'Ways of Seeing': the Tasmanian Landscape in Literature

THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH and ‘WAYS OF SEEING’: THE TASMANIAN LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE

ANNA DONALD (19449666)

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia

School of Humanities (English and Cultural Studies)

2013

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ABSTRACT

The Territory of Truth examines the ‘need for place’ in humans and the roads by which people travel to find or construct that place, suggesting also what may happen to those who do not find a ‘place’. The novel shares a concern with the function of landscape and place in relation to concepts of identity and belonging: it considers the forces at work upon an individual when they move through differing landscapes and what it might be about those landscapes which attracts or repels. The novel explores interior feelings such as loss, loneliness, and fulfilment, and the ways in which identity is derived from personal, especially familial, relationships Set in Tasmania and Britain, the novel is narrated as a ‘voice play’ in which each character speaks from their ‘way of seeing’, their ‘truth’. This form of narrative was chosen because of the way stories, often those told to us, find a place in our memory: being part of the oral narrative of family, they affect our sense of self and our identity. The Territory of Truth suggests that identity is linked to a sense of self- worth and a belief that one ‘fits’ in to society. The characters demonstrate the ‘four ways of seeing’ as discussed in the exegesis. ‘“Ways of Seeing”: The Tasmanian Landscape in Literature’ considers the way humans identify with ‘place’, drawing on the ideas and theories of critics and commentators such as Edward Relph, Yi-fu Tuan, Roslynn Haynes, Richard Rossiter, Bruce Bennett, and Graham Huggan. It asks what conclusions may be drawn from the differences in attitude toward nature and human settlement in Tasmania across the considerable time period represented by selected writings from 1870-1999: Marcus Clarke’s For The Term of his Natural Life (1870-1872), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1978), James McQueen’s Hook’s Mountain (1982), Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994), and selected work by Christopher Koch (1958-1999). The study explores the notion of ‘ways of seeing’ and concludes that Richard Rossiter’s concept of three phases of ‘the relationship between nature and identity within Australian narrative’ can be applied to the examined texts. Also, it appears that a fourth phase is apparent in this staging of a literary consciousness: one which can be contextualised within Huggan’s discussion of the ‘transnational’.

DECLARATION

This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication.

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CONTENTS

THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH 1

HOBART 2 1. The Territory 3 2. Mapping ‘Home’ 32 3. A Last Migration 62

ACROSS THE SEA WALL 69 4. The Northern Lights 70 5. Expected Time of Arrival 87

HOBART – TWENTY YEARS LATER 108 6. The Territory of Truth 109 7. The Long Fetch 128 8. The Road Not Taken 148

‘WAYS OF SEEING’: THE TASMANIAN LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE 160 1. Introduction 161 2. ‘Ways of Seeing’ 164 3. Why Landscape? Why Tasmania? 171 4. The Texts – Three ways of seeing 178 5. A Fourth ‘Way of Seeing’ 195 6. Creative Response 202

BIBLIOGRAPHY 208

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THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH

Anna Donald

HOBART

1. The Territory

Maeve Be mindful I tell myself, sitting beside the harbour, painting, making a picture of this lovely town of golden and grey stone set at the foot of a mountain. Hobart is landscape: all about us the hillsides, the sky, the clouds, the roiling of grey shapes over the blue, and the water driven around the globe, the forty two degrees and further of south, and slapping now against the sea wall before me in lapping waves, replete, the last victorious gasps after a great run, after a long fetch. The water licks the stone, brimming with the current of history, of ships, other lands, travellers: mesmerising, insistent, teasing the eye with patterns, the ear with whispers. Soon a world of stories rises and begins to hum. It is difficult to be on guard, to stop myself drifting into different territory: a boat, wet boards, a plank biting into my calves, a blister filling as I rush to bring my oar around, to dig it into the blue that kicks just a little too soon. The oar crabs and misses the surface. I lurch forwards, out of rhythm. The lash cracks on my back.

***

The painting is a gift for someone who’s coming from England for a visit. I’m hoping she’ll have happy memories of the place and like the picture enough to take it home. Maybe she’ll decide to stay on, as people do, though she might be disappointed in some aspect of The Hobart Experience. We often are... disappointed in life, whether in the wider world of friendships or of kin. I too have been disappointed but I’ve always found a new reason for a future. Anticipation is a drug. I painted this same view a long time ago, to put beside my father’s bed as he lay there, day after day, life after life. Sadly, the memory of him is haunted by slithering images of withered flesh, clawed hands, old bone in a jar. My father is long dead, my mother too, but just recently. Once I was enmeshed in their memories, now I’m making my own, striking out as it were. Of course some people cling to the idea of family, like my brother with his little brood. Me, not so much, though that could change, I’m open to it.

People love to come to Australia for a visit, to see first-hand all those touristy images, then if they move on to Tasmania, (not all do) they apparently find an unexpected hominess in the island, a sort of familiarity. Oh it’s like England, they coo, or if they go further west or south, Like Scotland. I have painted Scotland, in another life, more than twenty years ago. I was on the run then. And although this view before me is touted on a hundred tourist cards and websites, I am still painting my own view, what I want to see. I’m trying to get it just right: applying The Rule of Thirds, the placing of compositional elements upon intersections... showing the relationships of each of the separate parts: the sky, the water, and the detail. I have to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out because I don’t like clutter in a landscape. There is an ugliness always on view where people have been. Not out in nature of course, but where humans go ugliness will follow in some form or another, as in the blight of telephone poles, and coloured signs or television antennas. The one on the top of the mountain here seems such a desecration: the stick, it’s called, but what an excrescence. I always leave it out when I paint the mountain. Detail can be the devil as some say. The painting is a study of the old bond stores down here in Sullivan’s Cove, where it all began for the British, where the life of Hobart began. I’m inspired by the honeyed sandstone, the shapes and shadows of the windows, the huge wooden doors: I’m drawn to the history of it, the signposts back to the past when Hobart offered a new life to some, and the end of life for others. My brush hovers over the painting, stilled by images of bloodied shards of bones spiking through stripped flesh. I will myself to work but my focus is wavering. Each time I look up and out to the view I’m distracted. There is so much to think of in life. A dreamer, as my brother says. And sometimes he still says, morbid, or weird. It doesn’t bother me. I’m an adult and no longer the little girl he used to tease. I have always chosen to leave much about him out of my life but now... in the coming weeks I see that I will need his help. With the visitor. For I would like to present an image of family to her, show her the place that I have. Of course it will be a deceit but that has become my way. I will be crossing into new territory, over the threshold, into his family life, into unfamiliar domestic terrain, into his normal but ordinary life. A bird swoops overhead and I turn to watch its path as it flies to the west, toward the mountain: the Mother. Sun shines on the peak in the breaks between the rushing clouds which snatch the colour from trees and rocks. History intrudes.

Unwillingly I hear the rattle of chains; of the aborigines and the convicts plunging through the bush; the slavering dogs barking and racing, soldiers shouting, gunshots. The hunted are running hopelessly free. I feel their breath tightening in my lungs, my head pounded by the noise. It will happen of course, and it does, I am running with them, desperate for escape, branches slapping at my face and the ground trying to trip me. I shut my eyes. Fearful memory is all about. Some years ago a lunatic drove south with a gun to the Port Arthur convict prison, now a tidily sign-posted museum where people wander about in the sunshine listening to the guides and unsuccessfully trying to imagine the hell enacted there. The lunatic got out of his car and then enacted another hell, an enduring pointless rage engulfing innocent people. There, where so many had been imprisoned and flogged and died alone in dark dank cells, there, he chased and stalked and murdered until a score and more of bodies lay all about on the picnic carpet of lawn and flowers. I won’t take my visitor to Port Arthur, not when there is so much of the beauty of nature to see.

***

Focus. First the sketch; then preparation of my palette and brushes. There are deep shadows between the buildings so I’ll need spaces of light as a balance. I may have to adjust the colour a little: I don’t want it too dark: shadows and light will give definition to shapes. As a child, I was careful to creep quietly, else I would be heard and a shape would leap out to frighten me. I knew what it was like to be hunted in the dark: their joke, my fear. I think again of the fear of the hunted ghosts of the hills behind me. I hear the percussive smack of gunshots, pleading cries to the heavens (what use that?)... then an almost sweet silence, an expectation, as if thoughts are hovering and time passing and nature breathing again through the years. Now a restful scene of skeletons lying on the mountain in the bush; their bony limbs twisted and caught in the grasses, the rain having carried twigs and small stones into the spaces. I see those pale skulls, some dappled by sun and all sweetly serenaded by birds: skulls with thirsty square jaws falling open, or leering up at the day. I see moonlight breaking through the canopy of trees, carving into the thickets, finding, then falling on the long lost, drawing shadows on the shapes of curving ribs, rippling

6 over leg bones, dappling the knobbed knees, pattering across clicky fingers, and brightening the rusting chains. What sadness. What pain in the withered fortunes of life that some must endure. I think on the convict bones, once gloved in the shape of men from faraway places. What thoughtless mistakes, or evil, or simple broken lives brought them here to die in Van Diemen’s Land: the green hills and rolling dales of Britain forever lost to them. Again I focus on mixing the colour of the stone: hewn and solid; a contrast to the water of the harbour which slides now in slippery grey and green around the wooden bollards, licking at the steps of the landing stage near my feet. Yet still, just beyond my vision, the rising roar of landscape. Though I have sympathy for those haunted ghosts, it has been much diminished by my own flight.

***

Big fat mountain I used to say when I was little. In those days the road to the top was narrow and winding, and treacherous if it snowed, but of course we didn’t have a car because Mum didn’t drive. It was just the tram and the trolley bus to get her about. She let me walk her to the bus stop once, but when she got on she sat on the other side so I couldn’t see her, just the arse-end of the trolley-bus as it drew away. She was dolled up and off to the pictures, always the pictures and always with a gorgeous hat on her head. I’m a milliner, she’d say, at Belle Chapeaux, her voice as sharp as her hat pin. It is difficult to remember when memory began. For me it was when I was about six. I’ve heard people say they remember as far back as when they were three or four, and some say even earlier, ah the conundrum of remembering memory. Like most little girls I loved my mother’s clothes and wanted to dress just like her when I grew up. In fact for a while I wanted to be her: beautiful and feminine and artistic. From Spain, though she did not like to talk about it. I decided something bad must have happened there. As it can, anywhere. Beautiful she was but I do not say loving, in the list of my mother’s accomplishments because what do we know of that when we are six? Having no comparisons, we just accept. It is only later when we see other people at work in the business of family do we have pause for reflection.

Of course now I know that she was not who I thought her to be, just a sad imposter and now I only feel pity which I admit did come very late to me. For a time I preferred the tang of bitter resentment, like a cold gin and tonic on a hot summer day.

***

We lived in a two-storey house on a steep street that is so typical of Hobart. Up and down and around about the streets go, and those who travel by bus are grateful for the many handles provided to stop a head long fall at the next corner. In our house the best rooms were on the top floor and were for my mother. One her bedroom and one her workroom: both with views over the water. There was another room further up, quite small but with a dormer window, it had a beautiful view away over the hills, wasted entirely on my brother. From time to time I would pester him to change rooms with me but he never would. From the lounge room window downstairs there was also a view of the harbour, but narrower. Those vistas are long since built out, as our past lives will be built out, layered over, and just as well. I have no wish to be there again in those days, rubbing up against those ugly pieces of lives left over when the light of it all has gone. Back then, as a child, the view of the rectangle of colour was a magnet to my eye: it drew me away to dreams of other people, other places. I used to pile cushions on an armchair to get a bit of height so I could see the yachts tracking across the water and watch the sharp white bows biting in to the blue, watching as the bulging shapes and splashes of colour drew the movement out and across the river. And when the orange-painted research ship was setting off for a voyage to the Antarctic: ah, such a collision of colour! The man next door to us, often so annoying with his lawn mower (take note how to mow up a hill he would bawl over the racket), gave up the garden when the Sydney to Hobart was on and would sit on his veranda with his binocs, as he called them. If I asked he would let me have a look. It was amazing to suddenly see the people on the boats: see them straining at the ropes and canvas to make sail. Amazing too, other people in their little domestic scenes closer by, a woman pegging washing, a kid in a lemon tree, someone going in and out of their back shed with boxes, to and fro, here and there. I wanted some binocs just to look at the lives of other people.

People were interesting and in those days I liked drawing them. There was no money for paints, but I did well enough with my pencils. For subjects I’d watch passers-by from the veranda or sit in the park, or cajole my neighbours. They were amused by my serious intent as I drew, then when I showed them, I could tell they were surprised at what they saw, skinny limbs or big bums bending over a mop and bucket. Mr Binocs used to let me draw his grand-daughter who was happy to sit in her pram and watch. I had no words for it then but now I can see that the curves of her face were a comforting story... that there was perfection in the world. Eventually I had quite a collection of cherubs with wispy curls framed by lacy pillows and swathed about the neck with crescent collars. Mrs Binocs asked for one. I also liked high cheekbones and the shape of eyebrows. In school the back pages of my exercise books were speckled with eyebrows and noses and ear-lobes, all from my neighbours in the classroom. And feet, when the teacher sat at her desk she would cross her ankles: I liked the shape of the ankle bone against the rounded shape of the sole of her sensible court shoe. No stilettos in those early days. Mr Binocs was happy to be a model. He often went shirtless, wearing just a singlet which revealed the curving shapes of his arms. I see now that he was running to fat. I liked the way he crossed his arms across his chest when he sat in his wicker chair on the veranda because I had to work out where one bit went under the other and where it came out on the other side. He was tattooed with a hefty anchor, the lines a blurry blue and sprouting hair. Also a faded red rose, the woman’s name, I thought, difficult to read. I didn’t include his tattoos. Sometimes he was annoying because he wouldn’t sit still. He had an itchy rash he said, which often got so bad he had to rub it inside his shorts. When I frowned and concentrated on my drawing he’d laugh, You’re a funny one Maeve. If Mrs Binocs was home he’d call her to, Come and have a look at Maeve’s pictures. She’d peer at my page then look silently into my face as if looking at some strange little beastie goblin. I didn’t draw anyone in my family, not on paper but I could close my eyes and trace my mother’s brows and high cheekbones on an imaginary page, positioning the sweep of her hair just so, the clasp at the back holding the black coils up so neatly behind her neck. When I was older and spent time trawling through school encyclopaedias for information about Spain I would always stop to look at the faces,

9 particularly the one of a woman called The Duchess of Alba. The portrait was a side view, her hair was caught up behind like my mother’s, though the Duchess wore a lace head-dress. It seems silly now but to a child the similar hairstyle was evidence.

***

Mr Binocs showed me one day that if you turned the binocs around everything would then be tiny; the people like ants, all you could see was the landscape: green, blue, sky, clouds; a perfect picture, just further away. I liked those little landscapes but I stuck with drawing people. Back then in our house there was just my mother and me, and of course my big brother, the skite, who liked to give Chinese burns and cork my legs. Our father didn’t live with us: he left when I was a baby and was off somewhere else in Hobart. I never really gave much thought to that. My mother would take me with her at night every few weeks when she went to see him, though she’d make me wait outside while she went in. I was in love with my mother then, fascinated by her, and all the bits that went with being a woman. Occasionally she would let me sit in her workroom and watch her make a hat. I was not to speak so sat quietly watching as she sorted beads and feathers and lace trimming, making decisions of what to use and what to put aside. A feather here perhaps, then no, perhaps just a few clustered pearls (sadly, imitation): with, interestingly, a light swathe of silk draped softly on the side. Sometimes when sewing my mother spoke aloud; it wasn’t to me, just her thoughts trailing in a soft Scottish burr, Let’s see the now, this or this, what to use? Other times she decided she had used too much and after holding the hat, before her and twisting it this way and that would quickly strip away a few beads or one too many feathers. I was impressed and absorbed by her decisions, the skilful way she made something gorgeous come to life in her hands. I watched as her brows knitted with her decisions, and her lovely white hands sorted and stroked the feathers and the silk and smoothed-out pieces of lace or brocade, then the pushing of the hooked needle through the fabric and the tying of an invisible knot. Once when she was in a good mood and felt like talking she told me that the knot was the most important piece of hand-stitching. Without a proper knot, she said, the stitching will eventually unravel, there will be nothing to hold it together.

I remember I gave great import to that instruction, but I see now it wasn’t the lesson that was important to me it was because she looked up, at me, and spoke to me, shared a little bit of her wisdom, of who she was... as if... as if. But there, I still can’t define it. It’s like trying to get a particular colour into a painting. You can see the image before you, and you have your tubes of paint, but it is oh so difficult to replicate that, to get it just right.

***

My fascination with my mother but also the business of growing up and becoming a woman was intensified by another neighbour, a woman across the road. She had the exotic name of Zoe, and wandered about her garden in summer in white shorts which my mother said were made from sharkskin. Also, according to my mother, Zoe had a boyfriend called Lloyd who took her away on caravan trips north of Hobart, the Bay of Fires I liked to think, the name suitable for such an interesting person. My brother told me she swam in the nuddy, but how he knew that I don’t know. I thought of her plunging into the water, her sharkskin shorts left lying on the beach and wondered what it would feel like to wear shorts made of sharkskin, about the person who made them, how the needle might or might not slip through. Day- dreaming, I did drawings of a woman lying on a beach. I gave her a high curving bottom and long legs emerging from the shadows of fabric. The word bottom was not in my head then. It was just the shape I liked. Bottom came later, or arse as my brother said. In my drawings I positioned the legs extended and splayed on the sand, concentrating on the shadows and the shapes the legs and feet would make on sand in sunshine. And although I had never actually seen Zoe lying on the sand, or anywhere else for that matter, I practised the shapes by sprawling about on our lawn putting my legs this way and that to see where shadows went. Once Mr Binocs called out, Maeve, are you all right? You look like an upper-liptic. My mother heard of course and came out with a wooden spoon and let fly, hissing at me about, making a display of us. What on earth is wrong with you? Her soft burr always slipped into brogue when she was angry so earth became urrth. Sometimes I’d stand in front of the mirror and say urrth to see if it made me

11 look more Scottish, or more like her. I would like to have looked like her, even a bit. She might have liked that too.

***

My drawings were only in lead pencil but I put a lot of effort into the cross- hatchings of light and shade, and darker patches: the softness of skin; the colour of it, whether tanned or pink and white, or freckled, or the blue and green of old bruises. The best part of drawing, and I knew this even when I was a kid, was that you had a choice to include things you liked and leave out the bits you didn’t. It could make a lot of difference. It has stuck with me. It’s like people, they like to choose things about you to remember, quite often only things they have heard, not the real you, just their made-up version, and they pass on their version to others and they all talk to you forever as if it is so, until you want to scream. And what about the name Zoe! There were so many Bettys and Doreens and Hildas that Zoe, that last letter of the alphabet seemed to be full of mystery: a name from a place on the other side of the world perhaps where women had faces of peaches and cream, not brown and speckled and lined. I was interested in the thought of the end of the alphabet. It’s a place we rarely if ever get to; a place of all those last, odd, lonely, strange letters tipped together, like last thoughts, last lives, and plans long forgotten or lost. At school I went through a stage where every town and person in my stories used those last letters, but there is only so far you can go with it, and I think it drove the teacher mad, which made me happy. She stopped me looking in her dictionary for words with those letters and told me to be a bit more interesting. Anyway, for names I had Zoe, and I had a Zelda and a Zanuck and a town called Yelverton and of course Zeehan, but x was the sticking point. X. Very difficult except for x marks the spot if you are looking for treasure or going somewhere. Then, yes, x marks the spot where you are going. The spot you are looking for. The place you might be happy.

***

Zoe spent a lot of time in her beautiful rose garden. When people stopped to chat and ask questions she could be heard trilling, My domain, God’s Little Acre and waving her arm proudly in an encompassing sweep of the flowers. My mother thought Zoe was a show off and grumbled that the woman has too much time on her hands. Sometimes on a warm night I’d sit on the grass outside Zoe’s kitchen window and watch her in the glare of the light while she was cooking. I think I fell in love with her a bit, especially when she sang be bop a loolah and sashayed around her kitchen table. Once I saw her sit on her boyfriend’s knee at the table and feed him from his plate as if he was a baby. It was amazing to see them laugh and hug and squeeze each other. I hung around a lot after that to try to see what else might happen. When my mother found out, maybe she saw my drawings or maybe Zoe gave me away, she dragged me inside and gave me a good whacking for being so stupid. I don’t want you near that woman, she’s a hoor. Mum seemed to know lots of women who were hoors and would point them out to me on the street. My mother, Mrs Meg McGill, was not a hoor; she was a good woman, a sensible woman. She told me she had seen the light.

Meg McGill Tonight I’m off to the pictures with my friend Lorna, so I’m wearing my new creation. I don’t like the word hat, it sounds dumpy and plain. It puts me in mind of frumpy Hobart winter hats. I’ve let wee Maeve into my bedroom to sit and watch me get ready. She’s a difficult child, I have to say it, odd, always mooning about and annoying the neighbours. In here she knows to sit quiet. I see her in the mirror but I’ll not catch her eye. She loves to watch me and I make sure I put on a show, fussing about with dresses and scarves and bracelets, even though I know exactly what I’m going to wear. I laugh to myself when I see her eyes following as I pick things up then put them back down. I make sure to keep a serious look on my face. I’m her mother and must set an example. She has a lot to learn. It’s a mother’s duty: to teach. This latest creation, if I do say so myself, is gorgeous: just a touch of net around the front and a feather curled towards the brim. I sewed a cluster of pearls from an old necklace where the feather joins the net. The pearls set off my black hair:

13 my Eoin has this same colour. He’ll grow into a fine son, I know that. A mother’s blessing it is to have a fine son. The brim angled over my brow, is jaunty, certainly not tarty. Tarts and hoors, the words roll off my tongue the way they have from many a good Presbyterian woman. Surely there are enough of tarts and hoors about, or the makings of them. Oh I have to catch myself when I say the words in case I look right at her. She’s just a bairn, just eight, but I can tell where she’s heading. All those blonde curls. Sure to be trouble. All fur coat and nae knickers, as we used to say in Paisley when I was a lass. Now she’s looking at my picture frames on my bureau. I hope your hands are clean, I say. She puts them behind her back but leans in to peer at the faces. I know the questions she’ll ask for the umpteenth time and I’ll give her my same answers. She knows who they all are but she will ask. Who are they again Mum? She’s pointing, careful so as not to touch, her other hand still behind her back. I know she’s wanting a story, probably about Spain, so she can go away and dream with it. But she’ll not get one from me. Maeve, I say sharpish, I’ve no time for that the now! She straightens, her hand goes back to clasp the other behind her back and she shifts her eyes to my face. And this is the part I enjoy, my pantomime, I take up the hat pin with the diamante on the end and push it into the brim at the side, just above my ear. As I do I grit my teeth and screw up my face as if I am in terrible pain. Och now, I say loudly, that’s a terrible hurt. I wish I knew the words in Spanish, now that would be something. Then I look at her. Yes, her eyes have widened and she’s staring up at me, adoration on her silly wee face. I wait a second or two then turn and say, I’m off now. She jumps up and follows me to the front door, but I’m away. I don’t stop or stoop to kiss, ever.

Maeve I’m going to take a break from this painting and get a coffee over at Salamanca. I drink it keeping an eye on my equipment, waving to the gallerists and some of the locals I know who are going about their business, as we do. I make a note to bring my visitor here when she arrives. I’m still trying try to convince myself it will be fun to play the tourist guide for a while, but really I’m nervous at my ability to carry it all off. I’m not good with people, so I’ve been told, and how to get my brother on-board to help with the visitor, a conundrum. Perhaps a trip or two to the bush, he’d be in

14 that, he knows everything about plants there is to know. I can only draw and paint them, or take photographs, which is not real. I quell my sudden lack of confidence by getting back on task. I’ll have to leave out some of those ugly telephone posts and wires. It’s life, there are always adjustments to make and things to leave out. It’s important. A sort of editing, if you will, the way we edit our lives. Do not give people everything. Even if you do, they will still embellish, invent, twist. There are artists who include everything, absolutely every detail. They call themselves photo realists. I’m not sure if they’re brave or stupid. I get on my high art-fart horse then and say such as, Why not just take a photo and have done with it, if realism is what you want? Art is interpretation: that of the artist and of the observer (I can be as big a prat as the next one). But is life realism? Should we remove the tumours, the warts, the wiggly grey hairs, the moles, the scars, the bloodied wounds? Should we leave all of that out? What do we need for a life, for a story?

***

While I sketch and fiddle, and re-arrange the realism I think about the colours I’ll use. It’s an unusually warm day so my mind trails on un-directed in the sun, wilfully wandering from colour, to the heat, to memory, to the Royal Hobart Show: colour and crowds, fairy-floss, cows, cow dung, horses, all sorts. The Royal Show, but never really any Royals at all, and me forever too young to be allowed onto the Ferris wheel. One day as I stood watching my brother whirl around and around on it, my neck getting stiff with the watching, a girl’s shoe fell and bounced and re-bounded all the way down, she had been at the top and perhaps had lost her nerve and jerked or wriggled up there in her temporary roost, the shoe fell, bouncing... eventually hitting a boy on the head. He roared mostly with surprise, not pain surely. But by the time they got him down and onto the grass, blood had trickled in streams all down his face like claw marks. His collar and shirtfront were soaked to the colour of rhubarb. When he looked down and saw it he fainted. It was a day to remember.

We stood and watched for a while, my mother, my brother and I, then left hot and tired: away we went, home, all that way on the bus and the trudge up the winding hill.

***

In a moment I am there. The child. My feet ache. I just want to sit in a quiet spot and draw, perhaps a picture of the boy and his blood: a chance to use my coloured pencils. One of Mum’s beaux chapeaux customers has arrived with an order for a new hat. She is an old acquaintance but oh dear, she didn’t make an appointment. Tut tut, goes my mother pulling a face, then walks into the room and is as charming as she can be, though after the introductions and discussions of the hat, and when I wander into the room, she looks and says in her brogue, And this is Maeve, the youngest, the one I didne really want. The visitor’s eyebrows go up, up, up. Not mine, I’ve heard it all before. The visitor, a Mrs. O’Brien from Scotland, can’t believe her ears and looks as if she’s been slapped, then she smiles at me and says, Well, what a wain though, look at her hair, like gold. She pulls me to her, Here’s a wee hug hen, she says, her arms about me. Her front is like a cushion and smells of flowers. I don’t mind at all my face pressed in there. I imagine it’s like a grandma hug. My mother hauls me back and sends me off to the baker for a half round. I hear her begin a gossip. She slips from brogue to burr and back as I go up the path... well there’s just the three of us now, ever since the father, well I gave him his marching orders I did, no more of that going on I can tell you. But I can manage, and my Eoin, he’s going to be such a man.

***

I don’t want to listen to any more of that old story. I head towards the shops. On my way I dawdle and daydream and pick some of Mrs. Moore’s pansies to give to the baker’s wife who always gives me a cake and tells me I’m a beautiful little girl. I always eat the cake before I get home.

Meg McGill I’m not on a social outing tonight I’m on one of my jaunts. I walk up the street towards the tram stop with wee Maeve following me. I like to take her about on my jaunts because she learns from it. Tonight I’m going to the cafe I know he’ll be at. It does a three course with soup and mains and whatever to follow. It’s cheap but good. He has his favourite places and I’ve found them out. On the tram I sit by the window. My reflection shows off my lovely new creation. Beside me I can see Maeve and watch her without her knowing. She’s smiling up as the regular conductor comes down the aisle. He beams when he sees her and, Hello young Miss, he says, one and a half for you, he pauses, or are you a grown- up? She giggles. He’s a fool: she’s eight for God’s sake. I don’t turn my head but watch him in the reflection. Idiot. Maeve takes the tickets and turns to me to smile and I watch as she sees I’m staring out the window. She puts her head down and studies the tickets. The conductor is still standing looking and waiting for me to turn and smile and be the proud mother. I’ll no do that. Instead I keep looking out of the window past their reflections and away into my own thoughts which rush toward me and are always the same: how am I here in this life, and oh how I long to be back in the old country. Of course I’ve got my boy at home and he would be enough but there’s all the rest of it. If not for him I’d walk away, live in some other place, a secret place. The tram stops at the top of Macquarie Street and Maeve stands back for me to go down the steps first. The idiot conductor is still grinning at her. When you get older I’ll ask your Dad if I can marry you. She giggles again and I turn to look at him with the expression I keep for idiots. He shuts up. At the bank on the corner I tell Maeve to sit on the step and wait. I walk down to the cafe and look in. Sure enough Jock’s there, eating his tea by himself, and I go in, just as I would if he was with someone. He looks up as I sit and I see those blue eyes flash. I can read him like a book and though I do say so myself I’ve still a bonny face.

It’s been more than eight years since I gave him his marching orders. The bedroom finished it for me. Made me sick it did, he did, his moaning and sweating and holding me too tight against him, and then the sight of his red face clenched too close to mine as he ground out his Sweet Jesus Meg at the end of it all. I sit down opposite him trying to avoid the sight of his ugly freckled hands. So Meg, he says. I know he’s not expecting a reply. I don’t speak. The waitress arrives and smiles and stands with her pad looking gormless. I don’t look at her. She goes away but leans on the counter talking to the other one and they both stare over at me. I know what they’re saying. If I wanted I could put them in their place: pudgy faces and legs like tables, I would say. I cross my ankles and tilt my hat a little. They watch. What would you be wanting, he asks without even looking up. Just looking at you, I say. I thought you’d had enough of that. He’s trying to butter his bread. I pay you the money for the bairns, so I canny see why you do this. I just smile. Truth be I don’t know why I do it. I just enjoy following him from place to place. Pop up here and there. Put on my hat and coat and track him down. Be an annoyance. I can’t seem to let it go. What did I ever do to you Meg? he whines. Then suddenly, beside us at the table is a policeman holding Maeve’s hand. Is this your daughter? Jock looks at me, You didne leave the lassie out there. Madam, the policeman says, leaving your girl sitting on a step out there is wrong. Plain wrong. What were you thinking? I want to slap his face but I take her arm and say, We’ll be going now. I march her out. Looking back I see Jock and the policeman staring. Fools, both.

Maeve I’m moving along with the visitor’s picture as I’m now calling it, though of course I’ll be giving them more than a picture. They will get the entire kit and caboodle of everything here and how it came to be: the past, the present. How we got to where we are. It’s a daunting task and my confidence wobbles so I immerse myself in the brush

18 strokes. It’s taking shape nicely. I’ve managed to capture the clouds, the high round cumulus as they slide round the side of the mountain, piling up, preparing for a jaunt across the estuary. I need to work up the shadows on the buildings, give them a depth to invite imaginings of people inside busy watching, working, thinking. It’s quieter now, the lunch time rush over but the tourists are still drifting about. One wants to take a photo of me. No, I say, sharpish, and see her expectant smile change to a grimace. I want to say, Leave me alone, I want to think while I paint, but of course I don’t. Why do people just assume you’ll be charming and lovely and let them crowd into your space? My art voice intrudes: Painting is meditative. It’s also therapy: I like to be left alone to dream, to remember, to figure things out like the past, when I was a kid, and life just sort of drifted along, now we are barrelling head long. The past: there was school then home to do our jobs.

***

My brother Eoin chops the kindling and I set the table. After the meal we wash up and dry and put away: all the little routines that led to the end of a day and through the night and into the very next same, same boring day. Sometimes on the weekend my father comes to visit. He’s called Jock, though I know he has another name hidden back there in a different life. Jock never comes into the house so we sit on the veranda. Jock asks about school and listens when I talk. And though I know Mum is in the house listening to us, I don’t mind answering his questions which never seem bad questions. He does like to hear our news but when he leaves Mum tells us where we went wrong and what we shouldn’t have told him, though it is mostly me because Eoin hardly opens his gob. Sometimes Mum tells me that all I needed was a fur coat and some lipstick. Once Jock brought me a brooch in the shape of an elephant: it had sparkly coloured little stones on it, not jewels, I knew they weren’t jewels. Glass my mother had hissed. I wore the brooch all the time but one day it disappeared. I lost it and felt sad the next time he visited and I wasn’t wearing it. Strange the things we remember. Like my mother’s jokes and tricks. At night when I had to go to the toilet which was way up the backyard, I’d walk back to my room through the dark house and often she’d leap out of the black and scare me with a

19 strange growl and hold her hands up in claws like a witch pretending to scratch my face. She thought she was hilarious. I never knew when she would do it and it scared the shite out of me every time, so I tried to be very quiet getting out of bed and down the stairs. When I got a bit older I made it a rule never to drink anything after tea-time. Another day she played a trick that my brother loved and still talks about. Small things amuse small minds, I tell him. When I was about six or seven, she brought home two blocks of chocolate. We were amazed because treats were rare. I took mine to my room and looked at it and counted all the squares and worked out how long I could make it last. My brother broke his open straight away and it was gone in two minutes. That night I decided to eat two squares. When I opened the wrapper, mine was made of balsa wood. My mother had a friend who did window displays for shops and she had got it from him so she could play her joke. She and my brother laughed like drains. Funny stuff to remember, but also the sad and the bad. When I was nine there was the night of Jock’s accident, though I didn’t know it was him at the time. Eoin and I were washing the dishes. We heard a car screech and a loud bang. Mum called out to us, that’s an accident, and ran out of the house. I followed my brother up the back lane to see what was happening but I was too short to see over the wall, and he wouldn’t lift me up. I clambered up a bit but he kicked me back down. Later, back at the house, Mum and Eoin huddled talking in the front room, then Mum got dressed properly and went out. I asked my brother where she was going and he just said, to the hospital. I wanted to know who was sick, who had an accident, but he wouldn’t answer. Mum didn’t come back so I went to bed. In the morning when I got up she was still in her coat and hat with her handbag in her lap, just sitting in the chair on the back veranda and gazing away up at the mountain: it was August and cold so there was a little bit of snow on the top of it. The mist was wreathing back and forth the way it does. So beautiful. I stood by the door and watched her. I can see now as an adult that she was in turmoil, but on that morning all that was clear to me was that something terrible had

20 happened, and I knew not to speak, so I just crept back and got ready for school. I can’t remember at all where Eoin was and my father was the furthest from my mind. It was the day the Commonwealth Bank was to hang my painting in the foyer of their new building. An exhibition of kids’ work to drag in the public I suppose. Mine was a huge canvas divided into rectangles. In each I’d painted a different scene of Hobart: each a fragment; roads, houses, the mountain, churches, buildings, parks, construction work, statues, boats on the harbour. Each rectangle divided and separated from the next by a thick black line and set out to look like bricks, like a wall: partitions and separations.

***

And nearly three years later, which for some of us, would just be a whirl of days and nights, events, and summers and a winter or three. But for others, such as my father, whose real name was Owen, a proud Scotsman, an Aberdonian, and once such a tall, strong, handsome man. What had those years been for him, lying in a hospital bed, then hauling himself back into a life.

Jock It’s near to visiting time so I’ve wheeled myself up to the top of the driveway, where the ambulances pull in. It’s quite a way, and tiring, but I persevere. Though I’ve lost condition, my arms are still strong enough to spin the tyres over the path and up the hill where I sit and wait in the shade of the pine trees. I’ve my new leather shoes on, no slippers for visitors, I say to myself. One of the nurses went shopping for me to get them. We’d had a chuckle together and agreed that one day they could be passed on, as good as new. She said to me, One day Jock, a lucky person will be dashing about in your brown wing-tips. Then she stopped for she thought she’d upset me. I just gave her a smile and said, So they will lassie. I didne mind at all what she’d said.

***

Nurses going on and off duty walk by and smile; they know who I’m waiting for. They’ve seen Maeve many a time and remarked on her long plaits and her wee snub nose. Once the Matron called out, She looks like you Jock, and I couldne help but smile when Maeve scowled at her. What wee lassie would want to look like her father! I wait and look up through the pine branches where a crow is swearing advice to us all. The sky is a thick grey, almost charcoal, the colour of waiting, as if rain’s due any minute, it whirls me back to Aberdeen where I am again a lad of fourteen running up Union Street toward the bothy and through into the kitchen. My shoes thud and clatter as I go and my body pushes its way through the world. I can almost feel it, almost, for I’m losing the sense of that kind of movement, but never the memories of the old country, of home. It’s dinner time so I take my place at the table, facing the stove across the room. Pop and Ma are at either end of the table and all of us squeezed in somehow. Pop is cutting the loaf and I watch his hands as saws the crust. Always his hands with everything he does from mending the shoes to slapping our ears. He’s making a joke of something and we all laugh. Ma smiles across at him and round at all of us: six children and me the youngest but one. I can hear it all so clearly. I’m facing the fire and the mantle and, as always, I look up at the picture of the Cutty Sark. It sets me dreaming. Some long dead relative, George someone, I’m told, sailed on her, out of Aberdeen. I picture him hanging there in the rigging, dipping and swaying and smiling; his red hair catching the light and the clouds building behind the ship as they make their way to deep water, and away to a grand adventure: to Sydney, all that way south, going to Australia. And then years later there was me also going to Australia, leaving the old country. Though I was never sure I was doing the right thing, such a long way, a different world entirely. But Meg and I talked it out and agreed that once we were married we’d be off. It would be a chance for a very different way of life, and so it was. That last day in Aberdeen, I walked down to the harbour to sit on the sea wall. It was July and the sea surprisingly calm even for that part of the world. It was an oily blue, and in places I could see the reflection of clouds above. The smell of the fishing boats was rich and the shouting and bustling from the far end of the dock was just a wash of sound. Above the boats the gulls wheeled and jinked and shrieked.

Sitting there that day on the wall I tried to pinpoint sound and smell and the shape of the boats so that I could take this landscape with me to my new home. But sound is difficult to remember, shapes and colours yes. But sound? No. I can’t remember the sound of the car that night when it came speeding around the corner towards me, nor its brakes squealing. I heard nothing. Weeks later as I lay in hospital, someone searched out the newspaper where a witness had said they’d heard my neck crack as I hit the road.

***

Ah, but here now’s my wee Maeve, at last, coming down the road with my case in her hand. When she reaches me I ask her how she is and she says she’s all right so I turn and wheel my way back to the ward. I always take the case and put it on my lap as she’s carried it all that way, on and off two buses and through the town. I get myself up onto my bed and she sits looking down the ward, at the twelve beds, half of them taken and visitors talking quietly: mostly women here to see their husband or their son. There’s a women’s ward away in another building but I’ve not seen any of them out and about, they’ve their own places I suppose. Unpacking the case I see there’s no note, never a note. I always hope but I think of the hands that packed the case, and that’s enough for me. Just. Fresh pyjamas and socks, some books, peppermints, another note-book for my jottings, some refills for my biscuit tin, shortbread. Maeve likes the picture on the lid. She’s getting used to me and beginning to talk a bit more. Eoin’s been on the odd occasion but he plays football on the weekend so hasne the time really. Strange, but one of our neighbours visited the other day and said he had seen Eoin walking on the track out by Fern Tree, I told him it couldn’t be as Eoin would have been playing football, but the neighbour was convinced. Maeve visits every Saturday, a long way for a wee lassie on her own. I know she’s made to visit but I’m hoping she doesne mind too much. She’s running her hands over the lid of the biscuit tin. It’s a picture of a harbour and fishing boats. Nice colours, she says, where is it, Dad? I like to hear her say Dad, she’d been taught to call me Jock, but that’s changing with the hospital visits. It’s Aberdeen lassie, where I was born, I tell her. Where you met Mum?

No, I met your mum in Paisley. As soon as I say the word Paisley I’m back there, in that town, in that time. I’m twenty two again and how many times did I say that word to the glass in the ticket office window? It’s a soft word, Paisley, begins soft then just slides away. Those nights are suddenly with me: the crowded smells of tenements, the tang of fish suppers, the cold stone of walls. I breathe again the cool of the northern Scottish air, the rumbling from Coates’ mill, and me standing in the close on Gauze street waiting for my Meg to come down the steps, and there she is: dark-haired and beautiful. Me looking down on her face and bending forward, her tipping up on her toes, smiling up at me, her eyes beginning to close.

Maeve On that day so long ago my father was listening to lost voices, raking over his memories with us sitting together, working toward some familiarity, a way to be – there in a long room lined with beds and men with broken bodies. Silences. I see it now that I am grown. I see him getting caught up in the memories and dragging it all into that day where it did him no good at all. But then... I saw only my crippled strange father and my eyes would slide to the clock on the wall and I would wish the time away, when I could set off for home on the slippery street as I called it when very little. There, my mother would have been relishing her day alone.

Meg McGill Eoin is away at his football, and Maeve is off to the hospital. So I have the house to myself. I must say I do enjoy Saturday, the afternoons. The peace of it: a chance to lie in my bed and let my mind take me far away, into the past. And sometimes I dream, not often, but it’s aye the same. I think of my Da and the safety of him, before he died, the comfort of sitting on his lap by the fire listening to an adventure about sailing across the ocean, or the stories of the strange animals in Africa, and sometimes on sunny days a walk in Barshaw Park for an ice-cream.

