She perches on the edge of the cane extender. ‘Okay, fire away.’
‘Well, it’s got that pale green chest, obviously, and a yellowish head with little white stripes across the top. And it’s got black stripes along the edges of its wings.’
‘What colour is the beak?’
‘The beak is … is … dark grey, I think, I can’t quite see … damn, it’s flown off. I’ll try and spot the other one.’ He turns his head to the left and scans the fine lacy foliage of the wattle. ‘Nope, can’t find it. They’ve both gone.’ He puts down the binoculars. ‘Show me the book. I’ll identify it while it’s fresh in my mind.’
Of course, he can’t. It’s only in the evening when they are sitting on the veranda after dinner that Anna finds the colour plate that she is sure closely resembles what she observed with her naked eye. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘that’s it. Striated Pardalote. It says here they’re migratory birds who travel south in spring to breed and fly away in winter. They can be identified by their yellow eyebrow and white striations on the crown. Striations,’ she adds emphatically, ‘not spots.’
‘Show me.’ He takes the book from her and stares at the colour plate. ‘Brilliant,’ he says. And they go to bed with a sense of satisfaction. They’ve only been on the coast a month and already they have identified a pardalote. Until now they had never even heard of one.
This house. This house is their kingdom. It’s as if they were dispossessed of this house at birth and have at last reclaimed their entitlement. Instead of being confined to a boxed-in apartment they are free now to roam through its many rooms, to experience the joy of nooks and alcoves, not to mention their favourite hang-out, the wide veranda. In the city they had a small balcony off their apartment, but it wasn’t the same. You looked out to a smoggy curtain across the built-up sky or down a long drop to the bitumen road below. You were not earthed. What you desired was a space between two worlds, that dream-like threshold where you are neither in nor out but floating in a cradle of space, but you wanted also at any moment to be able to step off the veranda and onto firm ground. You were an earth animal, not a bird; you did not want to nest in the sky.
And the boy, too, loves the veranda; he likes to run the full length of it, trailing a long stick behind him that makes a loud, rackety clattering sound. Along the south corner Luke has strung up a rainbow-striped hammock and sometimes they look out on a still day and see the hammock swinging wildly and they know that the boy is enveloped in its folds.
In the city Luke rented a one-room office in a renovated warehouse while Anna worked from home in a tiny second bedroom overlooking a grimy fire-escape. Here, Luke has only to climb a let-down ladder to his sun-struck eyrie in the roof, a glassed-in attic he has converted into an office, while Anna retires to the back sunroom where she can look west to the smoky blue hills. He rises early, she tends to sleep in, but on all other fronts they observe a strict discipline. They even take their coffee breaks separately because it would be too easy to lounge together in the shade of the veranda and drift for an hour into idle conversation. Often Luke will carry his coffee out to the rickety Juliet balcony off the attic, for it looks across to the ocean and here he can study the local surfers, those sleek wetsuited truants of the moment. He thinks of them as black birds of the surf, paddling out beyond the reef off Rittler’s Point and riding the autumn swells in lithe, crouching postures so that they resemble some weird form of sea-bird looking for a kill.
Early in March they prepare a garden. They work in the late afternoons, digging into a sandy soil flecked with greyish white fragments of shell that tell them they are working over a midden. Luke uses some old fence palings to box in two vegetable beds and buys a trailer-load of rich brown soil from a farmer in the hills. He covers it all with green shade-cloth stretched over a structure of rubber tubing because the sun is too hot and without shade the seedlings will burn. Before they came to Garra Nalla, neither of them had used so much as a trowel. Now they have calluses on their hands and the pleasure of rhythmic physical movements, like raking leaves, can bring on a state of mindless contentment. Often the boy appears to play alongside them, whirling around in the dust or darting mischievously among the weed piles and throwing clumps of weed into the air. Sometimes he sings snatches of nursery songs in a thin, childish lilt that is charmingly off-key. At such times his parents do not look one another in the eye; the weighty joy of it would be too much.
