The House At Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  EPILOGUE

  PREVIEW OF GONE FISHING

  APPENDIX

  Acknowledgement

  Also by Susan Duncan

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE HOUSE

  at Salvation Creek

  SUSAN DUNCAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  The House at Salvation Creek

  ePub ISBN 9781864714647

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717204

  Original Print Edition

  Note: Some names in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Bantam in 2008

  Copyright © Susan Duncan 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Duncan, Susan (Susan Elizabeth)

  The house.

  ISBN: 978 1 86325 648 3 (pbk.)

  Duncan, Susan (Susan Elizabeth)

  Women journalists – Australia – Biography.

  Dwellings – New South Wales – Pittwater

  Pittwater (N.S.W.)

  920.72

  Cover painting 'Tarrangaua' by John Lovett

  Cover and text design by saso content and design pty ltd

  Chapter openers feature a pencil study for a linocut 'View from kitchen window at Tarrangaua' by David Preston

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

  Excerpts from the diaries of Dorothea Mackellar, the two poems 'My Country' and 'Peaceful Voices' and Mackellar's recipe for Spiced Cottage Cheese Custard are reproduced by arrangement with the licensor, the Estate of Dorothea Mackellar, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.

  For my mother, Esther,

  who has never lost her courage

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Unlike Salvation Creek, in The House I have made only a small attempt at trying to stick to an accurate chronology. Life on Pittwater slides along at an easy pace and we follow the call of every season – summer twilight races, autumn shoreside picnics, winter fires and spring cleaning. The years don't really matter much. More important by far, is that we are still around to experience them.

  PROLOGUE

  A LONG TIME AGO, but still barely more than ten years, I had another life. In the fast lane. But death changed all that. My brother, John, and my husband, Paul, slid slowly away within three days of each other and nothing was ever the same. Grief sent me mad for a while, although I only understand that now.

  I blunted the razor edge of loss in the shadowy secrecy of an illicit affair and the bottom of a wine bottle – or two or three.

  Which is just about as ugly as it gets. Was that the goal, I sometimes wonder, when I look back? To wipe myself out, forever?

  Then one day I sat across a desk from a doctor and heard the words we all dread. 'You have cancer,' he said. 'It's malignant.'

  There it was. Wipe-out. And I finally understood I didn't really want the end at all. Such hideous irony, that I needed the threat of death to fall in love with life. Ironic, too, that cancer gave me a wisdom I doubt I would have learned otherwise. Life is precious. Catastrophes happen. Make every moment count.

  In those first terrifying days after my diagnosis, I hesitantly stretched one foot forward. Gently tapped the earth with my toes. Like my mother does now she is old, making sure there are no bumps and she won't fall. And I began again. No falls for me, not this time.

  By some strange, miraculous stroke of – what? Luck? Fate? Maybe both. It certainly had nothing to do with good planning – I bought a boxy, pale-green tin house on the edge of a secluded bay about forty-five minutes north of Sydney's CBD. Waterfront property usually costs the earth. Not this home, though, because most people want to drive into a garage at the end of the day, not jump into a small, unstable aluminium boat to navigate dark waters in the blue light of the moon. Friends told me I was mad. 'Too isolated,' they insisted. 'Who wants to go home by boat? Where will you find an early morning café latte? How can you manage without restaurants?' As if they were the fabric of life. I ignored their dire warnings. Risked everything. Because sometimes that's the only way to ever make a real commitment.

  My tin shed hovered over the green waters of Lovett Bay, close to where a creek named Salvation tumbled in a delicate waterfall to the sandy tidal flats. It is one of five bays on the western foreshores of Pittwater that spread like fingers poised to grab Scotland Island, which rises like a mossy hill out of the waters beyond. It is an ancient landscape of ragged burnt-orange escarpments, soaring sea eagles, leaping fish and timber jetties.

  To get here, we park our cars at Church Point then catch a ferry or clamber into a tippy boat for the final leg home. Called 'tinnies', they are mostly banged up aluminium tubs with outboard motors hanging off the back. Pull the engine cord, grab the throttle, rev to the max, then fly through the water like a winged chariot. Laughing. Even when there's a gale and the water's so rough every wave feels like a concrete hump hit at speed.

  Mostly, our houses perch about forty-five feet beyond the high tide line, which is the legal building boundary. A few older homes, though, are built at the water's edge and have historic rights to be there.

  The north side of Lovett Bay, where I live, backs on to the wild Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. From a distance, it is as still as a painting. Up close, it teems with life. The bush never rests, not even at night when you hear the heavy drumbeat of wallabies on their age-old tracks, or the scream of a barking owl. And all around, always, there is the faint chorus of the water.