But my day-dreams always end with those same terrible words of my mother, He’s not coming home, Meg, he got sick in Africa and he has to stay there. Forever? I’d squealed, so loud, and frightened because it didn’t seem possible and I cried in her lap til she put me to bed. But I got up again in the dark and listened at the parlour door to my mother and my aunts crying and moaning and the other words being repeated, over and over, Lost in Africa. Dead of Blackwater Fever. In the jungle. Sometimes I say them out loud, strange words that seem so out of place in this room in neat and tidy Hobart. They hang in the air, scratch my heart, and haul me back to the house in Paisley before he died. When Daniel, as they all liked to croon, was away in Africa. When they decided it was too much and for too long and so it was better that we, my mother and I, should move in to live with the aunts, my Da’s sisters, so they could help my mother manage, while he was away. Though there was only me to manage. And in the time before he died, once I could read, was a bit older, I’d ask the teacher for books about explorers. She gave me one about a brave Scotsman, as she described, called Mungo Park. I thought it the strangest name and have remembered it all my life. As I read it I dreamed of my Da exploring with him: striding along through dark green jungle trees, with natives following carrying bundles on their head. Of course my Da was not an explorer, he was an engineer, but I told my friends at school he was an explorer, and they listened to my stories of it all. What I didn’t know I made up. But he was so far away and oh how I missed him. Oft times I’d hide behind the sofa in the big sitting room, or under the dining table and listen to my aunts and my mother as they talked about where he might be, and when he would be back. My Aunt Jean was confusing with her talk about nothing being the same since you married: we expected the world of him. Now... her voice prim like my Sunday school teacher at the local kirk, and her just as cold and always watching and listening. There’s so much I struggle to remember: like what it was my mother could not manage. That word stuck with me. It’s all too long ago now, and no one to ask, or to remind me. I don’t miss my mother at all, but my Da... He loved to travel, looked forward to his journeys, I do know that. He went three times to Africa, building bridges and roads; each time sailing away out of the

Clyde, away into the blue-grey of Scotland’s waters. And each time he returned to Paisley he brought me a gift: something pretty, for me, his wee Duchess. Sometimes a doll from Spain, or perfumed soaps wrapped in green and black tissue paper. I kept them for a long time before I used any, and I still have one in its wrapper. And still on my bureau, there, I have a photograph of him in his regalia, as he called it: The Gordon Highlanders, taken before he left for Africa the last time. I look at his fine head of black hair, his handsome brow, and he stands looking in at the camera, at me. I still have a brooch he gave me: a riding crop overlaid with a horseshoe. I don’t wear it in case I lose it.

Maeve I’ve packed up for the day: the picture, the gift, almost finished. I’m tired, I’ve been back there in the past too much, that depressing voice place which flattens me. The wind off the ocean is cold and starting to roar. I need comfort. I begin the walk home, up the hill and past the Town Hall, where the lovely four faced clock stands tall. A siren wails in the next street: an ambulance rushing somewhere and though I try not to listen, the noise wins. It tears me out of the day and sets me back in that landscape etched with silence and secrets.

***

Yesterday was my twelfth birthday, nearly a teenager, I keep saying. I wonder when I’ll turn into a woman? Our teacher talked about that but she didn’t make sense. Her face was red and she was blethering as Mum would say and Mum hasn’t said anything about how to be a woman either. I’m getting used to visiting the hospital. I should do, it’s been long past two years, every Saturday I’ve been coming here. I didn’t know people could be sick for so long, and still my Dad can’t walk. He’s given me some money for my birthday. It’s that new money: the decimals. I like the one with the platypus. Use half of it to buy yourself some paints lassie, he says, paint me a picture of the harbour, lots of blue and the boats and the sails. I can put it by my bed.

I used to like to draw people, but now I choose the ocean and the river and the sky. All the blues, like Dad’s eyes. I will Dad, I tell him, I like to say Dad out loud. It’s a small word, quick and positive and definite. My Dad told me that. He loves words and has lots of note-books that he writes in all the time and he has favourite sayings as he calls them. He talks about Comedy and Travel as being two of his loves. He says if he gets another chance that travel is what he will do. I’m not sure what he means by another chance. I’m not really sure what he means by Comedy. The man from three beds along wheels past: his shoulders are big but his legs are skinny. Dad said he’s been in the chair most of his life and that’s why his legs are so little and his arms are so big. Bill his name is. He plays basketball in his wheelchair with some other men. It looks sad the way they whirl around on the rubber tyres and throw the ball back and forward. I feel embarrassed for them, but Dad claps and shouts, That’s a humdinger, when someone gets a goal. I watch the spinning tyres and the round ball and the way their arms, which still look strong, push the ball up high into the air and the way it curves over into the circle of the goal. I like the punchy sound the ball makes when it hits the ground and the swoosh of the tyres as the men rush in again to take it and pass and throw and each to each. They are too quick for me to draw. Dad can’t play this game because he’s too sick. He’s got worse in the years since the accident, not better. His legs have got smaller, though he’s got rid of his slippers and got brand new shoes which he likes and shows me. He can’t move his legs or his feet, not even a little bit. I wonder what his feet look like inside those shoes. Have they got smaller? I’ve never ever seen his feet. I don’t think I want to. They would be all white and shrivelled; they would be horrible to draw. Bill calls out as he goes past, Hello Jock; I see your princess is here. How are you Maeve? You’re such a good girl coming all this way to see your Dad. I wonder about Bill’s thing... did it get big, or stay little? I make my face smile but my eyes slide away from him and up to a gum tree which stretches high up into the blue of the sky. My brother has been telling me about things. Our neighbour Zoe has her niece staying with her. She’s come from the country to stay for a while. She’s older than us, maybe eighteen or so but I was hoping we could be friends anyway, and perhaps play, though eighteen year olds hardly play. But my brother has told me the girl,

Suzanne, is up the duff. She’s having a baby. My brother tells me that where she came from she is the town bike. I was standing on the front veranda one day as she walked up the street, quite slowly, and looked to be crying though she was maybe only wiping sweat from her face as it was a hot day. Suddenly my mother was beside me on the veranda and the two of us stood watching the girl who saw us and raised her hand to wave. I raised mine in return but my mother slapped it down and said in her brogue. Do not do that Maeve, do you hear me, she is a hoor that girl, a hoor. As I looked I saw the wind was lifting gently up the hill and pressing against the girl’s dress and I saw her stomach was a big rounded lump like the mountain behind her. The girl turned away and in at the gate, then into the house. I was about to go inside when I saw Zoe come to the window and stare back out across the street at us. Again I wanted to wave but I didn’t. My mother cut my thoughts off with if you ever do that, if you ever come back here like that. I will kill you. I have remembered her words all my life. It was just an expression, people said.

***

The clock in the ward says half past three, ages yet. I want to go home and lie in the grass by the river, and look up at the mountain and the tumbling clouds. I jiggle my new money in my pocket and look at the picture on the biscuit tin. It’s a new tin a nurse gave to Dad, another picture of Scotland: The Bonny Highlands, it says over a picture of a curved stone bridge and a man with a collie dog. I try to imagine my dad walking over that bridge. I’ve almost forgotten what it looks like when he walks. On his bedside locker he’s got a glass jar and in it is a piece of bone that came out of a sore on his neck nearly a year after his accident. The water in the jar is cloudy and murky like tadpole water. The doctor told Dad it had been working its way out of his body all that time. A souvenir, Dad says, but his smile when he says it doesn’t look real, and I wish he would put the jar away, it makes me feel sick, like his big metal bottle that he does piddle in. He keeps it covered with a cloth but I know what it is. I don’t like the way the spout sticks right up under the cloth. Every now and then he tells me to go for a walk and I do and when I come back the bottle is covered up but in a different position and I know what he just did and what’s in it.

***

You’ve grown up lassie, he tells me. You look like my sister Mattie. Your Auntie. Where is she? Is she married? I’d quite like to see a lady who looks like me and I’d quite like an Auntie or a cousin. Away in Aberdeen, and she’s no married. There’s just the two of us now, he adds as if speaking to himself. What happened to your brothers and your other sister? I like the idea of family, all the ins and outs of it. Mum is an only child, so no hope there. They were a lot older than us, he says, people get sick and... His voice trails away so I don’t ask any more.

***

His Scottish accent is stronger than my mother’s. It’s because I’m a Northerner, he says. I want to ask him about my mother and Spain, but the moment passes as he talks about the old country. And I see that I am also a Northerner: it’s a cold place, so northern that the horizon curves like the globe at school. The sky is bright and icy, the river grey and rushing through bent and waving grasses. I see purple heather and mountains that lead on and on over the curved horizon and there are tall red-headed men in kilts striding along, like soldiers, but not. One of them is singing a sort of marching song but I can’t catch the words even though I run along beside them and listen hard. I watch them: their boots are stamping into the cold ground and the mud is splashing up behind them. I have trouble keeping up.

Jock It’s nearly the end of visiting time and the nurses are getting ready for rounds. Maeve’s got a far-away look in her eyes so I tell her about my woodwork, and the trinket box I’m making for her. Would you like a picture on the lid? I ask.

She swings her green eyes toward me and, One of Spain? she says as a question. Of Spain? I know where she’s getting that from. I thought that had all stopped. I’d like to tell her the proper story of it but Meg would say it’s not my place to tell. Yes, where Mum comes from. So I just go along with it. Did your Mum tell you the name of the town? No she never, I just know it’s Spain. Why don’t you know? She’s sounding cross and I curse myself but just say, Och my memory is going lassie but I’ll look out for a picture for you. I try to think of something else, turn it round. She’s brightened up a wee bit, smiling. Then she tells me about school and what the others are doing at home, and soon it’s time and away she goes with the case with my washing, up to the gate and turns to wave. Then she’s gone. It’ll be another hour or so before she’s finally home. Every week she makes this trip, and years of it. Sometimes I think she’s growing up and others I see she’s still just a lassie. I think of my wife and her dreams of Spain, and that terrible sadness rises up, as ever.

Meg McGill That wee toe-rag Maeve, I don’t know why it is that people are aye worrying about her. There I was stitching a beautiful pill box creation for Lorna for her wedding, and Lorna, supposedly my friend, who should be thinking about me and grateful watching me sew and give up my time for her, well suddenly she asks, out of the blue, why it will have to be Maeve to be looking after him when he gets out of the hospital and comes back here to live. She goes on about Maeve being too little for all that. She blurts it out like she’d been saving it up so I tell her straight, why I’ll no’ be doing it. He disgusts me. I see her face change but she needs to hear it so she’ll no ask again. I tell her that I said as much at the outset to him, make your own arrangements about that, I told him. No’ me, certainly not. The Hospital Visiting Nurse will come sometimes and the rest will have to be Maeve, you couldne expect Eoin, a boy… Lorna sits quiet, she’s wishing she’d never asked. I go on, a repulsive thought. I’ve been fool enough, and done enough. I’ve kept up with what he needs, even to

30 those stupid note books he writes in though God knows what he’s got to say. As far as him coming back here, well it’s no’ my worry. He’s here and he should be grateful enough. Begged me he did, and of course me, old softy that I am, gave in. But that’s as far as it goes. He’s a roof over his head for as long as it takes. Lorna is biting her lip and trying again with, but she’s only a child, still only twelve. I say, sharpish, Listen to me Lorna, what’s done is done and needs must, and I get on with the stitching for she’s waiting and she knows to shut up. It’ll do her good of course. Maeve, the wee bizum, teach her a lesson. She’ll not be running wild down the river, doing who knows what. She’ll go the way of his sister, that trollop, I can see it, her aunt Mattie, that tart laughing and squealing in the Barshaw Park on Glasgow Road. We were sitting on our usual seat watching everyone when she jumped up. There’s my brother, she shouted and she waved him over. Of course he was handsome in those days, straight from Aberdeen, with his northern accent. He thought we were all so swell, and of course I see it now, we were. He stood there gawping at me like I was the High Street’s Christmas lights. And now, crippled. Frankenstein, I call him. Before all this when he could still walk and wanted to visit the wains, I’d say, Maeve, Frankenstein’s coming to see you on Friday. She’d just look at me. Frankenstein the monster. Sometimes I feel a terrible pinch of pain that the bonny lad from Aberdeen has gone. I don’t know how that happened.

***

Stupid Lorna: tame and half-giggling and why would she be marrying that idiot of a boyfriend I don’t know, and she’s made me run a pin into my finger. I’ll need a plaster so as not to stain my work, even a spot of blood can ruin it all. Just a spot. And there was blood the Friday night that it happened. Jock came to the door to see the wains but I sent him on his way. He’d no right just to turn up. No right at all. We’d finished our dinner and were washing up and he should visit on a Saturday afternoon, not on a Friday night.

Then when he’d gone, just a few minutes later, I heard the squeal of a car and the bang, and I just knew, I don’t know how or why I knew, but, that’s an accident. It’s your father, I said to my boy, and I took off my pinny and ran out the door and up to the corner. There he was sprawled across the white line, people huddled around him, one shoe away down the street, his crib case away the other. The driver was just standing there looking down at him and talking and fretting and repeating himself, I couldn’t help it, he took so long to get across; I thought he’d make it across easily. And wouldn’t you know it, when I went to him and bent, seeing the blood in his red Aberdeen hair, and wondering, his blue eyes opened and he looked right into me. Scared me I can tell you, and oh what now, he was alive. I cursed him, but quietly, for the stranger’s arms were around me, the poor wifey. If I do say so myself I put on a good show for them all: sorrowful but not hysterical. Brave, they would have thought. As he was hauled off in the ambulance I knew how it was all going to turn out, and who they thought would have to be the muggins to be dealing with it. But they were wrong. Not this muggins, not this softy. My work waits on the table, even when I spread my hands out on the fabric I still can’t get on. Decisions paralyse me: the silk, or the brocade, the feather or the pearl in its little setting, oh how to put the pieces together? The lace lies in front of me and I stir enough to smooth it out again and again, check my pins, the thread, the needles. Come now Meg, make a start, the brocade, the satin, a ribbon? I’m twisting the bonny ribbons into knots and such a blue they are. Looking down I see they are ruined, the blue is crumpled, the lengths shredded. I want to take up my needle and drive it through my hand: anything but weep.

2. MAPPING ‘HOME’

Jock The house is terrible quiet. I’m not yet used to living here. So long in the hospital and the disappointment of it all: seeing what was ahead, that I’d never walk again, that there was no hope, then coming here to live. This house: her house. I listen again but still that silence. I read but can’t concentrate. The words run about on the page and my mind is elsewhere. I unroll my map, smooth it out, look at the places in the world still to be seen. Maeve and Eoin are at school and my Meg who knows where? She hasn’t spoken to me really, a few instructions, rules, the way she wants things. She goes in and out of the house and passes my door on her way out without looking in. Then her joke of turning the power off as she leaves so that I have to go back out to the meter box if I want the radio on. Often I don’t bother but just sit in the quiet until someone comes back. It’s all difficult. I understand that, for I’ve not been a part of their lives so long. I see that but still I had hope that I could be a father but I see now how it is to be. I’m living here and yet not. We are together and yet not. Sometimes I hear the thrumming of her sewing machine and I wonder what she might be stitching. I listen and imagine the colours, the material, the design. I think about her fingers spreading the fabric beneath the needle, her feet and ankles and calves and thighs working forward on the treadle and her bending, her breasts just touching the wood of the machine’s casing. I’ve half-written a piece about it. Of course we lived it all a long time ago, in another life, when I was her husband, proper. I sat in my chair and watched and half read my book and spoke to share a word or two and she would look across her shoulder and smile and laugh to me and tell me to go on. Or I’d read her some of my jottings, just things about the past: little memories of our other life in Scotland, the old country, the snow at Christmas and the bustle of the high street, our day trips, Culloden to look for the cairns of our ancestors; Edinburgh to see the castle and the canon and the suits of armour. She was a dreamer for the past, I see that now, a dreamer for romance.

She’d listen to what I’d written and sigh, and say, Oh Owen you’ve got that just right, it’s as if we’re there. Remember how windy it was and we snuggled up together and had tea and scones in that wee place on the corner looking out on Princes Street. She laughs as I do, and she turns to go on with her stitching. Long ago that, it seems. I smooth the map in front of me and trace the shape of Scotland. I see my hooked thumb and my curled fingers. Claws she called them. Don’t touch me with your claws. The blue of the map, the colours of the countries, the pink of the Commonwealth. A world, so far, and now it doesn’t seem real at all. Not at all, that we two, the same two threw ourselves together in our bed to laugh and wrestle, sweating in the new, strange, summer warmth, down here on this side, at the bottom of my map. I always thought to see more of it, and more of the rest of Australia. A train across the Nullarbor line all the way to the west. Or sail, that would be something. Hobart has a way of turning many of us into sailors. All that water, all around Australia, crashing on cliffs, sliding up the beaches, the coast ruled by tides and current. I feel as if I am adrift on a current, back and forth, adrift across the latitude and longitude of time. I listen to the day but there’s only silence. I can’t even tell if she is here under this same roof, working, making a hat. I used to enjoy watching her fingers, small but strong, picking out what to put on it and smoothing and stroking the material and the feathers, all those choices ticking over in her head. It’s magic you’re doing Meg, I’d say, and she’d smile or maybe pull a funny wee face. Her fingers.

***

It seems the visiting nurse is not visiting today. I’ve been waiting near on two hours and done as much as I can to deal with it all. Dragged the sheets off the bed and hauled them up to the washhouse. I nearly tipped my chair reaching for the taps but I couldn’t get to them so they’re still sitting there, and it’s all a mess. Stinks. I’ll have to wait til Maeve gets home.

Who’d a thought it Jock: a terrible thing to have to ask of a lassie. You’re better off out of it, I tell myself. I’ve thought of that many a time.

Maeve Home is where the heart is. I saw that stitched into a cushion cover somewhere. I don’t believe it, what rubbish, what tripe. There’s another that says Home is Where Your Journey Begins, I like that one better, even if I did see it on yet another cushion. Poor Dad. As a child I thought it was strange that he was so separated from his family, his brothers and sisters who all stayed in Scotland. He was the only one who wanted to travel, to leave his home and make another. And what of that Tasmanian home, so far away from his first, and the house in Hobart a strange land. I was too young when he came to live with us to be wondering what was going through his head, when he finally left the hospital. Did he have hope of a new life? Was it whispering around the corners of his mind that things would be different? If he had hope, then that was a tragedy. Now I see it so clearly. Some families are not really families: just people together at the outset then... whim or tragedy, it all just gets lost. It’s what happened to my Dad, he got lost here. I think my mother was lost before she set foot in Tasmania. He brought her along with love and romance and dreams, I see that now, many dreams, and going along with her stupid games, buying himself time with a shred of hope. And she the mother with her plan, the house purchased with insurance money, the price of his broken back. A house for her, a place for him to be, a price on all of us. She was a mystery. If at all possible I would laugh now, thinking back on me as a kid, but the laughing is long gone. I used to wait for her to break into Spanish, and I’d read up on all things Spanish in the books at school so that when that day finally came when she would sit me down to tell me all about it and include me in the wonderful story of it all and her travels, then I would be able to ask clever questions. She would see that I knew about Spain and she would see me as her daughter and part of her. That was my plan.

***

I liked to stand at her bedroom door and watch her curled up sleeping on the eiderdown: so still and beautiful. My brother came up behind me once and told me I was creepy for watching her. When she slept she always tucked her hand under her chin and her stockinged feet would be sort of crossed as if they were hugging themselves. Once she rolled over with a galumphing sigh which made me jump back. When I looked again her skirt was caught up and she had no stockings on so I could see her thigh, her very white skin so different from my own freckles and tan. I thought of Zoe and her boyfriend and wondered if my mother had ever sprawled on a beach with my father. I wondered where the girl Suzanne had sprawled. How she had got herself into trouble as my mother liked to say. It was only years later that I thought of the way the girl had got herself into trouble, how it was her, and nobody else. It was a burden for her alone to carry. By then I knew it took two people to make the trouble. I did like to watch people. Sometimes I’d go back to my room and try to re- create what I’d seen, filling pages of my sketch book with drawings of people and arms sprawling, legs akimbo as people like to say, or some people. I wrote akimbo in an essay for school once and the teacher scored it out with red and wrote in the margin that it was a Godless expression. She read it out to the class as an example of what not to say. They were silent, but not in the playground. I tried a drawing of my mother and her hair all caught up behind with a big comb. I thought it quite good and I had done lots of shading around her neck and where her hair lapped over the top of her ear. She hadn’t posed for it, she never would, but I had her face so imprinted in my memory it was easy for me, and the bits I could not quite remember I looked for when we sat at the dinner table. I took it into my father’s room one night when we were going to look at his map. When I showed him I realised it was not after all very good, as he screwed up his face and looked away from it.

***

Dad only closed his curtains just before he went to bed. There was a wall along the front of our house and you could sit there in the dark and not be seen by people moving up the street or by anyone in the house. I liked to hunker there in the dark and

36 look at Dad in his window, in the golden light. He always sat very still, just staring out past me, invisible me, towards the bay. That square of light with him in it was like a painting. I was startled once at school going through the library books in the Art Room to see a painting by an American, Edward Hopper, he had painted what could, so easily, have been my Dad sitting there in the light of a window and staring out at a woman, her hand up shading her eyes and looking seawards. I wanted to tear the page from the book to show Dad, but a phase of good behaviour had set in with me but I also understood that it would, somehow, make him sad.

***

My brother said my art was weird. He was a sticky beak always poking about in my stuff. The ones he scoffed at most were ones I did of me and Dad walking along together, or standing at a ship’s railing, or crossing a funny old stone bridge with a collie dog. They were all imaginings of course, but I remember how I drew with such care and dressed us both in going out clothes and used my coloured pencils to finish them off. I didn’t show Dad, they were private until the big pimple-head found them. I took them to school to show but changed my mind and brought them home again. Another my brother found was a fanciful drawing I had done from a book at school. It was a Spanish Duchess holding a little girl’s hand. I had tried to get my blonde plaits just right in the picture. They fell on either side of my face and down the front of my dress that I copied from the book. My brother thought it was hilarious and laughed and said you’re an idiot Maeve, waving the picture about over my head. I tore it up.

***

I had to come back to the wharf here today to make a few adjustments to the picture I’m doing, but I need to hurry because a dark line of clouds has formed on the southern horizon. It could be a rogue storm front, one of those huge Southern Ocean blows from the Antarctic that seem to spring up when least expected. I hope not for I need calm and sun and time, perhaps they’ll scud past, perhaps not.

I woke depressed this morning wishing I wasn’t getting a visitor after all. Be careful what you wish for as some people say. I want to hide. I don’t like ocean storms, the waves are so relentless: Prussian blue and deep cold ocean green. They trawl in from far away, from the edge of another country, from Africa, a long, long way, relentlessly through daylight and dark as if they have a purpose, a task. A dark task. A long fetch, the sailors call them. Cold deep water distance. I think of Pedra Branca, the towering stack of white rock, so named by sailors long ago, thirty kilometres or so out in the ocean, south of the tip of the island. And though it stands tall about sixty metres, they say that waves sometimes break over the top, when The Roaring Forties are surging. When Pedra Branca is there in the path of a long fetch. My stomach contracts when I think of those surfers who go down there and are towed out to the waves to ride them as they sprawl around the base of Pedra. Years ago a young scientist was sent on an expedition to climb the stack and count the numbers and types of birds nesting there. But a sudden huge wave washed over the highest point and carried him away. He was on the wrong side of the rock at the wrong time. The others said they saw him disappearing in the distance and his hand was raised to them. I feel the terror of someone being swept away, that wall of water, of nature, surging and grabbing and tearing him away and him with no voice to beg. Just dragged away and lost forever in the long fetch of cold, bulging ocean. And tragedy: lives lost or ruined for so little, so swiftly, so easily. In a house somewhere people forced to live and grieve forever. As always I feel myself drawn into the past. I try to fight it. You’re morbid Maeve, says my brother, but it’s true I think, and true also that there are two of me, always two, the grown up me watching the little girl me. I can be there, feel it all again, the bad parts and the good... a young girl finding her way, loving her mother, getting to know her father.

***

I’ve helped Dad, his washing, the bed. As soon as I set foot in the door from school he called out Maeve I’m sorry, can you help? Of course I got on with it and it didn’t take me long. I just put his washing on then hung up the sheets and re-made his

38 bed with clean sheets and said I was going down to the river. As I went out the front door I looked up and saw my mother at her window. She didn’t wave or smile, just looked. She didn’t like to come down the stairs very much and certainly never into my father’s room and certainly never to do the jobs which were now mine. She told me her job was to make the creations to earn money for us. I went to the river where I sprawled in the grass and looked at the sky, and thought about my certificate and whether to show Dad. I’d done a project on Spain and had asked Mum lots of questions about it and she smiled and laughed a lot and answered. She surprised me with her laughing. I discovered she’d got some things wrong. I found out her mistakes when I read the encyclopaedia so I fixed those bits before I gave it to my teacher. In the end I didn’t show anyone else especially not Dad because he still gives me a funny look when I mention Spain, and he was tired from waiting for me to come home to wash his sheets. He didn’t want to lie on the bed while it was a mess and it reminded me of what my mother liked to say, you’ve made your bed now lie in it.

***

I only do landscapes now: the hills and the clouds and the river and experimenting with colours. I’ve stopped drawing people, their faces, and legs and bums and other bits. My art teacher told me it wasn’t right that a student, a young girl would draw such pictures. She could have saved her breath for truth be told I was going off bodies myself.

***

Sometimes thing happen in life in the wrong order and we realise if we had known something before, then everything else after would have been different. Before my father came to live with us I used to visit Mr Binocs a lot. He was funny. But then he started a new thing. He would sit with his hands down in his lap between his legs and show me his extra thumb. It was an ugly, ugly thing. I didn’t think it looked at all like a thumb and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it when he passed me his binocs. I didn’t want to draw it no matter how many times he showed me. Maeve, why don’t you stroke it? Do you want to draw it?

One day he was scratching and rubbing away inside his shorts because he had that rash. Then he showed me his extra thumb. He said he’d hurt it and that was why it was swollen and if I drew it he would give me money for an icy pole. But Mrs Binocs came out, told me to take my pencils and paper, go home and not come back, ever. She told my mother. I thought it should have been Mr Binocs who got into trouble. That was before Dad came to live and I had to wash him. Drawing can be tricky. It’s the skin, it’s very hard to draw and get the colour just right. All those not quite pinks, and sort of blues, and little yellowish trails and puckery bits of darker red. Where the hair springs up out of skin is hard to draw, like a little mountain with a black spear that leaps up then curls away a bit like a snail design, and it settles down again against the skin so I lose my place with it all, the little whorls and curls and stretchy bits and sometimes my eyes just go weird when I try to remember what I saw and my hand goes wobbly when I try to draw what I have seen. I suppose some things are not for drawing or remembering. Sometimes if Dad’s wash water is cold the skin puckers and the hairs stand up straighter though I try not to look and he moans his strange sound and turns away and tries to take the wash cloth to do it himself. So, I’m trying water colours, and nature, not bodies or people anymore, but skies and hills and water. It’s a thrill to design a picture and work out where everything will go and what colours to use and how they might mix in or not. I’m working on one of The River Derwent. I wonder why some rivers are The Nile, or The Ganges, and others are The Mississippi River or The Hawkesbury River but here in Hobart it is the River Derwent. I like putting river first, it makes it more important than the name. The sky is cerulean today. I’m learning the proper names of colours, like sky colours, where if only, I would sit all day looking down. I’d stay there all day, and all night if I had a blanket, and maybe a sandwich, I wouldn’t care. Stay up there, wag school. I’d watch Mrs. Moore go down to the dunny with her knitting. She doesn’t know Eoin climbs on to the roof and watches her through a nail hole he put there. He said she always looks in the pan before she pulls the chain and he said she sniffs her fingers, but he is full of shite himself.

Meg McGill It’s terrible how time flies. He’s been living here now for six months. I’ll not go into a room if he’s there and if he wheels himself in I leave. The squeaking of his tyres on the lino sets my teeth on edge it does. And I hate to see his hands gripped on the wheels. I’ve nothing to say to him. I escape upstairs of course with work to do, creations to prepare. The customers keep coming and they sit and have a try on, and turn and preen in the mirror and make suggestions but I just do what I think with it. I know best what suits. I showed them all when I first came here to Hobart and they with their plain woollen coats and hats all bent and squashed as if they’d had it under their pillow for the night. It made me laugh to see the women going all about with their gloves and clumping shoes and stockings as thick as bandages on their fat legs as they dandled handbags big enough for horse-feed. They got their styles from magazines which came from the mainland, but it was all so old-fashioned. I just started off with a few customers but word soon spread about Meg McGill and her marvellous ways with tulle and lace and feathers. Soon they were all flocking, wanting the new look from the old country. I’d listen to them sitting chatting as they waited for a fitting and getting their noses up in the air about how much better they were than the mainlanders. I’d hide my smiles for I already knew I’d arrived in the back of beyond and they were fooling themselves, all of them. Mind you the houses were a surprise. Two storey with beautiful staircases and windows that opened onto balconies where you could be sure of a sight of the river and breezes in the summer. I was pleased when we managed to buy one, and a very nice street with trees all up the side and a wide sweeping frontage to the wall. Quite suitable for Meg McGill the milliner. I’m used to it now of course but when I first arrived I remember how in winter the women would be arriving in their damp coats and wanting me to do miracles for their drab faces and mostly I could. They would dole out a smile from their peaky pinched lips then launch themselves out of my front door and down the path wearing their new creation as if they were about to meet a film star, and might even be one themselves. I never took to the women at all, for once I heard a dumpy housewife making mockery of my accent and her herself speaking with her version of lah-di-dah which just sounded like a donkey braying to me as she tried to round out her vowels. It was the way the fellow on the radio spoke, trying to sound as if he had just stepped

41 out of Buckingham Palace. Those early days here I felt sorry for them living down at the end of the world and probably no chance to ever see the other side of it. At least Owen and I managed that, to get away, to travel, but not so far as I thought and he not ever again as it turns out. When he goes off to the Outpatients for his treatment I go into his room. I never sit but wander about and look out the window to see what he sees but of course I am taller than him, he in his chair, so I don’t quite see it as he does. It’s the view of the mountain but from my room it is so much better. He has his stupid map set out on his table. I’d like to tear it up but then he would know I was in here poking about and I don’t really want to be touching anything he pores over and leans on with his horrible claws. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I see a picture of Maeve and Eoin by his bed, not one of me because he knows I would never allow that. I peer at their faces staring out at me. I can see myself in Eoin, very clearly, he puts me in mind of my Da, but Maeve, none of me at all. Not at all. I know she’s mine, I remember that night too well, the night she was got, but where am I in her face? It is all her father. My room is on the other side of the top floor because I could not stomach the thought of him in the room below lying in his bed and staring up and through the ceiling. I knew it would be like standing on a coffin with a body in it but knowing their eyes were open. I did try it just the once. I went into the top room when he was in his bed and I stood over where he was lying, then I got a feeling between my legs which made me feel sick and ashamed.

Maeve It’s strange having Dad here in the house. I’m sort of getting used to it. I don’t have to go each week to the hospital which is good. But I’ve got other jobs now, the washing, and washing him. I do my jobs, and while I do them I plan my new drawings and what colour the sky and the hills and the trees will be. I like the mountain best, it has so many shapes of tumbling rocks and the bits they call the organ pipes like in a church, though I don’t go to a church I know what they mean. It is interesting to draw those big upright pieces against all the curves of the other parts and it’s scary the way the cliff drops straightaway and I wonder about standing on the very edge of it.

***

I’m learning about my Dad, the way he loves poetry. He’s reading me some of his favourites but I can’t understand all of it. He likes words, ideas, and imagination. I am pretending to be my English teacher who says they are important but not too much and she always looks at me over her glasses when she says it. I would like to give her the cane. Six of the best I would give her. We’ll plan a trip, Dad says, a holiday… a peregrination… a sojourn. Nice words, I reply, peregrination, sounds a bit like going in circles and sojourn a bit like falling asleep. And so they are a wee bit, he says. Shall we make a travelling plan, an itinerary? Call it the Gulliver’s Club? It’s a bit babyish but I’m persuaded because there’s a show on the radio on Saturdays, some club for kids and it always sounds good fun. It’s the Explorer’s Club or something like that. Yes, I say, I like that, yes Gulliver, I pause, not the bit where he was tied to the ground and couldn’t move, I stop. I mean the travel bit.

***

It’s night, and Mum’s out. Dad and I are in the kitchen talking about travel and the world and places we could go. He’s got his big map spread out. Eoin walks past and stops to look in but doesn’t speak. How are ye son? asks Dad and Eoin says, all right, like he just licked a cat’s bum as Mr Binocs would say. Then he walks away whistling. Dad listens to the whistling for a while then asks me where I would want to go on our trip. Spain, I say quite firmly. I told girls at school where my mother came from and they just laughed and said I was a liar. I gave bossy Debra Hancock a damned good shove and she fell on her backside so I had to stay back after. Eoin’s stopped whistling so the house is quiet: the lamp makes a golden circle: the kitchen table is like a raft. Dad’s eyes flick up for a moment when I say Spain. Hmmmm, Spain, he repeats. He’s got that look on his face as if he’s going to tell me something. I know he doesn’t like to talk about Mum. The hat pin. But I want

43 him to. So I wait and run my hands over the smoothness of the map. It is a world map and it is a feast. And why Spain, lassie? Why do you want to go there? I look at the grid of latitude and longitude, the map colours and shapes. Stupid Debra’s bawling is ringing in my ears, and I’m annoyed with Dad, telling him, Because that’s where mum’s family is from! Is it now? This time he looks up and right at me. His blue eyes go right inside. Yes, Mum said they all came from Castile. I feel like shouting it. Did she? Well, we can certainly go and have a look. He pulls the map closer, scans the distance between continents. A long way, he says, and who knows what we’ll find, or learn. He sighs, moves his ruler back and forth across the spaces then scratches with it under his chin. I’d like to snatch it away and break it in two and throw it across the room.

Meg McGill When I’m alone I catch myself staring out of the windows across the harbour and getting myself lost in it all, I do feel sadness then, I’ve got to say that. The water, the ships coming and going: a world outside there taking place: people to-ing and fro-ing around the big research ship for Antarctica, and yachting races when they all come down from Sydney. I can’t help but think of my Da sailing away from Scotland forever. When I was just a bairn, after he died, I’d imagine he was still alive and that he had gone to live in Spain to get away from my mother because she couldn’t manage. I know he used to visit there on his way back and forth, so Spain stayed in my head. Perhaps he was there, maybe he would send for me one day. I wanted him to be alive but that would mean he had abandoned me, left me in Scotland. And I couldn’t be content with that so I imagined I was some kind of Spanish Princess in exile and not yet allowed to return to Spain but soon I would, he would send for me. Stupid what we think of as children. I don’t know why it all stayed with me. I remember on the ship on the way out here, after we left the Bay of Biscay for Gibraltar, we sailed very close to the coast of Spain. There were caves in the towering

44 cliffs and when the waves hit them you could hear the booming and rushing of the water even though we were a long way off. I remember peering at a building standing alone on top of the cliff. Someone said it was an old convent, St. Marigny, they said. I thought about it long into the night wondering who was in there and how they lived every day staring out of their windows at the water but never going anywhere and I see that now it is me, looking out at the blue of the river stretching away to the south and the ocean. Dreams of Spain, just a game really. It became a game. I don’t do it now of course, well just to tease Maeve. I like to see that look in her eyes like she’s about to hear what’s in the Christmas stocking. Often, when they think I’m in my workroom busy, I’ll just have pulled the blinds on the windows and taken to my bed, even if it is the middle of the day. I try not to listen but the words of my Aunts come back to me when I said I was going to Australia. Even though I was past twenty one and married they complained that, It will never do, it’s the end of the earth. The end of the earth, though a different place from where my Da was buried somewhere in Africa. Buried there in who knows what place. Was it a proper graveyard? Did he even have a headstone? I used to dream about going to Africa and finding the place where he was just so I could put some flowers there or and mark the place in my head for all time, that there would be something definite to think about. It was something I talked about with Owen when we were younger. We went once to Culloden to look at the cairns of our ancestors and I remember I got upset thinking again of my father’s bones lying somewhere far away and possibly not even in a grave but just out in the jungle with ants and worms. It was a sunny day but the sun seemed to disappear as I cried and even when Owen took me in his arms to comfort me the day seemed gray and the place horrible. I don’t often think back to Owen and I for it unsettles me and puts me out of sorts for the rest of the day. It’s like looking back at strangers. Those horrible thoughts of where my father was all stemmed from when I was just a bairn and hiding behind the sofa listening to my aunts say, those natives probably just left him under a tree somewhere for the animals and the ants. But my mother did try to explain to me. When I was older she told me it was too expensive to bring his body home, and the heat, she tried to tell me but it got the better of her, sometimes as if she didn’t really know. Eventually everyone just stopped

45 talking about it. They just left him completely out of their conversations, like he had never been, had never been born. It made me angry.

***

I’ve played a trick. Tonight I told my boy, but not Maeve of course, and we laughed that I’ve taken the stick and burnt it in the wood heater. Let Frankenstein ask for it and I’ll be deaf. I knew what he was using it for, though I was disappointed Eoin hadne told me. Had to find it out for myself I did. But I did. I stood across from the Abbotts’ one night when I was on my way to the pictures with my boy and I keeked around the side of the gate. He came out when he thought I’d gone, wheeling himself ever so slowly, the stick on his lap. He nearly dropped it and I laughed for it would still be lying there; it’s a comedy to watch him trying to pick things up. But then he hunched himself up in the chair like a gorilla, and used the stick to open the box and click the switch back up. I could see the light come on straight away in his room. I wanted to walk right back and smack him over the head and that wee bitch Maeve too, and turn it off again, it’s me that’s paying for it, let them sit in the dark. I’ll bide my time. I just sallied off for the tram. I’d be enjoying myself at the pictures and they, well, I don’t know what they talk about. The stick went in with the others the next day in the chip-heater and I laughed as I soaped myself in the warm water. Wouldn’t he have loved to get up the stairs after me. I was always sure to call loudly as if to the wains, I’m off to my bath now, so he knew. The time with my son is precious for I’m worried he will want to join the Army and go away to that war. Sometimes when I’ve been out and come up the front path I see him up at his window at the top of the house staring out and across at the hills and he doesn’t even notice me go by. I worry that he’s planning to get away from here, or join up for Vietnam. It sounds an awful place, all jungle and creepers, and it puts me in mind of my Da in the jungle, and starts me thinking all over again whether he really is buried there. My mother said he was but perhaps she said that because I was just a bairn though it made me worry about the natives and the ants. Then that letter from my aunts saying he was buried at sea which I did not believe at all. I wanted him to at least be in the ground. When Jock was out at the hospital last week I looked on his map for Vietnam. It’s coloured a bright green which of course means

46 jungle, and I’m frightened of my boy going there to be shot maybe and lie there with no one caring. The papers say the war is all about America, just like the new money which is not so new anymore but I just can’t get used to it. I’m behind the times I know that but who would have thought, dollars and cents, and boys going off to war in a jungle to kill people, or to die.

Maeve Dad’s been out to turn the lights back on. It’s one of Mum’s tricks, turning them off. Sometimes I can hear her laughing and walking off down the path. Dad had a stick he used for turning the power back on but he lost it. I went down to the river and found him a big piece of branch from a willow. It’s curly at the end which I like. He laughed and said it would have to do, and it does. She’s gone to the pictures with Eoin. I’d be tall enough to reach the meter box to do it but Dad likes to. I’ve rolled out his map of the world and weighed each corner down on the table with some stones he likes. He collected them over on the west coast at the Gordon River, a long time ago when he went there looking for a job. There are still tiny bits of moss stuck to them. The map of the mainland, shows the coast mostly green, but the whole of the middle is yellow desert. Dad worked there once, before I was born, on the Nullarbor. I don’t know why he went so far away and I wonder if he missed Mum, but when he wheels himself back into the room, I just ask him what the desert was like. He sighs and I’m not sure if he’s puffed from being out at the meter box or from wheeling himself back in. He sits looking at the map then he starts to talk in that voice that sometimes makes me wish I hadn’t asked.

Jock I don’t like to think of that time in my life, even though I’m sitting here by the window and the breeze is coming in off the river I can still, when I think of the desert, taste the dust in my mouth and feel the heat, but the lassie’s asking and wants a story so I’ll try.

