was chairman of the Australia Council. His latest novel is A Stolen Season (Picador, 2018).

Glimpses of Europe Lost 1954

Dr Bródy – philosopher, philologist and metaphysician – was grateful to find work in Brisbane as an umbrella salesman. He lived in a nice little rented house. Each evening, mellow with drink, he would get there by spreading his arms, making a sail of his jacket, and being blown along by an obliging wind. While all creation moved in sympathy. So, the house reached him through billows of stars in the still-blue sky, floating quite by itself above the ground. What’s more the front steps, each in turn, rose to support his right foot, his left. Marvellous really and a challenge to science. The house anticipated every need. Doors swinging open revealed the way. Even his clothes knew to shed themselves as soon as the bathroom had him safely inside. Spectacles perched on the toothbrush holder. His hairpiece flew off. He was revealed as the naked natural incubus itself. The demon lover in the flesh. Windows permanently propped ajar invited the humid evening in. Water spouted warm from the cold tap. Such unasked-for luxury as a cold tap delivering warm water could not be imagined where he had come from. Water whispering blandishments from the nozzle and streaming off his bald head stung the skin deliciously. It pattered against the plastic shower curtain and chuckled down the drain. He hummed. He sang. Improvised nonsense. ‘Washing,’ he crooned in Hungarian, ‘is water’s apogee.’ The theme began to sound pretty good. ‘Washing’s water’s glory.’ Simple though the sentiment READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 38

was, nobody in his family could understand a word. Once, when Elsie suggested he might raise the boy to be bilingual he had not hesitated to refuse. ‘My dear,’ he’d said, though thankful for her care, ‘let me leave the past behind.’ He had felt her press comfortingly against him in bed. ‘I shall teach him French instead,’ he’d offered later, as a gesture. And then added wickedly, ‘So he and I can make jokes behind your back.’ ‘Oh, my back!’ she had laughed. ‘There’s plenty of that to make room for everybody, French or not!’ Now here he was, drunk again, standing in the bathtub under the shower, aware of someone’s nakedness sheathed in liquid glass. Just by stepping to one side he could stipple the same unlovely flesh with beads of light. Shameless flattery, because no bloom of natural beauty had ever graced his body. Even as a boy he kept the ugly thing covered. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows were enough for him to feel uncomfortably exposed. Now with the onset of middle age he suffered residual dissatisfaction at having lost the chance to strut during that period of life when strutting is least ridiculous. Baldness a confirmation of missed opportunities. Squinting for focus he could make out his hairpiece as a rakish hood (witness for the prosecution) hung on the washbasin tap. For the rest – splendid with drink and caressed by warm cascades – who cared? Water and more water gurgled, sucked and slurped till the noise became such a distraction he stuck the plug in the hole. There. Aha! Change of tune. Water tinkling on water. He cocked his head, attentive to the new octave. Sensual pleasures brimmed and bubbled as he sank down into the tub. Nothing was left of him except a severed head, shoulders and a pair of hairy knees. ‘Shall I come and scrub your back, love?’ Elsie called. He admired her leisurely Queensland accent, especially as she denied she had any such thing. ‘Or wait for you to drown,’ she added with a smile that could be heard, ‘and do it then?’ R OD NE Y HA LL 39

‘Do it now,’ he sang as part of his Hungarian aria, which he translated into booming echoes for her sake. ‘Do-o it now. Let’s do-o everything now.’ ‘But turn the volume down, pet. The child’s been put to bed.’ Next moment she was there, large, busy, handling him like big dollops of dough and taking no nonsense. ‘I shall die of the drink,’ he mooed tragically. ‘Then hurry up about it,’ she suggested, soaping him to the waist and feeling for his shoulderblades under pads of wellbeing. ‘Ah, but you’ll pine away without me,’ he grieved. ‘I shall take a South Pacific cruise.’ ‘Prostrate with grief and loneliness.’ ‘I shall wear flowers in my hair and dance the hula-hula.’ ‘You’ll be left with nobody to talk to. Off your food, you’ll probably take to the drink yourself.’ ‘I shall have peace at last and an end to philosophical conundrums. What’s more, I shall shut the boy away in boarding school and write him no more than two letters a year, see if I don’t.’ ‘When I’m gone you’ll still be saddled with regrets. Poor usedup creature, you’ll be. Rub there again, please. You have the touch. Ummm. I can never reach so far.’ He rumbled quietly, ‘Too soon your poor dear eyes will grow dim and your – pardon – hair will fall out.’ Quirks delighted him. With language, as with life. ‘Noway Hozay. I shall be the tourist to take the most photographs, I shall have the fanciest hats and the handsomest gigolos. My partying, I can assure you – stop wobbling about – will be famous from Tahiti to Christmas Island. Pass me the soap again, I haven’t finished.’ ‘The most you’ll inherit will be a half crate of whisky and some sample umbrellas. You’ll curse me till the day you die. And I’m afraid the boy will have to work his fingers to the bone – oh, your lovely English clichés – in some factory forging boilers for steam engines or canning pineapples. Failing which he’ll have to try out as a jockey READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 40

because he’s too small for anything else. Yes, and then the starvation could help keep his weight down. A system in everything. Or you could break his kneecaps to qualify him for a career as a beggar at the gates of Parliament House.’ ‘That’s quite enough water wasted. Show me your fingers. The skin’s gone puckered. Too much of a good thing is the story of your life.’ ‘No no, my back’s not yet clean. Heartless woman.’ She mopped her hands with the folded towel set ready for him. ‘When you get out don’t break your neck slipping on the wet floor,’ she advised. ‘And if you will insist on a cigarette before you dress, best not to blow out the match. No point setting fire to the whole house.’ She was gone. Just her warmth remained and the feeling of her hands all over him. ‘What if I’m drunk tomorrow? The countess expects me to entertain her coffee club,’ he warned himself. She could hear. ‘Madam’s quite capable of expelling you from her coven,’ Elsie’s voice reached him after a tiny delay, scientifically explicable by the length of the corridor though most likely because she chose the pause for emphasis. ‘It’s her prerogative to boss the peasants around. Born to it. She’s not above giving you the heave-ho for misbehaviour.’ ‘You don’t like her?’ ‘I’ve never met her.’ ‘Can that be true?’ ‘You keep her to yourself, so you can skite about her grand Spanish connections.’ Well, Elsie would never be at ease with the conversations at the coffee club. The extravagant waywardness. She wasn’t damaged enough. It was another of his eccentricities that, despite being a dedicated communist, Antal Bródy refused to condemn the elderly countess. She was one of a kind: wickedly clever and unscrupulous. And a welcome paradox in Brisbane. R OD NE Y HA LL 41

He stood and put his glasses on. There you are, said the mirror. Meanwhile the scene through the window seized the chance to jump into focus, neighbourhood living rooms as illuminated oblongs stamped on the night-time landscape. The floodlit ramparts of a city prison rose high above them to dominate the skyline. He watched dark figures patrol between the guardrooms perched at each corner. ‘I was thinking about empires and collapsed space,’ he cried, suddenly apprehensive, his voice too loud in the hollow bathroom. ‘Our journey from Rotterpardon-dam put an end to all that. We had to leave everything behind on the far side of the world.’ His glasses blanked out. ‘What’s that you say, pet?’ ‘I said,’ the triple doctor called through the open doorway, ‘has Australia been discovered yet?’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ she mocked her old darling, as if spelling the words out. Night time. The state public library faced the flat green patch of Queens Gardens. Empty, apart from a statue, a decommissioned artillery gun, a small chapel (also decommissioned) and a bench bolted to the ground. Each of them stood as if accidentally in its separate space. Nothing moved. Not even the tramp who slumped on the bench, head bowed, his beard a cushion bunched between chin and collarbone. He was not asleep. He was thinking. And the two bulbous string bags plumped on the seat beside him appeared to think the same. His hands jutted from ragged cuffs to cradle one another in his lap. The hands remembered what they independently did remember. Ingrained with grime. Just as his feet knew a kind of knowledge, his knees too, his loins, his hunger, his heart. He looked out from under shaggy brows at the carpet of cut grass. Prompted, perhaps, by a little stone cross on the chapel roof the stillness in his mind assumed the colossal shape of an abandoned READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 42

church which, half a lifetime ago, he had approached through melting snow. Eaves dripped. Birds flew in at the smashed windows. Domes and cupolas shingled with grey midnight scales gleamed under the spring moon. The looming entrance on Tverskoy Street had been blocked by Bolshevik vandals who’d dumped a truckload of dirt against the damaged doors. The image haunted him. His own people had done this. Not invaders, not foreigners who could be fought for their foreignness, not heathen marauders swarming under some silken code known only to themselves. It was folk who had been baptised here, who had sung in the choir, who had watched brothers and cousins married, and been married themselves in this same place. It was men and women who knew the archimandrite by name, who had put their hard-earned coins in the dented dish. This was what he could not grasp, even now. The intellect, more ancient and more devious than faith, was an old wolf scavenging facts. The need to know harked all the way back to the origin of the homing instinct. He had expressed his own deepest insights as action. Never more so than the night of his escape. The sudden impulse. Irresistible. Well, he’d expected to return to the Motherland on terms he could tolerate – at worst, his village in ruins – so, it had come down to a failure of imagination rather than the true indignation of faith. But what if someone had warned him then that he might never return? That the outcast is punished by longevity? That his youthful decision to leave Russia could extend to a life sentence: whereas death, for those mature enough to choose it, was mercifully swift? Would he have left? The Krupp field gun on its concrete pavement was a reminder of the tragedy he had been part of. The magnitude of chaos. One million five hundred thousand Russian soldiers – the world’s largest army – fought the Great War only to be buried in their own trenches by a barrage of exploding shells fired from weapons like this. Disarmed now and silent. Above it Queen Victoria stood darkly on her plinth, R OD NE Y HA LL 43

a figure of much the same build as himself, roughly one and a half times life-size, her bronze eyes fixed far away. Yes, he recognised her, the Grandmama of Europe, a woman burdened with so much power her life might never have been her own. They shared the vacuum of an unmeasured hour. He slept rough, as he had during the flight from Vladivostok (having learnt that the murdered Tsar Nicholas II was buried at Porosenkov Log), without caring if he never woke. But his resignation fell short because he still could not rid himself of loathing all spies and pimps. Loathing was the spark of survival, just when he would prefer complete detachment. Indignation gnawed at his gut. This was the sum total of unfinished business from a lifetime of ups and downs. This was the serpent he chose to wrestle when wrestle he must. Yes. Just as well he had no idea that the dark chapel behind its hedge housed the Queensland branch of the Central Intelligence Bureau. Briefly, there came a time when strangers had taken him in. They allotted him a room for sleeping, arranged by members of the Orthodox community. Persons of unforgotten appearance. Himself an old-age Prodigal Son. They took him to a church very different from that old familiar gilded cavern glinting with the myriad flames of devotional tapers. A tinny facsimile built of factory iron stamped into rustable sheets by men of no known faith and hammered to secondhand timbers smelling desolately of past uses in hospitals and Masonic halls. Well, his devotional needs were not satisfied. Anyhow, he found his back too stiff to bow to charity. So, although these kindly folk made room for him, provided him with food, economised and adjusted to having him among them, he couldn’t live like that. Once the break happened, what possible use could he have for the respectability of an address anyway? He lost contact with them. Now and then his wanderings led him again to that tin church in a suburb near the football stadium. He knew where he was, marooned on the footpath right outside a house to which he once held the key. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 44

Indeed he still kept the key somewhere in his bags. The marvellous oddity of a key as an object – and of locking a house as a mark of belonging – impressed him more than any tug to the heart. At such times he would linger, half hoping someone might emerge. Did the same two families live here? Would they recognise him? Suppose he shouted Fire! would his survival be greeted with panic? He moved on. In this strangely empty city his preferred destination was the public library: inside during the day and outside at night. Though the Soviet newspapers in the reading room were filled with hateful propaganda they were better than silence. Language deeper than loyalty. And he rewarded himself by dipping into a small stock of Turgenev novels in the original to savour a union of minds beyond politics. Breathing, he opened a few buttons for the mild night to reach in and touch him. He had embraced exile of his own free will. Whatever came his way, the experience was in character. Everything improvised. Wandering a plateau where past and present met, he feared no-one. Beyond hate, he had had his say long ago. Now here it was once more. Yet another dawn broke, spilling new daylight across the grass. Hunger sat him up on his park bench. Often he went without food. He was used to it. Two days this time. He yawned. He patted his old greatcoat. And inspected his empty hands, large powerful hands, the hands of a horseman. He thought of that church and the pile of dirt against the doors. He remembered, when he kissed the gold embossed icon for the last time, consoling himself with the platitude that holy symbols are only ever revealed in all their terror and glory to a doubter. Paint on cracked wood. Wishful thinking. Religion was essential to the life he called life. Without the Orthodox faith there could be no pride and no such place as Russia. It was still early. At leisure he stretched out on the bench again. R OD NE Y HA LL 45

Venturing into the maze and finally at the centre, the elderly Mrs Claverhouse, the Countess Florita Rebeca Consuelo, eyelids closed in the ecstasy of communion, knelt. Lost to herself at the secret heart of the mystery. She felt the dry wafer on her tongue. Body of Christ. Appallingly fragile. Broken against the roof of her mouth. Altogether dissolved. The power of transubstantiation caught her up, overwhelmed her and held her entranced, even though she knew she would be let down as soon as she opened her eyes. How bitter that eternity persisted in repeating and repeating the already familiar. The oddity of this struck her as being particularly odd in view of the upheavals of the wider world. Her husband, the odious Claverhouse (‘pronounced Clavers, as you’re doubtless aware’), had been left to cobble breakfast together for himself. She declined to do even that for him. Well, he could surely stick his own bread in the toaster? A pity her father had ever met him. She blamed Franco, the self-styled Generalissimo. Fascism being unacceptably vulgar, her family fled the civil war. That was eighteen years ago. Poor dear Papa. He would have done better to sit out the hostilities, agreeably pampered at one or another Hotel des Bains rather than mingle with the likes of Charles Claverhouse. Charles was a boor like most diplomats who move in the highest circles without ever belonging. An interloper compared to the members of her family in all its perennial ramifications and generations, the open-hearted with the vicious, the timid with the arrogant. Yet even the family let her down. When her brother inherited she was left with nothing but her dowry. A dowry could not be cashed in or spent on everyday needs, so she’d used it to buy herself a husband. She’d said yes to marriage because, at sixty-two, she felt she might soon be regarded as an old maid. Hence the ensuing history of private hostilities. The countess dismissed her regrets. At least there was no risk of running into him here – Charles was a Protestant and dry to the very core. Oh, she was beyond caring anyhow. She had not been good. Nor READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 46

was she now. The depth of her pride could be measured by the extreme courtesy she showed everyone apart from him. When it came to the point she was proud of her pride. Indeed she vigorously nurtured the embers of a whole range of sins: anger, revenge, heartlessness, jealousy and impatience. Stone columns stood around her. Arches cupped the used candle smoke. Words in a comfortingly dead language connected her. Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem. Though the cathedral was not quite adequate in scale she appreciated that all concerned, from stonemasons to bishops, had done their best. Too soon the service was over. It had been disappointing, but she wanted more. Dragging her carcass out of darkness, desire spread whispers among the lingering threads of music. Time to employ her rolled umbrella as a walking stick to help her stand. The corner of her grandmother’s mantilla touched one cheek as she canted to obtain leverage. She hoisted herself to her feet despite the accumulation of grievances … the mantilla touched the other cheek when she canted the opposite way. She emerged into the open, buffeted by a sidewise swipe of ferocious heat. This she liked. She had been born to a hot climate. Gravel crunched under her heels. Conspicuous in the luxury of black velvet, from her black beaded beret to black-stockinged ankles, with her white hair and fine white skin, she stood while the antipodes offered what was to hand. This turned out to be a vase of flowers (apparently plonked beside the path ready to be carried indoors) and a bicycle propped on its strut with the front wheel tilted askew. Humble objects, yet they cast gigantic diagonal shadows, grotesque as mythic symbols. Inscriptions on a strange land. Mrs Claverhouse with her plump gothic face, diamonds glancing from her earlobes, stood lost in contemplation of them. Her day, which had begun with unpleasantness, now seemed to promise something out of the ordinary. The organ could still be heard thundering a piece that assumed no-one was listening. And she could still taste crumbs R OD NE Y HA LL 47

of the host. A couple of priests strode her way deep in conversation, balancing missionary conundrums as heavy as boulders. Faces partly masked by hats, they acknowledged her with a glint of light in narrowed conspiratorial eyes. The taller of the two took possession of the bicycle and began wheeling it away down Elizabeth Street. From her trance she watched the rotating spokes. Sunshine caught in the round rearvision mirror trembled and flashed. A meteorite off-balance. The other priest informed her civilly, ‘I fear there may be a storm on the way.’ She smiled without needing to reply. Well, she had her umbrella with her, gift of Dr Bródy. ‘Best to make haste,’ he added. She scanned the patchy high-flying sky for signs. His warning seemed unlikely till, finally, she turned back towards the floating cathedral, surprised to find it billowing above her, unchecked, a sandstone cloud loaded with thundery shadows. The old man gathered his things (sleeping cap, the handkerchief he spread under his face when lying on his side, pages he had salvaged from Fathers and Sons after it fell to bits) and stuffed them into one or other of the two string bags he carried everywhere. He smelled stormlight in the air. Well, he would not be caught out. He knew his way around, setting his sights on a nice little arcade where there were public seats and a basement toilet. The bandages tied round his shoes held good, layers of clothing protected him from the heat and pedestrians parted to let him through. He ambled past the bus shed at the corner where he checked the clock (oh yes, time being a universal language), shuffling purposefully along streets hung with flags for some obscure reason. Enough red, white and blue bunting garlanded the buildings to suggest another war had been won. Next thing, the darkening sky proved him right. Flash. Bang. The downpour, let loose with tropical abandon, brought traffic to a standstill. The entire bitumen surface was blanketed in an READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 48

illusion of grey fur, cancelling reflections and smothering cars. The arcade being a street away and impossible to reach he found shelter under the awning of a café. All around him pedestrians jostled, shook collapsed umbrellas and laughed good-humouredly. Two children grinned at him, but hid behind their parents’ legs when he responded with a grandfatherly smile. Too late to take back, the smile had shown frightening gaps between his remaining teeth. He knew. And he lurched away just as the big door to the café swung open releasing a puff of enticing aromas. A party of customers had pushed past him and he found himself drawn after them. Lured by the fragrance of toasted food he was already on the threshold to the forbidden. He had not meant to trespass. Wedged by his bags between the door and the doorjamb, he was inside yet not quite inside. The stylish décor glittered, enlarged by the luxury of a carpet underfoot. His intrusion caused the hubbub of café chatter to subside till nothing but the rain could be heard. Flash. Bang. Patiently he sought to release his bags and escape. But a waitress had already begun shrieking at him. Women in hats exchanged looks across the tables, in one case publicly holding their noses. He understood, of course he did. In a moment he would extricate his encumbrances. Given time. He kept calm. It was a question of not crushing anything. But time had been stopped in its tracks by a lady in the far corner who held his eyes with hers. He watched through wreathed arabesques of cigarette smoke as she rose from her seat. Still fixing him with her brilliant gaze she advanced – a person his own age, perhaps – undeniably on a mission. The tea-drinkers and coffee-drinkers at their crowded tables witnessed the outrage. Oh, he could see at a glance she was an aristocrat, one of his beloved aristocrats. And how close she came. He towered above her. Her perfume! The youthful pink of parting lips! The preposterous R OD NE Y HA LL 49

diamond on her finger! She knew what she was doing – fully confident that he could be trusted to refuse an invitation – she reached with her naked hand and took hold of his lapel. They were close enough for him to gaze down into her dark rebellious eyes. Then, in case she might not have noticed the state of his ragged clothes, he drew back to save her from embarrassment. But she held on and even gave the cloth a twitch. He now saw she was not alone. A doctor stood beside her (surely a doctor), wordless but observant, recognisable by his spectacles and round belly. What’s more, this portly person bowed. Then so did she. Witnessed by the dwindling background of horrified faces all three of them bowed, exchanging compliments in their respective languages. At the last minute she astonished him with a gesture that pierced his heart. Finally, the old Russian monarchist extricated his bags. Free to back out, he brought the pantomime to a conclusion. The door swung shut and he was safely outside. With unruffled calm he faced the downpour, sodden flags, bunting plastered across the face of the buildings opposite, the street itself sliding away underfoot. The torrent of popping bubbles, roaring drains and flooded gutters so fascinated the gathered crowd that no-one noticed him, let alone the blush of youth revisiting his cheeks. The sun does not set: the horizon rises.

Late night. Stone-cold sober, Dr Antal Bródy suffered insomnia. Many hours after returning home to his little house in the suburbs he lay awake. It had been an extraordinary day. Beside him Elsie slept, plump and unsuspecting, comfortable and at peace. He must not wake her from her dreams. Stealthily he got up and tiptoed into the front room READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 50

where he sat in the cane chair. A cluster of moths celebrated his arrival, fluttering about his head. His sobriety was the consequence of having made a sale. And such a sale. The buyer for a big department store, caught by the rain on his way back to work, had placed an order for a large number of umbrellas. The elements as ally. And now, thanks to having resisted the beautiful temptations of alcohol, he had been able to report this to Elsie without exaggeration. What he kept to himself was that strange scene at the Colony Club when a tramp – familiar around town and rumoured to be a Soviet spy – had arrived in the doorway. Confirming his identity, the old fellow spoke to Mrs Claverhouse in Russian, citing his years of service to the Tsar and asking her forgiveness for his unkempt appearance. He, Bródy, was the only one who understood. Now, in his wooden ark of safety he murmured, ‘So, why didn’t I reply? At least on her behalf? Why not tell the countess he addressed her as Your Ladyship?’ The cane chair grumbled and wheezed while he delved for the cigarette packet. Was it a question of keeping his communist principles secret? Did he fear revealing himself as the enemy? Was it because his motive for learning Russian in the first place would condemn him? Altogether probable. Such wounds run deep. The comforts of the room gathered round while he imagined the tramp crouched somewhere under a bridge. By way of harmlessly indulging in regret, he added without actually articulating the words: Oh the hardship, the isolation! Yet, of course, he and the tramp would have had nothing to say to one another. They had each made the life they must live. Why add to the poor man’s woes? Why open the chasm of hope? No friendship was possible between them. Thus, it was settled. What’s more, she knew. Florita knew. How else could her farewell gesture be explained? She had reached up and touched the tramp’s cheek with the back of her hand. The gesture exquisitely impersonal. R OD NE Y HA LL 51

Dr Bródy lit a cigarette. Dropping the dead match in an ashtray he reached over to choose a record from the rack. He put it on the gramophone and set the volume at a barely audible whisper. Solo piano notes touched the air with felt hammers. He is in Budapest in an unadorned room of ample size where every scratch and scrape along the skirting-board is deeply familiar. The music room. Filled with mid-morning light. The great instrument stands on the waxed floor in the dark pool of its own reflection. Beyond the window he can see mansard roofs with chimneys giving out steady skeins of smoke. A powdering of snow hangs suspended in the quiet Sunday sky. His mother is perched on the piano stool, her head held to one side as if her right ear were more discriminating than the left, hair in the untidy bun of a self-forgetful person. She plays the opening of this heartrending piece he knows too well. He loves her with an agonising love so far beyond expression it comes out all too often as resentment. So, the same piano notes hung in that Brisbane room at midnight. Dr Bródy pressed both hands across his mouth, rings hard against his teeth. He did not expect this – his nerves had been deadened by repetition during the years of seeking refuge – least of all to find himself wounded by the sharpest shame of all. The last time he saw his mother she was splashing through mud at dawn, stripped naked and herded away among other naked women, being watched as they went by their healthy sons. Elsie, awake in bed and receptive to happiness, heard the faintest whisper of piano music and smiled. The dear old pet, she thought, thinks he can do without his memories.

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Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. She has been publishing books with UQP since 1997, with her first novel, Steam Pigs, winning the Dobbie Literary Award and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hard Yards (1999) was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Mullumbimby (2013) won the Queensland Literary Award and was longlisted for the Stella Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Nita B Kibble Literary Award. She has also written two novels for teenagers, Killing Darcy (UQP, 1998) and Too Flash (IAD Press, 2002). In 2013 Melissa won the inaugural long-form Walkley Award for her Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan’. Her novel, Too Much Lip, will be published by UQP in 2018.

Border Protection I wrote a novel before lunch today or was it a PhD thesis I forget. But anyway always the multitasker as my left hand scribbled my right arm raised a fire-hard lance Ironbark proper narbalang one which means strong for all you monolinguists. As it flew through the air straight and true my lance was singing an Archie Roach song. It sang a bit flat, but ah it was proper deadly anyway. My spear went on a bit till it discovered the previously unknown aorta of a colonist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time as usual!

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while my spear cleaved muscle cut sinew lodged in bone it was reciting a poem by Uncle Tony Birch. I stood over that trespasser. I jerked out my spear. Got proper soaked in red. It went everywhere by cripes! And as I wiped it clean, remembering the words of Uncle Kev Carmody, and the counsel of Aunty Alexis Wright, our spear kept interrupting me, telling me, real happy way, in a high and breathless voice that it belonged Sister belonged Uncle belonged Daughter, really properly belonged to everybody.

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Gabrielle Carey is the author of two novels – Puberty Blues (McPhee Gribble, 1979) and The Borrowed Girl (Picador, 1994) – as well as biography, autobiography, essays, articles and short stories. Her autobiographical works include Just Us (McPhee Gribble, 1984) and In My Father’s House (Picador, 1992). Her most recent book, Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family, was published by UQP in 2013 and went on to win the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. She currently teaches writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

Like a Love Affair All my life I have put my faith in books and literature and writing but of late I have begun to wonder whether novels and poetry, with their webs of literary illusions, have actually conspired to ruin me. My psychic dependence on books only became clear when I had a dream about being swept up in a cyclone and the only solid thing I could find to hold on to was a bookshelf. Needless to say, it wasn’t weighty enough to keep my feet on the ground. It feels as if all those years, and all those books, both written and read, have been leading to this moment; a moment where I sit in judgement of myself and my vocation. Something like a Carmelite nun, who, after fifty years, looks down at her worn hands and her worn habit, and suddenly and irrevocably loses faith. In order to understand how I got here I need to go back to the beginning, to the books that formed me. The book I blame for setting me on the path to becoming a writer is Ivan Southall’s To the Wild Sky, a story of children who are travelling in a light plane when the pilot has a heart attack and dies, leaving his young passengers utterly alone, mid-air. Which is pretty much exactly how I feel.

Although mostly unread and unknown to young people of the present generation, in the 1960s and 70s, Ivan Southall was a literary superstar. Selling in the hundreds of thousands and translated into over twenty G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 57

languages, Southall produced over thirty books for children and was the only Australian to be awarded the Carnegie Medal. While he was reviled by some critics, and accused of racism, sadism and misanthropy, his young readers loved him. The National Library of Australia holds hundreds of adoring letters from children that attest to a wide and devoted audience. Dear Mr Southall, I have just finished reading To the Wild Sky. It was a beaut book and I loved reading it. In the story they landed at Molineaux Island. Was this island fictional? I’ve looked in about four atlas’ and can’t find it. Kathy Dear Mr Southall, I have just read your book Ash Road and I have found it very exciting. I am very impressed by the way you describe the young people. What I’m trying to say is that you would have to know young people to have written about them and I think you know young people very very well. Sincerely yours, Mary Castle, Ohio Dear Mr Southall, I wonder if I could come and see you some time. I know that you are probably tied up writing one of those sensational books of yours but I just want to say, that seeing you are a marvellous author, maybe I could ask you a few questions and maybe you could tell me a few things. I would be very pleased to meet you as I have a few things to show you. Peter Dean

At the top of each letter in Southall’s handwriting is the word ‘Reply’ and a date. No correspondent, as far as I can tell, failed to receive a READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 58

response. Even Peter Dean, who wanted to meet Southall because he ‘had a few things to show’ him, gets a personal invitation. At the top of his letter Southall writes: ‘Reply, Yes, when he wishes. 12–10–70.’ My adventures into the Ivan Southall archives began with selfinterest. When I first arrived at the National Library I was actually looking for a letter from myself. I have always been a compulsive letterwriter so it was just possible that I too had felt compelled to put pen to paper while in the afterglow of reading To the Wild Sky. But after two days of reading through twenty-five folders of correspondence, I realised that there were two missing from the period in which I would have written. And in any case, by that stage, I was completely entranced with the letters from other nine-, ten- and eleven-year-olds. I loved their handwriting, their candidness, their stories about their pets, their complaints about siblings, their ambitions, their reports of daily mundanities, and I especially loved their spelling mistakes. ‘I past all my exams,’ writes Janie proudly, ‘and on Sunday I got 15 Easter eggs.’ ‘I don’t think wrighting books is for me,’ says Linda. ‘I am going to become a nurse if I can.’

Three cheers for Linda! What a sensible decision. My mother and grandmother were both nurses. Why hadn’t I followed in their footsteps?

Southall began his long career in writing for children with a series of Biggles-style adventure books based on a superhero pilot named Simon Black. ‘Simon Black was six feet tall, black-haired, skinny, incredibly clever, incredibly handsome – me, you see, my superego,’ he told oral historian Hazel de Berg. G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 59

Then one day a conversation with his brother resulted in a dramatic shift in style and content. Southall told the story repeatedly in letters, in conversations, and in interviews. As he explained in a letter to a reader in 1971: In 1959 in the living room of my home, then at Monbulk Victoria, I asked my brother a question: ‘What would happen to our children if they were left on their own and we were not here to look after them?’ He thought they would die, probably in a short time. I thought about it for a year and then decided to find out in a story. So I took some of those children who had been with us that day, and a few that I knew, changed their names, put them in an imaginary town called Hills End and then discovered the story you read in the book. I didn’t know how it was going to work out and I didn’t know whether the children would live or die. To me it was a real adventure.

Hills End was the first of Southall’s ‘survival stories’, where the young protagonists are faced with disasters. The story follows the fates of seven children trapped in a cave while storms and floods wreak destruction on their town; Ash Road chronicles a bushfire and To the Wild Sky a plane crash. Southall later described Hills End as ‘an abrupt and major change of course that came to be regarded, worldwide, as a new departure in literature for children’. A final draft was delivered to Angus & Robertson in 1959 but there were serious reservations about the author’s dramatic change in tone and subject matter. One of the readers for the publisher thought that it was too mature for young children and that ‘the psychological exploration of motives and moods (although interesting) [were] a little out of tune for the juvenile’. The question of whether his stories were or were not suitable for children would dog Southall for the rest of his professional life. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 60

Doubts about Southall’s new style delayed publication until 1962. What happened next was something that neither the author nor the publisher could have imagined. In 1963 Hills End was included in the list of New York Times Books of the Year and chosen by the American Library Association as one of fifty-five titles recognised as ‘Notable Children’s Books’ of that year. Translated into ten languages, it was developed twice into a television series, firstly in France in 1987, and then in Australia in 1988. In Sweden it was dramatised for radio and in Japan produced as a musical stage show. Sales eventually ran into the hundreds of thousands. Southall had clearly struck a chord and his young readers wrote to him to express their appreciation. Dear Mr Southall, I just have finished reading Hills End. I have read hundreds of books but never have I read one twice. Hills End I have read thrice. It’s the best book in my library and the best I’ve read in all my life (12 years, 13 yrs come May). Your faithful reader, Robert PS I am telling everyone about Hills End. Dear Mr Southall, I have read five of your books and I like them all. Hills End is my favourite. I live in a small goldmining town in Western Victoria. My great great grandfather was king of the splitters when Buninyong just began. We have an extinct volcano and the town is at the foot of it. I am ten years old and could I please have your autograph. Yours sincerely, Tim Simpson Dear Mr Southall, I enjoyed your book Hills End. Your description of the children was G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 61

so good. I can see and hear them. I like the ending. I’ve never read a book like it. It was touching and exciting. It sort of has a lesson: ‘Children can get along!’ Please write back. Sincerely, Betsy Holt

But what was it about Hills End that made it so exceptional? It was certainly dramatic. The little town is left in ruins and the children are alone without shelter or food or an adult to protect them. By pulling together they begin to rebuild from the wreckage, demonstrating, as Betsy pointed out, that ‘children can get along’. But there was something else that was new which wasn’t just about drama. Southall would later comment that Hills End was his favourite because ‘it was the first book I ever wrote that had something useful to say’. The ‘useful thing’ it had to say was that even amid disaster children were capable of rising to the occasion. In Hills End Southall was letting children know that, whatever the circumstances, he had faith in them. And it was a message that children were thrilled to hear. And there was something else that made Hills End groundbreaking: the external drama was matched by the internal, psychological drama going on in the minds and emotions of the child characters. As Southall said: ‘I am trying to introduce children to the idea that their greatest adventures, their greatest moments, will belong to what goes on inside.’ This was certainly an idea that I internalised. The interior life had always been more real to me than the exterior. But I’ve recently concluded that the perpetual introspection of the writer’s life is not a healthy or happy way of living. I’m now wondering whether I should have taken the high school Careers Advisor’s recommendation and become a florist instead.

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Southall was a professional in the sense that he earned his living from writing, a rarity among writers then as much as now. But his success had not come easily. His father, who had always been physically weak, died leaving his fourteen-year-old son obliged to leave school. The man who was to spend his life writing for and about children, had in fact been robbed of a significant part of his own childhood. Like his father, Ivan was not masculine, in a physical sense. Nowadays he might have found a way to fit in by joining the legion of slim hipsters but in the 1940s and 50s he felt inadequate. ‘I am not over-blessed with manly strength,’ he wrote. ‘I’m conscious of a thin body. I dislike standing in a public shower, or sunbaking on a beach. I feel eyes on me, my body worries me.’ Despite attempts at body-building and weight-lifting Southall couldn’t live up to the ideal of the burly Australian male and it was a deficiency he felt all his life. Even at fourteen Southall knew he wanted to write. But his mother wasn’t impressed with her son’s aspirations. ‘He should be told that writers starve,’ she commented. At fifteen Southall started as a copyboy with The Herald in their Flinders Street office running messages and making tea for the sub-editors. Later when he tried for a journalism cadetship and failed, he blamed his lack of education, a deficit that left him with a lifelong feeling of inferiority. In 1941, at the age of twenty, Southall presented himself to the Royal Australian Air Force to enlist for active service in the hope of fulfilling a boyhood dream to fly. While waiting for his call-up, he was conscripted into the army and sent to defend the Victorian coastline where for months he alternated between lookout duty and resting in a cave shelter. Then one morning in 1942, Southall experienced something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. An Australian military aircraft came in from the sea and plunged violently to the ground. The impact and the blast, he said, ‘speared my heart like a splinter of ice that never thawed’. G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 63

Southall’s comment is immediately reminiscent of Kafka’s reflection on reading: We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Certainly Southall’s disaster stories created this effect on their readers but this is exactly what bothered the critics. Should children be exposed to disasters of this magnitude? Should they read books that grieve them deeply? At one point in Hills End the children find their beloved teacher lying at the bottom of a ravine, seemingly dead. And with each book that followed, the degree of trauma experienced by the child characters increased. In Finn’s Folly a car accident leaves children orphaned alongside the corpses of their parents causing one critic to suggest that the novel violated the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. And in Josh the young protagonist is so mentally tortured as to be diagnosed by one critic as ‘intensely paranoid’, amounting to a literary experience of ‘constricted bitterness’ and ‘fatalistic (if not nihilistic) suffering’. Even some of his devoted readers wondered at the extent of pain Southall inflicted on his characters. Dear Mr Southall, I love your books and I think the best was Josh. Was Josh true? If it was I feel sorry for him. If it wasn’t why did you make so much trouble for him? Giselle

My impression is that Southall tested his boy characters to the very edge of endurance because it mirrored his own personal experience. Much of his writing seems to have its genesis in the death of his father and READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 64

the son’s sudden resuming of adult responsibilities. Southall’s books are populated again and again by young boys struck by disaster who are suddenly forced to become men. One critic suggested that most of Southall’s books could be subtitled: On Becoming a Man. Each novel is a portrait, in one way or another, of Southall’s own painful struggle with masculinity. On returning from his coastal duty Southall formally enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and in 1942 he boarded a US troopship for a long journey that ended at Pembroke in Wales, where the Second Australian Sunderland Squadron was based. From there Sergeant Southall headed out on the first of fifty-six operational flights. Every flight invoked terror. His principal opponent was not the enemy, he later said, but fear. Fear and flying would also become two of the main themes of many of the books he was to write, including To the Wild Sky. It is said that all writing is an effort to find that which has been lost. I was nine when I devoted myself to the idea of being a writer. I was also nine when my father left home and my parents separated. The house was heavy with unspoken tension and emotion; I knew something momentous was happening but I also intuited that it was something beyond speaking about. Silence was the only response. And yet I yearned to have my say. So I picked up my pencil. Perhaps this is something that Southall and I have in common: lost fathers. The loss of my own father happened twice. Once when he left the family home and then again when he took his own life. I too had found much of my subject matter determined by an untimely death of a parent. I too had found catharsis in the writing process and looked for healing in the creation of narrative. But if all writing is an effort to find that which has been lost, how do I go about finding my lost faith in writing itself? How do I write myself back into writing? How did Southall keep the faith? G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 65

Ivan Southall grew up in an intensely religious household. His father had wanted to be a missionary, after-dinner Bible readings were de rigueur and every Sunday revolved around the local Methodist church. Later in life, while living at Monbulk,Victoria, in the 1950s and 60s, the local Methodist minister asked Ivan to help out with the circuit of congregations and for a period he delivered sermons to schools and churches in the area. ‘In my stories from the pulpit I tell the epics of scripture in modern idiom,’ he wrote. Perhaps his survival stories for children were also, in some form, sermons and his readers, adoring and faithful, became his congregation. Every morning before he began to write Ivan said a prayer. ‘He never lost his faith,’ said his wife, Susan, ‘although he may have lost faith in the church. He said his work was his prayer.’ ‘I believe in what I’m doing or I wouldn’t be doing it,’ said Southall. ‘Without faith, I can see no reason for life nor any answers to the riddle of the world. All this would have no meaning.’ How I envy such faith. Does any living writer in Australia have the kind of faith in her craft that Southall did? Perhaps Southall’s diligence in responding to his readers wasn’t just an act of polite acknowledgement. Perhaps his direct relationship with them was the way he kept the faith. Maybe he was just as dependent on them as they were on him. Perhaps without them he would have felt like a pastor preaching to an empty church. And maybe it wasn’t just a question of faith, but also of love. ‘You reach those and please those who tune in on your wavelength,’ Southall wrote. ‘It is a very personal matter. Rapport – no less and probably no more. If it is there, it is something like a love affair, and even children fall in love.’ Before travelling to Canberra to look at the Southall archives I had bought a signed first edition of To the Wild Sky from an antiquarian READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 66

bookseller. I knew this was where I had to start – by re-reading the book that had determined my destiny. But I was so nervous about re-engaging with it as an adult that months went past and the book remained unopened. What if I couldn’t recall any of the excitement from fifty years ago? What if I’d lost the childish capacity for enchantment? What if I didn’t love him anymore? After a week in the archives reading letters from the 1960s and 70s, I finally found the courage to open my copy of To the Wild Sky. For the first few chapters I withheld my critical mind, wanting and hoping for the feeling of enrapture to return, but by the fourth chapter my apprehension was confirmed. I can’t go back. Even worse, I found the dialogue clunky, the tone abrasive, the gender roles stereotyped, the grown-ups mostly mean-spirited and unlikeable. What grated most were the comments about girls. ‘“Danger?” squealed Stevie. That was a word for women.’ ‘Gee whiz. Do they think you’re a girl or somethin’?’ ‘Am I to be plagued all day by a bunch of hysterical females?’

