The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  Time stood still on that trip back across Bass Strait. I retreated once more to my little cave under the deck, devoid now of all pride. At one point I emerged, hoping the sight of the short-tailed shearwaters, their flapless wings perfectly tracing the contours of the swells inches above the surface as if attached by an invisible rail, would lift my spirits. But I could feel my resolve crumbling. I soon shed myself of any remaining vestiges of dignity and retreated again to the bunk, for how many hours I could not tell.

  I forgot about the crew, and, in time, they forgot about me. There was only, once more, the stupor of sickness and the strange, meditative trance of crashing water as we threw ourselves at its mercy. I drifted in and out of sleep, of sorts, a waking dream peppered with lurching, rocking, and occasional verbal outbursts as if in a fever. It occurred to me that in any other context, an entire day spent lying down for hours on end, without the ability to read, sleep, or even properly think, would be unbearable. But in my condition it was the only bearable thing to do.

  16

  A GREEN WOODEN HUT

  The hours passed, or perhaps it was a week. At one point my body told me that something outside had changed, that the pounding swell had abated, then eventually, ceased altogether. Were we back home? Would I emerge to discover my small grey car waiting to take me back to a shower and a proper bed? The relative silence of the motor and the even swishing of the water was an indescribable joy. Using all my strength, I forced myself one step, then another up the small ladder to the deck. The three men working the boat were a silent tableau. They too, I suppose, has been disappointed not to reach our destination, and their faces told it, as well as many tense hours nursing their crippled boat back across Bass Strait, with no help whatsoever from their fourth man, a crewmember in name only. At least, I thought, I wasn’t eating into the provisions.

  We were in fact nowhere near home but back at least on the Victorian side of Bass Strait late in the afternoon. Mark and Alan had decided to make for the appropriately named Refuge Cove at Wilson’s Promontory, where we would spend the night at anchor before returning to our port at Hastings the following morning. A protected little shelter on the Promontory’s east side came into view. This oasis has provided shelter for seafarers for over a century. Limping in with our broken mast lashed to the deck, we were maintaining a long seafaring tradition.

  Several other boats came alongside and, seeing our forlorn state, enquired whether we needed assistance or, simply wincing at our plight, just waved. ‘They’re imagining how much it’s going to cost,’ said Mark, thinking no doubt of the bill he would soon be footing.

  As we anchored in the lovely little bush and granite bay, its stillness was exquisite, although at that point, anything less than the endless crashing of waves was a soothing tonic. As I contemplated a night of real sleep, I roused myself from my perch in the stern in the waning afternoon sun to assist Gerhard in assembling a small inflatable boat which he had extracted from its hold in the deck. Silently, we used a foot pump in turns, breathing life into the crumpled pile of plastic as it metamorphosed into a sleek, pale-grey craft, powered by a small outboard which we attached to a wooden plate at the back. The exercise, I could feel, was doing me good.

  ‘Are you, er, going ashore?’ I asked, feeling the urge to break the silence.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘You are.’

  As panicked thoughts of abandonment on desert islands rose in my head, Alan piped up from the other side of the boat, confirming the conspiracy. They had decided that the level of motion sickness I had undergone would leave me ill for some time, and the best thing would be to go ashore and walk about a bit, or even just stand still on terra firma. Then, I was assured, I would be retrieved.

  ‘People have been known to die of seasickness, you know,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Right,’ said Gerhard, giving the dinghy a heave into the water, and beckoning me to follow him in.

  The feeling of being back on land was extraordinary. My grandfather had spent the war years in the navy on destroyers and minesweepers around the Australian coast and, unlike many ex-sailors, he was completely unsentimental about the sea, choosing to spend his final years miles from the nearest ocean in a small shack in central Victoria. One of the few stories he told me – I was very young when he died – was of his unending battle with seasickness. ‘Every time I went out the heads,’ he told me. ‘Never got used to it.’ He also corrected me about assumptions of sailors appearing drunk on shore. ‘Sea legs,’ he had told me. ‘Just sea legs.’ Swaying against the upright post of a long-demolished jetty on that little beach, I knew then what he was talking about.