***

It was hot, very hot, even though I’d been in Australia, well in Tasmania, for years it was still a shock to me. A horrible hot wind in the day. Not at all like Scotland, or Hobart. The weather was a stinker. Maeve laughs when I say that, stinker, she repeats and tells me it would be a good one to use in a composition. I was sent to a stop called the 403 mile to fix the wooden railway sleepers and lay new rails. It was strange on the mainland then because every state had a different size railway width, or gauge. So people had to get on and off and change trains all the time. The trains were nice though, the rail coaches were very good and some were British style with padded seats and brass fittings, like the train I used to catch to Edinburgh or Paisley. Maeve is prodding me on as she does with a question. I must have paused. Where did you live? she asks. We were in tents, with iron fold-up beds, with one of those kapok mattresses and three or four old grey scratchy Army blankets. It was stinking hot in the day and cold at night. The tents were only big enough for a bed, everything that we had was to be stored underneath in boxes. There was no where to put pictures, no cupboards. Maeve is liking the idea of tents and thinking they were like Arab tents but I tell her they were just ordinary tarpaulin. She has a grand imagination that lassie. Just plain canvas that flapped all night and the sand and dust would drift in. Were there camels? she asks, persevering with me. She’s thinking of that fire screen in the middle room no doubt. I canny help but laugh, no camels at all I tell her, but there were animals and birds. Once we went for a wander in the scrub and came across a big nest, it had four eggs, emu eggs. After they hatched we brought them to the camp to keep as pets. Maeve has burst out with, you took them away from their Mum? I try to play that down and just get on with telling the story and how we didne think our actions were wrong, we just wanted something to look after, they had little beady eyes and stripy bodies and quick little legs. It was nice for all of us to have something to pamper. The cook raised them at the camp kitchen and fed them each

48 day. They grew big and tame. The cook, from somewhere in Europe said they were strangely wonderful company. I always remember him saying that, the way he said it. Maeve is frowning at me the way she does, a little scowl it is, she’s probably imagining the Mum running round looking for her babies. After tea each night we played cards and talked. We didn’t have many books or papers to read, and the radio was useless. We felt we were in the middle of no where. I must have gone into a dream there for a bit because Maeve is asking, What other animals Dad? You said animals and birds. So I tell her the story of the fox, how it was that one night I went back to my bedroom, we had sort of proper sleeping wagons by then and I had my torch lighting the way. I had a couple of fruit boxes beside my bed and I could see that one of the boxes was moving. We’d seen a lot of big snakes and I thought one of them was after my box of apples. Suddenly I saw some hair through the slats of the box and knew it was no' a snake. I wasne afraid but I wanted to catch whatever it was. My work coat was hanging on the door so I grabbed it and threw it over the box so whatever it was couldne escape. Then I took the box into the kitchen. Everyone watched as I began to unwrap the mystery parcel. We thought it was probably a rabbit, which we sometimes caught and ate. Maeve is squirming, I maybe should have left that part out. I put the box on the table, lifted the coat and there was a little fox. It went crazy when it saw us all standing looking but it couldne escape the kitchen. Finally we caught it and our ganger, Bill, said he would make a cage. It was only a baby and we thought we might be able to make it into a pet. And we eventually did. We fed it and it became used to us. We made it a collar and a lead and it became our mascot. We spoiled it a lot. Was it a boy or a girl? What happened to it? Maeve asks, she always like the end of things, where the story goes. It was a girl, and, well, it got away. It must have wanted to very much. It chewed through its rope and was gone. We never saw it again. It was gone, and we missed it.

Maeve

I’m getting sleepy and my Dad is looking tired. Let’s pack up lassie, you’ve got school the morrow. He rolls up his map. Later when I lie in my bed I think of my Dad out there in the hot sand, with emus, the wind, and the fox running away over the yellow. It’s not looking back, but it’s leaving a little trail across the sand and I see that it still has its collar on.

Meg McGill We needed the money, that was it, plain and simple. Work was scarce in Hobart, all over Tasmania in fact. We saw the advertisement and he made an application. It was a very long way away, somewhere past Adelaide, but the money was good. At first we were a bit glum, six months seemed a long time. It meant the bairn would be born before he got back. But he’d come back with money. In the meantime I’d just have to make the best of it with wee Eoin for company and my sewing. It would be all right. I liked his letters with snippets of his life away from us, like him telling me of the once a week tea and sugar train arriving, and the train with a big water tank, the train like an enormous travelling shop, all that way out there. Such an empty place. I’d read his letters and sit on the veranda looking at the bay and the boats and the purple mountain and try to imagine a flat yellow place with no water and out in the middle of nowhere. As the months drew on I no longer rushed to tear his letters open. They seemed to be full of misery, of him going on about how he missed us and the hot wind and the isolation. It was as if that dusty desert air would puff up out of the envelope and choke me. I resented it, I see that now, pushing the pram with wee Eoin sitting and my belly obvious another was on the way and no husband to be seen. I saw the pinched side-ways looks from women as I went in and out the shops and I made sure to keep my gloves off so they could see my wedding ring. I began thinking what it would be like if he never came back. If I could take my boy and go back to Scotland but of course that could never be for I was on the way with another. So I would have two, me alone with two bairns. It didne bear thinking about. So I just buckled down and thought of the money, and hoped it might make the difference and got on with making creations for women who learned to hide their suspicions. I’d keep his photo out as

50 customers were in and out for fittings but turn it face down at night when I didne want to think about him at all. But still those letters arrived. I would just leave them lying for days, not wanting that hot desert and him in the room with me.

Jock The lassie’s asleep but now my head is full of the past. I’ve taken out the map again just to look and remember and think on it all. Loneliness is what I remember. It was a good work crew, good mates, in fact the desert was more the enemy than the actual work. It was terrible hot during the day but at night, cold, and the wind would spring up and rattle everything. It was hard to sleep. The only other people we ever saw were the passengers on passing trains. Sometimes we’d catch a glimpse of a woman. It was always a moment for all of us that glimpse of a face speeding by and that was it. Faces and hands and hats moving past and away into lives. At night the lighted windows looked like beads strung out across the dark of the desert. I’d write to Meg and she would write back but then... The letters came on a Transline train headed for Perth. They didn’t stop so our mail was just parcelled up in a leather bag and thrown to us. The only snag was that sometimes it would arrive at midnight so we had to wait up alongside a fire we built. We used to burn the old sleepers to ward off the cold. We sat and waited under the big starlit sky of the Nullarbor. The first time we ever sat and waited at night we could see the lights away in the darkness. We thought it was close and would soon arrive but in fact it was a great distance away. Maybe fifty miles or more. It was incredible to us to think that the lights could pierce that vast distance as easily as an arrow could pierce paper. The lights seemed to twinkle and we held them in our gaze as we waited and waited. It was the longest straight line railway in the world, there was no curve in it, that was why the light which seemed so close was not. We read our letters straight away by hurricane lamps, or by the fire if it was still bright, and the next day when it was smoko we sat and read them again. Sometimes my tea got cold.

Then I began to sense a distance in her words. A bigger distance than miles. I’d look out at the empty land and try to think on Hobart and the house. When the letters stopped I got caught up with my own misery. Many a time I got up early so as to bring on the day and throw myself into the work. The camp had a hand-powered track vehicle. Sometimes I would take it up the rail a distance, away from the camp and just sit and stare at the horizon. The distance is so vast out there you can see the curve of it. So time passed, most of us spent a lot of time thinking of people and places far away. Others like me had families in other parts of Australia. There were fights among the men for I wasn’t the only one lost. When my time was nearly up I swung back and forward between worry and excitement. We were all the same, the men talking of our plans. Some of the New Australians, the ones from Germany and the Dutchies were worried about where to go and what to do about their futures. Most of them could speak a bit of English but only enough for labouring jobs and times were difficult. Some of them decided to stay on for another contract but not me, and some of the Australians who weren’t married said they were going to stay on because they had got used to it. But me, I was longing for the cool of Hobart, the blue and purple mountains, the Derwent changing colours as the day went by and boats skidding back and forwards. I wanted that fresh breeze on my face as I walked up the hill to the house. But most of all I wanted Meg, and to see our new wee bairn. On our last night the camp cook went out with his gun to get something for a special dinner. There were a lot of bush turkeys around because it had rained. There was a pair of them that sat in a straggly tree not far away. Anyway the cook crept up and took aim and pop, he shot one and it fell down. The other tried to fly away but when it saw its partner was dead it came back. He took another shot but missed and it flew away again but as we watched it came back to sit by the body of its mate. The cook got it with his next shot.

Maeve My dad’s very patient, not like Miss cat’s-mouth Wyche our sewing teacher. We have to do sample sewing and things like lazy daisy stitch and blanket stitch but I’m hopeless, not like my mum. I always have to unpick mine over and over and Miss

Wyche sighs at me. Sometimes I have to stay behind til I’ve finished to her standard. She says that word as if it something no one else has. I always think of a long stick made of gold with a jewel on the top like the Pope waves around. I hate it when we have sewing at the end of the day because I know what will happen and I have to get home because I have all my jobs to do before certain times. And sometimes Dad is waiting for me upset because he’s had an accident in the bed which means I will have washing to do and the bed to make. Dad, where’s your favourite place, where would you go if you… If I could? he answers. He’s been writing in one of his note-books. I’d love to read what he writes. He’s so quiet, concentrating, when he’s writing, doing his jottings, as he calls it. Sometime he reads bits to me and the words go up and down in his Scottish burr but softer than my mother’s voice. I heard Mr Binocs in his garden one day talking to his wife and he said my mother’s voice, scraped its arse along the ground like a dog with worms. That night as I lay in bed concentrating hard on not wanting to go to the toilet I spoke the words out loud and they made me laugh. I wanted to tell them to someone but I couldn’t think who. I decided I would put them in a composition at school the next time we had to do one, but I might have to make it someone else’s mum maybe in the story. When I ask Dad a question he doesn’t sigh, just stops and listens or explains. He never gets angry, just closes his note-book and says, Well let me think. Lots of places, really. He stops, then, I tell you lassie there are some interesting lost worlds I’d like to go to. Lost worlds? Can you show me on the map? Then I realise it’s a silly thing to say for if they are lost they will not be on a map. The map is still on his table with the four stones at its corners. He wheels himself over to it. I follow and pull up the little milking stool he made for me at one of his classes in the hospital. They think Atlantis might be here, in the Mediterranean. But it is now beneath the sea because of an earthquake or flood. There’s an island nearby called Santorini which is sort of a flooded volcano. Here it is. He shows me the place with his bent fingers and over here, he trails across the blue of the sea on the map and I notice how his hands are stained black on the sides from the rubber tyres on his chair. I try not to but I can’t help but think of Mr. Binocs and his extra thumb...

... is where the mighty Colossus of Rhodes was: a great statue of a warrior with his legs standing astride each side of a harbour. I wonder if it’s still there for I’d like to go and can see myself sailing into the harbour under the warrior’s legs and I wonder if he has trousers on or one of those sort of skirts that warriors wore. I would not look upwards from the boat. I would look out to the town that we were approaching and not look up. I can feel the breeze on my face and smell the salt air. The man guiding the boat is speaking in a language I don’t understand but it seems to have lots of zz’s in it. I think of Zoe. Dad is pointing to another place on the map and I drag myself away from the boat and the giant warrior, here in Tibet or Nepal, I’m not sure. They call it Shangrila. And here, he goes on before I’ve had time to start a dream, here is Babylon. He is talking to me but my mind has gone back to the warrior in the skirt. ... Xanadu, some of them were real once I think, but some probably only exist in people’s dreams. I ask him why people dream but I don’t tell him I dream even when I am awake. Och lassie, people dream for all sorts of reasons and for all sorts of things and they sometimes don’t make sense to anyone else. He stops to think, Will you go away one day Maeve, go travelling? I’ve moved to sit on his bed and I’ve pulled up a pillow to be comfortable. Yes, I say, I’d love to go away. When I’m old enough. I don’t want to say, when you are not here, so I drift. Dad is smiling across at me. We listened to the radio earlier. Men have walked on the moon. It’s amazing to think of all the money and the work and just the idea of it, to go up there and walk on the moon. I wouldn’t want to at all. Not the moon. I wake up a little and want a travel story. Dad, tell me what you saw on the ship on the way here. What places did you go to? I leave Mum out of the question, even though she was with him because I’ve seen the way his face goes when I say her name. It must be like a hat pin. As he begins I lean back on his bed and cross my arms behind my head and my ankles on each other. He wheels himself to the window. I look out as well and see that across the bay yachts are racing, their sails full, the wind leaping each to each then skittering through the buildings and starting a flight up the mountain. Well, he begins, his voice dipping low and fading.

When I look I see he’d dropped his head almost to his chest, one hand up to his forehead, as if he’d forgotten, Dad, I say, on the ship! Well, he begins again, what I remember is the excitement of leaving first off and the smell of the sea and the ship, of salt and the engine. Yes, the hum of that huge engine when it started turning and the clanking of the chain bringing up the anchor... I close my eyes and see myself leaning on the railing waving to... who is that I would wave to? Not Dad for he’s beside me and standing up, and tall and strong. He’s protecting me from the wind that’s whipping up. People are throwing coloured streamers that stretch out and whirl and loop and are caught and held then break and fly up, the ends slapping at the clouds. The crowd below are looking up at us but I don’t see any faces I know. Dad points to the flag going up, the Blue Peter. I settle again onto the pillow to listen. His voice burrs and catches on some of the names as he weaves the story of his voyage. White Cliffs, Dover, The Bay of Biscay, Gibraltar, then more difficult ones I find hard to remember, Napoli, Stromboli, Port Said, Suez… I wake to see Mum glowering at the door, Get you, up to bed now. It’s two steps to the door but I move slowly. Dad’s still at the window, his back turned, his wheelchair still facing so as to take in the view of the harbour. But the sun has set behind the mountain and the water is as black as the night above. There’s nothing to see.

Jock And the black nights tumble into bright days and back again. My Meg, you’re out again, sitting in the dark staring at life on a picture screen yet I crave you. If I could but wrap my arms about you, sink my face into your hair. But I now see what you see. The wheels, my black rimmed hands that turn them, shaped now like an ape’s, and useless feet turning blue, withered legs. Trapped.

Maeve Mum’s out with Eoin again. Pictures again. I’m glad she took him with her, he’s always needling. You’re so retarded Maeve, he says. You’re slow, you need to grow up. You’re fourteen, you should be thinking about boys, not sitting telling stories with your father. You’re weird. He spits out the word the same way he says tits and dick and balls when he’s talking with his friends, showing off at being a man.

***

Dad sent away for a brochure of ships that go to England. A big brown envelope arrived with lots of luscious stamps. Inside was the most beautiful shiny catalogue with maps of all the oceans and pictures of P&O ships. It means Peninsula and Orient but Dad’s not sure why so he's going to write a letter to ask them. In the booklet there’s a section for each ship and it shows the decks and where cabins are if you want to book and it tells you what is on each deck like a swimming pool or a ballroom or a library. We pick one that we like with two bunks, a hand basin, a wardrobe and a little table. There are lots of stairs but we don’t care. We picked our cabin on the port side, a little port is left in the bottle Dad says so we know which is left and right. We chose second sitting for dinner so we could sit as long as we like. The cabin is near the promenade deck where all the lifeboats are hanging. We thought that could be useful because as Dad said, you never know in life and accidents do happen.

***

I like those nights with Dad, but the mornings are different. I wait until Eoin’s gone. He’s left school and started an apprenticeship and has to leave early in the morning. When he gets home he’s dirty and tired and Mum falls all over him. She never comes down in the morning so when Eoin’s gone Dad calls me. I usually think of what I have for school that day and don’t really look when I’m doing it and I only have to do the bits he can’t reach. I bring the basin and the flannel and the kettle, and when he’s sitting up I put the warm water in the basin and everything within his reach then I go out and shut his door. I get my school lunch ready while I’m

56 waiting, then he calls out and rolls over on his side, with his back to me, Oh Maeve, he says in a voice that makes me sad. I change the water to do his back, and further down, but I don’t really look. I have to do his feet of course because he can’t reach. I don’t like them; they make me think of those skinny white feet in pictures of Jesus on the cross. They are white and withered with blue veins and I hate doing between his toes where the soap gets stuck and the big hard yellow toe-nails, which I have to cut and they are tough as nails, as he says to try to make it better, try to make me smile, and the bits skitter across the floor. He says the same thing every time I have to do it but I don’t answer I just get on. I’m glad he waits til Eoin's gone, that shite of a brother who was wagging one day and came down and looked into the wash basin as I was carrying it out. Any curly gingers? he asked, and loud enough for my Dad to hear. I wanted to throw the water on him. Sometimes my Dad tells me happy stories of his life in Scotland and tries to make me laugh but then when he’s telling me something from the past, like when he was on the Nullarbor, his voice goes down into that other place and he sounds like he’s talking to someone else and he says, Och lassie, this time Tragedy next time Comedy and Travel. It’s one of his sayings but I’m still not sure what he means. I get the travel bit but not the comedy. And I get the tragedy, I know what that is.

Jock It is a tragedy; all round. But not so much mine it’s Maeve’s but there’s no one else. I talk while she’s doing it, trying to make light of it, asking what lessons she has for that day. When she answers I hear the deliberate cheery ring she puts to her voice but that only makes my chest tighten and I just want it all to be over. Later I lie and wave as she keeks around the door to tell me she’s off. I see her go down the path with her school case and her uniform on. She’s cut her long plaits off, I’m growing up Dad, she says, I don’t want to look like a kid anymore.

Maeve

Another coffee break, a nice latte I think. This is becoming my favourite spot to draw and paint: so much to see in each direction. The mountain, the city, the water, wharves, ships. Sadly a behemoth of a plastic cruise ship, it seems about ten storeys high. Not at all like the ones I dreamed of so long ago with my father. When I run my hand over my paper, I’m careful not to leave a mark, just a touch beneath my palm, traverse the empty space, imagining and planning before I begin, relishing the power of the colours and shapes I will create: my choice of position, definition and meaning... what to put in, what to leave out: all my decisions and a timid understanding of my mother’s thoughts when arranging her beautiful creations. ***

That word. Suddenly I’m a kid again, Salamanca Place has disappeared. I’m fifteen, it’s late at night, all, and the milliner asleep. I have finished my composition for Mrs Purcell of the snooty Sandy Bay accent, Goodness me Maeve, sometimes you have too much imagination, making her voice go up so high the class laughs. Idiots, though my form teacher said I was meticulous and organised. Algebra Sir wrote, Maeve is a dreamer and Dad laughed telling me I couldn’t please everyone. My form teacher made me feel older, mature, almost a woman. A delicious word. Eoin reads my report, Hmm Maeve, he drawls, are you a woman yet? I see that grin that makes me want to punch him before he whispers a sing-song. I know things that you don’t. I know a secret, whistling as he wanders away.

***

Everyone’s asleep. I tiptoe quietly down the creaky staircase, into the hall cupboard with my torch I go. There it is, her fur. She never wears it because she says it’s old-fashioned but I’ve seen pictures of her in it. The fox head is creepy so I’ve put socks in my dress to make shoulder pads which keep the fox teeth away from my neck. To the lounge room, stupid name for I never saw anyone lounging there, well not like Frank Sinatra does with Mame Van Doren in Movie Play. Onto the leather lounge, I love the thick stitching on the arms; like a saddle, one to dream in. I settle the fur and think next time a red feather boa like the one I saw in The Mercury, but of

58 course the picture was black and white and I only imagined it was red. I stretch out smoothing my white de-lustred satin with a boat neck to show off my, amazing to say the word, cleavage. What a word that is. My mother took me into town a few weeks back to buy brassieres, she told the sales-woman I was a slow developer. She wouldn’t buy me the red ones I wanted, Those are for hoors, she hissed.

***

I lie back on the couch in a grand hotel on the other side of the world, far away, thank you, I say as I smile up at the waiter, I don’t mind if I do, raising my hand with my long, long, cigarette holder, up to my red lips. The brass fire screen has a bewitching picture of three pyramids and four camels with hooded riders. I am in Egypt, crossing the sands with them. I adjust my hood, fingering the tassels on the saddle, pressing my face into... do they have manes? The tinkling of bells on their bridles fills the space, paired with the soft slap-slap of big toed feet spreading through the sand. The men sitting straight and high draw their hoods about them for the wind is springing up and the sand is whirling. There’s Dad in a tent. I’d like to stay but the men are urging the camels on and I follow for a while but even though I plead they leave me behind. I rub my fingers across the stitching of the couch... little tracks around the arms and brass studs like a cowboy’s belt. Turning my head I accept the tinkling icy drink offered to me by the slick-haired waiter, then to my companion, Thank you Frank. Please sing “Fascinating Rhythm”. Yesterday my father sang that same song as he shaved his chin by the small mirror on the veranda but he was singing in his Scottish brogue and not at all like Frank Sinatra.

Jock There’s nowt I can do for they’re upstairs. I can hear the slapping. I’ve shouted to Meg to stop but it’s no use. I push myself out onto the veranda away from the sound of it. The harbour is alive and the sky busy with clouds. I’d like to be able to walk up the mountain again, walk anywhere, even ten steps outside for a different view, a

59 different angle, to the end of the street even. Best would be the top of the mountain where those tall stones remind me of the cairns on Culloden. Now I’m trapped here in this yard, trapped with this view. It is the best nature can do, but it’s a prison with streets too steep for people in cars to stop in time, too steep for a wheelchair. Impossible. I couldn’t do it and there’s no one else. I just stare out at the landscape. It stares back. I’ve made a few notes of the places I remember in Hobart that I can’t get to anymore. If Maeve gets a car one day I’m sure she’ll drive me. Places. Best would be Aberdeen, the old sitting room, the picture of the Cutty Sark, the harbour at Arbroath. Singing For Auld Lang Syne, my dears in our kitchen. Maeve asked me one day where my favourite places were but I couldne get the words out of my throat. I’ve written a few pieces about Scotland. When I read them back I have to catch myself before I go too far, before that feeling in my chest takes me over.

Meg McGill So, madam, clever miss, this’ll teach you to touch my things. Even if I don’t wear it, it’s still not yours to touch. There’s Frankenstein downstairs shouting to you. Do you hear?

Maeve Last night I sat with Dad as usual and we listened to the radio. He asks me about school and I tell him about my lessons, about how the teacher thinks I have talent. I don’t feel as if I’m skiting when I say that although Eoin thinks I am. He calls me Smart Arse. He’s going to be a plumber when he finishes his apprenticeship. I remember before Dad came to live with us Eoin used to tell me I was adopted. I thought that was the secret he always said he knew and so I used to daydream and get excited because I thought that out there somewhere was some lovely mother who was all mine and one day I’d find her. Then he told me it was just a joke. He’s like Mum, he loves a joke. He told me once that a doctor had to see me but would only see me if I went to a cubby he had built. I did go but it was Mr Binocs who came into the cubby instead. I’m not allowed to go to his house any more. But I kicked up a stink in the cubby because Mr Binocs is not a doctor, he works at the petrol station, so I shouted at him

60 that he was a liar like my brother and I ran away. Eoin said Mr Binocs had wanted to see my hair. I asked Mum if I could go to a hairdresser to get my hair cut but she just took up her sewing shears and cut off both my plaits. Quick snip she said, that’s fixed. She still won’t tell me about her life in Spain. It’s in the past, she says, and Eoin gives me one of his leery looks then does his nasty laugh. Sometime she stares at me and says, You look like your Aunt. Just that she says. I want to know more about my Aunt. I like the word: the idea. I’d like to ask her more questions. I still think about Spain. Just to myself. I look at the shape of it in the big atlas at school and I plan to go there one day. And I think about Dad, what it was like for him, for me, when he first came to live with us. And our Gulliver’s Club when I was younger: our pretend plans about travel. In a few weeks, end of the year, I’ll be leaving school, finding a job and saving up.

Jock I enjoy sitting out on the verandah looking up at the mountain. It’s starting to green up a bit after the fires that went through and nearly took the whole town. It burnt for days and places down on the coast were lost. The sky was yellow and grey for weeks on end and the air was choking with cinders. But we got through it all though many were terrified and rightly so. Meg packed some things in a suit case if the event arose that the fire turned this way, but we were safe as it turned out, but down through Fern Tree is all lost I hear, and some of Sandy Bay and Lenah Valley. Eoin came in to sit with me one night as we listened on the radio. He never says much so I wasne really sure what he was thinking. But it kept me company for I knew if the wind didne turn there would be nothing I could do. It was a comfort to have him sit though I knew it was just the emergency of the fire that brought him in. I know he finds it very difficult the situation here, but what can I say to the lad. He will have his own ideas of it all, having heard Meg’s stories. She loves her stories. I wonder if Maeve has forgotten about Spain. Somehow I doubt it. I thought it best all those years ago when I was in the hospital to put a picture of a horse on the trinket box I made for her. I wanted to get that idea of Spain out of her head. Replace it with another. I see now that back then I must have disappointed her. She was just a kid but she wanted to be like her mother, she wanted a picture of Spain and already had that idea so deep inside her that nothing I could do would change it. No stories I

61 could tell: about truth, about lies, about places to be. I never told her those stories, or my boy. I’m not sure what they make of life, of me, of their mother who I have now to admit is a strange one. I can hear my sister Mattie’s voice to this day. Even all those years ago when we were first here and Meg got some post from her aunts telling her that they had at last a reply to the enquiries they were always making to locate where her father Daniel had died. The sisters weren’t planning to travel there of course for they were getting on in years and very set in their ways. It was more about knowing where the place was, putting a name to it, and maybe being able to find it on a map. I can understand that, but the thing was the information after all that time was that Daniel, hadn’t died in Africa at all... but on board a ship on the way back to Scotland. That was sad, to think on him being buried at sea. It was near the Azores that they put him down, those islands out there in the middle of nowhere. A sad lost way for his chapter to be closed, the coffin just sliding away out from under the cloth and tipping down into the water. I showed Meg where it was on my map but I don’t think she really took it in for she hardly spoke of the news, almost as if the letter had never come. She just forever kept on with the way she had of talking about her past, about Spain, as if she had decided on something and that was it and not one shred of it would be changed. Changing people’s minds about things can be impossible: as impossible as trying to walk, to move from place to place. I think on it now, my first realization all those years ago in the hospital but that great betrayer Hope kept creeping in... now, my family gone, the love gone, but for Maeve. I’ve not warned her about love, though she’s old enough to know. I’d like to tell her about life and the things that turn people to savages. But perhaps I have no right. I had such ideas, and I now know full well that an idea doesn’t die. The will to make it happen can die, the will yes, but not the idea itself. It just turns into a stone in your stomach. It’s a comfort to write, to try to get it down on paper, try to distil the idea of who I am today, so far from that boy in Aberdeen, the one running back to the bothy for supper with my Ma and Pop and all my brothers and sisters. I am too far away from them all now: too far away. I don’t even feel Scottish anymore and when I hear Meg speaking I realise she’s almost lost her accent.

3. A LAST MIGRATION

Maeve I knew it would happen eventually. I’ve been expecting it for years. Dad’s sick and in hospital. I’ve rushed from work, trying to beat the traffic by taking the back roads to the hospital and mindful not to drive too fast, but wanting to hurry. It all happened suddenly. He had a fever and now some sort of blood poisoning, septicaemia. The doctor doesn’t seem to hold out much hope but won’t say whether he has days, weeks, left. They don’t say, except they tell me he’s comfortable. He doesn’t look like it, he lies as still as stone, sometimes turning his head from side to side. He’s asleep and I see his high cheek bones and the grooves around his brow and that strong jaw of his ancestors, my ancestors, such a long way from Culloden.

***

I’m resolved. I go to the phone in the corridor. She answers and I ask that she come to see him, I try to insist. Her voice claws its way through the wire towards me. I’m busy, she starts. I hold the phone to my ear a bit after she hangs up and I imagine the sweetest reply, I even think of going back to him and waking him to whisper in his ear, Mum’s on her way. But I can’t lie to him and I won’t tell him what she spat out: that same old, same old, Frankenstein crap. I wonder what she would have said had she been a woman of love? And he? As I sit looking at him I try to imagine his words. I think about his notebooks and wonder if I should read them. Perhaps when I get home I’ll take them out and see what he’s written. I feel a strange thrill at it. It will be a discovery. Will I find myself in his words? I suspect there will also be his private love. I don’t think I can or should read that. I’ve not yet been in love myself; boyfriends yes, work mates, but not love. Not the love my father so clearly still had right up to the end, if this is the end. The love runs in his blood still, the blood that’s pooling in his body, turning black, preparing to destroy him.

I imagine his words rolling around in that medicated swirl, his thoughts slipping toward that lyrical last horizon, I try to imagine, what he might say to my mother if she did come to sit next to him. But it’s too hard; I have no example to work from for I have never seen them together in their love. Not once in the ten years since he came to live with us. I used to think that one day I would but it never happened. I have not ever seen her smile at him or touch him, she just walks out of the room and away, ignoring him. Once she got dressed up and went out for lunch with a friend. As she walked towards the front door Dad wheeled himself out of his room and said, Happy Birthday Meg. She didn’t even look at him, just swept past and out to the taxi. And I have seen how his eyes followed her as he watched through the window of his room at her closing the gate and into the taxi and off down the hill to the city. What would he say to her if he could? I think of the places he told me about, what little he told me of them together. For a moment I am him, I know sweet lassie, that in the end we are strangers. The ward is silent, the corridor black. Imagine if just one last time you would look back with me at the years. Our places, the cool of the grass in Barshaw Park, a ship pitching into the blue. Hobart and the wind at our back as we climb the mountain, turning to look down at the harbour. Do you remember the tang of rain on granite walls: birds jinking in a summer sunset? Let me press my face into the velvet of your coat, and walk again with you in Barshaw Park, beneath the trees. But I stop with my daydream of his words, Give it up Maeve, I say and lean in close to whisper, Eoin’s coming to see you today, which is true. My brother has surprised me by making an effort.

Meg McGill Eoin’s at the hospital. It’s his duty, I see that. When the ambulance pulled away from the house, though I do say so myself, I took my time before I went into the room. I made myself a cup of tea first and took it out on the veranda in my chair and looked up at the mountain. It was a sunny day, the timber boards were warm beneath my feet and yes, I kicked off my shoes as I sat. Then I rolled up my sleeves, as they say, and I started. I knew he wasne coming back so I stripped the bed though I hated touching the sheets. Then his

64 wardrobe, hoisting out all the fusty clothes, it made me ill it did but I knew Maeve wouldn’t do it and would want to keep things and take forever. I didne feel right about asking Eoin. I must admit, I did feel a wee tinge of something when I threw his shoes in the bin. It’s only natural I suppose to feel something. Of course I was interrupted by Maeve ringing from the hospital, wanting me to go and visit. I don’t know what goes through her head, I’m sure I don’t. Later I got to his bureau and found all his note-books. He always fancied his writing skills, he did. And I did take one or two out to the veranda to leaf through as I had another cup of tea. They were full of tripe and as I suspected a lot about me. Stupid man to think I could still love him. Brought me here from across the world on a wild goose chase looking for a new life. Idiot. So there in the note-books he was mooning on and on with mawkish descriptions of me in my finery and sewing away at my machine. And a lot of him going on about being away in the desert and what happened to us. I remember when he came back all brown and seeming even taller than he always was and his hair springing up. He seemed so different, like another person like he had changed and I didn’t know him or like him. Frankenstein I thought he was, big and ugly. He came back different from the west coast too, as I remember, years ago when he was chopping the pines. He had broadened out a lot, huge shoulders on him, but this time, from being out there in the desert well he looked like a wild man, and his brow all furrowed he says from squinting in the sun, but he looked half mad to me. And here he is writing all about it. Tragedy, he’s writing. He says that I was different. Well I never, what rubbish. It was him. And here there’s more of it, some of the words repulse me, crave he says, and soft limbs, it’s disgusting, he’s writing about us in our bed, nobody needs to read these, what was he thinking? Quite makes me sick it does, and then more whining about himself, his accident, his horrible hands. He sees himself as an ape. He got that right. I tore the books to bits but left his map. I couldn’t tear a map for they always reminded me of my Da. If you destroy a map nothing can ever find its way again, it’s a terrible omen, can lead to tragedy, so I just couldn’t do it.

Though we already have the tragedy coming all this way with the lure of travel and happiness and what did I get eventually? A cripple. I tore the books and burned them. There were one or two letters for Eoin and Maeve but they’ve no need of all that sentimental slop. They went in the fire as well. When I was finished turning out all the cupboards I did the floor with boiling soapy water and I put his disgusting chair out the back. It can go to the tip.

Maeve Last weekend I took myself to the top of the mountain. I got a lift up which was good and planned to walk down. I wanted to draw those little flowers clustered between the grey stones. I know Dad loves it up there, he used to go a lot he said before his accident, before I knew him really. He was always inspired he said by the sight of the research ship heading to Antarctica and would make a point to go up there to watch it leaving port tracking the orange shape of it snaking away down the estuary. So, I thought a picture to put beside his bed might do, like I did years ago when I was a kid. As I sketched I saw us sitting in the landscape of another time, gazing down the mountain side into the blue and juggling our plans for the Gulliver’s Club, planning our embarkation as he said on a ship that would take us around the world. And even though I am now too old for such sentimental dreams I had to still my pencil over the page... I stayed too long, it got late and I realised I’d misjudged the weather. Hobart’s like that, jacket on, jacket off, jacket on: three temperatures in three hours. A chilly wind unravelled mist across the peak. Anxiety started me striding down at a good clip and, yes, so pleased when a car appeared and slowed for me. It was a family I’d seen up at the lookout and was happy to squash into the back seat between the kids and sit there with all the family banter and laughter and harmless questions. It was the innocent crush of flesh against my body, the sweet warmth of physical contact that got to me. I was intensely aware of knees pressing into my thighs, either side, then at another curve in the road the leaning against me the other way as if we were all just one body stretched across the back seat. Another bend in the road with strong young hands grabbing me, then a yelped woops, sorry as we laughed and banged about from side to side, but settling soon on the measured lengths of neat

66 suburban roads all the way to the house. When I waved them off from the gate, watching them disappear in their warm bubble of smells and laughter, I felt the tears. Inside, when I shut the door, the silence crushed me. I was glad my mother and brother were out. I thought to look again for my father’s notebooks but suddenly was too weary.

***

I knew he would die. There was nothing to be done, he was in the path of a long fetch, those dark purposeful waves from so far away, moving relentlessly towards him. It would have been wonderful to be able to tell him that Mum was on her way but I couldn’t lie to him and so I just sat close and pressed my head against his and tried to pace my breathing with that tiny patch of life that was still forcing itself out of him. Dylan Thomas’s Rage, rage against the dying of the light, repeating uselessly in my head. Dad, do not go gentle into that good night, I whispered, rage, rage. But the roar of towering waves filled the space between us.

***

I learned that the chance to say goodbye can be everything: it’s good to have time to do it, say goodbye, properly, which I did then at that time but not as it turned out for future goodbyes. Not really. Over the years my father had become used to people saying, Oh Jock, it’s a tragedy. And his smiling reply was always, This time Tragedy, next time, Comedy and Travel! Almost at the end but when still, just, able to speak, he whispered to me, Comedy and Travel. Days later they taped down his eyelids; I thought it grotesque and asked why. They get dry and he can’t see anyway, said a huffy nurse, then softening, but he can still hear, she offered. So I leaned in and whispered, Dad, next time Comedy and Travel. Then, despite the horrible hospital tape on his eyelids, advertising his blindness, a tear came sliding out from under and I knew he’d heard me. It was something to think on, to keep, that he heard, and replied. I took his hand and put my head beside his on the pillow.

Meg McGill She’s going away she says. Away to Sydney, and maybe overseas, giving up her job, and going. I’d like it to have been me. It will all be wasted on her. And a funeral! Well I never! Maeve wanted a ceremony for him. I said no. It was just his ashes. Eoin went with her, up to the top of the mountain. He said she cried like a baby and put the ashes down in between the boulders up there. Stupid really, it was a calm day, but the wind will blow them to the four corners. Now there’s just me and Eoin, though he’s gone and got himself engaged. She’s not much chop to my mind but we’ll see. She’s a bossy type and got him all involved in protesting about a dam for heaven’s sake. You’d think people would have more to do with their lives. They’re planning on three children so she’ll have plenty to do if she gets her way, and might not find it so easy. I always thought one child enough. Like me. Just me, my Da and Mother, three of us. My Da. I can’t stop myself going over all that, the letter arriving in Paisley with news he had died and my mother not even knowing where it was, most likely some unpronounceable place where he was building a bridge. There was such the tut- tutting, for Africans, for black feet to walk on, such a waste. And one day a box of presents arrived months after we heard he was dead. The aunts fought with my mother about who should get whatever was in the box. Then, strangely, not six months later, my mother was gone too, not dead, but just gone away. I was left. It was just me and my aunts, maiden aunts as they were called in those days, these days it would be spinsters. They didne really tell me anything much except that my mother had gone away and it was for the best. She came to the school gate one day and gave me a doll which Aunt Peggy burned in the sitting room fire. When I was much older, a teenager, I heard my mother had re-married and had another child, a boy. I heard she lived down somewhere in Ayreshire, a small town there, not a quality town. Her new husband had a shop which sold material from the mill in Paisley. I thought once to go and see, maybe meet my half-brother but time went on and I didne ever go. And then of course I met Jock, so handsome and filling my head with ideas of travel and new countries and I must have had my Da in me because I said yes. I wanted to go, to see the world. But I’ve not seen much as it turned out. Not much at all.

ACROSS THE SEA WALL

4. THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

Maeve On the plane at last: out of my old life, to Britain and history; to Aberdeen and the life of my father; and finally the reality of Spain. But there my excitement evaporates, my confidence wavers. I have been shut out of so much. Resentment wells, forcing me to focus instead on the anticipation of my aunt in Aberdeen, to stories she will surely tell of the early life of my mother and father, their meeting, the marriage, the move to Australia. My aunt Mattie will be the key to my mother’s life in Spain, she will know enough to guide me there, to Castile, to find out why it had to be a secret. The anticipation of what I will learn is a drug. I take the airline’s neatly folded map out of the seat-pocket and opening it see that someone has been here before me. An angry someone it seems for the route we will fly is scribbled and scored over deeply in red pen. The paper has been gouged as if in frustration and exclamation marks hover over both Sydney and London, and then, the map smoothed, re-folded, put carefully away. I wonder at it, a festering testament perhaps to some abandoned dream, bearing no indication of the direction of the disappointment, the starting point: destination unclear.

***

My brother couldn’t understand why I wanted to go away. I’m twenty one and I have to get away, I announced, then with much emphasis, I’m going to Scotland, keeping the rest of it, Spain, a secret. Pride has always prevented me wheedling for information, nor would I ever give him the satisfaction of sneering at my need. We are so totally different that he would think me mad to harbour a longing for something so far back in the past. It’s a longing that I find bewildering at times, why do I want to know it all... to fill in my history, to contemplate a richness of which I am a part. There is a hunger that I sometimes try to put away from me, to laugh off as a childish dream, but it always creeps back. I want to know my family. Ha, there I am sitting in the sun of a courtyard cafe, writing the postcard which will be stared at in the kitchen in Hobart, where it will be raining. No image of a

71 bullfight, instead a dancer, a woman with flowing black hair holding castanets high above her head, one hand on her hip smiling out at my mother and brother, who continue to stare at her. I shall write nothing more than, perhaps, Having a great time, or even, Busy meeting everyone, so many cousins! perhaps, Wish you were here!

***

That last leaving of Hobart, just before Mother’s Day: I the dutiful daughter, took a gift, always hopeful. My knock unanswered, I left the parcel on her doorstep. Perhaps she opened the door later and stamped her foot on it. Maybe I should have played one of those exploding package tricks. What a laugh to hide in the bushes and watch her go up in smoke, a little shriek, a blackened face, frizzy hair. How vengeful I am, and, again, childish: perhaps it’s hereditary: she certainly loved tricks, but usually only if she played them. In fact only if she played them.

***

I’m in the grip of operatic emotions and likely to leap from the seat at any moment with the thrill of it all. Several times during the hours and hours of flight I take out the map and look again and wonder in which direction they were travelling, and what had churned their emotions in such a way. I wonder if it was a man or a woman scoring red so angrily into the map. I run my fingers back and forth across the lines. I’m aware the woman seated next to me is watching but she asks no questions, and that’s all right, she’ll now have a story to tell, which she can totally make up any way she pleases: which is often the best way. I dig out my Spanish phrase book and settling back in my seat chat eloquently, but silently, to hotel porters, handsome waiters, interested travel companions, and finally to the astonished person who will answer a knock at the door and opening it, stare in amazement at their long lost relative. A practised Hola bursts from my lips. My seating companion flinches.

***

And oh so many hours later we fly over the English Channel and I look to see the ships below pushing through the blue, to Gibraltar, Napoli, Suez? Is there a red-

72 haired Aberdonian on board? Finally we cross the coast and began to circle over England, a truly green and pleasant land.

***

My focus is on Scotland but it would be exciting to stay in London to explore, for England is stamped into the hearts of many born in Australia, possibly more so in Tasmania, its cool climate encouraging the greens of the northern hemisphere. The memory of the old country was engraved by the earliest settlers in the design of streets and parks, the planting of trees, the cultivation of roses, the mapping out of flowerbeds with displays of daffodils in Spring, and the naming of streets and towns. For many Australians England is a place we must go, except for those of us of Scottish stock or Irish or Welsh: a different slant entirely then, a touch of defiance in it all as with my mother who would never stand up for the British anthem. She’s no’ my Queen, she would say. People stared.

