by Susan Duncan
'Plenty of time. Festival starts on 9 February. Give ourselves eight days to get there. Stop in some nice little inlets for fresh lobster and champagne along the way. Lovely!'
'What festival? Get where?' I ask Bob as we walk along the new ferry wharf, a long slim metal jetty leading to a concrete pontoon. There's a see-through shelter with a wall down the middle so you can dodge gales by moving to one side or the other. But a six-inch gap at the bottom means no matter where you sit, if the wind's blowing cold, your backside still freezes through to the bones. The chipped, white wooden rails, oyster encrusted pylons, yellow-coated steps and leaning shed of the old ferry wharf still lie alongside, abandoned and slowly rotting. It's like watching another era disintegrate.
'Dave wants to take Intrepid to the Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart, then go around Tassie. He's looking for crew,' Bob explains.
My heart sinks. Ten days of vomiting. Got carsick as a kid, get airsick before take-off. Winding McCarrs Creek Road always makes me queasy unless I drive so slowly the cars behind me get ratty. Sometimes I really wonder if I'm cut out for travelling. Or boat access life. But you can't give in, can you? Lying down on the sofa is not an option.
'Could go. Always wanted to check out the Wooden Boat Festival,' I say.
'You'll be sick as a dog all the way. Not worth it.'
'Like to see Bass Strait, too. Must be magic. And it's a great way to lose a few pounds, especially after Christmas. Be slim as a sardine by the time we get there.'
'Sardines aren't thin. They're just little.'
'No chance of little.'
***
Stewart and Fleury are horrified. 'I forbid you to go!' says Fleury, shaking a finger at me. As a young woman she raced yachts with Ted Turner, became famous for her on-board desserts. Never told a soul they were frozen Sara Lee. But she's been over the glamour of boats for twenty years, knows they're hard, dangerous work. 'He went to the stern for a pee in the middle of the night. Never saw him again.' Happened to two friends. Not much glamour in death.
'There's some pretty good seasick pills around now, and Jackie's a nurse. She'll know the best kind to get. It'll be great. Bit of a challenge.'
'I forbid you! I absolutely forbid you to go. You'll be throwing up before you even get to Lion Island.'
I'm about to deny it, but I pause. Have I ever made it past the corkscrew currents of Broken Bay, where the Brisbane Waters meet the Hawkesbury River and Pittwater, beyond where a sou'easterly hurtling straight from the Pacific Ocean spins a boat like a toothpick on rollercoaster swells? Nope!
'I'm gonna go, Fleury. I want to be with Bob.'
'You'll be over that by the time you get to Long Reef. I'll pick you up at Middle Harbour. That's about four hours from Church Point.'
'I'll be fine.'
'Like hell.'
Fleury is helping her daughter to prepare for her first full-time job since finishing university. 'Got to find a flat, a fridge, a bed and a sofa. And all in Adelaide!' she groans.
'I hate to sound like my mother, but how did she grow up so fast?'
Wasn't it only yesterday that she lay politely in a bassinet under a table while we all dined on navarin of lamb in a long-gone little Paddington restaurant called The Brussels? And now she is about to start her adult life.
'If you fall in love,' I tell her sternly when she asks for a couple of easy recipes to take to her new home, 'I want to know immediately. You may tell me anything and trust that I will not pass it on to your mother. Unless I feel I should.'
'I want a few cooking tips, Susan, not a recipe for living.' She smiles wickedly. 'Anyway, seems to me I spent my teens making sure you got home safely. It wasn't the other way around!'
Bugger.
I think long and hard about what to write. And after deleting twenty ways to avoid romantic disaster, because as my wise old dad used to say 'Experience is the only way to learn,' I come up with:
RULES FOR COOKING
1 Always use the best ingredients you can find (or afford), which usually means getting them from a good deli or good food stores. Buy less and buy quality.
2 Always use proper stock – make it yourself, especially chicken, or buy from a good deli.
3 Vanilla is important. Use beans. If the recipe calls for extract, use Herbie's or Madagascar (shockingly expensive but it lasts a long time).