But it wasn’t just these asides which, after all, only reflect the era. It’s that the boys get to be deep and thoughtful as they undergo their teenage inner turmoils while girls remain on the periphery of any action, physical or emotional. I was relieved then, on the last page of To the Wild Sky, when Southall partially redeemed himself by allowing Jan, one of his two girl characters, to light the fire, the only hope of survival for this hungry, bedraggled group of lost children. The critics were divided about To the Wild Sky, as they were about Southall’s entire output. Dennis Hall, writing for Australian Book Review, claimed that it was the most ambitious children’s book so far attempted by an Australian writer. Others believed the book was too dark, with one critic accusing Southall of borrowing from Lord of the Flies. G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 67

When To the Wild Sky won the Children’s Book of the Year Award Brenda Niall stated that she thought it would have been more appropriate for him to have been awarded the ‘William Golding Prize for Cultural Pessimism’. But what bothered critics and readers alike was the unresolved ending. Would the children be rescued or would they be left on this lone island forever? In 1968 a young boy articulated a common complaint: Dear Mr Southall, I have just finished reading your book To the Wild Sky. I enjoyed the story very much but I’m very disappointed with the ending. Why did you write an ending like that? Now I don’t know if they were rescued, or if they died, or if they lived there for the rest of their lives. Yours sincerely, Andrew Jay

Southall explained the genesis of To the Wild Sky thus: ‘To the Wild Sky grew out of daydreams I had as a boy, of flying an aeroplane far away to a wonderful place where no-one would ever find me.’ Was this why he had left the children abandoned on the island? Was he living out his childhood fantasy? My view is that the open-ended finale of To the Wild Sky appealed to the creative mind, to the child who could imagine her own ending, who considered the openness as an invitation, from the master to the novice, to write her own vision in her own words. And it was an invitation that I couldn’t resist. Not knowing, as I do now, what dark and difficult navigations lay ahead. At that age, it was precisely the darkness, the clouds of unknowing, that I found alluring.

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Like so many writers, Southall was driven, often to the detriment of his personal relationships. This was something I could relate to, having repeatedly failed in my attempts to combine motherhood, marriage and writing. Something had to be sacrificed, and it was never the writing. He confessed to one of his young correspondents: The only way I can write these days is to go away but this means I have to be very lonely because I must go on my own. Sometimes that is all right; it depends upon your mood; sometimes it is very difficult. The person who writes stories is usually born to write and can’t help himself. He has GOT to write. If that’s the way it is with you that’s the way it will be.

If Southall was right perhaps questioning my vocation is as useful as questioning my nationality or my gender and being a writer is not a matter of faith, as I had thought, but of fate. I am not the only contemporary writer to have been deeply influenced by Southall. According to Young Adult novelist James Moloney, Southall paved the way for the hugely popular, and also highly controversial, writer John Marsden. ‘The Tomorrow When the War Began series is in many ways a grand expansion of Southall’s scenario in Hills End ’, wrote Moloney. Marsden admits to being impressed by Southall as a young reader. ‘He did have a level of psychological awareness that I probably wasn’t aware of as a reader but it was very effective. I think he was aware of the unconscious or at least endowed his characters with unconscious minds more than previous generations had done.’ In a collection called Books That Made Me, novelist James Roy wrote, ‘Most young readers want a story that makes them feel something they recognise, something that makes them feel better G A B R I E LLE CA R E Y 69

about being who they are, and about being the way they are. For me, Josh was that book.’ Editor, journalist and non-fiction writer Mark Mordue feels equally indebted: Southall established a world for me that was adventurous, harshly sensuous, distressingly solitary and distinctly Australian. He helped me fall in love with reading; he also put me on the path to becoming a writer. I believe he was ‘the’ children’s writer of the last century but where is the recognition? Where is his plaque? Where is the prize in his honour? He had a decade of being the best children’s writer in the country, recognised the world over, and a few decades later he is utterly forgotten.

Southall’s fate reminds me of the final line from his novel Bread and Honey. When Michael’s grandmother is preparing to place a wreath on the Anzac memorial, he asks, ‘Is this because people remember, Grandma, or pretend that they don’t forget?’ The title of Southall’s unpublished autobiography, Delights Gained from Being Obsolete, suggests how he felt about his legacy. And yet, all these years later, there are thousands of Australians whose imaginations remain indelibly marked by the experience of reading Southall as a child. So although he may have felt forgotten, the love affair lives on. And like Mark Mordue, I feel a continuing personal debt to Southall; thanks to my re-encounter with the author and his affectionate readers, I have magically – for the moment at least – rediscovered my writing mojo.

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Matthew Condon is a prize-winning author and journalist. In 2013 UQP published the first book in his best-selling truecrime trilogy about Queensland crime and corruption, Three Crooked Kings, which was followed by Jacks and Jokers (2014) and All Fall Down (2015). Three Crooked Kings won the John Oxley Library Award with the other two books being shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards People’s Choice Award. Jacks and Jokers was longlisted for the Walkley Book Award, while All Fall Down won the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) – Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year. His follow-up memoir, Little Fish Are Sweet (UQP, 2016), catalogues the extraordinary personal account of the investigation behind the trilogy. Matthew has also written ten books of fiction, including The Trout Opera (Random House, 2007), The Pillow Fight (Random House, 1998) and A Night at The Pink Poodle (Random House, 1995). He began his journalism career with the Gold Coast Bulletin in 1984 and subsequently worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald and Melbourne’s Sunday Age. He is currently on staff with the Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine.

Lotus Come with me now. There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I know it’s dark outside. Don’t be afraid. I’ve lived in the dark for so long there’s one thing I know – what’s there in the light is still there at night. So come on. On your right are the ancient fig trees where the children play during the day, their laughter catching on the waxy leaves. Every time I hear them it sounds new to me. It tells me how far I’ve travelled from that goodness. As if I’d never been a child myself. Watch those dreary rose beds on your left. A thorn is a thorn, night or day. I see those roses and I can’t not think of bloody Hallahan. That’s Detective Glendon Patrick Hallahan to you. Sharp dresser. Trailed a wake of aftershave and heartbroken women. They got him here, for corruption, among the roses. Caught him taking a kickback from a hooker. He got off, of course, but that’s another story. I’ll steer you clear of the river. A river is something different in the dark. I suppose you know that. They fished that gay boy, Venamore, out of the water with a hook, not far from here. Poor, silly boy. Bashed to death. What did he see? What did he know? Only the river knows now. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 72

Brunswick Street. You can probably hear it. That rhythmic beating. Like distant drums. Or a heart beneath the bitumen. I worked here for years. Know every crack in the footpath, especially in the night. Keep up. I’m right beside you. Fortitude Valley. If it gets into your blood, that’s it – the bars, the dark rooms that reek of sex, the booze and broken bones, the blooms of vomit on the footpath. Blackening bodies alone in a bedsit, with the finest of needles still attached. The cordite off a fired gun. The dead eyes of the living. When you get used to all that, behind the perfume of the Valley, you can smell the money. Greed has a scent all of its own. Did you catch it? Still powerful after all these years, coming from the bottom of the stairwell of 142 Wickham Street, the illegal casino that the bigwigs of parliament say never existed. The reek of cash like bad breath. See that dump over on the corner? The World by Night strip club. Right next to it used to be Pinocchio’s, where the bad cops ate bad spaghetti and pocketed their folded cash before the money really started pouring in. But remember it, because it’s where a lot of what happened really started. Keep going. Not far now. When you’re on the game there are no seasons. My mother told me that. She walked these streets too, had a couple of brothels in her heyday. When Brisbane ladies of her vintage were playing bridge and studying pamphlets for nursing homes, she was still running two girls out of her little shitbox in Spring Hill. And over there on the corner, where Queen runs into Adelaide Street, that was the old National Hotel. That’s where I was at my peak. I worked out of there all through the 1960s. Bacardi and Coke. A fog of cigarette smoke. The police in their fine suits and pork pie hats. The jazz bands. Don’t let it get into your blood: the girls, the men. M ATTHE W COND ON 73

I still remember my favourite powder-blue double-layer chiffon nightgown with a white lace trim and satin bow. Us girls used to come down to the bar in our nighties. The sex started on the way back up in the elevator. The orgies. The coppers. Even if I told you, you would not believe what went on there. That lovely man Jack Cooper, the manager, he was shot to death on his way home from work one night. Riddled with bullets. But still the show went on. Here, turn left into Edward Street. That’s the old Rowes restaurant where the queers used to hang out. And over there is the Tattersalls Club. All men too, when you come to think of it. Let’s cross at the lights. And here we are – the Lotus Room. This place used to be the centre of my life. The only place where I felt safe. The restaurant is gone now, but let me take you inside as best as I can remember it. Down the stairs and into the main dining room. There’s the Billy Blackmore Trio on piano, bass and drums. You want jazz? Sure thing. Modern hits? Just name it. The place is always packed. Best Chinese food in the city. Look over in the corner. It’s a little dark, but look closely. That’s Detective Tony Murphy, the hard man, tucking into some Chop Suey. He likes his beer. He’s the alpha, the enforcer. That former commissioner, Ray Whitrod – too straight for his own good the poor bastard – he once said there were two types of officers in the Queensland police. The meat eaters and the grass eaters. Murphy’s a meat eater. So are his disciples. The guy next to him? That’s Detective Terence Murray Lewis. He’ll clean his plate down to the porcelain. Just another face in the crowd, you’d think, but he’s an old-world lizard. A chameleon. The chameleon, as you might know, can see in two directions at once. Hard to believe, but he’ll be the Police Commissioner in a few years. When Hallahan joins them it’s the mythical troika in flesh and blood – the Rat Pack. See them smiling and laughing over dinner. They READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 74

have that glow, don’t they? They shine with power and confidence. And with the knowledge that they own this town and everyone in it. That nothing is impossible when you have no fear of violence and are prepared to take what you want, when you want it. They were kings. I can tell you now; an age ago I slept with one of them. I won’t name names. But when we were done, I looked into his eyes, those two black pits, and I saw nothing but my own death. My papery old skin creeps just telling you that. It was those eyes that pushed me out of the game in the end. Sent me back to civilian life. Which is why I’m still alive. That spiffily dressed gentleman at the edge of the group. That’s Jack Herbert. The Bagman. He’s that movement at the corner of your eye and then he’s gone. He was the organiser of The Joke. He helped them set it all up, divvied up the money as the bent coppers took a cut from the SP Bookies, from the brothel owners and the escorts. They said it was for our protection but no-one was safe. Don’t be fooled. These men might seem friendly, just doing their jobs, but do you know what really holds them together? Do you know what keeps The Joke running? It’s the secrets they have on each other. That’s the glue. That’s the binding agent. Deep, dark secrets that go to the heart of being a certain type of man. Those cops had money coming in from everywhere. All hush-hush it was. For years they got away with it. But they’re not the ones I want you to meet. That’s not why I brought you down here. Come, follow me into the kitchen. That man at the chopping block. Preparing vegetables. His name is Ray Sue-Tin. See how expertly he handles the knife. As if it is a part of his hand. The speed. The accuracy. It takes inner balance to perform like that. It requires an absolute sense of knowing who you are and why you are here on this earth. Ray knows that more than anybody sitting out there in his restaurant, more than the Blackmore boys belting out M ATTHE W COND ON 75

‘Build Me Up Buttercup’. This is his restaurant. I met him late one night after a rough job. I’d been messed up by the john. When I saw lights on at the Lotus I stumbled in. It was Ray and his wife, Quorling, who steered me into this kitchen, sat me down, fed me. Ray and his incessant chopping. It was like a child’s lullaby to me. You know, he never even asked my name. That first night he lifted his eyes from his work, pointed the knife towards me briefly, and said: ‘You are Lotus.’ After that always with a smile, ‘Good evening, Lotus.’ It took me years to work out why. The roots of the lotus flower are embedded in pond or river scum, while the leaves float on the surface of the water. The flowers open during the day and close at night. They are sacred. Spiritual. Beauty from mud. They are purity that rises from the filth of the earth. Ray called me Lotus and I adopted it as my street name. When I was raped on the job, or when I had to give freebies to corrupt coppers, I always thought of the lotus and its promise. But you’re not here for that, for the pretty pink and white flowers. It’s time to take you below the surface and into the filth and scum of this pond we call Brisbane. Down there you’ll find the missing bodies this whole corrupt nightmare left behind. The women who knew too much, saw things they shouldn’t have. They’re all down there: lovely brothel madam Simone Vogel with her blonde beehive and expensive jewels; the young country girl Margaret Ward, on the game and dead because of it. This story is really about them. It’s the women who earned the money that kept the corrupt system going, and it’s the women who brought the whole thing down. They’re all down there, in the dark, nourishing the roots of the lotus plants. Come. Let me show you. It’s time you learnt the truth. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 76

I’m old myself now. I live outside of Brisbane in a town nobody remembers, in a house nobody looks at twice. Out the back I have a garden, and in the middle of that garden I have a pond, dense with waterlilies and lotus flowers. Sometimes, I kneel down at its edge and slip my spotted, arthritic hands into the water. These hands that have pleasured thousands of men. That have shaken uncontrollably. That have nursed a head teeming with nightmares. That have fought. In the water of the pond, I can see my girls again. The other lotus flowers. The ones who never made old bones. I can run a gentle fingertip down the cheek of Shirley Brifman. Look at her, so small, so insignificant. Just a country girl from a tough timber town on the Atherton Tablelands. As a teenager she’d escape every weekend and go out dancing in the halls throughout the torpid north, the humidity clinging to her homemade frocks. Broderie anglais over ice-white satin and capes of fur. That place was never going to hold her, not our Shirley. She ran off to Cairns and got a job, pulling beers at the Courthouse Hotel. She met Sonny there, and then she married him. When they moved to Brisbane, they already had baby Mary Anne in tow. Not long after they arrived Shirley started work out of the Killarney brothel. It wasn’t much to look at, just an old Queenslander in South Brisbane, over by the fish canning factory on the river. It didn’t take long, in that mud, for her to cross paths with the Rat Pack, and so began her dance with death. I see her now, exquisitely dressed, clutching a stole in winter, giving off the odour of a dozen men as she finishes her shift. Making her way home across the city to feed her kid. She was never pinched by the cops because she always paid up on time. The Rat Pack would come around once a week and collect the money for Bischof, the Police Commissioner. Big as a house and ugly as sin, he was. How is it that the most powerful men are usually the ugliest? I got no answer to that. M ATTHE W COND ON 77

But Shirley had a way. She could pop in and out of police headquarters like she was picking up a sandcake from Mac & East in George Street. All part of The Joke right? I think she thought she was safe with Bischof ’s boys, especially Murphy and Hallahan. They made her, and she did good for a while there. Moved to Sydney in 1963. Built an empire of brothels and became that city’s vice queen. But in the end they broke her. Her home became a stash house for stolen goods, a refuge for shot gangsters to recuperate, a place for bent coppers to meet and divide the spoils of their crimes. It was a black hole that pulled in all the light. But it couldn’t last forever. That Sydney copper, Freddy Krahe, he was fucking her one minute and burning off the soles of her feet another. She’d had enough. Even she got tired of the game, and so she blew the whistle on all of them. She had to move back to Brisbane then, and that’s when things came unstuck. She knew too much. She knew she was going to die. You don’t mess with The Joke. When she ended up as chief witness in a perjury trial against Murphy her fate was sealed. It arrived on her doorstep on a dark night in March 1972. They killed her and the case against Murphy evaporated. See her there, my troubled lotus, lost forever to the mud of the pond. Just another hooker out of the way. Barbara McCulkin, she’s another of my lotus angels. And her two little girls. See her in that little wooden house in Highgate Hill. That deadbeat gangster husband of hers, Billy, left her for another woman but still won’t let go. Here he comes now, up the stairs, bringing his own foul brand of terror. Where are they? Barbara and the girls? The lights are left on in the empty house. A frock still under the needle of a sewing machine. How do people just vanish? Did these men never learn that women are not disposable? That we are not playthings on the fringe of their bullshit. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 78

The lotus is indestructible. It can live for thousands of years, forever beneath the surface, waiting for the light, waiting to rise and bloom. Just because you can’t see my lotus flowers anymore – Shirley, Barbara and Simone – it doesn’t mean they’re not here. They’re everywhere. And they’re everywhere because they have never been put to rest. That’s the problem with secrets. They get under your skin. They itch and aggravate. They demand to be resolved. The Brifman story haunts this town. The threads of it catch on old brick and rose thorns, on fence pikes and gravestones. To understand what happened you must see them at play. Men, that is. And especially this group of men. The Rat Pack. Not Sammy and Dean or Bishop and Sinatra. Not the glamour of New York and Vegas, but our Brisbane pack, kicking back at Lennons or throwing down a late-night snifter in the Grand Central or the National Hotel – the stork clubs overlooking Petrie Bight. Jesus wept. They met more often than not in secret. Of course they did. And they did it after dark. Sunlight kills bacteria. The most convenient of places was Jack the Bagman’s place. Beautiful view of the river from his flat in East Brisbane. See the diamonds on the water? Jack must have looked at that every day and been secure in the knowledge that he’d made it. Five o’clock in the afternoon. On the dot. At the bar in Jack’s place. Look at the clock. Five sharp. And in they come, a handful of men who took a blowtorch to this town and this state, the sheer relentless heat of it buckling every decent girder in the system we call democracy. Dumb coppers took more money than they could spend. They didn’t have to worry about gangsters in Brisbane because they were the gangsters. And the spivs and molls were their employees. Thieves M ATTHE W COND ON 79

and players, the lot of them – came from nothing and ended up with everything. But I know there’s a special kind of death reserved for those bastards. They got waiting for ’em a cue of ghosts that stretches from here to the end of the river. Every whore they murdered or tortured or maimed or terrified, they’ll be waiting for them at the end. They’re nice and patient, ghosts. I know my time will come too. And when it does, those mongrels will be crying for their mummies into eternity. Enjoy your drinks, boys. I stand in front of the mirror and wonder how I made it through. Look at my old wrinkled tits and arse. Check out the ancient Lotus. Sometimes I look at her and blame her for all the trouble I’ve seen. I try hard to remember that she kept me alive and I’d probably be dead without her. I love her and hate her, the dirty bitch. Oh, there were thousands of men who visited. The blokes, the squareheads, that thought of her when they were screwing their wives in some square brick butterbox in the suburbs. She’s still got her nightie on. The one that smells of OMO. He’s slipped it out of his Y-fronts and given her a poke and that, they say, is the end of that. Fuck I’m old. And I’m cold. The scar on my shoulder? That bitch Legs West shanked me in a fight over a client. Some short-arsed accountant with elephant balls. He ran like hell. This other one like a big fat comma over my left eye? That was some big-shot prick detective up from Sydney. Thumped me and knocked me out cold when I laughed at the size of his cock. Fluffy ducks used to bring them to the surface, the laughs. And this tattoo on my tit? READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 80

You can hardly read it now, but I got blind drunk one night with that bastard Billy Phillips, ink man and dog to Glen Hallahan, and the mongrel scarred me. Three words. Do Not Resuscitate. Smart-arse. If I told you about what that world was really like, you wouldn’t believe me. I’ll tell you about the first time, though. How it happened. When I first dipped my toe in the pond. Way back when I was nineteen. Had two kids but the old man was lazy, wouldn’t work in an iron lung and clung to his Fourex tallies like a drowning man. There was no money in the house. The kids were hungry and bawling. We lived in Rosalie then. Nothin’ like today, it was. Back then it was shithouse workers’ cottages with a servo, a butcher and a barber shop on the main drag. Now it’s all shade cloths over driveways and swimming pools and hoity-toity restaurants. So this day I grabbed the kids and headed down to the butcher. Bill, his name was, working away in his little shop with sawdust on the floor, his apron spattered with blood. ‘Stay outside and play,’ I told the kids. And in I went. ‘Gidday, Bill!’ ‘Gidday, missus.’ Lord, I ordered the works. A pound of sausages. Juicy steaks. A mountain of mince. Tripe. Ox tail. Even some tongues, because the old man, shit that he was, loved a good tongue. Bill wraps it all up in butcher’s paper and there’s so much meat I can barely see him over the counter. He adds up the price on one of his sheets of paper and gives me a figure. And what do I do? I just look into his eyes, nice and green they were, below two thick black eyebrows with sawdust in them. I said nothing and just looked into those eyes like they were the most wonderful things I’d ever seen, and never again in my life would I encounter such beauty. M ATTHE W COND ON 81

I walked around to the side of the counter without taking my eyes off him, and he walked towards me and took my hand and led me through a coloured plastic curtain. We fucked quickly against the chopping bench, the blood and gristle staining my arse. Then I left with my goods. Good old-fashioned bartering, that’s how I saw it. I liked Bill, even though he only had three fingers on one hand and one-and-a-half on the other. I’d pull him for a chook and won’t tell you what it cost me for a Christmas turkey. That’s where it started. I was a mum. I needed to feed my kids. Think less of me if you want. I don’t give a shit. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to the brothels in the city and over at West End. Sometimes you’d cop a pinch. You had to pay a fine every once in a while, to make those dumb coppers look like they were doing their job. But mostly we all got on real good. We all knew each other. If you did your bit they’d warn you before they raided the joint. Then when those molls from Sydney came up in the 1970s they turned everything upside down. The shag carpet. The mirrors and spas. The food and grog. The money started to pour in. And following the money were the sharks. I reckon that’s when it got dangerous. The grog and the drugs. Girls shooting up just to survive. Working to pay for the drugs. Slaves to it. By the time I was in my late thirties, I was already too old for working in brothels. Too used. Like a car with too many miles on the clock. So I went out on me own. I was old-school. I was shagging some no-hoper in a flophouse that night in 1973 when the Whiskey Au Go Go went up, killing those people. Heard the sirens. Finished the job and went out and had a look-see. I stood in Barry Parade with everyone else and I knew there and then I was staring at hell. My lungs burned. I hardly blinked. The street smelled of evil. I swear I hadn’t thought of it until then, but at that exact moment I knew I was going to die. Like Shirley. Like Barbara and Simone. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 82

So I made the one smart decision of my life. I moved out of the city. Out to the fringes. There was still demand for pussy in Redcliffe. Down at Cleveland. Out west beyond Mount Coot-tha. I became a travelling saleswoman; just so happened my goodies were in my knickers. Pussy’s pussy. Now I’m just some old bat with a tatt on her tit. Although I can still turn a trick, if you please. For the old boys. The late-night walkers. Bit of hand relief in the roots of the figs. Why not? A girl’s gotta live. As for the Lotus. Sometimes when I get in a mood I feel sorry for her. She made me who I was and I disrespected her. Sometimes I think she doesn’t want to be a part of me anymore. That I disgust her. I lowered myself into the pond and I never got out. This town used to be so small. I’d hop on a tram in the Valley and shoot into the city and every second trip I’d see one of my johns going about his business, hiding under his hat. I’d see them in judge’s robes in court. I’d see their pictures in the paper, standing all prim and proper after a hard day in State Parliament. You never really know anyone. That Minister of the Crown, all bluff and bluster on telly, and not days before I’d had him in the dark in his special room up at Lennons, the room he hired just for the day, the curtains pulled shut. The big shot curled up on the bed like a little boy after he had me, whimpering over something in his life that didn’t concern me, some trigger that was pulled when he fucked a hooker. But who’d know that except me and maybe a couple of other girls who tucked his money into their bras? The girls who shared with him the lemon-scented sheets in a fine hotel for an hour a fortnight. Corruption and vice has run under this city like a tank stream since before I was born. The roots of the lotus go deep. It might be all church M ATTHE W COND ON 83

stalls and pursed lips on the surface, but underneath, trust me, there’s a monster with a coat of wire that has fed on hookers and bent cops and illegal abortions and bribery and murders and kiddie fiddlers and drugs and torture and crooked politicians since bloody John Oxley stepped ashore and planted the flag. You think it’s a coincidence that the place where they flogged convicts all those years ago is just a short walk from the Premier’s office in George Street? Apples don’t fall far from their trees, as me old gran used to say. Most of the old buildings are gone. The Bellevue. Cloudland. The cathouses in West End. Even the National. When we got Expo they told us we were all grown up. Oi, they said, see how you can eat late like them Europeans and enjoy beer that’s not Fourex, and wine that’s not Blue Nun. And you can have this thing called kulcha. Classical music and shit. Look at you, Brisbane. Not a country town anymore. When Expo was flashing its knickers on one side of the river, the bloody Fitzgerald Inquiry was going over in the courts on the other side. At the same time. You could have a drink at the German beer garden over in the west, then nick over the bridge and see the old detectives – crying and admitting to taking a red hot quid for years. You see how those bastards fooled everyone for decades? All part of The big fucking Joke. They took what they wanted. They ran the illegal casinos. They controlled the brothels. Murdered people who got in their way. Stuffed their faces. Built fancy houses. Dodged royal commissions. And what did you do? You said nothing. You let them corrupt the courts. Government. Every fucking thing. Because you were afraid. Then Expo went away, and when that READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 84

big old confession box of an inquiry came to an end we said our Hail Marys and started all over again, fresh and new. Love ya Brisbane. But did we really? The tank stream’s still down there. If you put your ear to the ground you can hear that foul, slowmoving water. It groans and murmurs like a parasite deep in your gut. It’s in me. It’s in you. It’s in all of us. You think you’re something fucking finer than me? There’s always been ghosts here. The ghosts of all the bodies left behind. They’ll be haunting the streets of this city when your children have dropped the first clod of earth on your casket over at Toowong cemetery, or sung off your coffin into the flames of the crematorium at Mount Gravatt. And they’ll be here watching over your grandchildren when one of those sweet things decides to take drugs for the first time in the fancy riverside apartment of a friend, or in the toilets of some shithole nightclub in the Valley, and feels the fingers of death clasp their heart before they’re brought back in the neon of a hospital emergency ward. Brisbane. You think you can dress yourself up with your hipster beards and horn-rimmed glasses, your fancy shawls from Nepal, your bloody organic bamboo robes and your bling from Italy? You think you can hide behind your fucking quinoa salads and your kale smoothies? You crawled out of the same shit as me. And we’ll all end up at the bottom of that dark pond. Baby.

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Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, and grew up in Melbourne. She is the author of two short story collections, including Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012), and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, 2016). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, The Monthly, Harvard Review and elsewhere. Her story ‘Glisk’ was awarded the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Rowe holds fellowships from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. She currently lives in Tasmania. 

All Things Once Molten Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse The point of a ship in a bottle / Is the bottle

—James Galvin, ‘Apollinaire’s Cane’

It is all so frail; sometimes the very act of reaching for a pen extinguishes the thought we hope to hold fast. Such as: Home as the first point of reference, the wood in the glass. Everything either does or does not smell like the place where you were born. Balsam, Aspen, Cottonwood, Birch. I do not know the smell of the place where I was born. Others told me: Dusty rain, wet suede. Burning sugar. Flying fox acid. Everything either is or isn’t: Rosin smells and turpentine smells. Moose nests and boat fuel. Smoke in our clothes and hair, the morning not yet hot. JOSE P HI NE R OWE 87

In the Pines, in the Pines, spinning tinnily through the speakers of a child’s portable Fisher-Price. In the Black Ash, Tamarac, Choke Cherry, Pin Cherry, Sitka, Sequoia, Sycamore, Spruce. But in the mornings what I open my eyes to are eucalypts: mammoth things, pawing the air outside my window. That was yesterday. Which in some languages is the same as saying: Tomorrow. Tent moth season. These first unmoored months when I notice everything, treading steadily in a great drift of What Now? waiting to feel the silty slope of my old life. Lake Merritt, B. tells me, is full of bones and secrets. Unwanted babies. (Isn’t everywhere?) Now and again, something cold brushing my foot. Dusks spent loping the lake, all of long gait and old-woman mind, guessing at the hidden orchestration of pelicans. In flight they move like a fleet of Cessnas but crash upon the water like winged rhinos. The grey ones hunched like messengers from the underworld. Nights the black lake is cribbed by gold bars of reflected lights. The swollen moon calving into it. I am standing on the roof in lieu of sleep. Witnessing, which is another way of saying looking but with the obligation that comes by virtue of being the only one awake. Did I mention I could have died? Happily, I mean, learning that ’54 Chevy in wild circles around the dirt lot behind the Golden Gate racetrack, a sixer on the floor and his hand between my knees. Every hitch of the road travelling the gearshift to tremolo my palm like rough kind language.

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On the troubled side of the lake we lay in bed listening, playing Gunshot or Backfire? When the earthquake came his daughter’s music box started up all by itself, It’s a Small World After All. That was yesterday. Or in any case: A Time That Is Not Now. One measured in the shadows thrown by colonnades, silk spun through the hedges. By the bells of Our Lady of Lourdes calling out across the water with the mournful grace of ships’ horns. My great-great-great (etcetera) grandfather came to Melbourne by ship. Which in many languages is the same as saying: Boat. Bored off the Cape of Good Hope, he shot an albatross for sport. As though he’d never read Coleridge. Is that a debt that carries down? And if yes, how far down? Plunging back: Something cold brushed my foot. Echo of a name a man gave me when I was small. The sunlight more viscous at this southern latitude. Thicker than glass. The glass itself set so long ago that the windows are thicker towards the bottom of the panes, having slid down slowly over the century. Suggesting that all things, once molten, stay viscous (myth?). And the birds more instructive than recalled, calling Reach-out reach-out reach-out. Turning out a pocket of the redwood seeds his daughter insisted I take Home, take Under. An antler she said I could find water with, if I needed water. Would I need water? Empty the glass. Afterwards you can smell the wood, though frail; sometimes the simple act of reaching for a voice extinguishes the very face you hoped to hold clear. JOSE P HI NE R OWE 89

A scatter of redwood seeds and a purple candy heart that asks Got Luv? An antler she said I could find water with. Shampoo for beautiful curls, which I could borrow, if I liked, despite not having curls. Another way of saying: Belong. Two days after the albatross, the boatswain warned my great-greatgreat (etcetera) not to gawp after a dead man as he was lowered to the ocean, for to watch was an old freak of sailors. But this lowering is written here, depicted, so he must have watched anyway. Must have felt himself obliged to watch, to witness. (Is this a debt that carries?) It’s the wood, the oak that’s carrying linseed, molasses, clove. Christmas. The place where you came from. Dust through the light. Damp flannel, the very face you meant to hold fast. Red clay. Creosote, like from the brown glass bottle my mother sought to cure everything with. Nothing it could not fix— bad dreams chest colds bone shakes high-mindedness. The antler would help me find water or else it would make me invisible. Remembering those white-tailed deer rocking toylike through the brittle woods. White flares through naked black columns of wintered birch. Appearing peripherally as a gang of hooded figures, running after or running from something. Chilling. You are very cold. You are very very very cold. Sudden shudder of sap under barkskin, its rush and recede, lines ribboning the woods to trap it, the lake cordoned off like a crime scene – tell it sweeter – like a treasured thing, museum piece. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 90

That was yesterday. Which in some languages is the same as saying: Tomorrow. In any case, A time that is not now. Something cold brushed my foot. A name a man gave me when I was small. You say it like: Nee-shah-tow. Though he never said how to spell it, or what people it belonged to. A Big Sky language, I imagined. Chiwere, Assiniboine … Buffalo horn bracelets my mother kept so safe we never saw them again. Running River. This a day after my near-drowning in the Yarra Yarra in the place where it still flows clear, right-side up. (Had he seen that? Had he been watching, obliged to watch?) A mixed blessing, my brother interprets, or no kind of blessing at all: When I think of your life, he says, I see a lot of transience. Suggesting that all things, once molten, stay viscous. Everybody has a love they lost in the woods. Listen to Guthrie. Listen to Lead Belly. In the Pines, in the Pines. When there’s nothing left in the glass, you smell the wood. Camphor in a chest holding linen holding the shape of a body as it was before children, before it swelled to become a fixed point of reference. Smoke in our clothes and hair, the morning not yet hot. Shampoo for beautiful curls, which I could borrow, if I liked, despite. not. Camphor for our draughty chests and otherwise, creosote, like for sealing ships. Nothing it would not fix. When we were sick, or bored, my mother said: Why not make a glory box? Which in her language was the same as saying: Look towards a time that is not now. JOSE P HI NE R OWE 91

The tick of an antique clock swaddled in cotton; next best to a mother’s heart muffled by fur. When my mother fell sick, she called for her dead mother. A cry left open for me to one day complete. In which language is found the inverse of echo? An utterance that foretells its own uttering? Reach-out reach-out reach-out. Photograph holding the shape of her body as it was before children, before it swelled to become our first point of reference. Glory box, hope chest, trousseau. Later I learned the objects I valued most were not valuable. Carnival glass. Things used as ballast. Then thrown over. My great-great-great (etcetera) grandfather wrote, of something I do not know: It is such a sight as only those at sea can get sight of. Which is the same as saying nothing at all. But later, recalling the albatross, how it hovered about the vessel a long time before it fell. How its body was just like a white boat upon the water, and the sea seeming now of a darker, a darkening glass.

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Larissa Behrendt is Professor of Indigenous Research and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. She published her first novel, Home, with UQP after it won the 2002 David Unaipon Award. It went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her second novel, Legacy (UQP, 2009), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. He most recent book, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (UQP, 2016), is an historical analysis of how Indigenous people have been portrayed in the colonisers’ stories. Larissa has also published numerous textbooks on Indigenous legal issues, and is the writer and director of the feature documentaries After the Apology (2017) and Innocence Betrayed (2014). She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year Award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year.

