My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  The smallest ember is still glowing in the firepit. I roll out of bed and scramble for some tinder. The coal fattens.

  Now? Fire yawns. You’re insatiable.

  It’s true. I don’t feel like I would ever tire of these fireside nights in my cocoon. I’m naked, and my toes are starting to cool. Tiny pebbles dig into my knees. I rub my hands over my ribs and lower back. I can feel the curve of my spine arching over to meet fire.

  Won’t you indulge me again, darling? My lips almost kiss the coal as I blow.

  Feeding fire the most succulent tiny twigs, I tease it slowly into flame. My shelter groans in satisfaction as its frosty toes thaw too. Fire begs for more. My lungs are life-giving bellows. Both shelter and fire are breathing with me, the grass of the shelter like gills filtering smoke, the three of us forming part of some larger, universal breath.

  Switching on my head torch, I pull down the book of Australian animal wisdom a friend sent me recently and flick to the platypus page. Platypus represents the true essence of women’s sacred wisdom, it reads. The ability to trust blindly in one’s inner direction and move as one with the creative ebbs and flows of Mother Earth. Both male and female platypus are born with venomous spurs on their hind legs, but as they grow, the females lose their spurs. Symbolically, the females learn to trust their Dreaming and the protection they receive through their sense of self-worth and connection to Spirit.

  I close the book and imagine my new friend, its little heart beating away in a burrow not unlike my own. I picture myself entering its watery world, at home in the dark, cold undercurrents. Right now, I don’t need to be anything in this life but the smallness and fullness of this gal sitting by her fire, listening to the rise and fall and movements of her own breath, her own heart. Just this.

  *

  That night I dream again. I am at a party and wander outside to find my grandmother lying on the bride’s chaise longue. Behind her are my family of Aboriginal women from Arnhem land. I’m annoyed that I have been inside at the party, when I could have been out here. My grandmother and I cry out to each other and tenderly embrace. She is close to death, and I’m both grateful and sad that I have this precious time with her. In the moonlight she teaches me a song and dance. I can’t believe it has taken me all these years to learn it. I wonder how many other songs and dances I have missed.

  6.

  “Your sleeping bags and matches are wet. You dropped your knife somewhere on the trail. And the temperature at dusk is hovering barely above zero. You have exactly one hour to get fire,” Kate looks at her watch, “Starting … now!”

  I spring into a jog and head west, plucking seed heads of whiskey grass and stuffing them into my pocket. Chloe crashes off to my right towards the ridge. It’s our first group activity since autumn. I was a bit reluctant to join in, but when I heard what the challenge was, I couldn’t resist. I’ve become very reliant on well-dried wild tobacco and lantana, and my treasured collection of carefully selected grasstree, mullein and golden-rod stalks. I’m dubious about our chances. Casuarina and banksia are the best potential boards, provided we can find dead and dry accessible branches. Anything on the ground would be too wet.

  I have been setting my own little fire missions lately (apart from the usual hand-drill ones, of course). A few times after heavy rain, and once in pouring rain, I challenged myself to collect that night’s tinder bundle. I fished around under the skirts of grasstrees for the petticoat of dry needles, plucked dry stamens from the underbelly of banksia flowers where the water didn’t run, and fossicked for dry inner bark of swamp mahogany and stringybark. The key to success was unlimited time: a slow treasure hunt. I reckon I learnt more about those plants in that test than in a whole year of taking from them in fair weather. There were surprise treasures too – a bandicoot nest and a bush laden with ripe sour currents. I’ve also experimented with wattle cord for the string of my bow-drill. Wrapping it around the spindle about five times, I had to keep the bow tilted downwards so the string didn’t rub on itself. After much puffing and multiple cord snaps, I did manage a coal.

  Hearing a break, I giggle to see Ryan falling halfway out of a banksia. With a hooked stick I reach up and snap off a dead casuarina branch. The timber is usually a bit too hard for me, but with five of us it could be okay.

