Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  As is the way with dreams, the kitchen, which is my kitchen even though it doesn’t look like my kitchen, is not my kitchen at all. It belongs to the Belgians, who are apparently away.

  The butcher has been asking the housekeeper out for many months without the slightest indication of return interest on her part. Whenever she visits his shop he is playful (in a light, deft way, not in the clichéd manner of men of his trade); she is dour. He is comfortable with her refusals and expects nothing of her, but her directness intrigues him and his continuing invitations remain sincere.

  One day, a day not dissimilar to any other, the woman capitulates, agreeing to an outing. The butcher is surprised but pleased. It is clear she has not weakened on the spur of the moment, but in fact seems to have come into the shop with her mind made up. There is nothing to say why she has made this decision, but there is no doubt it has been arrived at rationally, and with grave reluctance.

  As proof of her premeditation we somehow know she has been to a beauty salon to get her (late) middle-aged body attended to: legs waxed to the line of her underpants, feet soaked and softened, calluses pared back, toenails cut (she refuses all offers of varnish and even clear lacquer). She has had these basics done to make nakedness possible. To do more to the body would have been to attempt a stupid lie, a lie she has no patience for.

  All this she has done in a resigned, practical way, baring herself to the young beautician as one might to a doctor performing an invasive medical examination—deliberately not entering mentally into the details.

  And the couple’s outing? What was the nature of their outing? There is nothing to say what their outing was, but for certain it was short. The woman did not want to play getting-to-know-you in a restaurant, holding a glass of rosé. Perhaps they stayed in for a drink. Why not? They had the house to themselves; the Belgians are away.

  In the kitchen the next morning, the butcher is cheerful as he tends the pan, spatula in hand. He has the interior energy and constancy of the optimist in him. She, of course, is a pessimist. He accepts her slumped posture at the bench and her frank observation of him without taking it as a comment. Her negative presence is just as strong as his positive, and it carries just as much life force.

  •

  When I enter the kitchen to make coffee they are not there. Clean benches. Almost sterile. And yet the strong sense they were lately here, the man at the stove, the woman on the stool. The pan with its red, red halves of tomatoes.

  In my kitchen, while I slept, these people have been. And in the rippling disturbance they have left behind, I see and admire their mature courage.

  •

  For three years I have not written any fiction. My just-gone visitors make me realise how much I miss it. Though they were only here briefly, I liked them both a good deal.

  All day the house feels nicely balanced, empty and full at the same time.

  The History of Lawn Mowing

  These days when I’m mowing the grassy knoll in front of the holiday house, I always think of the writer Georgia Blain. I didn’t know Georgia personally, but friends of mine did. By their accounts, and Georgia’s own, she loved the domestic chore of mowing.

  I get it. The physical push and pull of it, the purposeful striding when there’s a long straight stretch and the way the motor’s ear-filling roar puts a bubble around you (although Georgia’s mower was manual, so she didn’t experience that bonus). There’s the joy of the transformation wrought, the domestic space brought to order, made inviting, hospitable, comfortable, beautiful for those you love, as well as the world at large. And there’s the undeniable satisfaction of completing a definable task, with discernible results, in a relatively short space of time. The great pleasure of this last should not be underestimated for a writer.

  So I’m mowing and I’m thinking of Georgia, in a celebratory, sisterhood kind of way, even though it was in the midst of this act that Georgia was felled. In her backyard, on a vivid, good-humoured day of sunshine, she had a seizure. It was the unwanted herald of unwanted news: the first symptom of a brain tumour of the worst kind. Felled, smote, struck down. By sudden visitation, her life was changed.

  While I’m mowing, I don’t think about the months of awfulness and the steady losses that ensued for Georgia and her family, although I’ve read what she wrote about that time, and have an imagination I can use. Instead I deliberately keep it simple: I just mow for us both, in cheerful acknowledgement of that woman’s sensible pleasure. And with respect for the sharpness of life; for the way, as Georgia’s story demonstrates, life so often does that bittersweet thing of being fucked up and apt at the same time.

  Georgia’s companionship adds a new element to the job of mowing, but for me, here, it has never been a thoughtless task.

  •

  I keep the mower around the back, under the house. The house sits lengthways on the tiny block of land and there’s a good dry waist-high space at the western end where the ground slopes away towards the place next door and the bay. The dirt under the house is grey/black and so dry it’s almost dust. Years ago I put an old carpet there that we were going to throw out, and I park the mower on top of that. To retrieve the machine I crouch down and waddle in a little, past the brick pilings on which the house rests. As I shuffle in I kick more dust onto the carpet and always a couple of shells. Beyond the rectangle of carpet are more shells, hundreds of, thousands of shells and parts of shells: cockles, whelks and more cockles upon cockles; bleached by age, they white-fleck the dirt. Shells that must be, there in the topsoil, more than 200 years old. I do not know how deep they go or how far they extend. Mixed with them, here and there, and over there and there and there, are small pieces of broken asbestos sheeting. Ranging in size from a thumbnail to a saucer.