***

So my compass is set first for Aberdeen, an Aunt, my father’s past, and later, Spain. I break the long coach journey north in the Lake District. It’s like Tasmania with the mountains, friends have said, and it’s true to a point. At Ullswater, I sit on the steamer in the sun and feel at peace. We are surrounded by mountains; the lake, seven miles long with a dog-leg in the middle, is placid except for the trails of boats. I dream and drift, but then, too soon, there’s a hubbub and hoohah of people who throw crisps to the grey geese. The birds honk disdainfully and rise with slow motion wing-beats, rising to disappear in the direction of far away mountains. Martindale Fells I am told. I would like to do that, to follow them, my arms waving in the peace of the sky: rising up above the noise. I think of Hobart: the silence of winter: the slate grey days and icy nights. And strangely, though I have only just left, I am homesick for Mt Wellington and the Derwent. My bravado of being a traveller on a mission has been shrivelled by anxiety. I am a stranger and I am going to see a stranger. At the coach station when I re-start my journey a crush of people are milling, shoulders nudging, and backpacks, long hair brushing past, close. Suddenly I smell a

73 memory: the smell of gum trees, of eucalypts. I look about, who is it, where are they or had I imagined it? Is my new, so new, so sentimental homesickness playing tricks with me but no, it’s real. I can smell eucalypts, but where and who? I can’t hear any Australian accents which is a shame as I’d like to sit down for a few minutes with someone and talk about home, hear someone with my accent. I look again as we are told to board scanning faces as I walk the aisle. An unexpected loneliness envelopes me, I want to catch the memory of home and who I was back then. I stare out the window as we head north, across the border and finally Scotland is racing beside the coach. At last I feel my courage returning. Perhaps it is the colours: blue, green and purple hills, moss-green water, the speckled grey of tumbled stones and all so different from the silver of eucalypts. There are grasses, leaning in pale clumps but not burnt by the sun: I am looking at the colours of Scotland, my anticipation is revived. I think of my Dad’s stones and his map, I notice hummocky clumps of grass and I recognise parts of Tasmania’s east coast: it is the same colour of grey stone and I feel strangely as if I am travelling home. I would like to get off the bus and sit for a while alone on one of those dry-stone walls, to listen for the sounds and test the wind for smells of grass and leaves and streams.

***

What sounds and smells would have called my father back to his childhood in Aberdeen, the place he always called home for surely Hobart was never home to him. Memory’s not just people, It’s many things, but sometimes no matter how much we want to remember something we can’t, and I think now of my father’s voice, now that he’s gone, and I can’t remember it. I hold photos before me and think of him but when I try to remember his voice it’s just out of reach. Like the little clicky-click of the garden gate or that grunted ooff as he pushed himself up the ramp in his wheelchair.

***

At last in Aberdeen and in the house where my father grew up. My Aunt’s making a cup of tea, I’m alone in the front room. The anxiety I felt on the bus has gone but is now replaced with a nervous expectancy, as if time is holding its breath. I stare about. I have imagined my father here a hundred times or more.

Yes, there he is at the head of the table. He’s tall, over six feet, and strong, wearing a jacket and tie with a crisp white shirt. His complexion looks ruddy as it would here in Aberdeen in the cold air. He’s cheerful, smiling, and there’s a light in his eyes as he watches my mother serving the soup. She’s laughing and throwing her head back, her small white teeth a splash against the tan of her skin and her dark hair, around her shoulders a kind of Spanish shawl. She throws it back as she reaches across the table. It’s cockaleekie soup, she says and spoons first some for my Dad and then some for me. She then serves herself and last, my brother who looks across the table and grins at me as he passes me the chunky brown bread he has just sliced for us all. He’s happy for me as it’s a celebratory dinner and I have just won a prize for a painting I put into the exhibition at the Town Hall here in Aberdeen. I’m eight so it is quite an achievement, my mother says and leans in to kiss my cheek. On the mantle are the photographs from last Christmas when we all went to Edinburgh to visit Aunt Mattie and what a fine time we all had. My father snoozed in the corner of the carriage while my mother read her magazine. My brother and I played our game of staring each other out with me winning every time until the landscape changed and I caught my breath as we drew in for the first time and saw the rock and the castle and the people all about, and oh how beautiful were the lights along Princes Street. On the walk to Aunt Mattie’s we laughed as we slipped on the icy street and Dad took my mother’s arm and she buried her face in his coat as she laughed, the feather on her hat catching the corner of his eye and he twitching and half shouting laughing saying what are ye about my wife, trying to put out my eye! And she reached up and kissed his cheek and we went on skittering along the cobbles and making our way through the cold to the warmth that was the haven of our Aunt Mattie’s sitting room where she had hot chocolate and a slice of pound cake ready for the weary travellers. We are so pleased to see Aunt Mattie again for she left Aberdeen four years before to make her way in the big city and to follow a man she loved. On that day we waved her off and called and continued to wave as the train had pulled away. At the last speck my father turned away and said. Well that’s that then, and we’d all walked up the platform away in the direction of home. It had been high summer and my father, despite my mother’s complaints, had flung his jacket

75 over his shoulder and turned his cuffs up to show his strong forearms. Our family in all seasons.

***

My dream has fled from its palette and I had been so busy there with all its details! I look about the brown room so quiet and cold. There are no photographs on the mantle, but there is a paperweight, not the gorgeous Caithness glass with the colours of heather and peat and the blue grey of water, it is a snowdome of Edinburgh Castle. I wonder how long since it has been lifted and shaken. I resist: there is a sadness always in those silent falling fragments. Further along the mantle is a doll in Highland clothing, still in its presentation box, the plastic crinkled and faded and now partly obscuring the face. I look in closely and see the expression of wide-eyed wonder. In the bookcase there is a collection of Sir Walter Scott’s books, now proudly displayed dust free in fine blue leather covers with gold italicised titles. Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor. In a moment I am in my father’s room as he intones, Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land.

***

From the kitchen I hear the cups rattling and the sound of the kettle whistling. There’s a silence as the water is poured. At last the door opens and she comes in and places a tray upon the side table.

***

I was shocked when she opened the front door to see that she had trouble walking and her hands were bad: arthritis I suppose from the cold, but looking so painful. We’ll just sit while it steeps, she says to me, It’s awfy kind of you dear to visit your Aunt Mattie, though the news you bring is very sad.

Suddenly the clock strikes in the hall and she brings her head up as if it were striking through another page in her life and I see in her eyes that there are few pages left. She rallies and gets up to pour the tea, though I half rise to help she nods at me to sit and cuts a hefty slice of cake, and pours the tea. I watch her and wonder how it is that my father thought I looked like her. She is old and sad looking. Years of typing other people’s writing, following their notes, copying their instructions, pages and pages of words and none of them written by her. I can hear the ding of the bell as she reaches the end of the line and the roll of the carriage as she puts in more paper and more and the back and forth of carriage return and the ding of the bell and years of other people’s words. We lapse into a silence with our tea and cake. But I missed your Dad terribly when he went to Australia, we all did, though of course we were happy for him, it sounded such a grand adventure. A grand adventure, the words resound in my head then the open wound of my father’s life begins to spread wider and to leak. I look back at her across the space and resolve to tell her only the best parts. I frame a response but she rushes on looking up at me at last, So tell me about your life in Australia. Your father wrote of course, but it will be nice to hear it from you. I tell her as much as I think she can bear, as much as I can bear. And your Mother, she asks, such a beauty, she must be heart-broken, and now with you travelling away but your brother. I look at my plate then up to smile and say, Yes it was terrible and of course they are as sad as I. Then my Dad is beside me in the room. He’s old and I shiver when I think of him once so tall, so wide shouldered and standing at the railing of a ship, looking out toward his new country. That’s who Mattie waved away when he left for his grand adventure. Into my head swirls the picture of the cripple, the life that settled on him, his half-life, like the dust that settled on shoes he never ever walked in but still kept to look at. I see the lines of pain and age now deeply etched. The watery blue, red- rimmed eyes beneath those thick brows and his hair silver grey, his knees drawing up.

I see him lastly as he lay in his bed looking as if he had never been alive, and, so true, had rarely ever sat me on his knee.

***

My Aunt is talking, filling the space but some of the words are for herself. I’m the last now, she says, your Father and I were the youngest two, the others a wee bit older. The town’s very different now of course and I do miss the old ways. So much of it long demolished for the new road down to the docks. So many ships now, the oil rigs all that out there. It’s all gone, and I’m sorry for it. The place looks very different. She waves her arm toward the door but she means to the east to the Atlantic, the oil, the cod and herring, the ice, the blue, the cold, and deep green of chopped waves cut short as the prow of the boats slice through. Was he happy there? she asks. I weave a story to suit, Of course after his accident. I fade and she nods and I see that my father would not have written the truth to her or to anyone. Such is love it seems for some. Not for Mattie. I’ve his letters still. She stands to open a bureau drawer and takes out a bundle. I see my father’s hand from his ‘jottings’, his shaky writing, spidery with the effort of holding his pen in his crooked fingers. I wish I had one of his notebooks but they are long gone I know now. I look at the bundle of letters and would like to ask to read some but they are his private words with his sister and I know he would have been buoying her up and keeping his counsel about his life. I feel sad for her because I have had the years and the memories, and she has only the letters. Did he speak much of us? This in a hopeful tone. Oh yes often, I reply, careful not to let on that I know the sad story of her trip to Edinburgh and finding the man was married, then her return in shame to Aberdeen. My mother had told me that story, laughing and scoffing. My father’s version had been gentler. She fills the space with, I’ve often thought to myself what it would have been like if they had stayed here and not gone away.

She looks so sad that I rush on. Yes, I think that too! I often wonder what it would have been like to grow up here. I can just imagine us sitting here at the table all of us and laughing, perhaps getting ready for a holiday or planning a trip, I can almost see it, Aunt Mattie. The words, Aunt Mattie, are an anchor to my father. She smiles for she sees her niece come all the way from Australia to visit.

***

I fill my days with walking, getting to know old Aberdeen and the new, finding my bearings. I’m not a tourist, I am part of a family. Aunt Mattie has sent off some letters to my cousins. She’s apologetic that they don’t know I’m here. We don’t get together very often, she says. The younger ones are in Glasgow and two have gone to London. I’ll get their addresses; I can do that for you. I reassure her, All in good time. I’m fudging the truth. All that can wait because I don’t feel at all connected to them. We are like Gondwanaland continents that have drifted apart. Right now I’m hungry for my father’s landscape, the one I am standing in, and later of course there will be the thrill of Spain. My secret still.

***

There is no picture of the Cutty Sark above the mantle in the kitchen. It is a calendar. No dates are circled. Mattie cradles her tea cup. I never thought to go she says and there were those poor ones who were sent long ago. I’m not sure who she means. Transported I mean, she goes on, to Tasmania. You can see their names on a plaque in the old town hall, those around here were proud of it in a strange way. Evidence that the English were still the enemy, and cruel, there’s never any love lost between the two.

She’s reading my face to see if she’s offended but I smile and agree, There’s a lot of injustice in it all, and people at home, in Tasmania are taking up their convict ancestors now with more pride. And what is it like, she asks me, Tasmania? I ready myself to give an overview of the scenery, the colour, tall forests, but the words dry up when all I see is my mother grim and downright, determined and dogged as she arranges her fabrics and feathers and pearls, her fingers stroking then trapping it all in her arrangements and fixed with needle and strong tugs at her thread and the tying of the knot which must be a proper knot that will never unravel. My Aunt takes my silence for sudden homesickness and affects a lighter note. Owen, loved it, he said it reminded him of home. Owen, and I am saying my father’s name to myself. Such a jolt to hear a woman’s voice say it in a soft Scottish burr that seems to bring him alive, for a moment. I want her to say it again. Owen. But when I nod to her and smile I am in my father’s room and he trapped in that chair with his withered feet and black rimmed hands. His shoulders hunched as he unfurls his map to spread it and there his four stones which he places at its corners. His eyes are tracking back and forth, latitude, the longitude, calculating the distance and telling me in his rumbling voice of the lost places and people's dreams. I stand to turn away from my Aunt’s eager gaze and I lurch into my tourist talk of mountains and rivers and the wilderness of forests. It is a practised reveal, Tasmanians know the phrases over and over, the collections of images of bays and beaches and valleys, all there at the bottom but one of the world. I keep her delighted and I wander around her room to keep my ghosts at bay but I stop at the snow dome and lift it to shake and the white fragments shift about to settle on the miniature skyline and castle of Edinburgh. We are both quiet. Well that’s enough then hen, she says, tomorrow’s another day so I’ll let you get on and I’ll away to my bed.

***

In the streets and shops I keep a look out for faces that suggest a long lost relative. I see the broad foreheads, the longish nose, the high colour of the cheeks and

80 the hair. Many times I see the red hair of my father when he was younger. And many times I see the blue flash of his eyes as I hand over money for stamps, or buy a magazine, or choose some flowers for Mattie. They are rugged faces used to the cold and wind, yet they are different from the winter faces of Hobart. At the town hall I search out the plaque and sure enough there is a McGill of the Tasmanian Convict Muster it says, Sarah, her name. I contemplate going in to the library for more information but it is enough for today for I see now I am in the land of my ancestors and I am walking where legions of McGills walked. Suddenly, an image of the Derwent in Hobart, the estuary when the tide turns. If you stand on the hill at Bellerive, near the Bluff you can see the water slow and halt and strange little waves with sharpish tops spring up as if in a nervous huddle of what now? Then in just seven or eight minutes the water begins to push and slide away to mysterious assignations with wind and currents. And thinking of Hobart, faces push into this my newish life but I push them back. I can see the questions in their faces, her face, my mother’s sneer, And what will she be doing now, what will she be making of herself over there? The words spill into my life in her brogue of pricking sarcasm as she sorts and stitches, tugging at her, proper knot. I will soon be finding out and going to Spain to dig out the truth of her.

***

I like to be out of the house, my father’s house I always say to myself, to walk and think, but it’s cold. Near the harbour I find a cafe owned by a Greek called Leo. He says he’s been in Scotland for many, many years and that he used to work on a ship. I don’t ask him if he has ever been back to Greece. He tells me has family in Australia. I don’t ask him if he has ever visited. I like him and go nearly every day to his cafe to sit and think; to read the paper, plan a side trip, find a job, or a place that runs night classes in art. Leo serves delicious fish and chips and loves to chat, but the state of his apron is a story in itself. It hangs by a thin string tied around his nine month belly and then in a tired bow at the back. It’s hot at his stove so tucked into his pocket is a cloth he wipes over his forehead to stop the sweat dripping as he bends into the pickled onion

81 barrel. The colour of the apron tells me there is no Mrs Leo or if there is she needs a good whipping. At night when I walk past and he is closed I see his apron hanging on its hook beside a yellowed advertisement, and Leo sitting with a glass of Ouzo before him staring deep into the aquamarine and blue of a poster tacked above the counter. He’s squinting at the white rounded walls, seeking out the roof turrets painted blue, tracing the contours of huddled houses high on the island hills of his homeland. He is searching out doorways, windows, exploring winding paths, travelling through the voices in his memory. I wonder if he can remember the sounds and the smells.

***

My Aunt doesn’t say much about my mother at all, which is no surprise to me but I’m becoming impatient. I feel I’ve breathed enough of my father’s life for now, of Owen, walking about in his footsteps here. There is still more to learn but I need to put it aside. There are questions I must ask to move me on in all this, things I have to know to plan my trip, to Castile, as she once let slip. So at last, one evening I ask as pre-cursor to so many more questions, How long after my Mum came over from Spain did you meet her? Aunt Mattie just stares at me. Had she been here long when she met my Dad? A smile is forming on her face but she stops it and leans toward me then speaks with her strong accent which has not been worn away by distance. Och hen, you’re surely not asking me that? Yes, I say, I’d like to know. Did your father never tell you? No I didn’t like to ask, he was sick. I stumble. I don’t want to tell Aunt Mattie of my father’s wounds. Oh dear. Well I canna understand why he didne. hen, I’m sorry to tell you, it was just a silly story. It was all rubbish. She loved to put on airs and graces she did, and was forever trying to tell us she was a Spanish princess. I don’t want to upset you Maeve, but we thought your mother a strange one, with all her stories. It’s a wonder her nose didne grow like Pinocchio, with all the tales she made up. I felt sorry for her I did. And we tried to tell your father she was an odd one. We all did. But it was too

82 late of course. He was already so taken with her. He couldne see past her bonny face and lovely clothes. My Aunt trails off, reading the astonishment on my face. But why Spain? I burst out, bewilderment struggling with an oceanic rage, Why there, didn’t you ever ask her why? Well I did once try to get to the bottom of it. When your father was out of the room but she just said in a voice, here Mattie pauses as if re-phrasing. She just said, it’s private. I don’t have to tell people everything. You don’t have to know everything. Tears sting. My Aunt looks at me so apologetically as if she is guilty. I can’t find any words. She went on and so I’m sorry hen I just left it there. The last thing I would want to do would be to upset your father.

***

I am enraged and humiliated. Puzzled. I feel ridiculous and bewildered thinking back to me as a child talking to my father about Spain and Castile. How many times I did that. He knew why I said that. He knew what I believed. I see Eoin’s leery grin when I talked of Mum and Spain. Them and their tricks. But my Dad?

***

At night I sleep in my Aunt Mattie’s front bedroom. She plays her music in her parlour, but I have to muffle my tears when I hear, And it’s long I’ve been dreaming of my ain folk. My mother sang it from time to time but I have no wish to have it in my head this night. My single bed is against the cold wall; the window right beside my pillow and the pavement immediately outside the glass. I hear footsteps passing; people coughing, laughing, and I imagine the bodies, the faces. I want to leap out and call, Take me with you. I imagine a smoky pub, a cloth-capped gent with a squeeze box, a fire, the fug of people in damp coats, a bit of singing. Danny Boy. The High Road. My love is like a red, red rose.

***

I am lost. There will be no trip to Spain, Aberdeen is grey and cold. I have to get away so decide on a trip to Culloden Moor where my ancestors fought. That much is true my Aunt reassures me. She waves me off with a sad little smile.

***

The moor is bleak. Tourists everywhere. Here is the cairn with the chiselled name of my father and his forebears. I run my hands over the grey stone. It is as tall as I am. I want to sit down and lean against it but the ground is damp. The wind whips the flags which have been placed around the site, and it carries away the voices of those who gawk and take photographs and offer their wisdom. It’s a place of desperation and sadness. I see no glory in this. So many foolhardy men rushing to their death towards ranks of bayonets and guns: as dangerous as dreams of Jacobite glory. The end of the Highlander way of life: the end of hope. Tragedy. Walking across the moor I find a silver stream running swiftly but strangely silent. I peer in past the trails of white and reflected grey of sky. In the stream are rounded stones forming a path; worn by water and imprisoned by the cold. I sink to my knees and reach a hand into the water. The chill grips me but I spread my palm and run it across the stones. I think of skulls still buried on the moor and these stones the hosts of grief. The wind is forcing tears from my eyes and my hand aches as I run it over the tops of the stones, the skulls. Someone is wailing as if injured. The sound is close by. Is it the convicts on the mountains at home, running before the dogs and the redcoats, or the men behind me on the moor dying, their kilts sodden in mud and blood, their faces trampled further by Cumberland’s men? Strong Highland brows and jaws shattered by muskets. I feel the crack of guns, I smell the powder. My head is bursting from the noises of it all and I stand to run, stumble to join the retreat, escape the slaughter. The ground is boggy and difficult.

***

I want no more of Aberdeen. Want no more of the house where my father once sat dreaming of his life far away, his life with his bonny Meg, staring at the picture of the Cutty Sark. My aunt bends over me in concern as I lie in bed. I stare up at her and know that I am looking at myself decades hence. I see what disappointment does: the lines, the faded green of eyes, the pinched and worried pursing of lips: there are no answers to those questions held within.

***

When we sit in her parlour she speaks in a quiet voice and twists her crooked fingers together, then I am suddenly wondering if, years ahead, I will try to lift a paintbrush just as she is trying to lift the teaspoon. I turn my attention to my hot chocolate and the cake she has sliced. Her kindness makes me want to weep. I am thinking of Pedra Branca in the path of the Roaring Forties and waves which have travelled so far.

***

Leo is wiping the counter when I tell him I’m leaving. He puts down the cloth and draws his hands across his apron. I realise he wants to crush me in a hug but I step back. I don’t want to cry. The tears would be for him. He is the distance of faraway places, ones we may never get back to, and if we do, we may be such completely different people that we will be strangers. Forever separate. I envy Leo his homesickness, he isn’t there, but he knows where home is. But I think Leo envies me my freedom for he has a request. Maeve, if you ever get to Greece, send me some new posters.

***

Days later my aunt and I say our goodbyes. She gives me a list of addresses of where she thinks my cousins are. She’s also given me a map with biro dots on it. Some of the dots have smudged. I fold it into squares for my pocket. She cries. I feel as if there is a stone in my stomach.

***

For a while I felt strangely guilty that I had so swiftly shut a door. No more my mother’s stupid lie, or my father’s, I say it aloud, Cowardice. I felt my mother fizzing through my guts and into my brain. I couldn’t look in a mirror.

***

To Glasgow on the coach, I said, I’ll go to meet my cousins. Her face lit up with a smile when I said it and I knew then the warm pleasure of telling a lie straight out, telling a lie straight into hopeful eyes and smiling while doing it. I will never see her again though she is yet to realise it. I momentarily regret that she might be sad when the truth reaches her and I wonder if the memory of her brother would have been best left without my arrival and promises. She hugs me a last time, with I’m so glad hen, Alison is near your age and David too, he’s at college there in Glasgow. You’ll be with family. She offers the fun of finding new relatives as if second prize in my lost opportunity to know my father and mother. It is like a lucky dip, so try again with the idea of family. I promise her, and proclaim, I’ll send postcards and even a photo of us all together, all the cousins from the McGill family, smiling away in the Glasgow light.

***

Halfway along during the night with the Scottish darkness blurring the landscape I take out the list of names of my cousins. Strangers all, and forever. Without reading it I throw the list out of the window. It whirls off carrying the truth and life of families away.

A cold gust of air rushes in, spurring a growl from my seating companion. Sentimentally I keep the little map with the dots from my Aunt’s hopeful pen and something from a poem my father used to say comes back to me, love pricks the course in lights across the charts. I shove him and his words away, repulsed as I think of his body, of water and soap, the drying of useless limbs, and the sickly white of his withered feet.

***

At the coach station I scan the boards for destinations far away from anything to do with family. There is a map showing the winding bus routes to the highlands. My eye is drawn to the west where the map shows a bulging, interesting coastline and further out in the ocean the Hebrides. The romance of the name sparks a longing within me and I scan the names of towns, one strikes me and the saying of it is satisfying. Ullapool. It is a mainland village well to the north, but it is beside the water looking out to the islands the coach driver says in a burred accent. His pronunciation of water carries an intensity of meaning, as if it were magical, as if water were somehow the path or means to wherever we may wish to be, as if beside the water meant safety and that was all one needed. Strangely it was Hobart which flew into my mind and the view of all that beautiful misty grey and blue that stretches forever south and I saw myself again on Mt Wellington cosseting my father’s ashes among the boulders and looking up at the distance away to the Antarctic. Sobs rise... I clamp them down with determined strides up the steps of the bus and a rummaging for pound notes then the organisation of my bags and a seat to the left as the driver said where the view of the water would be grandest as we entered Ullapool. A stranger I will be... in a new place. Forbidden and forgotten will be all others’ idiotic stories; their gormless mooning after other lives. I will make my own new life, and better it will be.

5. EXPECTED TIME OF ARRIVAL

Maeve My own life indeed. That was the plan but oh how plans go swiftly awry, and the not so new me of the new life now in a Kombi van bouncing about as we drive away from this village of beauty and charm. Away from Ullapool. Around me are my new friends all fellow travellers with no use for commitment or attachment or any firm plan other than to go to London, to leave the village. It is done, we are going to the mighty heart... of the greatest metropolis in the kingdom. We shout it out the windows. I have been in the village for seven months and now it’s done. No more the hills and the water and the clouds racing overhead, the northern landscape version of Hobart. I am running, leaving behind so much, yet taking too much with me. I hear my father, Comedy and Travel he says, my mother also with advice that I have disgraced myself. She is right. More, I have disgusted myself. My guts twist at the bright memories of the hope of it, of the place, the beauty of the village as I first saw it, the sight lifting me from the weariness of the journey from Glasgow, from Aberdeen, that first view of the water, to the left, on the run down the hillsides into the village in early morning light, set by dark water, the colour of cold. The houses huddled, and boats on the water, a loch, surrounded by mountains which heave and buckle the horizon. The sight took me out of my anger, my disappointment, stopped me re-arranging the conversations of hate which whirled in my head. I look back now as we drive away in the Kombi, and I cannot see the village as it was then. How strange it is, the difference as if a magician had waved some desolate wand. There seems nothing about it of that first morning, the first glimpse. My first impression, the anticipation. Nothing at all of the brightness and hope I saw at first. It is as if someone has taken up a brush and smudged all the colours, dimming them, drawing down the lines, changing the contours, gouging the paper into furrows and troughs in which muddy tones congeal beneath a leaden sky and rain and rain and rain.

The Kombi turns past the four-faced clock at the crossroads. Glancing into windows, into shops, I know that looking out are those who curl their lips and add to the stories of my time there, of my unexpected arrival one morning.

***

Way back, on that first day, I rouse from the trance of the journey all the way from Glasgow and looking through the coach window as we enter Ullapool, I dream a new blank map of my life and I’m delighted at a version of Hobart in the wide expanse of water which sends splashy waves up the pebbled beach. The cottages are white-washed, their grey slate roofs terrace the slopes and direct my gaze out to the water where there are many fishing boats, herring boats, I am later told. The boats bob, all facing the same way, like seagulls on a stormy beach: it is a wild and beautiful landscape which strikes me through with some sense of familiarity, of comfort and peace which stoke my anticipation and excitement. Within a few days, I find a job in the one tea-shop which sits above the one gift shop. It’s nearly the turrist season, the owner says in a broad brogue, you’ll have tae keep yer wits aboot ye, Lassie. I promise myself I will do so, such an earnest expression and twinkling eyes deserve no less. The accent and the blue of his eyes stirs a memory which I shove away.

***

At night I’m drawn to the little pub, to sit in the snug with a view over the water. It is early summer and the sky stays bright well past nine o’clock but the air is chill. Say, how are you mate, the publican requests. I comply and though it’s something I have never said, I don’t let on. I put on the accent a bit then exaggerate and tell them I have a pet kangaroo and a koala that lives in my bedroom. Do you know Rolf Harris at all Lassie? This from an elderly man who looks as if he has grown onto the timber bar stool and worn the dint in the counter before him. He’s my neighbour, I say, he gives me his old wobble boards. Old wobble boards, he says, You’ll need to watch oot then wi that Lassie. We roar with laughter for we are having a laugh. I like that and I see that I am not a tourist.

***

The postmistress assures me that my order of paper and paints and brushes will be with me in a week, and sure enough, and near enough, my parcel arrives and I rush to paint the landscape. At first my attempts do look strange, wrong. I’m frustrated but have to laugh when someone says. Sure lassie that’s an awfy bonny bright sky, it makes me want to take my shirt off ye ken. Will you paint in a deck chair for me? A palm tree maybe? Struggling again with the blues, I work in some grey, add a touch of cobalt and I see the clouds begin to race across the mountain tops. At first the herring boats are sitting on a summer tablecloth and again I mix and dab. But eventually I get it, I see it. There it is, that cold greenish blue of the deep current. I learn it is the Gulf Stream which sends warmer water up the coast. In a village not so far away I am told that someone once planted a seed from a palm tree, collected on some distant warm shore, yet the seed sprouted and a palm tree grew and flourished so far away from its island home. A strange story, but it is true, I later see when I go to the village and walk the gardens and see palms and a cactus quite at home, not at all lost.

***

Persevering with my art I try the mountains and the shapes and colours of the shadows, finding instead the colour of eucalypts. The purple of the hills eludes me just as the deep caste of the water. I need the tones of briar and bracken and the last of the season’s heather but all I see is Tasmania. I will not be homesick, so walk the hills and coves, resting on stone walls to stare at the hills and the water. Later, I mix and adjust, until I have them: the colours of Scotland. Yet even as I learn the colours and contours of my new home I find that my past and the places where I lived it have assembled into an angry greyscape of lies and sniggering. I feel the need to punish myself for my stupidity, to slash at myself, to lay the tracks of scars which will remind me forever how to be, for I have wasted my affection, misplaced my love, imagining attachments where there were none. That understanding has the effect of putting me in two minds. Outwardly I am an adventurous young Australian woman who has come to the village to live for a while and absorb the highland life. Beneath that surface I rail against my family and

90 myself. I am dismayed by what I see as betrayal, my anger and disappointment intensified by the triviality of the lie. How can it be that something which seemed just a joke to others can have affected me so much? My anger churns, it has peaks of hate, and I do not know myself at all but watch the Australian girl going about her new life in Ullapool, her chosen place. I listen to her conversations, her pretence, and I am pleased to see that she has learned the importance of lies. She tells stories about her past to those who ask and I mock with her as I listen. I watch eyes open with delight at tales of life in Tasmania, of the wilderness where convicts escaped and ate each other to survive, Port Arthur where the cat-o’- nine-tails sprayed mists of blood into the air, of Macquarie Harbour where hundreds of English and Irish and Scottish toiled and wept, were starved, and flogged to death. For good measure there is added the brutal saga of soldiers rounding up the aborigines driving them off cliff tops, shooting those who would escape, the miserable groups send to sit on stubby islands out in the cold cobalt sea. Of smoked heads and hands and feet parcelled up and sent to museums around the world. All of this takes the story away from the Maeve of it all. But eventually of course people do want to know and I hear her rummage again for more fine stories of a loving family who are missing the traveller. Pride turns the lie so easily on her tongue.

***

What geography and dreams there are in the faces of fishermen. The herring men. Seasons and storms, sun and rain, hope for the next catch. I start to draw the squinty eyes and eyebrows like brush brooms, jaws jutting and whiskery chins. It is a long time since I have drawn people, but I am now far away from Mr. Binocs. I sit in the pub concentrating with my paper and pencils, observing their faces and hunched shoulders and folded arms. The herring men grin at me, tipping their flat caps, pulling wry little smiles. Would you look at that now, they chorus, it’s Wullie the Stinker as sure as day. Wullie doffs his cap and buys me a half of lager asking for the picture. It’s yours, I say, and then they are clamouring. I laugh and work conscientiously to capture the images of these kind souls, to bind a bit of me into their

91 lives, to create a little piece of the Maeve of me which might survive, even after I am gone. Later I make more friends, two nearer my own age. I’m not a real tourist, you work here says Darry, short for Darragh, from further up near Lochinver, and his girlfriend, a redhead with blue eyes, Senga, she smiles at me. She has eyebrows which arch up high on her forehead as if she is startled, and perhaps she is. It’s Agnes backwards, she says when I ask if her name is Gaelic. My mother wanted to be different, she adds. Well you are that, I confirm and after a while she says eveam and we laugh and practice other names. And when we part she calls out, Guid nicht Eveam, in a thick brogue that pulls at my heart. I punish myself again with stupid ideas of how I might sound had I been born here. We sit on the sea-wall in the afternoon to watch the fishermen working on their nets. One calls to us, Och you two could be sisters. Are ye no? No, we yell back and laugh, looking at each other’s faces to see.

***

I am putting on a face for them all. My plan was to bring nothing of my past but it creeps in. A place, a date, someone’s name. It’s hard to stay away from it all, people want it now, no more the horror history stories. They are kind and curious and my silences to questions puzzle them. She’s stand-offish, a bit of a snob I hear one day as I leave a shop. It jabs like a hat pin. So I tell them some of my life and set it all in a patchwork of lies. In The Land of Maeve, everyone has been wonderful, and I am on a visit, come here to see the places my parents lived when young. I don’t mention Spain. Senga takes me to meet her mother Agnes who works in the Captain’s Bothy, a gift shop and tea room. We wander about to look for gifts, to send home, I tell Senga, for it fits with the person she is getting to know. There are key rings with seal skin and letter openers of stag horn and plaids, shortbreads, mugs, woollen mittens, caps, calendars, and everything Highland. Senga wanders about saying, would your brother like this, what about this for your mother? I tell her I can’t decide, that I’ll come back another day but my guts have begun to churn and I see my mother with her hands on her hips and my brother grinning and whistling.

***

Senga tells me I am a strange one because I like to wander in the churchyard looking at the headstones. It’s true I do like the idea of a graveyard, it’s something definite about the life that was lived. It is a puzzle how people come up with the inscriptions, each one seems just right though I never knew the people I suddenly get a picture of them bonneted or in a taffy flat cap, or someone with a pipe looking flintily into the future. Senga makes a fuss clamouring to take a picture of me beside the tombstone of a woman called Maeve, though she was forty six I see and dearly beloved and marked for a future appointment... we shall meet again. I am made to stand so the last name is obscured and just the Maeve is showing carved into the mottled stone. I think it is creepy but Senga thinks it funny. Then Darragh arrives half drunk with the bottle in a paper bag and lies on a grave with his arms crossed on his chest, red hair springing up and bristling in the breeze. How do I look dead? he yells taking another swig. I am disturbed by the sight of it and shut my eyes. Suddenly I am sitting alone in my father’s bedroom. The room is very quiet and I read through a few cards of condolence, some from nurses remarking on his cheery nature, and others from men he worked with who commented on his ability to get a job done and to lend a hand whenever it was needed... snapshots of a father I didn’t know, from the time before. I would have read them out to him if I’d had my time alone, though he be lying still and his eyes closed but he was whisked away to a fridge in a cheap suburb where cremation would take place and a cheap urn be handed back. Regret and anger surge through me and I shake it away with Get up Darragh, pretending to laugh with you have too much trouble to cause yet before you lie down. And we all set off for the pub, though it’s early in the day. We waste the afternoon talking to the fishermen and experimenting with silly drinks and eyeing off the tourists coming through. Some are from Australia and I feel stupidly superior that I work in the village. I belong. Senga is ‘old’ Ullapool. She takes me off to the museum her uncle has set up. We go at the end of the day when the tourists are leaving. Up high on a wall is a map of this part of Scotland, Ross and Cromarty and out to the Hebrides. The land is the faded yellow of the bracken and the water is the blue that conjures the image of masts

93 and white sails bucking in a stiff breeze. I stand before it and try to trace the shores but they are so ragged as to be ripped from the world by hand then thrown down again for humans to attempt their lives upon. Each corner of the map is embellished with a puffy-cheeked cherub blowing the winds of the world from pouting lips. I stand on tip toe and see the eyelids with dainty lashes and sculpted brows above those sweet soft cheeks. And there is Mr Binocs watching me as I draw his granddaughter.

***

We help her uncle tidy up and empty bins and Senga tells him I am interested in the olden days. That’s grand lassie he says, and I see his blue eyes. Senga is officious in her instructions of how to dust the glass cases and demonstrates her ‘ownership’ of it all. There are so many lovely treasures and I wander about looking at carvings and curios. In a corner stands a ship’s figurehead with oval eyes, red lips, and wispy garments carved in wood draped across the bosom. She leans forward into that same stiff breeze the cherubs were blowing from the corners of the maps. I think of the Cutty Sark, she of the short shirt cut too close and I remember my Aunt and there is my father before me in his wheel chair attempting an apology with his eyes. Senga is bustling with a key and calls to me to come see when she uses it to open a wide glass case. Inside it a ship’s log set out with beautiful handwriting and remarks about crew and victuals and ocean bearings all of which a mystery to me. Senga’s uncle stands at my side and tells me it is the log of a journey of people going to Africa, October 1890. The pages are flicked over by Senga to show me the entry for a girl of seventeen who has become ill, the ship’s surgeon has written in a beautiful hand that she has gradually become more and more debilitated and is now obliged to lie in bed a great part of the day. She had no apparent disease, but is weak with a poor appetite. Bainbridge has ordered a diet of hot milk, egg and treacle. Senga interrupts with We have to turn the page at the end of every day so it is ready for the morrow. She carefully turns the thick blue page.

I read the new entry to see if the girl has survived. Senga tuts at me and tells me it is bad luck to read it the day before. I ignore her and read on, unsettled to see there is no mention of the girl, instead a man taken ill, the doctor has ordered a purgative which worked briefly and he improved slightly, but still has an excruciating headache, he is agitated, his face sunk and dejected. I want to turn to the next page but Senga has pulled a big no face and locked the glass case. She is officious and full of her ‘belonging’ when she hands the key to her uncle Callum. It’s a grand thing to find a young woman interested in it all, he says. His brogue is rich and the word woman is delicious for I have only ever been a sister, a daughter, a friend, a niece. He asks about my Australia and I tell him a version of it, my Aussie tourist explanations. He smiles and goes along with it all fixing me with his blue eyes as I talk and ask if he has always lived here and he says oh aye for many years. He asks after my family, my father, That’s a shame he responds to my reply telling me he knew some McGills in Aberdeen years ago but not my clan as he says. Senga is dragging me away, Come back another day lassie, he says. Lassie I say to myself. And when I return another day with Senga who declares ooh a bad omen as she turns the page in the ship’s log for the new day is blurred and the page marked by water stains where the ink has run down and the circles and the degrees of latitude and longitude have run to tears it seems. I can find no further mention of the girl and ask Callum what happened who replies with, A mystery lassie, aye, possibly a tragedy. I wait for, this time tragedy, next time comedy. Tears well, memory strikes me in the pit of my stomach. I feel sorry for myself and the girl of long ago, lost perhaps on her journey to Africa. Callum distracts me with some beautiful carvings on bone, rubbing it first with his shirt. Scrimshaw I say, I’ve seen the same in Hobart I rush on to a discussion which draws him in as we talk about the life of sailors and explorers and the dreams of people who travel the world. I think of the Gulliver’s Club and the planning of journeys and the rolling out of maps.

***

Which is where it all began, I see that now, memory and my sentimental naivety, and not having learned any lessons it seems about people. He didn’t look at all like my father really, except for the voice and the accent, his hair was black, and

95 though he was muscular he wasn’t as tall as my father would have been when he could stand up, walk, days long gone. Too old, says Senga, what are you doing Maeve, he’s too old, it’s my uncle, it’s... and though she stopped I knew the words. She looked at me as if for the first time. ***

And I have tried to blame her, for it was her suggestion to go on his boat out into the loch at night and he at the helm was happy to be with the lassies and to show the Australian his life. I found the wildness of it all intoxicating, out there on the waves, plunging up and down and singing songs he taught us as I imagined the men on the Cutty Sark climbing the rigging. A clear moon and stars wild above my head and I felt a touch of Hobart and wished I could have sailed with my father out on the Derwent at night, racketing out these same sailor shanties that were disappearing into the night. Those others left behind me in Hobart had no place in all of this: they were the brown cardboard people. Dull, propped up in their lives of certainty. I wished they could be watching now and I decided that somehow they were... so I acted out my new life in colour and noise as if they would learn some lessons and how to live just by watching Maeve who now danced a bonny jig across the deck, skirling her tartan shawl about her shoulders to show her bodice pulled tight across her breasts, and shaking her hair free from her bonnet she tipped her face to the stars trailing the notes of Speed bonny boat... over the sea to Skye. And later, settling to watch the man at the helm of The Mary Hamilton who balanced on the tipping deck, bare strong feet splayed out across the boards in his herring men stance, slipping the wheel this way or that, his other brown and sailor- strong hand holding his glass of whisky and Senga and I as happy to fill his glass as our own. We all sang away into the night, and I was in my new, own life at last. When Senga rushed away to be with Darry at the pub I sat at the boat and watched as he wound the ropes and tightened stays and locked the hatch and he in his salty fishermen’s clothes with his bare feet. And the moon was looking to go down over the loch before we wandered away up the street and past the clock. He looked back once at The Mary as he called her. I like to see a woman tucked up he said and pulled me closer, the word woman still a thrill to me.

Then later we lay in my bed laughing at the miserable single blanket I had which would never cover a Sassenach’s arse as he said, or a hoor’s bare breast. He meant no harm but I saw that my mother was sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. Another night when I woke I lived a few seconds of a nightmare. I thought it was the face of my father turned toward me on the pillow. I was suddenly sickened to my guts, then the curtain shifted and there was Callum asleep. But the sickness did not go away.

***

Then truths were being told and tangled in the village. An accumulation of clutter. I could tell by the miserable little wrinkles round the mouths of the gossips as they took my money and handed a parcel. Their eyes not meeting mine but the mouths full of the story. In the pub the herring men were quieter with me and Wullie the Stinker concentrating on his darts and the board and not turning when I called to him. I felt ashamed, could not rid myself of it and never would. I thought of the heaviness on my body and arms wrapped about me and whispered love in the dark... but then, are you sure you're no' just fooling me lassie. And I don’t know how it was that it was my father’s voice and his face beside me on the pillow. Repugnant images and sounds pressed in on me. I took myself away. I was busy I said. It is all ended. I lay down alone to sleep, but nights just gone gnawed at me as my father sat in the room in his chair to watch me and think on what he had seen. I thought of a blade in my hand... to slash it across my stomach and down my legs. But I was a coward, like my father, and just rolled over to bury my face in the mattress.

***

A Kombi van full of Aussies has arrived. I pounce in ownership to show them around the village and lead an excursion further up the coast. They take photos to send home and give me some and I like the way I look standing next to the tall one and he half pissed, for we have all spent the day in the pub at Lochinver. We put our arms around each other’s shoulders and proclaim our mateship, our common ground.