The Smoke of Several Fires Captain James Cook wrote in his diary on 22 April 1770, as he sailed The Endeavour past the east coast of Australia: … In the P.M. had a Gentle breeze at South by West with which we steer’ d along shore North by East and North-North-East at the distance of about 3 Leagues. Saw the smoke of fire in several places near the Sea beach. At 5, we were abreast of a point of land which, on account of its perpendicular Clifts, I call’ d Point Upright … One can almost imagine the picture the ‘smoke of fire’ would have conjured in Cook’s mind. Families of hunter–gatherers huddled around flames in their camps as they ate and kept warm. What Cook wouldn’t have seen with such a Eurocentric gaze was the sophistication of the knowledge systems of the multiple nations that had existed for at least 65,000 years on the continent he was sailing past and naming. Even for the time, it seems like an extreme form of arrogance to assume that a civilisation that could sustain itself over millennia would have nothing to teach others. It would be inevitable that such a society would have a deep knowledge of the landscape and the natural world would be a critical factor in the sustainability of any culture over such a period of time. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 94

Cook was a product of the European Enlightenment but it would have been almost impossible for a man of his cultural background to link the ideas of Indigenous cultural practice and science together. The human relationship to fire is primal but for Aboriginal people it is more complex than just being about the basics of cooking and keeping warm. It was a key part of the active way that Aboriginal people cared for the land around them. It was not only used to control the species and the undergrowth within the bush, it would also be a trigger for the regeneration of particular plants and trees and the activating of seeds that could then become edible. It was also used as a farming practice. Bill Gammage in his book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia describes how, in drawings made of the Australian landscape by the first European colonists, the extent to which Aboriginal people controlled the landscape was evident. What seemed like land that was ready-made for European farming to the colonists was actually land that had been cultivated by Aboriginal people. Some of this cultivation related to the way that the landscape had been cleared to form places where game, particularly kangaroos, could be herded for easier access. The understanding of traditional Indigenous relationships to the land and environment, and of the proactive farming and cultivation processes that they were engaged in, have been significantly highlighted through the work of Bruce Pascoe and his book, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: agriculture or accident? He provides evidence of fields that had been farmed for yams and other plants, information that is slowly being recognised as providing not only new understandings of the possible native crops and the nutritional value of native seeds and plants, but also offers new insights into maintaining the sustainability of ecosystems and the environment. LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 95

But of course, like Cook, if you looked at the landscape and assumed that the people who lived there were a primitive hunter– gatherer people, you would not have seen the signs that Gammage and Pascoe can identify. Just as the knowledge of Indigenous food and farming techniques is now getting the attention of scientists, so too is the understanding of fire. Victor Steffensen, an Indigenous fire practitioner from Cape York, assists communities around the country in rediscovering the way that fire can be used as a key way of looking after country and of regenerating and healing it. He talks about the difference between ‘hot’ fire, which is destructive, and fire that is ‘like water’ in that ‘it trickles through the landscape and makes the country green, rich and grow and be healthy’. Steffensen’s differentiation between the two types of fire is a reminder that in modern Australian culture, fire is often only seen as the former – ‘hot’, destructive. For many Australians, the primary image of fire and the country is of devastating bushfires that have with sobering regularity given tragic reminders of the powerful force of nature. Even cities have not been immune from the unstoppable force of bushfires, when conditions create the ingredients for a devastating, often lethal, firestorm. In the aftermath of such ferocity, we often reflect on whether there was enough burning off, the appropriate steps taken to keep the bushland that surrounds our homes from becoming a tinderbox. Burning off is now routine practice of fire agencies as a proactive preventative measure. While there is a growing acknowledgement that Aboriginal cultures have always had a deep understanding of cultivating and controlling the bush through fire, this overlooked science is finally being recognised and investigated, its scientific insights being given due weight. As the world faces a global environmental crisis generated by manmade climate change, it has forced a rethinking of what sustainability looks like for our environment and our society. And in doing so, it READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 96

is challenging scientists – and the rest of the community – to look at Indigenous knowledges in a different, more respectful way. It is easy to see how Indigenous people see Captain James Cook as a symbol of colonisation. Although he did not start a colony, his voyages and his mapping – and the cultural assumptions that appear in his journals – were all foundations for the colonisation process that would take place. It is no surprise that he remains a contentious historical figure. In 2012, Aboriginal–Chinese artist Jason Wing won the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize for his sculpture, ‘Australia was Stolen by Armed Robbery’. Wing had placed a balaclava over a bronze bust of Cook, making him look like he was about to commit an armed hold-up. There was a backlash against the artwork and for the first time the prizewinner was not featured on the cover of the catalogue. Of even more concern to the artist – who reported receiving a barrage of hate mail, death threats and internet trolling as a result of his artwork and of his light skin – was the omission of his artist’s statement that linked Cook as a symbol of the colonisation that had, in Wing’s view, continued with the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (or the ‘intervention’) and as such, was a continual breach of human rights. In reflecting on the controversy, Aboriginal artist and curator Djon Mundine recalled that some white Australians treated Wing’s work as though it was ‘a blasphemy against a God-like image’, and observed how Cook remains a revered and untouchable figure for many white Australians. This stark difference between the way Cook is seen as an historic figure in the Indigenous community and in the wider community, is just another manifestation of the conflicting views of Australian history that arises between a narrative from the Indigenous perspective and the narrative from the dominant, colonial perspective. LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 97

The telling of Indigenous history remains a hotly contested space. In the lead-up to the 2016 Federal Election, the ABC conducted an online survey, Vote Compass, that took the temperature of the electorate in relation to several key issues. From the first 200,000 responses, 71 per cent of Australians agreed with Indigenous people being recognised in the Constitution. However, in response to a question on whether school textbooks should refer to the arrival of European colonists in Australia as an ‘invasion’ of Aboriginal lands, 45 per cent agreed and 41 per cent disagreed. Obvious tensions emerge as soon as the question moves from a general proposition – recognition in the Constitution – to specifics. But these contestations are not really debates about Indigenous history, they are debates about the national narrative non-Indigenous people want to have about the Indigenous people they have colonised. This acrimonious debate has been polarising and leaves no room for all the shades of grey and no room for competing narratives. The Keating Government commissioned the Bringing Them Home report in 1995. Released in 1997, it contained powerful personal accounts of how the policy impacted on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were taken away and the parents who lost their children. The moving accounts included the prolonged mourning by parents and the extraordinary lengths they went to trying to recover their children from state care. It included accounts from children who suffered psychological, mental and physical abuse within institutions, within the families they were adopted out to, and in the places they were sent to work. The accounts are harrowing and it is impossible to read them and not be affected by them. What they showed was, you can make all the pretty legal and ideological arguments you like about why a policy was wrong and cruel but nothing is more persuasive in evaluating its impact than the legacy it has left on the people subjected to it. Although the Keating Government had commissioned the report, it was the Howard Government who received it. The official response .

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was to dismissively say that only one in ten children were taken away; many children were removed for their own good, or at least removed with the best of intentions; and that the report was too emotive, using terms like ‘cultural genocide’ when they were clearly not appropriate. It seemed that the response to the report was largely designed to detract from the powerful personal narratives within it. Saying that ‘it was only one in ten’ is a way of using statistics to downplay the power of the personal experience. Of course, not every person removed by the policy had a bad experience. Many grew up in loving homes. And some children were rescued from circumstances where they were neglected. But that is not the totality of experience and it should be a concern that any child was abused or mistreated while under the care and protection of the state. Evidence to the Bringing Them Home report included accounts of continual sexual abuse, physical punishment that was akin to torture, and humiliating psychological abuse. There was also evidence that children were told that their parents were dead or did not want them when that simply wasn’t true. These things should never have happened and we should be concerned that they did. From an Indigenous perspective, the debate about how Australian history deals with the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families was so hotly contested because it goes to the heart of the story that Australians tell about their history. It is a struggle between two competing narratives about the way we tell Australian history – do we romanticise our past or do we acknowledge the mistakes we have made? History, however, is not one romanticised story – it is a series of competing narratives, brought to life by different groups whose experiences are diverse and often challenge the dominant story that a country seeks to tell itself about its history. LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 99

There are no absolute truths when it comes to history. It is a process, a conversation, a constantly altering story. As Inga Clendinnen reminds us in her book True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality: ‘To consolidate history made out of true stories we need time, and peace, and we need the will. We also need to keep in mind that truth is a direction and an aspiration, not a condition.’ In the crudest way, this dichotomy has been described by many as a tension between a ‘white blindfold’ and a ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. The ‘black armband’ describes a narrative of history that is more sympathetic to and inclusive of the Aboriginal experience and perspective; the ‘white blindfold’ version ignores it. This tension has played out in debates between historians and commentators in relation to a range of historical experiences that define Indigenous experience in the colonial state – frontier massacres, child removal, cultural practice. But it is a mistake to see the ‘white blindfold’/‘black armband’ tension in the telling of Australian history as a tension between the way that non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people tell their history. In fact, the debate rages between non-Indigenous people and is much more about the history of Australia the dominant culture wants to tell. For Aboriginal people, whose views on an historical narrative are based much more on lived experience and family history than competing interpretations of source documents and historical archive, their perspective remains unchanged by any debates among academics or by the opinions expressed in the editorial columns of the nation’s broadsheets. Perhaps one of the most unhelpful aspects about the ‘white blindfold’/‘black armband’ dichotomy within historical narratives is the assertion that there are only two possible ways to tell history – that it is, in its crudest terms, black or white, one or the other, ‘us’ or ‘them’. It fails to take into account all of the other competing and complementary narratives that should be a central part of the Australian story – the story of more recent immigrants, of other diaspora communities that READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 100

have made an imprint on Australian society and who have their own history and perspectives. The other unhelpful facet of the ‘white blindfold’/‘black armband’ dichotomy is the claim that the latter is all about making Australians feel guilty about their past. As though to acknowledge the history of Aboriginal people can only lead to a feeling of being ashamed of it. It does not seem to allow for a response to the history of Aboriginal people in Australia as one of wonder at the depth of knowledges within their culture – about fire, farming, aquaculture, sustainability. Nor does it allow for the exploration of the more constructive, powerful and positive histories between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. And nor does it seem to comprehend the possibility that anyone living in Australia today, in a colonised society that is only approaching two hundred and fifty years of existence, could take the view that Aboriginal history and culture is actually a central part of Australian history and culture – that in recognising competing historical experiences, it is not necessarily about ‘us’ and ‘them’. A good illustration of this is Tony Albert’s sculpture, ‘Yininmadyemi – Thou Didst Let Fall’, which has dominated a corner of Hyde Park in Sydney since it was erected in 2014. Four large bullets stand side by side as three fallen shells lay on the ground beside them. They signify the contribution that Albert’s father made as a soldier in World War II. Standing a short walk from the Anzac Memorial and Pool of Reflection, the art installation is a reminder of the Aboriginal contribution to the armed services. In war, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen fought side by side. On returning home, Indigenous ex-servicemen were treated differently from their non-Indigenous counterparts. Albert’s sculpture honours both the overlooked contribution and the distinctive treatment of Indigenous people in no way detracting from the memorialising nearby of the sacrifice of Australian servicemen and women in war efforts. Honouring of one story does not preclude the honouring of LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 101

another. In truth, the story of our history is much more shades of grey than black and white. Among those who arrived on the ships of the First Fleet in 1788 was Lieutenant William Dawes. An astronomer, he came ashore as an engineer and surveyor to build the colony, construct streets and survey the surrounding countryside. Yet he maintained his interest in the skies and began to study the stars from the part of the foreshore that is now known as Dawes Point. Although Indigenous people were cautious about entering the colony, many came to his hut and it was seen as a welcoming place, a safe haven where knowledge and friendship were shared. Dawes was curious about this country and its Aboriginal people. He was a man of science who wanted to understand his new surroundings. He engaged with the Aboriginal people, particularly a young girl, Patyegarang, from whom he learnt the local language and about the tides, the food, the medicines, Aboriginal perspectives and stories about the stars. We know this because he kept a diary that chronicled his time there and recorded snippets of conversation and other observations. Kate Grenville’s novel, The Lieutenant, is inspired by the relationship between William Dawes and Patyegarang. Her hero, Daniel Rooke, describes his anticipation of what he might learn from this strange, new land and its mysterious, elusive inhabitants: ‘He was watching one universe in the act of encountering another.’ Rooke’s colleague, Silk, had an ‘impulse … to make the strange familiar’; Rooke’s instinct was to seek ‘that strangeness and lose himself in it’. Dawes approached Indigenous people with curiosity and an interest in a relationship of co-existence. This was not the norm and his views were soon forced into stark relief with those of his fellow colonists. As conflict increased between the first peoples and the new arrivals it became increasingly evident that the colonists intended to stay. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 102

When Pemulwuy speared his gamekeeper in 1790, Governor Arthur Phillip ordered several marines, including Dawes, to capture two Aboriginal men and sever the heads of ten more. After intervention from senior officers, Governor Phillip lowered this to the capture of six Aboriginal men, and if they couldn’t be captured, they would be shot. Dawes refused to participate. He was arrested but after discussions with Reverend Richard Johnson agreed to take part. The expedition, fortunately, was a failure. They didn’t even find any Aboriginal people. Dawes then publicly declared that he regretted taking part, a stance that affected his relationship with Governor Phillip. Dawes had dreamed of finding a life in Australia for himself and applied to stay in the colony, perhaps becoming a farmer. Governor Phillip agreed on a few conditions. One was that Dawes apologise for his public comments condemning the punitive expedition. Dawes refused. Dawes left the colony in 1791 and arrived back in England in 1792. He went to Sierra Leone that same year and would become governor there at various times between 1792 and 1803. He also became involved with the international anti-slavery movement. In June 1799, Dawes gave evidence before a committee of the House of Lords when they were considering legislation to limit the slave trade. In 1813, he went to Antigua where he was a correspondent of the Church Missionary Society and also established schools for the children of slaves. Dawes allows us another way in which to not only view first contacts but also to think about what might have been. It would not have changed the outcome of Australia being colonised, but the relationships with the land and with the Aboriginal people could have been very different if Dawes’ approach of mutual respect and exchange of knowledge had been a foundation. For Dawes, his experience in being close to Indigenous people deepened both his understanding of the world around him as well as his understanding of a common humanity. His approach is rarely celebrated – and not celebrated enough. It gives an insight into an alternative view that is neither ‘black armband’ LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 103

nor ‘white blindfold’. Dawes approached his relationship with the Indigenous people with curiosity, respect and an understanding that their knowledge is rich. He sought to understand what their understanding of the world was, because he knew it would help deepen his own understanding. His was a humanitarian approach that valued Indigenous perspectives, culture and knowledges, which as a blueprint for race relations, provides the possibility of a very different relationship between Indigenous people and other Australians. It is a pathway to an Australia that is not ‘us’ and ‘them’ but instead sees Indigenous culture as a central part of Australian culture. It could lead to an inclusive nationalism that celebrates diverse perspectives and experiences. Such an inclusive approach today wouldn’t only improve relationships with Indigenous people but also improve the way we understand multicultural communities and other marginalised groups, particularly asylum seekers. And within this inclusive nationalism we can acknowledge that there is not just one dominant national narrative but a range of concurrent, competing and conflicting stories that reflect the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives within Australian society. The curiosity that Dawes had for Indigenous cultural practices and technologies was shared by Indigenous people who themselves were fascinated by the clothes and skills and tools that the invaders brought with them. Another Aboriginal figure who became prominent in the colony was Bungaree. He was curious, intelligent and had a sense of humour. He would mimic governors and other authority figures. A generation behind Pemulwuy and Bennelong, he would befriend Governor Macquarie. Bungaree also sailed with Matthew Flinders on the voyage that circumnavigated the continent from 1801 to 1803 where he acted as an interpreter with Aboriginal nations around the country – an experience that would have been richer for him than READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 104

for the colonists whose main interest was in mapping the coastline. But while Bungaree developed contacts and connections with the colonists, he retained influence in his own community. Bungaree kept his connections within his own community while he sought to understand the world the colonists were shaping. He took advantage to adopt customs he thought useful and to use their technology and skill to understand his own world better. He tried to find a way to adapt to his new world without losing his sense of identity and his Aboriginal heritage. Indigenous women also had to find ways to navigate their place in the new world they found themselves in. Patyegarang took on the role of patient teacher and gentle mediator in her relationship with Dawes. Barangaroo was married to Bennelong but she did not share her husband’s conciliatory relationship with the colonists and was vocal about her opposition. She refused to drink wine and to wear European clothes, angering her husband. On occasion, she would attend Government House with nothing more than a slim bone in her nose for decoration. In the area named after her today, she had an early encounter with the colonists that was a prelude of the environmental damage that the colonists and their culture would wreak on ecosystems that had been kept in balance for millennia. Barangaroo was a fisherwoman. The contribution women made to the food in Eora society was significant and this was one source of the esteem and respect they held in their own society. In November 1790, the colonists had made a haul of over 4000 salmon with two nets. This action sent Barangaroo into a rage. The fish were given as a gift to some of the Aboriginal men which insulted Barangaroo not only with the wastefulness of it – it was too much to be consumed – but also because the gift from men to men overlooked the place of women in the community. It was also a signifier of the way the traditional and powerful roles of Aboriginal women within their community would be undermined by the new colonial culture. LA R I SSA B E HR E ND T 105

But although she was defiant in her own way, Barangaroo was navigating a future for her own people. She died in childbirth in Government House but she had chosen it as the place to give birth with the intention that – as was the way in her culture – the place of birth would give her child special rights and obligations to that area. It was an intentional decision to give her child some claim over the spaces that the colonists were claiming for their own. For Indigenous people, the perennial questions posed by that moment of invasion are around the best strategies for surviving it and determining how to assert Indigenous identity, culture and sovereignty in a context where it faces assaults from the dominant culture every day. For the rest of Australia, it poses the challenge of how the dominant national narrative deals with that moment of invasion in the story it wants to tell itself. To this day, the possibilities inherent in that challenge have become bogged down in the emotions of the ‘invasion’/‘settled’ debate. And this stand-off prevents an opportunity for a more sophisticated, nuanced and inclusive national narrative. Surely what Dawes shows is that there have always been those who, even though the dominant narrative was entrenched, saw an alternative path. In these places of curiosity and exchange that Dawes explored, there seems little room for guilt or shame just as there seems little room for arrogance or an innate sense of cultural superiority. Until the myth that Australia was ‘settled’ becomes a thing of the past, we can never move to be a country where all Australians see Indigenous history and culture as a key part of their history and culture. Until this happens, we will never find a way to truly share this colonised country. And we will continue to overlook the significant science that sits within Aboriginal knowledges that would better enable us to understand this land we now share.

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David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. His first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems, was published as part of the UQP Paperback Poets series in 1970. His next collection, Neighbours in a Thicket (UQP, 1974), confirmed his reputation as one of Australia’s leading poets, winning the Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award, as well as the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. Seven volumes of poetry were to follow, including his most recent, Earth Hour (UQP, 2014), which won both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His first novel, Johnno, was published by UQP in 1975. He has gone on to publish eight further novels, which have won major Australian and international awards and been translated into many languages, as well as publishing novellas and short stories. He has also written a play, opera libretti and many highly regarded essays. Malouf was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1987 and elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. In 1997 he was declared an Australian National Living Treasure, while he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000.

Garden Poems I.

Everything in the garden is scary, a murderous silent soft-kill epic. A jasmine-slip in its rage for Lebensraum angles a moment in air, an open daylight strangler, then takes grip. To spiders a launching-pad for space-walks, sky-hung deathcamps, sticky ends. To cabbage-moths, if the giant beaked and winged ones permit,

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succulent storage for a dreamtime generation, all mouth; inchling wrigglers, fleshy green consumers to the last leaf of their habitat. All this, in a backward glance, to be read as the Eden we broke clear of, free falling but on our feet. Before us a tangled masterpiece: the law, a lyric text, and everything in the garden God wot rosy but needing work. A florist shop, cut blooms in buckets. The sacred heap.

II.

Bundled high above an iron-barred courtyard gate, like a queen-sized bed-sheet heady with the perfume of dreams, or free-to-air, a low cloud caught in passing, a swag of jasmine in full bloom. D AV I D M A LOUF 109

It tumbles over itself with nowhere to go, but ladylike pink-and-white, makes what show it can; as if this misstep in a career that was intended to be all flounce and opulence was intentional, a matter simply of relaxing and breathing out: the self as fragrance. All that’s needed being the right frame (a frame of mind), and with no hint of the common stripper, a body that assumes, à la Manet, the proper languorous high-heeled crossed-at-the-ankles pose: insouciant sensuous naked repose.

III.

Leaves fallen, fallen leaves, the unaccounted relicts of a season barely gone in the relinquishment of green for other colours, cinnabar, bronze, magenta, damson; the half and quarter-tones of so much after -life, so much flamboyance in the act of simple dying. Flames without fire, the seethe and scuffle

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of lapsed encyclicals, bare ruined libraries unshelved and heaped for the new broom, their show -and-tell a ghostly pantomime of presence. Under burnt-out suns, spent skies, a danse macabre of the unready yet simply to lie, simply to rust and crumble into the hush of best forgotten.

I V.

A life gone fluttery on panicked wings seeking the air but settling for an earlier sanctuary No fanfare no introit of arrival At the pitch of earth-hum massed voices at scratch and scrape in the substratum a home -coming Before the chill sets in D AV I D M A LOUF 111

a welcome to the common first ground of things Almost warm

V.

Snails, travelling slower than stars, in their own way taking measure of space, haul their shadows across the yard. Dragonfly-wings, their rainbow twitch. In a trance of blossom, the prunus. Seemingly stationary but striking out underground. In the dominance of light at point of noon, unreferenced shade. The boughs that cast it no longer in view. Tumbling in and out under the radar, honeyeaters, from hello sunshine to blanket show rejoicing, as we do, in the illimitable instancies.

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Karen Foxlee published her first novel, The Anatomy of Wings, with UQP in 2007. It went on to win numerous awards, including the Dobbie Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her second novel, The Midnight Dress (UQP, 2013), won the Sisters in Crime Best YA Debut Crime Novel in 2014. She has since written two books for children – Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (Hot Key Books, 2014), which was an E.B. White Read Aloud finalist, and A Most Magical Girl (Piccadilly Press, 2016), which won the Readings Children’s Book Prize.

A Little Lower Than the Top of the Sky Nowadays mothers never let their children visit haunted places but ours encouraged it. She filled up the two-litre Orchy bottle straight from the tap and inspected our shoelaces. I was no good at shoelaces then, or telling time, but still she let me go. ‘Where is the sun when you need to come home for lunch?’ she asked. ‘Just a little lower than the top of the sky,’ I said, and my brother, who was even younger, agreed. ‘What do you do if you see a snake?’ ‘Don’t annoy it,’ we said. We saw a snake once, rippling its way along the concrete gutter. It was iridescent olive and with each undulation we saw a rainbow in its body. We followed it at a respectful distance until it slipped down inside a drain. It was a long way to the Haunted Grounds and we had to set off early. Outside the sun was still behind the silver rooftops and the earth had the new morning smell of eucalypt and asphalt soothed cool by the night. Darren and Gordon were already waiting at our fence. There should be a word for the feeling at the beginning of a day like that; when the oranges are still inside their peels in a brown paper bag and your yellow scoop shorts aren’t yet dirty and the sky is still huge and unmarked. We turned three times, as in a fairytale, to wave to our mother before we rounded the corner. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 114

Air conditioners sang the music of our suburb, filled street after street with little zincanneal houses raised on concrete stumps. They droned and thumped and droned and thumped, a steady tattoo, and high above the brown hawks called. We were both brown-haired, my brother and I, but Darren had white hair that rose in a wave from his pale forehead and crashed around his solemn blue eyes He invented things with tin cans and the inner workings of music boxes and the batteries from transistor radios. He knew the names and statistics of every character in Star Wars. Gordon was his opposite. He had black hair and a face patched over with masses of freckles. When the day grew hot his skin would turn mauve beneath this mask. Gordon was good at digging and lifting. He dug up tracks for us with his freckled hands that led from the riverbank down into the dry bed. He ripped out blond grass and cleared fallen tree limbs. I called these tracks the Dirty Deeds tracks because I was good at naming things. In places, the banks along the river were high and covered in jumbles of silvery felled trees. You needed tracks to get down off the dirt road to hide from bad people who did dirty deeds. Or sometimes you just needed to run when the day felt twitchy, when the trees breathed suddenly and a cloud moved over the sun or a hot wind sprang up and willy-willy came dancing down the road. We slid down the Dirty Deeds track that Gordon built and hid beneath the riverbank overhang until the danger passed. The difference between civilisation and the wild was the crumbled shoulder of Urquhart Road. There the houses ended and the bush began. We walked down to the creek through rock and yellow grass and stumpy Silver Box with whispering leaves. We stopped at the stormwater drain first. Our mother could abide haunted places but never drains. Drains filled suddenly with water and sucked children away. We stood there near the drains and looked at the faultless blue sky. K A R E N FOX LE E 115

Inside, we pressed our ears to the cool concrete and listened to the tremors of road trains out on the Barkly Highway, the faraway murmurings of the mine. Darren said you could probably hear as far away as Cloncurry in those drains and we believed him. After we listened long enough we walked back out into the light. The river had a skin of mud-cracked scales. We could pick up those scales easily, prise them loose with fingers and hold them flat upon our palms. We touched the river that way each time, a kind of greeting. When you are young you can speak the language of such things. Upstream was the crossing and on the opposite bank, about fifty metres away, a patch of trees. Behind them was the beginning of a powdery road. Our mother called it a bulldust road and when we came home she would say, ‘Look at you both covered in bulldust.’ There, standing on the crazed river skin, my rituals began. Darren was smart and Gordon had strong hands but I was good at ritual like my mother, who dried wishbones on the kitchen windowsill and took us to the cemetery to sweep and scrub our grandparents’ graves and insisted all family fights were patched up before the sun went down. Once a month or so she opened our grandmother’s sea trunk and took us on a journey, down through the layers of telegrams and tablecloths and tarnished silverware and brittle yellowing bridal veils and dresses she wore when she was sixteen, down to find the two plaits wrapped in plastic, one brown and one golden, cut from her sister’s and her own head the day they left on the Inlander to boarding school. Duchess, Cloncurry, Julia Creek, Richmond, Hughenden, Torrens Creek, Pentland – those fleeting stations flickered behind our closed eyes as the plaits were placed in our hands. She watched us carefully feel the weight of them. ‘We have to put our hand on the tree,’ I said in the middle of that dry river. We were one girl and three boys but that morning I still had power. There on the dry river they deferred to my rituals. The patch of trees on the opposite bank I had named Butterfly Headquarters. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 116

We crossed the cracked back of the river and bent down to crawl beneath the branches of the small group of trees crowded there. Those trees had a smell that stuck in your throat – only just bearable – but contained within the curtains of their hanging leaves was our secret: another tree. This tree lay fallen and all the others wept their leaves over it and around it. Its skin was patterned all over with termite scribblings, and the leaves and sun made that enclosed place quiver with light and shadow. We placed our hands over a part of that tree where termites had drawn what we fancied were butterfly wings. We did it solemnly, no speaking, one hand on top of another. ‘Butterfly Headquarters,’ I whispered. Then we crawled back out and set off again because there was still a long way to go. We’d been to the Haunted Grounds once before and I had told my mother about it. She listened, her face shining with sweat in the kitchen, where she was cooking buttery pikelets for our tea. ‘Did you disturb it?’ she asked. She didn’t like us to disturb things. Not snakes. Not roses on her rose bushes. Not other people. Not haunted places. ‘No, we ran away.’ ‘Why did you run away?’ ‘Because it put a ringing in our ears.’ She flipped pikelets thinking. ‘Will you go back?’ she asked at last. She had grown up in that town when there were still tent-houses mixed in among the real houses and some streets still meandered out of line, when the Finns were first laying down their quartz grave markers at the cemetery. She knew the river, had crossed it daily to town with a string bag to buy meat or flour or sugar for her mother, had played in Death Adder Gully and climbed the hills behind the Base Supply Depot. ‘Yes,’ I said.

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We crawled out from beneath the weeping leaves and walked along the bulldust road. There were other places we had to visit along the way. Other rituals to complete. The Haunted Grounds were bends away yet, maybe three bends, I would count them this time so I could remember. ‘The Aquarium now,’ I commanded, after we had walked a good while. We clambered down into the river again. The sun was already turning the stones hot, for here the scales of the river gave way to stones, white stones, caked in white dust. In among the stones, treasures were caught each time the river ran. The delicate deflated silver bladders from wine casks. Forks and teaspoons. A man’s brown leather belt. Pannikins. Sneakers. A watch face. Once a toilet doll with a mudencrusted crocheted skirt. The river stones crunched and rattled beneath our feet and the sun was warm on the crowns of our heads. We clambered up onto a small raised island in the middle. It had crumbling sandy edges and was covered in dishevelled dry grass but at its centre there was a tiny waterhole I named The Aquarium. The Aquarium never dried up even when it didn’t rain for a year and we liked, first, to peer into its black glass mirror at our reflections. The river showed us ourselves there in that spot – scrawny white kids, just turned eight. There was a fallen log on the island, this one not sacred, but purposeful. There was enough room for all four of us to sit on it. We took off our sandshoes and slipped our feet into the water. It was always dark, that water. The top layer burned our feet and ankles going through but down beneath it was cool. Darren said if we dived down, down there would be no bottom. His father said even in a submarine, you’d never find the bottom. My brother, Archie, said there’d be a whirlpool deep down that would suck you away. This is what our mother said so we never swam there. Waterholes are full of whirlpools. Children disappear into them and never come back. Gordon was quiet. A hawk circled above us, watching. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 118

‘Will we go into the Haunted Grounds?’ asked Archie. I could tell he was scared even though he was smiling. ‘Yeah, we’ll go in,’ said Gordon. ‘I’m not scared.’ The river bent about one hundred metres upstream from The Aquarium. A small bend, on a map it would be nothing, but it was just enough to hide what came next. That’s what the river did to stop you knowing what it was thinking. Around that bend was another land. Even though we had been that way once before, fear had erased the getting there from our minds. If we tried to remember, it was just yellow grass and stone and light. We removed our legs from The Aquarium where the river had held them in its cool mouth and let our feet dry in the sun. When our shoes were on we started walking again. ‘What kind of ghosts live there, do you think?’ asked Darren. ‘Mightn’t even be ghosts,’ said Archie, hopefully. ‘It might be the home of Min Min lights,’ I said. ‘As if it would be,’ said Gordon. ‘Min Min lights aren’t even real.’ ‘They are,’ I said. Our grandfather had seen one when he was driving beer to the Burketown Pub. It had followed him for kilometres, playing games out beyond the Gregory, zipping back and forward behind him, racing out to the horizon and back again. Our mother told us that story many times although sometimes it was near Boulia and sometimes Dajarra. Our grandfather always stopped the truck though and stood on a road and shouted out beneath the bright spray of the Milky Way, ‘Come and get me then.’ The rascally Min Min light didn’t. It just kept following. There were other stories too. UFOs on the Marlborough Stretch, glowing crocodile eyes on a night-time boat ride along the Albert River and, in a shimmering trick of light, Burketown viewed upside down in the sky reflected on the salt plains. Our grandfather’s sea voyage too. The man who jumped overboard and impaled his head on a submerged K A R E N FOX LE E 119

mast out in the middle of the ocean. ‘What would the odds be?’ our mother asked us as we pictured his legs twitching there. We didn’t know. Min Min lights were real. My grandfather had been chased by them. We climbed back up onto the bulldust road and I muttered it under my breath. ‘I believe in them,’ said Darren. He was an inventor but also liked magic and talked endlessly of booby traps and alien visitations. My brother smiled, he didn’t like upsetting anyone. His strength was keeping the peace. But Gordon’s skin grew dusky beneath his freckled mask. ‘Come on, Gordo,’ said Archie, but I knew there was no reasoning with him. I watched him with interest. The thing about Gordon was that he had no imagination. It horrified and fascinated me. He stayed fuming about Min Min lights all the way to The Fortress, which was a place where two regal gums with pearly bark stood. Between them several trees lay fallen in a pile. There was a hollow, a space between the bank and the fallen logs, where we liked to sit and stare through the timber gaps at the creek. At the bottom of the hollow there was a space big enough for us to squeeze through and slide down the bank if danger came. Gordon had enlarged it with his bare hands and I named it The Getaway Door. We sat down and took turns drinking from the Orchy bottle and ate our oranges and stared through the spaces at the river. No-one mentioned Min Min lights anymore. The cicadas started up their singing at The Fortress. One lone cicada began with a click, click, click and then his orchestra swelled, a thrum, thrum, thrum, filling our ears. We pressed ourselves low into the hollow to escape the white heat. Far away, through the wild song, we heard the warning siren for a blast at the mine and then deep beneath our bottoms the earth shuddered like a giant grumbling in its sleep. No-one thought to look at the sky.

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We met a bad man near The Fortress. We had started walking again, our lips and fingers still sticky with sweet orange. The road was straight so he must have been sleeping in among the stinking Gidgee Gums. We were long past the Dirty Deeds tracks. The Getaway Door was behind us. We could have run and dived over the riverbank down onto the stones but we didn’t. We whispered among ourselves. Should we run? Should we just keep walking? Darren said, ‘Maybe he’s just a man walking.’ But he had a bad look about him. He was a cowboy and his clothes were covered in dust. He was thin in a bad way, a mean way, like food meant little to him. Not like our house where food was everything. Mulberry pie and pikelets and fairy cakes and hot stew and casserole and sausages and mashed potato and cutlets and shepherd’s pie and corn beef fritters and spoons of sugar heaped on top of cornflakes. He didn’t look like he cared much for food. His denims hung on the hooks of his hips. He had a bright half-moon of blood in his left eye. ‘Where are you lot going?’ he asked and he flicked his head to say come closer. He had a quiet voice. ‘You’re walking on private property,’ he said. He had a rodeo belt buckle and a whip in his hand. ‘Trespassing.’ I thought Gordon was going to argue because he liked to argue. You couldn’t even get a submarine in The Aquarium. Min Min lights are just a story. I don’t believe in ghosts. My dad says there’s no such thing. This isn’t anyone’s land. You’re not the fuzz. But he only said one word, quietly, ‘run’. He started to run first, then Darren, but that bad cowboy had a hand out quick and he got a hold of my brother’s T-shirt for a second before he broke free. He cracked his whip down hard at our ankles and the sound of it rang in our ears and for a long time after his laughter followed us. We ran along the river but not in the direction of home. We ran Haunted Grounds way. The bad man didn’t chase. In all honesty, he K A R E N FOX LE E 121

didn’t look like he had much run in him. I thought of my mother. She would be in the kitchen making butterfly cakes. ‘Never go far from the river,’ she always said, ‘because if you stay on the river it will eventually bring you home.’ But I felt unsettled and far from home. We jumped when there was a screeching explosion of budgerigars from the trees. ‘Holy shit,’ said Darren. The river widened, a drift of stones on one side and scales the other, a sliver of brackish water down the middle, ankle deep, which held the sky. Finally, I remembered to look up at the sun. I held up my hand and checked its position. It was still lower than a little lower than the top of the sky. ‘Don’t look directly at it,’ said Darren. ‘It’ll burn your eyeballs out and you’ll be blind.’ ‘But we need to know,’ I said. Sometimes my mother licked her finger and held it up to tell the direction of the wind like she was a sailor, only she was just on the patio, looking at her Piccadilly rose shrivelling in the heat. She made us look at the atlas to learn the cities of the world. She tested us. Norway, Oslo. Sweden, Stockholm. Finland, Helsinki. Coldest place in the world, Vostok Station, Antarctica. Hottest place in Australia, Cloncurry 53.1 under a tree.

