by Gregory Day
As Liz pulled into the picnic ground she saw Carla leaning patiently against her red Holden Barina. A brand-new straw hat and a water bottle with Velcro straps sat on the bonnet beside her, her black hair was tied back and she wore no make-up. Liz parked alongside, got out, and they kissed hello.
Carla had enough enthusiasm for the both of them. ‘I am so up for this,’ she said. ‘I’ve been talking to the kids about it for days. They think I’m nuts.’
‘As usual.’
‘Yeah, as usual! How are you, Lizzie?’
‘Fine. I like your boots.’
‘I know. Aren’t they great? Just hope I don’t get blisters. It’s the first time I’ve worn them.’
This was to be no powerwalk, they’d agreed on that. Carla thought powerwalking was stupid, she’d told Liz it looked like a car stuck in first gear, as well as being a depressing admission of middle age.
They set off down the beginning of the track, over the corduroy ramp that crossed the swampy gully and across the fire-access road that had been dozed through the ironbarks years before. They walked, chatting pleasantly, through young regrowth that strong winds had scattered in all directions around them, Carla doing most of the talking. Before long they had left the saplings behind and had begun to rise out of the lap of the valley and up along the course of Bootleg Creek. The trees matured and the track became more established as they walked further away from town. Their chat lessened as the deeper rhythm of their walking demanded their attention.
Liz would normally have walked ahead of Carla, being more familiar with the track than her friend, but she needed the unobserved privacy of walking behind. Aside from not wanting Carla to be constantly looking at how much her bum had ballooned out in the last three months she also needed to be able to scratch and slap at her anxieties as she went along: bits of falling twig that caused her to panic as they landed on her, leaves that got caught in her clothes like a bull-ant would. She was on edge and if she walked ahead it would be obvious, whereas this way Carla could be the first one to break through the gossamer on the track, and the first one to come upon anything unexpected, like a snake, or some startled wallaby that might bound across the path. Not long ago, Liz would’ve been proud to bear those responsibilities for her friend, but no longer. As they stepped along with the sky developing patches of blue above them, she consoled herself with the thought that she was doing Carla a good turn, sacrificing the equilibrium she could have maintained at home just so her friend could bound into the bush and swoon. It was the least Carla could do to walk ahead.
They made their way through the Fern Gully, deeper into the folds of the hills. They stooped under an enormous mountain ash spar that had fallen over the track, they strode past dripping garnet sap on black trunks and leaves asterisked with mildew. Carla walked with confidence and vigour over tiny filaments and spores, taking in the colours as well as deep draughts of the air, so grateful that she wasn’t sitting at home or having to lay the linguistic foundations for her clients’ two-week holidays in Tuscany. As the track wound up and out of the Fern Gully, she looked across the trees at the neighbouring ridge and down further along the gully they’d just ascended from. She couldn’t wait, right then and there, for the day when her two kids would be old enough to enjoy a walk like this with her. It was exactly the type of activity she wanted them to participate in. Just to have the space. The trees and the good air. It was one of the reasons she had brought them out of the city. And, of course, to escape the madness of their father, her ex-husband. He would no sooner take them on a walk like this than get up early in the morning, she thought to herself as she climbed the incline and rounded the knoll in the direction of the Bootleg Creek Falls. At the thought of the children’s father, Carla felt a familiar tension rising inside her and her step quickened. But then she checked herself. She wasn’t out here with these beautiful trees to get angry with him! Let it go, Carla, she said aloud into the crisp space in front of her. She resumed the walking pace she felt was appropriate to the bliss of the new morning.