Then they are leaving and it is too easy for they offer me a ride to London and we screech of our plans in the pub again, and I look about but no sign of Callum. Senga is angry with me. Darry whispers, Maeve, you’ve pissed on her patch, this is a small village, it will stink. When I tell her I am leaving, Darry bibs in with a promise to follow me, Soon, he says. I see the flash of a leer. I will a return to my high spirits which carry me on and I say goodbye to everyone who is still smiling at me, I’m happy to lie when I vow to go back to the village one day. As I am waved off some call out, Send us a picture of your kangaroo! Och aye, I will that, I call back in my new Scottish accent. But some of the others just stare. Senga is standing beside the Kombi and I say, come with us now, jump in. She doesn’t. When the van pulls away past the docks I see The Mary anchored, nose to the wind. The hatch closed.

***

In London we go carousing every night in a different pub and we play the tourist to the hilt but I miss the beauty of the Scottish village. My mother is in my head. I think of my drawings propped now on mantles and bureaus, curling at the edges, thrown sideways or to the floor when a door blows in with the gales. But I hope some are saved, in frames tacked together by Wullie the Stinker’s stained fingers and hanging now in cosy sitting rooms, perhaps even one or two in the pub. And I see the wrinkles around the mouths of the women in the shops and know that their conversations have me pinned. Oh to turn another page in the ship’s log or walk along the sea front to watch the boats trawl out with birds jinking and the water that glassy blue of early quiet morning tide when the wind is on a certain slant.

***

I disentangle myself from my travelling friends. I sketch, scribbling notes to myself on the pages about how things should look. London is full of clutter I see, people, cars, barges on the river, grey, rain, papers blowing past, swirling my mind along into the greatest metropolis in the kingdom. A bedsit near Tottenham Court

Road, a walk to work through St. Giles, Longacre, Covent Garden; the fruit and veges long gone. In the afternoon the jugglers, stilt-walkers and buskers are working the crowds. An advertising agency: Savoy Street, the lower level windows tucked in beneath Waterloo Bridge looking out on the Thames. I watch the river traffic from my desk and at lunch I wander along the Embankment near Cleopatra’s Needle. I think of a firescreen and three camels lurching over the sand-dunes, a fox. Sometimes I walk further up the Strand to Australia House to the reading room and the newspapers. As I flip through it the sound of Aussie accents brings tears to my eyes. Walking back I see a travel agency, a poster of Spain. I start to shake, a passer-by takes my arm and encourages me into a coffee shop to sit.

***

John Lennon has been shot. Someone leaped out at him from the dark, leaped out right up close with a gun. That night I keep a light burning while I sleep, yet still I see a woman lurching out of the darkness at me with a witchy hand. A letter arrives from Senga, on flimsy blue lined paper in an envelope that has the address slanting away. I read it looking for the fun, the memories but she’s still angry, I know her mouth is pulled into wrinkles as she thinks of me. She has discovered, she says, that Darry is a degenerate. Two of us it seems, though at the end she tries an eveam. Mawkish shit I say in my mother’s voice. The letter goes into my bedside drawer, though I think about her life and what she will do and the irony of Darry plunging a needle into his arm in such a beautiful village. I never find the words to reply for my mother has begun to fizz in me again, my thoughts churn in an ugly brogue. I berate myself in her voice for who I am, for my restlessness, my mistakes, my anxiety. It’s difficult to shake off the stink of failure. I hear my father’s voice, Comedy and Travel. Lying in bed at noon, the curtains drawn on a cold day, I think of Hobart, of the ocean, and Pedra Branca being crushed by green seas. Spite wins me over, and it’s not too late. I will be the tourist my family think I am. I shall go to Europe after all, not to Spain, but other charming places. I’ll write postcards to people about my adventures. Peregrination is sounding in my head and I

99 throw it into a conversation with fellow train travellers. When I laugh I sound like my mother, though more high pitched, which catches the attention of the passengers.

***

Paris is my beginning. I am still focussed and steadfast in my desire to be a tourist. I give it my all and attend to observations of my new, own life. Walking through the Gare Du Nord I note how they have obligingly laid bright yellow tape on the wooden boards where the surface is uneven. Careful, do not trip the sign says, too late, but a postcard jotting! I wander wide boulevards beneath spreading and startlingly green plane trees. It’s hot and I’m tired. Anger flares when my father appears beside me. I walk faster to lose him though I know he is shambling behind me on his white, withered feet. Unbidden, another image of brown strong feet splayed on a deck and balanced against the kick of wind and waves. Moving faster I pass endless shops with jewellery, fashionable clothes, and hats, lots of hats. Sometimes I stop to look, to catch perhaps a glimpse of a milliner who might be concentrating and smoothing out the silk and the pearls, feathers and tulle, stitching with her hooked needle, tying off the tightest of knots. Choosing a hat pin and sharpening her brogue. My father is again beside me. I step up the pace til he falls behind. Cripples are slow to move. Crossing the Pont Neuf I stand looking into the water. I swear aloud when I see my father has re-joined me, a passerby swerves away from me with an anxious glance. At Notre Dame a sudden loneliness weakens me. Look at the windows Dad, I say, the rose windows. We crane our necks to look, then moving on I find a little world inside a glass case: a construction scene in miniature: men with pulleys, piles of bricks, carpenters, window makers: lovely blocks of mellowed stone. I peer in and see the workmen’s equipment, food stalls, wheelbarrows. Tiny people busy with tasks. Lilliputians. Where’s Gulliver? I exclaim, turning to share the joke with him but I’m alone. It’s possible to buy copies of the little workmen to put on a shelf at home. But what would they be without their cathedral? Moving closer I lean in to the miniature world. I hear the hammering, the shouts of look out as a load swings overhead. I stare in and in. My head touches the glass. Stand back madame a man commands.

100

Where’s my father? Ah, there, but no, it is Callum after all. I see my mother too, sneering. The noise of the little workmen and their hammers and the shouts have made my head ache. I find a bar, tall stools and walls covered with photos of American film stars. Pop music, too loud, far too loud. I need to be inside that glass case in my overalls with the little men busily hacking the lovely stone and building something. It is a cold day and I wander around a market. I find an old soldier’s coat, quite a good size, which still has the buttons on it. Eagles they are, and a hole in the fabric that the man says is a real bullet hole. So, a coat from a German soldier: war and lies and futile dreams. I think of Stalingrad and marching through snow for days on end to meet despair in the razor cold of a ruined building by a frozen river. My feet want to follow them despite the ending of it all. My father has gone, Callum too, but my mother is forcing her brogue onto me. I’m weary and sit to rest in a booth in a cafe. A strange dream overtakes me and I am on a ship looking for someone. I’m told they are below so I step cautiously down wooden steps to a dark cabin. In the middle of the floor stands a long iron box with a curved lid. Where? I ask the person who has followed me. He nods towards the box which I see now is a coffin. I grasp the handle of the lid and lift. It is dark in the space but I see a figure lying with hands crossed on their chest, but they are not dead, their eyes have rounded at my gaze and follow me as I turn to ask, Why are they in here, they are still alive? but the man merely reaches past me and shuts the lid. At that moment the floor of the cabin pitches and a wave breaks through and sweeps us all away. I hear a voice calling from the coffin. I wake myself with my tears and sit struggling with a headache.

***

Back in London I have letters from friends who address me with Babushka, or Cherie Maeve, or dear Sweet Columbus. They are writing to a cheerful traveller. I continue the charade with my replies and lies as I’ve become used to them, so useful to keep the world away, to live it the way we want, leave out the parts we don’t need, pack in some filling, perhaps even someone else’s dreams. It doesn’t matter, people will only listen to the bits they want, will only hear what they wish and will make up the rest to suit themselves, to fit the picture they already have.

101

Some I post, others I keep to read because I have begun to believe it all myself. I like the story I am telling people, though I know it will trail behind me for years to come, possibly forever.

***

My office friends welcome me back with a weekend in the country. It will do you good. Get away for a bit, you’ve not been well. They speak encouragingly, in past tense. I’m tired but we go. A cathedral in a lovely town of yellowed stone, a choir, the voices rising to the sky, filling the Guardian Angels Chapel and look, little faces painted on so long ago! I imagine the brushes and the paints and the concentration: tiny brows and lashes and round pinkish cheeks, oh dear, perhaps too round, too pink? Where did all my drawings of babies disappear to? I walk on. I don’t want to think of babies. Still the people sing and still I think of the little painted angel faces and the pink, too pink cheeks. I hear my mother’s voice: tarts she declares Bizums, I can tell them a mile off, they all have a look about them, toe-rags, hoors. I look for a window to check my reflection, to look at my shape, its roundness.

***

London: time passes, rushes. One day in Piccadilly Circus on the steps by Eros, there shockingly, Darry from Ullapool, sitting, staring. I see the scabs and remember Senga’s words. I know why he is here, beneath Eros. Still handsome in that dissolute way that probably attracted her, until that day she saw him shoving a needle into his arm and falling back on the couch with his legs splayed and his fingers twitching. Darry, it’s me Maeve. He greets me. His speech is tired but there is enough of the brogue to whirl me back.

***

102

I can feel the wind off the loch and see the white cottages and fishing boats. It is again the day Senga and I got him to row us out to the middle of the loch where the big herring boats can swamp a dinghy. Deep water. I liked the feeling of being in the colour: it was like Hobart. I lay back in the boat and looked at the sky to see if it was different from Tassie. I remember wondering if a line through the earth would connect. For a moment I wanted to be there. You can do it Darry, I yelled, you’re a big braw Scotsman like my Dad. He would have rowed me anywhere! So I was still fooling myself. Not anymore. I focus on him now in front of me, with London buses whirling by and tourists shaping up for photographs, and what I see now are drug dealers, pimps, whores. I ask if he knows that Senga got married, and went to live in Inverness. He just shrugs, his eyes glazing.

***

And now, when I have time alone I go, usually on cold Sundays, to galleries, often the National. I could find my way blind-fold, clumping up out of the underground, puffed from the stairs, past the lions, the fountains, up the steps into warmth, that strangely welcoming stale warmth of bodies, damp woollen coats, soggy boots, and well sat-in trousers and skirts. The rooms are comforting. Leather- covered benches, honey-coloured wooden floors, the ticking of the radiators beneath the frosted windows. Men who look like railway station attendants walk past, their rubber-soled shoes squeak and wheeze. I think of old lungs trying to breathe. My father’s face is before me. A Hopper Exhibition: I wish I could have sat to watch him paint, all those white weatherboard houses and sea-scapes and grass. That haunting one of the woman, her hand up shading her eyes and staring out from the windowed weatherboarded house towards the ocean. There’s a man beside her, though barely discernible, her husband, her father? He’s also looking out of the window... a collie dog, all together in the world but still separate. Hopper has painted the picture as if the light is coming from two different directions. I like the effect, it jangles the eye and makes me look more closely and wonder at its meaning. Wandering the rooms I note huge gilt frames, pictures of pale fleshy bodies, names that announce Italian

103

Gothic, or Duccio. Virgin and Child with Saints. I move on, the mawkish goodness of the faces annoys me, my mother is in my ear, glaekit, she says, gormless, hoor. I trawl room after room of paintings of people who sit on velvet chairs and lie on puffy beds and eat grapes or play harps or gaze up at a dove or reach out to touch a robe. Gormless I say. Foppa’s The Adoration of the King. Signorelli's Circumcision, how disturbing the emphasis on blood and knives and flesh. Room seven, Venetian Sixteenth Century. And then, Coques' Woman With a Child, ah cherubic babies. Dali’s Time stretched and moulded over the hours, the nights, Hieronymus Bosch and hunched figures scuttling over cold and windy streets into my head to make a noise.

***

One Sunday there is a special exhibit, a selection of paintings from Spain. I can’t help myself. There the faces of Goya’s huddled lines, The Third of May, eyes rounded expectantly, waiting for the click, staring at the muzzle of the gun pointed at them. What use their upheld palms, standing there waiting for the shot? The sad figures in Yard with Lunatics, locked up and lonely, just waiting for the end. The long fetch, and I also in its path. I am disturbed by a painting called Las Meninas. Though I read that the title means the Maids of Honour the picture seems more about the adults standing about watching each other, through mirrors or from positions slightly out of view. The viewer faces several intense gazes. A dog, a dwarf attendant upon a young blonde- haired girl, people watching. Though the painting is well composed I find it unsettling. There is a coldness and a separateness between all the subjects. I count eleven people which includes the artist at his easel who is also looking at me as I look. Faces stare out of a mirror. A dark-clad man in the background is walking up steps, or is he walking down, into the room? He is also looking at me. Later on the tube ride home I sit staring at my reflection in the glass opposite, the passengers in the seats opposite stare back at their reflections behind me, impassive faces all. None of us catches the gaze of another. Again a sense of the separateness of us all wells up in me and I am suddenly full of grief and loneliness. I get off at the next stop though it is too soon. I walk the rest of the way home: part of the legion of London people; oblivious and strange to other lives. I force myself to

104 think of running in an open space, the energy of feet drumming on the hard sand of a shore line, the sound drowning out words in my head. I want the ocean.

***

A friend (though I shrug them away, they stick) suggests some counselling to help me sort through things. Those phrases seem to slip so lightly on the lips of the concerned. It is a step too far for me, but they persist and finally I give in, more from curiosity I tell them, it can’t hurt they chime, give you some direction. So one day I’d raced from the Tube across Tottenham Court Road, stopping as always to look in the window of Heale's, that Habitat stuff, chairs, sofa, and lamps. I saw myself on the couch, smelling the leather, sprawling back on it, the Braille of its stitching telling a story like a brass screen with camels plodding, wind whipping and stinging. To the Doc, up the stairs, clanking on my knee-high lavender leather boots and into the waiting room where I affect calm by staring at a wall calendar, July, a cricket team in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. So charming, chocolate-box England, everyone frozen in time on that glorious blue-sky day. I peer in at it; the people in the deckchairs are half asleep. I think of two summers ago, my first in London after Scotland. I would like to be in one of those deck-chairs, in a time before all of this. I resist my counselling of course, and can’t even look in the Doc man’s eyes, while he asks me... so earnestly, questions which would make most people shriek with laughter. All that sort of Kahlil Gibran stuff. You are the tree and the vine that clings is your spirit trying to climb to the clouds. I am stubborn and tell stupid stories and lies. It is fun I think, all on the good old National Health Service. Each time I go to see him, and enter the inner sanctum I check to see what his arrangement for the week is. He makes a show of his possessions, his special things, and I see there is pathology in his theatre of objects, his story. Sometimes he has a couple of antique backgammon sets arranged artfully on his desk, as if men in subdued hues of clothing will sit and pull their beards and calculate a victory. Other times he will have set out two or three figurines taking it all just a little further by whimsically having them face each other. Another day he had snowdomes. I wanted to leave.

105

The day I finally cried for him was one of those wilting wet London days, just after those young Royals, he with his silly grin and her with a mop top fringe had trundled through the city after their wedding and most of London seemed to be celebrating. The Doc started again with his Persian Ponderings, you are the ocean, and you pound upon a dismal shore. But eventually he hits a nerve. Unloved he says. You are as one unloved. He was about to lurch into more of his Ali Baba wisdom when I just began to cry, for real, and I called him a bastard which surprised him, as he was by the welter of tears. He called it my break through, and delivered himself pats on back but, really I had already decided, and as usual kept it to myself, that I wanted out of the Northern Hemisphere, it was done, that I would go back to Australia, away from London, but not to Tasmania, to Sydney. And what opened that door of tears? Well that day he’d moved on, there was no couch. Hit the pillow he yelled, punch it, it’s everyone you don’t want in your life. Go back home, go back and make it yours. He was very loud. Say it, make it yours. Make it mine, I yelled, hoping the waiting room was empty. Let go of the past. Let go of mistakes. Go home. Take it back and make it yours. Home is only a town. No one does this to you, you do it to yourself. The lost child is you and you can make it all right. And that was when the silliness of the pillow and swiping at something with it suddenly morphed into real anger and real tears. I surprised myself.

***

I like that poem by the Russian... Yevtushenko, called Telling Lies to The Young is Wrong. I’ll go with that, it’s a poem for mothers. I think of mine, she of the dark eyes, cheekbones, black hair, her figure the shape of men’s nightie night dreams. I will go back, not all the way, but to Sydney. I shall miss some of the life here, some, because the rest of it is turning me to stone. And so I do it, pass it over, my new, own life, on to other dreamers, as with the dreams of Scotland and Spain.

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***

In my bed-sit I haul back the curtains to look out on another day. The rain has stopped falling on the jagged slates and I throw myself into sorting and packing up. Into the bin with my Aunt’s map, the dots of where my rellies might be. Why did I keep that I wonder when I threw away their names and addresses? I was already tired of maps when she gave it to me. I am getting rid of junk, no, too harsh a word, and not detritus, also too harsh, encumbrances perhaps? I throw out letters and postcards and photographs, but keep back a few, and looking, get caught up in the faces, are they liars those people who toss their heads and laugh and sitting, cross their legs confidently, looking about the room for a familiar face or one which they know they can dazzle with their charm. Are their smiles real, the truth? Have they truly found their own landscape, or are they hiding from memory and places. But I don’t want answers to any of my own questions, for I am now one of them. I have no use for the truth.

***

It’s a crisp day. The Barley Mow for lunch, a bus ride to Chiswick with trees in full autumn colour. A magical last walk down Strand on the Green, a half of lager in the City Barge. I drink it at a table outside, to watch the river, the mighty Thames where ducks are watching me. The swans go up and down. I sit for so long that the tide goes out and the oozy black mud is exposed to the faltering sunlight. The swans are not deterred, they waddle about and fossick arching their necks and fixing those of us close to the bank with their beady eyes, waiting for the main chance. I heard that a while ago a man leapt off the railway bridge, trying to finish it all, he didn’t realise how shallow the river was at that time of day. He broke his back but didn’t die, just lay in the mud until the ambos squelched out with a stretcher to collect him. Although I am often drawn to his idea, indeed have measured and assessed its boundary and shape, that high wide leap, the arc into oblivion, I would have advised him just to rest here, in this seat where life looks quite manageable. The sun seems to dim as I sit and there I am again driving across the bridge in Hobart which collapsed in part one day, its supporting struts just cleaved away by an absent minded skipper. I wondered for the hundredth time what it must have felt like

107 when suddenly there was no road ahead, when all at once the end had arrived. There may have been some vague hope beating in a heart that the car would float, that the seat belt would magically unbuckle, that the blue Derwent would lift them up and deposit them perhaps on a quiet corner of Old Beach, alive and breathing in the musky smell of the reeds. There would have been others, the realists, who knew that the game was up, their guts clenching, their bowels shrivelling, bladder spurting, before the high wide arc into oblivion and down into the suffocating depths, their ears filled with the bubbling of rushing water. I draw myself back from the images for they can be absorbing, and I turn again to watch the people, so many people, and yet there is the separateness of us all. Was it the cold-steel certainty of a solitary future that caused the fellow to leap that day? Perhaps, then why did no one tell him before, prepare him for the realization that we are all alone, wherever we are. True, there is the chumminess of friendship, the solidarity of colleagues, the sticky web of family: but they are all contrivances, and if not maintained, if attention is not paid, forelocks not tugged, obeisance proclaimed, knees scraped at the altar of Christmas and Birthdays, then they are nothing but dew on a lawn. On the towpath before me pass the elderly making for home in fading light, before the chill of life sets in. Businessmen with furled umbrellas stride through rehearsing their conversations for the morrow’s deal, and skeltering children escaping school, rushing past with notice-me noises. There are mothers going back and forth on the towpath pushing strollers... and a baby staring ahead, oblivious of its journey.

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HOBART – TWENTY YEARS LATER

109

6. THE TERRITORY OF TRUTH

Eoin I kept the letter to Maeve short. The doctor can’t say how long Mum’s got, could be weeks or even months. I didn’t want to phone, it seemed too abrupt and I know she’s been entrenched in her Sydney life, near on twenty years now, so may not want to make the trip back for such news unless it’s more certain. My wife checked the wording so there was no tone of ‘blame’ in it, I don’t want to stir her up. Most people would think a daughter would want to be taking care of her mother, but not Maeve, she’s got off lightly with it all, taking off all those years ago on her little jaunt to the other side of the world and then coming back to Australia but not to Hobart, living it up in Sydney, well it all fell to me, the looking after Mum, all that. The jobs round the house, the garden, Christmas lunches and birthdays and no sign of Maeve. All down to me it was and me with my own family to be looking out for. But I did it and no complaint really, just to myself or my wife. Doing my duty the wife said but I have to say Mum can be annoying with her grating voice and her complaining and harking back all through the years to things that happened before I was born, and then to various events when I was a kid. I almost feel sorry for what my father endured. So it’s not been easy. I’m fortunate my wife always sees the best in people because she’s kept the peace and maintained some communication, so I wrote to Maeve, we’ll see what she does, let her make her own decision of whether she comes back. I say whether because I’m not convinced Maeve cares about Mum. If she does come back I’ll be interested to see what goes on between the two of them. I know there’s unfinished business there. People always expect mother and daughter to have a bond as they say and to be close and get along, but not those two. I’m not sure what was behind it all, what was the truth of some of the things I heard. I remember once Maeve at a barbecue we were at, or some such social event - unusual for us. Maeve was talking to a group of people, and I’m not sure how the topic came up but Maeve was saying that not all mothers were wonderful and loving. When pressed by someone to explain she said, Well my own mother for instance, doesn’t like me, don’t think she ever did. She has a knack for cruelty. The woman who’d asked the question looked shocked as if some social no-no had been committed, as if it

110 was a sin to paint your mother in less than a glowing light. Of course it was another example of Maeve’s startling honesty, and it was true about Mum. Maeve had let the word knack hang in the air a bit then gave the group, ignoring me, a steely look, shrugged, and wandered off. I’m used to Maeve’s ways but I know other people can be taken aback. As she strolled away there was a little hiatus in the chatter as if people were assessing what kind of person Maeve was, as if it was probably her own fault if her mother didn’t like her. As usual I thought to myself that Maeve should have kept her mouth shut. Mum’s still in the house we all lived in but I’ve moved her downstairs for convenience. She’s in what used to be my father’s room. She’s not said what she thinks about it, too sick probably, past caring. The room had been shut up for years, doubt if the door had been opened, just to throw junk in it looked like. I did a job on it, clearing, changing the furniture, giving the walls a coat of paint. My wife made new curtains. When I was pulling out the old wardrobe I found my father’s Gladstone bag. I’d always liked the look of it but hadn’t seen it after he died. I thought my mother must have got rid of it but she missed it as did Maeve and it has sat there in the dust atop the wardrobe all those years. It was filthy but when I opened it a smell caught me that set me back. It was like Dr. Pat tobacco, though my father had never really smoked, I remember just a cigar that the fellow next door gave him once on his birthday. So maybe it was the smell of leather, I’m not sure and I couldn’t place it but I have to say, I felt a pang of something, like regret or melancholy which was stupid as I’d never really had much time for my father and rummaging around and looking at his things was a closeness with him I’d never had. I recognised that, it was an awareness of distance, of a memory coming back to me from a place so long ago that I could hardly capture it. It was something of the man that I never really knew, and I think suddenly a part of me wanted a chance at it. But, all too late, and an annoying little shiver of jealousy ran through me when I all of a sudden got a picture in my head of him sitting with Maeve in the kitchen poring over that map of his and them chatting and laughing and me passing by up the corridor not wanting to look in or to speak. I’d like to have found one of his little note books but I think my mother got rid of them all or else Maeve has them. There was a battered Oxo cube tin, inside it a pair of cufflinks. He never wore cufflinks because his hands were so damaged, the nerves

111 or something, that he could hardly do up his buttons with them, so the cufflinks were a relic from a life I never saw him live. Also, tucked down in the bag, his pay book from the South Australian Railways, left over from his time out there on the Nullarbor. I’d picked up along the way that had been a bad time for him but of course I was only a baby when he was away so whatever I knew of it was just Mum’s version I suppose, because I never really talked to him. When he came back to the house to live, Maeve had to do the work of washing him and helping him dress and change his bed when he shat it. A part of me knew it wasn’t right for a kid like her to have to do it but there was no way I could and Mum, well, a long story that one. So I could never meet his eyes really knowing what Maeve had to do and he, I remember never really looked me in the eye. There was a conversation about the cruelties of life that I see now, with the advantage of time, that we could never have, so it all just lay there between us, a swamp of stuff we would never ever get through. There was no how to guide for the situation we were in, no way of knowing how to get around it all and of course our little family so small with no outsiders we just continually rolled around in the stink of it all. The times my father and I were together, just the two of us, were so few that the thought of starting a conversation that could go on and on round unexpected corners was out of the question. I didn’t want to start anything that might never be finished. We sat once in his room the time when the bush fires were raging, each day burning nearer, and nobody knew what the outcome would be though we knew that it would be difficult if we had to get out quickly and my father in his chair. I don’t know why I went in to sit with him that night. It wasn’t too long after he had come to live with us, I was still at high school so really just a bit of a kid and shy of him, avoiding him in the rooms or trying to pass him in the hallway, watching him through a crack in the door heaving himself in and out of his chair and grunting as he tried to reach things. It was like having some broken-boned beast in the house but not knowing how to approach to help, and quietly deciding it might be easier to pretend not to have even noticed. But that night with the fires getting closer and lots of people packing up and leaving their houses I saw him there at the window looking out, kind of hunched in his wheelchair and so I just went in and sat. He’d given me a nod and one of his closed

112 mouth smiles he did which always looked as if he was clamming up a bundle of words that wanted to spill out. Like he had so much to say but knew he couldn’t because he had no right. So, we didn’t talk too much just listened to the radio bulletins of what the fireys were doing and where the next outbreak was, listening to the reports of people losing their farms and homes and making for safety in their cars. It was a bit like listening to the end of the world, and I saw, really for the first time, that we had a strange kind of closeness, that we were, despite everything, sort of a family and should be looking out for one another, though how to do that bit was beyond me. And years later when the bridge went down, when the ship knocked out the piers, and whole sections of it and cars just spilled over into the water, I went in and sat with him then as well. Mum was out at the pictures and Maeve was crying at the thought of the people trapped in their cars the ones who had drowned when they went over the edge, just sort of drove into oblivion. A couple of the neighbours came in to talk to Dad about it and we all sat on the verandah watching the lights on the harbour as they searched for bodies. The Navy had sent a team of frogmen or scuba divers and they were pulling the bodies out of the cars. It was morbid to watch the activity but no one could help themselves and Maeve was wittering on, saying they’re in the dark, the poor people, lost in the dark. I told her to shut up as they were already dead, drowned, and she took off upstairs to her room nearly taking the door off its hinges when she slammed it. Dad had given me a look when I shouted at her but as always did not buy into it, he always kept his place, or seemed to know his place which was just on the edge of us, and no way ever to move further in. I’m not a melancholy type if that is the right word but every now and then things come back to me, mistakes that were made that can’t be put right. When memories are stirred up, like when I came across the Gladstone bag, and was suddenly full of a kind of sorrow, about a lot of things, too many really to say. I kept the bag and all its little bits, put it away. I knew I’d think about things when I had time for it stirred up a lot of memories and some of them were hauling me back to times past like the night the bridge came down and my father and I sat on there when the neighbours left and Maeve in bed, Mum not home and watched the lights on the river, knowing that people were sitting in their cars at the bottom of the river with their clothes and their wallets and shoes and handbags and staring eyes not to ever see anything again in life and all the grief it was going to bring. When I was older I realised he was probably sitting there thinking about the end of life and how it comes to us, the

113 inevitability of it, the helplessness that he lived with every day, like those people in their cars just bowling right off the edge of the broken bridge and down into darkness, helpless in it all, screaming out to nothing. I stayed with him for quite a while, mostly in silence or saying the search lights are bright, or looks like they’ve got a crane on that barge now, and somewhere in the middle of all that dark and tragedy I had the picture of my father lying on the road that night when he was run down, when I looked over the fence and saw him there, sprawled across the white line, his body totally still, his face turned in my direction, though I doubt he could see me, but, I remember this as clear as ever, his eyes were opening really wide, rolling and sort of staring, then closing as if he wanted it to be a bad dream and if he shut his eyes then opened them the view would be different, the place he had found himself in would fade and all would be well. It was just a quick little window I had before people moved and blocked my view and all I could see then were his feet with one shoe missing and his sock slipped down and his bare white heel just resting there on the black road. The night the bridge fell, and after the neighbours had left, Mum came home and gave me one of her looks so I just took myself off up to my room. I heard her in hers but I knew that my father was still out there on the verandah. I felt a bit emotional. It gave rise to a guilt I’ve never felt before. Well, not so much even guilt just a sadness for lost opportunity and wishing I had known the story, about why he had left us. I could see what it had done to my mother, I’d had to live it too, as had Maeve, she’d had it harder than I did, I’ve got to say that. The memory of those days and the way Maeve took off after a dream of Dad in Scotland... well, I wondered again how Maeve would play it out when she came back and sat herself down beside Mum’s bed for what could be one of the last times.

***

After I posted off the letter to Maeve I drove up to the lookout at Mt. Nelson, there was too much cloud at the top of Wellington and I knew I wouldn’t be able to see as far. I’ve always liked that spot on Nelson, with the bush stretching away down its steepness to Sandy Bay. The view brilliant, and never too many people, it’s something about looking out at that expanse of world from such a height that somehow pulls emotion out of its little hidden places and into the day. It is a place that

114 makes you wonder at all the beauty of the world but it’s also a place, a view, should I say that can drag your emotions to the point of tears if you were so inclined. I’m not, but I can imagine that on a day when someone was feeling low and they looked out at the magical blue view of sky and water and beautifully moulded hills... then if the tears were there, they would come and that person might wonder why personal relationships could not sit so well in harmony as the world and all its parts do. The pale blue of the hills way down at Bruny blend so well with the curves of South Arm and then rise and link and swing around to become the sweep of Tranmere then on, up to the jutting Bluff at Bellerive which itself takes the eye around a corner as it were to the upper reaches of the Derwent. I can see what Maeve was always trying to do with her art. There must be a comfort there to concentrate on all that nature got just right: concentrating on the lines and shapes and colours of that harmony must surely take the mind away from the ugliness of human relationships.

Maeve Twenty years in Sydney and settled I thought at last, but then, news came to me from my brother. He is still in Hobart. Our mother is ill. It did give me a jolt. I always imagined her sitting up in that room stitching and smoothing beautiful fabrics and making lovely things for people to wear, not lying in a bed, weak and pale as he describes. It suits me to go back now, her illness is no inconvenience to me. I won’t need to play the role of the martyr returning from Sydney to a sick mother because people will invent that for themselves as they do. I shall just smile and wait it all out. Hobart. The time is right. I may not stay there, but I may. Who can say what will happen. I’m ready for a change. And I have questions to ask her. I don’t rush to see her straight away: Jet-lag I tell my brother on the phone. A laughable lie, all the more delicious because it is so obvious. I take time to wander about Hobart, exploring to see how much it’s changed but finally I go to the house which is as quiet as ever, and a bit weird because she’s now in what had been my father’s room, for ease of access to doctors and nurses and those who had been hovering for the past six months. When I see her lying there where his bed was, emotion rushes to the surface. Some friends of hers are there and they take it as sadness at her condition. One fails an

115 attempt to hug me. I mutter a fuck off to myself and I don’t cry, nor do I stoop to kiss, not that, ever. I sit quietly and ponder the taking of her hand, the audience would like that... but I don’t. Their talk burbles back and forth. And the phrase her come-uppance keeps springing into my head, You’ve made your bed now lie in it. When we talk, later that day and in ensuing visits, sometimes with my brother as the watch keeper, I make sure not to mention Spain. Not yet. For it still eats at me, what was all her talk of Spain for? Was it really just a joke, just lies. I’m curious more than ever because I now relish the telling of my own lies. I’d like to know about hers, a shared experience, the lying, it’s a bit like cancer patients discussing their symptoms and their treatment but I’m not ready to ask yet and my mother looks at me and gives me nothing, no clue about what she’s thinking really and I wonder what they were for, where did those lies come from, what place?

***

When I first went to Sydney from England I eventually took a few quick trips to Tassie. Guilt on my part perhaps, but they asked very few questions about me of my travels. So, out of devilment, or spite, I dished up a picture of a vibrant, free-wheeling individual travelling Europe, garnering sophistication and insight as she went. I described the landscapes of Europe and England and Scotland, the architecture of towns, the essence of nature in field and forest. I gave them the geography of tourism. No maps of memory were unrolled, no trawling the archives of dreams, certainly no use of broad brush strokes to demonstrate the shape of disappointment. No need for them to see the smudged, charcoal sketches in my head. They saw a palette of Northern Hemisphere spring-time colours: the new-leaf green of trees in spring, crocus, daffodils, birdsong, all the sounds and colours of happy times. I rounded out those shapes, gave them body and definition, fore-grounded individuals and drew them as solid, inspirational, and bonded to me. Not all the images were contrivances; I kept the first happiness of life in the Scottish village to myself, just as I did the other.

***

So my mother is ill and I decide to give Tassie another try, while waiting. And I do settle back into a life in Hobart: it may be temporary but surprisingly there is

116 some anticipation in me about how I can make it all work, rather like composing a painting and leaving things out and adjusting the composition, deciding on the relationship of objects. My life evolves into a job, a working life, graphic design, advertising. At the interview the man looks through my folio of past work, then, over his glasses. Perfect, he says, we want tourist guides, concentrate on the scenery, on nature, what people want to see, build up the picture for them, invite them as it were. Get them to walk with you. I like these ones you’ve done of The Rocks tourist precinct in Sydney, something like that for Salamanca would work. Of course he wants to lure them with the historical, lure them back to the usual Tasmanian trauma of chains and corpses, of floggings which paint the world red in a misty spray littered with tweaks of flesh, and those cannibal convicts lost in the bush, defeated and hungry. Ah, I can almost smell the thigh bone cooking on the little fire, settled down in the tussocky grass, an unruly line of smoke eddying, fat beginning to drip and encouraging the coals: charcoal grey, flame orange, bursting sizzling flesh. I wonder if my mother will be buried or cremated. I choose my view and my position and begin the task, leaning back against the sandstone blocks looking out to where Darwin, among others, made their way up the river. I hear the convicts calling: I see the Prussian Blue of dark waves chopping against the carvel planks and oars grinding in rowlocks, I see their desperation. There they are pulling across the harbour, their shoulders rigid in the cold, the sinews beneath pulling gristle from bone, gristle from bone. The wind whips wet and salt into the faces already crusted with what they always suspected, expected even, lowly thoughts and lowly lives, too hard to lift up, look up. For this I’ll have to put my colours away. It’s Indian ink, and my pen which I use to dig into the paper pulling shapes into this day but it does me no good... I am blinded by sepia tones, blanched white of bone, shadows, grey, crimson slashes on bruised flesh. A mountain, water... white tips on waves, cold, sinews, gristle and bone breaking loose from the husks of men.

***

Hobart has changed into a tourist town. I enjoy the bustle of it all: antique shops, art galleries, bars, restaurants. I got used to all that bustle in Sydney, Darling

117

Harbour, Manly, The Quay. There’s a similarity, I think it is the light on the water, the gulls, and here too the gulls are scrapping over chips thrown to them by the tourists. The other week down on Bruny Island I watched as they wheeled back and forth over the white sand, gliding in pearl-grey streaks. Now it’s hump-backed indignation. Querulous screeching, and yelps of protest as they scrum for scraps. They’ve forgotten the sea, the heavenly smell of distance, the spreading horizon, the blue salt garden where they dug for fish. I saw Eoin the other day, watching me but I kept my head down at my easel, so much easier to pretend. Leave him out, give him nothing. I just turned my head away and concentrated on my work. There is a strange comfort in this place, sitting anonymous and silent in the middle of it all. My brother doesn’t really want to go travelling, has never really wanted to. Many people don’t, they’re happy to sit in the same chair in their office for twenty years or more. Dusty desk and files and the same bits on their pin-up board for years and years, the same objects on the shelves, never moved, books never opened. They talk about places but they never go. I went to Eoin’s office once in the Fisheries Department. He seemed quite happy and full of himself joking with his workmates and introducing me as The Happy Wanderer. I picked up on his sarcasm but they didn’t of course. It just made me feel sad for him and re-enforced to me that he is peripheral in my life, like a telephone pole in a picture which I choose to leave out.

Eoin It’s strange to know Maeve’s here living in Hobart after so long, even though she’s just filling in time til Mum dies, which sets me wondering all over again, whether she cares or is just interested in getting something from the will when the house is sold. Though that’s not really who Maeve is I have to say, but then do I really know who she is? Will she stay on when Mum dies? I might have to get used to it but at the moment it’s a jolt to see Maeve out and about. The other day I was driving past on my way home and took a turn down the Franklin Wharf. There was a clipper ship in so I parked and went for a wander. The Aurora was also docked and I watched the activity of getting it ready for the next trip to the Antarctic. Its bulk is enormous especially next to the ferries.

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It was on my way back to the car when I saw her, right over near the Elizabeth Street pier but I knew it was her with her little stool and her easel, drawing away. I thought to go and speak to her but didn’t. Too hard. There’s never been a connection really. I was never much interested in her when we were little and when she went travelling I didn’t really care, certainly not about what she was doing, or her dopey postcards. They always had strange little cryptic comments on them, like she was having a go at someone, not the sort of usual things tourists write. There didn’t seem to be any description of where she was, as if she expected the picture to tell the story and her comments couldn’t add anything to it. And she was probably right when I think about it. She spent all those years in Sydney after London and only visited here a few times. Mind you I didn’t go to see her either. I’m not a tourist myself, got no desire. I love Hobart, best place in Australia. My wife, who always sees the good in people, wrote to Maeve in Sydney every now and then, she’s big on family but it’s never been the way with us Maeve and I. I tried to explain to my wife, Louise, how it all started, just the normal brother sister stuff. Fighting, teasing, but then let’s face it, Maeve just went weird. Dad’s accident. Changed everything it did. I told my wife the story as best I could.

***

It was a Friday night, when I was eleven, Maeve and I were in the kitchen doing the dishes. Someone knocked at the front door and Mum went to answer it. When she came back her face was red. I knew that look. Bad mood look. So I was hoping Maeve would drop a dish, and I was drying really fast, but not properly, just so to keep ahead of her. I was nagging and telling her she wasn’t keeping up and so she was hurrying. It was typical brother stuff: stirring the little sister. Everyone does it. I wanted her to break something, I used to love it when she copped it. Talk about sibling rivalry! Then from the street, a loud noise, a car squealing, a sort of bang, a thud, Eoin, Mum said that’s your father, I wasn’t sure what she meant, she ignored Maeve who, I’m remembering, just stood there looking dumb. Mum took off her apron and raced out the door. I went out the back way, up the lane. Maeve was running along behind me. I got a foothold on the fence and pulled myself up to see people standing about in the street staring, and there was Dad’s lunch box in the middle of the road, further on

119 one of his shoes. Mum was standing with some other people looking down at him. Someone had bored down the hill in a car and smashed right into him. He wasn’t moving and I thought he was dead at first but then I saw his eyes were rolling around in his head like he was looking for a way out, or trying to wake up from a nightmare. Maeve was pulling on my jumper to climb up, but I was at that stage of finding her a total pain in the arse so I just gave her a good shove back down. I don’t think she saw anything at all, which could have been a good thing. It’s strange but each time I remember that night, there are different little details I can see, which might not be what I remembered from the time before. I remember Mum’s hair had come loose from her combs as she was running and though I probably didn’t register it back then when I was a kid, I think of it now, and imagine she looked like a girl again with its black shiny mass falling down her back. And there my father crumpled on the ground, never to get up on his feet again, and my mother looking young and beautiful and ripe for life.

***

Images and truth, the mystery of memory, what we remember and what we forget. Once at the Hobart Show which Mum took us to every year, Maeve and I went into the Hall of Mirrors. Some of them made us look tall and skinny, others short and fat. Some stretched our heads out like beans and made our feet look like turnips. All the kids laughed and pointed at themselves and nudged their friends and bellowed again in hysterics at the images. At one particular mirror we stood in front of, I noticed Maeve’s face, and the sad expression on it. It was a mirror that showed us as ripples on a sea. It had kind of curves in it so only parts of us showed, like a reflection in the water when the wind is moving across. It had the effect of cutting us into slices as if there were whole swathes of our bodies that had been rubbed out. I just thought it was weird but Maeve stood looking so forlorn. I see her face now, looking at the disjointed parts of herself in the glass. I have no idea what she was thinking and I dragged her away and off to the next one, but obviously that look on her face has stayed with me. I see now that there was a sadness in her, maybe a concern about life that was already beginning to well up. If I was a sentimental sort I would say I now feel sorry for that kid staring at her strange twisted image. She looked lonely. I remember her thick golden plaits falling down each side of her face like ropes.

