From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  ‘The rest?’

  George propped himself up on an elbow to stop the water getting in his mouth. ‘The ones like you. The others who left.’

  ‘Oh.’ The voice was quiet for a while. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, where did they say they would be?’

  ‘They didn’t. They didn’t say.’

  ‘Here, though?’ George asked.

  ‘Port Adelaide?’

  ‘No, this place. Earth.’

  ‘Yes. Here. Earth.’

  ‘Now?’

  The voice went quiet again and George could feel it, just under his own mind, trying to remember.

  ‘Because you know there used to be thousands like you,’ George said, or maybe thought. ‘Tens of thousands. Sailors talked about them. Sailor stories, tall stories, legends. Eightlegged creatures sliding onto becalmed ships, wrecked ships. Shifting shapes, wreaking havoc.’

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘The oceans were full of them.’ George sat up out of the water and saw the thing had shrunk down, blended itself with his own body, and he felt calmer than he had in a very long time. ‘Before my time.’

  He sluiced the water from his skin and squirmed his way back into his wet clothes, covering the mark. ‘One bloke told me, oh, twenty years ago, that his grandfather had seen one, transformed itself into a tiger and ate the cabin boy then slid off back into the sea. Ridiculous story.’

  George thought some more. ‘And in Warrnambool, a fella said he’d seen a creature in a freak show, in America, suspended in brine. A fraud, he thought – something cobbled together out of bits of fish. Still, it could’ve been.’

  ‘Where did they come from? Did anyone see them come? Did anyone see?’

  ‘They’d been here long before us. William told me. Or maybe it was Henry. That they’d been on earth longer than almost anything alive. Millions of years perhaps.’ He thought for a while. ‘I don’t know what that means. That some creatures have existed longer than others? That the earth is old. That there were once things, millions of years ago, that there aren’t anymore.’

  The earth is old, he thought mostly to himself. Older than we could ever know. He felt himself shrink and the weight of it all tumbled off his tiny, insignificant frame.

  His socks were far too wet to wear so he pulled his shoes onto his bare feet.

  ‘And now they’re gone?’

  ‘I don’t know if there’s anyone alive who’s ever seen someone like you.’ Except me, he thought. And Henry.

  ‘They could be hiding?’

  George shrugged, but he didn’t think so and neither did the thoughts in his head.

  ‘But where did they…?’

  ‘No one knows. One day, they were just gone.’

  12

  I am a million years too late.

  I am a million years too late. They are gone. Home. They are gone home and I am here and I am a million years too late. A million years they were under this star, the sun: my people, then their people and all their little billions of people and now? And now, just me. Hello, where is everyone? Hello?

  Gone.

  Home.

  I clutch around his neck, limbs about his neck and waist like a joyful piggyback-riding child and not even a molecule of joy inside me, or wait.

  Wait.

  One.

  One molecule and it says to me this is done now, this is done. You are here. Whoever you want to be. They are gone and you are here and there is nothing more for you to do. You are alone. No one knows you and you are alone.

  I sing the song of my people and it drops frail into the dust, no other ears to hear, and this time I let it lie. The breezes of this earth raise the dust and my song blows hot across the streets and homes of this town and settles into the skin of its people, into its creatures, into the grey-green leaves of its stoic trees and settles soft over every dish of food, into every mouth that feeds.

  We are here on his street now before his house, my house, and I unpeel myself and slide, soft, down the back of him, down the leg of him, from the cuff of his trousers and onto the dirt and here I am again, fleet-footed fur, and I roll in the dirt and the sun, that star, shines on my belly, and his hand strokes my belly, and I feel the flow of my hot animal blood.

  ‘Henry,’ I hear him say from inside the house. ‘Henry, are you there?’

  And the boy calls back and the man says, ‘Henry, why don’t you go into the larder and cut a slice of meat for this cat of yours?’

  A NOTE ON HISTORY

  On 6 August 1859, the steamship Admella was wrecked on Carpenters Reef, about 1 kilometer off the coast of South Australia. It had left Port Adelaide the previous day, making its regular trip to Melbourne. One hundred and thirteen people were aboard – eighty-four passengers and twenty-nine crew. For more than a week the wrecked and broken ship was stuck on the reef, its inhabitants slowly dying from hunger, thirst and exposure. Many attempts were made to rescue them, but terrible weather and bad luck meant every effort failed. Finally, the wreck was reached by a lifeboat from Portland, Victoria: twenty-four people had survived the eight-day ordeal. Among them was Bridget Ledwith (who was in all likelihood not an alien from another dimension, but whose identity was a source of mystery and controversy in the years after the wreck) and George Hills, my great-greatgrandfather. George had been washed off the boat during the first moments of the wreck, but was rescued by Soren Holm, an able seaman from Denmark; Holm drowned soon after while trying to reach shore and raise the alarm.

  After his rescue, George married his fiancée Eliza Ridge; they had eight children including Henry (who lived until he was seventy-three), George (or Georgie, who died when he was nine), and their youngest daughter, Sarah, who was the mother of my grandmother, Nancy Bradley. George Hills died in 1916 at the age of eighty-three. You can read his account of the wreck by searching the website Trove for George Hills, Admella and the Adelaide Register.