4 Use very fresh eggs. The whites should hold together like gelatine and the yolks sit up like a glossy, golden dome.
5 Get to know your butcher. He will always help you if you establish a relationship with him.
6 When stewing chicken, use thigh meat. It can be cooked for longer without drying out.
7 Swiss brown mushrooms are preferable to regular mushrooms. They're worth the extra money.
8 The Tasmanian Honey Company makes wondrous products – I use leatherwood honey, which has more oomph. Experiment with different flavours. Honey should have far more overtones than just a flat sweetness.
9 Rice is tricky. Use the right kind for your dish. Calasparra is good for paella and there's an Italian risotto rice, Ferron, that is great. (I will murder you if you use poor quality rice – there's not enough starch in it to give you a creamy result.) But: you can use jasmine rice for Chinese dishes, although I use Basmati for everything apart from paella and risotto. You can buy this from supermarkets. Basmati is a beautiful long grain that must be cooked by absorption method only. (Measure the rice and the water according to the instructions on the packet and turn down the heat to almost nothing the moment the water boils, then turn off the heat just before all the water is absorbed and leave it with the lid on for another five to ten minutes.)
10 Use what's in season. It's always best. Get to know your greengrocer, who will also look after you if you establish a relationship.
11 Fresh herbs are superior to nearly all dried herbs. If I can't get fresh, I change the menu. If you need tarragon, it must be French or, at a push, winter. Don't go near Russian, it has no flavour. Flat leaf (Italian) parsley is best. Dill needs to be very fresh or it gets dull and slightly bitter. Rosemary is queen – but it's got to be fresh and if there are flowers on it, try to avoid it as it means it's past its peak and will be slightly bitter and very strong. That applies to all herbs. Basil must be very fresh and smell heavenly.
12 If you're making fresh pasta, use double 0 (00) flour only. Other flour glugs up. Let the pasta dry for at least half an hour before you cook it. Overnight is still good.
13 Pastry is best made at home (unless it's puff or filo, then you're definitely allowed to buy it from the supermarket). If you have a food processor, it's easy. Just use frozen butter instead of cold butter. Also, I often use lemon juice instead of water. Always rest pastry in the fridge before rolling it, then rest it in the fridge again after rolling it. If you don't it will shrink. Also, if you use too much water (or lemon juice – whatever fluids) it will shrink. If you're using filo, rest it on a damp tea towel to stop it drying out and breaking up.
14 Use uncultured unsalted butter for everything. If you use margarine, I will take out a contract on your life. If you use salted butter, I will haunt you.
15 Make your own mayonnaise. It's easy and quick, especially if you use a food processor, and it tastes so different from bought products they could be from different planets. If it curdles, take another egg yolk and whip the curdled mixture into it.
16 Always use good chocolate – Valhrona or equivalent. Cocoa – Dutch is good. The Valhrona one is almost too rich.
17 Cream – thick (not 'thickened') is fine. Don't bother with double thick or very expensive creams. If you want to dress it up, add icing sugar and vanilla. The icing sugar makes it stiffer.
18 Always spin your salad greens until they are dry. If you don't the dressing won't stick. Never let your salads swim in dressing and dress at the last minute to stop sogging.
19 Use Murray salt (pinkish) on salads. It's fabulous. Maldon is also wondrous but always try to buy Australian if you ca
n.
20 Easiest ever dessert: Fresh strawberries – the best you can buy – accompanied by sour cream with dark brown sugar stirred through. HEAVEN!
Final advice: Almost anything tastes good if you're hungry enough.
When I give it to her, I'm puzzled. 'You know, darling, there are a squillion great cookbooks around that will tell you all this and more. Why don't I get you a couple as a going-away present?'
She smiles, that clever young woman who will always be a child in my eyes, and shakes her head. 'Cookbooks have no soul and aren't filled with our own history,' she replies.
Then I remember Barbara's recipes. Handwritten or clipped from magazines and filed together in a loose leaf folder, with notes alongside: 'This is quick and easy for a big group', 'Use half the amount of butter', 'Don't overmix'. Bob gave the book to his youngest daughter. Hopefully, she will keep it and pass it on to her daughter – with recipes of her own added with handwritten hints. It is the resonance of the past that is compelling and comforting. Any food, if it's cooked with care and love for the people you are feeding, turns out ok.