The Haunted Grounds were right there, around the next bend, waiting for us the whole time. We were quiet for seeing them again, hesitated there on the river bed, faces burning in the sun. Even the bulldust road disappeared before that place. It turned inland and away towards the spinifex hills as though it knew better. There was nothing to be scared of. I told myself that. It was a place of trees. That’s all. No matter how much they stopped you still. No matter how much those trees did not straggle or bend but READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 122

stood upright, perfectly straight. No matter how much that place had its own strange light. There was nothing to be scared of. The bush grew back on either side of that place, stumpy and unruly, but those trees were evenly spaced, as though planted. They held themselves upright to the sky and we took one step towards them. Don’t run, I said to myself and took another step, so I was in the lead. There was one tree that stood forward, a sentry, close to the bank. I touched it tentatively, one finger first, then my hand, flat upon its skin. The others followed. Our ears rang straight away. This had spooked us before. That ringing had made us forget to breathe, it had got our feet running before we even knew they’d started. But we stayed there this time, our hands on that sentry tree. It was cicadas perhaps. Or silence. ‘It’s just cicadas,’ I whispered. ‘You reckon?’ whispered Darren. We sat down and kept our hands on its white skin. It was kind enough to let us, was how it felt. The sentry tree had a laugh inside it but all the other trees were solemn. The ringing swelled in our ears. The Haunted Grounds was filled up with that ringing but that ringing was only silence I decided. I took a deep breath and listened. It vibrated everything, that ringing. It undulated, rolled in a steady wave. Cicadas, I wanted to say, but the ringing stole the breath right out of my mouth. Haunted was a stupid name. Gordon stood up, looking suddenly bored. He moved away. I shook my head. It wasn’t that bad. We were breathing, not running. We were looking in at the singing trees. Thirty trees, no more. They were old trees, that’s how they felt. They’d been there a long time and they’d seen a lot of things. They’d have seen the river come down a thousand times and when it flooded they would have drunk deeply from it with their toes. The sun had touched them daily, painted dawn and sunset along their lengths, they’d know brown hawks and eagles, the moon and shifting of stars. K A R E N FOX LE E 123

I covered over my ears against the ringing and uncovered them again. There were the blackened circles and stones of campfires all around the outskirts of that place. Gordon kicked the rocks at a campfire and under one was a flattened packet of cigarettes and a lighter. ‘Don’t touch them,’ said Darren. ‘They might be poisoned.’ Gordon hesitated, picked up a saucepan without a handle instead, and dropped it. Deliberately. ‘Shhhh,’ I said. But he only raised his eyebrows in mock confusion, opened his palms to the sky. Some type of weather raced across his face. The flicker of a storm. There should be a name for the feeling on a day like that. When the adventure has not ended and the late morning has not yet sprung leaks and emptied all the magic out. I sat hoping, with my hand on that tree, watching Gordon. Haunted Grounds was a stupid name. It was flimsy, it could never stick to a place like that. I heard my brother say, ‘No.’ ‘I’m not chicken,’ said Gordon. ‘I’ll put a foot in.’ ‘Don’t do it Gordon,’ said Darren. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Why?’ asked Gordon. ‘Give me one good reason?’ ‘Because you’re not meant to.’ I had no other argument, only that I knew it wasn’t mine or ours, that it was something we shouldn’t touch or enter and even then, those thoughts were only half-formed. They were trees and not trees. It was haunted and not haunted. It was cicadas or silence. ‘You don’t make all the rules you know,’ he said. ‘I don’t see a fence here.’ ‘Please,’ I pleaded, but he didn’t listen. He walked up the small sandy bank, right past the sentry tree, and planted his foot inside the invisible perimeter. Then he made a grunting noise and ran into that singing still place. He charged like READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 124

a bull, head down, and slapped his hands against the closest tree. He went into that place, right up to another tree and slapped it too. Then he walked out, staring at me. He sat down again suddenly and though he had no expression on his face, he’d grown a violent purple beneath his freckled mask and a pulse ticked in his throat. The sun dimmed a little. The ringing remained. The smile inside the sentry tree disappeared and my eyes stung with tears. I was ashamed to look back. I walked home the whole way down the centre of the dry river, ahead of them, and I refused to look into my brother’s eyes. He spoke of soccer. Of Test cricket. Of cricket cards. Of going to the town pool. He picked up rocks and threw them. He rallied Darren and Gordon, who strutted now, face still glowing mauve, to do the same. Who could throw the farthest? ‘Do you want to be in the game?’ he asked me. I ignored them. We passed The Fortress and then The Aquarium and I knew its name was stupid too and I was stupid for naming it. We never looked in its mirror, all four of us, again. We passed Butterfly Headquarters and the day was broken and I swallowed down my sorrow.

The sun was at the top of the sky and our mother already had Saturday lunch on the table: Kraft cheese pristine in its blue box and Spam in a tin. Tongue wrapped up in cling wrap and pickles and bread and salami with cheese and a Devon sausage, sliced tomato and wilted iceberg lettuce. My older sisters fought over who got to turn the key in the Spam and who got to use the shining new cheese slice. At home, everything was the same. But that night, when Mum came in to play Capitals of the World, I wept against my pillow. USSR. Moscow. France. Paris. Austria. Vienna. And suddenly snot exploded out my nose and I choked on K A R E N FOX LE E 125

my tears. My brother in the bed opposite turned towards the wall and cried too. I sat up and lay against the mountain of my mother’s belly, felt her nylon nightie, smelled her sweat. I listened inside the great land of my mother to her heartbeat. She rested her warm palm on my forehead. ‘Too much sun perhaps?’ she said but I shook my head. She smoothed down my hair, roughly and firmly, again and again. ‘We went back,’ was all I could manage. I knew she would understand the rest. That we’d disturbed the place. ‘It will be all right. It will be all right,’ she said, but I continued to weep for that place and a boy who would never feel magic until finally I fell asleep.

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Patti Miller is the author of eight books and numerous articles and essays published in national newspapers and literary magazines. She published The Mind of a Thief with UQP in 2012, which was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Nita B Kibble Literary Award, shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for History. Her most recent memoir, Ransacking Paris (UQP, 2015), was released to critical acclaim. Patti is a highly successful memoir and non-fiction teacher and mentor who offers courses at the Faber Academy, as well as many other writing centres around Australia and in Paris. Her latest book on writing is Writing True Stories (Allen & Unwin, 2017).

Icarus No-one in the family thought Barney would be the one to jump off mountainsides with only a length of nylon cloth holding him absurdly in the sky. Risk-taking wasn’t his role. In large families, for ease of categorisation, each person is assigned a simple role: the artistic one, the brainy one, the funny one. Barney was the rational and methodical one. He did not act in extreme or unpredictable ways. He stayed in the same job – school-teaching – nearly all his life, made sure the knives and forks all faced the same way in the drawer, produced computer printouts of journeys before he took them, had a place and date and time for everything. There doesn’t seem to be anything to account for him one day buying a set of wings and stepping off a mountainside into thin air as if he were Icarus – except that he did have flying dreams as a child. Every night he flew across the farm where we all grew up, soaring above the paddocks and fences like a feral angel. Sometimes in his dreams he plummeted towards earth, but he always saved himself at the last moment.

One morning, Barney took off from Beechmont hill in southern Queensland, at, he noted, 153º 12'7" East, 28º 7'3" South. The launch site had a grassy slope curving gently down into a basin with rainforest on either side, cleared paddocks below and a view out to rugged, bushcovered mountains. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 128

It was a sunny day with a few cumulus clouds. He had checked the meteorological report online as usual – the weather station at Nerang, the rain radar and the Doppler wind radar at nearby Mt Stapylton – and there was nothing concerning to note. The expected maximum temperature was 23 degrees. No rainfall was forecast. There had been a fall of 14 millimetres nearly two weeks before, which meant the countryside was soft with freshly growing grasses. He had dropped his wife, Jenny, off at Gold Coast Airport on his way to Beechmont. She was flying to Adelaide to visit her elderly father for a few days. Their three adult children were spread around the world, in Auckland, Budapest and Dubai, all of them enjoying adventurous lives, none of them concerned about their sixty-one-year-old father leaping off into the sky that day. Barney had been flying for six years by now and was confident in his skills and in his equipment. He had methodically checked the canopy for tears, the lines and risers for tangles, and the carabiners and altimeter-variometer to make sure all was well. He sat on the hillside with a dozen flying friends, mostly men, and a couple of women, enjoying the warmth of the early spring sun and the companionship of being able to exchange stories about cloud suck, thermal triggers, B-line stall, kiting, anti-G chutes and ridge soaring with people who knew what he was talking about. For decades I had hardly seen him, often there were five or six years between meetings. Whenever we did meet – once for Dad’s funeral, once to help paint Mum’s house, and then very recently, for Mum’s funeral – there was friendly, but not open conversation. It was hard to imagine we had the same origins, had grown up on the same farm in the same family. There was, I suppose, a mutual incomprehension between us. I theorised too much, was too fanciful, too messy, too feminist; he was too technical, too orderly, too detached, and didn’t seem to need to communicate with anyone apart from Jenny. When I visited there were PATTI M I LLER 129

topics we hopped around. I thought of him as clever and methodical – and someone who didn’t have a lot of heart, nor poetry in his soul. I was wrong about both. When our mother was dying – this was his first flight since then – he had made the ten-hour drive from his home in Murwillumbah to be with her during her last moments. Kevin, our younger brother, was there at the same time. We had a roster, all eight of us taking turns to sleep in her room and tend to her barely existent needs. Kevin rang me one day while Barney was out, praising his gentle and loving care of Mum. ‘He gives her a little spoonful of mashed banana and a little sip of water, and he wipes her face and holds her hand.’ I was surprised, as I was meant to be. Even mentioning it carried the subtext, We didn’t expect this of Barney did we, huh? I hadn’t been the only one in the family to build a simple and inaccurate picture of him.

The breeze was light, the air was warm, but not hot, the windsock lifted gently and the grass rippled. A few magpies flew steadily without being buffeted, several other paragliders had taken off – Drew, Jason, Al, Kirsty, Bridgette – and it was Barney’s turn, then Gavin’s. There’s a wide launch area at Beechmont, wide enough for six to take off at once, which was useful during competitions, but this Thursday morning was just for pleasure; there was no rush. From the conditions, he expected to climb to over 4000 feet and then fly for about fifty kilometres westwards towards Beaudesert where he knew some good landing spots. He spent twenty minutes getting ready. He unzipped the harness and wing from the backpack and checked the equipment: his reserve parachute, a flight computer, a VHF radio, an ordinary magnetic ball compass and a SPOT tracker/emergency beacon which sent out his location every ten minutes. Next he spread the wing out, inspecting it and making sure all the READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 130

lines were clear, then loosely put his harness on, then his helmet and warm clothes. Next he attached his VHF radio to a PTT mic/speaker system inside his helmet and placed the radio in his jacket pocket. He already had his hiking boots on – they were heavier than ordinary shoes but they provided stability and ankle support for landing. Now he was ready to clip in. He put his arms through the shoulder straps and clipped on the T-strap leg loop, then bent down and looped a bungy under his heel to keep the bottom of the harness in place. He did up the ‘fail-safe’ leg loop system, then clipped the chest strap shut. Finally he put his gloves on, did a radio check to make sure it was working, picked up the wing and carried it across to the launch area. When Barney described this whole process to me – my mind blurring a bit with the detail – it became suddenly obvious that his technical brain and methodical nature were the necessary grounding for all his flying off into blue sky dreaming. The equipment had to be assessed and used with precise care, every action had to be done in sequence and checked and re-checked, all the information about conditions had to be gathered and understood. It wasn’t just a matter of an ignominious tumble; it was life and death. He was willing to face it, but without the slightest trace of recklessness. I had never understood before the clear relationship between rigorous discipline and utter freedom. The wing lay on the grass behind him. As Gavin helped spread it, he could feel the slight weight of the harness on his shoulders. He gripped the A-risers attached to the leading edge of the wing in his right hand and pulled gently, allowing the breeze to inflate the cells of the wing. It lifted as it inflated until it rose above his head and then he pulled down on the C-risers, attached to the trailing edge, to prevent the wing surging over his head and collapsing in front of him. Getting the timing of the C-risers right was one of the first things to master – you would look a bit silly if a wing collapsed on top of you before you had gone anywhere at all. PATTI M I LLER 131

Now that the wing was steady over his head, he checked that all the lines were tangle free and all adjusted to the right length. He held the brake handles in each hand under the riser straps, and then released the A- and C-risers, still holding onto the brakes, and turned down the hill. The wing pulled forward and he walked to keep up with it, pulling the brakes a little to stop it surging over his head. Because the wind was light, he ran for a few steps and then the wing lifted him fluidly off the grassy ground, easily and gently. It was so like his childhood dreams that, the first time it happened, he told me he had laughed in joyful recognition.

He pushed himself back into his pod harness as soon as he was airborne and slipped his feet into the cocoon. The wing tugged, seeming to want to fly as it always did, to have a mind, or desire, of its own. It was swinging light, lazy pendulums; he corrected them by leaning a little against the swing. The slope was already metres beneath him, but he could still see blades of feathery spear grass and clover, looking deceptively soft and thick. He leaned to the right and the wing dipped and turned towards the basin. The air was turbulent, buffeting the wing and his body sideways and upwards, jerking him around as if he were on a roller coaster. He headed towards the top of the ridge, looking for some thermal lift. He was about 150 feet above the eucalypts, close enough to see the detail of foliage and his friends’ faces, high enough to see out across the ranges, but he wasn’t looking towards them because he needed to concentrate on gaining height. He was aware of the blue haze of the mountains on the periphery of his vision, the light and shadow of peaks and valleys, and below, a smooth green carpet. This was his country, the part of Australia where he had lived for years. The house he shared with Jenny on the edge of Murwillumbah, looking out over cane fields towards Mt Warning, was fifty kilometres READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 132

away as the crow flies, as he could fly. It was on the other side of the Springbrook National Park; the road he drove along to reach the launch site snaked along the Nerang River, a brownish thread he could use as a geographical marker when he flew southwards. This part of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland is not like anywhere else in the country; it is subtropical, mountainous, wild, but also dotted with farmlands and towns – it is fertile and well watered, green for most of the year. The valleys and mountains of Bundjalung country had attracted thousands of hippies looking for a sustainable life in the rainforest in the 1970s and by the time Barney arrived with Jenny and their three children in the late 1980s, the region was dotted with communities that grew their own everything. Feral living in the bush without modern conveniences didn’t really interest Barney, and the belief systems that came with it, Gaia and goddesses and chakras, were as irrational to him as the religion he had rejected as a teenager. Yet it’s obvious from the paintings he did in his spare time – his choice of subjects, fields, houses, rivers, fences, neatly backed by mountains and large skies – that he was drawn to the juxtaposition of human and natural order. There was no pain or wildness in his pictures, but an appreciation, almost an imprisonment, of a safe and pleasing world. Above the earth, many geographic features were easy to see – forests, rivers, ranges – but mountains and hills seemed flatter and lower from above. Usually Barney flew between 3000 and 7000 feet – flyers measure height in feet rather than metres – and one day he reached 9500 feet in a thermal. I thought it must be unnerving to be so far above the earth with only a slim arc of nylon holding him up, but he said, the higher the better. ‘It’s much safer than being close to the ground – if something goes wrong there is plenty of time to either sort it out, or throw the reserve,’ he said. ‘And you can chat to wedge-tailed eagles up there.’ He sent me a photograph of himself as a dot in the sky under a red and white wing. There was blue sky all around him and clouds PATTI M I LLER 133

beneath – a rare experience as clouds mark the top of thermals and only appeared below him when a sea-breeze brought in a lower cloud base. Far below there was a farming landscape patterned with cloud shadows and in the distance, mountains and a far blue horizon. He said he had often thought of painting the view from up there. ‘But to do it justice,’ he said, ‘it would have to be painted on the inside of a large sphere and viewed from the inside.’ When he said that, it made me realise how floating in the sky gave him the sense of being in a 360-degree reality. Of course, everyone on the planet is in that reality, but with the solid earth beneath our feet, we see in simple horizontal and vertical planes. For him, he was inside the egg of the world, a tiny speck of matter at the beginning of the infinite universe, soaring and circling above the curved earth, at the far edge of human possibilities. On this day though, he was still only about 200 feet up, trying to climb using the usually reliable thermal triggers along the ridge. He had been circling for a while and it was starting to feel like he wasn’t going anywhere. He knew from experience it would become fatiguing to constantly pull on the brakes on the turns when the rising air was weak. A series of punchy thermic bullets, narrow columns of rising warm air, lifted him, but then he lost them and flew into a moderate sink of falling cool air. It was hard work and nothing he tried was getting him any further ahead. Today wasn’t going to be the day he soared above the glorious world chatting to wedge-tailed eagles. He decided to head back in for a landing on the bomb-out at the bottom of the launch site and try again later. There were still plenty of punchy updraughts, so he was alert for any sudden changes. He slid his legs out of the pod, ready for landing, and made a wide 180-degree turn for his final approach. He scanned the trees and the grass for any signs of any unusual movement, especially the sudden flutter of dry leaves and dust on the ground, but the soft green re-growth from the recent rains gave nothing away. He glided READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 134

in gently and reached the middle of the landing site, just a few metres above the ground. Suddenly, he was shot vertically upwards in a violent twisting corkscrew of air. He realised afterwards it was a whirlwind, or ‘dustdevil’, without the tell-tale dust; the short spring grass had hidden the signs. But at that moment there was no thought, only the sensation of his body being spun upwards in a nightmare whirl. The wild twisting upthrust caused a major collapse of the wing, but the force of the upthrust was so fierce he kept going upwards, reaching about 40 feet, the height of a four-storey building. The lines were slack and the leading edge of the wing was pointing towards the ground – and then it collapsed and deflated completely. There was no time to reopen the wing or use his reserve. From four storeys up he plummeted, feet first, towards the ground. Just eternal blackness now, he thought. No hope. It was the only thing in his head he told me later. He didn’t believe in an afterlife of any kind, nor any kind of God. He was the first one of my brothers and sisters to refuse to go to church, a rebellion of family-shattering size in our strictly religious family. We weren’t just Sunday believers, our every day was shaped around religion. We prayed the Rosary on our knees every night, we learnt our catechism, we examined our conscience, we understood sin. Barney stood in his bedroom and refused to move, disobeying not just Mum and Dad, but our entire heritage. He was a teenager at the time and I was still a child, but I can remember the terror I felt at him stepping outside the safe frame of belief. He didn’t believe in God then, and now, as he faced eternal non-existence, he didn’t change his mind. As Barney braced himself for impact, he made one almighty effort and flared, pulling on the brakes of the just re-opening wing as hard as he could a moment before hitting the ground. That last second flare changed the angle of impact from 90 to 60 degrees – and saved his life. PATTI M I LLER 135

‘I hit the ground very hard,’ he said in an email to me later. Every time I read that comment, I think he deserves some sort of award for understatement. His legs buckled instantly and the bottom of his spine smashed into the ground with tremendous force. He felt two large bangs, like firecrackers going off in his back. His first thought was a surprised recognition that he was still alive. No eternal blackness. Then he realised he couldn’t feel or move anything from his waist down and knew immediately that his back was broken. At that moment he believed he would never walk again. His injuries, later catalogued, were: a burst fracture of the T12 vertebrae with shards damaging spinal nerves, stable fractures of the T2, T4 and S5, a chip off a higher vertebrae, two broken ribs, severely bruised and battered feet, ankles and knees, nerve damage in the spine affecting the right hip and leg, and severe trauma to the lower bowel and bladder. He didn’t know any of that yet. But he was alive and had to get help. Although he was in severe pain, he could still move his torso and arms. He took his gloves off, pulled his radio out of his flight-suit pocket and called. He can remember exactly what he said. ‘This is Barney. I’m in the bomb-out. I’ve crashed. My back is broken. I can’t move or feel anything from the waist down. I need help.’ While he waited he tried to detach his wing but the carabiners were under him, impossible to reach. He could see other flyers spiralling down from the cloud base to land beside him so he waited. It was then the dust-devil suddenly showed its truly diabolic nature, returning and switching directions, instantly re-inflating his wing. He was picked up and swung along with just his toes touching the ground, dumped down again, then dragged, broken-backed, for forty metres before he could pull down on the lines and bring the wing back under control. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 136

I find this moment, the dragging after the fall, more unspeakable than anything else. The fall is terrifying to think of, but the brokenbacked dragging is sheer horror. It seems a stroke of extreme malice, even for the Fates who care less than nothing for any of us. Just leave it at flinging the body to earth why don’t you? Barney’s friend Drew landed and unclipped his own wing then ran towards him, followed by Jason and then Kirsty, Al and Bridgette. They knelt beside him, asked him foolishly if he was all right. Gavin stayed at the launch site, contacted the ambulance and coordinated messages from other emergency services – but didn’t call Jenny. Barney wanted to know what he was facing first, to know the bleak reality. He was certain he would be a paraplegic for the rest of his life. His brain circled relentlessly over the loss of independence; the many things he would never do again – the reality of not being able to stand, walk, run, dance, have sex, fly, or even go to the toilet. He dreaded being in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and being a burden on his family. And then he felt grateful that at least it didn’t happen while Mum was alive; it would have been too distressing for her to bear. I have to say this last remark reveals more than anything else how limited my knowledge of my brother had been in the past. To feel gratitude for sparing someone else pain at such a moment strikes me as extraordinary. He lay on the soft grass while the others gave him water and held his wing over him for shade. He clenched his teeth and waited. The others kept talking to him, reassuring him that things were perhaps not as bad as they seemed and that help was already on the way. He said afterwards he couldn’t begin to describe his gratitude for the fact that his comrades – that’s what he called them – were there with him. He said he had never realised before how crucial that kind of human support was in a critical situation, how much we need others to survive. The ambulance arrived after about forty minutes. The paramedics asked him questions and tried to diagnose his injuries but didn’t give PATTI M I LLER 137

him any painkillers – when spinal cord injuries are suspected, painkillers are withheld because the medication can interfere with the specialist diagnosis. He had to keep clenching his teeth while the paramedics cut him out of his harness and flying suit and lifted and strapped him onto a stretcher. Twenty minutes later the CareFlight helicopter arrived. The doctor on board also didn’t administer painkillers – and warned him that the helicopter would vibrate as it revved up to take off and that it was going to hurt. ‘He wasn’t wrong,’ Barney said. Once they were airborne the flight was smooth. Barney lay on his back staring at the padded ceiling while the doctor kept a close eye on him. He was flown to the specialist spinal unit at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra hospital where the helicopter landed on the roof. Hospital staff ran out and he was trolleyed to an emergency theatre, nurses plugging in electrodes and cannulas and doctors calling out directions and ordering equipment as they ran. ‘Just like on TV shows,’ Barney said. The damage was quickly assessed. First, before the operation, Barney had to sign an indemnity form. The surgeon stressed that all he could do was prevent the bone pieces from further cutting his spinal cord. Only time would tell, he said, the extent of the nerve damage and how much of it would repair. He hoped for the best, but he made clear that there was no guarantee Barney would walk again. He explained that as well as the danger of further damage to his spinal cord, there was a chance he could also lose his sight as a result of the operation. Barney was introduced to the surgical team, which seems oddly polite in the circumstances. Then he was anaesthetised and the surgeon began the delicate five-hour operation on the shattered T12. He pulled the shards of bone away from the spinal cord and stabilised it by binding it with titanium rods to the vertebrae above and below it. The T12 is in the region that sends messages to and from the legs, READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 138

so that any hope of walking again depended on the success of this reconstruction. It was the evening of the day it happened and none of us yet knew any of this. When Kathy, the oldest in our family and a trained nurse, rang the next morning I knew from the tone of her voice something was wrong. She told me that Barney had been in a paraglider accident; that he had broken his spine in several places and it looked like he wouldn’t walk again. I remember thinking, It’s only four weeks since Mum died. And then I thought, Barney will never fly again – the boy who flew every night in his dreams. In those first moments, it seemed worse than the fact that he wouldn’t walk again. And, of course, I thought about Icarus; the non-existent gods would always have their way.

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Samuel Wagan Watson hails from honourable ancestors of the Birri-Gubba, Mununjali, Germanic and Gaelic peoples, and grew up in a family of accomplished authors, political players, entrepreneurs, academics, artists and raconteurs. His collection of poetry Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight (UQP, 1999) won the David Unaipon Award. Since then he has written five more collections: Hotel Bone (Vagabond Press, 2001); Itinerant Blues (UQP, 2002); Smoke Encrypted Whispers (UQP, 2004), which won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry; The Curse Words (Vagabond Press, 2011) and Love Poems and Death Threats (UQP, 2014). His work has been translated into seven languages, inspired various musical compositions, and been the subject of film and television productions and visual art projects.

Temporary Ghosts Whether reading off the page or slamming upon a stage, raconteurs are the temporary ghosts of story in places the world over. We appear as apparitions … spoken and textual … creative entities … there at a venue one minute and vanishing the next … on the go … on the go … on the go. Don’t assume we are unorthodox freaks threatening the values of a traditional literary establishment. Think of our sudden arrival and departure as a kind of paranormal activity. 4.30 a.m. Tray tables up … down, down, smash … tightening in the chest … wait until the Captain has turned off the seatbelt signs. ‘Welcome to Darwin.’ Welcome to the RUSH! The sudden heat greets you like dirty-ol’-man fingers, touching you in ways you don’t want to be touched. There is only one sure way to judge the words produced by black Australian writers and that is by recognising the ghosts that appear in their content. Indigenous storytellers can pepper their spiritual entities in the flavours of rich, scorched earth and ochres. But spectral beings that once echoed Anglo songlines of blood find it hard to attract the cologne of occupied and tortured country. Some ghosts are guiding and paternal. Others are lost and bitter. SA M UE L WA G A N WATSON 141

The Northern Territory capital is situated on old and disputed land … place of the mighty Larrakia Nations … Darwin has been cut, shot, bombed and cycloned … this is also a land vibrant in ghosting. As a soft urban writer I acknowledge that even my dark skin is too soft in this terrain. We had to be in Katherine for a poetry performance by one o’clock. I hadn’t ripped-up the Stuart Highway for some years. It was the eve of the Intervention and racism was about to smash this land and her children again, with immunity and extreme prejudice. The Intervention was creating a new league of ghosts and it would take some heavy ceremony to cleanse the future. The organisers warned that maybe an audience of ten people were waiting for us. Do we have a PA system? Do we even have a hall? Ten to twelve hours of travel to read only three poems. We’re scheduled during the local AFL season. About to become a poltergeist, unnoticed in a ghost town. Did the audience of three people even get it? Before long we’re back at an airport. On the go … on the go … on the go! At 40,000 feet the Captain has turned off the seatbelt signs. Bring me a [fucking] drink! What an anticlimax. Where is my rush? And my ninth-grade English teacher said I’d never amount to anything … ‘We’re now making our descent into Jakarta. Can passengers please put their tray tables and chairs in an upright position.’ Make sure the visas are stamped. Avoid paying bribes to the immigration police. Who is meeting us? It’s lunchtime in downtown Jakarta and gridlock is pumping. The Makassan sun is climbing high, poking hot pincers into the sprawling city. Small passenger-loaded motorbikes play Russian-roulette. An Imam calls for lunchtime prayer from the mosque near the hotel. It is an eerie aria that makes this metropolis more Middle Eastern than READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 142

simply, Eastern. Maybe it’s just my insecurities … driving by the nearly refurbished Marriott after the bombings. The heavy tobacco and cinnamon flavours of the land’s kretek-smokers tango with the smog and noise pollution. Tightening of the chest. Do we need an interpreter? Do we have a PA system? Muslim students planning to picket our reading; really? What a RUSH! Did anyone get my poetry in that rush? Late afternoon in a festering Javanese jungle. Black-demon bats lounge in the banyan trees surrounding the huge lava-stone temples. I am enticed by a group of traditional minstrels and their ‘spirit-dancer’. A beautiful young woman with her serpentine body seduces me as she invites the primordial revenant to possess her lithe form for a brief dervish of the undead. When is the next rush of adrenalin? Where is the next audience? Am I awake or am I dreaming? ‘The Captain has turned on the seatbelt signs. Local time is 6.30 p.m. Welcome to Tromsø.’ The dull midnight sun will soon be on high in the Nordic lands of the Sami and everything is coldly foreign to my touch. ‘Sorry Sir, your luggage must still be in Heathrow Airport.’ Chilled, tired and a little damp, just like the monolithic mountains formed in the last Ice Age around this port city. Whisks of snow cloud remain at their peaks. Even in this Arctic-circular summer we’re hitting a high of three degrees; the fjords teeming with salmon and Viking wraiths. On the go … on the go … on the go. Did my books arrive? Obviously not. Did I arrive? How do you say, ‘I’ ll have a beer’ in Norwegian?’ I feel myself coming down … SA M UE L WA G A N WATSON 143

We have interpreters … we have guitarists … a member of the Sami parliament is going to welcome me to country. Chest tightening. I can’t understand a word. The audience gasped when I wanted them to laugh and laughed when I needed them to cry. I’m the only one who didn’t really get it. Riding along the same fjord where the great Sami poet Áillohaš was taken from this mortal realm too soon. A giant sea eagle follows us all the way to Tromsø airport; could it have been a Sami shaman? Goodbyes and tears almost frozen in the deserted departure gates. I am a former visitant of this plain. On the go, on the go, on the go. ‘The Captain has switched on the seatbelt signs, smoking is not permitted on this flight …’ I must be in a waking dream? Agent Gonsalves, Homeland Security checks me out – LAX, Mexico City, San Salvador, Medellin. ‘Local time is 7 p.m. The Captain has switched off the seatbelt signs.’ In the early evening Medellin exists in the cusp of a monumental crater … from above sea level everything seems tiled in red terracotta. ‘Welcome to Colombia!’ Adrenalin chases the jet-lag. Shots of Aguardiente; fire-water chases everything else including headaches and stage nerves. This was once the stronghold of Pablo Escobar and the blood-soaked Cali Cartel. How many poets and artists were murdered for expressing their free-rights against cocaine? In some of these neighbourhoods fifty people a month were assassinated during the height of the vice wars. Libraries now thrive where carnage once reigned. My first reading in the central plaza is attended by nearly 7000 chanting Colombians … ‘VIVA POETA! VIVA POETA! VIVA POETA!’ At once the exorcism is exhilarating! Chest tightening … interpreter ready … PA system cranked so loud I can’t hear my inner ghosts. Breathe, read. Breathe, read. Breathe, read. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 144

Sofia Vergara look-alikes all want a photo with me. Whisked away by smiling security with Mossberg short-barrel shotguns. Back in the plane – Medellin, San Salvador, Mexico City, LAX. Waltzing past Homeland Security. Speaker systems welcome the troops from Iraq: ‘AND DON’T FORGET TO GET YOUR FREE DRINK AT THE BOB HOPE USO SUITE, BECAUSE THIS COUNTRY APPRECIATES ITS SERVICE PEOPLE.’ I run into an Australianspeaking Qantas cabin crew and almost cry … arrival and departure death-rattle possessively like ouija boards. It occurs to me that I could have walked in the footsteps of Che, sprouting Neruda and Lorca, and I didn’t even realise it. Time doesn’t stand still for poetic poltergeists. ‘Welcome to Brisbane. The Captain has turned off the seatbelt signs. Local time is 5 a.m.’ Pulled aside by Customs and checked for Colombian traffic … chest un-tightening. The cabbie asks me what I do. Travel writer, I tell him because poetry is not valued by cabbies in this socioclimate. Hit the front door. Scramble for the keys. The kitchen smells the same. The bedroom smells the same. She has made an effigy of me with old newspapers on my side of the bed. A note on the fridge: WELCOME BACK. SEE YOU TONIGHT. THE ELECTRICITY BILL IS DUE TOMORROW. Luckily I have pesos all the way to the bank. And breathe … breathe … breathe finally … I have landed in the static arena of a non-performance area, the nonexclusion zone for everything civil and unpoetic. Back to being a ghost in a province that is home. Let the anticlimax begin as I slip from my eidolon guise into something more comfortable …

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Julie Koh is the author of two short story collections: Capital Misfits and Portable Curiosities (UQP, 2016). Portable Curiosities was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards and the UTS Glenda Adams Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. On the basis of Portable Curiosities, Julie was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist in 2017. Her short stories have appeared in places including The Best Australian Stories (2014–2017) and Best Australian Comedy Writing. Julie is the editor of BooksActually’s Gold Standard, the librettist for satirical opera Chop Chef, and a founding member of Kanganoulipo.

The Lion in memory of Jesse Cox

Guy de Maupassant lives in a shed at the bottom of my garden. I come to know this because I have a strange but pleasant dream one August in which the shed belongs to him. The shed is in the backyard of the house where I grew up, and which I’ve inherited from my parents. I’ve lived here my entire life. In my dream, the shed is made of an old wooden boat supported by brick pillars and topped with a tiled roof. Two steps lead up to a pair of pretty windowed doors on the side. It’s a sunny day, and the shed is surrounded by flowers. I know Guy is living there, though I don’t see him emerge from the shed. I also know that he is very famous, though I don’t know why. I have no issue with him living on the property – in fact, it seems that we get along well. I have a good feeling about the arrangement. When I wake, I wonder who this Guy de Maupassant is. I wonder if he’s a real person. But before I have a chance to google him, I hear a loud bang, like a firecracker has gone off behind the house. I step into the backyard in my pink tracksuit, and there at the end of the stone path, which divides the yard exactly in two, stands a solid man with dark hair and a heavy moustache. He’s wearing a nightshirt and Turkish slippers, and is holding an old-fashioned pistol. I know immediately that this man is Maupassant. He seems to have originated from thin air, and has already moved in. The dream has been a premonition announcing his arrival into my reality. JULI E KOH 147

Ah, François, he says, examining his gun. I have returned from an unusually bracing swim. Give me a light lunch, but let it be strengthening; two boiled eggs, a grilled steak, French beans, Gruyère cheese, and very hot tea. I tell him my name is not François. I point out that I am neither French nor a man. He doesn’t appear to register my protest. Look, François, he says. See the leaf on the tallest branch of that white poplar? I will cut it off at the stem. He lifts his pistol. A shot rings clear, and the chosen leaf flies off what is in fact a jacaranda in someone else’s yard. He looks me in the eye, studying me. Do you no longer wish to be my valet, François? he asks. Is this the cause of your identity crisis? I’m not sure how to respond. Instead, I suggest it would be a good idea to put the gun away, since we’re in the middle of suburbia. Guy laughs under his moustache. Certainly, François, he says, and fires another shot, this time into the agapanthus. When he is done, I make him a peanut-butter sandwich and we sit on cast-iron chairs in the garden sipping tea. For so long I have travelled from place to place seeking relief from the cold, he says. And I believe, François, that we have found it in this strange and ugly Australian garden, so far from Étretat. He says he thinks the weather will be conducive to his writing. He might start something for Le Figaro. You’re a writer? I ask. He laughs. My friend, have you lost your mind? I tell him that I’ve recently begun to write short stories. I am glad, he says. I will be your mentor, in the same way that Flaubert was to me. I would die happily if someone were to think of me the way I think of him. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 148

Our routines immediately fall into sync. We wake at eight in the morning to take a walk around the garden. It has transformed overnight. Yesterday it was bare grass, with a lone mango tree in the corner. Now it heaves with fruit trees, beans, peas in flower, vegetables, roses and strawberries. As we admire the rosebuds and visit goldfish in the sudden pond by the fence, Guy mentions that his brother, Hervé, is a gardener. When I was born, Guy recalls, the old doctor massaged my head so that it was as round as an apple. He told my mother it would give me a most active brain, and intelligence of first-class order. But he was unable to do the same for Hervé. My poor brother. He has had difficulties since. We write every day until eleven. Guy works in the shed but sometimes visits me in my study. He slides on his blue glasses and looks over my shoulder as I type, pointing out unnecessary words. It is unnerving. I often wonder why he has come here to teach me – a woman so solitary, so ugly and obscure. He encourages me to pace up and down the stone path reading my work aloud to check the rhythm of the sentences. Whenever I do so, he finds a nice patch of grass in the sun and stretches out to listen, a big cat. After eleven, we dress and have lunch. We eat produce from the garden where possible. The man likes a lot of cream in his meals: scrambled eggs with cream, spinach with cream, endives with cream. Each afternoon, he takes his pistol and fires off fifty bullets. Oddly, the neighbours never complain, even though their fences are filled with holes, and bloody pigeons lie sprawled in their yards.

While my writing starts to flourish, Guy turns the backyard into a sort of menagerie. He introduces me to his spaniel, Paff, a cat called Piroli, his parrot Jacquot, a couple of Barbary ducks, eight tortoises that come and go, and beagles whose sole purpose is to hunt rabbits. Bonjour, petite cochonne! the parrot shrieks whenever I approach. JULI E KOH 149

Guy has a strange knack for attracting local animals, and is rarely without galahs from the neighbourhood waddling at his feet. Hello, my little ones, he coos as the animals circle around him, vying for attention. The menagerie soon grows. I say, François, he begins one morning, I should like to keep some hens, so as to be sure to have fresh eggs for breakfast. Bring me six hens and a fine cock. I find a hen breeder on the internet and acquire a set of new friends for Guy. When they flap out of their cardboard boxes he is immediately in love. They promptly fall in step with the animal entourage that follows him around the garden.

Guy hosts an endless series of dinner parties in his shed each night. For the very first, he requests eel stew and vanilla soufflés. We must also have enough champagne, he says. And stop all the clocks at a quarter past eleven. I will trick my visitors into missing the last train. They will have to stay overnight! He’s constantly dreaming up schemes for dinner parties, tennis parties, boating parties – every sort of party imaginable, complete with country dances, fortune tellers, amateur theatricals and raffles of live rabbits. He tells me about the guests he intends to invite: princes and princesses, government ministers, actresses, writers. He extends invitations to far more women than men. He gives the impression that he is in the midst of a hundred simultaneous affairs with beautiful women. His specialty, it seems, is other people’s wives. I’m never invited to attend his parties, so I spend the time working in my study. I never see his guests arrive or depart, and I never manage to meet his beloved mother, who is always at the top of his guest list. When he’s not at home, he goes out boating in a white jersey and knickerbockers, with a white yachting cap. Sometimes he READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 150

disappears for days and weeks on end, telling me he is off sailing his yacht, the Bel-Ami, along the coast. When I am on my great white bird, he tells me, no-one can hunt me out.

