by David Malouf
Those four and a half acres were an eyesore—that's the council's line: openly in communication, through the coming and going of native animals and birds, or through seeds that can travel miles on a current of air, with the wilderness that by fits and starts, in patches here and great swathes of darkness there, still lies like a shadow over even the most settled land, a pocket of the dark unmanageable, that troubles the sleep of citizens by offering a point of re-entry to memories they have no more use for—unruly and unsettling dreams. Four and a half acres.
Boys riding past it on their way to school are caught by a sudden impulse, and with a quick look over their shoulder, turn in there and are gone for the day on who knows what adventures and escapades.
Driving slowly past it, you see a pair of boots sticking out from under a bush. At eight thirty in the morning! A drunk, or some late-night rover who has been knocked on the head and robbed. A flash of scarlet proclaims the presence of firetails lighting the grass.
Jacko's Reach: once known, and so marked on older maps, as Jago's. How, and at what point, by what slip of the tongue or consonantal drift, did the name lurch backwards into an earlier, not-quite-forgotten history, so that the white man's name became a black one and the place reverted, if only in speech, to its original owner's? Jacko's.
For as long as anyone can remember the people who had a legal right to the Reach, and are responsible for its lying unkept and unimproved, are Sydneysiders, but there are no Jacks or Jagos among them. They themselves have fallen back to a single remnant, a Miss Hardie of Pymble, who claims to have been a pupil of Patti, speaks with a German accent, and sold Jacko's over the telephone, they say, for a song.
It is a place you have to have seen and been into if you are to have any grasp of it. Most of all, you have to have lived with it as the one area of disorder and difference in a town that prides itself on being typical: that is, just like everywhere else. Or you have to have been hearing, for as long as you can recall, the local stories about the place, not all of them fit to be told—which does not mean that they are not endlessly repeated. Or you have to have lost something there—oh, years back. A little Eiffel Tower off a charm bracelet, or your first cigarette lighter, which you have never given up hope of kicking up again, and go searching for in sleep. Or you have to have stumbled there on something no one had warned you of.
Back before the First World War, two bullockies (they must have been among the last of their kind) settled a quarrel there. No one knows what it was about, but one party was found, the next day, with his skull smashed. The other had disappeared. The bullocks, no longer yoked to the wagon, had been left to wander.
Then, two days later, the second bullocky turned up again, hanging by his belt from a bloodwood. An eight-year-old, Jimmy Dickens, out looking for a stray cow and with the salt taste of porridge in his mouth and that day's list of spellings in his head, looked up and saw, just at eye-level, a pair of stockinged feet, and there he was, all six feet of him, pointing downwards in the early light. Old Jimmy was still telling the story, in a way that could make the back of your neck creep, fifty years later, in my youth.
The facts of the case had got scrambled by every sort of romantic speculation, but it was the awe of that dumbstruck eight-year-old as he continued to look out, in a ghostly way, through the eyes of the gaunt old-timer, that was the real story. That, and the fact that it was still there, the place, and had a name. You could go out yourself and take a look at it. That particular patch of Jacko's, that tree, had been changed for ever, and become, for all of us who knew the story, the site of something you could touch. A mystery as real as the rough bark of the tree itself, it could change the mood you were in, and whatever it was you had slipped in there to get away from or do.
Well, that's Jacko's for you.
When I was seven or eight years old we used to play Cops and Robbers there. It seemed enormous. Just crossing it from the main road to the river gave you some idea, at the back of your knees, of the three hundred million square miles and of Burke and Wills.
Later it became the place for less innocent games, then later again of games that were once again innocent, though some people did not think so. Jacko's became a code-word for something as secret as what you had in your pants: which was familiar and close, yet forbidden, and put you in touch with all the other mysteries.
The largest of those you would come to only later; in the meantime, Jacko's, just the word alone, fed your body's heated fantasies, and it made no odds somehow that the scene of those fantasies was a place you had known for so long that it was as ordinary as your own backyard. It was changed, it was charged. And why shouldn't it be? Hadn't your body worked the same trick on you? And what could be more familiar than that?
What Jacko's evoked now was not just the dusty tracks with their dried leaves and prickles that your bare feet had travelled a thousand times and whose every turning led to a destination you knew and had a name for, but a place, enticing, unentered, for which the old name, to remain appropriate, had to be interpreted in a new way, as if it had belonged all the time to another and secret language. Girls especially could be made to blush just at the mention of it, if your voice took on a particular note. For them too it had a new interest, however much they pretended.
Those four and a half acres, dark under the moon on even the starriest nights, could expand in the heat of Christmas and the months towards Easter till they filled a disproportionate area of your head.
On sultry nights when you had all the sheets off, they suggested a wash of air that could only be fresher and cooler on the skin, a space you could move in with the sort of freedom you had known away back when you were a kid. You walked out there in your sleep and found it crowded. There were others. You met and touched. And those who were bold enough, or sufficiently careless of their reputation, or merely curious about the boundary of something too vague for the moment to be named, actually went there, in couples or foursomes. They weren't disappointed exactly, but they came out feeling that their mothers had exaggerated. There was no danger, except in what people might make of it through talk, and about that their mothers had not exaggerated, not at all.