  Where exactly was I? Venturing tentatively off the tiny beach, a track took me to a camping ground where two small tents had been erected but not a soul was in sight. I skirted this and, for a short way, followed a path that would, according to the sign, take me to Tidal River, the very place where this entire quest had begun decades ago, standing mesmerised on its beach as my imagination ran wild about a group of offshore islands called the Glennies. I longed to see it again, but it was at least a full day’s hiking away. Refuge Cove was the far end of the peninsula, the end of the line.

  Walking slowly and deliberately, I gradually regained equilibrium, the fading seasickness now being quickly replaced by exhaustion. A table and bench beside a large green wood cabin in the middle of nowhere seemed to offer a perfect spot to rest, and in the late afternoon light, I put my head down.

  A roar of voices made me start. Two men, beers in one hand and shovels in the other, staggered past towards the hut.

  ‘Nah, dahnt geddup mate, sheez right, ’nuth beer?’ said one.

  ‘G’day,’ offered the other, as they disappeared inside the hut, which I suddenly realised was full of people.

  ‘Hey, hey, ya mate ousside,’ I heard one continue through the open door. ‘He looks like … you know … you know who he looks like? That funny cunt!’ I felt the rising of a familiar dread. Time to make a quick escape towards the beach. Too late. Looking up, I was surrounded.

  ‘Shit, he fuckin izz!’ said one, beers still in hand. There were about eight of them, all in park ranger attire, or parts thereof, and representing various ages and stages of drunkenness.

  One with red hair and a squint looked at me as steadily as he could. ‘Hey, didn’t you used to be that funny bloke from you know, that show?’

  Since abandoning a career in television comedy, or rather it abandoning me, I have, on a regular basis, been assailed with comments such as this. My heyday seems to have entwined itself with certain non-specific memories in some people’s minds, and I am constantly being asked to explain the source of these nebulous recollections. I’m used to it now. After years of answering such enquires sensibly, I now concur with whatever happens to be suggested. It’s much easier. To some people, I’ve appeared on television shows ranging from Homicide to Gardening Australia, and have even apparently read the news in several states on many different networks. These days, though, it’s often a personal connection that is processed: a cousin’s cousin, or that friend, perhaps, of uncle Graham they chatted with a couple of years back. ‘How is the old boy?’ I’m always careful to ask.

  (The oddest question, and one which puzzles me even now, was from a large man in a black zip-up cardigan and elevated sports shoes. ‘Hey mate,’ he asked, approaching me at a city bar, after watching me unnervingly for some time. ‘Didn’t you used to be Glenn Robbins?’ The existentials of that one still confound me.)

  But, exhausted and still seedy, I was, in this little bush clearing, entirely at their mercy. Soon their numbers increased, swaying, and grinning, all in bits and pieces of Parks Victoria uniforms, grubby from head to foot from many hard days working outdoors. Where were they coming from? How could such a small hut hold so many people? It was as if I’d disturbed some giant ants’ nest and was now trapped beside it to endure the consequences.

  As so often happens in these situations, I quickly became c
ompletely removed from the conversation.

  ‘Comedy Company, wasn’t it? Wazz’ nee onth Comedy Company?’ said the very drunk one.

  ‘Nah, not Comedy Company, the other one. Whassit called …?’

  ‘The Late Show?’

  As they proceeded to discuss me in the third person, running through a list of television programs with which I had never had the slightest involvement, my easiest escape would have been to get up and walk quietly away. But I had left my run too late.

  ‘So … what the fuck are you doing here?’ asked the redhead, who seemed the most sensible, or at least the most sober.

  I began to explain my predicament.

  ‘Yeah. You look shithouse. Get him a beer, Robbo. It’ll do you good mate, believe me,’ he said, and instantly an ice-cold can appeared in front of me, complete with Essendon Football Club stubby holder. For some reason drinking it seemed the most wonderful idea in the world and I downed it in almost one draught. Looking up to their silent gazes, I realised I had impressed them, albeit unwittingly.