My life soon revolves around Guy’s shed. I find every opportunity to visit him there. I barely remember life before his arrival. It’s as if he’s always been there with me. I become preoccupied with writing to impress him. I want to complete a book of short stories. I write stories of outsiders and entrapment. I write stories of people who dream of going home but don’t know where home is. I write strange stories that extract the darkness from within me. I catalogue every betrayal. It is a deep dive every day, and I become lost in my work. So much depends on finishing this first book. Aside from the house my parents have left me, I have nothing to my name, and will not stop working until I become famous. I want people who have underestimated me to open the paper one day and see my face staring out at them. I will be famous, or I will be nothing. Guy begins to tire of his dinner parties, so I have more time to sit at my desk and concentrate on my writing. On quiet nights, all I have to do is run him a hot bath in the house. He constantly feels cold. The fur coat he’s brought with him does nothing to keep him warm. I am forever acquiring blankets on his behalf. I, too, see less of my friends. Their company makes me lonely. An unbridgeable chasm yawns between us. I don’t tell anyone that Guy lives with me, that he is the only one who truly understands what I have undertaken, who can see and feel the torture of my work and of my existence, who remains by my side shaping every word. He is the only person I want to see. You are right to withdraw, Guy says as we cast new bullets one day. One must not be afraid to stay away from society in order to keep one’s JULI E KOH 151

values. I myself am without illusions; a solitary, a savage. I work and I wander, in order to preserve my isolation. Only your work will save and avenge you. Contemplating my reclusive future, I become fixated on buying a country estate, which will be my home when I am famous. I watch a TV show each week in which couples wanting to escape the city inspect cottages for sale in the English countryside. I draw a picture of my ideal home to pin on my vision board. The house has yellow plaster and red shutters. Smoke wafts from its chimneys. It is surrounded by grass and trees, gardens and orchards, a pond, and Guy’s boat shed. You have drawn La Guillette, says Guy as he hovers over me. My old country home. I think of it often. I see you have remembered the magnificent ash trees and white poplars. I pine for the house with red shutters, but it feels so far beyond my reach.

Guy begins to complain that all of his joints hurt. His eyes turn red. He tells me there is a mist over them, and that the light in the shed is making them tired. He has difficulty reading, even with his glasses, and has trouble shaving. We both get terrible headaches. We sleep badly. I wake consistently at a quarter to two in the morning with a stomach-ache, and have to spend the rest of the night reading until the sun comes up. Often I will take a chamomile tea to Guy, since I assume he’s also awake: the early hours of the morning are oppressive for us both. He has begun to get sharp intestinal pains, and regularly requests perchloride of iron in some water. I have no idea what that is, even though he’s adamant that it’s there in his suitcase of drugs, which is nowhere to be found. He regularly complains of noise from the bakery disrupting his sleep. There isn’t a bakery nearby. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 152

I try a restrictive diet to cure me of my digestive troubles. Guy begins to adhere to his own special program, featuring meat, potatoes, eggs, milk, cheese and custard. We are both very ill. I feel like a brain trapped in a body that is over a hundred years old. I sink into a constant sadness. It threatens to swallow me whole. I cry all the time. There seems to be no point in anything. My doctor says it’s nothing to worry about. You aren’t depressed, she says. Melancholy is an underlying characteristic of your personality. It’s common in artists. Guy complains that it’s starting to become too damp for him in this town. He wants us to set sail for Nice to visit his mother, but I tell him I’ve nearly finished my book of short stories. I must stay.

I’m nearing the end of the final story in the collection. It’s the last day. I pull myself into the depths, into the other world. I am so immersed in the anger and pain that I can barely function. Guy appears in my room as I type the last word. My poor brother! he says. I saw him die. He waited for me to come to Dr Blanche’s asylum before he went. When I had embraced him he said twice very loud ‘Guy! Dear Guy!’ as he used to do in the garden of Verguies when he called me to play. I wiped with my handkerchief his poor dimmed eyes. Their beautiful blue. It had disappeared. Guy paces my bedroom. He has lost control over his legs, which he now lifts too high for each step, or puts down too quickly. On the way to the cemetery, he says, I saw a shadow, a phantom! He stops to look closely at the wall as if it is a mirror. My brain has dissolved, he cries. Can you see, François? It is leaking through my nose! He watches the wall as if he is seeing his brain fall, drop by drop, in a sticky goop, to the wooden floor. Guy, I tell him, nothing’s wrong. Please sit down. JULI E KOH 153

I have been made a count, he says to the wall. You must address me as Count de Maupassant. He howls like a dog. He licks the walls. I feel the same agony. Our minds rage. Guy turns to me with a violent look. You have taken my place at Le Figaro. You have slandered me in Heaven. I beg you to leave me. I refuse to see you any longer. He disappears. I examine the mirror on the wall. I consider my own hateful face, my intense ugliness. I think of how I should kill myself, and draw a finger slowly across my throat. I lie in bed and can’t sleep. I watch the clock. At a quarter to two in the morning, I hear a noise in the yard and get up to check on Guy. The door swings open. He is standing in the middle of the shed looking at me. He has a paperknife in his hand. His throat is bleeding. See, François, he says, what I have done. I have cut my throat. This is a case of absolute madness. Where is François anyway? He should be here instead of me. I am numb. I can’t face the slit in that neck, the spilling blood. But we are alone. Guy cries that he won’t be taken to the same asylum as his brother. There is nothing I can do but call an ambulance. I wait with him, holding his hand, but when the paramedics arrive, he refuses treatment. They don’t even look at him when they say they can’t assist me. I scream at them. I push them back out through the garden gate. I run into the house and take a needle from my sewing box. Without anaesthetic, I stitch his throat together. The stitches form a black smile. Guy is silent. He watches my tears with dead eyes. When it is over, he is calm. Forgive me, François. I ask him to lie down, and wrap him in blankets. I sleep at the foot of his bed and pray for our suffering to end.

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The next morning I’m in the kitchen beating an egg into a cup of tea to take to Guy. A man in a white uniform appears at my kitchen table. He introduces himself as a nurse from Dr Blanche’s asylum. I tell him that Guy is very sick. We walk together to the shed. It is a cloudless, warm day. The nurse asks me to stand back, so I watch from the shade of the mango tree. He disappears inside for several long minutes. When he emerges he holds his hand up, as if to tell me not to follow, and walks very slowly down the garden path. He is followed by a dark-haired man in a rumpled nightshirt and Turkish slippers, with a line of black stitches across his throat. I wonder who this man is. I have an overwhelming urge to follow him wherever he goes, to protect him and be protected, to fall at his feet and thank him, but I’ve lost control of my legs. As I watch him walk down the path, the patient begins to disappear. First his head and shoulders, then his torso and legs. He becomes a pair of feet shuffling down the path. Then his feet vanish. The nurse walks on alone. Every now and then, he pauses to gesture to the invisible man behind him, showing him the way. At last, they arrive at the garden gate. The nurse ushers the invisible man through it. I rush to the gate to catch them before they leave. I ask the nurse why the man has been living at the bottom of my garden. Forget him for now, says the nurse. Grow stronger. Go to the seaside and listen to life itself. You must alone uncover the symphony, section by section. I gaze at the shed and feel that I’m seeing it properly for the first time in a long while. Now I see a rusted fibro shed, long overdue for demolition. It isn’t a boat but a compact box, barely taller than I am, with a flat roof. At the front of the shed, in the centre, is a small wooden window. To the right of the window is a peach-coloured wooden door, locked, paint peeling. To the left, a large hole in the wall where it once met the grass. I peer through the window and see that everything inside is grey, covered in thick dust. There’s an old lawnmower, a ladder, a tool JULI E KOH 155

box, a bag of old golf clubs. In one corner is a painted dollhouse that my sister and I used to play with as children. This is how the shed has looked since I was born – a relic, built by the original owner to be a darkroom. As I am contemplating the interior, I suddenly remember that I once had a curious dream that this shed belonged to a famous man, but I can’t for the life of me recall his name. I turn to ask the nurse if he can tell me, but he has vanished. That night, I’m struck with an immeasurable sorrow. I cry until there is nothing left, though I am not quite sure what I’ve lost.

In the ensuing months my book is published and sells well, but I am listless and produce nothing new. I travel from city to city promoting my book, but I no longer care about my writing, and recognise little of myself in it. At festivals, I answer questions with bloodless charm. I am interviewed for newspapers and feel only disorientation. I have found success, but it is a wasteland. What I have sought for myself is not in the literary world. My ambition vanishes. I have no sense of who I am. I don’t think I have the capacity to produce good work again.

At the end of a year of book promotion, during an unusually warm spell in August, I find myself feeling an inexplicable yet familiar sadness. I start to think I am seeing signs of something returning to me. A grey heron stands on the roof of the shed, regarding me with a clear yellow eye. The shed door opens and closes in the breeze, a bowl spins independently on the kitchen bench, a coat hanger falls off the rack of its own accord. ‘La Mer’ strangely inserts itself into a favourite playlist on my music streaming service, followed by ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 156

I take leisurely walks around my neighbourhood at sunset, and have a recurring feeling that someone is walking by my side, examining the magnolias in bloom as I do, and, on the home stretch downhill, based on aromas wafting on the breeze, guessing with me what each household is cooking for tea. But I also get the sense that the time has come to let go. I call contractors to knock down the shed. On the appointed day, I open the garden gate for them but can’t bring myself to watch them dismantle the structure. Instead, I pay them up-front and drive to the seaside. I sit on a bench at the top of a cliff and feel the warmth of the sun on my back. The sea looks different from how I remember it. Today it is transparent green. The cliffs surrounding me are white. In the distance, I see a yacht and finally the memories I’ve been struggling to recall become clear. I recognise the boat – it is the BelAmi sailing out to sea. A lion stands on the prow, strong and healthy, dressed in white, seeking endless summer, pursued by shadow. Only then do I hear the symphony, and slowly I begin to write.

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Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He published his first book, The Fat Man in History, with UQP in 1974. He is the author of fourteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel. Among other prizes, Carey has won the Booker Prize twice – for Oscar and Lucinda (UQP, 1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (UQP, 2000); and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice – for Jack Maggs (UQP, 1997) and True History of the Kelly Gang. He has also won the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times – for Bliss (UQP, 1981), Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs.

The Road to St Lucia I had been so often nearly published, and regretfully rejected, so frequently not acceptable at this present time. I was, in one instance, insufficiently distinguished. I had an excellent agent in London but she would have to wait another five years before a future Faber editor would be old enough to get a job and thereby acquire my book. That my work arrived at UQP was not because I had the wit to send it, but because Michael Wilding, that well-known literary scholar, proposed a short story collection of five writers. I forget who they all were, except he was one and I was another. UQP were about to publish Wilding’s Aspects of the Dying Process, together with Geoff Wyatt’s The Tidal Forest and the work of a third writer who somehow did not deliver. It was my great good fortune that the deal with the printer required three titles. I was also lucky that the UQP editor was Craig Munro, who responded without hesitation to my stories. Here was his third collection. The Fat Man in History. He had the presses waiting. He had a brilliant idea for a cover image. In the whirl of events that followed I recall him flying down from Brisbane with a borrowed Nagra tape recorder. I should have been wary or intimidated but I was pleased to be interviewed. We talked at length. We drank at length. An hour or so later Craig discovered that the tape was blank. I didn’t care. I was more than happy to do it all again. P E TER CA R E Y 159

As Craig writes in his memoir, Under Cover: Adventures in the art of editing (Scribe, 2015): The more we imbibed, the faster our oracular inhibitions flew out the window. I asked if he wanted to be a full-time writer. ‘No,’ he said, ‘because I think writing’s a boring fucking insular silly occupation.’ … When the second track ran out and the reel of tape began to flap around noisily, we called it quits. As Peter had stopped drinking some time before me, he offered to drive me downtown, so we clambered aboard his new Jensen-Healey sports car. We had the Healey part in common, as my first car had been an early model two-seater Austin-Healey Sprite. The Jensen-Healey was powerful, and its tyres slithered and slid on the Melbourne tram tracks, now shiny with rain. Peter’s temperament was such that our afternoon of spirited conversation seemed to hone rather than impair his concentration. On those slippery thoroughfares, his control at the wheel was impressive, with the same edgy fluency that ran through his best stories.

Craig was far too kind (or too eager to make the link between the car and my writing). I wish his parallel was accurate but I come from a family of drivers in which it was generally agreed that I drove like my mother not my father. That is, I possessed none of the finesse the Careys admired. I was, just the same, with whatever carelessness, anxiety, urgency, over-use of the brake, whatever sudden angers and changes of lane, off on the road to a writer’s life. I signed the contract without a thought. I had imagined I would be very happy just to have a printed book. That was all I had ever wanted, to say ‘see’ to the friends who had doubted me. But when the book was finally in my hand I began to wish it might possibly be reviewed. In truth, I expected very little, so it was a shock to open The Australian on 2 September 1974. There was Robert READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 160

Adamson – the Robert Adamson. He liked my book. ‘His imagination is fired with genius,’ he began. What writer ever had such a first review? I spent a great deal of a lovely weekend in Maldon sneaking off to re-read it in private. I had been living in Melbourne when I wrote The Fat Man in History but I had moved to Sydney by the time of publication and was immediately misunderstood as a Balmain Writer. By 1976 I was spending most of my time in a hut in Yandina, Queensland. Here, looking out into the rainforest, I wrote War Crimes and Bliss. Here, for a while, I lived in comparative proximity to UQP, the staff club, the bookshop. Then, just when we were closest, we had squabbles about that contract I had signed so recklessly. I had made it very hard for my agent, Deborah Rogers, to negotiate a sale in London and New York. So there followed an awkward period, and I will leave it to the UQP archives to one day reveal the splendid fireworks in London and St Lucia. In my own mind the dates are hazy. It was during this period, when my publisher had ceased communications with me, that I found myself in Sydney. I recall some sort of official dinner, with writers and publishers at long tables. Somewhere between courses UQP’s general manager whispered in my ear that Bliss had won the Miles Franklin Award, but mum’s the word. Whatever awkwardness had crept into our relations was now swept away. Soon after, Bliss won the NSW Premier’s Award. Soon after that, Laurie Muller arrived to run the press and I, coincidentally, finished Illywhacker, all six hundred pages of it. As luck would have it, this was exactly Laurie’s sort of book and he was determined that the country share his excitement. Of course he had come from Lansdowne Press where, as I recall, he had huge success selling collected works of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson with a TV advertising campaign. He did not have those financial resources for Illywhacker but his passions were similarly engaged. He went for it, Laurie Muller–style. P E TER CA R E Y 161

Sometimes when I look at those first editions of Illywhacker on my shelves I am aware of how shitty the paper quality is and this – paradoxically – makes me smile, because there is Laurie Muller producing a book for the right price point, reaching more readers than anyone expected. In old age the six hundred pages have become a dun colour although, because I am sentimental on this point, I would prefer to call it orange-grey, or alabaster, or marble white – the colours of Irving Penn’s ageing begonias. I always thought of Laurie as a partner, someone whom I could trust, a man passionately committed to a national literature published by Australians for Australians. I was always proud, year after year, to publish with him, and more than grateful that he and Deborah Rogers worked together so amicably to negotiate a return of the rights I had so carelessly thrown away. Laurie and I rarely agreed about jacket design, and I happily maligned most of UQP’s efforts (often damaging them further by interfering), but in the end this was a very small thing when set against Laurie’s commitment to the work. When I began work on True History of the Kelly Gang I asked Laurie if he would come with me on a four-day trip to Kelly Country, along with my friend, the great architect Richard Leplastrier. What an incredible presumption, I think now, but neither of them ever made me conscious of it. It was Laurie who guided me, straight off the plane from New York, to that little known museum in Benalla, Victoria, where I could see with my own eyes that green sash, like the Turin Shroud, which had been souvenired from Ned’s wounded body on the day of the Glenrowan shootout. I had not been aware of the sash before I began my research but I assumed it had disappeared forever. Now here it was, a holy relic, stained, faded, resplendent green. Not even the weight of Ned’s plough sheer armour would move me so intensely as this moment in a quiet Benalla street. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 162

Laurie also brought along three swags and for the first time in my life I slept with nothing between my eyes and the stars. He was a horseman and helped me see the bush with a horseman’s eyes. He had been as a Captain in the Citizen’s Military Forces, and he appointed Richard corporal and me the private, and he certainly made sure that I did not avoid my duty to get out of the car and climb that hill, or struggle down that creek or stop to talk to the farmer on horseback. Of course this leaves out many other important people I worked with at UQP, including Rob Brown in Sales and Carol Davidson in Marketing. It was Carol who took charge of rejacketing the backlist, producing nine volumes that still are my favourite reissues, designed by the very talented Jenny Grigg. Just then, when my books looked like everything I could have dreamed, Carol took a job at Random House in Sydney and Laurie, who had postponed his retirement so many times, finally named a date. It had been twenty-eight years. We had published eleven books, and found many readers and won a lot of prizes. I had also drunk some very good red wine in the best company and I think of those long lines of empty bottles when I open my vintage Illywhackers, which now give off the smell of almonds and the faintest tea-rose scent of tuberous begonias.

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Sarah Holland-Batt was born in Southport, Queensland, and has lived in Australia and the United States. Her first collection of poetry, Aria, was published by UQP in 2008 and went on to win a number of literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize, and the FAW Anne Elder Award. Her second book, The Hazards (2015), won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the WA Premier’s Book Awards, the AFAL John Bray Poetry Award, and the Queensland Literary Awards. She is a Senior Lecturer at QUT, the poetry editor of Island magazine, and editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and 2017 (Black Inc.).

In My Father’s Country I. THE BUR R

It is guesswork, this slattern backcountry I climb in darkness: ice shirring gunmetal moors, each hillock and rise a cairn of tortoise stones, slate in skid and trip steps. I have come hunting you where the cottage moon roosts I have scouted the cold declensions of the stars for your lagered vowels, the slough and guff of pub talk and grift, but all I have is a map of burrs, places you have clung, the briar catch,

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the pinch of cobbler’s peg at each clench of the years, the heart’s geography stymied by the fuse-bright blur of Yorkshire’s border lights, and I do not know my way. There is no proof of the pear trees you shinned, that hedgerow berried with your scarred blood, no ruins of the lime mortar and granite house where you grew, no symbology of rune and henge I can read here in the dark. Mist scuttles the barns, the world tipples into fog, black exhalations of woodsmoke from workers’ chimneys purl out. Still, I look in every skirled pane for proof of you, a lilt, a laugh, a coat on a hook holding the shape of an arm.

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II. YOUR DY ING

Late, late, late, late, late. You are late in your dying. You, who always scarfed your food before all, a public school habit forged in the war where marrow was swopped for jam, mutton for lamb; you who finished first, dux, swot; you who pathologically topped: you are late. I can forgive you your dying but not this insistence. You always said you’d go swift. I hate that you’ve stayed. You took your mind first, bon mots, gallows wit, but still your body persists. Your dying has taken the better part of two decades, as if,

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handed this one last task, you have resolved to do it exhaustively— methodical, a pedant above all— but how can I deny you your time? It’s your curtain call, your fall, and though you always loved Baroque efficiencies, in the end you’re less Bartók than Prokofiev, a heavy touch, bombast and squall.

III . THE HE X

Your mother loved the bottle but you were jovial, semi-teetotal, somehow immune from the streak of drink running matrilineally— a swig, a swoon, the room awash in a flush of swinging light— that giddy rotten freedom you eschewed for life. Painful, then, that the hex found you in another way: READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 168

sober syllables uttered drunk, the slur, the sliding vowels, the creeping lisp of Parkinson’s. Indignities compound. Language sluices away from you, bolts like a gelding from the box. In fright you find yourself half-cut without a sip, your throat uncooperative, over-oiled, the words scrambling in a rush, a stutter, a cable in garbled Morse not even you can decode.

I V. LONG DI V ISION

Each car ride with you was a test— so sorely you wanted a mathematician. You got a daughter instead: wilful, disinterested in inverse relations. We drove Bournemouth to Land’s End, each groyne and harbour wall pebbled with unnavigable stone SA R A H HOLLA ND -B ATT 169

as you drily taught, blue anorak zippered to the neck. I knew how to disappoint, feigned boredom. Pigheaded, I picked over tchotchkes in seaside shops, chucked gulls sodden chips, ignored your puzzles. When you gave me equations I turned to the window in a snit— class dismissed. My stupidity served me poorly; adult, I can barely add. But sometimes when lecturing a subdued hall, I hear your ghost, or its confident hectoring gist: that is to that as this is to this.

V. A NTIPODES

Delighted by tomcats and squirrels, kinder in general to animals, you confused with your tenderness. Mostly you were shy, shy with your daughter, your wife. As though a too-loud word, READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 170

a shout might blow away your precarious new life. I was always unclear about the lure of your long exile to the antipodes, though as an adult, I understand the urge to clear house, start again—I do it almost every year. If you felt disdain it was rarely on display, still, your learning was lost on your new continent: dull friends you incited futilely to read The Late George Apley, guffawing in-laws baffled by your banter at Christmas lunch, your annual homilies on Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples growing quietly strident over lukewarm prawns.

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V I. A NTI- GR AV IT Y

For science, you took me to the beach to test the weight of sand. I scooped and scraped three grades: shelly stuff, squeak quartz, volcanic black, winnowed and watered between my hands. You looked on, watched the dark surge in my palms, a cradle I could not keep, expounded something about physics though it did not stick. Terminally bored, I was deaf to your brilliance. Next year we tried my idea, hammered a pendulum from our cat’s post, revisited gravity. I watched the lead sinker swing toward me, grasped it, let it go. You were so patient as I reeled through bunkum theories, lobbed leading questions to turn me round. Finally

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I understood what made things fall. Now, when you ramble and loop in the roil of your mind, I see that line swing out— nothing can bring it down.

V II . A BR IEF HISTORY OF THE BR ITISH R AJ

I was never good at being public. Neither were you. Clammily private, in your better mind you kept shtum about family. Unknown, unseen, they were a gap where I alchemised: the sooty face of my grandfather’s Self-Portrait in Oil, hawkish glowering brows so like my own, his watercolours of Algeciras posted home to Harrogate, sketches of downed bridges in wartime France where he was bombed from the sky and hurtled you to solitude SA R A H HOLLA ND -B ATT 173

in that house with your mother’s stockpile of rum—all fodder. They were never quite real. In your decline, though, you’re expansive, fluent in the unverifiable. Like the news you delivered last week that half the family was British Raj— my grandfather born in India, boarded at the Bishop Cotton School, my great-uncle the Postmaster General of Bihar Orissa. Colonial anxieties converge in my head, a tangle of half-missed steps. And while the names and dates are plausible, your true origins are lost for good: Worthing, Leeds or Bangladesh, all unpronounceable and obscure as ash.

V III. BR A IN SURGERY

As I snailed around the Vatican’s overblown putti skies in the southern hemisphere they were opening your brain. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 174

Sawing off a neat cup of bone then lifting it like a doffed cap, probing the wet squelch for a spark, electrodes basted to your temples in a mimicry of electroshock— bite down, bite down, soon the lights will be out. Mid-anaesthetic, though, they woke you up again, made you lift an arm, then a leg, squirrel your fingers into fists, like a pet they were taking through its paces. You didn’t resist. Like swimming, you said—swimming, with a rod in your head.

I X . THE TR EMOR

We knew before the doctor did. Your hand crabbing, its fits and starts like a fieldmouse in scrabble panic, the scribble of a cardiogram drawn on air. Every gesture was loose. Your motions were approximate, SA R A H HOLLA ND -B ATT 175

missing the mark. There was nothing to say, nothing still— you were irate with your diagnosis. The house quaked under your powderkeg fuse. For weeks you only addressed the cat, sought its cool, contained ministry. The anger didn’t abate. You snapped, jackal-mad, at the slightest error. I learnt to stay away, avoid asking, tiptoe across faultlines I had no seismograph to measure. It is years, but the tremor still buckles and shakes.

X . INDIR ECT A DDR ESS

We’ve said our goodbyes— you’re elsewhere now. Here, but nowhere really. We only talk in poetry. I’m not sure when I last saw the you I knew— READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 176

whenever it was I didn’t make note of the date. No fear. We were always bad at ceremony—the cake uncut, the gifts faintly embarrassing. At times I glimpse the iceberg tip of your subterranean mind but you’re away mostly and so am I. I’m sorry we don’t speak more often— my syntax is broken. Falsely cheery or stern, I don’t know how to address you, how to be your parent. I wish you could teach me to be patient but you’ve jumped the gun, fastest off the mark in the quickest sprint of all.

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X I. W INTER, WORTHING

You spent your war years on Worthing’s shingled seafront— the beach blockaded with slabbed concrete and wire to rout the Krauts. Churchill said they won’t come by sea, but you lived in imminence at the outbreak, sleeping huddled in the front garden before the Morris Shelter arrived, that suffocating quarter inch of steel wrapped like a blanket around your childhood. Your mother paid peppercorn rent for a house where you hardly slept then you were exiled to board at twelve when her boozing revved, your father dead, your country on ration. Now the shore is a tip of crockery shale, soft glassfuls rubbing it smooth, each heaving

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wave stubbing out, beginning again. Cheap trinket shops dot the front. At night the lights spot on like lanterns in rolling spray, quaint font rocks and swings on the gastropub. My whisky sears and cracks its ice—the sting, the saw of true north. Then I think of you sleeping on your frozen front lawn. And I cannot get warm.

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Steven Herrick is one of Australia’s most popular authors for children and young adults. He published his first book for young people, Water Bombs, with UQP in 1992. He has written twentythree books, many of which have been on the CBCA Book of the Year Awards shortlist, including Love, Ghosts and Nose Hair (UQP, 1996), A Place Like This (UQP, 1998), The Simple Gift (UQP, 2000), Pookie Aleera is Not My Boyfriend (UQP, 2012) and Bleakboy and Hunter Stand Out in the Rain (UQP, 2014). He has twice won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. His most recent verse novel, Another Night in Mullet Town, was published by UQP in 2016. For the past twenty-five years he’s been a full-time writer and regularly performs his work in schools throughout the world.

The Taste of Blue It’s finally stopped snowing. Outside it’s bleak and silent. I can see all the way to the front fence where the snow piles up in drifts. Not a thing moves, except the clouds. They hang thick and ominous above Rook’s Crag. There’ll be another dump after dark. All I’ll hear is the patter on the roof and the occasional snap of a frozen branch giving way. There’s two hours until nightfall. Enough time to make it out and back. I put on my woollen socks and heavy boots, tucking my jeans into the socks. The Driza-Bone hangs behind the back door. I’ll slip it on before leaving. But first, I have to get the gun. In Dad’s room, I reach up to the top of the wardrobe. My fingers touch the cold steel of the barrel. I move my hand along to the stock and lift the rifle down and place it on the bed. The box of ammo is underneath the bed. I take out five bullets and put the packet back in its place. I load the rifle the way Dad taught me, clicking the magazine in place and flicking the lock to ON. Before I leave the house, I shrug into the Driza-Bone and pull a beanie low over my ears. Already my teeth ache from the cold. I sling the strap of the rifle across my shoulder and close the back door. In the distance is the laughter of kookaburras, high on the Crag. I’m not hunting for cackling birds. The hard caked snow crunches as I walk down the driveway. At the front fence, I look both ways along the road before swinging the gate wide and stepping through. I’m careful with the latch, tying the wire STE V E N HER R I CK 181

around twice. I walk slowly along Barnes Creek Road until I reach the path. It’s a kangaroo track, worn hard and deep so I can trust my footing. The creek runs fast and ice blue with snow melt from above. The roar of Sutton Waterfall two hundred metres away mutes my breathing. The water that flows wild over its edge is the same water I drink in the house. The same water Dad and me used for cooking and cleaning and nourishing the vegetable garden. When we redirected the pipes into our house, Dad grinned and said, ‘Snow melt and gravity, that’s all we need to stay alive, son. And the gun.’ It had taken three weeks of backbreaking work to clear a decent path through the undergrowth for the pipes. ‘As long as there’s snow on the mountain,’ Dad had said. And there was always snow on the ranges behind our house. Ever since we moved here.

I was seven years old when we first pulled up outside the house. I remember looking at the rough-hewn logs on the walls and the rusted iron on the roof and asking, ‘Where are the pigs?’ Dad turned off the engine and unhooked my seatbelt, ‘What pigs?’ ‘The pigs that live in the barn.’ I pointed to the building. Dad looked at me for a long time, scratching his chin, then he laughed, a deep booming sound. ‘That’s our new house, Jacob,’ he said. He got out of the car and I followed him up to the verandah. The floorboards creaked under our boots. I peeked through the front window, still hoping to see a big sow sitting in the lounge room, suckling her babies. The rooms were empty. Dad turned the key in the lock and stepped through the door. It smelled warm and yeasty inside the house, like the rough logs were breathing. I walked to the back wall and touched it, feeling the hard timber against the flesh of my palm. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 182

In the kitchen, Dad turned on the tap. It made a rusty knocking sound. No water came out. He laughed again and turned it off. I ran upstairs to explore. A bedroom each for me and Dad, both with windows facing down to the front paddock and the road in the distance. I loved the view, from the first time I saw it. A few days after we moved in the clouds disappeared and I could see Rook’s Crag. It towered over the valley blocking the sun in the late afternoon. On that first day, Dad had walked out to the backyard and picked up the axe lying beside the pile of wood. He placed a piece of ironbark on the cutting block and with one swift blow split it down the middle. He looked at me and smiled, ‘Fuel for heat and cooking.’ He glanced towards the water tank. There were bullet holes in the side. ‘Now all we need is water,’ he said. ‘And pigs,’ I added. Dad picked up the logs to carry them inside. We bought Martha and Henry a few months later from a pig farmer down on the plains. The man’s name was Maddison Paul and I kept thinking we’d got his name the wrong way round. I called him Mr Maddison. He didn’t seem to mind. He handed me a little piglet and said its name was Henry. He told me that no matter what I do, I shouldn’t pull Henry’s tail, not even in jest. Pigs are proud animals and they didn’t like having their tails touched. I promised him I wouldn’t. Me and Dad bought some chickens, a goat and a dog named Rastus. A few weeks later a truck pulled up outside our house and unloaded ten calves and fifteen sheep. Dad signed a piece of paper for the driver and we herded the animals into the front paddock where the grass had grown long and wavy. After Dad closed the gate, I climbed onto the highest rung. I gripped on tightly and rested my feet on the lower bar. ‘We got ourselves a farm, son,’ he said. I counted the cows and sheep again, just to make sure none had crept back into the truck to go home to their parents. They were all there. ‘Are we going to eat them, Dad?’ I asked. STE V E N HER R I CK 183

‘We’ll grow them nice and fat on our fresh grass and then sell them. We’ll eat the money,’ he answered. I giggled, ‘You can’t eat money!’ Dad tousled my hair, ‘We’ll buy things to eat, son.’ He scratched his chin, ‘Actually, we’ll probably buy them back as meat!’ I looked at the dull eyes of the sheep staring at me. They stood still in the centre of the paddock, waiting for us to leave before they started grazing. They were trying to make sense of where they were and failing. Sheep are stupid. It’s the first thing I learnt on the farm. Sheep are stupid. Cows are slow. Pigs are smart. And don’t turn your back on a goat.

Six years later, the virus came. It had such an innocent name. Noone knew the damage it could cause. Dad told me it only attacked introduced species, like cows and pigs and goats. And sometimes people.

I stop walking when I reach the trail head for Rook’s Crag. I ease the rifle from my shoulder and place it beside a tree. Then I carefully slide down the embankment beside the creek to the water. I reach into the flow and cup my hands. The water is so cold it hurts my throat as I drink. It tastes fresh and clean and blue. Can you taste a colour? I scramble back to the track and pick up the rifle. A few metres away a swallow swoops along the surface of the creek. It lands on a boulder and flicks its tail like a crazy weathervane searching for the wind. I aim the gun at him and look through the scope. I can see its bright little eyes scanning the air, looking for insects. The scope is so READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 184

powerful I can make out every feather. Its chest rises and falls quickly with each breath. It sits on the rock for a few minutes, longer than swallows normally do. I dare not move, even though the cold is making my legs ache and my hands lock around the metal of the barrel. Then it flies up to a branch above me, snatching at an insect. A long deep rumble comes from across the ranges. It shakes through my bones. It’ll be an hour at most before the storm reaches me. I start up the track quickly, my eyes searching through the trees. The roos will be seeking shelter. It’s been six days since I’ve eaten meat. The icebox is bare and the cupboard has two cans of baked beans left. For a long time, Dad relied on me to feed us. The electricity shut down soon after the virus arrived. The fortyfour gallon kerosene drum echoes as it empties. My eyes are becoming accustomed to the shadows in the house. The fireplace is my saviour.

I walk gingerly along the track through the hardwood forest, silent with snow. I take a young roo, once a month. Only lately they haven’t been as visible. The winter has set in solid and the animals don’t want to wander too far. They’re probably bunkered down under an overhang somewhere below me, looking out at the bare shoots sticking through the snow. We’re all going to starve if it doesn’t ease up soon. I hear a crack behind me and turn quickly, face to face with a wombat lumbering down the track. He stops when he gets a whiff of me. He doesn’t leave the track. He just stands there, waiting for me to move. I don’t fancy him coming much closer. He’s built like a tank and I’m sure I can hear him growling, threatening me. I reach down slowly and pick up a rock, just in case. To scare him away without hurting him. He senses something and takes a few steps forward, snuffling under his breath. A crack of thunder roars overhead. STE V E N HER R I CK 185

The wombat waddles off the track down to the creek, stopping near a boulder. I’m not sure whether to go on or turn back now the wombat’s given me right of way. If I’m carrying a roo on my shoulder I don’t want to meet him again on the path. He won’t move a second time. It’s a pity you can’t eat wombat. But there’s no way I could lift that fat bastard. I tramp deeper into the forest. When I reach the top of the Crag, I stop and look down the valley. Far below I can see a herd of roos, dots still against the white. I raise the scope to get a better view. It’s a family, with three young joeys out of the pouch. They keep close to the trees while Mum and Dad graze on what’s left of the shoots. Damn it! They’re well out of range and it would take me two hours to get down there, shoot one and then carry it back home. I sit on a rock and think of what to do. Baked beans tonight. Kangaroo tomorrow.

In the valley below, the roos hop back into the trees and are gone. If it was summer, I could stay out for another couple of hours. I could kill a goanna. There’d be ducks flying overhead and I could try my luck. The scope would give me half a chance. I’ve never taken one on the wing before, but if they flew close enough? A branch snaps under the weight of snow behind me and falls with a thud to the ground. I look up, checking the branches near my head. I can’t stay here forever, but I’m not sure whether to walk further into the forest hoping a roo will stray into my path. Or to return along the track, defeated. The kookaburras start up again above my head. I’m tempted to let off one shot just to shut them up. To leave me in peace. The track towards home is lonely and still. As I return to the road, I picture what will happen tomorrow. I’ll wake at dawn and eat a can of beans. I’ll take the gun and make the same hike back this way. Only READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 186

I won’t stop this time. I’ll follow the winding track down into the valley and I’ll wait there for the roos to return. I’ll sit among the trees and rig up a branch to hold the rifle steady, to be sure of my shot. I’ll breathe shallow and calm, waiting. It won’t matter how long I have to wait. I know they’ll return to the clearing where the last of the winter feed grows. Even when my arms and legs ache with cold and lack of movement, I’ll sit still, ready. When the roos emerge I’ll watch the joeys frolic together. The strongest and biggest joey will stray furthest from its parents, testing its nerve. I won’t choose him. I’ll wait until the parents are on the other side of the clearing. The joeys will stay close to the trees where I hide. I’ll choose the smallest joey. Before I shoot, I’ll close my eyes and remember Dad’s last words. ‘Survive, Jacob,’ he whispered. Then I’ll fire one shot aimed between the head and the shoulderblades. The joey will crumple to the ground. The sound will shake the snow from the branches. I’ll look across at the parents, ready to take aim again if they hop near. I’m sure it’ll be dead before I get to it, so accurate was my aim. I’ll kneel beside the animal, take out my hunting knife and gut it there, feel its warm blood on my hands. I’ll reach in and pull out the insides and leave them on the snow for the crows. I’ll tie its legs with a rope I’ve brought in my backpack. I’ll plunge my bloodied hands into the snow to clean them, wiping them on my jeans before putting my gloves back on. I’ll stand above the carcass and cast my eyes around for the rest of the mob. They’ll be together at the edge of the clearing, waiting for the joey to return. The parents will be in front of their children, noses pointed towards me. The smell of death will reach them and they’ll be confused. The old buck will hop a few paces forward to see if I react. I’ll reach down for the gun because I’m scared. Neither of us will move for a while. The joey at my feet will still be warm when its parents turn and hop into the forest. They will stay among the trees where I can’t see them. They’ll keep STE V E N HER R I CK 187

watching me. I’ll lift their child, their brother, onto my back and walk from the clearing. Then they’ll return to where the crows are gathering. They’ll hop around in aimless circles while the crows flutter black over the entrails. The old buck will hop close and sniff the ground. After lumbering up the hill for hours, I’ll look back down into the valley and see the roos still there. The late afternoon will be closing in. Even from this distance, the red stain on the snow will be visible. By the time I get the joey up to Barnes Creek Road, I will not be able to smell him anymore. His smell will be my smell. Together, we’ll return home and I’ll hang the joey by his legs from the lowest branch of the gum tree behind the house. I’ll sharpen the knife on the stone and put on Dad’s chainmail gloves. I’ll cut the skin from the hindquarters and make a long incision down the middle, careful not to damage the meat. I’ll slowly pull the skin away, using the knife the way Dad taught me. The tearing sound of unwilling flesh. I’ll start cutting pieces from the animal. I’ll pack it in sealed containers in the icebox. It’ll last a month. Thirty days before I have to do it all again.