On a walk along the back track, I run into a neighbour and tell her about writing 'Cooking Rules' for Fleury's daughter.
'Glad she appreciated it. I was at a twenty-first birthday party recently, where an ancient aunt lovingly handed over her mother's recipe book to the birthday girl. It was clearly the most precious thing in her life and to part with it was a measure of her love and hope for her grand-niece's life ahead. As soon as she turned away, the girl and her mother whispered, "Cheapskate!" behind her back. Felt like snatching the book away from them. They didn't understand what it was all about.'
'Yeah, it's the past that reminds us who we really are, no matter how many times we reinvent ourselves along the way.'
***
Late October and jacarandas froth along Pittwater Road in purple splendour. Bougainvillea spills in red and pink rivers over fences and corrugated iron rooftops, flounced like chiffon. Jasmine clings to walls, its tiny white flowers like the night sky. The colours are so lush it's difficult to believe the drought goes on. And on.
Big Dave's working to get the boat ready, sanding timber, polishing steel. Painting, cleaning and lining up Bainy to service the engine to purring contentment. He's also getting anxious about crew for Intrepid. Bob is keen to explore the wild coastline of Tasmania but doesn't want to do the numbing slog from Pittwater down the coast to Victoria and across irritable Bass Strait to Hobart. He's done it too often, mostly as either skipper on his own boat or crew in the iconic Sydney–Hobart Yacht Race when, every Boxing Day, a fleet of svelte yachts glides out of Sydney like a flock of giant seagulls or parrots, depending on whether they've hoisted pure white sails or rainbow-coloured spinnakers.
Bob was in the blow in 1998 when thunderous waves rose higher than a city skyscraper and six men lost their lives. He was one of seven crew on Bright Morning Star, a 55-foot yacht fitted for cruising not speed, owned by Hugh Treharne, Bomber's brother. Hugh was tactician the year Australia won the America's Cup, in 1983. I was still living in the low-slung timber house at the water's edge on Scotland Island the year of the horror Sydney–Hobart and I knew Hugh and Bomber but Bob was in the future.
When the storm hit between Christmas and New Year, Pittwater, normally raucous with parties, went silent. It was a dreadful time, the whole community huddled around the radio and television waiting for news. Big Dave was on a boat, as were Zapper from Scotland Island, Bob and many others. Pittwater was lucky. Everyone survived. There was no backslapping hurrah for the men when they returned, though. They came home silently and for a long time no-one asked what it was like that night. But slowly, the stories came out.
'I was on the helm,' Zapper said. 'The noise was horrendous, like the world was being hammered to pieces. Then suddenly there was absolute silence. My glasses floated in front of me. I reached for them, my arms slow and heavy, like I was in a dream. I realised we were under water. The boat had rolled. Then the roaring began again. We'd righted.'
I didn't hear Bob's story until a couple of years later. 'The storm reached a peak as I came off watch,' he recalled. 'I was exhausted. The boat was chaos. Stuff rolling, falling, crashing, banging.' He had one dry change of thermals in his waterproof bag. He hesitated. Should he change or not? Just as he stripped, a wall of deep green water exploded though the hatch, filling the cabin like a backyard pool. A round pink shape hurtled towards him and landed heavily on his chest. For the first time in his life, Bob thought he might die. He couldn't breathe. He was drowning.
'Another bloke was thrown out of his bunk and landed on me. Bomber's son. I shoved him off. The boat righted. The water sloshed to the floor. I was winded but I could breathe again. I managed to pull on my wet-weather gear, strapped myself to a safety harness and went on deck. The mainsail was reefed three times but I watched a wave shred it like a cotton handkerchief. We were doing six and a half knots under bare pole. If you looked behind, all you could see was a sixty foot green valley.'
At four o'clock in the morning, they made it to the shelter of Eden, an old whaling and fishing town on the coast just before the halfway mark. They tied up to a barge on a mooring and waited for light.
'All I wanted was a hot breakfast and dry clothes,' Bob said. 'But we couldn't get a taxi. The bloody media had grabbed the lot. We all walked to a café in town, ate everything we could see. Then we went to the laundromat and washed and dried our gear. Felt almost normal.'