But this is not Eden, this is drought country. Behind the coast are hills of dry sclerophyll forest and between the hamlet and the forest are pastures cleared for sheep, grasslands that are dried out and dun-coloured from seven years of drought. There is rain in the hills, though not as much as there used to be, and there are times when the locals gaze up longingly at the caressing mist that occasionally settles over the low peaks on the horizon. Seven years of drought: it has begun to sound biblical; a curse.
When first they moved in, the water level in their tanks was alarmingly low and now they set buckets beneath the shower for the first run-off, wash the vegetables in a mixing bowl, drain the water into a second bucket and strain the remains of the teapot into a big ice-cream container. When they renovate, they will replace the lavatory cisterns, but this is complicated, for the new minimal-flush patent is a problem with septic tanks and blockages are frequent.
There are days when they speak only of water.
Their nearest neighbour is an elderly widower, Gilbert Reilly, who made himself known to them soon after they moved in. Gil is tall with a long beaky nose and ginger-grey hair that is thin on top. He has taken to dropping by for a coffee and what he calls a ‘natter’ and mostly they encourage this because Gil is a mine of local folklore. Not only that, he is happy to advise them on how to work the wood stove: the kind of dry wood they need and where to get it; how to avoid a build-up of creosote; how to bank and dampen the fire. And Gil approves of the new settlers, the sea changers. ‘They bring a bit of life to the district,’ he says, ‘and you can’t expect things to stay the same.’ He himself has four grown-up children who live elsewhere. They rarely return to visit their father, but Gil claims not to hold this against them. ‘Too expensive for ’em to travel often,’ he says. ‘Mortgages are tough now.’ This is one of the reasons they like him: he is not one of those old codgers who drone on about the good old days.
On the other side of them is Rodney Banfield, the local plumber, a short, thickset man in his late twenties with a long blond pony-tail and an ugly dog, a black Staffordshire cross that barks and barks and barks all night until Rodney comes home in the small hours of the morning. His shack is a fibro box painted a deep pink with a large satellite dish on the roof and a small deck featuring an array of decrepit vinyl armchairs. But Rodney is not always there. He waits for his girlfriend’s husband to fly inland to the mine for his twoweek shift so that Rodney can moonlight in the miner’s bed with the miner’s wife. This is not a happy situation and the smell of trouble drifts in the air on those nights when Rodney is banished back to base camp to sit out on his boxy deck, to brood and smoke. At the bottom of his block he keeps a shed where often the light is on overnight and Luke suspects an indoor dope garden, which is nothing compared to the plantation Rodney is rumoured to be growing in the hills.
In April the weather begins to cool and Luke buys a wetsuit, but soon realises that he prefers walking to swimming and if he goes to the beach in two minds, in his wetsuit, then once he has swum the lagoon he can’t walk in the suit without chafing. After a while he tires of the effort to struggle into and out of this latex corset and the wetsuit hangs in the wardrobe like a ghostly frogman. He is less an active participant in Nature, he jokes to Anna, than an observer, and he marvels at how easy it is on his walks to become mesmerised by the birdlife: black cormorants perched beside the lagoon, lusty pelicans lolling on sandbanks at low tide, opportunistic Pacific gulls cruising the shoreline. Sometimes he sees a pair of red-eyed sooty oystercatchers, and out to sea the big white gannets with swo
rd-like beaks, diving at sudden and electrifying speeds into schools of mackerel that tremor below the surface. Best of all are the black swans that congregate in the north-west corner of the lagoon. Only once has he come upon a swan swimming in close, but as he approached it began to paddle furiously across the surface of the water, rearing up suddenly to reveal a flash of white tail feather before soaring into the sky like a phallic arrowhead.