  Back at the Gunyah, Chloe and Dan are setting the kindling teepee. Ryan races in, throws the banksia branch on the ground, empties his pockets of rocks and starts percussively chipping two together. I’ll leave that one to him. My brief attempt at flintknapping, in the US, resulted in six stitches on the back of my hand, at an expensive hospital.

  “Yay, Nik,” I yell, as Nikki runs in, lathered in sweat, a beautifully straight grasstree stalk from the heath in hand.

  “Where are we up to?” she says, breathless.

  “Here, try notching this,” Dan says, handing her a crudely hacked banksia branch.

  I shed my jumper and start mashing stringybark between my palms.

  “Halfway,” Kate calls. Balanced on her knee, Bella gurgles and grins at the spectacle.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” says Nikki.

  We place our hands on the stalk and pause to set the intention. Ryan starts, struggling to find purchase with the roughly made notch. Finally it burns in and the first whiff of smoke appears.

  “Woohoo!” Dan exclaims.

  We pass it around the circle, the smoke building until the branch suddenly splits in two.

  “Boards, we need more boards,” Nikki says.

  Ryan races into the bush. I grab the rock he abandoned and start trying to carve a notch in a natural fork in a banksia.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Kate warns.

  “Okay, I think this one’s good to go,” I say.

  Ryan sprints in just as smoke is gusting out.

  “Last one,” Chloe says, gritting her teeth.

  Ryan strips his shirt off to take over, his pecs rippling as he leans into the stalk and whips his arms back and forth. Nikki holds the board down, smoke enveloping her.

  “We’re almost there,” Nikki urges. I can feel the coal close, aching to burst. Sweat drips from Ryan’s forehead. What a goddamn sexy act of creation this is. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. The joining of the long straight stalk in the notch opening; the slow warm-up, the building of friction, heat and pressure; the knowing of when to pull back and when to give, the blending of finesse and brute strength. It’s the original dance between the masculine and the feminine. The universe making love to itself right here. It’s positively blushworthy. Ryan grits his teeth and grunts with effort.

  “I think we’ve got one,” Dan yells. Panting, Ryan gently takes the coal and tips it into Nikki’s awaiting tinder bundle. We fall silent as she blows on it, midwifing it into flame.

  “Fucking beauty,” Dan says.

  “Time’s up,” says Kate, coming over to celebrate with us.

  Putting on a billy of tea, we settle in cross-legged around our truly homemade fire. I’m surprised how cosy it feels to be in the group again. Maybe I’m ready to come out of hibernation. The bush certainly is. The butcherbirds are starting the day with a new amorous-sounding song. I’ve seen my first goanna, been bitten again by my first ant and my first mosquito. My low-level snake alert system has switched back on since the death adder was spotted again near the kitchen. A myriad of yellow pea-related flowers are lighting up shrubs one by one, while delicate carpets of white, purple and pink sprinkle the forest floor. All the wattles are coming out. It’s like unwrapping a new present every day, and I’m never sure which gift will have chosen to unveil itself from its khaki camouflage overnight.

  This morning I went wandering along the creek and savoured the crunch of the first ripe dianella berry. I felt ripe this morning too, my heart soft as ice-cream on a hot day, swirled through with nostalgia, both melancholic and swe
et. It ran down the sticky fingers of the early morning light, pooling at my feet as I stood transfixed, watching the feeding flocks drum up business.

  Another sign that spring is knocking came earlier today, when I was waiting for Ryan on the side of the trail and found myself stepping out of the sun and into the shade. I liked that I noticed the significance of it. It reminded me of a story a friend told me, how when he was walking with his family under the awnings of the sidewalk in early summer in New York City, someone stopped them and said, “You guys must be Australian; you’re the only ones walking in the shade.” Now that is awareness.

  *

  The boil of the billy is rattling the lid when a car engine rumbles up the trail. Sam gets out, looking grave.

  “Everything okay?” Kate says.

  “Well, no, not really,” Sam says, kissing Bella on the forehead and settling on the ground next to Kate. He turns to all of us.