  I moved into the tin shed only three weeks before being told I would lose a breast and all my hair. And perhaps my life. For a while, I thoug
ht I'd made a hideous mistake, that my friends had been wise after all. But slowly I learned a new set of values that had nothing to do with the fast lane, or proximity to café latte.

  I learned that if you are weak of body and spirit, you can still find strength by being useful in a community, a community that takes you out of your own messy despair, re-anchors you in normality and puts you in touch with optimism. I learned that control is an illusion, that it is better to embrace change than to fight it. I learned to let go of wanting and, instead, focus on being. I learned that when you are forty years old, the best years are ahead, not behind, which is what we are so often told. I learned that when you are past fifty, adventure lurks in every moment if you look for it. I learned that it is cynicism that kills passion, not age. And after a lifetime of flitting, I learned where I belonged. And with whom. I learned all this in my simple tin shed where I sat on the deck on cold winter nights with a cup of tea and a blanket over my shoulders, breathing in the briny smell of oyster shells, wet sand, sea grass and mangroves. The fresh clean of high tide. Savouring the smallest details of a world I thought I might have to quit soon. But I am still here. So far so good.

  In time, I began a friendship with Barbara, the woman with beautiful blue eyes who lived in a pale yellow house called Tarrangaua, on the high, rough hill at the mouth of the bay. And she passed on her love of the bush, her passion for all things Australian, as we drank tea together on her elegant columned verandah in the late afternoons. We talked about everything but death in those days, although it shrilled silently between us because she, too, had cancer. She died late on a hot autumn night, as gracefully as she had lived.

  For a while, her husband Bob and I were friends, helping each other through his grief and my fear. Then, returning from a dinner party one starstruck night after a wild storm, he stopped the tinny near the crumbled shore of Woody Point and kissed me. We married on a brilliantly sunny June day in 2001, on a lovely old boat in the middle of Lovett Bay, surrounded by family . . . and, of course, dogs. It was a new beginning. A relationship that grew out of respect and friendship. The strongest of all foundations.

  And this is what came after.

  1

  FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS after we marry, Bob's pale yellow house on the 'high rough hill', which is the Aboriginal meaning of Tarrangaua, stays empty. I know he prefers the grand isolation of his home high above the waters of Lovett Bay to my shacky shed hovering over the shoreline, and yet I cannot bring myself to give up my house, where the earth, sky and sea surge through walls of glass. Where the moon prances on the bedroom floor and the sun spears rainbows of light on the timber deck.

  Tarrangaua, too, has its own particular beauty. It was built in 1925 for the rich and reclusive poet Dorothea Mackellar, and is a solid, quietly authoritative house – stately, even – made of bricks and terracotta tiles and surrounded on three sides by a gracious verandah. Through the day, light and shadow play on textured walls. It can look sombre, though, when the sun is masked by clouds and the spotted gums and ironbarks, rigid sentinels that enclose the building, turn black in the rain.

  Mackellar, who built the house as a summer retreat, was born in 1885. As she grew older, she led a lonely life, thwarted by death and lost love – and, later, alcohol – but she had the courage, and the heart, to write a poem that evoked the raw passion of a young nation tired of being seen as Britain's grubby apron. In a single line, I love a sunburnt country, she embraced a land of droughts and flooding rains and made fools of an establishment that continued to yearn for green and shaded lanes. As though England's ordered gentility was the promised land and home, and Australia nothing but a far-flung, feral colony.

  The poem, 'My Country', first published in 1908, made her famous and she was invited to recite it over and over throughout her life. It gave her a sense of achievement, a sense she would leave a worthwhile legacy.

  My Country

  The love of field and coppice,

  Of green and shaded lanes.

  Of ordered woods and gardens

  Is running in your veins,

  Strong love of grey-blue distance

  Brown streams and soft dim skies

  I know but cannot share it,

  My love is otherwise.

  I love a sunburnt country,

  A land of sweeping plains,

  Of ragged mountain ranges,

  Of droughts and flooding rains.

  I love her far horizons,

  I love her jewel-sea,

  Her beauty and her terror –

  The wide brown land for me!

  A stark white ring-barked forest

  All tragic to the moon,

  The sapphire-misted mountains,

  The hot gold hush of noon.

  Green tangle of the brushes,

  Where lithe lianas coil,

  And orchids deck the tree-tops

  And ferns the warm dark soil.

  Core of my heart, my country!

  Her pitiless blue sky,

  When sick at heart, around us,

  We see the cattle die –

  But then the grey clouds gather,

  And we can bless again

  The drumming of an army,

  The steady, soaking rain.