  •

  My elderly neighbours tell me the house was brought here on a barge. At least, that’s the story they were told, in turn, by an old-timer. When might that have been? I ask, but they don’t know for sure. Maybe the forties. When building materials were scarce because of the war. Everything was reused, repurposed, materials scavenged.

  Almost every window in the place is different, so the dating makes sense.

  When it sailed in, the house would probably have been just its core self: a little oblong wooden box, compartmentalised into three rooms of equal size, side by side, with a verandah running along the front and around each short end. Only afterwards would the verandahs have been closed in with fibro sheeting to make what are now the other rooms.

  For many years, I believe, the house was used as a rough fishing shack, and perhaps went unattended or even abandoned for long periods. It may have been vandalised, the fibro bashed in then replaced. Easy to throw the broken asbestos pieces under the house. There to mix histories with the midden on which the house was set. There to wait and disintegrate into poison fibres.

  •

  When we holidayed in this area as kids we never knew anything of the Aboriginal people who lived here first. We knew of middens (rubbish tips, my dad said they were, but it was an engineer’s cut-and-dried comment, recognition of the universal need for such an amenity, and left at that), and there was also hearsay of paintings in a cave in the bush, high up on the hill behind the old house we stayed in. (The cave was too far away for little legs to travel, I was told. I did not know where it was, and I never went.) But what seems astonishing today, in these comparatively enlightened times, is that the middens, the cave, were somehow completely disassociated from any actual people. And so it never occurred to me to think of Aboriginal men, women and children once walking the same tracks I walked, or fishing or watching the waterway as I was so fond of doing. Nor did I know of or wonder about those families’ dispossession. I grew up in, was schooled in, that long era of deliberate and coordinated white forgetting.

  Though I try to pick up whatever bits of information I can, specific, local knowledge about Indigenous life is more than ordinarily difficult to obtain, for good reason. The country of the
Central Coast belongs to the Guringai and Darkinjung people, but the boundaries are unclear, and the names of the smaller groups who made their home here are unknown. The smallpox that the first colonisers brought with them quickly spread to this region from Sydney, devastating the population. The few survivors were isolated, their families and clan networks destroyed.

  Settlers took over the land early, because it was easily accessible by boat, and most of the first people were gone. They set up subsistence farms, cut timber, and for decades dug out the most convenient middens, sending the shell to Sydney for lime burning; lime to make the mortar which would build the city.

  Rudimentary archaeological surveys carried out in the 1970s and 80s show what common sense should already have known—this little peninsula was resource rich and a favoured place of occupation for Aboriginal people. In these few square miles over 80 sites and middens have been logged. When I go walking now, I see evidence of the busy activity of Indigenous living everywhere. By the estuary, more middens (which we understand now as campsites where people prepared and ate food around cook fires, and where, on occasion, the dead were buried), while up on the ridgelines every rock platform is worth a second look for grinding grooves or engravings. Fire trails cut into the orange soils often have, exposed in their banked sides, patches of white clay suitable for painting body or cave.

  Like Mungo Man rising from the ground to show himself, it seems the old people and the old ways are coming forward to instruct. When a recent spot fire swept through a section of bush at Box Head, a rock platform was revealed just off the track. On it were engravings of a boomerang and two decorated shields, also the pecked outline of a fish, just begun. Strong winds have since stripped the burnt leaves from the trees. They lie as litter, perhaps to be scattered back over the rock by the next blow, the process of covering beginning again, to keep the site safe for another generation.

  On exposed plateaus some of the engravings are worn faint and almost away, but on one the firm outline of a kangaroo jumps strongly alive. From that platform both the coastline and the hinterland may be viewed: it is close to the sky. I can imagine how powerful it would be, to stand there in full possession of the encyclopaedic knowledge that belongs to that spot, to know all its songs and stories—stories in which law, land, food and culture are indivisible.

  Wherever humans are, landscape is not long without culture. I was born in Australia, but to my interactions with the natural world I bring the Western tradition of art, and Western systems of knowledge. They’re what I was given. And so Milton and Galileo and Van Gogh appear in my writing, to help me describe and make meaning from my estuary. They are an inadequate fit but I make the best of it. I say to that art, that thinking: You’re here in this country now, so come on. Bend yourselves to perform in local conditions. Come out of your cathedrals and museums and work for me here.

  But the great forgetting is lifting. Indigenous knowledge is beginning to be valued by non-Indigenous Australia, and, with enormous generosity, Aboriginal people have responded, sharing what is appropriate, to offer a glimpse of this country’s greater inheritance and belonging.

  Children will grow up knowing much more detail about their own country than I did. And always when there is knowing, something new can be made from it.

  •

  When I put the mower back under the house, the asbestos scraps I see there remind me of a visit I once paid to the matriarch of a settler family. She lived in a huge old mansion on the family spread in the Southern Highlands. I was to interview her for an article I was writing and she kindly invited me to stay the night so our conversation could extend.

  As soon as I pulled up to the steps of the mansion in my old Toyota Camry, the front door opened and Janet popped out to greet me. She was nimble-bodied and, in smart, figure-hugging casuals, was youthfully dressed for her 80 years of age—and friendly. On the verandah she looked down and said, ‘Oh, don’t mind that, watch out,’ and tapped her foot towards an enormous blob of bird shit. We proceeded inside to the hallway, down which I could have driven the Camry, with plenty of room either side.