The snow starts falling when I reach the road. I look back at Rook’s Crag but see only a leaden wall of dark clouds. It’s going to dump for hours. When I reach the front gate, I can’t be bothered untying the wire, so I place the gun on the snow and jump over. I look up to the house in darkness, a wisp of smoke coming from the chimney. Before I go inside, I cut enough wood to last the night. Then I carry it in and load the fireplace. It’ll be dark in half an hour. I toss the kindling into the wood stove and get it blazing. I remember how Rastus would whine from his kennel, how he’d jump up and lick my hand, eager to come inside and sit by the fire. Like an old man. I buried him out back near his kennel. The ground was so hard it took me all morning to dig it deep enough, even though Rastus was only skin and bones at the end. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 188

I walk to the window and look out at the gathering gloom. My footprints on the driveway are already covered in fresh snow. The road is a white ribbon through the forest. The snow falls heavy and suffocates the land.

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Nicholas Jose is best known for his fiction and cultural essays. His first short story collection, The Possession of Amber, was published by UQP in 1980. He has since written two further collections of short fiction, seven novels, including Paper Nautilus (Penguin, 1987), The Red Thread (Hardie Grant, 2000) and Original Face (Giramondo, 2005), and his acclaimed memoir Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (Allen & Unwin, 2002). He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009) and has written widely on contemporary Australian and Asian art and literature. He currently works as a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Beetroot Audrey’s grandfather had been a ship’s captain, with the sea in his blood. When his son Oliver, Audrey’s father, started thinking about retirement, he too found his way back to the sea. He remembered a remote place on the coast and bought a block of land there, where he was the first to build a house with a long verandah across the front just for watching the horizon and large windows that brought the sea inside, as if you were on a ship. Daphne, Audrey’s mother, decorated the holiday house on a nautical theme, in white calico and aquamarine satin, with garlands of shells hanging from the bracket lights. Oliver looked after his wife as if she were a wayward child and Daphne kept him entertained. At sunset he would rock by the window with his whisky, reading a crime novel, while she, in a frilly apron over a sleek black dress, crumbed fish for dinner and made salad: lettuce, cucumber, tomato and beetroot. Oliver always liked beetroot, approving of the cannery that opened for business after the war. That was industry. That was progress. In the school holidays Audrey and her husband, Chris, and their three children came to the house, overlapping with Oliver and Daphne, though never for more than a few nights. Oliver grew irritable when his routine was disrupted and Daphne got flustered. Audrey treasured those times, especially the empty afternoons when her mother was asleep on the bed and she could sit with her father gazing together NI CHOLA S JOSE 191

at the line where sea disappeared into sky. Her father gave Audrey the support she needed in her life, a sense of being held by light and rippling air and being granted understanding. Her arrival had not been easy for Daphne. It was to protect them all that there had only been the one child, making their family a trio, or triangle, of two fine women – one dark, one fair – and a man who liked to manage things. And now he was gone. The rocker sat with its back to the sea with no-one to sit in it. Oliver had worked to the end, putting off his final retirement, until he collapsed in the street with a heart attack. His sudden, unthinkable absence filled everything.

Mother and daughter drove down to the house and planted his ashes under the vine out the back. That grape would outlive them all, they said, even if the birds got all the ripe fruit. The autumn air was thin and pale and the sea moved sullenly, lapping the shore, shush as the tide turned. Daphne was confused more than anything. She would have to find a new role for herself and couldn’t see what that would be. At seventy she might live for another twenty years. Widow’s weeds? Not for her. It was too sad that way. Audrey cried over the loss of her father until she made herself ill. She felt no conviction that she would be able to go on. For her this was the harrowing of grief. They removed Oliver’s gear from the bathroom and bundled his old clothes into a bag for charity. They put away his ashtrays. His photo, under glass on the dresser, seemed to inquire from afar how things were. They didn’t know what to do with themselves and stayed only one night. Daphne vowed she would never come to the house again by herself. She could only be there if Audrey brought her, which added to her daughter’s pain. Audrey wanted to be at the place on her own, to commune with her beloved father, her counsel and guide.

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When the school holidays came, they drove down in two cars, except for Kate, Audrey’s eldest girl, who was invited away by friends. Chris settled the family in for the Saturday night then took his car back to town the next day, leaving the others by themselves in the house – Audrey, her lanky fourteen-year-old son, Robbie, her younger daughter, Alison, who was seven, and Daphne. The only other light along the coast that Sunday evening was the bright fluoro to the east where the council lit the public steps to the beach. The other shacks were dark. The tea-tree along the road moved in the breeze and the fields of stubble rising in the distance behind the house were dark and silent. The sea stirred as if in response to a deep call. They were each in bed with the lights out early, with their thoughts or their dreams in the darkness.

When Audrey got up in the morning to put the kettle on for her cup of tea, the ocean had become grey and disturbed. The verandah door slammed behind her in the wind. A cloud bank was moving in bearing rain. She brushed the hair and the sleep from her watery eyes and battled her way back inside. But by midday shafts of sunlight were thrusting through the clouds making silver circles on the unsettled sea. After spending the morning behind her closed bedroom door, propped on pillows with the radio humming, Daphne emerged in a lilac dress that matched her cardigan and fluffy slippers; her make-up was on and her tinted hair teased out, ready to face the day. ‘We’ve been on the beach,’ said Audrey, coming in from outside in a woolly teal-blue jumper and thick pants. ‘It’s blowy out there!’ Alison was in tow, rugged up in a duffel coat and beanie. ‘We found a sea egg,’ said the girl, holding up the olive-green carapace to her grandmother. ‘I’m making a necklace.’ ‘Did you sleep all right, Mum?’ ‘Like a baby,’ Daphne replied. ‘I took a pill.’ NI CHOLA S JOSE 193

Audrey hadn’t slept at all. Or so it seemed. She heard the sea all night. ‘I’m going riding after lunch,’ said Alison. ‘There’s a pony down the road,’ Audrey explained, ‘a grey Shetland. The woman said Ali could have a ride.’ ‘How exciting!’ hooted Daphne, who was putting cold meat and salad on the table for lunch. As soon as Robbie came in, wind-swept and wild-eyed, they sat down to eat. When she looked out the window at the sea, Daphne became disoriented. Was the ship moving? The blue-green membrane was like a curtain across the world to her, whereas Audrey could see through that veil to the other side, to a source of light in another world. ‘Did you forget the beetroot, Gran?’ asked Robbie. ‘There’s a jumbo-size tin in the cupboard,’ said Audrey. ‘I know that, dear, but I couldn’t find the opener,’ Daphne replied. ‘We’ll have it tomorrow.’ After Audrey and Alison went off for the pony ride, Daphne returned to her bedroom and the radio for company and Robbie went down to the beach where he made ripple footprints in the sand with his rubber soles. He felt camouflaged in his sandy jumper and blue jeans that matched the swelling sea. His hair whipped about like the black feathers of a shag as he walked to the headland and scrambled over to the next small cove where he was out of sight. There was a formation of smooth pink stone there that resembled a maze. When he was a child it was higher than his head and he could hide himself in its walls. Now it was a puzzle of passages through which he moved, his hands stroking its mottled sides. At the centre was a podium where he could stand and declaim. They were studying Macbeth at school and he needed to learn the key speeches off by heart. In his unreliable breaking voice he unleashed deep roars and high fractured shrieks as he recited the lines. ‘Out damned spot!’ he shouted to the elements with a thrill of guilt. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 194

‘What have you been doing?’ his mother asked when he came in. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Walking.’ ‘The pony kept trying to throw me off!’ Alison told her brother in outrage. ‘You should have seen Ali,’ Audrey laughed. ‘All kitted out with hat and crop. She was more than a match for that brute of a thing. They flew down the road and pulled up to a nice halt. It was like something out of St Trinian’s!’ The dry kindling had been used up and the fire smoked with the green twigs that Robbie brought in. He threw on balls of newspaper and fanned the little flames till they caught. Daphne floated about complaining, in a muu-muu with purple hibiscus on it as if she were in Bali. After dinner they cleared the table for a game of cards. Daphne had a new pack and as she unwrapped it and sorted the deck her fingernails made a scratching sound. The game was Five Hundred, with Robbie and Alison teaming up against their mother and grandmother. Daphne gave each player a pile of plastic chips. She was a gambler. She liked that edge. Audrey looked at Alison’s hand to help her call. The girl was too young to play properly. Daphne had good cards, as always, and told her daughter to concentrate. She took trick after trick. Even with Audrey helping the opposition, or perhaps because of it, Daphne won the game for her team. She enjoyed the clatter of the chips as she distributed the winnings. Alison was peering at the old woman’s skin, crepey and white. ‘Can I touch your face, Gran?’ she asked, laying her fingers gently on her grandmother’s cheek. ‘It’s soft. Like a silkworm.’ She was breeding them in a box with mulberry leaves at school. ‘Did you ever hear anything like it,’ chortled Daphne. ‘Like a silkworm! That’s my powder, dear.’ Daphne wanted another game since the cards were falling her NI CHOLA S JOSE 195

way, but Alison laid her head on the table and Audrey said it was time for bed. Lucky in cards, thought Audrey of her mother, a widow now. Was Daphne unlucky in love? Did her mother even know what love was? Expectation, duty, compliance, a certain remote adoration … but love that wrung the heart with grief? The ecstasy of light, the rapture in the dark? Her son was fiddling with the fire. ‘Better let it go out,’ she told him. ‘Do you know that saying, Robbie? Lucky in cards, unlucky in love.’ She would open the doors and windows in the morning to blow the smoky air away. Audrey was disgruntled, and so was Daphne, as they went to their rooms to sleep that second night.

There was a man on the beach in the morning. He was tousle-haired Darren Hahn, the abalone diver from the shack along the clifftop, striding out to show himself. Alison was there, too, looking for sea eggs for her necklace, the sea choppy under a blue sky. ‘Is your mum down?’ Darren called out and Audrey heard his voice from the house. A little later she came down the steps to the beach herself and walked along the weed-strewn sand to a point where she could see that the curtains were open in the Hahn shack but the car was gone. Darren had his business and his family in the nearby town. It would be good to catch up with him for the local news. Audrey’s father had always liked Darren. He had charm with his mop of fair curls. On still days he used to take Oliver out in the boat and show him the secret spots for abalone, the big ones that got unbelievable prices when they were flown north to Asia. Coming in over the reef the whitecaps turned messier as the day wore on. Robbie strode out into the wind with his scarf around his READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 196

neck. When he got to the stone maze the foamy tide was flowing in and out of the pink granite walls and his boots sank in wet sand. ‘This is a sorry sight,’ he repeated aloud, thinking how nerves got to Macbeth and his wife when the bloody deed was done. A clutch of wood pigeons broke from their nesting place in the side of the cliff. Then rain came in a gust and the birds circled back under cover of the overhang. Robbie’s whole body was pulsating with the words. Consider it not so deeply … It will make us mad. When he came in, his mother made him dry himself off with a towel. Alison was watching cartoons on television. Daphne was tackling another salad and this time the jumbo tin of beetroot was beside her on the chopping board. They were interrupted by a knocking at the door that might have been rattling in the wind. A man’s voice could be heard, shouting above it. Audrey turned. ‘Who’s that?’ Robbie went to investigate. He turned on the outside light and opened the door, and there was Darren Hahn. ‘G’day mate. Is your mum at home?’ he grinned. ‘Darren, hello,’ called Audrey over Robbie’s head. ‘Come in.’ ‘I brought you an abalone,’ Darren said, holding a parcel wrapped in newspaper in his two hands. ‘Thought you might like to try.’ His face was ruddy and lined. He was five or six years younger than Audrey. He wore a mustard sweater and had brushed his hair. Alison came over from the television. ‘Can I see?’ Darren put the parcel in the kitchen sink and opened it to reveal a large knobbly shell. Proudly he flipped it over to show Audrey the thick muscle, green against the mother-of-pearl inside. ‘I could fix it up for you if you like.’ She stared at him not knowing what that would mean. Her right hip protruded and she hugged her breasts under her wool top. ‘Outside I mean,’ he said quickly, ‘under the tap.’ He had a knife in his pocket. ‘If you’ve got a hammer.’ NI CHOLA S JOSE 197

Robbie and Alison watched the man in the circle of light as he sheared the flesh from the shell and cut the edible meat from the rubbish. ‘Can I have it?’ The girl wanted the pearly shell. ‘You need to leave it soak for a while,’ Darren said, rinsing it under the running water. ‘Then you can rub off all that stuff and it will turn silver.’ With a hammer through a wad of newspaper he pounded the flesh against the concrete step to tenderise it. Then he cut it into thin strips the size of matchsticks and piled them neatly on a plate. ‘You can take that in to your mum, mate,’ he said to Robbie as he washed his hands. Inside the house Daphne had replaced the television noise with her tape of Frank Sinatra and put out some snacks. She pirouetted, her purple hibiscus flaring. ‘What are you drinking?’ she asked when Darren came in. Audrey had suspended the dinner preparation. The table was set for four; she hadn’t added a fifth place. ‘Season it a little,’ said Darren, coming close as Audrey looked at the plateful of abalone. ‘Pepper and salt, a light dusting of flour, and fry it in hot oil for thirty seconds. It will be a bit chewy, but she’s as fresh as it gets.’ ‘It’s very kind of you, Darren,’ Audrey said, moving into the front room with the man following. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he replied. ‘How’s Chris?’ ‘He’s up in town for work. He was here on the weekend.’ She did not say that her husband was interstate on business. Not easily reachable. ‘Here’s luck,’ said Daphne bringing drinks on a tray, beer for Darren, a gin for Audrey and brandy and dry for herself. ‘It won’t be the same without Oliver,’ said Darren. ‘He’ll be sadly missed. It was a real shock to everyone down here. Must be hard for you two ladies.’ READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 198

Audrey tinkled the ice in her glass, feeling her tears well up. Daphne’s eyes were glinting. ‘The kids will miss their grandfather,’ Audrey said, acknowledging Darren’s condolences but not wanting to discuss it further. ‘It’s nice to have a bit of a party,’ said Daphne. ‘We need cheering up.’ ‘I know you like a party,’ Darren smirked. He had seen the old woman dance on a tabletop in the pub one Saturday night. He sat himself down in Oliver’s rocking chair with a comfortable sigh and looked at Audrey, who was like a dream for him with her fine looks, her wavy blonde hair. He couldn’t help puffing himself up. ‘I’m working seven days a week,’ he told her. ‘There’s a fortune in abalone. I might make my million yet.’ ‘That’s fantastic.’ She stared at him in her father’s chair. ‘Yeah.’ Then Daphne came, glass in hand, sashaying to ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’. They were on their second round of drinks. ‘Don’t you love it?’ she cried, pulling Darren to his feet. Robbie watched from the couch as the man disentangled himself and took up a position near the fire. ‘Mum, can we cook the abalone now?’ Alison called out. ‘I’m starving.’ ‘Goes well with a beer,’ Darren responded. ‘They pay an arm and a leg for it in Japan.’ ‘Will you stay for tea, Darren?’ Daphne asked, fox-trotting in front of him. ‘We’ve got plenty, haven’t we, dear?’ But when Darren looked at Audrey he got nothing. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Thanks, anyway. I better keep moving. Next time the party’s at my place.’ ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ chuckled Daphne. Darren’s legs were planted squarely in the middle of the room. He was a man with ideas, and a strength and life of his own. He could have stayed and played around a bit more. But Audrey was seeing NI CHOLA S JOSE 199

him to the door with her lovely nervous smile, so he said goodbye with a wink. After he was gone Audrey turned out the back light and locked up. She fried the fish and made the pan hotter for the strips of abalone, frying them as Darren had said. The kitchen filled with smoke that smelled pungently of the sea. Daphne poured herself another good brandy and turned to Robbie for a dancing partner. The boy sat stubbornly resistant on the couch. Alison turned the television back on, drowning out the soppy music with the squawks and canned laughter of her sitcom. ‘Grub’s up,’ announced Audrey. Daphne’s salad had been interrupted again. This time there was cucumber, tomato and lettuce with mayonnaise to go with it, but after struggling unsuccessfully with the tin opener, she gave up on the beetroot. The air in the room was smoky, fishy, boozy, damp, thought Audrey, smelling the warmth of their bodies. From outside came the whistle of the wind and the muffled churning of the sea. She reflected on her neighbour, coming in and flying out again like that. It was not the time to let the outside in. When they finished eating Audrey washed up and told her son to dry the dishes and put things away. Her mother was no use. Daphne wanted to play cards again with her slippery new deck, but had no takers. ‘What a pity Darren didn’t stay!’ Daphne said. ‘If only Oliver was here.’ She took a long slug of brandy, prepared to drown her sorrows. ‘Come on,’ she challenged her daughter. ‘You can drink to that. You’ve got a husband still. Think about me.’ Audrey would not be drawn. ‘Time for bed, Ali. You need an early night. Robbie, thanks for tidying up. Time for us all to settle for the night.’ Daphne was waltzing in the middle of the room, closing her eyes and shifting her weight from side to side. Robbie spread the remains READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 200

of the fire with the poker and put the screen in place in case his grandmother fell in that direction. ‘Oliver loved me for my dancing,’ Daphne boasted, her eyes wide as if she were on a stage. ‘It’s a pity you never danced, Audrey. You’ve always been so beautiful. Darren thinks you’re beautiful. I can see that.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ said Audrey. She had put up with her mother’s nonsense all her life. If her father were alive this would not be happening. But he was gone and she was stuck with it. ‘Goodnight, Robbie,’ she said as the boy took himself off. ‘Come on, Mum, your bedtime too. The party’s over.’ The wind outside blew louder than ever. She took her mother by the arm and led her to her room, turning the lights out behind them. In the darkness the embers glowed. Daphne felt light and soft. She floated, like something empty. ‘Nah-night, dear,’ Daphne said, slurring the words. ‘Nah-night.’

Daphne managed to change into her nightie and put on her robe. She stumbled to the bathroom to clean her face. Audrey could hear the sound of doors opening and closing as her mother bumped around. Some of the noise seemed to be outside as the wind buffeted the house and the sea surged. A strange glow came through the curtains into the dark bedroom, in a false dawn as the moon cast light from above the clouds onto the frothing water. Audrey let the tumult of her thoughts run … She was responsible for all of them and she was adrift. The burden was an anchor that could drown her, all the way down. A vision of the sea and the sea captain seized her in a convulsive sob, a ship looming out of the darkness of the storm and the voice of her father calling like the voice of God … It was Alison who heard Daphne when she got up for the bathroom. She was scared and held back, watching from the doorway. Down the NI CHOLA S JOSE 201

hall she could see her grandmother in a shiny quilted robe sliding against the wall with something in her hands. Light from the kitchen made angled shadows and there was a trail that looked like blood. The girl heard the storm burst in then the door slam shut. She ran into her mother’s room and tugged at the warm sleeping body. ‘What is it, darling?’ Audrey stirred, capping the girl’s soft head. ‘Gran’s gone out. She’s doing something.’ ‘Maybe the chairs have blown away,’ sighed Audrey. She was used to getting up in the night in a storm to bring the chairs inside. ‘Let’s go and see.’ Below the cliff on the beach the white breakers had withdrawn over the sand leaving a black line. A figure was visible, white and black, her robe blown around her, her head bare, her arms wide as she stepped from side to side in a dance. ‘Mum!’ yelled Audrey. ‘Mum!’ Her cries got higher and more urgent as, clinging to the rail, she and Alison felt their way down the steps in the dark. Inside the house Robbie woke to hear his mother’s frantic shouting and came groggily out in his pyjamas. There was something sticky in the hall under his feet. He saw the smear over the wall and the dark liquid on the floor. In the living room it dribbled across the rug and out the front door. He was treading in it. It was not quite blood. Cold. Beetroot. Possessed by her sense of an occasion in which she must play her role, Daphne had returned to the task. The giant beetroot tin and the clumsy opener were on the bench where she’d left them. With her painful claws of hands she carried out the action she had performed so often in the past, hooking the cutting edge of the opener on the rim of the tin and turning, as bite by jagged bite the lid lifted and deep red liquid oozed out. And when she couldn’t force it any further she stabbed at the tin in frustration. She scratched herself, she cut herself, she persisted. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 202

‘It will be gorgeous,’ she said, picturing the beetroot slices arranged neatly on a plate. ‘Where is everyone?’ Lifting the heavy can with two hands, she proceeded angrily into the hall and hit herself against the wall. The juice poured down her robe onto the floor, going everywhere. She had to get off this sinking ship. ‘Help!’ Daphne called, heading for the door. ‘Audrey! Darling!’ She was outside now, fluttering in the dark on her adventure. She moved to the top of the cliff as if stepping into the footlights and heaved the tin away from her, brushing her hands together, rid of it. Her fingers were sticky from the salt-sweet liquid. ‘What fun!’ she told herself as she clutched the rail on her way down to rinse her hands in the sea. On the beach her body was flung and shaken like a doll roughly handled. She stood on the sand on the edge of the foam and kicked out one leg then the other. She wouldn’t topple. Waving her arms above her head, she kept her balance. Then Audrey’s hands came around her gently, firm in their grip, and she grasped her daughter for support. The boy was on the other side of his grandmother to steady her and she yielded to him in the same way. And Alison was holding her mother’s free hand tight as they fronted the sea in a chorus line of four. With Audrey supporting her mother’s weight, Alison in front and Robbie behind, the foursome managed their way up the steps without causing a fall. When they reached the verandah at last, Audrey became stern and scolded. ‘What on earth were you doing, Mum?’ ‘There’s beetroot juice everywhere,’ Robbie said. He could see the tin at the edge of the water, rolling back and forth, as if it had bounded from where he last saw it on the kitchen bench, out of the house, over the cliff and onto the beach, tossed by a devil of the night. Inside, Audrey washed and dressed her mother’s cuts and abrasions, changed her nightie and tucked her into bed. Daphne could be meek now. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said. NI CHOLA S JOSE 203

But Audrey was exasperated. ‘What would Oliver think if he could see us?’ ‘He can see us. He’s just out there.’ Alison was upset and Audrey had to settle her to sleep. Then she had the job of cleaning up the beetroot with a mop and bucket. The crimson trailed from the kitchen to the hall and through the front room to the verandah. It was chilly work and she was weary. Robbie dabbed at the rug to try and get the stains out but it was useless. He hated beetroot, he decided. When she finished cleaning up the mess, Audrey started packing. She didn’t know how she could ever come back to this house, even if it was part of her. Hers. Her father’s gift. Up against the sea. They would leave at first light.

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Peter Skrzynecki was born in 1945 in Germany and came to Australia in 1949. He has published twenty-two books of poetry and prose and won several awards including the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the Henry Lawson Short Story Award. His books of poetry with UQP include Immigrant Chronicle (1975) and Old/New World: New and Selected Poems (2007). He has also published two collections of short stories and three novels. In 2005 his collection of short stories, The Wild Dogs (UQP, 1987), was published in Poland to enthusiastic reviews, and his memoir, The Sparrow Garden (UQP, 2004), was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Polish government. In 2002 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to multicultural literature. He is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.

Red Cabbages I don’t know why they were called ‘red’ cabbages because they looked more purple than red – growing alongside other varieties in our backyard garden at 10 Mary Street, Regents Park. My mother had been a servant in a German household during World War II – she’d learnt how to cook them and always said how good they were for our health. Cut down the middle the two halves resembled a Rorschach ink-blot test whose meaning I tried hard to interpret; but my mother didn’t have time to waste on pictures. The cabbages had been grown to feed us and she chopped them into small pieces. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 206

Water was added to a cooking pot and in they went. What was it about those red cabbages that kept drawing me back? I’d sit in the garden and talk to them when I was growing up as if I needed their company or they needed mine. Was it something to do with Europe and the wartime years spent afterwards in Germany in a DP camp? No-one else heard our conversations but that didn’t matter. They tasted of the earth – smelled of rain no matter how much or little had fallen and stood out from the common green variety and the crinkly-leaved Savoys. Decades later I searched suburban delicatessens for brand names that suited my taste – not too vinegary, not too sweet – until I found Kühne: Rotkohl that claimed to be ‘Nr 1 in Deutschland’. Now when I eat them I savour every mouthful P E TER SK R ZY NE CK I 207

as if my life depended on it – remembering those conversations we had among rows of earth and how they were never finished.

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James Moloney has written more than fifty books for children and young adults. He started his publishing journey with UQP in 1992 with Crossfire, and went on to win Honour Book Citations from the CBCA for his Dougy trilogy, with the third title, Angela, gaining an Honourable Mention in the UNESCO Prize for Children’s Literature in the Service of Tolerance and Peace. One of his most popular and enduring novels, A Bridge to Wiseman’s Cove (UQP, 1996), won the CBCA Book of the Year Award in 1997. It is the story of a lonely teenager, Carl, who is sent to live with an uncaring aunt on the Queensland Coast. Visitors to Rainbow Beach and Fraser Island would recognise the backdrop, especially the famous barges on which Carl finds work. This best-selling book struck a chord with its adolescent audience and over the ensuing years, whenever Moloney was invited to speak to students, the question inevitably arose: ‘What happened to Carl after the story’s end?’ The following is his response. It occurs ten years after the novel’s end.

What Ever Happened to Carl from Wiseman’s Cove? Carl heard the phone as he stepped out of the shower. It will be for Fiona, he decided, and continued to dry himself, only to find her waiting for him in the hall with the cordless extended towards him. ‘It’s Skip Duncan.’ Fiona knew the odd architecture of his family well enough to have tightened the muscles around her mouth. He took the phone in his thick-fingered hand. It will be about Harley, he told himself. The little shit has done something they can’t get him out of. He closed his eyes, the way a child hides from monsters, and put the phone to his ear. ‘Is that you, Carl?’ came Skip’s voice. In all the years since Carl had left Wiseman’s Cove, he had never heard the man’s words crammed into wires and delivered so intimately into his ear. It was always Joy who called. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good news,’ said Skip. He sounded lost, unsure of himself. On the barge, with Carl as his deckhand, he’d given commands as much as he’d ever spoken to the boy. Later, after the barge had been sold, Carl helped him scour the hulls of fishing boats and fix their motors, but the air of authority had never quite left his voice. Over the years Carl had learnt to navigate the man’s tone to find the fatherly affection. Words simply weren’t his medium, but on this morning, at least, he had no other option. ‘She had a stroke, Carl. Early this morning. Doctor says it was the heart flutters she’s been having. More dangerous than she let on.’ READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 210

She? thought Carl. Not Harley then. This call was about Joy. ‘We got her into the tinny and across to Wattle Beach. Ambulance was waiting, but she was gone by the time we reached the hospital.’ ‘Gone?’ Carl repeated in confusion. Gone where? After the meaning hit home, when the first pumps of blood threatened to crush him from the inside, he did what he’d learnt to do as a child – he forced out all emotion until he stood like an engine stripped of its parts.

Within the hour he was driving north, Fiona in the passenger seat beside him. Carl didn’t just occupy the driver’s seat of their Corolla, he filled all the space and more. Even when he’d worked from dawn till dusk aboard Skip’s barge, washing the salt and sand from 4WDs, he’d been the same, the physical work not enough to shed the extra weight. These days he sat with a mouse cupped in his hand making the cursor move as energetically as he’d once scurried on deck, resigned to the collateral damage to his waistline. He still kept his hair short, but on his chin he sported a goatee to please Fiona. It helped him stand out, she said, and Fiona wasn’t about to let her man ghost through life unseen, as she suspected he’d prefer. Near Eumundi, he permitted a hand on his thigh and sensed tears in his partner’s eyes, as though they’d crossed from his dammed-up body and up her arm to rain down her cheeks instead of his. After the turn-off, they hurried through man-planted forests of pine before descending to the sandy scrub country and their first glimpse of Wattle Beach. He couldn’t help thinking back to the day they’d first travelled this road on a sweaty, swaying bus. ‘I can see the sea. I saw it first,’ his brother, Harley, had cried in triumph. Little kids like to win. Older by five years, Carl had spotted the flash of blue half a minute earlier, but said nothing. Carl guided the Corolla past the café where he’d first noticed Maddie. Ten years earlier she’d been the focus of his teenage longing JA M E S M OLONE Y 211

and since he hadn’t dared go near her circle of friends, she had also been a symbol of his exclusion. How those first painful months in Wattle Beach had changed them both – today it was as though he and Maddie had been born brother and sister. One block on and across the street they passed the store where he’d collided with Maddie’s mother and learnt that her name was Joy. He could still see the broken bag of vegetables on the pavement, still hear his muttered apology and, if he let himself, still cringe at how awkward he’d felt. A left turn took them by the vacant lot where he’d kissed Justine for the first time, after they’d slipped away from a party. But by then the town’s rejection of him was receding, in tandem with the loathing he no longer experienced in front of a mirror.

Maddie was waiting for them at the marina. ‘What are we going to do, Carl? I keep hoping this day will start over again and she’ll be there like every other day.’ ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ he said opening his arms to her. ‘She was your mum a long time before she was mine. It must hurt so much.’ She wept into Carl’s chest while Fiona folded her arms over them both like a priest anointing a marriage of tears. Maddie didn’t notice that he remained dry-eyed, but Fiona did, and frowned. ‘How’s Harley taking it?’ Carl asked, when Maddie stood back from him at last. She busied herself with their bags and wouldn’t look at him. ‘Why didn’t Harley come to get us like he always does,’ he asked more forcefully. ‘He’s taken off into the bush,’ Maddie admitted finally. It was an answer to his first question as much as the second. Harley had always been the demonstrative one, much as he liked to style himself the hard man. It was such an extravagant gesture and typically problematic for the rest of them, but at least he’d shown the hurt. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 212

The outboard settled to a steady note, with Carl at the tiller while Fiona sat with her back to the bow, comforting Maddie. September blue bore down on them, doubled by its reflection off the water. He’d crossed this narrow strait more times than he could count when he was Skip’s deckhand, helping to ferry 4WDs to the island’s fishing spots. Now there was a bridge ten kilometres further north, rendering Skip’s barge redundant, but not before that rusty tub had carried Carl Matt to begin his new life with the Duncans in Wiseman’s Cove. The image of himself on board the barge that day brought tears and, spotting them, Fiona took his hand. ‘It’s good that you let it out, Carl,’ she whispered. But these tears weren’t for Joy Duncan; this was memory of an idyll he’d sentimentalised – THE HAPPIEST YEARS OF MY LIFE – forever capitalised. He’d stayed until he was twentyone and even then the leaving had been hard. Although he knew if he’d stayed any longer, he wouldn’t have met Fiona.

At the house, Skip sat in a leather armchair as lined and weathered as the man it enveloped. Head in his hands, he offered only the story he’d told on the phone, man-handling his grief with a repetition of facts. Carl knew that he’d felt its grip once before – the Duncans had lost a son named Graham in an accident that left Skip with one leg shorter than the other. ‘The grief crippled him more,’ Joy had once told Carl. ‘He was a lively man until then. A fun father.’ Perhaps he had been, but Carl still found it difficult to link the man he knew with the smiling face in photographs with the young Graham. A child waddled from the kitchen, chased moments later by a woman in a loose-fitting dress meant to hide her shape, rather than enhance it. Carl stood staring at Justine until she took her eyes from her son long enough to notice him. Then she came straight on without breaking stride to hold him close like a stuffed bear from her childhood. ‘Carl, I’m so sorry. I know Joy was a mother to you more than your real mum.’ JA M E S M OLONE Y 213

Justine cried openly, easily, as though Carl needed a proxy for his absent tears. ‘I spent so much time here when we were kids, she was like my mum, too,’ she told them. ‘And no-one helped more when this one happened,’ she added, nodding at the toddler. The little boy’s father had taken off soon after the birth, a story familiar to Carl since it mirrored his own. Justine was as big as ever, the untameable hair a ginger mess that wisped about her face. Her embrace was deeply comforting for Carl and when she was done with him she hugged Fiona, who knew well enough that Justine had been Carl’s sort-of girlfriend in high school. Justine controlled her tears. ‘You loved her, Carl … and she loved you. I saw it every time I came to visit.’ Carl closed his eyes and hoped she would stop. The words were meant as further comfort, he knew, but she was too close to the truth. He went searching for a knapsack and filled it with water bottles. ‘I’d better go after Harley.’ Skip followed him onto the porch. ‘You should know. He took the gun.’ Fiona lay a hand on Carl’s forearm. ‘Maybe you should let Harley have some space?’ she suggested. When he ignored her, she put the other hand to her belly in a way only he was meant to notice. ‘Let him come back in his own time. He’s just upset. We all are. How are you going to find him, anyway, with so much bush to hide in?’ ‘He’s not hiding.’ Carl knew where he’d be. The gun was the giveaway. His brother was sure to be at the ‘firing range’, a patch of bush Skip had once marked out for them to practise with the twenty-two.

