by Colin Thiele
STORM BOY
STORM BOY Colin Thiele
40th Anniversary Edition
This edition published in Australia in 2002 by
New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Sydney • Auckland • London • Cape Town
www.newholland.com.au
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Copyright © 2002 text: Colin Thiele
Copyright © 2002 illustrations: Robert Ingpen
Copyright © New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
ISBN(13) 978-1-86436-804-8
e-ISBN 9781921655524
STORM BOY LIVED between the Coorong and the sea. His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles round the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible ruin of white water and spray. All day and all night they tumble and thunder. And when the wind rises it whips the sand up the beach and the white spray darts and writhes in the air like snakes of salt.
Storm Boy lived with Hide-Away Tom, his father. Their home was a rough little humpy made of wood and brush and flattened sheets of iron from old tins. It had a dirt floor, two blurry bits of glass for windows, and a little crooked chimney made of stove pipes and wire. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, and it shivered when the great storms bent the sedges and shrieked through the bushes outside. But Storm Boy was happy there.
Hide-Away was a quiet, lonely man. Years before, when Storm Boy’s mother had died, he had left Adelaide and gone to live like a hermit by the sea. People looked down their noses when they heard about it, and called him a beachcomber. They said it was a bad thing to take a four-year-old boy to such a wild, lonely place. But Storm Boy and his father didn’t mind. They were both happy.
People seldom saw Hide-Away or Storm Boy. Now and then they sailed up the Coorong in their little boat, past the strange wild inlet of the Murray mouth, past the islands and the reedy fringes of the freshwater shore, past the pelicans and ibises and tall white cranes, to the little town with a name like a waterbird’s cry—Goolwa! There Storm Boy’s father bought boxes and tins of food, coils of rope and fishing lines, new shirts and sandals, kerosene for the lamp, and lots of other packages and parcels until the little boat was loaded like a junk.
People in the street looked at them wonderingly and nudged each other. ‘There’s Tom,’ they’d say, ‘the beachcomber from down the coast. He’s come out of his hideaway for a change.’ And so, by and by, they just nicknamed him ‘Hide-Away’, and nobody even remembered his real name.
Storm Boy got his name in a different way. One day some campers came through the scrub to the far side of the Coorong. They carried a boat down to the water and crossed over to the ocean beach. But a dark storm came towering in from the west during the day, heaving and boiling over Kangaroo Island and Cape Jervis, past Granite Island, the Bluff, and Port Elliot, until it swept down towards them with lightning and black rain. The campers ran back over the sandhills, through the flying cloud and the gloom. Suddenly one of them stopped and pointed through a break in the rain and mist.
‘Great Scott! Look! Look!’
A boy was wandering down the beach all alone. He was as calm and happy as you please, stopping every now and then to pick up shells or talk to a molly-hawk standing forlornly on the wet sand with his wings folded and his head pointing into the rising wind.
‘He must be lost!’ cried the camper. ‘Quick, take my things down to the boat; I’ll run and rescue him.’ But when he turned round the boy had gone. They couldn’t find him anywhere. The campers rushed off through the storm and raised an alarm as soon as they could get back to town:
‘Quick, there’s a little boy lost way down the beach,’ they cried. ‘Hurry, or we’ll be too late to save him.’ But the postmaster at Goolwa smiled. ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘That’s Hide-Away’s little chap. He’s your boy in the storm.’
And from then on everyone called him Storm Boy.
The only other man who lived anywhere near them was Fingerbone Bill, the Aboriginal. He was a wiry, wizened man with a flash of white teeth and a jolly black face as screwed-up and wrinkled as an old boot. He had a humpy by the shore of the Coorong about a mile away.
Fingerbone knew more about things than anyone Storm Boy had ever known. He could point out fish in the water and birds in the sky when even Hide-Away couldn’t see a thing. He knew all the signs of wind and weather in the clouds and the sea. And he could read all the strange writing on the sandhills and beaches—the scribbly stories made by beetles and mice and bandicoots and anteaters and crabs and birds’ toes and mysterious sliding bellies in the night. Before long Storm Boy had learnt enough to fill a hundred books.
In his humpy Fingerbone kept a disorganised collection of iron hooks, wire netting, driftwood, leather, bits of brass, boat oars, tins, rope, torn shirts, and an old blunderbuss. He was very proud of the blunderbuss because it still worked. It was a muzzle-loader. Fingerbone would put a charge of gunpowder into it; then he’d ram anything at all down the barrel and fix it there with a wad. Once he found a big glass marble and blew it clean through a wooden box just to prove that the blunderbuss worked. But the only time Storm Boy ever saw Fingerbone kill anything with it was when a tiger snake came sliding through the grass to the shore like a thin stream of black glass barred with red hot coals. As it slid over the water towards his boat Fingerbone grabbed his blunderbuss and blew the snake to pieces.
‘Number One bad fellow, tiger snake,’ he said. ‘Kill him dead!’ Storm Boy never forgot. For days afterwards every stick he saw melted slowly into black glass and slid away.