Not for long, though. Later that afternoon, Eden was a graveyard of battered boats and bruised and battered men with sunken eyes black with shock.
'Never should have stripped in a storm,' he said, over and over, shaking his head. 'You keep your clothes on, wet or not. A bad decision like that can cost you your life.'
***
It's a crystal-clear evening after a roaster of a day. Far too hot for October. Makes me wonder if the apocalypse is coming. Or doomsday. When I was a kid, the school playground was always rife with prophecies of doom. 'The world will end next week,' little Gunther would insist, eyes wide with fear, skinny legs poking out of leather shorts with embroidered braces. And the rumour would take hold until we scared ourselves silly, running home to ask our parents if they'd heard. The world is coming to an end! And my parents would laugh, the best cure for fear, and my brother and I would have to do our homework after all.
But when the weather is weirdly wrong for the time of year, or a storm lashes so violently that the back track is strewn with fallen trees or when the sky is orange from the smoke of bushfires, the doomsday words of long ago claw back. For a split second I wonder, is this it? Then I shrug. What will be will be. Don't sweat what you can't control.
'Got your crew yet?' Bob asks Big Dave when we meet, as usual, passing through The Point. Around us, people stand chatting in groups. Curly-haired Scotty with his shy smile and handsome Thad with his devoted brown border collie, Griffen. Bainy, his fisherman's cap titled forward against the setting sun. Toby, khaki shorts overcoated with red dust, and thoughtful Dave with his big, slow smile, dreadlocks shorn. Matty, red-faced and grey-haired, less able to charm and dangerously oblivious to the penalties of reckless living. They all look knackered and hold their beers like the brew has been sanctified and will lead to everlasting life.
Heather, Scotty's partner, still in her navy blue and white nursing uniform, sits at one of the wooden tables with a rum and coke in a can. She's a natural comedian – the humour black when she talks about working in the dementia ward of the nursing home that is part of the retirement complex where my mother lives. 'Mate,' she'll say, 'the posh old girl with the plum in her mouth. Every time you go into her room, it's hello, how are you, how lovely of you to visit, how's the weather, seen any shows lately. You're in and out about ten times a day and it's always the same: Hello, how are you, how lovely of you to visit . . . She cracked it today, though. One of the wanderers nicked off with a photo from her bedside table. Nothing posh about her
today . . . Mate, words I've never heard!'
And the sad stories. 'Couldn't get Mrs Kafoops showered. Shrank in the corner whimpering like a baby. Must've been raped as a kid. There's a few like her. Lived with it all their lives and probably never told a soul. In those days, women shut up. Buried it in their heads until dementia cross-wires their brains and opens the box. Now it haunts them. Breaks your heart.'
Groups dissolve and reform with a slight turn of a shoulder. The talk rambles on. Who fell out of a tinny? Who ran aground? Even small crises are recreated in comic skits. 'Mate, I was busting for a pee. Busting! So I scooted through the moorings. Bloody water police got me. Didn't want to know about my bladder. If men had babies they'd be more understanding. Well, I couldn't wait while he wrote out my ticket. Peed over the side. Never seen a boat move so fast. Still haven't got the ticket.' But occasionally, voices shrink to a murmur about a struggling marriage, a health crisis, kids careening down the wrong path under the illusion it's nothing more than good fun.
Big Dave sways backwards and forwards on his heels. I look at him sometimes and wonder whether he locks pressure inside because he's a man and a cop and he's not supposed to have frailties. But we all do.
'Got a team together for the trip,' he tells Bob. 'Only thing is, they're all women.'
'Nothing wrong with that,' I blurt.
'Not a thing, except they don't know anything about boats.'
'Who are they?'
'Kerry, from The Island. She's retiring from work, said she wanted a challenge. Well, we can manage that. There's one little problem, though,' he says, screwing up his face with concern. 'She's scared of boats. Little ones, like tinnies. Hates them. Not sure she'll feel much better on a big boat, which will make it a bit hard ferrying her on and off when we throw down the anchor.'
'Bit of a handicap, yeah,' says Bob. 'Who's the other person?'
'Annette. From The Island. She's done some sailing but she's been a bit crook. A lung transplant a year ago. She's good now, but wouldn't like to push her too hard.'