  “I just had a visit from Terri.”

  “Oh?” Ryan says. Yesterday, Ryan helped her and a local handyman shift her water tank. Terri and her kids have become part of our extended tribe, often delivering us a roadkill roo with the weekly bread delivery. On a particularly frosty morning recently, my pre-breakfast wander took me up their driveway. I peeked in the window to see the three of them curled up on the couch, eating pancakes and reading. They beckoned me inside with broad smiles. It was like stumbling upon a gingerbread house in the middle of the woods.

  Sam sighs before continuing. “Terri just told me that yesterday she found Lily hiding in the car. She said that the handyman had taken her behind the shed, pulled down his pants and asked her to touch him.”

  “What the …?” Dan trails off. We gasp.

  “She’s pretty sure nothing else happened but wanted to know if Ryan noticed anything.”

  “No … nothing,” Ryan stumbles, looking shocked. “After we moved the tank, I left him to it. I can’t believe it.”

  “Oh my God,” said Chloe.

  “Has Terri contacted the police?” Kate asks.

  “She just did this morning, yes.”

  Nikki starts crying softly. “Why do people do things like that? I don’t understand.”

  “I just can’t believe it. He seemed so normal,” Ryan says. He can’t stop shaking his head.

  Bella is squawking and Kate shushes her onto the boob. “Thank God it wasn’t worse. What’s the stat – something like one in three women over their lifetimes?”

  “Yeah, and it’s not just women either,” says Dan.

  “It’s just another symptom of a sick society,” Ryan says. “Another form of disrespect.”

  “Disconnection, it all comes back to disconnection,” Kate says grimly, smoothing Bella’s forehead.

  My face has become hot and I can’t think of anything to say.

  “There’s no excuse; it’s just crap,” says Nikki, drilling a stick into the ground. “I hope the police follow it up.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Lily seemed her normal self when I was up there, pulling me into a game of tips,” Sam says.

  “Yeah, but it’s the whole culture of it,” says Chloe coming back with mugs and honey. “And you never know where things like that get buried.”

  I look at the ground, feeling strangely frozen.

  “Are you okay, Dunny?” Dan asks me, pouring the tea.

  “I’ve never told anyone this before,” I say, breathing in and out slowly. “When I was about four or five, a family friend used to do that to me. I did touch him. I don’t think it went any further. I don’t feel anger or anything, really. I’m not sure why I felt the need to share it now, but there it is.”

  Dan goes quiet and looks at the ground, clenching and unclenching his fists, then looks up at me with lips gripped tight and a knowing flash in his eyes.

  Nikki comes over and takes my hand. I can see her slender fingers lying in mine but can’t seem to feel them. I shrug to assure them I’m fine. It does feel a little strange to have said it. Not a huge relief, just like something has been turned inside out.

  *

  A rock face edges out to meet the first branch of a blackbutt tree. I nestle myself into the crook, the cool breeze of the approaching front watering my eyes, and rest my cheek against a milky white limb. In the last few days since our fire circle, I’ve been mooching around in a strange fog, my wanders stilted and colourless. I can’t even be bothered with my sit spot. Rather than the urgency of thought that usually pushes my hand across the page of my journal, I’m drawing only doodles in the margins. The mountains and valleys of my moods have levelled out into a featureless plateau.

  I mentally add this climbing tree to the ones tagged on my ever-expanding adventure map. I currently have three favourites – the grandmother fig, the sunrise/sunset pine and a particularly comfortable camphor laurel on the edge of the paddock. I visit them often. There’s something about being off the ground that is inherently calming, as if the physical act of gaining height allows me to see everything as a higher, wiser self. The tigers of the mind can be growling below on the savannah but I am safe above, just another monkey on a branch. As a child, I would regularly climb the four massive Moreton Bay fig trees whose marauding roots broke the ceramic water pipes around the house. I always made sure to leave a gift for the fairies in the tree hollows. There was one rule if you climbed trees with me – once amongst the whispering leaves, secrets must be whispered and only truth told.