Valmay Mitchell was thirteen. She got no warning from her mother because she did not have one. She lived with her father in an old railway hut out on the line.
Every fellow of my generation knows Valmay's name. If she were to come back here, to take a last look at Jacko's for instance before it goes under for ever, she would be astonished at her fame.
She was a plain, blonde little thing who left school in the sixth grade. She wore dresses that were too big for her, went barefoot, and her one quality that anyone recalls was her eagerness to please. She would do anything—that was the news. Then one day, when we were all in the seventh grade, she disappeared. She was nowhere to be found.
People immediately thought the worst. Valmay Mitchell was the sort of girl that acts of violence, which haunt the streets like ghosts on the lookout for a body they can fill, are deeply drawn to. She had last been seen going into Jacko's with a boy on a bike. Which boy? He was found—it was the bike that gave him away—but never publicly identified, though we all knew his name. He admitted he and Valmay had been in there. They had both come out. But Valmay stayed missing. They combed Jacko's inch by inch and found no trace of her, though some of the searchers found things they, or others, had lost there and had spent years looking for. It was a real treasure-trove that came out of the hunt for Valmay. You could have weighed her against the heap of it and the heap would have weighed more.
They dug in places where the ground was disturbed, they dragged the river. Nothing.
Rumours flew about. She had been seen getting into a car—a Holden, or a Ford ute, or a Customline—poor little thing! It was her innocence now, suddenly restored, that people were drawn to. Then the news came back that she was in Sydney, in a Salvation Army Home, having a baby. One boy got a postcard from her. Several others spent anxious days in the weeks afterwa
rds running out to waylay the postman in the fear that she might drop them a line as well. They are middle-aged now, my generation. One is our local baker, another a real-estate agent, another a circuit judge. Our lives these days barely cross. One of them does odd jobs out at the golf course and we exchange a few words now and then. Not about Valmay Others I see driving their daughters to dances or calling for them afterwards, just as in the old days, or at football matches where their grandsons are playing.
Still, it's an older fellowship we share than the ones we belong to now, Rotary, or the Lions, or the BMA; and in a ghostly, dreamy area of ourselves, some of us are still willing to acknowledge it. The gangs we ran with back there, whose passionate loyalties did not last—the scratch teams for rounders, with captains choosing in turn. You can look about, if you have an eye for these things, at a public meeting where people are vociferously taking sides, or round the spectators at a concert, or in the thin gathering at an Anzac Day service, and re-form, in a ghostly way, those older groups, and see something that is oddly moving: darker loyalties, deeper affinities, submerged now under the more acceptable ones. The last luminous grains of a freer and more democratic spirit, that the husbands and wives of my generation still turn to in dreams. It's like having the power to see into someone's pocket, where among the small change and dustballs he is still turning over a favourite taw.
It is this, all this, that will go under the bars of neon lights and the crowded shelves and trolleys of the supermarket, the wheels of skateboards, the bitumen walks and solid, poured-concrete ramps.
Jacko's, as we knew it, will enter at last into what a century and more has already prepared it for, the dimension of the symbolic. Which is of course what it has always been, though the grit of it between your bare toes and the density of its undergrowth, the untidy mass of it against the evening sky, for a long time obscured the fact. After all, you don't lose something as palpable as a solid silver cigarette lighter, not to speak of your innocence, in a place that is purely symbolic. Or gash your foot there so that you carry for ever after the consequent scar. Or stand, day after day, waiting to be called as the possible ninth, the tenth man of a team, in an agony of humiliation you feel may never end.
So it will be gone and it won't be. Like everything else.
Under.
Where its darkness will never quite be dispelled, however many mushroom-lights they install in the parking lot.
Where it will go on pushing up under the concrete, reaching for the wilderness further out that its four and a half acres have always belonged to and which no documents of survey or deeds of ownership or council ordinances have ever had the power to cancel. The possibility of building over it was forestalled the moment it got inside us. As a code-word for something so intimate it can never be revealed, an area of experience, even if it is deeply forgotten, where we still move in groups together, and touch, and glow, and spring apart laughing at the electric spark. There has to be some place where that is possible.
If there is only one wild acre somewhere we will make that the place. If they take it away we will preserve it in our head. If there is no such place we will invent it. That's the way we are.
Lone Pine
Driving at speed along the narrow dirt highway, Harry Picton could have given no good reason for stopping where he did. There was a pine. Perhaps it was that—its deeper green and conical form among the scrub a reminder out here of the shapeliness and order of gardens, though this particular pine was of the native variety.
May was sleeping. For the past hour, held upright by her seatbelt, she had been nodding off and waking, then nodding off again like a comfortable baby. Harry was used to having her doze beside him. He liked to read at night, May did not. It made the car, which was heavy to handle because of the swaying behind of the caravan, as familiar almost as their double bed.
Driving up here was dreamlike. As the miles of empty country fell away with nothing to catch the eye, no other vehicle or sign of habitation, your head lightened and cleared itself of thoughts, of images, of every wish or need. Clouds filled the windscreen. You floated.