  First, we got my few things into the ground-floor bedroom I’d been allocated, and then we headed off to the kitchen—all at a kind of skip to cover the distances—while Janet kept up an absent-minded commentary. ‘Can you smell something? The kids came up yesterday and said there was a smell. Must be a dead rat under the house somewhere, but they brought up the dogs and couldn’t find anything.’

  Indeed, there was a smell. It was especially putrid down the end of the kilometre-long hallway near the dining room, through which one had to go to access the homely kitchen, passing a mahogany table which could easily have accommodated twenty. As we travelled, the rat smell—like super-intensified dampness mixed with fertiliser—curled around the warrened corners of the house, absent in one room but unexpectedly reappearing in another.

  ‘I haven’t turned the central heating on,’ said Janet. ‘Don’t want to spread it.’

  Later, carrying a drinks tray into a sitting area under the complicated stairway in the baronial hall where there was an open fire, she said, ‘Yes, I think there is something there.’

  That there could be any doubt was a wonder to me. As she handed me a biscuit piled with smoked trout, I mildly agreed.

  That night as I lay in bed I thought I could detect whiffs of it entering, hanging in layers in the air. I tried to school myself to think of something else. But then, perhaps, there was another whiff. Past the dark shapes in the room—the queen bed and the single bed, the divan, the big wardrobe and two dressing tables—in it crept, for sure. Those clammy whiffs, falling in slow motion, must be settling on my sheets. I thought of the clothes I’d left out hanging and the smell of death climbing in.

  I could not sleep. I was Lockwood in his closet-bed in Wuthering Heights, suffering visions.

  •

  In the afternoon we had gone on a tour of the house—well, of most of the ground floor. I wasn’t invited upstairs. Rooms led on to rooms. We saw the library where the property records were kept; the billiard room (the table an acre of faded green baize, the faded lampshades above it tilted and broken); a couple of sitting rooms; a bar, probably once a butler’s pantry but now like something from a 1970s beer commercial; the backstairs for the long-gone servants; and sundry utility rooms beyond the kitchen. But under Janet’s reign the grand old house was trying its hardest to be a cosy family home, and photos of her kids and grandkids jostled for prominence on every available surface. On the walls were numerous execrable abstract paintings done by Janet, all huge and all red, mixed in with what I was sure were important Australian artworks, but the tour proceeded at such a clip there was no time to look. Everywhere I glanced there was a hotchpotch of good stuff and rubbish, all in different stages of neglect. And so much furniture. Because the rooms were so large. Even the bathroom across the hall from my bedroom could have been measured in acres. The shower, the bath, the toilet and the pedestal wash basin stood at lonely distances far apart. The white shower stall (cavernous) was stained orange with rust. A clear plastic mat, which was mouldy underneath, was provided to stand on. Mercifully, the shower curtain, also mouldy, hung arms-lengths away. The ceiling there, as elsewhere, was about 6 metres high: impossible to clean or fix easily where it was dirty and broken. I thought of Janet’s grandchildren who, when they all piled in to visit at Christmastime, must racket around the house, simultaneously thrilled and repelled by all they saw, noticing every detail and strangeness. I imagined them in the bath, wide-eyed.

  Despite numerous drinks in the alcove by the stairs, Janet effortlessly produced a lovely little evening meal of marinated chicken; though she was impatient with the broccolini by the time she got to it, giving it repeated hurry-up stabs, knife into the pot, as it boiled. She had little candles dotted around the kitchen table at which we sat; and there was more wine and ice cream later. She didn’t ever ask would I like this or that, she just put things in front of me in a confide
nt, generous way—a countrywoman provider, though on the genteel end of the scale. We talked easily about the pioneering years and the consolidation of the property, its vastness in the golden days when several brothers and their families occupied the mansion, making sense of all those rooms that now only Janet rattled around in. There were tales of lean years and learning the land; digressions on this family member or that who went away, came back, made a fortune in finance, was the country’s leading expert in rose growing, dug silage pits to save the place from drought, was tough but fair; there was gossip about city apartments and duties in town, about prominent neighbours and famous visitors.

  In the morning I was prickle-eyed from lack of sleep and slightly hungover, but Janet was fresh. She insisted on driving me around on a quick tour of the property’s nearest buildings. There was a beautiful old shearing shed (good for parties for the kids, Janet said), there was a schoolhouse, a family chapel, several original cottages, the property’s own store.

  And then, at last, I was released. I climbed into the Camry and headed home.

  I’d had a good time. Janet was excellent company and we’d had many laughs; she was a kind woman. But as I drove off I had a better appreciation of the complexities of living with history. Everything in that house had the strings of its provenance attached, and the same would be true outside for every paddock and every windmill and trough. I could absolutely understand the impulse if the next inheritor wanted to walk away, to start living on new terms. The place was an encumbrance, built on something false. It was telling that, in all our discussion, the topic of how Janet’s family first took their land was never raised, by either of us.