By the time they reached the falls, which were barely a trickle at that time of year but which afforded a nice halfway point on the walk to stop and have a rest, the sun was burning quite hot and Liz’s oilskin was becoming a real nuisance. With skinks darting to either side, she showed Carla down the natural stone steps from the path to the ledge of the waterfall and tugged the coat off and laid it on the rock to sit on. She gingerly lowered herself onto it and began to swig from her water bottle, anxious about dehydration. Carla sat down beside her and stared in wonder at the view. From the ledge where they sat was a sheer drop of some eighty feet into the creekbed, which then ran away from beneath them as a gorge through the bush and back towards the sea. Even from their dry height they could see the gorge was full of drapery and moss and spinning, dangling cocoons catching the light. Carla had had no idea this walk was so spectacular. She wished she’d brought a camera. She would’ve loved to have the scene she was looking at as her screensaver. To remind her, to keep her focused on what was important.
The ledge of rock with its watery inclination was shaded. On either side the land rose up and out of the creek’s path so the sun needed to be at its zenith to penetrate in to where the two women were now sitting on the blue oilskin. Carla had a drink of water as well and was glad of the moisture.
‘It makes me want to paint,’ Carla said, looking down the gorge.
‘Really? I didn’t know you did.’
‘Well, I don’t anymore but I did heaps when I was at school and that. I was right into it. Can you paint?’
Liz laughed. ‘ Me? No.’
‘Did you see those orchids back along the track?’
‘Yeah. You can see why people get obsessed with them. They’re just special.’
‘What about how much they look like a woman?’
Liz laughed again. Sitting still in one spot was relaxing her, she didn’t have to worry about what might be around the next corner or what nasty thing might fall on her from a tree.
‘That’s what Craig says,’ she told Carla.
‘Yeah, well, any man worth his salt would have to notice that. They were almost turning me on when I was looking at them back there.’
‘He says he can see me in bed, lying back, with my legs and arms spread out.’
‘I bet he can.’ Carla smiled. ‘You two are so happy, aren’t you? After all this time.’
Liz paused, listening to the grass-trees hissing above her in the passing breeze. ‘Yes and no,’ she said eventually. ‘He can be a prick.’
‘Yeah? I can’t imagine Craig being a prick. He’s so easygoing.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s fine most of the time but I can tell you he hasn’t been talking about seeing me as an orchid of late!’
They both laughed, and drank more water. It was implicit between them, a given, that men were far from perfect. Carla knew that Craig could be as nasty as anyone but she preferred to idealise him in front of Liz, she liked to shed hope wherever she went, not pessimism.
After ten minutes or so, the time came to push on. Carla was keen to get moving, Liz less so.
‘Do you want to walk in front?’ Carla asked her as they climbed up from the ledge and back onto the path.
‘No, you go,’ Liz said, standing aside to let her friend pass.
They pressed on up, out of the creekbed and into a posse of tree-climbing birds clicking on an arid limb-strewn slope. After twenty minutes or so, they rose up into she-oak country at the highest point of the track. Liz was thinking about what Carla had said, and how she herself still loved to look and talk about orchids despite her recent anxious feelings towards the bush. The ant bites had made her jittery, everything seemed hidden and full of potential, but somehow the orchids were different. Almost as if they weren’t a native plant at all. They were tiny in the vastness of the bush but once you noticed them they were open and exposed, all-revealing, colourful and delicate. Everything else seemed vaguely sinister as she wa
lked along, so she kept her eyes glued to the verges of the track for signs of the sympathetic flower.
At the top of the hill, the stunted she-oak and scattered granite everywhere looked Spanish and macabre to Liz, whereas to Carla the opening out of the eucalypts onto xanthorrhoea and casuarinas was romantic. She remarked over her shoulder to Liz how varied the walk was.
They reached the top of the dry height and began to descend, back into messmate and ironbarks and clearer glades of wiregrass falling away on their left. After a kilometre or so on a slight decline they came to a place where the low bush dropped away to the south to reveal a clear postcard style view of the distant green riverflat, the ridges on either side and the golden rocks and the white beach at the rivermouth. Carla was once again delighted by what she saw and for Liz it was consoling too. They were nearing home.
They sat down again, this time on a large slab of ironstone where they each ate an orange. They looked out over the land below, towards the dune hummock in the far distance and then the hazy sea. Now that the walk was nearing its end, Liz was almost relaxed enough to consider trying to describe to Carla the weird phobia the ant bites had induced. But she didn’t. She decided it was not the type of anxiety Carla would understand.