120

She was the one who ended up visiting Dad in the hospital, taking his stuff and bringing it back for washing, then, three years later, when he came home to live, she had to look after him. And I’m glad it was her. I just never could relate to him. Coming to visit us before his accident and asking questions about our lives, then those years of him in that wheelchair. I heard him bawling once in his room when he thought no one could hear. Suck it up I thought to myself. You pissed off and left us when we were kids. I regret the way I behaved towards Maeve but I was a kid too and it was just easier to keep out of it all, just to watch the way Maeve got attached to Dad. I think of her in his room with the basin and the washcloth and it makes me cringe. One day years later she told me about the scars on Dad’s body from his accident and the operations he had. She rambled on about white pathways and tracery and stitches cobbling memory and went on about how his scars were a landscape of despair. I was trapped in the car with her so I just had to tell her to shut up, that I didn’t want to know; that she was sick in the head talking about it. And once she showed me a drawing of a jar with a piece of bone in it. She’d scrawled on the bottom of the drawing, geology of the body. It didn’t seem normal to me. Still doesn’t, though I know I’ve changed a bit towards her. Well, getting married does that, expands your ideas about people, about life, about what’s important. My wife’s got me involved with the Greens. We spent a lot of time way back protesting about the dam, it brought us together, gave us a bit of focus. Maeve’s never married. I don’t think she’s interested in kids, and no boyfriends that I know of, but who knows what she was doing in Sydney for all those years, and in London before that. Could have been married and divorced three times over for all we know.

***

I was a bit of a bastard to Maeve when Dad died. We took his ashes up to the top of Mount Wellington: Mum didn’t want the expense of a funeral and I didn’t much care either way. Maeve wandered around taking her time with this urn of ashes looking for just the right spot, god knows where that was. I was getting bloody impatient and she kept bawling. Finally she knelt down and put them in between a

121 couple of big boulders. I had to haul her away or we would have been up there all night. Then, on our way down in the car from the top she started singing that dirge Dad liked, The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen, mean home sweet home to me. I told her to shut the fuck up.

Maeve I painted this view of Hobart once for my Dad, he’d given me money for my birthday, for paints and he wanted a picture. I took it to him in hospital, that terrible ward of crippled men, wheeling up and down, going nowhere. What would I give to see him now, I would have questions, and I would persevere with them. I have dreams about him in which he is walking. I never dream about my mother: that poor woman, sad, and crippled in a different way. I go to see her every now and then. I can’t get over the fact she’s in bed in my Dad’s old room. I would love to ask her what she thinks of it but it would be like goading her and I’m not quite strong enough for that. My fingers roll the fat, sable brush, it’s so soft. Concentrate Maeve! I shouldn’t be trying this today, too many tourists, people who stoop to watch over my shoulder. I want to say go away, but I smile and nod when they comment, That’s nice dear, will you put a tree or two in it do you think? Then they want to take a photo of me making a picture, a memory for them. I’m getting better at politely ignoring. But sometimes I do snarl, depends on the day. I can imagine their conversations when they get back to West Godforsaken. Oh yes this one’s of that artist we saw in Hobart, down at the Salamanca Markets. She didn’t say much but of course she was busy with her pencils, I thought what she was drawing was rather stark: I doubt she would have sold it. Poor thing. They crane to look but I keep on. I’ve learning to ignore people.

Eoin I told my wife about seeing Maeve, she thought I should have stopped to speak, as she does but it’s too hard. And really, let’s face it I’m past forty five and Maeve has gone forty so it’s a bit late to get the family thing happening.

122

Maeve’s been to see Mum a few times and when I was there I saw her sitting and she’s got a look on her face that gave me the creeps. Sort of unsympathetic, as if she’s not really come to make Mum feel better but instead to sit and watch, just watch. It’s as if she’s enjoying it, and I keep waiting for her to break out a bit and try to sort whatever went wrong between the two of them way back but I’m not sure it’s going to happen, Mum is looking more ga-ga every day.

Maeve Sunday, the Rorke’s Drifte of the week: survived the five days but now the weekend and the rotting carcases, of jobs not done and things too hard. Time was I’d wrangle my lipstick and hair and troop off with mates to a bar. Now I’m content to sit and paint myself the day away, a thermos to keep me going. If I were a different person I would probably go to visit my mother today, but I’m not. I’m bored with her illness, it goes on and on, if it were me I would find some way out of all that mouldering and moaning and piss on the blanket. So I’ve dropped off a bit with visiting. She’s got plenty anyway who fawn about hats, oops, the creations, she made them. I don’t think they even know who she is. She can’t play too many tricks anymore. I see her lying there watching me with her beady brown eyes and I wonder, sometimes she looks afraid as if I might lean over and clamp my hands down on her face, or shape them into claws and make as if to gouge her eyes as she might to a child in the dark of a hallway. Just a joke it was, yes, just a joke. I’m liking the wetness of the paper here, just drop in a little wash of Payne’s Grey let it bleed into the cobalt, form an edge on the white, random, let it spread out and dry, don’t interfere with the flow, but some do, you get that. They can’t resist fiddling, turning colour to mud, watching a huge wart form, and then the disguise, turn their paper round and blob in something to turn it into a pansy or a cornflower. You see them in exhibitions. I like to walk with my head sideways to see if I can spot the undeliberate mistake. Me, I’d just rip it up, start again. Move on: new paper, new colours. Move on. Wet on wet, the wash, let the colours bleed... I was surprised by my father, by who he was, so different from what I was told. No Frankenstein: no ugliness in him, no real abandonment of me. He was clever and kind but, alas, love made him cowardly. My mother must have laughed when he kept her stupid, childish

123 secret, whispering to my brother, watching my father and me, listening to our lives as they grew together. I feel the anger beginning to simmer in me again, starting to fizz. Now I understand irony, so much more than his Comedy and Travel: me too shy to hug him, yet each morning preparing the basin and soap. And there I was again in the landscape of family, wandering through a mirage: the land of love. My father and my mother: their geography; one wanting to stay, the other to escape. I lie in my bed and imagine the wind and the cold and her. I see her over my shoulder, through the rain, see her laughing, dancing, waving. I put my back into it and row across the water: viridian green. I ignore the salt spray and focus on the mountain, and beneath, the lights of the town. Distance and place and memory: salt on the shells and crushed bladder-wrack beneath my feet as I run the shore.

***

Well, at last, dying we are told yet again. It’s not an effort to visit her this time. She looks terrible, her skin a greenish colour: her white hair looking too big for her head, her throat wrinkled and sunken. Why the hell is she wearing a string of pearls? Horrible. I’d like to draw her. She’s quiet. When next she opens her eyes and sees me still sitting there she reaches out and touches my arm. You’ve a lovely face, she says, I’ve smacked it many a time. Is it an apology? But I say to her at last, thinking, Come on - story for story, even though I now know her story, I want her to fess up. I want to hear it from her. Finally. Tell me about Spain Mum; tell me the story of Spain. Why that place? She just smiles and looks right through me into wherever she wants to be, wherever she thinks she’s off to. I haven’t been this close to her face for years. If I bent forward just a little I could kiss her cheek. Could. Tell me, I urge, gritting my teeth, wanting to grip her shoulders and shake the words and the rest of her life out of her. But her smile just broadens and she closes her eyes on me. I feel like hissing at her.

***

124

My brother’s wife, Louise, has asked that I go through my mother’s things with her to find a dress and shoes. I had resisted, but now stand in the upstairs bedroom while she sorts the racks of clothes back and forth. She’s exasperated with me, and probably aware of my elevated (almost delirious mood). Heartless, I hear myself saying of myself. I like it. I feel so light, and as if I’m on the verge of something new which I suppose I am. Never having been free to wander this room, I make the most of it, picking up bits and pieces and clunking them back down, taking pleasure in startling my sister-in- law who burrows about carefully as if my mother is still in the bed watching. I try on some shoes and pace about: tap tap tap. Louise flinches at the sound and stares at me as if I’ve grown another head. I try a hat here, swing a hand-bag or two about until it looks as if she will cry, so I rat around searching for the old fox neck-piece. Sadly, no sign: how pleasant it would have been to loll on the sofa with it curling about my neck. My mother’s lipstick. How close I am to her now. I twirl it out of its tube to sniff its fragrance. Unknown to me and to my father. I throw myself flamboyantly on the bed and toss the pillows about falling back on the cover to stare up at the ceiling. I make a mental note to look at the ceiling in my Dad’s room, which it will always be to me, to check what my mother would have seen in her final days. Sitting up again I wander about the room, picking up dusty photographs, now so faded as to just be sepia shapes, ghosts of another world. My sister-in-law continues to fuss with scarves and gloves. She’s frowning, troubled by my mood but says nothing. Opening a wooden box I poke about its contents: pearls, rings, a key, and buttons. An ancient wrapper from a bar of soap so old it fragments beneath my fingers, I’m not inclined to be careful with it. I find an equally old piece of grey felt, inside a brooch which looks like a riding crop, atop a horseshoe and a bow; I remember seeing it a few times long ago. There is also a folded square of thick paper which I open to see part of a map torn from a magazine perhaps. It shows some islands in the Atlantic, the Azores. Scrabbling again I find, falsely glittering toward the bottom of the box, a child’s brooch in the shape of an elephant. Later when I go downstairs I look at the plaster ceiling rose of my Dad’s room. It looks like a wreath. How comforting.

125

***

The other week I saw a troubling photograph. It was in National Geo or similar, the location somewhere in the Pacific expanse, perhaps the Sargasso Sea? There the currents have formed an island from the detritus of our modern day, mainly plastic junk but strong enough for someone to stand on. It’s said to be huge and full of creatures, trapped, tortured, and rotting. In the picture was a bronzed and muscular fellow (an ideal husband?), holding up a length of twisted nylon yellow rope: caught in it a bird, surely not an albatross... the bird dead, its beak gaping, the man unsmiling. Then, last night, I dreamed that I somehow was there and stepped out upon it as if it were a pontoon, though a stinking one. Still curious, I ran across it: lightly at first, then more confidently until I saw two figures standing some distance away. I thought one was my brother and behind him a woman but as in all dreams they drifted and disappeared. I looked about me then down at the rippling surface which somehow held my weight. It was then I saw, caught within the web and weave, familiar faces which writhed with the current and endured the nibbling of sweet little crabs which opportunistically had made their homes within the eye sockets.

***

We had the chance yesterday, my brother and I to look in the coffin. There she lay: powdered, with a touch of rouge and a suggestion of lipstick. Tut tut, no hat on her head, no creation atop? Perhaps it would not sit right in the coffin. Difficult to wear a hat when lying down I suppose. The hat was on her chest, her hands placed as if holding it, and gloves which I hardly saw her wear which disguised the absence of a wedding band, so thoughtful my sister-in-law. I’m pleased I couldn’t see her beautiful hands. The hat had no pin piercing it that I could see. Oh dear, going off to another world unarmed.

***

126

Days later, a minister encourages us to celebrate the life of my mother. He talks of a woman neither he nor I ever met: a woman who never walked in my world. When I sit at the back people turn to look and frown and wave their hands for me to move to the front. I don’t. There are a lot of women here, more than I would have imagined. I play a game and try to pick those who are married, widowed, never married, abandoned, and betrayed. It’s difficult, as difficult as picking out lies. I day-dream about drawing the roly poly elderly ladies in hats. I see old hands, some cut deep with wedding bands preparing for this event by scrabbling through the tops of wardrobes, others opening hat-boxes with reverence. Can I really smell camphor and hear the rustle of dusty tissue paper? Look at the back of their necks, lined and brown-speckled from the sun, yes even here in Tasmania. And atop those leathered pillars the hats, the creations: island gardens bobbing and nodding to the tone of my brother’s eulogy; islands of pink and lavender posies, wisps of lace, and shameless feathers poking upwards. Here and there I see a hat-pin. The coffin slides away. Good luck Mum.

***

And there I was just a few weeks later trying to make up my mind whether to stay in Hobart or to go back to Sydney and the past caught up, just suddenly one day, standing in my friend’s kitchen, where I was house and cat-sitting when the phone rang. A young English voice, a London accent asking, Is that Maeve? I don’t answer straight away. I’m puzzled. Malcolm the cat is staring at me, flicking the tip of his tail. I’m thinking it’s Senga but it can’t be, the voice is too young. Eventually. Yes, I say struggling to think, someone from London, a friend of a friend, on holiday looking for a bed? But how did they know where I was? Then I twig. Aha, they must have rung my brother. At last, Eoin’s been useful! I smirk, ready for a discussion about his turgid phone manner.

127

But I’m brought up sharp when the voice continues, do you know someone called Meg. Margaret? Suddenly my mother’s name is drilling into my brain and the hair is beginning to prickle on my neck. Then in a voice that I have to force out, I knew a Meg a long time ago, twenty years ago, in London. I’m ringing from London, she said, my name’s Emily Margaret, I’ve been looking for you.

128

7. THE LONG FETCH

Eoin Amazing, Maeve has a daughter, she’s here, arrived from London a week or so back. I’m shocked, especially as I didn’t think anyone could keep their mouth shut the way my sister has all these years. More than twenty years for fuck’s sake. The girl’s twenty one. I’m reeling and it’s just not sinking in with me. Just yesterday it was, we found out. Louise, my wife answered the phone and brought it through to me whispering Maeve’s in a state. I listened as Maeve went on and on and I couldn’t say a word. I’d never heard her talk so much and have never heard that tone in her voice. She wanted to come over, bring someone from England. She wouldn’t say who but my wife, being who she is, invited Maeve to bring her friend over for a meal. We had no idea who it was when she came in and introduced a girl, maybe early twenties I thought, tall with thick black hair. Very modern, hair in a spiky little arrangement, one of those Post Office bag type things slung over her shoulder. I know nothing about fashion but she looked with-it. Then Maeve got us to sit down and launched into a story that just left me and my wife staring at her. The girl sat listening, red in the face and not saying a word. Only Maeve was talking and telling us about a phone call a few weeks earlier and all the organisation and my wife and I just sat and listened Later we had a meal, which was tough, sitting at the dinner table and trying to make polite conversation with a total stranger without touching on anything that might hit a nerve. Tough. When they left I sat on the veranda and downed a couple of tinnies trying to get my head around it all. There’s a teenager in our office who keeps calling people random. I think this is what he means.

***

Not sure if I can play this family game that Maeve wants. I’m making an effort but I think there are elements in this of my sister’s tendency to go off the rails and it’s like she just discovered penicillin or something. She even looks different and her

129 voice has gone a bit hysterical. Tragic. During the meal the other night she talked non- stop trying to invent some sort of camaraderie that’s never really existed between us. After dinner I went to my study, leaving the girls to talk, later, I found Emily, Maeve keeps saying the whole bit, Emily Meg, interesting she got Mum’s name, I wouldn’t have seen that coming. Anyway Emily was standing in front of a picture frame in the hallway. One of those with about ten pictures in it that Louise put together, family photos and stuff, Maeve and I when we were kids, all that. When she heard me she swung around and I expected to see her looking sad or wistful but I was a bit taken aback because she looked angry, frowning, her face flushed. She just walked off. Louise was good, she’s got a sort of sixth sense and took Em around the house showing her the stuff I’d made, chairs, tables, cupboards, all from fallen logs in the forest. You’ve got to try and save what you can of it all. Well Em did like the stuff and ran her hand over the polish and asked a couple of questions about the trees. So she came round a bit and started smiling again, though Maeve looked a bit huffy for a while there. I’m not sure Maeve is going to get from this what she obviously needs. I could be wrong. I got her on her own for a few minutes and said who’s the father, where’s the father? She looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, just blurted out I don’t know. I persisted with where was he, where were you? London? No she said, Scotland, he’s Scottish then she just clammed up and took off out of the room. I wish she’d stop saying this has changed my life.

***

We’ve invited Emily to stay with us for a few days. Louise’s idea really, get to know our kids, her cousins. My niece I keep thinking. I haven’t seen that angry face again. Maeve didn’t object, though they just had twenty years apart. Emily sits at night and talks and tells us how it felt to see Maeve for the first time, now I’ll sound like Maeve, it is pretty amazing! I was talking with my wife about our kids really, but it’s interesting, the genetics of it, that Emily paints, went to art school, done well apparently. She’s showed us a bit of her stuff, things she’s done since she’s been here. I quite like them. Modern scratchy sort of stuff with charcoal and blue and green splashed through for the hills and the ocean. I can’t describe them but the over-all

130 effect is pretty darn good. So she got that from Maeve I’d say, gives you something to think about, the old nature / nurture argument. And I wonder about the girl’s father, her real father. Maeve hasn’t said anything about him except what I got out of her the other day that he was a Scotsman. I’m trying not to ask the wrong thing as I’m not sure what’s been said and what hasn’t.

***

I wish Maeve would stop going on about stuff and particularly stop saying this has changed my life. Next time she says it for sure I will fucking well let rip at her. I feel like saying well the truth has come out, been on the tip of my tongue for so long now, after all, that was always what Maeve was on about even as a kid. She just didn’t get it back then, that people lied. It was all about truth, she always owned up if she’d done something. She just did not get that people lied and played tricks or made up stories. You’d think as a kid the penny would have dropped. She went off once to a birthday party, some girl in her class, a Saturday afternoon, and she was back half an hour later. The mother had answered the door and said the party had been the week before, and she was sorry that Maeve’s invitation had the wrong date on it. I knew right away that her little classmates had played a joke. Set her up. Had it the week before then laughed at her behind her back all week as she talked about the up-coming party when they’d already had it, and she’d gone off all dressed up and with a present she’d raided her piggy bank to buy. Tragic really. I knew she wasn’t popular at school, she was weird as a kid, and the others picked up on it and left her out, as kids do. But Maeve just did not see it. I told her they’d lied to her and she said people don’t do that, people don’t lie like that. As I got older it made me laugh that she was so stupid. Where her obsession with the truth came from back then I don’t know but, she turned that around. Did she what, which makes me wonder if she told the father, does he know? So, my sister’s been living a lie for the past twenty years and now, it's out of the bag and she just rolls with it, barefaced and no apologising and it’s as if she’s in a play.

***

131

I used to tease Maeve when we were kids. I remember that but most of my teasing I haven’t got a conscience about, it was too complicated, everything that was going on and I was just trying to keep my head down til I could get out of that house, and it was easier if it was Maeve in Mum’s sights. Mum loved playing tricks which was probably a bit strange, and she had this thing about sex. Well I didn’t see that back then, only now, she’d often call Maeve a hoor. Just out of the blue, about her hair sometimes, Mum used to say, hair like a hoor. Then there was all that other business of Mr Binocs as Maeve called him. Dad wasn’t around in those days, not that he would have had any say. I do regret taking her to the cubby when Mr Mac said he wanted to see her hair. He gave me money for a coke. Didn’t seem any harm in it then but now, well it’s not something I would tell my wife that I did, now I’ve got my own daughter. Maeve was in hot water over it and sulked for weeks, maybe that was when the unfair, not right and stuff all started. She kept saying the guy lied and maybe he did, she wouldn’t say exactly what went on. I listened at the door when Mum was questioning her. I don’t know if he ever did anything because after that no one spoke about it ever again, except maybe Maeve who would flare up about people telling lies. Well I wonder what she calls it hiding the truth about her own life all this time, whether she’s told her daughter any lies.

Maeve The long fetch, that’s what I’m thinking. The wave catching up after a long trawl, more than twenty years this one, and now us in the first years of a new century. London, just over twenty years ago seems like a million miles and years away, except it is suddenly right here. I look at her and I can see her father, but I can’t bring myself yet to talk about him. The age difference between us, might disgust her... I need to be careful. Memory is coursing through me so much that I feel sick with it. I know I must talk to her, soon.

***

132

The Rule of Thirds keeps playing in my mind... the areas of a picture, the compositional elements arranged to create a synergy between them, a picture showing the relationships of each of the separate parts: the father, the mother, the child, and like a drawing I’m making decisions about what to include and what to leave out, trying to show the relationship, share the space, tell each story. Just as I don’t like clutter in a landscape, I don’t want clutter in the story I must tell. In the meantime I’ve made plans for us, things to do , places, so much impossible time to make up by exploring this strange but glorious territory, this different country: there are no signposts, no maps for this experience, just paths untrod ever before, so I keep on, claiming the territory. Making it mine. I never thought I would feel as elated as I do, but terrified at the same time. And I just want to pretend it is only us two. Leave all of that other stuff out, leave out the detail, the clutter, just concentrate on us. But I know she will ask. Everyone wants to know where they come from of course as she does. I wonder if she’s seen her birth certificate and the Father Unknown I wrote that day, prepared to suffer the look of disapproval and disgust from social workers. Yet I hear my mother. Hoor, she says.

***

My brother’s having a clear out at his house and phones to say he’s bringing something over. He hands me an urn of our mother’s ashes, Do what you like with these. It’s your sort of thing, you’ll know best. Maybe you and Emily can have a ceremony or something, find a place for them. He’s trying to be nice, I know that, but how can anyone get something so wrong? Why would I care about my mother’s ashes, when all this exciting new world is before me. I laugh to myself that maybe he doesn’t want to scrabble around on the top of Mt. Wellington with me like we did so long ago with Dad’s urn. It suddenly strikes me that he has always kept his distance a bit from the whole family thing, except his own of course. He walks down to the car and turns, says nothing, then, She’s nice, he says, and she paints. What about that! He’s smiling at me, and I have a strange feeling of the tide turning, as if I’m watching from the Bluff as the yachts begin to heel about on their moorings and point away.

133

I wave him off, standing to watch as he turns the corner and toots. I heft the urn in the crook of my arm but really I have no time for all that, for her, my mother, all that malarkey. Into a cupboard it goes, she goes. It’s a small urn, I could fit it in a suitcase and take it with me somewhere wonderful, somewhere significant perhaps. To Spain. At last to Spain? She’d like that. But the cupboard it is. No mantle position for you my lady, the milliner of Beaux Chapeaux. Wait here my dear. I say it in the imperious tone she would use when speaking to a customer. Wait here. I shut the cupboard door and laugh at the world.

***

Back to Sullivan’s Cove to finish the painting for Em, for my daughter. It’s a thrill to say those words, an affirmation, of me, of life, and see that I am grateful to my brother which is a first I whisper to myself, wanting to shout it out loud. I’ve taken particular care with the picture and I hope she likes it. It’s more or less the same view I did for Dad so long ago, but I might not touch on that topic with her, not tell her too much of all that. I am leaving a lot of the past out, sorting through it, editing, censoring my life, the past, making it fit for purpose. I want the future clear and free, not clogged with memories of Dad in his bed year after year, and Mum upstairs working her magic with creations. Oh yes, what creations. In some ways, though I would never tell anyone this, it is kind of okay that both Mum and Dad are gone, Mum not so long ago, because it clears the field as it were. What a strange world that Mum could not hang on long enough to... but I mustn’t muddy the waters with all that tainted memory, I have enough of my own and I’m determined that all the telling of the past, of memory, will be mine.

***

The phone rings. Wakes me. 5.am. Who the hell… She is dead. I listen and then, a ragged, rising noise from me which I can’t stop. Someone asking me if I have family to call.

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I find a way to listen. A speeding car. Kept going. Left on the road.

Eoin Jesus wept. It’s terrible. Unbelievable really. Surreal. A tragedy. The poor kid. Poor Maeve. And now so much in the newspapers and on the tv. Search for hit-run killer. The bastard has taken off, hiding, maybe someone will dob him in. Irony, Emily had taken a bus so she could have a few drinks, went to an art exhibition, didn’t want to drive, took a bus home, got off it to cross the road and it was a one-way street, and steep: typical Hobart. She was staying with us for a few days, going to go back to Maeve the following day, they were off to Bruny, going camping. And what keeps drumming in my head is that evening before she went out, we were sitting on the veranda, she was staring out at the view, probably so as not to meet my eyes and she said, I don’t feel as if I belong, I don’t feel as if it’s my place, all the while just looking out across the town and the water. Surreal.

Maeve For just the first second in the morning when I wake I am protected, one second of grace before remembrance and reality claw at me.

***

I was told I could see her at the morgue. I was allowed because her real parents in London had already had the news and identified her. By computer and video link, a camera suspended over the face of the dead and hooked up to a waiting observer (another victim), away in some other place. There we all were crying over the same person, and us thousands of miles apart and never having met.

135

I said yes, that I was grateful to be allowed to see her. Eoin came with me but I didn’t really believe what I was about to see: improbable, impossible, too much. If it’s true I will have to die as well.

***

And later, in the morgue, behind a glass wall, I went in with a policewoman, not with Eoin, not sure what I expected. I soon discovered there could be no throwing yourself onto the person. No final hysterical clutching. No touching the body, do not spoil clues the forensic people will need, in case they can find whoever did it. Hit her and drove off, left her. Strange, a little detail I remember as I stood there and looked through the glass I said, What have you done? When I saw her lying there behind the glass, the curtain having been drawn coyly aside, her face came back to me from a time long distant, a face with beautifully painted on eyelashes... in a glass case, a mural on a wall, surrounded by a thick gilt frame... And I thought of a face beside me, on a pillow. A late summer night with birds crying and jinking through the air over the herring boats.

***

I see someone has been busy and careful. I am grateful for that. A block of something under her neck holding her head up, and the blood mostly washed away, some bitumen still embedded, a little bit of paint, that yellow ochre colour of old cars, her face not pink but grey: neither rounded cheeks, nor dimpled chin, just a face fallen in on itself. I wouldn’t want to draw this, couldn’t think of colours for this, neither cobalt nor Payne’s Grey. No washes of colour upon colour. No way to render this even if the DNA of Goya pulsed in every cell of my body. Goya, that celebrated Spaniard would have put red cheeks and wild eyes, perhaps a beret, a rugged overcoat, feet stamped far apart for stability, and all watching and waiting. Waiting for a muzzle to be raised, waiting for the order to fire,

136 for the falling down in heaps - the slumping and thudding of bodies to the ground, into the mud, to lie there in the rain. And her last breath... angry? Possibly, but definitely agonised, and maybe just a sigh, which served only to draw the life out of her face, draw it all inside, to some small core of her which still, improbably, hoped to live. No camera or film crew there at her last. No call for close up, or fade in music: nothing there for her at the last, in the rain on that road. Her long last breath had drawn the hope out of her dreams and the beat out of her heart. I think of a man away on the other side of the world, perhaps he too now dead and never knowing the truth of it all. Never knowing all this. Then someone drew the curtain closed as if the end of a show, red velvet and a proscenium arch but no applause, none at all, just quiet shuffling and a bump from behind the curtains. Moving the scenery? Getting the next one ready? I was drawn away by someone in uniform who was reverential in the pursuit of kindness. Though the funeral director had more to say, about the arrangements to fly her to England, all paid for by her real parents. She’ll be laid to rest he said (such quaint terminology, she needs a rest after what’s happened). Later my brother drove me to his place, along a sad highway: the water on my left. What a landscape, I will know it forever. And forever every time I drive this way I will be back in this day, this moment, this life, this Hobart. We round a corner and the trees beside the road begin to slide into view: the colours different here but still a wet in wet. I see Prussian blue and raw sienna and some Permanent Rose, but those trees need to have firm uprights, a palette knife needed to draw the lines down, across the pages into the foreground. I feel the palette knife in my hand and I begin to make those strokes to bring that colour down. I look at my hands, there is Rose Madder, that dark red of drying blood and my hands are covered. I look in my lap and the colour is now gushing and spilling out and I hold my stomach to keep the scream in. I need to get out and go to those trees, to sit in the shadows thrown by dark Hooker’s Green, Northern Hemisphere tones. I’d like to be able to sit by a grave, or at least to know where that place will be. I reach for the door handle but my brother swerves off road and clutches at my arm so painfully it feels as if he will twist it off and he swears at me, then idiot, he calls me, idiot. Then he says sorry and I see he is trying.

137

Eoin Emily’s parents in London have arranged for her body to be flown there. No funeral in Australia, and I’m glad. It would have been more drama. Now Maeve is rambling on and on about whether Emily is being buried or cremated. She wants to know if there will be a place to lay flowers, a place to sit and think, she says. She wants to go there, to England. She asks where the place will be. How would I know? Finally I lose it. Totally, and I’m not proud of myself. For fuck’s sake Maeve, get over it. You were dreaming. She’s theirs - not yours! You gave her up. Remember! She belongs in England. That’s her place, not here! What on earth is wrong with you? My wife’s worried that I might have pushed it too far. Twice lost, she says, twice lost. She thinks my sister might try to kill herself but I think Maeve’s got more guts than that. Though she does keep talking about finding the bloke and killing him and saying what if? But there’s no point in wondering the might- have- beens in life. There are too many. Life is random, there is no such thing as fate, only co-incidence, wrong place wrong time, all that. Like the night my father came to visit us, on a Friday and Mum turned him away as it was the wrong day and he just walked off up the street and the car came round the corner and that was it, life over, almost. But what if she had let him come in to see us that night? And Maeve’s life book-ended by people and accidents and tragedy. For fuck’s sake, now I’m saying it!

***

They did catch the driver, two weeks later. He got a hot-shot lawyer, and just ended up with a piss-weak fine, dangerous driving or something. Lost his licence for a while, three months I think. They couldn’t prove he was drunk or speeding, though there were witnesses from the pub but he went into hiding and there wasn’t anyone else there on the road that night. A coward he was, I’ll give Maeve that, he was a fucking coward. Jesus, no one’s bullet-proof so I’m worrying for Maeve. It is a tragedy but even so I wish to hell she’s stop repeating it - Tragedy, tragedy, she keeps saying. And crying and starting up again with all her talk of lies, like the guy not admitting he was speeding, and

138 injustice and wanting the truth and all this from the secret life of hers in London, I still can hardly believe it. Surreal. I’ve got to stop saying that my wife says.

***

Maeve wants to find the guy and kill him, or herself. What sort of talk is that? I make her stay with us for a while, talk to her, try to get some sense into her. Maeve, listen, who knows what she did when she stepped off that bus into the rain and went to cross the road? Who can say? But Maeve just looks through me and talks about going away somewhere. My wife tries to get through to her, no chance because Maeve starts on about our father, then the bloke in Scotland. I can’t make sense of it, is she talking about our father, that accident? She seems to be getting them confused.

***

I went to the court with Maeve, had to, wanted to... but I doubt she even heard a word. We listened to the young couple who’d been watching television who heard a noise, a bang outside on the road but didn’t go to look. When they turned off the sound during the ads in the film they thought they heard moaning outside in their garden. But it was raining, as always in Hobart, and the film had twenty minutes to go. When it finished they couldn’t hear anything but for some reason decided to have a look. She was there on the verge between the footpath and their garden. Still alive. When they bent over her she apparently asked, Is it raining? She died before the ambulance arrived. The young couple afterwards, outside court, spoke to Maeve and started her off again with the might-haves, the could- haves, the what- ifs. And Maeve is on about her leaving Em as a baby and the guy leaving her and I tell Maeve to stop looking for fucking patterns in it all. It’s random. Life is random.

***

139

A Journal. Emily’s. Arrived in a parcel for Maeve but sent to me with a letter from Emily’s parents, saying they’ll leave it up to me whether to give it to Maeve. And it’s my decision whether I want to read it or not. They said they had and couldn’t decide whether to send it but in the end they have and now it is up to me. Jesus Christ I thought, another fucking Maeve drama this will be for sure. In the end I started to read it. Louise thinks Maeve is on the edge, so I thought maybe reading the journal would give me a way in to help somehow, but what I read shocked me. She’s called it A Journal for Future Generations. It felt strange to read it, a person I didn’t know, not really, and I found out more about my sister, a lot more. I could hear myself somehow echoing Maeve with her tragedy, tragedy. Some of the words really cut me which made me wonder. Caused me a lot of doubt about whether to pass the book on to Maeve. I think she needed to know or would want to know. Some of it was cruel. It reminded me of all those years ago when Maeve was at school and the kids pretended the birthday party was on a different day because they didn’t like her and wanted to play a trick. It reminded me of a lot of stuff really. I read parts of it out to my wife to get the female perspective but she just kept saying poor thing and getting all weepy. Interesting as I said that the girl went to art college, and a bit of an odd family, kind of liberal conservatives I suppose but the father sounds strange, all that business with the trains, the signs of old stations that had been closed, laid out on the floor in rows, dozens of them. And walk-ways on the floor between the rows so people could read the names. Emily I can see is a lot like Maeve because she’s talking about the closed stations and people maybe wanting to commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of an express. What kind of talk is that? But then as Louise pointed out Maeve keeping the baby for a year before giving her up was a bad thing. Then Em’s writing about her own kids that she might have one day and that was it. I had to put the book away for a while, it was taking me into dangerous waters, private territory and I didn’t like that expression she used bad seed, sounded like the sort of thing Mum would have said. The other bit that got me was the Father Unknown that Maeve apparently wrote on the kid’s birth certificate. She said it was a Scotsman so why did she write that? It’s a mystery but I’ll be dammed if I’ll ask. In her journal Em sounds as if she

140 thinks it’s someone she saw in a photograph that Maeve sent her, an Aussie with a Kombi van. The whole thing is a bloody sad business. And it got to me again when she was writing about the trip we took over to the west coast. She had a good time. We all did, we had a laugh, one of the few by the sound of it. It was a good day, trekking through the forest then coming across those protestors who told us to fuck off. And Emily swore back at them which kind of surprised Maeve a bit but we all laughed together, though I did feel I’d passed my use-by date and felt like giving them an earful. Now Em is writing... Poor Maeve. I call her that to myself. Put me down on a bed in a hand-over clinic and she just had to walk away. Leave me, because she’d signed a paper. She wrote in her letter. Saschie loves reading them, that as she walked away I cried out, angrily, and she went to turn back but she didn’t. Yeah, The Road Not Taken. That’s the title of a poem which I went and looked up. The person talking sounds regretful to me, saying ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence’ referring I suppose to the fact that the road they took, the ‘one less travelled’, made all the difference, and possibly not a good one. The poem certainly made me think of Maeve, but all of us really and the choices we might regret later on. It was painful to read about Maeve dragging out Emily’s baby blanket that she’d kept all those years. I read that bit to my wife who went into meltdown, told me to stop reading, that it was like a depressing play. It made me think a bit about Mum and Dad and how I hardly ever saw them speak to each other, and Maeve, I remember now, would talk to Mum who would act as if she hadn’t heard. I saw a play like that once. Reader’s Theatre it was called, bored the arse off me, with no scenery and the actors speaking then either walking off stage or just standing or lounging in a chair waiting their turn, maybe choosing a different chair for the next go round. But they didn’t ever look at each other or acknowledge a presence, or respond to what was being said, even though their stories intertwined. There was no connection. And when the play was over they all just sat and looked at us in the audience in silence. Very arty, but now I think about it, it did have a message, the style of it. My wife, Louise, always says there is something seriously wrong with our family. One of the first things she noticed way back was how we hardly ever use one another’s name when we speak. I do often say my sister and my wife.

141

I have a name Louise will say. But she reckons I always lapse again and she hears me say my wife to someone. I wonder about it. There’s a closeness in using someone’s name... I never heard my mother call my father by his, just him, or a visitor, or your father, or she’d tease Maeve with Frankenstein. Families and their shit. I’m trying to make mine different.

***

I flipped through most of the journal and I saw that Maeve did the thing with the map like she used to do with Dad. Em found it a real turn off. Poor Maeve, she just doesn’t get it and still talking about Spain, after all this time, still talking about Mum’s stupid joke. Boring the kid. Em writes, she plays with the ruler, measures and calculates some weird centimetres to kilometres thing... what a plonker. I’m bored. I know we’ll never go to these places. I don’t want to go with her. I don’t think I like her. I need to tell her. Well that really cut and make me think hard all over again about whether to give Maeve the book or not but of course I had to give it to her in the end. She needed to know the truth, read it for herself if she wanted to if she could no matter what it would do. So I gave it to her and told some story about a mix up with the address. I didn’t tell her I’d read it of course and she didn’t ask. If she had I would have just lied. So much easier. I’m not sure what she’ll do next. My wife’s worried Maeve will do something crazy but I think Maeve will just take off again. Probably ring me from the airport, I can hear her, Sydney first then onwards she’ll say, cracking Hardy as usual. The thought of her heading off makes me feel so bloody angry because it’s as if she’s always throwing our lives back in our faces, almost as if to say it’s just not interesting enough here for her. The last time she said that, she’d walked down the yard to talk to me in my workshop. She wandered around picking things up and saying, Are you ever going to fix this? I can’t believe you’ve still got this old thing, and why don’t you chuck this? She gave me this little lecture about how when she is working on a picture she leaves out all the crap stuff, light poles and tv aerials, said she only keeps what she wants in it, gets rid of the useless stuff. When she left I looked around at all the bits she was going on about and suddenly it did all look like crap and I just had to get out, my blood was boiling. I got in the car and drove up to the top of Mt

142

Wellington and parked, ignoring all the rubberneckers looking at the view. I stayed in the car out of the wind. It was a hazy blue down over South Arm, and beyond towards Bruny Island I could see a bit of smoke rising, possibly a bushfire. I thought vaguely about the Antarctic, the tours they run now, I’d like to go one day. I looked down at the town spread out below squeezed between the river and the mountain, the houses rising up the hillsides and all looking so beautiful and peaceful there and everyone getting on with their stuff with boats going back and forth and leaving the track of their wake on the surface of the water. And over the arch of the bridge which stands up so strong and sort of determined leading over to the other side... to Bellerive... and cars moving along down to Tranmere and that big bluff of a hillside where all the trees leave off and there is just an expanse of grass. All so peaceful and picturesque. Good word. I tried to work out why it just wasn’t enough for Maeve and why I felt so pissed off with her. She can’t seem to stop, just keeps going. I don’t know if that’s bravery or stupidity.

***

I think she’s caught me out in a lie. I saw the way she looked at me when I handed her the journal. I should have admitted I’d read it but I couldn’t. I do like to know what is going on, always have. Even as a kid, I’d creep into Dad’s room to read what he’d been writing but of course I couldn’t understand most of it. I felt by reading it I might understand what it was between him and my sister. But I never did ‘get it’. I used to go through Maeve's things all the time and Mum’s room was a bit of a magnet. She took that brooch of my sister's that dad gave her. I found it in Mum’s jewel box. At the time I thought to give it back to Maeve so she could pin it on her dress. Just for once I wanted my Mother to see that she was not completely in control of everyone’s life but of course I didn’t because I was a coward around her. Maeve’s getting ready for a move, or for going away. She brought over a painting she told us she did for Em and gave it to me and Louise. She liked you both she said as she handed it to me, and I wondered if she’d read the journal, and I felt bloody sick but took the picture. It was pretty good, Sullivan’s Cove, I vaguely remember one like it by Dad’s bed years ago.

143

She’s gutsy, I’ll give her that, moving on and not giving up, she’s always been a bit of a fighter. I remember when I took her to that cubby where Mr Mac was waiting for her and I left her and went out but watched through a slit in the tin, when she saw him she leaped up all red in the face and kicked him so that he nearly fell and she shouted at him and ran off. There were no tears, even though she was only a kid, she was a hard little nut. It has stuck with me all through the years the way she was. Gutsy. I suppose that’s why it was a shock to read the journal, to know she wasn’t bullet-proof. It was also a shock to read what Em wrote about me in it.

***

There was a lot of back-story in Maeve’s life about the motherhood thing. I remember once her telling someone that not all mothers were wonderful and loving. She was talking about our own Mum, and busy shocking whoever it was who was listening. It was on one of her visits from Sydney after she had been in London so I wonder now if she was actually putting herself in that basket, and regretting giving her daughter up. Judging herself as it were, that she had kind of repeated her own mother’s ways, the harshness, the rejection of a daughter. Maybe she should talk about some of that stuff, possibly with me, but I don’t see how we can get into it all, maybe I should have told her I read the Journal, but I just did not want her to know I had read that last cruel line. People just do not realise how many ways there are to kill someone. It’s sad. I’m her family but it doesn’t mean anything, it’s beyond our power to make something of it, to get any sense of belonging to something together, of sharing a past. And maybe she could tell I had read it, that I was lying... because she’s got good at lying herself. Now she’ll be off weaving her way through the world, with strangers all along the way, and bound to be disappointed somewhere all over again in her travels. It comes with the territory. And yes, I’m angry, envious even, which seems ridiculous considering all her pain and heartache but I am... and that's the truth of it.

Maeve

144

A long deep silence of nights: sometimes in sleep, images become nightmares but nights always give way to dawn, and that first second of mercy before the crashing wave.

***

I didn’t know what to do with her journal, A Journal for Future Generations - she wrote that in it somewhere. I couldn’t decide whether to carry it, or leave it, or burn it. Finally I burned it and the baby blanket. I took the painting I did for her over to Eoin and Louise, I hope they like it. I remember thinking that day I started it that she might be disappointed in the trip and I wondered again if she had written about it to her real parents who I knew had read the journal before it went in the post: the covering note that came with it said only, You might like this. It had been gathered up at that horrible time and taken to England with all her things and now, sent back, by mistake as it happens to Eoin’s house. I didn’t like the sound of them from what she wrote. I was disappointed in them. I read the journal right through, several times, running my palm across its pages, looking for a life.