At first, Hide-Away was afraid that Storm Boy would get lost. The shore stretched on and on for ninety miles, with every sandhill and bush and tussock like the last one, so that a boy who hadn’t learnt to read the beach carefully might wander up and down for hours without finding the spot that led back home. And so Hide-Away looked for a landmark.
One day he found a big piece of timber lying with the driftwood on the beach. It had been swept from the deck of a passing ship, and it was nearly as thick and strong as the pile of a jetty. Hide-Away and Fingerbone dragged it slowly to the top of the sandhill near the humpy. There Hide-Away cut some notches in the wood for steps, and fixed a small crosspiece to it. Then they dug a deep hole, stood the pole upright in it, and stamped it down firmly.
‘There,’ said Hide-Away. ‘Now you’ll always have a Lookout Post. You’ll be able to see it far up the beach, and you won’t get lost.’
As the years went by, Storm Boy learnt many things. All living creatures were his friends—all, that is, except the long, narrow fellows who poured themselves through the sand and sedge like glass.
In a hole at the end of a burrow under a grassy tussock he found the Fairy Penguin looking shyly at two white eggs. And when the two chicks hatched out they were little bundles of dark down as soft as dusk.
‘Hullo, Mrs Penguin,’ said Storm Boy each day. ‘How are
your bits of thistledown today?’
Fairy Penguin didn’t mind Storm Boy. Instead of pecking and hissing at him she sat back sedately on her tail and looked at him gently with mild eyes.
Sometimes, in the hollows behind the sandhills where the wind had been scooping and sifting, Storm Boy found long, white heaps of seashell and bits of stone, ancient mussels and cockles with curves and whorls and sharp broken edges.
‘An old midden,’ said Hide-Away, ‘left by the Aborigines.’
‘What’s a midden?’
‘A camping place where they used to crack their shellfish.’ Fingerbone stood for a long time gazing at the great heaps of shells, as if far off in thought.
‘Dark people eat, make camp, long time ago,’ he said a little sadly. ‘No whitefellow here den. For hundreds and hundreds of years, only blackfellows.’
Storm Boy looked at the big heaps of shell and wondered how long ago it must have been. He could paint it in his mind…the red campfires by the Coorong, the piccaninnies, the songs, the clicking of empty shells falling on the piles as they were thrown away. And he thought to himself, ‘If that time were now, I’d be a little black boy.’
But his father’s voice roused him and he ran down to the beach to help dig up a bagful of big cockles for their own tea. And when they had enough for themselves they filled more bags to take up to Goolwa, because there the fishermen and the tourists were eager to pay Hide-Away money for fresh bait.
Storm Boy stood bent over like a horseshoe, as if he were playing leapfrog; his fingers scooped and scraped in the sand, and the salt sea slid forwards and backwards under his nose. He liked the smell and the long, smooth swish of it. He was very happy.
Storm Boy liked best of all to wander along the beach after what Hide-Away called a Big Blow. For then all kinds of treasure had been thrown up by the wind and the wild waves. There, where the wide stretch of beach was shining and swishing with the backward wash, he would see the sea things lying as if they’d been dropped on a sheet of glass—all kinds of weed and coloured kelp, frosty white cuttlefish, sea urchins and starfish, little dead seahorses as stiff as starch, and dozens of different shells—helmets, mitres, spindles and dove shells, whelks with purple edges, ribbed and spiral clusterwinks, murex bristling out their frills of blunt spines, nautilus as frail as frozen foam, and sometimes even a new cowry, gleaming and polished, with its underside as smooth and pink as tinted porcelain.
In places the sand would be rucked and puckered into hard smooth ripples like scales. Storm Boy liked to scuff them with his bare soles as he walked, or balance on their cool curves with the balls of his feet.
He grew up to be supple and hardy. Most of the year he wore nothing but shorts, a shirt, and a battered old Tom Sawyer hat. But when the winter wind came sweeping up from Antarctica with ice on its tongue, licking and smoothing his cheeks into cold flat pebbles, he put on one of his father’s thick coats that came down to his ankles. Then he would turn up the collar, let his hands dangle down to get lost in the huge pockets, and go outside again as snug as a penguin in a burrow. For he couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet.
For Storm Boy was a storm boy.
Some distance from the place where Hide-Away and Fingerbone had built their humpies, the whole stretch of the Coorong and the land around it had been turned into a sanctuary. No-one was allowed to hurt the birds there. No shooters were allowed, no hunters with decoys or nets or wire traps, not even a dog.
And so the water and the shores rippled and flapped with wings. In the early morning the tall birds stood up and clapped and cheered the rising sun. Everywhere there was the sound of bathing—a happy splashing and sousing and swishing. It sounded as if the water had been turned into a bathroom five miles long, with thousands of busy fellows gargling and gurgling and blowing bubbles together. Some were above the water, some were on it, and some were under it; a few were half on it and half under. Some were just diving into it and some just climbing out of it. Some who wanted to fly were starting to take off, running across the water with big flat feet, flapping their wings furiously, and pedalling with all their might. Some were coming in to land, with their wings braking hard and their big webbed feet splayed out ready to ski over the water as soon as they landed.