  Other than these facts and some accounts of the wreck taken from Ian Mudie’s book Wreck of the Admella, From the Wreck is entirely made up and bears no relationship at all to reality.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my uncle Andrew Hirst for inviting me to Mount Gambier in 2009 for the 150th anniversary of the wreck of the Admella, and for making me realise this was something I wanted to write about. Thank you also to my mum, Anne Rawson, and my cousin, Catherine Hirst, who had already done so much of the research before I even started thinking about the wreck, and to mum for reading several drafts.

  Thank you to those who encouraged me to write this the way I wanted to write it. Marlee Jane Ward listened to me thrash the idea out of my head and said it was something that would work. Jane Ormond, Rose Mulready and Bridget Weller have been, as always, my stalwart writing companions. Charlotte Wood and Alison Manning ran a two-day workshop that helped me get my brain in shape.

  Rose Mulready, Rose Michael and Patrick Allington all read drafts and made the manuscript so much better than it would otherwise have been. My late, much-missed uncle John Hirst fixed some of my historical errors, told me to keep going and shared many plates of cheese-on-toast. Penelope Goodes was an incredible editor with a sharp eye and a deep understanding of what I was trying to do. Peter Lo designed another brilliant, beautiful cover for my work. Barry Scott has been such a supporter of my odd tales, and publishes some of the best books in Australian literature.

  Thank you to those who inadvertently inspired me: my uncle George Rawson, who endured appendicitis, two older brothers, and the terror of a fictitious tramp called Johnny Greenteeth; my nephew Tane Rawson, whose brilliant brain is a great joy; my dad, Howard Rawson, who has been telling me imaginary stories my whole life; Kat Scarlet, who made me a stunning tattoo of George Hills and the Admella and who suggested Bridget Ledwith might be creepier than I thought; Rebecca Giggs, whose Granta article ‘Whale Fall’ was a magnificent insight into the underwater world; and Jessie Cole, my calming, enlightening and ever-amusing pen pal.

  And
thank you, of course, to my husband Andy, who is amazing – he really gets why someone would bother to waste their life plugging away at a piece of art that may never matter to anyone else. He also noticed that octopuses are probably from another dimension: that was very helpful.

  This book is set on the lands of the Buandig and Kaurna people, and was written on the lands of the Boonwurrung and the Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation.

  PRAISE FOR JANE RAWSON’S WRITING

  A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

  Reading this book is a lot like getting lost in John Barth’s funhouse. Or a novel by Thomas Pynchon. It’s Kafkaesque, but without the darkness and the violence. The story never loses its poignancy. This is a book that throws the windows of the world open. It leaves lots of spaces for the reader to climb through, and think, and wonder.

  Camilla Nelson, The Conversation

  In some ways, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is reminiscent of early Paul Auster, most notably In the Country of Last Things. There’s something too of the sheer storytelling joy that you find in Neil Gaiman, the meaning subsidiary to the narrative adventure. While early Peter Carey is an exception, we don’t often see this kind of fiction in Australian literature. It’s the strand of the novel affiliated with Cervantes’ Don Quixote rather than the later work of the realists. Rawson has taken risks with plausibility and triumphed.

  Ed Wright, The Australian

  I thoroughly loved this book. Film-like, dream-like. Funny, and charming.

  Dave Graney, author of 1001 Australian Nights

  A free-range and funny apocalyptic time-space road trip, with James M. Cain, J. G. Ballard, and Tom Robbins all fighting for the wheel.

  Steven Amsterdam, author of The Easy Way Out

  Formaldehyde

  Original, intelligent and compelling – a rare combination. Sharply observed, assured and witty. Smart but never showy. The most original novel I’ve read for some time.

  Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project

  A delicious blend of science fiction and magical realism, of severed limbs and Russian novels, a tale this gloriously weird and absurdly funny needs an expert hand to guide us through. And Rawson handles the changes in tense, setting and point-of-view expertly, making Formaldehyde a joyous and addictive read.

  Alan Vaarwerk, Readings blog

  The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change

  It’s a surprisingly good read. A useful book that may just wake a few more people up to the reality of the devastating effects of climate change.

  ReNew Magazine

  Where should I live? What kind of dwelling should I live in? What should I do in an extreme climate event? How should I live? Sooner or later we are all going to be compelled to think about these questions and to take some kind of action. There is no better place to begin than by reading The Handbook and talking about it with your family, friends and colleagues.

  Clive Hamilton, author of Requiem for a Species

  Will you believe me if I say that I picked up The Handbook late last night after I had finished reading Patricia Grace’s Cousins just to have a look at the introduction before turning out the light, and found myself reading the entire book instead? It’s true. I couldn’t stop reading it. This is a fantastic book.

  Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

  Jane Rawson is a writer and a bureaucrat who lives in Melbourne’s west. She has written three books of fiction – From the Wreck (2017), Formaldehyde (2015) and A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) – and a non-fiction guide, The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change (2015), co-authored with James Whitmore. Her work has won the 2015 Viva la Novella Prize and the 2014 Most Underrated Book Award. You can find her short fiction in Sleepers Almanac, Overland, Tincture, Seizure, Review of Australian Fiction and at janebryonyrawson.wordpress.com.