  “What secrets do you have for me today?” I ask the tree.

  Wisha wisha wisha, the leaves reply. Something is lost that must be found. That night I dream. I am one of two female national park rangers for a remote northern hemisphere fjord, a land of ice and vast mountains. We are patrolling an area that is in danger of being vandalised by men in a four-wheel drive. I remark that it’s the edges that are always under attack and need protection. We receive advice – just do what you’re doing, no need to amp up the effort. I pull out a map and realise I’m standing on the edge of a massive icy area that I haven’t yet explored. I know that when the time comes, I will have to enter it.

  *

  “How ya doin’?” Kate asks when she sees me on The Block a few days later.

  “Hmm, okay, I guess,” I say. She tilts her head and looks at me quizzically. I can’t give her any more information because I don’t know myself. Terri and the kids came up last night to cook up the bat they had found dead in their house that morning. Lily seemed fine, crawling onto my lap and making up songs about bat stew. Everyone seems to have gone back to normal. Except me.

  “You’ve had a big winter. Maybe you need to take a break,” she says.

  I remember back to what Chloe said about things getting buried. This year does seem to be acting like a poultice – drawing all the toxins to the surface. It’s been one thing after another. Maybe I’m just tired.

  A couple of days later I ask Dan to drop me at an isolated national park campsite by the beach. Despite the crystal blue waters lapping gently around my ankles, my restlessness amplifies. A tightness grips my abdomen, restricting my breath. It’s impossible to sit. I walk kilometres to the nearest shop to buy a newspaper but can’t focus on the words. I fixate on why I didn’t buy chocolate. I walk all the way back to get a family-sized block and wolf it down in a matter of minutes. There is the weight of someone sitting on my chest, but I have no idea who it is or how to shake it.

  One afternoon, I attempt to climb a rocky headland, struggling to find toeholds in the smooth face of the lava blocks. I lick my salt-encrusted lips as an easterly blast whistles in my ears and whips my cheeks. From the top, seemingly endless white sand disappears into sea mist to the north. In the other direction, another vast stretch of coastline is broken only by the form of a single fisherman. I slump against a rock, gazing blankly to sea, barely lifting my eyes when a humpback w
hale launches its bulk out of the water in a spectacular breach.

  A teenage girl bursts onto the headland with a delighted cry, having just caught the whale’s display. She is barefoot, dressed in a maroon woollen wraparound dress tied at the waist with a colourful embroidered belt. On her wrist is a plaited leather strap. Dark ringlets fall over white cheeks. Not seeing me, the girl throws her arms out wide as if embracing the sea, her mouth open in rapture. She turns abruptly, perhaps remembering herself. I get up and follow her, just far enough behind to remain unseen. Three younger siblings, similarly crowned in curls, join her, the smallest boy pulling her hand back towards the start of the trail. Around the bend a woman appears swathed in an alpaca-wool wrap, long dark hair falling like silken seaweed down her back. She moves as if directed by the flow of her hair towards her brood. She looks like Selkie, the folkloric seal woman who I’d just been reading about in Women Who Run with the Wolves. In the tale, Selkie leaves her underwater home to marry a lonely fisherman and bear his son. Instead of letting her return after seven summers, as promised, her husband hides her seal skin. Selkie grows dry and brittle. When her son finds the hidden pelt, Selkie makes the excruciating decision to leave him and return home, in order to save her own life.

  I crouch in the bushes, watching the mother. She smiles broadly as her children run towards her. She has a wholly human face and yet it could also be the face of a goddess, the archetypal feminine in flesh and blood. It sparks a familiar yearning. During town missions I scan the faces of women, watching their features and mannerisms, searching for that which is universal. I catch glimpses of it in a smile, in the way a woman turns and takes the hand of a child. I saw it once between the lines on one wrinkled face, heard it in the methodical tapping of her shoes as she sat on a park bench amidst roses and looked out onto a river. The expression changes but the essence remains the same. The life of a woman so ordinary – and yet within that, or perhaps because of it, is the extraordinary.