One late afternoon around dusk, returning home from a walk along the rocks, he opens the side gate beside a shaggy old banksia tree and there on a low bough, at eye level, is a bird he does not recognise. It looks like an owl. Normally the birds in the garden are skittish and fly away when he approaches, but this one gazes back at him with the utmost composure so that he feels he could reach out and stroke its grey speckled feathers. Instead he just stares into its eyes, and the weird thing is this: the bird stares back. It looks right at him, and in that moment of looking a current passes between them, a soundless exchange of energy. He feels his breathing slow, and the strange, almost painful sensation of his heart expanding in the cavity of his chest. There is no time: time is a loop of endless return, a return to this moment, which is not strange but a coming home, and it does not occur to him to ask where this home is because he is simply there, he is in it; this silent space of euphoric emptiness. And for the rest of his walk home he is elated. He has never been happier; pointlessly, mindlessly happy.
That night he scans the book for an image of the bird on the bough but is unable to find anything that remotely resembles it. At first this bothers him (he likes to put a name to things), but after an hour of fruitless searching he lays the book aside. Seeing the bird, he tells Anna, is more important than the naming of it. It’s like the boy, he reflects; they’ve never named the boy, and it doesn’t matter, indeed it’s better that way. Lying in the dark, just before sleep, he thinks of how much he would have liked it if the boy had been there with him, if he too had been able to see the bird, and be seen by it. But he has no control over the boy, who comes and goes as he pleases.
And yet, the next morning when he goes out to chop wood for the stove, who should be there but the boy, poking at the woodpile with a long stick in the hope that the blue-tongue lizard that lurks in the crevices will dart out into the open. Sometimes the boy can look like an angel, polished by the sun, but today he is a bush urchin; on his left shin is a large purple bruise and his hair is matted with dirt. Seeing Luke approach, he whoops loudly and bangs his stick on the wood block as if performing a karate chop before running off to scatter a small party of New Holland honeyeaters that has alighted on a feed-tray of over-ripe figs, laid out for them on the grass by Anna. In an instant the boy has disappeared behind the far corner of the house where the river wattles grow and the honeyeaters, brash and undeterred, return to forage for their breakfast.
Often in the mild evenings after dinner Luke will go for a walk, straying far along the highway that runs beside the coast. On the other side of the highway from Garra Nalla and set among the yellow grasslands is an old squatter’s mansion, built of stone. From the road, only the fanlights of its Georgian windows are visible and the vaulting of its enormous roof; the rest is obscured by a builtup mound of earth topped with stone ramparts. Along the sides and to the rear there are stone barns and stables, and here and there an old stone cottage with a derelict shingle roof, so that the whole settlement has the air of an abandoned compound, handsome but sinister.
One evening he takes Anna with him to show her the house and they climb the barbed-wire fence and approach the compound. Soon they are close enough to the built-up mound to see that along its stone ramparts there are narrow rectangular slits for firearms, and they realise they are looking at some kind of colonial fortification.
Later they ask Gil about the big house and he tells them it was bought up two years ago by a consortium of businessmen. The new owners have no interest in mixing with the locals; they fly in their city friends for weekend parties and it is clear that Gil does not warm to them; he preferred the old squatter’s family, the McKinnons, for whom he had worked as a shearer and a roustabout. They knew how to get along with everyone. From time to time they turned up at community events and when they did, they knew people’s names. They loaned equipment for emergency situations and their sons did their bit in the volunteer fire service. But not long after the old man died, the elder son, Dugald, went swimming off the wild beach around Rittler’s Point, got caught in a rip and drowned. The property, which had been in the family for almost a century, was sold to the consortium.
And the fortifications?
‘Bushrangers,’ says Gil. ‘And the blacks, of course. Every now and then they’d make a raid on the sheep, or worse.’ Gil also tells them that the area along the coast was once known as Ross’s Farm but that when the land behind the headland was sold off for houses in the nineteen-twenties they gave it the name of Garra Nalla, which was the name the local tribespeople had for it.
‘Who was Ross?’
‘Some old soldier-settler who shot himself. Tried to farm along the coastal strip after the first War and had a bad go of it.’