  ‘Mate, we’ve got some snags in there,’ said someone. ‘And a bed. Grab something to eat and come in and have a kip.’

  ‘Sure,’ was all I said before being ushered in.

  The hut was accommodation for the maintenance teams when they were working for long periods on the tracks that stretched across kilometres of the national park, and for these blokes, it had been a big week. It was all surprisingly tidy and functional, with six or so bunk beds along two sides of the room and even space for a TV in their makeshift living room. They proudly showed me some maps of the park glued to the wall, but the topographical details swirled before my eyes.

  I ate a warm, greasy sausage on white bread, and then another. Having food and liquid inside my empty and dehydrated stomach was indescribable. I could literally feel the carbohydrate being digested, the nourishment slowly passing to the extremities of my body. I think I remember the main man as Tim. He looked at me and shook his head.

  ‘Fuckin’ boats. That’s why I never go near the fuckin’ things. Just have to look at one and I’m chucking. Come on, mate, get your head down here. We’ll clear off.’ And so they did, in an instant, suddenly filing out without another word. Where they went or for how long I have no idea because when I awoke it was almost dark and I was still alone.

  I searched around to find something on which to leave a note of thanks but gave up in a panic at what the time might be and headed back to the beach.

  Half expecting the Sea Snake II to have simply gone without me – and who could blame them? – I was relieved to see its now illuminated form bobbing a hundred or so metres off the beach.

  ‘We thought we’d lost you for good,' said Mark as he picked me up in the runabout a short time later. ‘Just in time for dinner.’ I glanced back to see if there was any sign of the hut and its occupants who had shown such strange and unexpected hospitality, but all I could detect through the trees was darkness.

  Over dinner that night, I was at last able to hold my own, at least in the company if not crewing the boat. In the confines of the tiny cabin, the men had created a hearty dish of meat and vegetables, which despite my earlier repast I devoured with gusto. They all remarked on how much better I was looking after my walk and spell on dry land, but I kept my adventure with the hut and its occupants and the beer to myself.

  After a glass or two of red, and some unrelated conversation, and being able to focus once more on the purpose of my mission, I decided to tell them the story of Deal Island, the boy and the creature.

  Given our confined environment, I gave them the fuller version, with little embellishments here and there, taking terrible licence, filling in the look on the policeman’s face as the creature appeared, or the anxiety of the keeper at the top of the path, waiting that awful morning for his young charge to reappear, hopping nervously from one foot to the other. Harmless, speculative details to provide more wash for the backdrop without corrupting the central story.

  Their reactions were mixed. Alan gave a quick laugh – a fairly reliable indication that he thought the whole thing rubbish. Mark looked thoughtful and Gerhard, as usual, said very little indeed. ‘Good story, good story,’ muttered Mark seriously, but added no more and gave little away as to whether or not he believed it. All that evening, though, he remained contemplative and a little distracted.

  The trip back home, limping our way back along the Victorian coast, was another nauseating, buffeting eighteen-hour ordeal which began at dawn the next day, but somehow I managed to keep my stomach down, and even partially conquered the relentless hiccups. At one point late in the afternoon, the engine failed and we drifted as the lads – despite their age they seemed like lads – put in another remarkable display of seamen’s ingenuity, stripping the fuel pump and locating the blockage, before reassembling it in under an hour.

  Finally, at around ten at night, a last epilogue of misadventure played out when, back inside the calm of Western Port and within sight of our harbour, we hit a sandbar and stuck fast. All efforts to prise us off with the engine were fruitless and, despairing, we prepared to stay there until the morning tide. One last thrust, however, with the engine straining back and forth in the cool, still air like a muffled animal, and the boat first budged an inch, then, with a jolt, broke free.