Everywhere there were crisscrossing wakes of ripples and waves and splashes. Storm Boy felt the excitement and wonder of it; he often sat on the shore all day with his knees up and his chin cupped in his hands. Sometimes he wished he’d been born an ibis or a pelican.
BUT SOMETIMES Storm Boy saw things that made him sad. In spite of the warnings and notices, people hurt the birds. In the open season, shooters came chasing wounded ducks up the Coorong; some sneaked into the sanctuary during the night, shot the birds at daybreak, and crept out again quickly and secretly. Visitors went trampling about, kicking the nests and breaking the eggs. And some men with rifles, who called themselves sportsmen, when unable to find anything else to shoot at, bet one another that they could hit an egret or a moorhen or a heron standing innocently by the shore. And so they used the birds for target practice. And when they hit one they laughed and said, ‘Good shot’, and then walked off, leaving it lying dead with the wind ruffling its feathers. Sometimes, if it wasn’t too far away, they walked up to it, turned it over with their feet and then just left it lying there on its back.
When Storm Boy ran back to tell his father about it, Hide-Away muttered angrily, and Fingerbone slapped his loaded blunderbuss and said, ‘By yimminy, I fill him with salt next time! If dem fellows come back, boom, I put salt on their tails.’
When Storm Boy laughed at that, Fingerbone flashed his white teeth and winked at Hide-Away. Neither of them liked seeing Storm Boy looking sad.
When Storm Boy went walking along the beach, or over the sandhills, or in the sanctuary, the birds were not afraid. They knew he was a friend. The pelicans sat in a row, like a lot of important old men with their heavy paunches sagging, and rattled their beaks drily in greeting; the moorhens fussed and chattered; the ibises cut the air into strips as they jerked their curved beaks up and down; and the blue crane stood in silent dignity like a tall, thin statue as Storm Boy went past.
But one morning Storm Boy found everything in uproar and confusion. Three or four young men had gone into the sanctuary. They had found some pelican nests—wide, rough nests of sticks, grass, and pelican feathers as big as turkey quills—and they had killed two of the big birds nesting there. After that they had scattered everything wildly with their boots, kicking and shouting and picking up the white eggs and throwing them about until they were all broken. Then they had gone off laughing.
Storm Boy crept forward in fear and anger. From behind a tussock he looked round sadly at the ruin and destruction. Then, just as he was about to run back to tell Fingerbone to fill his blunderbuss with salt, he heard a faint rustling and crying, and there under the sticks and grass of the broken nests were three tiny pelicans—still alive. Storm Boy picked them up carefully and hurried back to Hide-Away with them.
Two of the baby pelicans were fairly strong, but the third was desperately sick. He was bruised and hurt and helpless. He was so weak that he couldn’t even hold up his head to be fed; he just let it drop back flat on the ground as soon as Storm Boy or Hide-Away let go of it.
‘I don’t think he’ll live,’ said Hide-Away. ‘He’s too small and sick.’
Even old Fingerbone shook his head. ‘Dem bad fellows kill big pelican. Don’t think little fellow stay alive now.’
‘He mustn’t die,’ Storm Boy said desperately. ‘He mustn’t! He mustn’t!’
He wrapped up the tiny bruised body in one of Hide-Away’s scarves, and put it by the fire. All day long he watched it lying there, sometimes moving feebly or opening its beak to give a noiseless little cry. Every now and then he poured out a drop of cod-liver oil from th
e bottle that Hide-Away had once bought for him, and tried to trickle it down the baby bird’s throat.
Night came on, and still Storm Boy watched the sick little fellow hour after hour, until Hide-Away spoke firmly about bed and sleep. But Storm Boy couldn’t sleep. Again and again through the night he slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the dirt floor to the fireplace to make sure the baby pelican was warm enough.
And in the morning it was still living.
It was three days before the baby pelican was well enough to sit up and ask for food. By then his two brothers had their beaks open hungrily all the time, although of course they were still too young to have their creels or fishing baskets ready.
‘Anyone would think that I was Grandfather Pelican,’ said Hide-Away, ‘by the way they always turn to me for food.’
‘You’ll have to be,’ Storm Boy told him, ‘because their own father and mother are dead.’
‘Well, they needn’t think I can spend all my time catching fish for them. Look at that fellow sitting up as if he owns the place.’
‘Oh, that’s Mr Proud,’ said Storm Boy.
‘How do you do, Mr Proud.’ Hide-Away bowed and scratched the top of the pelican’s head. ‘And what’s your brother’s name?’
‘That’s Mr Ponder,’ Storm Boy said. ‘He’s very wise and serious.’
‘And what about the tiny fellow?’ asked Hide-Away. ‘Is he Mr Peep?’
‘No, he’s Mr Percival.’ Storm Boy picked up the bird gently in the scarf and held him on his lap. ‘He’s been very sick.’
‘Welcome,’ said Hide-Away. ‘And now Grandfather Pelican had better go and catch some fish or there won’t be any tea for the three Mr P’s.’ And he went off down to his boat.
And that was how Mr Proud, Mr Ponder, and Mr Percival came to live with Storm Boy.