He started out confidently, sure that he’d find his brother in no time. But it had been more years than he realised and the rainforest had reclaimed the tracks he remembered. An hour later he was lost and slapping at READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 214

sandflies. Above him the canopy glittered. Here, all life reached upward or died. The palms rose to three times his height before the first frond, but they were merely acolytes for the massive cedars. He stopped and listened for noises, hints of stealth. Was he being stalked? If Harley was out hunting to distract himself then Carl in his grubby grey shirt could be mistaken for a roo. ‘Harley!’ he called into the silence. There was no response but the extrasensory conviction that he was being watched made him call again. Still nothing. If it was Harley, he was playing a game and Carl had no patience for it. ‘Show yourself.’ ‘Go away, you great tub of lard.’ ‘I can’t. I’m lost.’ A figure appeared from behind one of the cedars. ‘Typical. Have you got any water?’ Harley Matt was twenty years old, but Carl’s strongest memories of him were at half that age, when he was the naughty little boy who went where he wasn’t supposed to go out of pure cussedness, who hurt those around him in ways he didn’t see, who simply didn’t care. There were moments when Carl had hated his brother for all the explaining and apologising he was forced to do in front of teachers and neighbours and grim-faced cops. With rifle in hand, Harley was as erect as Carl was stooped and, where he was hidden beneath flesh, Harley’s arms and legs were naked cords of muscle. He’d left school around the time Carl had enrolled at UQ. The timing wasn’t entirely coincidental for, with Carl gone, Skip needed a new offsider and Harley took to the work with a willingness he’d never shown towards school books. Harley had acquired a new tattoo on his forearm since his last visit, but Carl was too far away to make out the detail. ‘Skip’s worried about you. They know you took the gun.’ ‘To protect myself. There’s dingoes.’ They both knew dingoes were no danger to a grown man. ‘Hey, Carl,’ he said, drawing him into a JA M E S M OLONE Y 215

conspiracy by way of changing the subject. ‘I’ve found a den.’ Carl let himself be led through the rainforest, Harley exhorting him to be quiet and glaring at him when this proved impossible. Carl regretted his elephantine nature, but mostly because he wanted to play along for his brother’s sake, not like the shame he’d felt in the schoolyard. He laughed, challenging Harley to make more out of his failing, but instead Harley called him forward to show him a pair of pups pretending to fight. The mother appeared, sending them into the den, but stayed in the open herself to sniff the breeze. Harley took aim. ‘Is this what you came out here to do?’ asked Carl. ‘Shut up.’ The words were a mere breath. ‘Why kill it?’ ‘They’re a menace. Harass tourists in the national park.’ His finger closed round the trigger. ‘She’s a mother, Harley. You saw those pups.’ Harley slumped against the tree he’d been using to steady his aim. ‘Fuck you, Carl. What did you have to say that for?’ he said loud enough to send the dingo into her den. His breathing had become heavy, an attempt to ward off what he knew was close. It wasn’t enough. He raised the gun and fired into the treetops before charging into the waist-high ferns. Carl followed but quickly fell behind. ‘Harley, wait!’ Harley turned and raised the rifle again. For a moment he aimed at Carl, but there was no bullet in the chamber. ‘Go home.’ ‘Come back with me, Harley.’ ‘Why? So we can all cry together around the coffee table?’ He worked the bolt so now there was a bullet at the trigger’s beck and call. He aimed well above Carl’s head, but the roar from the muzzle was still a shock. ‘Don’t come looking for me. I’m staying out here until after the funeral,’ and moments later he’d vanished. ‘Being out here won’t let you escape,’ Carl shouted at the READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 216

undergrowth. ‘It’ll still be there when you go home.’ When this didn’t bring his brother back he fired off a bullet of his own. ‘Joy is dead!’ The rainforest fell into shocked silence, leaving Carl to remember he was lost. He was still weighing up which way to go when Harley emerged into the open as quickly as he’d disappeared. ‘This way,’ he said, leading Carl to the clearing they’d used as a base for the firing range. Here the brothers slumped, separate still in their misery, at opposite ends of a fallen log. ‘I can’t be there for the funeral,’ Harley said, defiantly. ‘What, you’re not going to be there for Joy? You can’t do that much for her?’ Carl snapped at his brother and instantly regretted the words for their clichéd emptiness and worse, for their naked blackmail. Harley saw through it easily. ‘Don’t you dare dump that on me! I’ve spent my life trying to do what Joy wanted.’ But as a defence, indignation had its limits. ‘And I never could,’ he whimpered, beginning to crumble. ‘I always let her down. I tried so hard, Carl.’ Carl felt for his brother then. He had watched him every day and knew he had tried, and mostly Harley had succeeded. Even on the days when he messed up, Joy hadn’t loved Harley any less. Carl was older, had feelers in the air. He’d watched in awe the way Joy handled his brother, punching through his gruff pretences to coax out the damaged little boy who hadn’t known how to be cared for. She dealt with Carl a different way because his need for affection lay on the surface, easily nourished with a word, a look, a touch. Joy’s face from those longago days could still conjure itself before his unwilling eyes. It came on him now, without warning, and he gasped at how much lay behind the image – but he wasn’t ready and he forced the moment to pass. Harley had composed himself, too. Carl shuffled along the log until he was close enough to give his brother one of the water bottles from the pack that now sat between them. The rainforest watched warily, knowing better than the brothers that more was to come. ‘Why does God hate us?’ Harley finally asked. JA M E S M OLONE Y 217

‘Since when do you believe in God?’ Carl challenged him, but he knew where this was going. ‘I don’t,’ Harley conceded with a shrug, ‘but it’s pretty unlucky to lose two mothers.’ Carl almost laughed. Unlucky seemed an entirely inadequate word. ‘What do you remember about our real mum?’ ‘Not much,’ Harley snorted dismissively. ‘Mostly I remember her screaming at me.’ When Kerry Matt was at her lowest, she didn’t say anything to Carl, leaving him to imagine what was in her head. That was worse than being screamed at. ‘She had her good days,’ he said, feeling he should defend her. ‘Do you remember the veggie patch?’ Harley responded with a blank stare. ‘It was at our last place in Brisbane. Had a bit of backyard. Don’t you remember how excited she got?’ But Harley shook his head. They’d worked all day, stripping away grass and loosening the soil. It was just Carl and Kerry, he recalled now. She’d spoken to him so freely that day, about how good it was going to be. She’d taken him to the nursery to pick the plants and seeds – just the two of them – and that was what meant the most. He had been happy with Kerry, even if only in the briefest windows. By the end of the week he hadn’t been able to get his mother out of bed, let alone down to the veggie patch and it was no fun doing it on his own. The memory sent a wall of emotion towards him like a curling breaker, just as the image of Joy had done. Harley was looking at him, both of them uneasy. How long could they avoid the weight of this day? ‘Do you remember coming here when Skip taught us how to shoot?’ Harley asked. ‘You were better than me, right from the beginning.’ ‘Bloody right. Ten years old and I hit the bullseye way more than you.’ READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 218

‘You were always better than me, Harley. Not just the gun. You handled the tinny better than me. You were better at being loved than me, too.’ He hadn’t meant for those last words to slip out. It was a sign of how close to the surface the currents of this day had begun to surge. The proud smile faded quickly from Harley’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’ Carl knew he should stop now. ‘You and Joy,’ he said anyway, and when he heard no bitterness in his voice, he kept going. ‘You were the one, Harley. She might have told you off all those times, but she didn’t have to try with you. That look was always on her face. She loved you like she’d given birth to you herself.’ ‘Oh, fuck,’ Harley moaned meekly, his head down. He fought what was coming with more deep breaths and failed. ‘I was going to move out,’ he said to the ground. ‘I told her about it and she said she’d been expecting it and it was all right for me to leave. But the look on her face, Carl. It didn’t match up.’ That was all it took. Harley became incoherent and quickly gave up trying to speak through the sobbing while, beside him on the log, Carl considered what his brother had said. The face hadn’t matched the words. Where could such insight have come from if he hadn’t learnt it from Joy? Carl said nothing, made no attempt to comfort, simply left Harley to howl for dingo pups so nearly orphaned, for the mother who’d raised him, even though he wasn’t hers, for that same woman who’d loved him like none was ever likely to again.

Carl’s mind was kilometres away and ten years into the past, peering at a boy, himself, who knew he had found people to care for him for the first time in his life. It was something he’d felt with the physicality of a breeze on his skin or the waters of Wiseman’s Cove around his ankles. It wasn’t just what had been added to his life, it was what had been taken away – Joy had erased the unrelenting ache that came with being unlovable JA M E S M OLONE Y 219

Only then did he see how exhausting his old life had been and, with his energy no longer burned so needlessly, he was able to divert it elsewhere. He began to speak up at school, he made his own friends and he kissed Justine who was big, like him, and always laughing. Back then, he’d loved Joy Duncan with a ferocity that scared him. It wasn’t until the brothers came to live in Wiseman’s Cove that Carl saw how special Harley was. He’d always told himself the little shit was more of a handful – and he was – but Harley was the one Joy mixed the cakes with, it was Harley who made her eyes sparkle. Joy gave herself to Carl, and generously so, yet Harley was always there too, unless it was an interview at school or a doctor’s appointment. She never refused him, even when he manufactured situations that excluded Harley. But Carl had learnt to read Joy’s face much earlier than his brother. He’d taken a closer look at the photographs on the Duncan’s old sideboard, then. Although the portrait of long-dead Graham in school uniform showed a face utterly different from Harley’s, the other pictures told him the story – Graham standing beside Skip with the bream he’d caught, Graham steering the tinny with his father smiling in approval. There were more, all snapped by Joy and in all of them the lean figure of a ten-year-old was the focus. Carl had felt her preference for his brother like a lover’s betrayal. At first he looked for faults in himself, as he’d so often done on the mainland, and sensed the unwelcome anxiety returning. But those months on the barge had changed him and this time he’d caught himself before the self-loathing could set in. When he’d crossed the water to Wiseman’s Cove, he told himself he wasn’t going back to the way he’d been before. He had reconciled himself to the somewhere short of a mother’s love that Joy offered him and turned to Justine instead, giving her more of his under-utilised heart than a schoolgirl could manage. It wasn’t until later, when he met Fiona at university, that someone had use for his heart at full throttle. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 220

And yet Carl knew he had been loved in Wiseman’s Cove. He never doubted it and he’d had no right to ask for any more. He had made himself stop looking at the family photos. He had given thanks for what had come his way, whether he’d earned it on the Duncans’ barge or simply because his reflection now showed a man worthy of love. He’d been right to call those years the happiest of his childhood. He wrenched his thoughts back to the clearing amid the cedars, to Harley who wrestled with his grief nearby, to the reason they were here. It occurred to him that he’d missed his chance to tell Joy about the baby; Fiona had insisted – not even Wiseman’s Cove was to hear the news until she was at least eight weeks. Joy would have been so pleased for him – he’d been looking forward to the look on her face and suddenly, in his eagerness for that scene, he saw how much he still performed for her, how he was still trying to win her away from Harley. He’d twice repelled the muscular waves of grief, but found now that it was what rushed out of him that hurt. She was gone; he could feel her peeling away from his chest. He thrust out his hands in a vain effort to retain what he had lost and it was the futility of this that made him burst. He sat wrenching air through his throat in a toneless duet with his brother, each entirely alone with his Joy Duncan, while around them the cedars gave grudging witness. Neither of the brothers knew, nor cared, how long they emptied themselves in this way. Finally, it was Harley who said, ‘Look at us, like a couple of drunks hurling into the gutter.’ They laughed then, and wiped sheepishly at their eyes. ‘This is what I was afraid of,’ said Harley, ‘that I’d blubber everywhere in front of my mates at the funeral.’ ‘So you’re okay to come home with me now, then?’ ‘Yeah, I suppose. I didn’t exactly come prepared to sleep rough, did I?’ ‘Good, ’cause I’ll only get lost if I head back on my own.’ JA M E S M OLONE Y 221

Carl reached for his knapsack, while Harley hooked the rifle over his shoulder. ‘Did you mean what you said before, that Joy loved me more than you?’ Carl waited until the knapsack rested comfortably in the middle of his back. ‘No mate. Just the grief talking.’ He watched his brother’s face relax. ‘Come on, you’d better lead the way.’

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Jaya Savige was born in Sydney and grew up on Bribie Island and in Brisbane. His first collection, Latecomers, was published by UQP in 2005 and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, was highly commended for the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize, and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. His second collection, Surface to Air (UQP, 2011), was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier’s Prize. His most recent collection is a chapbook, Maze Bright (Vagabond Press, 2014). Jaya is a lecturer in English at the New College of the Humanities in London and is Poetry Editor for The Australian.

Credo, Décor, Coder for my sisters 1.

Past the soft twigrush, above the coral fern, the matted yellow spikes of banksias bend like feral corn toward the bay. The salted ghost of Ian basks by Buckley’s Hole, daubing mozzie-coil ash on canvas—as thumping bass, akin to Tibrogargan (patron of his coal), booms from a lowered Falcon’s subwoofer, swelling the painter’s ad hoc sail. To what solid thing is this web of ours attached? To the shared credo of midges zipping through our bower, UFOs we casually smudge upon the décor? To this whimbrel’s corpse, an Icarus NASA won’t ever detect? Alas, the coder

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stays unseen among the auras I scan— so I gather with my blood for our sad relay in the paltry shade of casuarinas.

2.

Woorim’s ghost crabs rallied early. The most translucent one would be the priest, clawing at the latest layer of our loss. Dawn came like the dorsal stripe of dun foals spilling newly into hay, but could not circumvent our flood of l’esprit de l’escalier. I’m a bloated, wily honey ant, revolted by the language nectar speaks. Yes sometimes surrender’s the only way in, but how to tip your ashes into rankest space?

Forget that, son; tell me how my daughters fare in the place of carpet snakes?

3.



Are your sisters known to the guards of King Street, whom even the cane toads shun? Or stranded by the crystal tide that surged here as you honed your thees and thous upon the Bridge of Sighs and Pont Marie? JAYA SAV I GE 225

I fear I glimpsed my daughters among the thousands of beached sea-stars, when the rain tempo went haywire at Ben-Ewa—please check for gasping starfish in your latest train poem; note any resemblance to the punch leeches pack … Here a crown-of-thorns begins to suckle at your temple. We hear it slurp each speckle.

4.

Keener than a gecko’s insult, sharper than a swerve of lorikeets roiling drunk in glucose stink— grief is a glinting labour. Toil reeks from aspirants to equanimity. Wait, is this Coonowrin’s or Loki’s tree? Deception Bay or Circular Quay? In time we come to where the cruel foam scrawls its obsessive cursive; my antique ‘I’ pipes down before the lace forum of the sea. Mum, if you’re on this shore, your painter is an expert camoufler.

In turn each sister hoists her handful to the eastern island.

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The carpet snakes compose another hiss sizing up the nereids aslant. Dad’s stuck on the way the waves refuse to quit, like reliant sedans. Whelk-grit clings to the months’ weave. Here is here, elsewhere’s elsewhere, says monsieur obvious during a wet shave weeks later. Well, we’re all elsewhere now, Mum. Of course the tide rushed in to delete the glyphs our heels were grooving, even as the grey nurse hid you in its ancient lidless eye, the kind of eye that could hide urns.

5.

Nothing else yields quite like coastal wind as it receives ash. As if it said, Yes, I’ll seed the future, as soon as your shiver ceases. The monks had a word for it: esssse, a breath that through the face’s sieve arches

JAYA SAV I GE 227

like an escapee porpoise, convinced it possesses the property of those particles whose vanishing, only, the physicist assesses. On the return flight I watched as a sail crept west toward the salt-marsh inlets across an acre that shone, an escarp lit with phosphorescence. I strained to listen above the engines, struggled to reconcile fens with islands. This is how khaki tinsel dwindles: with distances that confer silence on even the most dour falconer, waiting by the wallum’s inflorescence.

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Venero Armanno is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, including his recent novel, Burning Down (UQP, 2017). His other well-known books include The Dirty Beat (UQP, 2007) and Black Mountain (UQP, 2012). His novel Firehead (Random House, 1999) was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and The Volcano (Vinatge, 2002) won the award for Best Fiction Book of the year. He has also written two short story collections, Jumping at the Moon (UQP, 1992) and Travel Under Any Star (Bareknuckle Books, 2016). His works have been published in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Israel and South Korea. Venero is a trained screenwriter and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.

Black Cockatoos Past the living room window there was early morning fog. A hot night and a hotter day lay ahead. Thinking things over, Miller went to make Shirley a sandwich and pot of green tea. When he returned she’d turned her chair so she could watch the weather channel. ‘They’re saying it mightn’t hit until late this afternoon, even overnight. Looks like you’ll have plenty of time.’ Miller placed the tray by Shirley’s right so that she wouldn’t need to wheel her chair back. There was a small lament from down the long corridor – Saskia huddled at the step with her snout pressed to the screen door. Longing eyes stared at him. ‘So maybe a lot of rain?’ ‘Could be like 2011. Probably this morning’s the best chance to take her out.’ ‘I need a decent hike,’ Miller told his wife, ‘so I won’t rush back. Maybe lunchtime, if you’ll be okay?’ Her smile was crinkled, yet a good echo of the more vibrant Shirley he used to know. ‘Take all day if you want. I’m streaming the entire second series of—’ Saskia let out a yelp, some canine instinct telling her that a walk was imminent. Miller wondered if the dog pictured the national park nearby. He kissed the remaining strands of Shirley’s hair, feather-light. ‘Take care,’ she told him, and the weather channel flicked over to READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 230

an entertainment service Miller took no interest in. He wasn’t any great outdoorsman, but since retiring he preferred to be out of the house as much as he could. Especially since the girls had moved away; especially since Shirley discovered more and more things she could no longer do. Her decline broke his heart: Miller walked among trees while Shirley kept to her chair; he emptied his thoughts in long bushwalks while she immersed herself in her shows. These days Shirley experienced the great outdoors only when he drove her, then pushed her chair along one of the more accessible trails he’d found – and when that trail was no longer friendly to wheels, he carried her. If she was cold he put his mouth against her neck and warmed her with his breath. Then Miller would help her sit somewhere comfortable, with a nice panorama for her to take in. He rummaged around for the dog leash and his walking shoes. Outside, Saskia bounded away from the back step, bounded back and barked, one-two-three.

Though it was barely the first week of December it already felt as if another long hot summer had settled in. The morning remained humid and misted. They’d already walked down the long grassy decline behind the house. Miller picked up the pace as he led Saskia into the park at the entrance to the hiking trails, of which there were a good half-dozen, each of varying lengths running through different types of terrain. The ground was wet from overnight rain and the air was heavy and still. One path disappearing into the trees to Miller’s left was very slushy indeed, so he took a more familiar track that followed the creek. After particularly heavy rain that creek might flow fast and deep, yet in a decade of living in the area Miller remembered only three or four such occasions. He was already sweating into his T-shirt. For Saskia every foray through this vegetation was like the first time. He kept her on the leash but let her dart here and there, that V E NER O A R M A NNO 231

busy nose roving over dirt and grass and into shrubs. Slurries of shallow mud slowed their progress, though it wasn’t long before they were two kilometres into the trail and approaching its prettiest parts. Miller waited while the dog squatted and left two healthy mounds. He noticed deeper water here, washing over flat rocks. Then, further along, eddying currents swirled around thick, exposed tree roots. He’d always wondered if here was a possible platypus habitat, though he’d never seen any. There was definitely a sort of small dam, with earthy banks and roots, overhanging vegetation, and reeds and logs just right for constructing burrows. Miller glanced at heavy fronds dripping down from the wet canopy. All was quiet. The temperature increased by degrees. He envisaged the sweltering day ahead. Good to do this walk early. Miller adjusted one of his laces as Saskia strained against the leash. For a moment Miller looked both ways along the trail and listened for the sounds of other hikers. When he was certain no-one was around he unclipped the leash from her collar. ‘Go on, have fun.’ Saskia felt her freedom and dashed ahead a good twenty metres. She turned her narrow head to check on Miller, disappeared into brush then reappeared behind him, playful as always. Miller gave a whistle so she’d know to follow. Beyond the canopy, which was thinner just here, he studied birds crossing the dull sky. They faded into the fog then re-emerged as if playing their own game, settling into nearby pines. Miller recognised them: they were a trio of black cockatoos he’d seen make infrequent appearances over the past year or so. The humidity was cloying and Miller wiped perspiration from his brow. He called for Saskia but she was busy on the trail, sniffing at what must be spoor in the undergrowth. To her this place was a cornucopia of smells, an everyday paradise. Miller knew there were feral deer, so prolific in their numbers that the council had taken to culling them with spotlighted rifle shots. The forest was also home READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 232

to scrub turkeys and water lizards. He’d seen wallabies. There were snakes too, of course, from emerald-green tree snakes to far deadlier cousins. Horse riders came through and locals with their dogs, so it was always an extra miracle when you could have a place like this all to yourself. He wasn’t about to curse the morning heat that kept people away. Maybe they’d head on another five or ten kilometres. He was in no hurry to return home, if the weather held off. Shirley would be fine with her binge-watching. She’d lose herself all day. Miller pushed his thinning hair back as a warm wind meandered through the trees and across the surface of the water. Then the cockatoos were flying once again.

As he made his way upstream Miller noticed the water flowing more quickly. It was deeper too, and he wondered about that. There must be run-off from somewhere further back, from the many tributaries in the mountains. He imagined heavy, low clouds unloading themselves over blue ranges, the run-off flowing down into these creek systems, all of which eventually drained into the river. In 2011 the Brisbane River had flooded so quickly the local populace had been caught unawares. There’d been more to it than that, of course. Flooding had been widespread across the entire south-east. The centre of a nearby town was hit by roaring torrents that carried away cars and just about everything else; people too. Over thirty-five lives were lost and Miller wasn’t certain, but he thought that even today some individuals were still listed as missing. Arguments remained over unspecified dam releases to protect dam walls, though authorities and a later investigation said none of that had been the cause. Miller wiped his dampening palms against the seat of his jeans. Funny, along this lovely green trail he was following the stream seemed deeper again. V E NER O A R M A NNO 233

‘Come on,’ he called, but Saskia was roving. Miller wished he hadn’t let the dog off her leash. ‘This way,’ he spoke with uncharacteristic severity, deciding to save the extra kilometres for another day. By the look of that stream a lot of rain had to already be falling somewhere. It might arrive earlier than expected. He walked a quarter kilometre, noticing previously exposed reeds along the creek bank now swirling underwater. That meant the stream was at least two or three times as deep as it had been moments before. He guessed it was the height of his calf. And flowing fast. Miller looked for Saskia. The trail was empty. He whistled three short bursts and waited, the leash bunched in one hand. He slapped his thigh in mild annoyance. If the creek chose to overflow he’d have to trudge through slopping water and mud. Saskia would be filthy; he’d need to give her a bath. Better to get her on the leash, get back home, which was a pity. A morning wasted. He retraced his steps and found the dog engrossed in the flavours that marked a heavy pile of scree. Deer might have passed during the night. ‘Come on, get moving.’ She didn’t look up so he whistled and held out the leash, always a sort of kindly talisman for her. It signalled only good things: a walk, the car, both. ‘Saskia!’ The tone of his voice was more threatening than he’d intended. The dog’s head came up. Saskia eyed him, front legs splayed. ‘Hey, come on,’ Miller spoke, realising his mistake. ‘Let’s get home.’ The dog wouldn’t move. He’d spooked her. Miller was about to step forward but a trembling that came up through his hiking boots made him stop. He saw that Saskia felt it too. The dog’s ears, previously flattened, pricked up. Her entire body twitched. It was unmistakable, an actual vibration of the ground, of the trail, what Miller imagined the precursor to an earthquake would be. He READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 234

felt the juddering in his soles and up his legs. Instinct made him turn towards the stream. It rushed violently and was now well above its banks, scouring the trail’s edge. Miller stepped backwards. In that flow came branches, weeds, leaves. Larger branches had been swept up too, and he watched the biggest one being jammed in the exposed roots of two dead trees. The rumbling intensified. With no idea of what it all meant Miller hurried to the dog, thumb uncocking the leash’s snap-lock. Now Saskia came forward, wanting the security of the leash and of Miller’s firm grip. ‘That’s a good girl.’ With one hand he held her collar, but before he could fix the leash to the collar’s steel loop Miller had one quick glimpse of something that was so far beyond extraordinary as to be completely inexplicable: a wall of water burst through the trees. Instantly he felt himself smashed backwards. For moments he had no sense of what was happening. Saskia was gone. He tumbled as if caught in ocean surf and barely felt one shoulder strike the ground, or his left arm crack a branch, or his back drag across a rocky outcrop. Miller’s head slammed against something hard. He swallowed water, coarse and bitter, full of effluvium. He blindly reached out for something to grip onto. The current spun him around until he found a protruding branch, then another. His feet kicked underwater, no longer touching the ground. He knew his grip wouldn’t last against this surge; instinct told him to lift himself out as fast as he could. He tried to blink away the watery grit. He rubbed his eyes into his forearm then realised the two gnarled branches he held himself with weren’t at all strong. One was bending while the rushing current tore at his legs and clothes. Gasping, sucking air, he grabbed at a higher branch, missed, tried again and finally reached it. The thing snapped and he dropped underwater. He fought for a foothold, scrabbled with his fingernails at the trunk of a tree, but something rushing beneath V E NER O A R M A NNO 235

the surface knocked his boots and made him lose what little purchase he had. One hand strained for a thick branch just at the edge of his fingertips. He managed to grasp it, and finally hauled himself free of the sucking torrent. Miller was panting hard; his heart was racing. His jeans and boots weighed heavily, yet he was out, standing now on an unsteady branch with both arms wrapped around a slim tree trunk – the side of his face pressed to its smooth bark. Miller felt himself shaking. He moaned. Around him there was an ocean unleashed. Looking at it he couldn’t help but cry out at the sight, and at the thought of Saskia carried away. It took him moments before he was aware of his boots; they were again under streaming water to the ankles. The water bubbled and frothed around him. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t petering out. Instead, the water continued to rise. He strained his eyes for a means of escape. The hard current ate at his calves, next his knees. He couldn’t stay where he was. Gulping air, he shifted across the branch disappearing beneath him and tried to hold himself steady, reaching out for the next tree. It was thicker, maybe sturdier. With effort Miller hauled himself across, and was now just above the waterline. His mind reeled, wondering what to do, where to move next, then in the water he saw a head bobbing, one arm flailing. He shouted but the head had already gone under, the hand grasping at air. Miller saw that a leash was wrapped around the other hand. The heads of a woman and a dog came up together, then both bodies were jammed into an obstruction of broken branches. Miller called out again. They were wedged into a rough wooden V that created an impromptu dam. Miller saw it was a girl, and young. For a moment she had two arms free to wrap the dog with. More than herself, she was fighting to keep its face out of the water. Miller crawled forward on his branch as far as he dared. Her black hair streamed around her face. The Doberman was copper-coloured and choking on water. Then the swell tore the branches from under them. The girl READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 236

managed to grab hold of a hanging limb of a tree closer to Miller, and at that moment she saw him, her mouth spitting froth. Miller lay flat along the branch and reached out. The girl hung onto her Doberman by the leash, the dog straining to get back to her against the current. Her other arm struggled to hold them afloat. ‘Reach up – I’ll grab you,’ Miller shouted. She did it immediately, without thinking. He felt the wet clasp of flesh to flesh, then the heavy jerk of his arm wanting to be torn from its socket. For moments he fought to keep the girl’s hand in his grip even as her dog was an anchor pulling her away. ‘Let go!’ he cried out. ‘Let go of the leash!’ He managed to drag the girl closer. He half-lifted her so that he could get one arm around her waist, but couldn’t pull her out, not with the way the current wrenched at the dog. ‘Your dog … for God’s sake …’ ‘No!’ Water boiled around them. He lost the grip on her waist but now she had her free arm around Miller’s neck. He tore at her other hand to get rid of the leash. She fought against that, but Miller felt the sudden snap of freedom and the dog was gone. The girl sobbed. He pulled her up and out, and for a moment held her. She was all bones, wet and brittle. They both breathed hard, exhausted, wordlessly trying to understand the shape of this new world. Around them uprooted trees, branches and bushes whisked by. There were lengths of timber too, from some construction maybe, and what looked like bent sheets of galvanised iron. Was it roofing? What exactly had happened? In silence they watched a children’s trampoline turning and turning until it snagged on something then remained bouncing in the current. Miller helped the girl get hold of the tree trunk. She grasped it, still breathless, then she said, ‘You bastard … my Ruby …’ V E NER O A R M A NNO 237

Rain was falling now. This teenager, maybe sixteen, was shivering. It was shock, Miller knew. He was only beginning to pull himself together. ‘Are you okay?’ Her face was so thin and drawn it made her distress seem worse. ‘I can’t believe what you did … my dog …’ ‘He was going to drag you away.’ ‘I don’t care. I don’t care.’ There was nothing Miller could say to that. The important thing was they had a measure of safety. He was thinking the water had finally found its level, though the currents still flowed with the sort of propulsive energy that made his heart race. How this had all happened he couldn’t imagine. Something about the dams? A wall breaking? Some ridiculous decision of a massive release? Miller gazed across the drowned woodland. He didn’t want to look at the girl’s face, see more of her hurt, her accusing eyes. He didn’t want to tell her what she must already know, that for a handhold here and a branch there they’d both be gone. Small fragments of civilisation travelled past. There went a wheelie bin meant for recyclables. Over there, two spare tyres bounced along. So what was the extent of this disaster, and might there be worse to come? ‘When will the water go?’ he heard her ask, voice quiet. She’d pulled herself together a little. Miller tried to give her heart. ‘Soon. It can’t last …’ The truth was that he couldn’t help thinking back to the recent big flood, which had lasted long past any actual storms. Had it been a full week? Then what hope did they have? To get them out of this tree would require some kind of orchestrated water rescue, and that wouldn’t happen until someone reported them missing. Men and trucks would have to find a way through the flooded reserve. The canopy overhead meant a helicopter would never be able to drop them a line. ‘I don’t have my phone with me,’ he said. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 238

‘Me either … I like the peace and quiet …’ ‘But your parents know you’re here, right?’ Her eyes remained downcast. Miller didn’t know what that meant. He said, ‘We’ll be okay. Your folks will ring around. The authorities will be onto us in no time.’ ‘Mum’s away till tomorrow. She visits Grandma on the coast to make sure she’s all right through weather like this. I’m always safe at home … with Ruby.’ As she said the dog’s name a great shiver travelled through her thin frame. He wished there was some way he could comfort her, but all that mattered was this tree – this tree and the branch they kept themselves steady upon. ‘What about your dad?’ The slope of her shoulders told him there wasn’t one. And right now Shirley’s enjoying her show, he realised, one episode rolling into the next, hours slipping by while she’s cotton-woolled inside our home. Jesus, but didn’t I tell her something about making today’s hike a long one? The tree was a tallowwood covered in stringy red bark. He knew several of the eucalypt species surrounding them but not what must be many hundreds of others. The grey ironbarks and brush boxes were easy to identify. His mind wanted to focus on similar small details only – the spotted gum beside them, a huge clump of araucarian vine. He knew there was fruit in the forest. Custard apples growing wild and berries called— The girl’s hand reached for him, unexpected as anything, seeking reassurance. ‘You’ll be okay,’ he heard himself say. ‘You really will. Do you live far from here?’ Her home was on the other side of the reserve. Little wonder he’d never seen her before. V E NER O A R M A NNO 239

‘My name,’ she offered quietly, ‘it’s Lía … with an accent over the “i” …’ ‘That’s a pretty na—’ He was distracted by something approaching. At first Miller thought it was a body but as it passed it revealed itself as a full garbage bag, tied at the top, wrested away from someone’s backyard. For moments a terrible surge of panic changed into a need to actually laugh. ‘Sorry,’ he spoke. ‘What?’ Her name wasn’t the more common ‘Leah’, but an Italian variation. ‘My dad, that’s where he was from.’ So forlorn, the way she said it, and now Miller felt even more protective towards her, the way he would have felt towards one of his daughters. His attention shifted to Lía’s long thin arms. She was still holding his hand – gripping his hand – and he made her let go so she could wrap herself to the trunk once again. No matter what happened he knew he’d stay with her. ‘What grade are you in?’ ‘Nine.’ ‘That makes you fourteen?’ ‘Fifteen. I had to repeat a year.’ So young. Younger than he’d thought. And he sensed something in what she’d just told him, some longer story about why she’d had to repeat, but he wouldn’t ask. Instead, he said, ‘Keep hanging on. Don’t move around, we don’t want to lose our balance.’ ‘I don’t like being stuck up here.’ ‘I’ll look after you.’ ‘I don’t know you.’ Of course she didn’t. She couldn’t. The newspapers, media, schools, everything would have told her other things about old men like Miller. ‘I’ve got three daughters,’ he started. Would that make her feel any better? ‘They’re much older than you …’ READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 240

‘How is anyone going to find us?’ ‘Let’s be patient. Like I said, the water can’t last forever. We might just walk out the way we came in.’ Even as he said it Miller knew the chances of this were slim. Warm and heavy summer rain made its way through that canopy above. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend. He might come around today.’ ‘Will he think something’s wrong, if you’re not home?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘Would he go looking for you?’ ‘He’s never come with me into these trails. He doesn’t like Ruby very much.’ She thought a moment, eyes remaining downcast. Miller realised she was transfixed by the currents. ‘He’s got a really good car … that doesn’t help much today …’ Miller wasn’t sure if she was trying to make a joke or not. He wished he could see her eyes, maybe understand her a little, but the way she kept staring at the rushing water concerned him. How did he used to speak to his girls when they were this age? How had he helped them with their troubles? ‘We’re not going into that,’ he told her, nodding down at the rushing torrent. ‘All right.’ ‘Your boyfriend, how old is he?’ ‘Twenty-two.’ If Lía really had been one of his daughters, Miller would have shuddered. The girl said, ‘So you’re married?’ ‘My wife’s at home.’ He didn’t add the facts about Shirley’s infirmity or her incredible ability to lose herself in the television. ‘Look up there,’ he spoke, wanting to distract the conversation to something else. ‘I saw them earlier.’ Lía turned her head. He was surprised to see the smallest smile come to her lips. V E NER O A R M A NNO 241

‘I let them out when I took Ruby for a walk.’ ‘What?’ ‘They’re almost like pigeons. They’ll come home later in the day. They like doing that.’ ‘Cockatoos, right?’ ‘Yellow-tail blacks. They’re staying close because they know I’m here. I’ve had them since they were babies. Now I remind them of food and their nest.’ ‘So you’re good with birds?’ ‘I had to learn. Mum got them for me. Sort of … after Dad.’ Lía had her own facts she didn’t want to add, but Miller wanted to keep her talking and distracted. He didn’t like the way those dark eyes of hers kept turning down towards the currents. She was as scared as he was, but the girl was a child and he’d lived a full, full life. ‘What about your dog?’ ‘She was a rescue from a breeder who wasn’t very nice.’ Lía stopped. Then she said, ‘Dad was a policeman. He got killed one night … there was trouble somewhere. We got his medals …’ Medals, Miller thought, and new pets, plus a year of school gone missing. ‘He wouldn’t let me fall. If he was here.’ Miller saw her arms trembling. ‘You won’t fall. I’ll hold you.’ She swallowed hard. ‘What are your daughters like?’ He wouldn’t tell her. Miller would never let anyone know what he knew, which was that each of his girls had chosen their own lives rather than stay home and help him with Shirley. He couldn’t blame them. He loved those faces, so full of life and the future. Their mother though, much as they might love her, she was something to stop those lives. ‘They’ve moved out now … all grown up.’ ‘You miss them?’ Lía, Miller thought, more than I’ll ever say. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 242

Suddenly, the tallowwood listed hard. So hard, and falling, that Lía’s chin struck him under the eye. The tree held, but at an acute angle. It forced them together, so much so that Miller and the girl now faced the churn. Her eyes were wide. ‘We … we have to swim,’ she said. ‘I’ll hold you but – maybe to get to another tree. If we could just grab those branches over there—’ ‘Look, my birds.’ Did she want to distract herself? Was this her way of coping? Yet Lía’s cockatoos, wetly sleek and black, and so distinctive with their yellow tails, were settling into branches only metres away. Miller stared at them as if for an answer, or some hope. ‘Your friends want to be close to you. So don’t be afraid.’ ‘When I look at them, I’m not.’ A haze of stronger winds swirled through the trees, carrying twigs and leaves. God, all he wanted was to get home; he wanted Shirley; he’d have each of the girls on the phone for their distant voices. His gaze followed the edge of this new surging sea. Far past Lía’s birds, at the crest of a wooded incline, he thought he saw two dogs. It was true; he could just discern them. The gusting rain made each seem unreal, a vision of distant ghosts, but there they were. The dogs twitched backwards and forwards. ‘Look, Lía.’ She saw them. ‘Ruby!’ ‘More friends.’ ‘RUBY!’ she cried out. ‘Maybe washing up against the side of the hill gave them a chance to save themselves.’ ‘And that’s your dog?’ ‘Saskia.’ ‘Can we do it?’ ‘What?’ V E NER O A R M A NNO 243

Miller was aware of the quick rise and fall of Lía’s chest. There was something new in her voice. ‘We have to,’ she said. ‘This tree’s going.’ ‘We’re not dogs,’ Miller said, but he knew she was right. Lía had put away her fear. It was time for him to do the same. ‘Whatever happens,’ Lía said, still trembling, yet keeping herself together, ‘it’ll be okay.’ Her three birds were closer now. They’d probably follow. From up on that ridge the dogs would as well. One way or another these animals would be with them. If Miller and the girl did manage to get across and climb up the slick, muddy slope, their dogs would come find them. If not, their resting place would be sign-posted by black cockatoos. The tree listed one more time and the blast of water tore at their clothes and hair, their arms and legs. ‘I’m with you,’ Miller told the girl. Lía spoke the same words, and he had her hand, and they let themselves be taken away.

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Kári Gíslason is a writer and academic who lectures in Creative Writing at QUT. Kári was awarded a doctorate in 2003 for his thesis on medieval Icelandic literature. His first book, The Promise of Iceland, published by UQP in 2011, told the story of his return to his birthplace Reykjavík. His debut novel, The Ash Burner, was published in 2015. Kári is also co-author with Richard Fidler of Saga Land (ABC Books, 2017), a travel memoir that explores the sagas of Iceland – the true stories of the first Viking families who settled on that remote island in the Middle Ages. As well as memoir and fiction, he also publishes scholarly articles, travel writing and reviews.