The oranges were good; luscious, even. Both of them knew the Vitamin C would do no harm. Carla lay back on the ironstone slab and closed her eyes. She let out a deep breath. Then straight away she hoisted herself back up again and glanced cheekily over at Liz.
‘What?’ Liz said.
Carla leant forward, with a smile in her eyes. ‘You know Colin Batty,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
Carla widened her eyes mischievously and then adopted an expression of mock guilt.
‘You didn’t?’ Liz said.
Carla giggled. ‘Not the whole way,’ she said. ‘But we pashed. In the pub carpark.’
Liz’s face contorted. ‘You what? With Batty! And out in the open?’
‘Well, it was dark. There was no-one around. But I wouldn’t give a shit if there had been.’
‘But, Carla, he’s so unattractive!’ Liz said, staring hard at her friend with a worried look.
‘I know. But he was kind of sweet, actually. He’d spent the whole night in the bar telling me about the stars. And the planets. That’s how we came to be outside. Then it got a bit full-on and I stopped him.’
‘So what are you, desperate or something?’
‘Probably. Anyway, he got pissed off then and called me a cock-tease. So I told him to fuck off, got in my car and drove home. Shouldn’t have either, I was that drunk. I had no idea. Once I got in the car I could hardly see over the steering wheel.’
‘Oh, Carla,’ Liz sighed, shaking her head but now with a hint of amusement on her lips. ‘Not Colin Batty.’
Carla looked genuinely chastened. ‘I know, Lizzie,’ she said. ‘What was I thinking?’
‘Who knows! You’ve got to get up to Melbourne more often. Get your rocks off with someone nice. Some nice young boy. You’re too gorgeous.’
They sat on the slab and before long they were laughing hysterically at the whole episode. Carla was glad she’d told Liz. She’d not been going to but in the end she couldn’t help it. Apart from anything else, it was such a good story. She knew Liz would be shocked.
The time came to move again. As they walked down through the ironstone and granite and back into swordgrass and ironbarks, Liz could hear a wallaby thumping away from them through the bush. She reminded herself how lucky she was not to be on her own, to have a husband like Craig. She decided that she should at least try to talk to him about what she was feeling. Her own darkness. It was changing her, weighing her down, and it was irrational. She could feel the difference between Carla’s lovely, open energy and her own.
No, she decided eventually, she couldn’t discuss it yet, she’d just continue, and if she ate less she wouldn’t put on too much weight. With her work she couldn’t avoid sitting on her bum for a few hours every day, but it was those cakes in Minapre that she had to cut out, and the smoothies. She might even stop doing the cafe thing at Minapre altogether. Yes, she should stop that. Maybe I should retrain, change jobs, do something more physical, she thought, as the picnic ground and the end of the walk came into view.
Carla and Liz arrived back at their cars puffed and flushed. They drank deeply from their water bottles. Checking the time, they found the walk had taken them a bit over two and a half hours. Carla thanked Liz profusely and Liz felt suddenly very happy, both that she was back at her car and that she’d endured the walk for her friend’s benefit. They hugged and kissed and drove off waving through their windscreens.
ELEVEN
SON OF A PIONEER SURFER
Colin Batty’s father was a pioneer surfer from further back along the coast at Devon Beach. Long before the average Victorian male in their twenties was thinking about anything other than test cricket and the Australian crawl, Arthur Batty, or Art as he was known, had taken to riding the local breakers out of sheer, only-child boredom. On a cornery plank of splintered cypress which he’d grabbed from a nearby windbreak that was being chopped down and milled on site, he would struggle through the tide and undertow and attempt to chime in with the propulsion of the surf. It couldn’t quite be said, as Art Batty later claimed, that he was ‘hotdogging the small fry’ during those supposedly halcyon days he described as the true beginnings of Australian surfing; rather, he would often be seen hauling the leaden cypress plank awkwardly back through the overcast waves for yet another attempt at standing up, his frail body almost blue with the cold, his nose sniffling, his nostrils running sea-green, and his mind full of a kind of blank abandonment that even the energy of the waves could not interrupt. However, the bare fact remains that well before the surfing craze began to properly hit the eastern shores of Australia, before the images of bronzed Californians with bleached smiles, perky girlfriends and lollipop boardshorts started trickling in from the US during the 1960s, young Art Batty was indeed, like some unwitting omen of change, riding a plank through the choppy waves on the front point at Devon Beach.