***

Now I’m keeping busy clearing the decks as they say, throwing out my old drawings, paintings, ones I did in another life. I look at the person who painted them and see me swirling the water, mixing the blues, the greys and the greens and I’m thinking of the mountain. I imagine the wind pulling at my hair. I look out my window and see the clouds scudding and a yacht has overturned in the bay. I wish my neighbour from all those years ago were still here. I would borrow his binocs so I could see if the people are laughing or if they are screaming. I would think they are screaming. When I drive by that place, never across the actual spot, I remember that the next day there was a yellow chalked outline of the tyres. On a wet day, it is too often wet here, I stood with flowers, where to put them? On that outline? But the cars are whipping by and disappearing over the hill like the one on that night, not stopping.

145

I place the flowers to the side, to the edge where I keep my thoughts, around the boundary, just the edges of it never wanting to be there in that place, with the car lights looming and her trying to step back. I hear the crunching of bones and it sounds like the crack when I snap a piece of charcoal before beginning a sketch. Crack and snap. Then the colour of blood. Her eyes closing and the man driving away into the dark, leaving, like me.

***

Today I stand at the shore of this shy bay in which I have swum, long ago, in a bikini. Long ago. The water is restless today, in this most familiar place where I know that just a few paces out the earth falls away and the water is suddenly deep and the current swirls and pulls. I have wrestled that dark current in the past. And in the past I stood here and looked at my reflection and it was so clearly me. At other times I bent and tried to see into my eyes. But it wasn’t possible, even when the water was still and pale blue. So I stand and look and wait for my shape to change, which it does a little, depending on the wind ruffling or a bird settling or a perturbation, who can say? Across the blue I hear the slide of traffic noise, un-ending, people moving from place to place. I am in an Impressionist painting. If I were to paint this scene I would take a large view; away to the hills which would be Hooker’s Green: dark, not that light Hooker’s London Plane tree colour, but the broody just-before-the-storm look, most appropriate and a nice contrast to the north with the sharp edges of the mountain which defines the landscape here. That and the river, and the wind rushing up from the south. I feel it all and wonder if it will stay with me to the end, til I am far away. Til I am no more. Today, my reflection is not clear. It’s a pity. I would have liked to stand here a last time and see myself in nature, a picture of me in the colours before me, my head stretching out there into the blue, into cloud land and the shapes of nimbus or cumulus or cirrus forming a design about me. Perhaps I should go home, choose another day, when the water isn’t restless. But nature is moving into the season of wind and rain and waves, and I don’t have

146 time to wait. There is no time. So, yes, I would like to have seen myself once more, clearly, in the blue water looking up at myself, smiling. The two parts making one of me, but I’ve left it too late. In the morning I’d dithered, drinking coffee, making lists, and tidying. Washing clothes and chucking rubbish, and opening the journal yet again in case I had missed a page. How stupid, pretending to myself, like waking up in the morning and pretending it is the day before everything went wrong. I was looking for an ending to a search, but there was none: the words instead just tracing an outline... The Territory of Truth; its borders, I see now, defined so haphazardly by emotion.

***

And once, in those last few hours this morning as I walked back and forth, I stood in front of my mirror to peer, and assess. Then I leaned forward and looked into my eyes, as if, as some might say, to find the truth in them, to see what truth others see, searching for a clue... to a landscape, a place. Standing here beside the restless water, I recognise the here and now of life, the moving heart of it that is the truth. The place that is the movement between birth and death, between justice, truth and lies. Unreliable Life, the place where nothing stands still, which might be why some choose to end the moving of it all, choose not to wait, choose to make their own ending of it, away, away with a leap from a building or a bridge, or huddled down in a bed in a darkened room, or by pocketing stones to wade into a river. I watch the closing of their eyes.

***

I am walking forward, the water is colder than I thought, the current stronger than I remember, the slope more acute. Slippery, stones roll beneath my feet my chest is cold, the horizon is changing, it’s bending up and buckling into the sky. Are they the mountains of Hobart? There is gunfire and the barking of dogs, but soon through a mist I see the cairns of Culloden, hear the skirl of pipes, the tramping of men’s boots and hollow cries across the distance, there is a stream rushing over stones, a cold and damp and slapping of waves which I see now is the Loch stretching out deep blue away from Ullapool. Away and across the ocean and turning south to Pedra Branca...

147 further, turning north, away even to the Pacific and a swirling island of detritus, of lost creatures, bones scoured, eye sockets empty, pitiful creatures all. Now, distant faces stare at me from across a stream, a woman, a man, a girl with dark hair. They begin to move away and the girl lifts her hand as if to wave then turns and whispers something to the woman. I wonder what truths she holds as she turns back and calls to me across the distance, tranquillo, tranquillo.

***

A quick gust of wind riffles the water before me, clouds scatter shapes in the sky between the glitter of the sun. I am ready and dressed for travelling: a plane, a long trip, somewhere new. Lifting the urn I toss my mother’s ashes on the water. For a moment or two the surface is clouded and grey, then the tide smooths the colour to blue.

148

8. THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Journal Hobart, Australia, my mother. I didn’t cry at the airport, she did. It was weird to hear her say my name. Emily she said, all breathy, about five times... and so weird to look at her and try to find bits of myself in her face, which I couldn’t really. But the first thing... I don’t like her. I felt sick when I realised. It was the moment I had thought about for so long and there it was... disappointment in everything and in myself. Am I too judgemental? I need to go carefully, give her a chance, give it all a chance, and try to find out who my father is. The Father Unknown of my birth certificate... which must be a lie.

***

When we got to her house we sat to talk, both so nervous, she was shaking. I thought she was going to tell me about my father. Instead she rushed off to another room and came back with a box, which she opened to show me a baby blanket. Mine. She passed it to me and I did raise it to my face. What a plonker, as if I would still be able to smell me, the baby that I was. Pathetic really because all I could smell was naphthalene or something, old lavender, anyway it didn’t smell of babies. I was supposed to open my eyes with delight and I did try but I’ve never been sentimental. She produced it as if it was some kind of confirmation or evidence that she cared and had kept it all that time.

***

Later that night, and it could have been my jet-lag but she seemed really strange... floating backwards and forwards with stories, stopping half way through then telling me about something else. It was boring me witless. I think she’s stalling about the truth. She got me to sit at her big wooden table, the same one she sat at with her father, my grandfather, out came an old map of the world to look at. I put my

149 coffee cup down and make a wet circle, not really deliberately. She kept rambling but my big question was burning a hole in my temper. She said she’d like to go to Spain, to see what people find so fascinating about it. I didn’t know what she was on about and I didn’t tell her I’ve been there heaps of times with my real parents, not her who, immediately the words gave me away leap into my head. Not Spain, I said, but didn’t say why. I couldn’t believe we were having that stupid conversation. Just an idea, she said. Then went on about someone she knew who was obsessed with the place and how she wanted to go there to find out what they loved about it. Who cares I thought. Some dicky old friend of hers. She kept staring at the map, and I suggested New Zealand. It’s close, I said but she just stared as if in some trance. So annoying. I don’t think I like her, certainly I don’t love her. How can I? She rejected me, left me in England and came here. But she is the key to finding my Father Unknown. Weird. She ran her hands over the map. The world is a feast, she said, I love the grid of latitude and longitude. The colours, shapes. She looked up, played with the ruler, measured and calculated some centimetres to kilometres thing... what a plonker. I was bored. I know we’ll never go to these places. But reading this back I flip, change my mind because I so want this to work. I do. So I’ll make an effort and go on a trip with her, wherever it is she wants to go. She talks a lot about my grandfather, her father, his Gulliver’s Club, and I’d like to have known him, and my grandmother. She doesn’t say much about her. I guess there is just so much it must be difficult to work out what to say and when.

***

I’ve always kept a journal, and this section of it is, I guess, A Journal for Future Generations. I think it will be important in the future for me to look back but also for my kids when I have them about how it all worked out. Usually I have no trouble writing my journal but suddenly I’m stuck. There is too much. At least I now know my bio mother but I want my dad as well. I always wanted to find her of course, or learn about her, why she gave me away. That’s the big question. And I will ask it. Why would you leave me behind? Leave me in another country even! And is it really Father Unknown like on my birth certificate?

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***

So far so good. I’ve been holding myself back from blurting anything out about my father, but Maeve still hasn’t said anything. Dianne always said I should try to find my birth parents one day. She told me straight up I was adopted, and she knows we haven’t bonded as she calls it. But I still wouldn’t want to hurt her, she’s always put me first, let me go to Art College instead of trying to make me into a brain surgeon or something. I’m not smart enough. Not in their way. D the librarian, she and the mathematician didn’t really get what they wanted in me I suppose. I love them but they have some embarrassing habits like riding old Agatha Christie bicycles with ancient baskets on the front, belonging to some bell-ringing group, always banging on about books. My Dad, the mathematician, keeps to himself a lot. He loves writing letters to the papers about things like looking after the walking paths in the Lake District, that sort of thing. I don’t know if he ever really loved me. He likes to sprout on about a poem called The Road not Taken which is about getting to a point in your life where there are two roads and when you have to choose one it can make all the difference. Not sure if he means it was good to adopt me or whether he would have preferred to just go it alone. I think he’s a loner, he probably only said yes to me to keep Dianne happy.

***

My real father. At last she’s said it. I asked her straight out, why she wrote father unknown and she just shut up for a while, then said she was young and confused and didn’t know what to do and wrote it down and couldn’t take it back. She said he was a man who worked in a village in Scotland that she passed through on her travels. Said his name was Callum McKay but she didn’t know where he was anymore. She gave me up because people kept at her about giving me a better life so she thought that’s what she was doing. And I guess it was. Me, the cuckoo, landed in the lovely nest in Putney with my new parents. I’ve got to think about all of this. It is exciting and sad. A lost father. Callum McKay.

***

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There’s a distance between my English father, the mathematician and me. And he’s a bit different... got an obsession! I showed Saschie his collection once, she couldn’t believe it. In the big spare room, laid out on the floor in rows are hundreds of tatty old signs, the names of railway stations that have been closed down! He’s in a club with a lot of other sad people who collect them, swap them, a bit like stamps except you need space! He’s left little walkways on the floor between the rows so you read the names as you tip toe carefully through, all these signs of stations which no longer exist, shut when they changed the train system. I think it’s a bit grim, abandoned railway stations, all still attached to towns. They don’t get pulled down, they just sit there, some are made into garden centres or storage for bottle banks and old clothes bins, that sort of stuff. But there’s no disguising it. No one who stands on one of those platforms will be going anywhere soon, they’ve all been left behind, forgotten. Just their scarf being whipped up or their hat blowing off as the express whizzes straight on to an important town where important people live. All over England and Scotland and Wales, empty platforms, deserted waiting rooms, old noticeboards with yellow timetables and peeling Streets Ice-cream posters. How depressing. I wonder how many people jumped out from those platforms when the 5.10 from Wherever roared straight past?

***

I’ve been here two weeks now and I’m learning about my real mother, though some of it I knew before from the counselling I had to have because my case was different, because I was ten months old, not a straight up immediate adoption, so the case had to be discussed fully, and the mathematician and the librarian were told all sorts so they knew my real mother was unstable (D’s description?) and they had to think hard about taking me on in case, bad seed and all that. My parents had follow up interviews after they got me to see if I had been traumatised by changing parents. I’m not sure I should tell Maeve what I know, that she was in London and alone, had me, kept me, then people talked her into giving me up, said it was for the best. Here’s the thing, Mum (Dianne) told me Maeve was from Australia and she thought Sydney but I wonder now if Mum just told me that to put me off the trail?

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***

Mum told me Maeve had to have therapy before she signed the papers to make sure she was clear about what she was doing and not still totally screwed up, and of course my real father didn’t figure in it anywhere, as I said, Father Unknown on the form. I think it shocked me because it was so unexpected, and honest, it carries a message. I know it has always shocked Dianne and the Mathematician, that my real mother was loose, as someone once said. But at least I now have his name, though he’s lost. That has been playing on my mind. I woke up last night thinking about it all, for some reason I think she’s lying or holding something back. I couldn’t get back to sleep. She might have been lying to protect someone or herself, maybe he was married... people do lie, about everything. But maybe he doesn’t even know. I don’t believe that it’s a Scotsman. I want him to be an Australian. I see him in a Kombi flogging it around Europe, or climbing the Inca trail in Peru, totally unaware he had a daughter. I wonder if he did know would he have come back, would have taken me with him? Maybe we could have trekked the Inca trail together or run with those bulls in Pamplona, even the Munich Beer Fest. I would have been in that. I’m not sure why I don’t believe her. When I first rang her and talked to her she sent me some photos of herself taken before I was born. I’ve got it with me here. She’s standing next to a Kombi van with a whole lot of guys but the one next to her has his arm around her and I think it is him, if it is then I have his hair. Jet black and straight. I always knew my mother was Australian and so I just decided my dad was too so I looked at Aussies in London, after I got that photo, looking for jet black hair and a wide smile with a little gap in the front teeth. As if he was still in London all those years later. Long gone. Moved on, travelled far away. Maybe he would have loved me if he’d known: would have taken me with him as he back-packed around the world. Now she’s telling me my Dad is from Scotland.

***

In her letters when she first wrote she told me my Australian grandparents were dead. She told me about her brother, my uncle Eoin, but she didn’t sound too jazzed about him or his wife, Louise. Of course I’ve met them now, and their kids, my cousins! Amazing.

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Come to think of it she was very low key about a lot of things which makes me think she’s lying or holding something back. She doesn’t seem normal to me, always holding back. There’s no details in what she says, in her stories, maybe she really didn’t want me, doesn’t like me. Maybe she hates kids. She keeps telling me that life was fine but she was in a bad place. Stupid expression, what place could be that bad to give your baby away? I hope I can have children. Chernobyl blew up in Russia when I was about five. A nuclear re-actor spewed poison everywhere, blew all over Europe and I was on holiday with D and the mathematician somewhere in Germany. Who knows where all that radio-active shit went, only time will tell, I could already be sterile. I asked Maeve more about the guy standing next to her in the photo. She said he was a friend she travelled with for a bit, that she met him and his friends in Scotland somewhere. I nagged her for more and she said he went off to work as a swimming coach somewhere. She didn’t show much emotion when she was talking about him, and I got a funny feeling that maybe he wasn’t my father. I don’t know what to believe. Is she telling the truth? It’s depressing, and makes me hate her. Was I stupid dreaming of an Australian father, going up to Australia House, a bit tragic I know, trying to work out if I belonged or if I was an imposter? And of course I felt like an imposter. The place is always heaving with loud Aussies in bright clothes, parkas and ski boots, laughing and skiving off and talking about their trips to Scandi or Pamplona. I used to get a newspaper, and sit near them to listen to their voices and what they had been doing, where they were going. I felt jealous, rotten jealous. It could have been me. Why wasn’t it me? Which is why I began looking through Sydney phone books where I always thought she was. When I was little I dreamed about meeting her and the two of us walking across the Harbour Bridge hand in hand. I don’t even know if you can walk across it, is it just cars, I don’t know, and staring up at the Opera House, or a visit to Taronga Zoo. It was always blue and sunny in those day-dreams. Bright sun, blue waves on the harbour, Sydney Happy-town but in fact it was a totally different place... Hobart, a nasty cold goblin town, crouching at the end of the world with its little secrets about my life.

***

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The thing is D. kept it from me for ages that M was from Hobart. She kind of let me think it was Sydney and I often wonder if she didn’t really want me to find M even though she said she did. No wonder I don’t know who I am or where my place is. Saschie calls it Unlocking The Secret Maeve Geography Files. Both of my mothers from Oz though D and her family left Melbourne when she was tiny, went to England, her father transferred with the bank. She says she never really thought of herself as Aussie though she must have somehow deep down to have wanted me. I think. I wonder if you can ever stop being from wherever you were born? I don’t think so, surely it’s embedded. I’m not sure whether to tell M that D was born in Oz. It’s kind of a weird co-incidence. Callum McKay. I want to go to Scotland to find him.

***

Maeve wanted to know if I’d been happy and I told her I was, though it wasn’t totally true. I hated being adopted but how can you say that to people. D sometimes bought me books for Aussies kids, little gumnut people and a wombat, koalas, but they didn’t do much for me either. Maybe I’m schizo, I don’t know. When I got older I liked all those stories about the kids locked in the attic. D. used to say, Em, you can’t be angry all your life you know. I’d just go up on the roof terrace and lie there and look out over the Common: away to the towers of the city and think about other places, people far away, making up faces for them, imagining their voices and their houses, especially the ones whose lives should have been my life. I used to get depressed and bunk off school. Hide in my bedroom, wander around the house when no one was home. I’d go into the spare room and look at Dad’s railway station names. I felt like kicking them all over, but just moved them around and swapped their positions, put Tonge where Gretton should have been. I know Maeve wasn’t happy either, couldn’t have been. Poor Maeve, I call her that to myself, put me down on a bed in a hand-over clinic and just had to walk away, leave me, because she’d signed a paper. She wrote in a letter that as she walked away I cried out, angrily, and she went to turn back, but she didn’t. Yeah, The Road Not Taken. Why did she tell me that? It made me sad when I thought of what might have been. She was a coward. Though I wonder if that was what the mathematician was getting at, kind of excusing M. She was a bit older than I am now when she gave

155 me up. I could not imagine doing it, can’t even imagine having a baby, as for sex, tried that. I’ve got a feeling she’s a bit weird. I rang Saschie again in London. She wonders if Maeve really is my Mum. Bloody hell, that’s all a bit Hollywood Horror for me. Typical Saschie, my best friend. I miss her, we have such a good laugh together. She was born the day after John Lennon was shot so she thinks she’s channelling him and will be a rock star one day. I don’t think so but she does crack me up. Hearing her voice makes me homesick for London. So far away on the other side of the world and hours and hours!! I didn’t realise how much I loved it. For example the tube, not going up and down the windy tunnels or escalators but sitting in the carriage and being whisked along, zooming along in fact, being in there with so many people, walking with legions yet being anonymous. It is weird to be in the lives of strangers for just a little bit, then the doors slide open and away they go. Even if you catch the tube about the same time every day, stand on the same spot on the platform, get in the same carriage you still probably won’t see any one familiar, sometimes, but not often. So many trains, and a few minutes up or down the escalator or getting held up somewhere can mean you miss that person. Often I invent occupations and lives for the person sitting opposite (or squashed up against me), so many people in and out, squeezing past. Dick and Dora, Melanie, Michael and Gertrude, and all the modern names, hyphenated trendy names. I wasn’t given modern. Mine is (are) more about other people than about me. Meg or Margaret, is the name I had for the first ten months of my life. The Emily was tacked on at the front by my mum Dianne. I’ve tried loads of nicknames but none of them really stuck. My mother (Dianne, that is) calls me her Lost Little Kangaroo. I’m homesick.

***

Maeve took me over again to see her brother, my uncle Eoin and his wife Louise. I like them, he’s kind of quirky with a weird sense of humour. They seem normal, I’ve promised to stay a few nights with them at some stage. I’ve done quite a few little sketches: houses, the harbour. Maeve drags me around when she goes to interview people at galleries, she writes the art pages for the local paper, which I secretly think is a bit of a rag. When we go to the galleries I feel as if I’m the exhibition. She keeps telling our story to people who stare at me or bray

156 in Aussie accents, how wonderful, what a great story, so nice for the two of you, great times ahead! Prats. It makes me want to go totally psycho.

***

We’re going into the countryside, or the bush as they call it here. Maeve has some art commission, to raise awareness of the environment, preservation, all that. She’s going to photograph the native orchids that grow here, in what someone said was just ordinary bushland. I like the bush, it’s not ordinary at all, but quite unexpectedly different from home, the green and pleasant land and the sky here is so bright, makes me squint. We’re planning our next trip down to Bruny Island; fine- tuning the Gulliver’s Club itinerary - all the details of the places we’ll go. It’s beautiful here, so much nature all around, mountains and forests and amazing beaches... but so different from home.

***

The photography trip was great, we all sort of got closer. Uncle Eoin knew all the best spots. We went over to the west, way into the forest to find some rare orchid Maeve was writing about and needed some photographs of. I was happy tramping through the grass listening to birds that sound really strange, different from home. I can’t name them all but Maeve told me a few that she knew. At once stage we walked through quite a creepy forest, not at all like the woodlands at home. It was full of really tall ferns which they call man ferns, and I think that is a seriously creepy name, reminds me of The Triffids. Maeve said it was near where some convicts escaped and ate each other. I thought she was making that up but Uncle Eoin told me the story as we sat having a bit of a picnic. I felt sorry for the convicts. He and I went for a walk by ourselves while Maeve was taking her photographs. He told me that when he was a kid his bedroom was right at the top of the house and from his windows he could see the panorama of nature, as he called it. He said he loved to watch the colours racing on the mountain when the sun went in and out, and he vowed that one day he would know every inch of those hills, every creek-bed, each rock, and tree. I like the way he says things, like the ideas are coming from some deep place of nature, it makes me want to rush off and get my paints. And

157 he does know a lot about the bush, really interesting stuff about the plants, and the history of what happened when the English came here. Some of it is cruel and gruesome, but I was fascinated. Eeek, blood lust! He is so different from my Dad in England, of course he’s not my Dad, he’s my uncle but talking to him and listening to his stories I felt I had known him ages. He didn’t feel like a stranger to me. It was a good feeling. I didn’t let on that I didn’t really like Maeve, I know it’s anger at being rejected but I just can’t seem to get past it. Anyway, I loved listening to him and when we went back to join up with Maeve I felt annoyed at her all over again and could not look her in the eye. Later on we came across a protest camp with people trying to stop a new road the Government is going to build right through the forest. Uncle Eoin was pleased to see them as he had a lot of history with the area from when he was younger but we couldn’t get close to talk because the protestors saw Maeve’s camera and yelled out, no journalists. We just kept walking towards them to explain but they started throwing stuff at us and I called them cockheads. I don’t think Maeve knew I was a bit sweary in real life. What a laugh. Anyway it got nasty and Uncle Eoin was making no progress with them which I think embarrassed him a bit so we turned back. They yelled at us something like yeah fuck off to wherever you came from. I gave them another mouthful, Maeve stared at me then all three of us burst out laughing. Maeve was so lucky to have a brother when she was growing up, and lucky to be able to do her art, but I felt a bit sorry for Uncle Eoin when he described the factory where he worked when he left school and how he made a promise to himself to get out and into another life when he could. Maeve got the better end of all that when they were kids. Listening to him talk I realise I would have liked a brother although it sounded as if they didn’t do that much together, as if they were making an effort for me, which was good. Uncle Eoin said he was pleased there was a feisty new generation of greenies willing to keep the fight going. He’s a real conservationist.

***

Another day of feeling sad about Maeve. Such a rush of mixed emotions... a roller-coaster really. My confidence zooms, then just goes flat again. We are total strangers and I just don’t feel as if I belong. Worse, will I ever stop being angry with her? Maybe it’ll be okay one day when I really get to know her, but I don’t know

158 when or how that will happen as I know I won’t stay here long. I want to get back home, to London... didn’t think I’d get homesick but I am. Tomorrow will be new territory for me, I’m going over to stay with Uncle Eoin and his wife for a few days... spend some time with my cousins. It will give me a break from feeling bad about Maeve. I’m so disappointed... I just don’t feel comfortable around her, not like I do with him. I wish I could have been his daughter.

[ END ]

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‘WAYS OF SEEING’: THE TASMANIAN LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURE

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1. INTRODUCTION Landscape ‘is not a thing, but a way of seeing’ says Edward Relph, the cultural geographer and author of Place and Placelessness (1976). The notion of different ways of seeing in relation to the interaction of humans with a known landscape and the way they react when encountering the unfamiliar is an enduring preoccupation of many, not least writers and artists. Certainly it has been one of mine for many years, dating back to 1973 when I travelled from the Kimberley region of North Western Australia where I had been working and painting to England and thence to work in Grasmere in the middle of the Lake District in Westmoreland. At that time John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing had just been published and the associated television series was being shown. Although Berger’s focus was the ‘hidden’ ideologies in Western cultural aesthetics, it was the notion of a ‘hidden’ force within the artist that intrigued me, particularly because I was at that time experiencing the visual ‘shock’ as a painter of moving from one colour palette to another: from the reds, browns and burnt-out skies of the Australian Kimberley to the filigree of greens in the heart of Wordsworth’s Lake District. I struggled to ‘turn my eye’ to depict cool green fields, dramatic slopes littered with scree, and the grey depths of mountain tarns. It was then I began to think of the ‘force within’, of the aesthetic pathway we follow which may, or may not, diverge at some juncture. I wondered how long it would take me, as a tourist, to ‘see’ my new landscape, and I considered the forces at work on those early explorers, botanists, and artists, who depicted the flora and fauna of the ‘new’ world. As an Australian I thought of the 19th Century painter John Glover, known as the ‘Father of Australian landscape painting’, who left England as a successful artist and moved to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831 where he set about recording his surroundings. Much of his work reflects his traditional European training modelled by such landscape masters of the late 1700s as Claude Lorraine, Salvatore Rosa, and Gaspard Poussin. Despite his work being traditionally European it is possible to see him training his eye to the differently shaped gum trees, the spindly bushes, and the bright skies (even in Van Diemen’s land). The landscape is depicted with an eye to detail of authenticity and the hillside flora looks much as it does to this day with the exception that in places it has, due to environmental protection by volunteer bush care

162 groups, grown to such an extent as to obscure the view (Timms, 2009; p.168). My Harvest Home depicts settlers gathering hay onto a wagon: the picture somewhat reminiscent of Constable’s bucolic The Hay Wain. In Mt Wellington Glover has depicted a large group of Aboriginals seemingly merrily encamped by the Derwent with the mountain looming behind them. He is perhaps paying tribute to the Aboriginals and their way of life for, by the time he was painting the picture, most of them had been shipped off by Governor Arthur to inhospitable islands or else hunted down and killed. It is of course a matter of personal preference but it is the work of William Charles Piguenit, a Hobart-born Tasmanian landscape painter, whose brooding works strike more of a chord with me - possibly because his paintings seem to have more of an emphasis on the geographical landscape rather than on the people. A contemporary of Glover, he was equally prolific but the title of ‘Father of Australian Landscape Painting’ went to the English-born Glover, rather than to the local Pigenuit - possibly because he was the son of a ticket-of-leave convict. Pigenuit thus had the ‘convict stain’, so abhorred until relatively recent times (Koch, 1993; p.111; Timms, 2009; p.148). My interest in how long it took for us to ‘see’ a landscape, and how we saw it, was added to by my experiences as an English teacher when I encouraged my students to consider the ways writers of fiction depicted the landscape and how that depiction was a force within the narrative. Often it was Hardy or Bronte, but as the years went on Stow, White, and Winton were added to the canon of texts which explored a physical and psychological landscape: poetic, strangely beautiful, and often mysterious. These ruminations on the ‘ways of seeing’ in art and literature have led me to the investigation of the notion of ‘belonging’, of feeling comfortable in a known space, where that comfort extends beyond the physical, into emotion, intellect, and ultimately to the point of influencing the aesthetic response. ‘Ways of Seeing: The Tasmanian Landscape in Literature’ documents my aesthetic exploration by tracing the depiction of landscape in selected key works set in Tasmania: Marcus Clarke’s For The Term of his Natural Life (1870-1872), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1978), James McQueen’s Hook’s Mountain (1982), and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994). The exegesis will argue that the desire within humans to ‘belong’ and to establish an identity is inextricably linked to landscape and place. Further, the concept of the place to which we feel we ‘belong’

163 extends beyond the physical, beyond ‘the view’: it extends into emotion and intellect. Commitment to a sense of place makes demands on our actions and on our attitudes, and ‘belonging’ is achieved by personal identification with a landscape whether that takes place within the context of the society, a cultural historical legacy, religion, or through concern for the natural environment. The Tasmanian landscape has been variously narrated in its history, giving rise to a ‘literary timeline’ of impressions of landscape from first settlement to current day, revealing differences of cultural identity in the development of ‘nationhood’. Consequently, the historical and the socio-political are evident and changing throughout the chronological scope of the novels chosen for this study. The exegesis explores the way writers of fiction have responded to landscape and contributed to the formation of the social and cultural context of the island. As Christopher Koch remarked, ‘Geography is the great hidden shaper of history and character. The essence in landscape and climate will always impose itself on the human spirit, and especially the writer’s spirit, more finally and insidiously than anything else, in the end’ (1993; p.118). The chosen texts are used to trace not only aspects of the depiction of landscape, but the way in which the concept of ‘landscape’ has grown to encompass broader notions of ‘country’ and ‘identity’. I note Philip Mead’s discussion of the work of Bonyhady and Griffiths (2002) in which it is suggested that ‘country’ moves away from the ‘painterly’ landscape into a richly textural evocation of cultural meanings. Country ‘is also a kinship term, implying familial and personal responsibilities and a differently conceptualised sense of ownership’ (Mead, 2009; p.555). As a painter, it is the term ‘landscape’ that I use, different from the indigenised ‘country’. The texts to be discussed were chosen based on their depiction of landscape at a particular time in Tasmanian history, and the relationship of that landscape to the key cultural narratives of Tasmania which inform the reading of the chosen texts. The study does not imply that the writers who have been chosen wrote only on that ‘landscape place’: several of the writers wrote, at various times, fiction set in other countries and other time frames. Nor do the choices mean that there were no female novelists in Tasmania, rather the choices reflect purely personal interests of this writer and are not meant to stir a gender debate.

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The exegesis will use the novels to interrogate Richard Rossiter’s study of a writer’s attachment to nature: Ordering Chaos: Nature and Identify Formation (1997). Rossiter based his work on West Australian writers of fiction and posits that there are three linear phases in attachment to nature: the first when ‘the relationship between nature and identity is of an observing, classificatory self with nature as Other: a second stage when the observation or relationship with nature is seen as constituting an objective adjunct to the narrative, particularly of the emotional self; the final third phase is of self inscription within nature, where the gap between self and Other is closed’ (1997; p.80). This is when the concept of ‘landscape’ is widened from a biological plane to one that includes a spiritual element: the ideal of the integration of humanity in a landscape. This study using Tasmanian texts suggests that there may be a fourth stage or phase, when the identity with landscape or place moves away from localised cultural narratives to interrogate the transnational. That notion will be interrogated by a study of Out of Ireland by Christopher Koch.

2. ‘WAYS OF SEEING’ ‘Landscape’ connotes a geographical environment, and to some, an aesthetic notion, yet a landscape is also a ‘place’ within which humans live out their daily lives of tedium, passion, or despair. Some lives are fulfilled, some uneventful, but the experiences within each contribute to the development of ‘identity’. For some people landscape is ‘who they are’ and is contingent upon their past and their hopes for the future; it may hold positive memories but may also be a repository of grief and loss. Landscape, therefore, is not just what we see: in its broadest sense it can provide that core human need, the seductive pleasure of ‘belonging’ and the awareness of ‘self’. It can hold a spiritual value that is ‘invisible’ to others, this, due to the different ways by which humans interpret landscape, such interpretation leading to a cultural construct. Maria Tumarkin (2001) in her analysis of the effect of traumatic incidents in specific places and in her interrogation of that trauma on the community asks ‘What do places do to us?’. In answer she references the work of cultural geographer Claude Fischer (Networks and Places, 1977) and affirms that ‘place’ is the ‘bedrock’ upon which identity is built being ‘storehouses for individual and collective memories’ (Tumarkin, 2001; p. 200). Moreover, in stating that ‘place is always being invested

165 with meaning and impregnated with memory’ (2001; p.200) Tumarkin suggests that the way memories are layered on ‘place’ requires a community to consider the assimilation (or not) of that new layer. In Place and Placelessness (1976) the cultural geographer Edward Relph rejected the notion that landscape or place is a non-negotiable dimension in life and argued that place is far more than somewhere we live, further, that ‘landscapes change their identity according to the way in which we experience them’ (1976; p.133) and are ‘defined less by unique locations’ because they are ultimately ‘important sources of individual and communal identity’ (1976; p.141). He felt that space, or place (in a broader sense, landscape) should be explored in terms of how people experienced it. Also, that in identifying the symbolic significance of a landscape we should consider not only its three components - its physical face such as waterscapes, geology and vegetation - but how it functions, how it is used by humans, or even if it is used at all. This consideration substantiates the contention that, in landscape repose value and meanings which sustain humans in their search for identity. Landscape ‘is not a thing, but a way of seeing’ (p.45). Twenty years later, in An Author’s Response: Place and Placelessness in a New Context (2000; pp.613-619), Relph addressed the opinion of some theorists (Massey, 1997; Peet, 1998) who felt his work operated as a nostalgic memoir in tribute to past time and place. Relph affirmed his stance, stating that the world of the post modern condition of technology and globalization did not alter the persistent human desire to acknowledge that ‘place’ was central to identity (Seamon and Sower, 2008; p.50). The views of Relph are in accord with those of another cultural geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan who writes of the ‘affective bond between people, place and identity’ (Topophlia, 1974; p.5). Tuan believes that the landscape contributes to perception of self and culture. His emphasis (whether it be landscape or the built environment) is that the aesthetic is not a part of culture, but that it is the heart of culture: it is the core. Tuan also asserts that it is the pleasure of the senses that inspires people to create. One can see that this applies to Tasmania where the beauty of the landscape provides a stimulus to the senses: a pause to smell the ocean, to contemplate the changing, racing colours of the mountains, and to note the passage of the breeze or storm across a treescape - its movement seen only through the bending and swaying of branches. Weather phenomena dominate life in Hobart, sprawled as it is at the base of Mount

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Wellington: the colour of the sky, the rocky sides of the mountain, and the forest, change from hour to hour as does the colour of the Derwent Estuary. Sometimes the clouds sink so low that the mountain disappears: to a newcomer, the sight is startling, for the mountain presides in the consciousness of everyone and when it disappears the effect can be disorienting. In Space and Place (1977), Tuan built on his work in Topophilia (1974) by analysing the environment in terms of human experience and identity, and by exploring his interests in the way people form attachment to place and nation. He discusses the ‘scale’ of the concept of ‘place’ suggesting that it can stretch from a comfortable chair at home, to a place only imagined. Importantly, he also asks, ‘how long does it take to know a place?’ (1977; p.183), observing that getting to know a place first requires only ‘abstract knowledge’ which is rapidly gleaned by the observant: the simple ‘where’ and ‘what’ and ‘who’ on a superficial level. Quick too is the visual quality if ‘one has the artist’s eye’. However, it is the ‘feel’ of a place which takes longer because it forms part of the subconscious. He suggests ‘attachment’ can take either years or, it can happen in one intense moment. Regarding the length of time it takes to ‘know’ a landscape or place Tuan suggests contemplation of the ‘life cycle’ of a human: ‘Ten years in childhood are not the same as ten years in youth or manhood’ (p.185). He suggests this is so because a ‘child knows the world more sensuously than does the adult’ (p.185). Tuan refers to the writer V.S. Naipaul who also contemplates the ‘knowing’ of a place where one is born. Naipaul in The Mimic Men has one of his characters declare, ‘where you born, man, you born’ (1967; p.20), the words a response to being told the names of unknown trees in his ‘new’ country. The character reflects and realises that when he is in the place of his birth (The Caribbean) he subconsciously awaits the seasonal flowering of the local ‘poui’ trees which occurs only one week in the year. This subconscious knowledge is part of him and similar to the marking of time and celebration felt by the Japanese when the cherry trees of their homeland blossom for such a short period in spring. Tuan suggests that the seasons and elements such as the landmarks of homeland, mountain peaks, and culturally significant places such as battlefields, all enhance ‘a people’s sense of identity’ (p.159). This feeling of belonging and of knowing (even subconsciously) grows easily from familiarity into a ‘quiet attachment’. Tuan takes care to point out that although people may wander the world, they will still look back, for various reasons, but the shared reason for looking

167 back, to think of ‘place’, is the need to acquire a sense of self and an identity (1977; p.186): it is something of the ‘knowing’ that artists or writers may find in landscape and place. This ‘seeing’, belonging, and the development of an identity, is relevant to the works chosen for this study but also to those chosen by Bruce Bennett for the anthology, Homing In: Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood (2006). The essays discuss Tim Winton, Dorothy Hewett, and Paul Hasluck, as well as a newcomer to (Western) Australia, the Malaysian poet Ee Tiang Hong, and an expatriate, Peter Porter. As Bennett states, his choices were made not for the ‘canonical status of authors but their fruitful engagement with themes of alienation and belonging in a changing Australia’ (2006; p.1). Poststructuralist theory has ‘cast grave doubt upon the classical notions of truth, reality, meaning and knowledge’ (Eagleton, 1983; p.143), the result of which has been the ‘decentring of our intellectual universe’ (Barry, 2002; p.64). Notions once thought of as ‘givens’ are now seen to be ‘socially constructed’ or ‘fluid and unstable’ (Barry, 2002; p.33). ‘Fluid identities or world views are shaped by particular collectivities that are socially and geographically situated’ (Barry, 2002; p.3). The most ‘fluid’ sense of self or identity has been shaped in part by a social context and a geographical location, despite the individual’s present state of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins, 1998; p.3). This shaping and layering of self identity is, as Simon Schama contends in Landscape and Memory, built up ‘as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’ (1995; p.6). It is not just a history of geology and vegetation; it is the history of memory and has an acculturated meaning. Schama’s work with its Northern Hemisphere context foregrounds the stratigraphy of history, generations, and memory. He contends that landscape may ‘indeed be a text on which generations write their recurring obsessions’ (p.12), thus laying claim to a national identity, as in ‘Sweet France’, ‘The Sceptred Isle’, and ‘America the Beautiful’ (p.15). Landscape as text is a notion applicable to Tasmania, the Van Diemen’s Land of the past where the ‘recurring obsession’ is with its historical landscape as a settler colony. It is a particular historical landscape which demonstrably has provided a narrative arc for literature, a reading of which gives pause for reflection on the ‘dispossession’ of the Aboriginal people, and the dismal lives of convicts. To these has been added contemporary concerns about the use (or not) of the physical

168 environment. As Schama observes, landscape has ‘the power to ‘shape institutions we still live with’ (1995; p.15) and thus with which we identify. The affect of landscape is one explored in Jane Grellier’s thesis ‘Awe, disillusionment and fear: attitudes to landscape among Christian colonists of far South-West Australia’ (1996), the focus being the period 1829-1849 and the ways in which the cultural background of the colonists influenced their responses to the landscape. Grellier’s work provides a useful foil to a study of similar issues in Tasmania in that Grellier also cites the conclusions of Relph that landscape is not a physical reality but a construction created by the person viewing it, shaped by historical, geographical and cultural contexts. She also explores the influence of the Christian heritage and attitudes to landscape, that being, one of spiritual awe but within which still resides a fear of the unknown or the ‘Other’. The experience of Georgiana Molloy was chosen by Grellier to investigate the ways in which an individual begins to form an identity with a landscape. Molloy, a piously religious woman isolated in the South-West in the early years of Western Australian colonisation, became absorbed with nature and her surroundings. Intrigued by the unfamiliar vegetation and the beauty of their flowers she began a project collecting seeds for experiments in propagation. While travelling about to collect specimens she also formed friendly relationships with the Aboriginal people in the area. Ultimately, she was totally at peace with her isolated ‘quiet’ surroundings, drawing strength and comfort from the natural world, thus moving from, as Grellier states, ‘Outsider’ to ‘Insider’ in a landscape with which she identified. She formed the ‘quiet attachment’ of which Yi-Fu Tuan speaks (Tuan, 1977; p.159). Attachment to nature also interested the West Australian academic Richard Rossiter who provides an instructive and unique discussion of various ‘stages’ in the process of attachment (Ordering Chaos: Nature and Identify Formation, 1997). Rossiter is intrigued by the suggestions of the way in which a relationship with the world and nature formed, and further developed into a sense of self. He cites his initial inspiration for the subject as the critique given by Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992) of the Swedish botanist Carle Linne whose work The System of Nature (1735) was the starting point of zoological nomenclature and a considerable influence on all further botanical investigation: a ‘disciple of Linne, a J.G. Solander was with Joseph Banks in Cook’s initial exploration crew’ (Birns, 2005; p.130). Linne (according to Pratt) asserted that ‘plants by their reproductive parts effected a change in the way

169 people saw the world’ (Pratt, 1992; p.76), his comments referencing botanical seasonal changes such as the burst of bloom in springtime, mentioned elsewhere in this exegesis. Rossiter, although foregrounding the role of nature, develops his ideas regarding identity with due emphasise on the equal importance of the influence of the political, the sexual, the cultural, and the national. In his pursuit of an understanding of how identity is formed he applied himself to the study of West Australian texts of fiction and non-fiction. His objective was to interrogate the ‘way in which an unstable self is represented in the different narratives. The instability suggests a self in the process of change’ (1997; p.77). He cites first a description by E.W. Landor, The Bushman; or Life in a New Country, an observation made in 1847of the Swan River or ‘Perth Water’ from Mount Eliza where the English narrator ‘muses whether the scene had been designed for thousands of years to be viewed only by savages, mindless as the birds and fishes that frequented its waters’ (p.77). Rossiter provides the commentary that it is the musings of a ‘European’ ... ‘certain of his rights’ and dismissive of any claim by the Aboriginal occupiers of the land. This, Rossiter claims, is the example of ‘the primitive as Other’: a threat to the cultured and the civilized. Rossiter outlines as evidence of a ‘paradigmatic shift’ the work of the authors K.S. Prichard and E.L. Grant Watson, where (Rossiter believes) their attachment to nature has moved from the view of ‘Other’ to a state where it is ‘separate from the self, but able to represent an aspect of self’ (p.78). Although he mentions those early works, he explicates the point by more detailed discussion of several later authors: Seaforth Mackenzie (The Young Desire It, 1937), Peter Cowan (The Colour of the Sky, 1986) and Kim Scott (True Country, 1993). Rossiter is of the view that there are examples in those works of the ‘chaos of identity’: a ‘chaos’ which is resolved by developing a relationship with country, as when Billy in True Country goes to the Kimberley and learns his history in relation to the naming and the powers of nature (Rossiter, 1997; p.79). Through such a process, the character recognises nature as a part of his ‘self’. Rossiter then offers as an example of his third ‘stage’ in the process of attachment to ‘place’ the West Australian novel Cloudstreet (Winton, 1991) where nature becomes ‘that-which-I-am’ (Rossiter, 1997; p.78). This narration of the

170 identification, and the process of becoming ‘one’ with nature is what Yi-Fu Tuan means when he identifies a ‘quiet attachment’ (Tuan, 1977; p.159). Further evidence of this third and final phase in Rossiter’s model may be found in the writings of Marie Bjelke-Petersen. Roslynn Haynes (Romanticism and Environmentalism: the Tasmanian Novels of Marie Bjelke-Petersen, 2001) suggests that Bjelke-Petersen’s several works published in the early 1900s demonstrate that her Christian beliefs and devotion served as a focus for her identification with landscape. Her inspiration stemmed from the purity she saw in the untouched landscape which gave rise to her belief that the New World was morally superior to the Old World and the sublime Tasmanian landscape was a place of healing. Building on the ideas of Rossiter, I suggest that there may be a further, fourth stage in the development of a literary consciousness in relation to landscape and identity: a fourth stage, where the focus of writers is outward-looking and their ‘way of seeing’ is not of the landscape of a regional self-conscious cultural identity but is an active participation in what Graham Huggan terms ‘transnational cultural traffic’ (2007; p.xiv). Huggan argues that Australian writers should not be tasked with maintaining a dialogue on evolving local – national concerns. Rather he suggests Australian literature should, as ‘settler literature’, also concern itself with its changing relationship with an increasingly globalized world and to interrogate the national through the lens of the transnational. The ‘transnational imaginary’ exists, according to Huggan, by ‘shuttling’ back and forth between the local and the global. He suggests this is a process of post-colonialism of national literatures in that it ‘engages’ with ‘what others have made out of Australia’ and is therefore ‘always effectively transnational’ (2007; p.viii). I suggest that it may be not so much a ‘shuttling back and forth’ – rather it may be a spiral. I am thinking here of Bruner’s ‘spiral curriculum’, not in any sense of structured constructivist learning, but as a model to visualise the momentum of centripetal force spiralling through the cultural narratives of Tasmania then ultimately moving outwards as centrifugal force asserts itself. Huggan also interrogates the concept of an identifiable ‘Australian literature’ and warns against both the ‘patronizing view of Australian literature as merely a branch of English literature’ and the inclination to view it as ‘anti-colonialist literature of national self-affirmation’ (2007; p.5). Rather, he suggests, it should be placed in the ‘ambivalent context’ of steering ‘a not always careful path between metropolitan accommodationism and post-colonial resistance’ which ‘exists in semi-permanent

171 tension with its larger British and American counterparts’ (2007; p.6). Further, he notes the existence of a sustained expectation that the literature of Australia should be ‘identifiably Australian’ although exceptions could be made for those (as he points out) whom Nile calls ‘global celebrity writers’ (Nile, 2002; p.12). Huggan also affirms the difficulty of finding a distinctive collective of the identifiably Australian when there are, as he notes, three strands of Australian writing (settler , indigenous, and migrant), there being, of course, no ‘stable’ or ‘singular’ identity. Here Huggan is referencing the useful critical commentary of such as Graham Turner (1994), and Paul Carter (1999). My study does not suggest that the ‘transnational’, or suggested fourth stage of the focus of narrative identification and ‘place’, is necessarily progressed to, or that all writers process through these stages one after the other in some lock-step, prescribed manner of heightened awareness. Rather, it is suggested that there are four ‘ways of seeing’ - of identification with landscape in its broadest cultural sense - and that a melange of elements including social context is at work. One of those elements is engagement through a complex and multi-layered process with geographical location, the transnational - beyond the local, beyond borders.