Swimming Lessons The name of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, is a descriptive one – ‘Smoky Bay’. It derives from the area’s distinctive geography and the history of its settlement. When the Viking settlers first arrived from West Norway in the ninth century, they found a harsh and rocky coastline. It was exposed to the North Atlantic winds, and in every sense an island carved out by glaciers, storms and wild rivers. But the Vikings also discovered hot springs and steam – reyk, the smoke in the bay where they built their first farms. Over a thousand years later, the steam still rises there, and retains its place in the names left to us by the Vikings: Reyk-janes, Reyk-holt, Reyk-hólar and others that celebrate the extraordinary gift of natural hot water in a cold climate. Hver and laug are also common, and like reyk direct travellers to places where, at the end of the day, you might soak your limbs in hot, sulphurous water. The main downtown street in Reykjavík is called Laugavegur, ‘Pool Street’, and leads to Laugardalur, ‘Pool Valley’, where in the old days women would do their laundry, and where today you find the country’s largest swimming pool, Laugardalslaug, or ‘Pool Valley Pool’. As a boy, I went there most days. My mother worked nearby, so she and I met during her lunch break – at the time, the lower grades didn’t begin school until around one o’clock, so I could go before class. I loved swimming with her, but I also liked the chance it gave me to test my independence; usually I’d swim in a different lane, and READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 246

faster than she did. Other days, I got to go on my own, or sometimes with friends from school. In winter, when we left the pool, we’d ignore the strict instructions we were given to dry our hair properly, hoping that it might freeze as we walked home. If it did, we could snap it off like icicles. I left Iceland for England when I was ten, and then we came to Brisbane four years later. Whenever I returned for visits I rushed to the pools, and especially the one in Laugardalur. Over time, my first swim came to signal to me that I really was back. It was as though I didn’t fully believe I was in Iceland until I was once again swimming in the warm water with the cold air on my hair and shoulders. The pools of Reykjavík, it seemed, had retained the magical impact they’d had on the first settlers. Some two decades on, I began to write about these return journeys to Iceland, and about the Viking stories of the early settlement that I discovered there. My first book, The Promise of Iceland, was the result of these returns and discoveries. And yet the result of something else, too. For, by then, I’d found that writing and swimming formed a partnership in how I experienced and understood my birthplace, rather as they formed a partnership in the early Icelanders’ understanding of the country. I began to think that, together, they might teach me how to travel between two very different islands, Iceland and Australia, and along my own patterns of migration and return. When we first arrived in Brisbane, the old family friends who’d helped with our move to Australia were keen to show us the famous beaches that lay to the north and south of the city. Brisbane didn’t have much in the way of swimming beaches, but you didn’t have to drive far to find them. The first that I saw were wildly beautiful, with endless lines of blond sand. But the surf was rough, and as I had no experience of swimming in waves, I had trouble finding my feet. K Á R I G Í SLA SON 247

On one occasion, I was caught in a current that swept across the face of the beach. It didn’t take me out very far, but I did cross a line that seemed to run between the light blue of the shallows and the darker water beyond. I was frightened and breathless. I knew I didn’t have control, and that I could be dragged out. What scared me most was not drowning, but what might be down there, in the dark water at my feet. The feeling that I might not be able to see where I was anymore. I don’t remember when we first visited the coastal village of Noosa. It lay a little out of easy reach, at the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast, and beyond a comfortable daytrip in our friends’ Falcon 500. Their car seemed never to go over ninety kilometres per hour, perhaps because there was no air conditioning and the windows had to be down. But when we did eventually make our first visit to Noosa, when I was about sixteen, I wondered why we hadn’t been going there the whole time. For, here was a bay – what to my eyes then seemed a better-defined landscape. However different Noosa might be from the bays of Iceland, the forested hills that braced the gentle arc of the beach created the same sense of shelter, and what I suddenly felt was a necessary framing of the vast body of water that lay further out. Without that frame, the sea was endless and unbounded. With it, the ocean looked more like a book, with a proper cover that held the sea in place. If I didn’t start writing that day, then I think it must have been very soon after. For my first journals, poems and sketches sought out a sense of structure in landscape. I didn’t understand it very well, but my writing was a search for familiarity, just as swimming was. I went to Noosa whenever I could, even if it meant a long, hot daytrip and driving with the windows down. The first Vikings to sail to Iceland had a strange but magical custom for deciding where precisely to settle, one that involved both their gods – Thor, Odin and Freyja – and their sense of family honour. As they READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 248

neared the coast of Iceland, they would take a consecrated timber beam from the high seat of the ruling chieftain, and cast it overboard. They followed the beam as it drifted in the dark grey water until it reached the land, and built their farms wherever it came ashore. The ritual emphasised both newness and continuity, a way of building a different life with the materials of the old. Such, in any case, is the account of the settlement given in the sagas, the first stories of early Icelandic life and society. I began reading them as an undergraduate student at the University of Queensland. This was in the early 1990s, some five or six years after we moved to Brisbane. I was lucky: I enrolled in the Old Icelandic course in the final year that it was offered, and so was given the chance to encounter the first literature of my homeland. I’d forgotten most of my Icelandic by then – the language slipped away rather quickly under the Queensland sun. But I have to admit that I had an unfair advantage over the other students. Icelandic grammar is very complicated, with lots of declensions and verb forms. But I found I could intuit much of what the others had to learn by rote. They didn’t seem to mind: no-one ever objected that it was unfair, and in fact there was something so sweetly odd about learning medieval Icelandic in Brisbane that the class was an unusually friendly one. Meanwhile, visiting Noosa and finding something familiarly Icelandic in the shape of the bay reminded me of how important swimming had been to me as a child. Noosa, it seemed, was the place where a piece of Icelandic timber had washed ashore; if I could have cleared out the shops on Hastings Street I would surely have built a farm there. Or at least a coffee shop. I went on weekends, and imagined my takeover. I began to take swimming more seriously, too. After lectures, I walked down the small hill in front of the Michie Building, where English and literary studies were taught, to the university pool. To begin with, I swam about the same distance I had as a child – four or five K Á R I G Í SLA SON 249

hundred metres. But gradually my fitness improved: I added a single lap each day, rather as one adds a learnt word to a store of new vocabulary. There were other similarities to writing and language. Swimming wasn’t a natural activity to me; that is, I didn’t feel as though I was born to be a swimmer. A squad of Olympians would sometimes be training in the pool at the same time as I was – a few lanes across. I watched them with delight and envy. They had a very different way of cutting through the water – much more relaxed and fluent than mine. But that didn’t matter. Even if you weren’t a natural swimmer, you could train your body to accept the rhythm and movement of the water, until at some point swimming became quite compulsive. You needed to go to the pool every day, or you felt a little incomplete. Just as I needed to read and write. Swimming also mirrored something of the oddly intimate, or separate, feeling of the Old Icelandic classes. There were, I think, only two full-time staff at the pool. When I became one of the regulars, I got to know them well. Mark, the assistant manager, would sometimes look up from his duties to offer advice about my stroke. He said I had to stretch my arms out further, and imagine I was trying to catch something in the water just beyond my reach. That sounded like Old Icelandic classes, too – a reaching out for something just beyond the fingertips: an encounter with the first settlers of Iceland whose lives I read about in the sagas, a language that was slowly coming back to me, stroke by stroke. After my swim, I’d sit in the early evening sun for half an hour, and watch the pool fill up with after-work swimmers. I waited for that first chill on my shoulders, and then packed up my things, fetched my bike and rode home. Iceland’s most famous saga author was the poet and politician Snorri Sturluson, who lived from 1179 to 1241. Snorri is one of few saga authors whose works can be listed with any kind of certainty. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 250

Anonymity was a key feature of saga writing, and a reflection of the sagas’ origin in an oral tradition that valued communal ownership of stories more than individual acts of creativity. But we know that Snorri was fascinated with poetry and history, and there are contemporary accounts of his involvement in writing and manuscript collection. It’s thought that Snorri wrote Heimskringla, a history of the Scandinavian kings, Egil’s Saga, a story of the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrímsson, but perhaps most importantly the Prose Edda, an account of Old Norse mythology and religion that still forms the backbone of our understanding of the Viking gods and myths. Even though Snorri was a Christian, he understood the joy of historical difference, and left us a wonderful repository of folklore and ancient religious belief. Snorri lived in Reykholt; that’s to say, a place of reyk, or ‘steam’. In fact, Reykholt is extremely steamy: you see the area’s pillars of white smoke well before you reach the houses. These days, there’s a museum and visitors centre in Snorri’s honour. And a bathing spot, too. Snorri was given to luxury, and had his own outdoor pool, as well as a tunnel that ran from inside his house to the water’s edge. It’s still possible to take a bath in the very place where Snorri would sit and talk to his friends about the politics of the day, poetry and sagas. In 1999, I began a doctorate in medieval Icelandic literature, and as part of my research I returned to Reykjavík to work at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, where the country’s saga manuscripts are housed. The topic of my PhD was a long-standing one in saga studies, namely how the authors of these works balanced their use of literary devices with more historical aims. For a long time, saga scholars had sought to reconcile the apparently conflicting nature of these works, which employed both documentary and artistic modes of narration. I arrived in Reykjavík late one afternoon in August. My hosts, Bergur and Rut, were old family friends. They owned a large house on the K Á R I G Í SLA SON 251

Reykjavík seafront, and by chance not far from an excellent little pool. It wasn’t Laugardalslaug, my favourite – but no matter. Vesturbæjarlaug or ‘West End Pool’, was within walking distance of their house. So, after we’d caught up for an hour or so, I asked if they’d mind if I went for a swim. They looked at each other, I think puzzled by my desire to leave the house so soon after arriving. But they were very polite. ‘Yes, of course,’ said Bergur, and walked me to the back door. It opened onto a seaside path crowded with cyclists and walkers. Well, crowded by Icelandic standards, in a country of 330,000 people. I didn’t mention to Bergur and Rut that I needed to swim in order to feel like I was back. But perhaps they guessed it, for later, when they took me on drives into the countryside they always found a new public pool for me to visit. There are some 120, and so it isn’t hard to keep finding new ones. But on that first swim, after I’d made my apologies to Bergur and Rut, something unexpected happened. As well as feeling like I was back in Iceland, when I was in the pool I also felt as though I was still in Australia. As I swam up and down, I wondered whether you could perhaps be on two sides of the world at once – in this home in the North Atlantic, while your fingertips reached for a handful of something just beyond it. Even a long way beyond it, all the way back to Brisbane. In the thirteenth century, Iceland descended into a terrible period of civil war. Snorri Sturluson was one of those most involved in these disputes, and one of its victims, too. In 1241 he was assassinated by his rivals in the cellar of his house at Reykholt. We have a detailed account of the murder in a book written by his nephew, Sturla Þórðarson. It records how, in Snorri’s last moments, he called pitifully to his attackers, ‘You will not strike!’ On that occasion, when he most desperately needed his words to take effect, they failed him. His enemies drew their swords, and stabbed him. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 252

In the years that followed Snorri’s death, the country became embroiled in an ever-more vicious fight for supreme political control. It was disastrous, for ultimately the civil war led to Iceland’s loss of independence, in 1263. Four hundred years of Icelandic sovereignty, begun when those Viking ships sailed into Reykjavík, came to an end. It would not be fully reclaimed until 1944. My friend Bergur was alive on that day that Iceland regained its independence. Like many others, he saw the moment as the country’s reunification with an earlier self, the Iceland of the sagas. Bergur was something of an amateur scholar, and during my trips back to Iceland he took me for drives and taught me a lot about how these works belonged in the landscapes in which they were set. Bergur had spent the summer months of his youth in the south, which is the setting of Njál’s Saga, arguably the best of the sagas. He knew the work off by heart. Sometimes, I felt he read the saga for its place names as much as for the action. Once, when I visited Iceland with my girlfriend, Olanda, Bergur and Rut took us to see some of the farms and valleys mentioned in Njál’s Saga. We camped at Seljavellir, a valley of steep cliffs at the base of Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano that is topped by a glacier and that a few years later would erupt and close down the airports of Europe. That weekend, though, the volcano and its surroundings were entirely calm: the weather was mild, and we had all the time in the world to walk along the glacial streams in the area. We reached Iceland’s oldest public pool, a laug built into the side of the valley wall. We had it to ourselves. We sat and talked quietly, just as Snorri and his followers had once sat talking about the past while around them the disputes of the day continued to rage. We, too, felt that our world was changing. By now, I was thinking that I might one day return to Iceland to live. I asked Olanda what she thought. Could she imagine living in such a remote part of the world, and so far from her family in Brisbane? K Á R I G Í SLA SON 253

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what would I do?’ ‘Maybe work at a swimming pool,’ I suggested. ‘There could be worse jobs.’ ‘I think you’re the one who should work at the pool,’ she said, and splashed a handful of water in my face. Three years later, Olanda and I got married on the beach at Noosa. On the night before our wedding, I slept badly and woke very early. It must have been around four-thirty, but there was already faint, blue light around the edges of the curtain in my hotel room. We were observing the tradition of being apart on the last night before the wedding, and so now I lay awake on my own, thinking too much about the day ahead, trying to get back to sleep. Eventually, I gave up and went for a walk. It was very quiet on Hastings Street; not even the delivery vans had arrived yet. I followed the path between the bakery and an ice-cream shop and then down to the sand; there was no-one on the beach, either. I sat down and watched the water. It was lovely: blue, but somehow also transparent green. I took off my shirt, and stepped into the shallows. I ran my fingertips along the surface, which now seemed glazed with white light. In the distance, Rainbow Beach was a line of yellow shadows on the horizon. I didn’t really want to swim swim. I was happy just to stand there with the water up around my shoulders. I could see my feet. And then, beside them, a shark. A small hammerhead, circling me. For a second, I felt the pulse of all my fears, a long build-up of worry about living in Australia, the possibility that I would always be in-between places. But as quickly there came an overwhelming sense of wonder at the sight of the animal, of a thing I’d often feared when I swam out past the shallows. When the shark turned and left, I half-wanted to follow it. There seemed to be some invitation in the final flick of its tail. But then I READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 254

wondered whether it might have a bigger brother out there, one that might not simply circle me and leave. I got out of the water, went back to my room and slept soundly for two hours. I don’t need to tell the reader that the hammerhead shark was a symbol. I expect the shark did not see itself that way. It thought it was a shark that saw some feet in the water at a time of day when there usually weren’t any feet there. But I understood its presence differently, perhaps because back then, as now, I was prone to look for symbols. I trusted the Vikings, and Bergur, on that: whenever possible, it pays to read the landscape as a story, and the story as a landscape. A timber beam floats a certain way to the shore, so you follow it – allow the materials of your old home to shape your feelings for the new. I decided that the shark had swum in to tell me that I could stop fearing Australia, and not think of my attachment to this country as taking me away from Iceland. A few months later, I was offered a teaching job in Ísafjörður, a remote town in the north-west of Iceland. Olanda and I packed up our lives and moved. As we approached the coastline, we decided not to toss wood ahead of us; we were flying, so that would have been very dangerous. But I took with me the memory of the shark that appeared on my wedding day. A year in, we moved from the north-west to Reykjavík. Olanda got a job at Laugardalslaug, ‘Pool Valley Pool’, as I think destiny required her to do. I’d finished my doctorate by now, and had time between my commitments as an English teacher to think about how I might write about Iceland – my life there, as well as the saga stories that I loved. How I might go about combining documentary and artistic modes of writing. I wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t really ready, so instead I swam most days. Because Olanda worked at the pool, I was allowed to swim at K Á R I G Í SLA SON 255

closing time, at around ten in the evening, while Olanda and the other staff were packing up. I had the pool to myself, and swam laps in the near dark – with only a few lights at either end of the lanes. From the middle section of the pool, the yellow lights blurred into blue and then green. At the end of our second year in Iceland, our first son Finnur was born, and we decided to return to Australia. I finally settled down to write about Iceland in earnest. I found it was easier to write about the country from here, but still my most productive hours were always straight after a swim. The result of my efforts, both at writing and returning, was a memoir about my birthplace and about my parents called The Promise of Iceland. It was a book about promises – family promises, and the promise of home that I felt whenever I was in Iceland, and went for that first swim in Laugardalslaug. In working at it, though, I discovered something else. There was more to my story than the search for a perfect moment of return, or a recapturing of how it had once felt to belong in a place without giving it any thought. Instead, writing about Iceland had become an act of the water, connecting islands that lay far apart – between them, the light blue sea and the dark waves, handfuls of water just beyond the fingertips.

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David Brooks is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, four short story collections and four novels. He has also written a major work of Australian literary history, The Sons of Clovis (UQP, 2011). His second novel, The Fern Tattoo, published by UQP in 2007, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His following novels, The Umbrella Club (UQP, 2009) and The Conversation (UQP, 2013), established him as one of Australia’s finest writers. Until 2013 he taught Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where he was also the Foundation Director of the Graduate Writing Program. He is a renowned editor and translator, formerly co-editor of Southerly, and was the 2015/16 Australia Council Fellow in Fiction. A vegan and animal rights advocate, he lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and spends several months each year in a village on the coast of Slovenia.

The Touch At seventy-three I finally learned something about the true nature of birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. So at the age of eighty I will have made some progress, at ninety I will have penetrated the deepest significance of things, at a hundred I will make real wonders and at a hundred and ten, every point, every line, will have a life of its own. –Hokusai

In September 2015 there were news reports that authorities had unearthed a three and a half tonne head of Lenin in a forest southeast of Berlin. The head, almost two metres high and carved from pink Ukrainian granite, was once part of a nineteen metre statue that stood for twenty years in the Leninplatz, partly encircled by prefabricated apartment towers. The statue, designed by Nikolai Tomsky, had been originally hauled to East Germany from Russia in numerous huge pieces, by a convoy of trucks.

In one of the author’s dreams he is standing on a dock with a small dog at his side, watching a huge barge arrive. On the barge are a tall, READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 258

muscular helmsman covered in sculpture dust, an elderly woman seated at the far side of the deck, and a young girl of three or four standing on the near-side, looking directly at him. Behind the helmsman, on a raised part of the deck, are massive blocks that appear to be sections of a huge statue of David. As the barge inches closer, the dog attempts to leap aboard but falls short and disappears in the turbulent water between the barge and the huge wooden piers.

He’d got sick of them, the thefts. One or two pieces every now and again, okay, but bags full? And so had built a strong iron gate at the entrance to the field. And a month later the bottles had started, up-ended on the spikes. Rilic, they all knew it was, the only one who’d kept the faith, or so he claimed: he who didn’t believe in property. But what do bottles signify? Rollo’d given up drinking years ago – even Rilic, famous for his binges, had given up drinking. Rollo suspected a dark irony somewhere, but how to read it?

In the 1995 movie Ulysses’ Gaze by the Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos the central character, played by Harvey Keitel, stands on a dock watching a large head being loaded onto a barge, along with other segments of a huge statue of Lenin. This character, himself a film director, known to us only as ‘A’, has come to the river port with a woman, with whom he has just, the night before, slept for the first time. On the dock he D AV I D B R OOK S 259

tells her that he cannot love her. She turns and walks off, to buy something for the journey they are about to take. The barge begins to move from the dock. Keitel at the last second runs towards it and leaps onto the deck, to travel, alone with the statue, up the Danube to Belgrade, leaving the woman on the steps of a building on the other side of the square, watching him go.

Late at night, unable to sleep, I find myself thinking about Sophia: how, when I was leaving the city, I saw her sleeping in her pile of rags in the white marble entrance to the Crédit Agricole. How I found her again, in a dream, on the long flight of stairs: the rushing, the pool of light, the people grouped about her body. How the stairs continued downward, into a further dark the dream didn’t let me bring anything back from. How I realised, years later, that the dream may have meant she was dying, that all along I might have known this without knowing.

Rollo hadn’t realised how far it had gone – no-one had – until the day Ugo, passing the upper field on his tractor, saw Rilic at Rollo’s potato patch and, coming back an hour later, glimpsed a bulging bag behind a bush at the entrance. He stopped and picked it up, brought it to Rollo, handed it to him at the door. READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 260

‘Why are you bringing me potatoes?’ Rollo asked. ‘I already have plenty.’ ‘Take them,’ Ugo said. ‘They’re yours anyway.’

The desire to be individual fashions us as Capitalism’s subject. One focuses upon oneself – is therefore divided from others – and bedecks that self so as to pronounce one’s difference. What we are led to think makes us stand out from the culture in fact makes us serve it the better. As we’re led to think we’re escaping we’re in fact running into a trap. Is this then a denunciation of individuality? No, individuality can be achieved in other ways. But it’s a warning that we must be aware of this double face, this trap, and seek means to avoid it. Ironically, humans are being led to the slaughter – consumed as they are consuming – much like the animals that are raised to be consumed by them.

I don’t know what route the trucks would have taken through Russia and Poland, on their way to East Germany, or what city they might have started from – the news reports didn’t say – but I imagine the groups of people in the towns and villages that must have gathered to watch them in amazement as they passed D AV I D B R OOK S 261

through. Such a vast statue! Of Lenin! In pieces! Where is it coming from? Where is it going? Why? The reports do say that the location of the buried pieces, in the forest south of Berlin, was never recorded – an unmarked grave – and that it was only by luck that a foreign film-maker, who’d made a documentary at the time, remembered. The workers detailed to take down the statue cut it into one hundred and twenty pieces. Were all of those pieces buried? Might some of them have been taken home, as mementoes, by members of the public? Imagine, in a corner of your garden, a great ear, a huge finger of Lenin!

The Great Wave, towering over the long boats that are like thumbnail moons against the dark sky of ocean, the men in them huddled, minuscule, bent in prayer or just against the impending blow of it. Tendrils of white water at the crest, or claws, animate, leonine. Huge paw of the worldbeast about to strike. Fuji – for this is one of the Thirty-six Views – far in the background, dwarfed by the peaks of sea, one of them, in the foreground, mimicking Fuji’s shape, the breast of it, blue, white-crested with snow. Clouds, cumulonimbus above it all, heavy with storm. In the print I have you could think the sky itself a vast wall of water about to obliterate everything, the Great Wave itself, the mountain, the fishermen, thought.

In her small third-floor apartment in an ancient building – once the house of a prosperous merchant – in the centre of the city, the lover of the author who, much later, will READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 262

dream of the barge carrying the segments of the huge statue of David, paints, on the bedroom ceiling, her own version of a famous detail from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – just the hands, with the tips of the fingers almost touching, that spark about to happen. When, as she is applying the final touches, a friend visits, she has them take a photograph of her, standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand, that she can send to the man who is yet to have that dream, who has only recently returned to his home in the antipodes. In the photograph, as she had hoped, the hands are just visible over her shoulder, among the opening clouds. When he receives the photograph, the author writes back to her that he longs to be laying beside her, staring up at the painting, holding her hand in his.

She told me of how, at twelve, she’d been buried in ash. ‘The whole city was covered,’ she said, ‘as if with black snow, and I was lifted out.’ An old woman by then, my grandmother, almost eighty, with her writhen hands like a hard, ancient landscape, and I myself just turned twelve. ‘It was so dark from the ash,’ she said, ‘we had to use candles in the middle of the day.’ That was the fourth year of Ho¯ei, a violent time, first a great earthquake and then, seven-by-seven days later, the mountain, pouring its ash for seventeen days. ‘We all thought the world was ending,’ she said. And I dreamt

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it that night for the first time, myself running, the mountain at my back, huddled against the blast of it.

In an earlier film by Angelopoulos, Landscape in the Mist, a girl and her young brother, searching for their lost father, stand in a harbour city watching a helicopter lifting a huge hand from the water. As it is lifted, the hand at first points towards the sea from which it has just come, though as it rises and is carried away it seems to point to everything. Remembering the famous hand from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it is hard not to think that what one is seeing fished from the harbour is the hand of God, somehow fallen to earth.

Rilic, the artist, upstairs light burning all hours of the night, chopping wood in the courtyard at five a.m. just to bedevil his neighbours’ sleep, then himself – deaf as a post – sleeping all day, through anything. Getting up in the late afternoon, going out at dusk with his bags, helping himself, a few tomatoes here, a few potatoes there, lettuce, peaches, plums, apricots, figs …

She seemed to take pleasure in sitting on the bench outside the chemist’s, legs apart, exposing herself. Not what you would call a pretty sight and I tried fairly successfully not to glance though it was not an easy situation. She would glare at me, as if singling me out, with a mixture of irritation and aggression – daring me READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 264

to look, I thought, so that she could then react, abuse, although I think another part of me feared she was staring into my soul. And I, my imagination haunted at the time by her of whom she was a kind of abject avatar, intrigued in my own way, wanting ‘information’, such as the eyes can get it. Repulsion/Attraction. Why can’t Philosophy be an angry, middle-aged, homeless woman at the Annandale shops, exposing her cunt?

Almost the entire population of the small riverside town has run to the riverbank to watch a barge crawling against the current carrying the huge sections of a statue northward. Lenin? Can it be Lenin? Young women carrying babies, old men with their walking sticks, workers and schoolchildren on their bicycles. One old woman is carrying a hen.

Such loneliness, and such destructive abandonment. We know almost all that we need to know, and yet look at us, acting as if we know nothing …

Leafing through a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, the woman who painted the almost-touching hands of God and Adam on her bedroom ceiling comes upon an advertisement featuring a photograph of a naked woman covered in chocolate, her hand D AV I D B R OOK S 265

held out towards the viewer with, in her palm, a large, ripe strawberry. She buys several large bars of chocolate and a punnet of strawberries and, taking them home to her apartment, asks her next-door neighbour to come, in precisely one hour, with his camera. In the interim she melts the chocolate, coats herself with it, then, climbing onto the sturdy kitchen table, which she has placed against a bare white wall for effect, sits cross-legged awaiting his arrival. Her neighbour, a doctoral student in Philosophy and a self-professed Marxist, has been attracted to her for some time, though he’s never had the courage to declare himself. Now he finds himself in the situation of being asked to take photographs of her naked, albeit covered in chocolate. It might almost be a dream come true, were it not attended by the bitter irony that he sees her thus only in the process of helping her prepare a message for another. He obliges, of course, and within a few days delivers her the photographs. She is so delighted to have them that it is several months before, prompted by her lover, she asks her neighbour for the negatives, by which time – or so he tells her – he can’t find them anywhere.

If it is fair to say the legacy of Lenin came to represent the great rival of Western Capitalism, then it is also fair to say that, with the READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 266

‘victory’ of Western Capitalism – its global saturation – Lenin has come to represent its repressed Other. Although it is perhaps also fair to ask whether it is Lenin himself who is the repressed, or whether the repressed is that body of ideas for which Lenin himself is only an avatar, a body of ideas which Lenin himself began to undermine through the harsh, paradoxical measures – purges, gulags – by which he and his successors set about the liberation of humanity. So that the Other which Lenin and his legacy have come to represent has come to have, in effect, its own, repressed Other.

In one of his other dreams the author who dreams of the barge carrying the segments of the huge statue of David watches, from a safe vantage on a cliff behind the waterfront, great waves about to overwhelm a coastal town, huge breakers, ten or fifteen metres high. It’s a recurrent dream. In one of its variations it is a valley further inland that he sees, its villages inundated as the water sweeps up from the distant sea. Sometimes he watches from a hilltop; sometimes he shelters in a great hall, with others, waiting for the water D AV I D B R OOK S 267

to strike. He does not need to interrogate this dream. He knows instinctively that a dream of huge, threatening waves foreshadows great upheaval. Is it coming to him alone? Or is it coming to everyone?

He’d been digging a well, Rollo, in the valley field, and four metres down they’d found it, a perfect stone, round as a bowling ball, that he’d taken home as proof there’d once been a river there. Dark greeny-black and flecked with mica, the size of a man’s head, it had, exactly at its equator, a hairline crack you could almost have thought a map of the river itself. That was in ’92, just after the end of Communism, and they’d used it, the stone, to prop open the door of the boot-room, to keep the place aired. They’d moved the boots eventually, and forgotten the stone. It was only when Maria went over to visit Anna Rilic and saw it in the middle of the new water feature that they realised it was gone.

Is that what they are? Each of these works, these books, a block of stone, to be heaved into place? Is that what they thought, some of those who watched, in the early hours, the cold morning, after the barge had passed?

Alone in his third-floor apartment the philosopher studies the photographs of his chocolate-covered neighbour. Some evenings he masturbates over them. Others he simply READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 268

gazes, ‘absorbing the text of her body’. The hair at her pubis, he thinks, is like the fur of a mouse with its back to him; the shape of her hand, as she offers the strawberry, reminds him of the shape of Adam’s, in the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

That – all that – and that, when I went looking, not looking for her but my eye cast out, there was eventually, instead, the raven, large, tousled, thick-necked, rummaging in the garbage bin beside her bench.

In another dream they are driving through the countryside, windows down, warm wind in their hair. The wild poet wants to show them the Grampians. They turn left at a sign and make for a settlement on a ridge, pull up at an old stone wall just before the houses. The author gets out and walks to the wall; the others walk into the village. Below the wall is a lake. Looking down into the water, he sees, at the base of an old tower adjacent to the wall, a sunken doorway, around which pale, fluted creatures are drifting. He watches them a long time, absorbed by their gentle movements, is wondering what they mean when he hears shouts. His friends have been captured. What can they have done? He is standing in the D AV I D B R OOK S 269

village square, helpless, trying to understand, when, on a roof opposite, a man appears from a doorway and moves slowly along a walkway to a wooden ladder. The man is tall, muscular, naked, covered in ochre, or is it sculpture-dust? He begins to descend. He is the Judge.

In the 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin! the top half of a statue of Lenin is carried by helicopter across recently reunified Berlin, its right arm outstretched as if offering something to the people below, or perhaps just gesturing to what the city has become. See what you have done! it might be saying, or Look at what has been done to you! But it is only the top half of the statue. The hand appears to be offering something simply because of the way this half is being carried. No doubt the hand originally gestured towards the heavens.

The woman whose lover is the author who later dreams of (etc.) marries that man and leaves the city, renting out her apartment in the merchant’s house. She repaints most of it but, in a rush to prepare it for her tenants, leaves the painting of the hands on the bedroom ceiling. One cannot help but wonder what subsequent tenants have found themselves thinking as they have lain on their bed there, looking upward.

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Did my mother wear a kimono of a blue like that? Was her breast so perfect, so secret? Did it ever have a mantle of snow? And the power, the force, the fury – what are they? My hands, how long have they looked so like rice fields, seen from a mountaintop?

What does the barge have to do with the great waves, the great waves to do with the dog or the pale, fluted creatures? What do the pale, fluted creatures have to do with the sunken tower, the sculptor to do with the helmsman, the helmsman to do with the Judge? Yet how can they be separated? When one of them appears the others come, as if they know but can no longer say, the script having been lost, the writer whose hands once offered it having died decades ago.

The outdated furniture thrown into the street. The rubble from the dismantled wall. The flea-markets brimming with junk, the clothing, crockery, household items that only a few months ago were prized possessions. For some this is not a result of liberation. For some it is as if a tsunami has hit, sweeping away a whole order of things.

The mountain-climbing Marxist philosopher who took the photograph of the chocolatecovered woman and who would not return the D AV I D B R OOK S 271

negatives, dies in a fall in the Austrian Alps five years afterwards. His body and the body of his uncle, with whom he was climbing, have not yet been recovered.

I wonder if some of the power of these great stone heads is because they are seen on their side or back, as if the body they belonged to, now gone, invisible, distributed, had been lying down. If they were upright, we’d be reminded of the statue they belonged to. In our minds they’d still be looking upon us from above, or out over us. Lying down, the impression is of some huge being sleeping, or at rest, still thinking.

What did they think, as they were falling?

‘What is the tree,’ she once asked me, ‘and where are the blooms? Are they outside us, or are they ourselves?’

It was only a stone, but it had rankled. First the fruit and the vegetables, then the bottles, now this. And all the borrowed tools he’d had to borrow back. A few days later, the heatwave broken, he’d gone over to Rilic’s when he knew he wasn’t there, to take the stone back, found the water feature dry and the stone in the middle of it, split almost exactly in half along the hairline crack. There was no way he could carry both halves, with his injured hand. He’d taken one and intended to come back for the other, but he’d READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 272

been distracted, the opportunity gone. It was only weeks later he realised that it had been then that the bottles – whoever it had been who had been placing them on the gate-spikes – had stopped.

The dog. He had worried so much about the dog, but later found him among the posts of the pier, on the other side, still dripping from his plunge but his tail erect with excitement as he sniffed about among the seaweed and the rotting fish …

Driftwood. I must draw myself like a piece of driftwood.

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Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Her first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award and was published by UQP in 2014. It went on to win the Dobbie Literary Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards’ Indigenous Writers Prize and was also shortlisted for The Stella Prize. Her debut collection of poetry, Comfort Food, was published by UQP in 2016.

18Cs For my mother, Paola Balla & Maddee Clark – whom I have learnt from 1.

calves strung on the massage table my body’s caught in a bad memory she says it can be overcome she says I respond well to firm pressure let this be my response. 2.

Carlton: walking to my new residence take three steps through what looks like finger and blood before I register: chips and sauce trams are waiting. 3.

community was so welcoming. it felt like my welcome here. 4.

sovereignty was never ceded. why do we need to reference the invasion, we are continuing our ancestors’ talk. I can close my eyes and you are gone – that’s the power of Country.

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5.

cut my hair today with nurse’s scissors for it’s my health I consider. where did the words on the street come from? and what will take away their protection? it’s just hair. 6.

commission into black deaths in custody, commission to write my name out a bunch of ways, to write a blog on safety, commission into black deaths in custody, my skull size was commissioned. this was a commission too. 7.

copycats are back. what you told my grandmother you told my mother you told me. there’s a crossover of words and tones and spins. copycats are back. 8.

careful with the way I pick up a pen, careful with my words, Mum taught me that, culture taught me that. 9.

culture cannot be multi not even for a politician’s convenience not even for a white man’s lie. still selling but the world’s cottoning on. 10.

class was nice, instructor was poetic, said practice was like coming home. noticed girl with sky blue jumper. saw her in the organics store after. mentioned jumper’s colour. she said it was like the walls of her first bedroom. a double comfort, I said, and helped her find ingredients for an orange almond cake until she said it was for her boyfriend.

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11.

created communities are a way to design our futures. 12.

colourblind is a common complaint. you claim you don’t see colour. how about I show you the colours on the awnings of your church, the posts of your university, the gates on your homes. let me illuminate cos you’re in the dark. 13.

chills. they didn’t bury you right. 14.

cost-effective Friday night dinners – how about I drink the salted water I soaked my toes in, how about I call Blackfella eats and ask them where the yams are, how about. 15.

Citizen was waiting for me at the bookstore. becoming a habit to walk home with brown paper parcels. I’m looking for comfort when my protection has gone. I’ve grown up to a world that was uglier than the one I was promised. I remember days where I would skip home. my feet would get this much off the ground. tell me where did all that hope go? 16.

can we be post-gravity too? post-cop-killers and post-take-thechildren-away. 17.

coast trip tomorrow can’t wait to be on the waves and see my location with a bit more perspective. E LLE N VA N NE ERV E N 277

18.

courage is telling them what you think of that play, that script they try and write us in will no longer contain us. bring me a new coat of oppression. this one’s wearing thin.

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AC K N OW L E DG EM E N TS

UQP would like to thank its contributors for generously offering their work for publication in Reading the Landscape. The following authors are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright material and acknowledge the following resources that inspired and informed their work: Mireille Juchau After the Strider, the Stranger —The line ‘After the strider, the stranger’ is from Georg Trakl’s poem ‘Limbo’ in Sebastian Dreaming, translation by James Reidel, Seagull Books, 2016. —The line ‘Better to live in a state of impermanence than one of finality’ is from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, translation by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969. —The extract ‘For the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality’ is from Theodor Adorno’s Notes to Literature 1, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Columbia University Press, 1994. -Gratitude is given to Rooan and Samira Al Kamashi for their generous help with Arabic and details on Iraq. Gabrielle Carey Like a Love Affair Thank you to the Australia Council for their generous support towards the writing and research into the life and work of Ivan A CK NOW LE D GE M E NTS 281

Southall; the National Library of Australia for permission to publish letters from the Ivan Southall Collection and Hazel de Berg Collection; and Susan Southall and Mark Mordue for kindly agreeing to be interviewed. The following books were referenced in this essay: — Southall, I, A Journey of Discovery: On writing for children, Macmillan, New York, 1976. — Steggall, S, The Loved and the Lost: The life of Ivan Southall, Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2006. — Ridge, J, The Book That Made Me, edited by Judith Ridge, Walker Books, Sydney, 2016. Larissa Behrendt The Smoke of Several Fires The following books were referenced in this essay: -Clendinnen, I, True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2008. -Gammage, B, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011. -Grenville, K, The Lieutenant, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2010. -Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, HREOC, Sydney, 1997. -Pascoe, B, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: agriculture or accident?, Magabala Books, Broome, 2014. Julie Koh The Lion The following lines were adapted from Recollections of Guy de Maupassant: by his Valet François by François Tassart, translated by Mina Round, John Lane, London, 1912: ‘Give me a light lunch, but let it be strengthening; two boiled eggs, a grilled steak, French beans, Gruyère cheese, and very hot tea’ / ‘a most active brain, READING T HE L A N D S C A P E 282

and intelligence of first-class order’ / ‘I should like to keep some hens, so as to be sure to have fresh eggs for breakfast … [B]ring [me] six hens and a fine cock’ / ‘great white bird’ / ‘When I am on my [great white bird, he tells me,] no-one can hunt me out’/ ‘I myself am without illusions[;] a solitary, a savage’ / ‘When I had embraced him he said twice very loud “Guy! Dear Guy!” as he used to do in the garden of Verguies when he called me [to] play … I wiped with my handkerchief his poor dimmed eyes’ / [a] shadow, a phantom! / ‘I beg you to leave me … I refuse to see you any longer’ / ‘“See, François,” [he says,] “what I have done. I have cut my throat. This is a case of absolute madness.”’ The following book was also of assistance in researching ‘The Lion’: -Steegmuller, F, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path, Macmillan London Limited, London and Basingstoke, 1972. Peter Carey The Road to St Lucia The following book was referenced in this memoir: -Munro, C, Under Cover: Adventures in the art of editing, Scribe, Melbourne, 2015.

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