The clouds up here were unreal. They swirled up so densely and towered to such an infinite and unmoving height that driving, even at a hundred Ks an hour, was like crawling along at the bottom of a tank.
A flash of grey and pink flared up out of a dip in the road. Harry jerked the wheel. Galahs! They might have escaped from a dozen backyard cages, but were common up here. They were after water. There must have been real water back there that he had taken for the usual mirage. Like reflections of the sky, which was pearly at this hour and flushed with coral, they clattered upwards and went streaming away behind.
“May,” he called. But before she was properly awake they were gone. “Sorry, love,” she muttered. “Was it something good?” Still half-asleep, she reached into the glovebox for a packet of lollies, unwrapped one, passed it to him, then unwrapped another and popped it into her mouth. Almost immediately she was dozing again with the lolly in her jaw, its cherry colour seeping through into her dreams.
They were on a trip, the first real trip they had ever taken, the trip of their lives.
Back in Hawthorn they had a paper run. Seven days a week and twice on weekdays, Harry tossed the news over people's fences on to the clipped front lawns: gun battles in distant suburbs, raids on marijuana plantations, bank holdups, traffic accidents, baby bashings, the love lives of the stars.
He knew the neighbourhood—he had to: how to get around it by the quickest possible route. He had got that down to a fine art. Conquest of Space, it was called, just as covering it all twelve times a week in an hour and a quarter flat was the Fight against Time. He had reckoned it up once. In twenty-seven years bar a few months he had made his round on ten thousand seven hundred occasions in twelve thousand man-hours, and done a distance of a hundred thousand miles. That is, ten times round Australia. Those were the figures.
But doing it that way, piecemeal, twice a day, gave you no idea of what the country really was: the distances, the darkness, the changes as you slipped across unmarked borders.
Birds that were exotic down south, like those galahs, were everywhere up here, starting up out of every tree. The highways were a way of life with their own population: hitch-hikers, truckies, itinerant fruit-pickers and other seasonal workers of no fixed address, bikies loaded up behind and wearing space helmets, families with all their belongings packed into a station wagon and a little girl in the back waving or sticking out her tongue, or a boy putting up two fingers in the shape of a gun and mouthing Bang, Bang, You're Dead, kids in panel-vans with a couple of surfboards on the rack chasing the ultimate wave. Whole tribes that for one reason or another had never settled. Citizens of a city the size of Hobart or Newcastle that was always on the move. For three months (that was the plan), he and May had come out to join them.
Back in Hawthorn a young fellow and his wife were giving the paper run a go. For five weeks now, their home in Ballard Crescent had been locked up, empty, ghosting their presence with a lighting system installed by the best security firm in the state that turned the lights on in the kitchen, just as May did, regular as clockwork, at half past five; then, an hour later, lit the lamp in their living room and flicked on the TV; then turned the downstairs lights off again at nine and a minute later lit the reading lamp (just the one) on Harry's side of the bed in the front bedroom upstairs.
Harry had spent a good while working out this pattern and had been surprised at how predictable their life was, what narrow limits they moved in. It hadn't seemed narrow. Now, recalling the smooth quilt of their bed and the reading lamp being turned on, then off again, by ghostly hands, he chuckled. It'd be more difficult to keep track of their movements up here.
There was no fixed programme—they took things as they came. They were explorers, each day pushing on into unknown country. No place existed till they reached it and decided to stop.
“Here we are, mother,” Harry would say,
"home sweet home. How does it look?"—and since it was seldom a place that was named on the map they invented their own names according to whatever little event or accident occurred that made it memorable—Out-of-Nescaf Creek, Lost Tin-opener, One Blanket—and before they drove off again Harry would mark the place on their road map with a cross.
This particular spot, as it rose out of the dusk, had already named itself. Lone Pine it would be, unless something unexpected occurred.
“Wake up, mother,” he said as the engine cut. “We're there.”
TWO HOURS LATER they were sitting over the remains of their meal. The petrol lamp hissed, casting its light into the surrounding dark. A few moths barged and dithered. An animal, attracted by the light or the unaccustomed scent, had crept up to the edge of a difference they made in the immemorial tick and throb of things, and could be heard just yards off in the grass. No need to worry. There were no predators out here.
Harry was looking forward to his book. To transporting himself, for the umpteenth time, to Todgers, in the company of Cherry and Merry and Mr. Pecksniff, and the abominable Jonas—he had educated himself out of Dickens. May, busily scrubbing their plates in a minimum of water, was as usual telling something. He did not listen.
He had learned over the years to finish the Quick Crossword while half tuned in to her running talk, or to do his orders without making a single blue. It was like having the wireless on, a comfortable noise that brought you bits and pieces of news. In May's case, mostly of women's complaints. She knew an inordinate number of women who had found lumps in their breasts and gone under the knife, or lost kiddies, or had their husbands go off with younger women. For some reason she felt impelled to lay at his feet these victims of life's grim injustice, or of men's unpredictable cruelty, as if, for all his mildness, he too were one of the guilty. As, in her new vision of things, he was. They all were.