‘Someone is always trying to shoot something around here,’ Gil had said when they asked him about the history of the settlement and he described how, late last autumn, he had heard gunshots coming from the marshlands at the edge of the lagoon. When he strolled over to investigate, he came upon the consortium’s overseer and some of the weekenders shooting at the swans. Confronted by Gil, they claimed to have a permit, because the swans were eating the turnips sowed for stock feed, but Gil rang the police and demanded they come and put a stop to it. The shooting was a danger to anyone walking in the sandhills, he said, and because the local constable was a nephew of Gil’s he drove in and called a halt.
Later, Gil confided that his mother used to ‘bake the occasional swan.’ They were good eating, he said, like goose; oily and gamey. ‘Us kids used to collect the eggs over in the corner of the lagoon where they had their nests. Big things, like this.’ He cupped his swollen and arthritic hands. ‘Made the best scrambled eggs.’
In the fourth month of their migration, Anna sees a scrawled FOR SALE notice in the window of the supermarket in Brockwood. While Luke is on one of his bird-watching walks, she drives over to the neighbouring settlement behind Rittler’s Point and buys a weathered yellow canoe, a surprise birthday present. The owner, a young surfie called Jacob, agrees to come over one weekend and give them some pointers on how to handle the canoe. Neither she nor Luke has ever paddled anything in their lives before, but with an afternoon’s coaching from Jacob, a lithe, sunburnt boy, they begin to get the hang of it. Afterwards they invite Jacob back to the house for a beer but he declines. ‘Have to pick up a mate,’ he mumbles and then, as he climbs into his father’s white Toyota ute: ‘Watch out for the swans,’ he says. ‘If you get too close, they’ll go you.’ He grins. ‘They think they own the place.’
Soon, in the late afternoons, they are gliding across the still black water, paddling stroke by slow stroke into a hot dusk. From across the lagoon they can hear the sounds of children careening around the headland on their bikes, their shouts echoing out over the water. Lights come on in the houses and the flares of homecoming high-beams light up the distant ribbon of road. On some evenings the boy comes with them, sitting deep in the canoe on the floor between their knees. He seems to like being on the water, except when the swans are near. Then his little body becomes stiff and hyper-alert, and he looks up anxiously to scan the sky.
It’s around this time that Luke has the first in a series of recurring dreams. He dreams of a tidal wave that sweeps in from the ocean and submerges the settlement in a depth of clear green water. But this isn’t a nightmare; it’s a benign dream, a dream in which he swims beneath the sunlit surface like a water baby. And the boy is there, swimming alongside. His face is radiant and there are small translucent fish darting around his head; his golden curls stream behind him in unravelling coils of
light while his small but supple limbs beat against the current.
*
The nights in Garra Nalla are quiet and it’s then that Luke likes to read. All day he works onscreen and at night he has no desire to engage with it further, least of all to blog. He leaves it to Anna to catch up with friends, to post news of their sea change and to write those jokey accounts of rural mishaps that bear no true resemblance to the mysterious charm of their life here. Often he reads in bed while Anna, the night-owl, trawls through the cable news networks with their blaring live footage that can sometimes get on his nerves. It’s a habit she got into as a teenager, before her father died. Her father, who worked long hours, was a news junkie, and if she wanted his company she had to sit up with him on the couch, watching the late news and documentaries. While he ate and drank the supper she prepared for him, he would comment on the events happening onscreen and it was then she felt close to him, like an adult he had taken into his confidence. Now, here in Garra Nalla, she has BBC and CNN: they make her feel connected to the outside world.
Behind the house is an old shed, like an outdoor dunny, and not long after they arrived Luke broke the padlock to discover two trunks crammed with antique hardbacks. ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’, he jokingly dubbed them, for when he opened the larger of the two trunks the dust rose into his nostrils until he was convulsed by a sneezing fit and had to back out into the fresh air before returning to drag the trunks onto the grass. Each trunk bore a brass plate engraved with the name A.E. Henley Esq. and he guessed that they must be the property of a previous owner. He enquired at the Brockwood library and found that yes, the Reverend Henley had retired to Garra Nalla in the late sixties after two decades as the Anglican vicar of Brockwood. When the Reverend died, his house was auctioned off with all goods and chattels, including a large library of books, but the trunks must have been overlooked and left to moulder in the shed.
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