  Core of my heart, my country!

  Land of the Rainbow Gold,

  For flood and fire and famine,

  She pays us back threefold –

  Over the thirsty paddocks,

  Watch, after many days,

  The filmy veil of greenness

  That thickens as we gaze.

  An opal-hearted country,

  A wilful, lavish land –

  All you who have not loved her,

  You will not understand –

  Though earth holds many splendours,

  Wherever I may die,

  I know to what brown country

  My homing thoughts will fly.

  Mackellar built Tarrangaua when she was forty years old and employed a married couple, who lived in a cottage on the property, to care for it. Although we are told it became her favourite home, it remained empty for months at a time.

  Houses, though, are oddly living things. When they are deserted, they begin to die. Old houses are especially vulnerable, like old people. Unless there is someone to notice a crack, a leak, mould clinging to long undusted furniture, a slow rot sets in. They get a smell, too, of neglect, like the dank smell that floats from the pages of a book left unopened for too many years. Bob and I are aware we cannot leave Tarrangaua echoing emptily forever, yet the idea of tenants is abhorrent. To sell it is unthinkable.

  One day Fleury, a great friend and neighbour who has a travel business, asks if we'd ever think of opening Tarrangaua for tour groups.

  'What kind of tours?'

  'Small groups, mostly from the US. I take them to see the Aboriginal rock carvings on the Ku-ring-gai plateaus and give them a short Indigenous Australian history lesson. They get back on the bus to go somewhere to eat. Maybe you could provide lunch or morning tea? Sitting on the lawn at Tarrangaua would be quite special.'

  'I'll talk to Bob about it,' I reply, my mind already spinning with possibilities.

  It is more than a year since I sat in a crackling, slippery chair with a needle in my hand, being swamped, drop by agonising drop, with a poison that was supposed to save my life. My soul shifted during those grey days where we patients marked time with empty eyes, too frightened to look beyond the moment. I used to crane to see the sky through a window, always careful not to rip the needle from its slot. And later, when I stepped from the chemo ward outside into the physical world, everywhere I looked I saw the small miracles of daily life.

  I doubt I will ever again have the kind of strength it takes to drive through peak hour traffic to a suffocating cubicle in a high-rise building to toil all day sealed off from birds, flowers, trees, the sea, sky, wind and earth. So Fleury's idea is appealing. It gives me the opportunity to work – a powerful ethic instilled from
childhood – but on my own terms and in an environment that I believe sustains me.

  Bob is hesitant and for a while I wonder if he is unwilling to tamper with what has inevitably become a shrine to another life.

  'It is a way of breathing energy into the house. Without disturbing it,' I suggest.

  He is still noncommittal. I mull for weeks, writing lists with plus and minus columns.

  'Be a chance to do some cooking,' I say one day. 'Could be fun.'

  'It's a lot of work. Do you know what you're doing?' Bob asks, sighing loudly.

  'Haven't got a clue. It's a challenge, though, don't you think? And there's no real downside. If it doesn't work, we pull the plug.'

  'A challenge? Yeah, well, challenges keep you young.'

  'And they're harder to find as you get older.'

  'You could go back to journalism?'

  'No. Well, maybe an assignment here and there if it appeals. But that's all. I cannot bear the thought of working unsatisfyingly anymore. I sometimes look back and wonder what the old rat race was really all about.'

  'You must have enjoyed it once. And it paid the bills.'

  'Yeah, well, now I'd rather live more lightly with less.'

  'It can be a mistake,' Bob adds seriously, 'to turn your hobby into a business. It can kill the passion.'

  Instead of listening carefully, as I usually do, I plunge into a new career.

  2

  MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE 1999, when I moved to this sleepy little enclave where there are only five houses.

  My friend Veit, with the ceramic blue eyes and gentle humour who helped me through chemo, has quit his job at the boatshed next door, lured by fishing for lobster somewhere near New Guinea. He dreams of untold wealth, so the rumour goes. We don't know for sure. When boaties move on, they begin again without the past weighing them down, which is part of the seduction of the sea, I suspect. You can reinvent yourself in every port.

  Jack and Brigitte, who live behind the Tin Shed, have a third son. He is tall and strong though barely two years old. Stef and Bella, who bought the house at the mouth of Salvation Creek, are no longer weekenders. The city, for them, has lost its gloss and they come home to the peace of Lovett Bay each night. Bella leaves us from time to time to work for the International Red Cross in Bosnia, Jerusalem, Timor, China. Lovett Bay, when she returns, brings her back to sanity.