The fact that he did this for only one spring and summer, that of 1952–53, did not deter Art Batty one bit from creating his own personal legend, a legend which eventually became entwined with the larger destiny of Devon Beach itself. The splinters and bruises from where the heavy hunk of wood kept hitting him when he fell off had conspired, along with his own general physical delicacy, to drive him back out of the water and into a small gang of schoolboys dedicated to British radio comedians and the card game 500. But when those images from the Californian coast did finally start appearing a decade or so later, Art Batty immediately saw his opportunity. Informing his hardworking father that he would no longer be happy helping dole out the milk in the dairy, Art hitchhiked to Geelong, from where he took the train to Melbourne to have his teeth fixed by a Collins Street dentist. Three days later he returned with a new smile and a loan, to open up the prototypical, and eventually semi-mythical, Art Batty’s Surfer’s Shop.
History has decreed that Art Batty’s Surfer’s Shop is now so legendary, and such an icon of the pure and soulful dawn of surfing, that no-one is exactly sure if it ever existed. Except Colin Batty of course, who grew up amidst the smell of fibreglass and boardwax in his father’s shop, listening to Art subtly propound his own myth, to whoever would listen, as the Duke Kahanamoku of the local coast. Young Colin knew, in the squinty dissatisfaction of his own childhood, that his father was a con-man like no other. He also had no doubt that that was why his mother had shot through with a curly-headed giant on a Triumph motor cycle when Colin himself was only nine years old. Such was the elaborate nature of the Art Batty charade, however, that there were moments when young Colin almost admired his father’s assiduous ability to play the role of the pioneering surf guru, complete with goatee and lingo, when all the while the drawers under the shop counter were full of antacids, Disprin and antihistamines for his various malingeri
ng ailments. As an adolescent son with an active mind, however, Colin’s shame about the situation burned deeply, easily outweighing any admiration he had for the consistency of his father’s imagination.
He grew up resentful therefore, with his mother’s red hair but alone, alongside his father in Art Batty’s Surfer’s Shop. He swore to himself on a daily, if not hourly, basis that as soon as he could he too would shoot through like his mum, and never come back.
Wearing a blue duffel coat and carrying a green vanity case of his mother’s in his hand, Colin Batty walked out of Devon Beach on the day before Christmas 1975. He spent that summer working as a general hand at a children’s safari park at Bunyip, on the You Yangs side of Geelong, and then the whole of 1976 as a farm labourer further up into the Brisbane ranges near Blackwood. There at night he would sit alone on the tiny, sloping verandah of the paddock shack where he slept and feel his freedom. As the winter encroached he would also feel an intensity in the cold of the ranges like he’d never known on the coast.
He began to read by the fire after dark rather than gazing at the stars. With all the disused gold mines scattered in the hills around him he became fascinated by the gold rush years, when the almost deserted Blackwood area had been the bustling site of the first Victorian strike. He learnt about it all from Hec Spate, who he worked alongside during the day, and who seemed to know the gold history like he’d been there at the time. Hec Spate was one of a dying breed, an itinerant whose penchant for yarning as he worked receded at nightfall to a blank-eyed solitude. With his daytime yarns he fed Colin’s imagination on wild and curious stories of fortunes made on the diggings, until the young man found himself with a thirst to know more. From Hec Spate, Colin borrowed a beaten up copy of The History of the Australian Gold Rushes, which he would read at night, looking up occasionally from the pages to see the glow of Hec’s campfire out on the fringes of the paddock.