  Back at the marina, exhausted, my mission to Deal Island a failure, I made my thanks sincere but brief and with unseemly haste, leaped from the boat and walked with speed along the little concrete walkway to my car. Sitting in the driver’s seat once again was a kind of paradise. But driving back along the empty freeway, my relief at being back on land was even now being diminished by a dusting of melancholy for the sheer magnificence of the water, and those kind fellows who, I was quite convinced, were capable of absolutely anything.

  17

  RON’S OTHER STORY

  It happened – well, he told me it happened – on another Bass Strait island, but he never said which one.

  The two couples lived in the same remote farmhouse, eking out a living from the sheep they ran on different parts of the island. The dwelling was not big, but with a couple of adaptations, it was just spacious enough for them to enjoy a modest level of independence from each other. Once in a while a supply vessel would arrive, their only contact with the wider world.

  At some stage, there was a falling-out over something, and the couples stopped speaking to each other. Gradually, the older pair whose living quarters were at the rear cut themselves off completely and established an entirely separate existence. This arrangement seemed to work well enough in the manner of true Victorian-era pig-headedness, and the four carried on their lives for some time in this way, their peculiar situation gradually becoming known around the place, as the two couples who shared the same house on the same island but who would not speak.

  One day, however, the older man died, presenting his wife with a dilemma. She was not strong enough to bury him in the hard winter ground, and the supply vessel was not due for some time. She could always give in and ask for assistance from the people on the other side of now the sealed-up door, but that would mean her being the one to break the feud, and that was unthinkable.

  Ron couldn’t tell me how long this situation continued, but the widow’s solution to her problem was only revealed, it is said, weeks later when the supply vessel arrived.

  Coming up to the house, the captain was greeted in the usual manner by the surviving farmer and his wife. Pleasantries were exchanged and stores were unloaded. He then enquired about their neighbours and was told simply that they’d been quieter than usual, but that they could still hear them talking occasionally.

  Making his way to the other side of the house, he chatted with the widow who, he later recounted, seemed quite normal. They discussed the weather, the price of wool and news from the mainland before he enquired about her husband.

  ‘He’s having tea,’ she replied, ‘come in and say hello.’

  Upon entering th
e house and approaching the kitchen table, the captain’s blood ran cold. There he was, the man in question, weeks deceased, sitting completely dressed as usual at the kitchen table as if at Sunday lunch. The woman, it turns out, had been the daughter of a London taxidermist and was skilled in the art of mummifying a body. After having done so, she seems to have gone quite mad, forgetting he was no longer of this world and treating him accordingly.

  In true Victorian tradition, Ron told me, she was taken away to an institution for the insane.

  I had, therefore, another story to track down. Perhaps I would have a chance to do it on my next stop, to one of the biggest and best-known islands in Bass Strait, Flinders.

  18

  THE OLD AIRPORT

  The last time I can remember visiting Melbourne’s Essendon Airport was with my mother when I was about eight, and an enduring memory it remains. In my mind’s eye, she looks something like Jacqueline Kennedy, elegant still in her forties, clutching one of those small round cases that women carried in those days, tottering across the tarmac in a fine woollen suit, me in tow, towards the propeller-driven Vickers Viscount that was to take us on our trip to Canberra. I remember walking under the nose of the enormous silver aircraft with its handsome ‘Ansett-ANA’ livery, excited to the point of breathlessness at the prospect of my first-ever flight in an aeroplane.

  A decade or so later, Essendon Airport’s status was forever eclipsed by the opening of Melbourne’s shiny new Tullamarine, which, to compound the insult, was built just up the road. For all that, however, the new airport with its futuristic arrival halls of steel and glass failed to kill off Essendon entirely. For undoubtedly murky reasons of town planning, it survives to this day, decades past its use-by date, occupying an enormous slab of priceless real estate in the growing heart of Melbourne’s suburbia, and playing host to a curious array of aviation peculiarities: charter airlines, helicopters, restored vintage joy-riders and an eclectic assortment of private aircraft. It’s also the place you go when flying with an airline you’ve never heard of to an odd, out of the way part of the world such as Flinders Island.