3. WHY LANDSCAPE – WHY TASMANIA? People of a certain age will recall a prickling discomfort from their schooldays when they were given plastic map templates of Australia which had dotted lines designating state borders. Mysterious to some would have been an awareness that Tasmania was not on the template and seemed to have been ‘lost’ from the rest of Australia. Tasmania is, yet is not, part of Australia: it is the metaphorical equivalent in landscape of what it means to belong, and yet not. The separation from the rest of Australia has perhaps seen the development of an ‘island identity’ which has resulted in a sharper focus on the narrative arc of its local history. The concept of an identity with nature and landscape is also re-enforced in Tasmania, where at every turn the beauty of nature assails the senses. Although small in area, the island has many glorious places of natural beauty: stretches of white sand crescent beaches; a multitude of smaller islands; the interior hinterland of lakes and mountains, and yet further east and south, the almost impenetrable wilderness. All

172 such fascinate and deepen the love of place of those who kayak the rivers or who sail, hike, and climb. Place and landscape are also the inspiration of artists and writers in Tasmania as they are, of course, world-wide and across Australia. Bruce Bennett states that ‘one can discern a powerful habit of place-making among Western Australian authors’ (2006; p.62) and lists Cowan, Stow, Jolley, Davis, Drewe and Winton as writers for whom landscape ‘has been a haunting presence demanding some form of fictional reconstruction’ (2006; p.62). This notion of identity and the sense of belonging to a landscape is also evident in the process of Tasmanian authors and that the concept of place ‘as a meeting ground of mental, emotional, and physical states is a suitable focus for the literary imagination’ (2006; p.62). Northern Hemisphere critics and writers have been similarly absorbed by imaginative impressions of landscape and in ‘place-making’ (Ebbatson, 2005) attempts to unravel the reading of a landscape by noting D.H. Lawrence’s view that throughout history one ‘England’ blotted out another: that industrial England blotted out agricultural England. In Tasmania, the colonial past has not been ‘blotted’ out, but has been ‘layered’ by narratives which work to expiate the guilt of genocide and give currency to the eco-political and economic debates of the destruction of ‘wilderness’. The debate concerning guilt and its effect on national identity is still evident in contemporary writers and in fact has formed a palimpsest of the Tasmanian historical narrative. Landscape as ‘character’ has been a staple of much Australian fiction (for example, Stow and White). It is a concept also evident in English novels such as those of Thomas Hardy where the English landscape works to support the narrative and assist in the development of plot or character. Hardy’s belief was that the ‘beauty of association’ with a landscape was more important than the actual physical beauty of it. He was concerned with the ‘emotional register’ within a landscape and how it might strike a chord in the reader. The first white people to see the Australian wilderness saw no other humans (who ‘mattered’ to them), all was unfamiliar: the skies, the stars, the season, plants, and animals. Those writers of the nineteenth century whose ideology was based in the Judaeo Christian tradition saw the new South land as a malleable landscape which humans could, with their superior ‘virtue’, adapt to their own requirements.

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The cultural belief of that period was that humans were superior to and separate from the environment. Those who were settlers began to tame, re-arrange, and order the wilderness in an effort to humanise it into the forms they knew: towns, parks, squares, straight streets, and vistas across the ‘fields’. Those who were visitors and returning to the Northern hemisphere tended to dramatise or romanticise its difference, even to scoff at what they had seen. In either case, the view was that humanity was superior to the land they beheld, and they should set about rendering the country familiar to themselves by subduing the savage, weird, and melancholy land. Later in the 1890s with the fervent birth of a nationalistic identity subscribed to and influenced by the Sydney Bulletin, writers such as Lawson and Furphy set in train a new approach to the land. Instead of it being a land which was tameable and malleable, writers saw it as a harsh and sterile land where swagmen must press through with fortitude and courage and where people had to stick together to survive (Green, 1961; Ward, 1958; Dutton, 1964). The concept of ‘the bush’ and the struggle of humans within it gave rise to the myth of mateship: men and women battling along together against the odds to make a life in the exotic great new South land. The emphasis on landscape and mateship was commonplace in the early twentieth century with bush poets and short story writers, such as Paterson and Lawson, mining a wealth of material and the public seeming to have an insatiable appetite for it, so much so that the bush and mateship became a literary tradition. The impoverished bushmen struggling through the droughts promoted the belief that humans could not tame nature, but could with mateship accommodate to and survive its vagaries and ‘terror’ (Green, 1961; Ward, 1958; Dutton, 1964). In the 1930s a group of writers under the stewardship of the poet Rex Ingamells formed The Jindyworobak Movement, their objective being to promote indigenous culture. The name supposedly meant ‘to join’ or ‘to annex’ and was an effort to foreground and develop the unique difference of Australian Aboriginal culture. It was a ‘loose attempt to develop an identifiable Australian aesthetic from the rich fabric of Aboriginal culture’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, 2002; p.143). No Aboriginals were members of the group and the movement was relatively short-lived. It did however seem to stir interest in indigenous visual art, and in the romanticised ‘Outback’ as ‘place’.

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In the 1950s there was a shift toward a more symbolic representation of the landscape, where the protagonists were somewhat sublimated by the ‘idea’ of landscape and in fact could be humiliated by its power. White and Stow in particular dispensed with the confinement of ‘mateship’ and wrote of characters whose humans concerns were set within a symbolic landscape, and although they consolidated the notion of landscape they ‘employed’ it as if the landscape itself were a character. Stow’s Tourmaline (1963) takes place in a sterile, wretched town in the arid north west of Australia existing at the mercy of the dust and the punishing sun. It is symbolic of the human struggle with landscape, and similar thematically to To the Islands (Stow, 1958) and Voss (White, 1960) in which the broad plains and high wide skies were as much ‘characters’ as the humans. In those works the Australian landscape is the stage upon which is explored the way humans related to others, and whether they survived. The key narratives of Tasmania have much the same basic elements as mainland Australia but three stand out quite distinctly, those three being: • its beginnings as a penal colony, • the genocide of the indigenous population • the on-going battle between conservationists and industry. The first penal settlement was established in Hobart in 1803 and the transported convicts were set to work on building roads, harbours, settlements. Those who were troublesome were sent to camps on the West coast where starvation, floggings and other forms of discipline were so brutal that many convicts chose to attempt an escape - preferring starvation in the bush or being shot to the conditions in the camp. Sometimes they murdered each other so that they might be hanged instead of having to endure. Those who did escape in groups sometimes resorted to cannibalism in attempts to stay alive (Collins, 2004; p.4; Maxwell-Stewart, 2008; p.69; Timms, 2009; p.147). Within thirty years of the first settlement the Aboriginal population of approximately six thousand had fallen to less than four hundred as a result of genocide. Tribes were rounded up by soldiers and marksmen with dogs, they were chased onto promontories overlooking cliffs, from which they were further driven into the sea to drown or be killed leaping from the cliff tops. Some tribes who were judged to be less dangerous were taken to offshore islands where they were left: they starved, contracted illnesses, and died. Dispossessed and removed from their traditional

175 lands, their numbers dwindled rapidly. Adding to the guilt and shame of that period of history are other appalling acts such as the removal of heads or feet or hands, which were smoked and sent to museums around the world (Ryan, 1996; Timms, 2009). Paramount in contemporary Tasmania is the controversy over the logging of old growth forest so that the wood can be pulped for paper or turned into wood chips for export: in the place of the eucalypts are planted rows of pine trees. In the 1960s and 1970s conservationists mounted campaigns: battles were fought, lost, and won. Lost in 1972 was Lake Pedder, ruined for a hydro electric project; however the Lower Gordon River and the Franklin River were saved. The stand-off continues between foresters and environmentalists. Tasmania is not a wealthy state and has a high level of unemployment, so the controversy continues with trying to find a balance between protecting the wilderness, and providing employment. People develop a sense of place through experience and an awareness of a particular area: through knowledge of the history, geography and geology, its flora and fauna, and the built environment. Important too, are the legends and myths of history: all combine to develop a sense of ‘place’ and a relationship with others. A reading of Haynes’ Tasmanian Landscapes in Painting, Poetry and Print (2006) reveals the ways in which artists glorified the ‘untouched landscapes’: immigrant visitors regaling it as ‘more English than is England herself’ (p.197) and the way Tasmania reminded them of ‘home’. Later, there developed a ‘grass roots’ narrative of mateship and self congratulation at overcoming hardship. Much of this sprang from the West coast gold rush of the late 1890s which ‘overlaid a culture of success and progress on the dismal reputation of the area’ (Haynes, 2006; p.203), the West coast having been the site of one of the most brutal of penal settlements, Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour. The ‘myths’ of mateship continued on the West Coast of Tasmania through the stories of ‘heroic’ men who worked as ‘piners’, far from civilisation, felling and collecting Huon Pine in the wilderness. ‘Piners’ who walked in the laboured footsteps of those long dead convict slaves of Macquarie Harbour. Haynes describes a ‘contemporary triumphalism’ evident in ballads and poems of the day in which the ‘West Coasters’ were depicted as glorious heroes taming the wilderness (Haynes, 2006; p.205), an image which layered the ‘place’ with a more acceptable narrative. Most contemporary Tasmanians have moved on somewhat from the preoccupation of the ‘English’ landscape and now are absorbed in the preservation of

176 natural wilderness. Not just in parks or the wilderness but in gardens and city streets native plants are ‘all the rage’ (Timms, 2009; p.166). Indeed Astrid Wright, convenor of one of several community bush care groups, reports the Hobart City Council to be ‘much more interested in bush care than most councils’ (Timms, 2009: p.169). Tasmania’s beauty is recognised worldwide and approximately twenty percent of the island has World Heritage listing. Tasmanians have also overcome their guilt about the convict system and some now proudly claim their convict ancestors as heroes who were fighting the scourge of the English and the elitist oppression of the class system and the subsequent poverty the oppression caused. It is not surprising that Tasmania has been referred to as ‘Gothic’ (Thorne, 1990; p.121, Cranston, 2003; p.29), partly because of its landscape but more particularly its history (though it should be noted that all settler colonies have a brutal history). The narrative density of the history of the island disturbs the conscience, and the consciousness of the population, to such a degree that Tasmania is also sometimes referred to as a ‘traumascape’ (Tumarkin, 2001; p.199). In 1996 the massacre of thirty five (non-indigenous) people was perpetrated by a gunman at Port Arthur, the site of the former penal colony infamous for institutionalised barbarity. The site, one of outstanding natural beauty with soft hills, a protected bay, and rolling green lawns with lines of shady trees, was thus layered with evil yet again. The perpetrator of the massacre commented during interrogation that ‘a lot of violence has happened there. It must be the most violent place in Australia. It seemed the right place’ (Timms, 2009; p.138). Trauma and place are forces to be reckoned with, opines Tumarkin (2001; p.200). However, she states that ‘the relationship between trauma and place and identity is not an easy one to gauge’ (p.201) because it is ‘effectively overshadowed by the privileging of time’ (p.201). The death of so many innocent people in Port Arthur on that day in 1996 served to haul the visions of the trauma, cruelty and ugliness of history back into the present. The 2012 winner of the Tasmanian Glover Prize for Landscape, Rodney Pople of Sydney, created a furore of revulsion and controversy not so much by depicting the buildings at the Port Arthur convict settlement in the Romantic style of an earlier artistic era but by placing in the foreground of the picture the ghostly figure of Martin Bryant the perpetrator of the 1996 massacre.

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Tasmania has always held visions of the ‘Gothic’. It was after all the place at the end of the Earth, the unknown, where ‘criminals’ were sent, and although penal colonies existed throughout Australia, the geographical separation of Tasmania gave rise ‘to the unconscious need to use Tasmania as Australia’s psychological sink – a repository for all the displaced insecurities and cankering guilts that lurk behind the veneer of uneasy Sydney’ (Hay, 1996; Birns, 2005). Tumarkin points out that Tasmania is therefore representative in the collective imagination as a place haunted by past practices. Moreover she argues that ‘it is the spatial ordering of the “Other” which obscures the fact that Australia is, in a way, her own Tasmania – begotten in violence and shame, unable to give her ghosts a proper burial, entangled in the web of haunting repetitions’ (2001; p.205). Margaret Scott, the Hobartian poet, academic and critical commentator, stated in her 1997 annual lecture for the Tasmanian Peace Trust that ‘Tasmania is a place in which elements of Australian life become intensified, where tendencies move to inescapable consequences, battle-lines are more clearly drawn and the moderate or partial becomes extreme’ (Scott, 1997). It is those extremes so entangled in the past that have provided creative inspiration, and the identity of ‘place’ (often a Gothic representation) in Australia. Roslynn Haynes states that ‘relating to Tasmania imaginatively required a context and the inscription of “stories” to provide it with unique cultural resonances’ (2006; p.197). Those ‘stories’ and ‘unique cultural resonances’ have shaped the personal and cultural identity of Tasmanians: They are ‘stories’ which have emerged from the three key narratives which reverberate through the history of the island: the first, its beginnings as a penal colony, the second the attempted and largely ‘successful’ genocide of the indigenous population and third, the battle between conservationists and industry. Tasmania has ‘banquets of history’ (Timms, 2009; p.149). Clearly Tasmania’s physical and epic historical landscape provides a rich source for the interrogation of the way humans identify with ‘place’. The unique historical and cultural landscape ensures an abundance of ‘stories’ which invite an examination of the differences in attitude toward the ‘landscape’ of nature and human settlement evident in writers of fiction. The density of the cultural narratives in Tasmania also provides an exploration of the notion of ‘ways of seeing’ and the

178 concept of phases of ‘the relationship between nature and identity’ within those narratives.

4. THE TEXTS - THREE WAYS OF SEEING Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life provides a vivid but melodramatic starting point for this study. As an Englishman whose identity with landscape was formed in another culture, in another ‘green and pleasant land’, he like many of his colonial contemporaries looked on Tasmania only as a landscape to be used for the incarceration or exile of the outcasts of society (Hay, 1996; Birns, 2005). On assignment to report on convict history for the Melbourne newspaper The Argus, Clarke saw the landscape as a brutal partner in the control of the convicts: the ocean, the ragged coastline, the cliffs and the impenetrable bush seeming as much a prison as the existing gaol’s walls and chains. Nature offered no prospect of freedom, in fact the island’s landscape of ocean, mountain, and cliffs isolating its occupants so completely as to lead, inevitably, to the brutality which resulted from the absolute power of those in charge. In the opening lines of the section titled ‘The Topography of Van Diemen’s Land’, Clarke’s choice of words conjures the vision of a brutal, threatening prison, a dangerous wild place where nature is foe; as if the coastline approach to the colony had been nibbled by rats - ‘gnawed’, ‘devoured’, ‘bitten’. Then as the settlement is reached and the confines of the ‘Little England’ are breached, the scenery is described as ‘fertile fair and rich, rained upon by genial showers’ (2008; p.89); ‘the cool south breeze gently ripples the blue Derwent and fans the curtains, the city nestles in the broad shadow of Mount Wellington’ (2008; p.89). Such a description of the settlement of those who are free, is a contrast to that of the protagonist, Rufus Dawes, who as an extra punishment is set down without company upon Grummet Rock which stands isolated in Macquarie Harbour. From there he watches the activity of the other prisoners, cruelly encumbered by leg irons while felling massive trees, dragging them through the scrub, toiling in the lime kilns, digging coal, and so forth.

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Later Dawes is cast up by tide upon a shore, the description of which foregrounds the ‘otherness’ of the wilderness landscape: ‘Dense shrub and savage jungle impeded his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before him. He was lost in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in morasses’ (2008; p.126). At every turn the landscape is presented as a foe and Clarke compounds the melodrama with the convict’s realisation that ‘Death had waited to overtake him in this barbarous wilderness. As a cat allows a mouse to escape her for a while, so had he been permitted to trifle with his fate’ (2008; p.127), as though “ a bloody finger pointed at the corpse which lay there’ (2008; p.128). When describing the Port Arthur prison, the protagonist Dawes notes its grim authority and is mocked by the juxtaposition of the beauty of the scenery: ‘He had learnt by heart each beauty of rising sun, sparkling water and wooded hill’, he says of the signal station; ‘it reared its slender arms upwards into the cloudless sky, he knew it all. There was no charm for him in the exquisite blue of the sea, the soft shadows of the hills, or the soothing ripple of the waves that crept voluptuously to the white breast of the shining shore’ (2008; p. 271). It was Colonel Arthur who reported that Tasmania was a ‘natural penitentiary’, commending the clever design of the ‘Almighty’ for his provision of a place from which to carry out ‘Regulations for Convict Discipline’ (2008; p.214). The convicts on their way to Port Arthur, passing ‘the purple beauty of this convict Golgotha’ (2008; p.313), had no escape from any part of that coastline where the waves of the Southern Ocean ‘poured their unchecked force. The isthmus emerged from a wild and terrible coast-line, into whose bowels the ravenous sea had bored strange caverns, resonant with perpetual roar of tortured billows’ (2008; p.313). The East Coast, the site of civilization, of the town, and the ‘superior English settlers’, is contrasted through the description of the well dressed, ‘dapper clergyman’, a newcomer who ‘trips daintily down the summer street that lay between the blue river and the purple mountain’. Around him are well-dressed people intent on serious purpose, ‘a town ascribing to all the laws of civilization’. All about in the summer day (not the drear and dripping, misty forests and shores of the prison island), were ‘well dressed officers of the garrison, bowing sweetly to well-dressed ladies’ although said ladies did also shrink from ‘ill-dressed, ill-odoured ticket of leave men’ (2008; p.191). Clarke first wrote His Natural Life in serial form - published from 1871-1872. It had a happy ending in that the hero’s fortune was restored and he returned to

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England. Two years later it was reworked into a novel and published in 1874 as For the Term of His Natural Life. The ending was quite different in that although the hero’s filiative relationship was with England, he died in Australia as Marcus Clarke himself did (Clarke at the age of 35). This changed ending of the saga raises an interesting point. Is the question of whether the character Dawes returns to England or remains in Van Diemen’s Land an example of ‘the colonial psyche wrestling with the competing claims of English and Australian society’ (Thieme, 2001; p.119)? Is this an example of the staging of a literary consciousness of identity where the ‘settler’ consciousness of ‘place’ (the enclave colony) shifts from Van Diemen’s Land as ‘Other’ to that of a place to ‘be’ - Rossiter’s third phase? Certainly in the descriptions of wild places, and wilderness away from the colony, landscape is described in the first phase of ‘seeing’: hostile, unknown, hazardous, and ‘Othered’. However, whereas Clarke’s focus was on the perception of landscape from a convict or settler point of view, to the indigenous population that same landscape was home, their shelter and provider back throughout the ages of their existence. It is tempting here to suggest that Aboriginal attachment to ‘country’ is a clear example of a consciousness within the third phase of Rossiter’s identity with landscape. Sadly, it was a landscape which was soon to prove a grave, carved out by the same brutality of purpose which ensured the ‘Regulations for Convict Discipline’ were enacted. Arguably, nowhere in Australia was the history of brutality more compelling than in Tasmania. Within thirty years of the first settlement (1803) the Aboriginal population of approximately six thousand had fallen to less than four hundred as a result of them being rounded up and transported to off- shore islands. Dispossessed and removed from their traditional lands, their numbers dwindled rapidly. By the 1970s the Aboriginal land rights debate, and by extension the history of their brutal treatment, was being more forcefully heard. The shame of that period of history has been well documented (among many others) by Lyndall Ryan (The Aboriginal Tasmanian, 1996), the result being to educate the population (those willing to listen) as to the many appalling acts perpetrated on the Aboriginal people even in death. That Aboriginals were seen as curious lesser-beings to whom the usual protocols of dignity and respect did not apply is evident in the fact that so many, once buried, were unceremoniously dug up, their skeletons and skulls then sent to museums for study. Years later, one English Professor of Anatomy refused to return a collection

181 of skulls to Australia because ‘research would suffer’ (Ryan, 1996; p.270). The realization of the cruelty, brutality, and lack of respect for Aboriginal people dragged the shame of past colonial actions into the emerging identity of Australian nationalism, changing the sense of ‘belonging’ so that it involved a shared ‘guilt’.

Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1978) reveals the disturbing tale of the dispossession and murder of the aborigines in the early days of Van Diemen’s Land. They were hunted down and killed or rounded up to be sent to several off-shore islands which became ‘prisons’. The miserable conditions of cold, isolation, and exposure caused illness, death, and the decimation of a people and their culture (Ryan, 1996). Drewe’s novel takes its name from a comment uttered by a convict as a description of the aborigines when he is objecting to ‘acting the slave for the heathens. Bloody savage crows’ (Drewe, 1978; p.52). The time-frame of the novel switches between two landscapes, that of the present day and that of the past: the story of the fictional young man (Crisp), who is conducting research on the history of Tasmania, is wound into the real life work started in 1829 by George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines (self- styled as ‘Father’ of the aborigines). Under the auspices of the Government, he was charged with rounding up the last tribal remnants of aborigines in a misguided policy of ‘conciliation’. It was the belief of most people that it was in the best interest of the aborigines to be taken to Hobart and then shipped to Flinders Island in Bass Strait. History records the illness and death that resulted from this exile. Reading Robinson’s ‘Report of a Journey of two thousand and two hundred miles to the Tribes of the Coast and Eastern Interior during the year 1844’, the fictional protagonist of The Savage Crows (Crisp) finds himself morbidly enthralled and drawn back into history and the lives of the people of Van Diemen’s Land. He travels to Tasmania to experience the island for himself and moves further into the depths of its history by travelling to even smaller islands. There he finds himself frighteningly far from ‘civilisation’ among those who make their living from ‘mutton- birding’. His experience is somewhat similar to that of the young school teacher in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), who by accident has to spend his school holidays in the town with the locals. The two characters share an equally horrifying and disorienting experience in totally unfamiliar social situations.

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In earlier travels on Cape York Peninsula the character Crisp ruminates on the lives of the early explorers who lacked resourcefulness beyond ‘eating their horses and sitting under shady trees waiting for death’ (p.62). By contrast (he continues) the aborigines who accompanied them ‘pulled through’, ‘getting by on grubs, lizards, seeds and roots’ (p.62). Crisp mocks the European who refused the food from the aborigines, preferring to wait for the supply ship; he goes on to speculate that it took ‘the second generation to feel at home in the wilderness, to adapt’ (p.62). The text cleverly juxtaposes the experiences of Crisp with those of Robinson as he travels through Van Diemen’s Land to learn more of the indigenes. The juxtaposition exposes the gulf between the stumbling, bumbling Robinson and the local tribes, some of whom prove to be friendly and helpful. The Journals of Robinson reveal the story of those who are at one in nature, the aborigines, while the white man (the observer) is out of his element. At times the natives accompanying the over-dressed and buttoned up Man of God, happily remove their clothes to swim, then almost miraculously to Robinson, scoop from the ocean floor edible marine plants. On land they equally skilfully find food to satisfy their hunger: ‘herbs fungi roots berries and shellfish’ (p.67). Juxtaposed also against the image of people living in tune with nature, is the life-style of the whalers whose sexual abuse of the women is deplorable and a metaphor of the degradation the whalers also impose upon nature. Drewe skilfully draws a parallel in his description of their camp, ‘The stench of rotting meat was overpowering, hanging over the whole camp. Whale carcasses were drawn up on the beach breeding flies. The shallows were streaked and glistening with oily putrescence, tidal pools congealing in the sun’ (p.75). By contrast, when Robinson comes across a group of aborigines who have not been drawn into the lives of the whites he finds them to be capable, focussed, and well able to sustain themselves from nature, ‘the natives caught crayfish and stoned to death a large seal marooned on the beach. They flitched the seal meat and carried the flesh back to camp’ (p.105). The disparate ability of the aborigines and Robinson are demonstrated by his attempts to be at one with nature, and which meet with humiliating failure: he can eat little, and feeling poorly from his travels, sits swollen by the stings of gnat and mosquito which only seemed to relish ‘the skin of the palest of the party’ (p.104). The natives are curious and sympathetic to his plight and after inspecting his numerous cuts and stings paint the

183 parts of his body that he is willing to expose with a mixture of ochre and ashes (p.121). Later, members of a particular tribe are fascinated by news of Robinson’s ‘cloth house’ (his tent) and accompany him to see it ‘laughing and dancing along the track’. However they are disturbed by the sight of a gun and will go no further so Robinson must continue his journey with his own natives through unfamiliar territory: ‘we stumbled into creeks in the growing darkness, scratching ourselves in thorny thickets’ (p.117). Late into the night he reaches his camp, ‘overcome by fatigue, cold and hunger’ (p.117). Eventually he returns to the principal camp of the Toogee tribe and is led through the forest by them beside a river ‘amid a grove of kangaroo-fig trees’, they spent the night eating and sharing the conviviality of the tribe, singing and dancing late into the night (p.119). Drewe’s description of the acceptance of Robinson by the aborigines makes the eventual murder of the tribe by soldiers all the more tragic. From time to time Robinson’s senses are afforded some equilibrium and respite from his travails, particularly when he is able to make ‘our camp on a wide plain resembling an English park; beautiful grass like bowling green dotted with honeysuckle trees. I saw the tracks of a large tiger or hyena creature’ (p.142). Drewe is referencing the native fauna and the presence of the Tasmanian Tiger which eventually went the way of most of the tribespeople. The text and its description of the way of life of the aborigines emphasise the tragedy of the outcome of colonisation. ‘We discovered two big and deserted native huts, built as usual near a water cascade and a grove of kangaroo-fig trees. Hanging from one roof was a grass basket filled with shellfish and house-leek’ (p.142). Robinson’s own natives want to steal the provisions but he stops them. Later they find that the tribe has left at their camp some ‘mutton-fish lined in rows, two for each of us’ (p.143). Notwithstanding all these positive experiences, Robinson still, when uttering a sermon for the white residents of Emu Bay Camp, refers to the aborigines as ‘savages’ and the land as a ‘desert’ (p.149). Despite his immersion in their culture he is still in ‘observational’ mode, and despite his best efforts, as history has recorded, Governor Arthur and his Executive council still uttered the edict to expel ‘these miserable people’ and have them removed to Flinders Island where, the record shows, most died of pneumonia, pleurisy, and malnutrition (Ryan, 1996).

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At times the text depicts the landscape as a foe against which both the aborigines and their captors must wage war to survive: Following the tracks of the Toogee, the Port Davey tribe, over the next days we passed through dense forests, crawling on hands and knees through holes in the rough foliage and scrambling over slick moss. We travelled through swamps, in places up to our thighs in mud. We descended cliffs so steep I worried for the safety of the convicts carrying our knapsacks, and ascended a rugged mountain range composed of white and variegated marble. Broken rock fragments rolled from the leaders' footsteps and fell on those following behind. (p.105) And: A narrow path led down to the ledge; at its far most reach was a dead-end, a high rock wall. Beneath the ledge was a drop of a hundred feet or more on to angular rocks stippled with brightly coloured lichens. The ledge was strewn with Toogee bodies, men, women and children lying amongst their scattered food baskets in a morass of blood and ripe fruit. The Dorsetman and the second Scot moved among them, swinging bodies over the cliff on to the rocks. Blood ran down the cliff face, congealing in the sand and probing like fingers into porous crevices. The split bodies of the Toogee sailed over the cliff edge. (p.148) Elsewhere is emphasised the beauty and bounty of nature with detailed descriptions of the wild life, fruits and fish that would have sustained the first inhabitants. We followed the river’s course to a small bay where, to our pleasure we found our whaleboat anchored. On this coastal plain the weather was warmer and wildlife abounded. Swans and geese flocked along the river

bank, screeching and squabbling over wild fruits and marine creatures. We ate heartily of provisions and fresh waterfowl. (p.113) The text reveals the extremes of early experience in Tasmania and, for many Tasmanians, their growing commitment to an identity with Tasmania as ‘place’ being unsettled by a sense of guilt in relation to the terror of its history as a settler-colony. Drewe’s characters are a vehicle for criticism of past colonial policies, themselves a source of further guilt and conflict which disturbed the sense of ‘belonging’ of the white inhabitants. The novel is an example of Rossiter’s second stage when the observation or relationship with nature or ‘place’ is seen as constituting an objective

185 adjunct to the narrative, particularly of the emotional self, that is when an emotional attachment is formed and the writer’s motive force springs from experience and observation.

Rossiter’s third phase, self inscription within nature, where the gap between self and ‘Other’ is closed, can be explicated in a Tasmanian context by the work of James McQueen and Richard Flanagan. This is the stage where the idea of landscape is widened to mean the human environment within which humans feel they are ‘one’ biologically and spiritually. However, McQueen and Flanagan are also writing within the context of conflict: the ‘Chaos of Identity’ of which Rossiter writes (1998). Expansion of settlement into wilderness is a source of on-going social conflict in Tasmania (as it is throughout the world). The ‘green movement’ has led to a desire to counteract the exploitation of nature by seeking accommodation of humans within the landscape rather than in domination and the destruction of it. McQueen and Flanagan are writing within that context, going beyond accommodation, instead moving toward a total sense of ‘belonging’ and personal identification. Both McQueen and Flanagan, unlike Drewe, are Tasmanian born. However, birthright does not necessarily denote attachment or authorial affiliation, as demonstrated by the narratives of Marie Bjelke-Petersen. A reading of Haynes’ critique suggests that although she was an immigrant from the Northern Hemisphere (Denmark), Bjelke-Petersen’s attachment to the Tasmanian wilderness was formed by her deeply spiritual nature. She not only sought to spread her ‘Christian Message of a personal God who could be communicated through with through prayer’ (Haynes, 2001; p.62) but also crafted characters who gained the ‘added reward of religious enlightenment to crown their experience of the Tasmanian sublime’ (p.63). McQueen and Flanagan have produced work which references the contemporary view of landscape as powerful, beautiful, and nurturing; providing peace and a haven for humans and therefore worthy of protection. However, in Tasmania many of the rivers and forests have been, and still are, under threat from economic forces which see nature as a marketable commodity, so it is within the context of environmental protection that McQueen and Flanagan write, their sense of identity and belonging strengthened by their birthright and their passion for conservation practices that enable humans to live in harmony within nature.

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McQueen’s novel Hook’s Mountain fits the category of eco-writing (Cranston, 2001) in that it exhorts us to join the battle to protect nature. The author’s affiliation with the Tasmanian wilderness is, according to Cranston, ‘a short step away from a call to defend one’s country or motherland’ (Cranston, 2001; p.62). Here, we are reminded of the words of Relph (1976) that an intense identification with place motivates people to defend it against outsiders and against destruction. Documented involvement by Tasmanians in various campaigns to protect the wilderness is further evidence that landscape is not just geography. The idea of ‘place’ can be deeply entrenched in our memory and longing. Whereas the character Arthur Blackberry is engaged in a struggle to save the bush on the local hill where ‘he had been born, had grown up, lived, made his small accommodations’ (p.3), his father and uncles remember it in very different circumstances. They do so ‘in the mud of foreign trenches’ (p.3). There is a poignancy in the image of Australian soldiers ‘in foreign trenches’ amidst the horror of war, vainly thinking of the hillsides of ‘home’. The focus of the narrative is the relationship between Lachlan Hook and Arthur Blackberry: the first a bitter soldier who has retreated to live in the countryside, the second a vulnerable, socially isolated man. When the two are drawn together it is Blackberry who, in awe of nature and militant environmentalism, is depicted as the ‘Everyman’ of the contemporary environmental Tasmanian narrative: a high- profile and constant political, economic, and social battleground. Arthur Blackberry finds a friend in Hook and he also finds a purpose in defending the landscape from developers. The ‘eco-critical’ voice in Hook’s Mountain addresses social and cultural concerns regarding the preservation of the wilderness. The narrative describes the struggle to prevent clearing of the natural vegetation on the hillsides, the subsequent destruction of the forest and the replacement of wilderness by rows of plantation pine. Arthur and Hook watch in anguish and in growing anger as the log trucks pass by, ‘each day three or four of them dragged their great loads of logs through the valley on their way to the saw-mills and newsprint plants and woodchip mills. The great wasp- striped diesels coughed and muttered at all hours, the vibrations of their passage trembling the ground, stirring the old timbers of Myola’s houses’ (p.31). Arthur

187 learns from observation and from Hook that landscape is a cash crop: ‘they cut down the gums, the best ones, for the timber mills, then they take the second best for chipping, then they just bulldoze what’s left, push it up and burn it’ (p.34). Arthur’s transition to his new role is fraught with his lack of confidence. When Hook arrives unexpectedly one morning, ‘He was suddenly glad that he had made his bed; for some reason which he could not understand, he would have felt ashamed and embarrassed had Hook seen the tousle of his blankets’ (p.13). He wants to be seen as alert and efficient: a disciplined soldier for the fight ahead, the one being charged him by his growing friendship with Hook. His bushman skills become apparent when he leads Hook through the forest: [he] moved gently, quietly, into the wet undergrowth between the tall trees. His boots moved noiselessly over the carpet of dead leaves and damp grey soil. The high bracken and prickly mimosa seemed to swallow him, parting as if by some magic before his passage. He did not walk so much as drift; squat, silent, grey as the evening; almost invisible, almost inaudible, and completely at home. (p.26) The description serves to emphasise the way in which landscape can nurture humans, providing a ‘place’ to be. Relishing his inclusion in the battle, Arthur develops a sense of purpose, place, and identity. The destruction of the forest which is causing him anguish is also a threat to his lately won friendship: it attacks his new found value as an individual; he is wounded, as is the land. Again the text demonstrates Arthur’s sense of ‘place’: a small chill breeze rippling the feathery tips of the wattles behind them and swaying the tall silver stippled trunks a little. Before them the meshing spurs of foothills, hills, low mountains stretched away for fifty miles… the dark and sullen carpets of the pine plantations thrust their tailored edges sharply over ridge-crests … the clear-felled strips lay like ugly wounds. (pp.33–34) The text offers a critical view of forest management, principally the clear-felling with chainsaws and tractors of the soft native bush: all for the establishment of pine plantations to provide a ‘crop’ to be marketed. These modern ‘economics’ enrage Hook, who is committed to a personal war. In a symbolic moment of bitterness he throws away a moss covered stone, taken from the forest and given to him as a curio by someone with whom he could have formed a family. He sends it ‘skimming viciously into the night’ (p.140), signifying his frustration with those who must take or

188 own a piece of nature. In that act he signals his repudiation of a human family and his intention to join nature where he will be part of it with no need of mementoes. McQueen uses the symbolism of the act to emphasise the character’s conviction to his cause: his fate is sealed and he will fight and die, a far more powerful symbol of love of nature than the coveting and ownership of a stone from the forest floor. Time and again the text foregrounds the beauty and importance of the landscape: In the autumn the blue cranes came back to the creek, and later he found, deep in the ti-tree bush, a breeding pair. And the cuckoo shrikes called from the plum tree by the road, and the big oleander bloomed by the corner of his shed with flowers the colour of blood. (p.207) The text employs Blackberry as a conduit through which the process of attachment to landscape is channelled. Once he has joined Hook in their observations, to watch the bull-dozers and machines at work destroying the natural bush of peppermint, flattening the bracken, gouging the ochre clay of the soil, he then fully understands that the destruction is an attack upon themselves and he is totally accommodated to the world of nature: within his squat body a new resolution struggled towards a translation to action; action not for the valley, not for the people, not for Hook even… but for himself, that all his years might not be totally negated. (p.212) It is in these last pages that we see the third stage of identity with landscape, the conviction in a cause, which is to prevent the destruction of nature. Arthur Blackberry is at last aware of purpose in his life, and he recognizes an identity: he must defend nature because he is one with it. The emphasis of that concept invites the reader to take sides, to clarify their own relationship to landscape, much as the population of Tasmania has had to take sides in the controversy surrounding the timber industry. McQueen’s affinity with the landscape of Tasmania is evident in his work. It is the same affinity which has inspired not only poets such as Vivian Smith, Gwen Harwood, but also pictorial artists such as Geoffrey Dyer, an Hobartian by birth, who has achieved contemporary Australia-wide acclaim for his paintings which raise awareness of the beauty of the natural environment. Similarly, Max Angus’ book Pedder: The Story, The Paintings (2008) immortalised the allure of the (lost) Lake Pedder which many Tasmanians still dream of somehow restoring to its ‘pre-dam’ state. In his book Angus affirms the value of landscape and contextualizes it within

189 the frame of environmental activism. It is a theme explored by Tim Bonyhady in The Colonial Earth (2000), which details early approaches to the conservation of trees, laws against the fouling of water supplies, and attempts to protect native animals. In Hook’s Mountain the struggle to protect the environment ultimately claims the life of Hook. His death references the deaths of several Tasmanians who have lost their lives in their efforts to record and protect the wilderness. The photographer Olegas Truchanas, for example, once ‘worked as a draftsman for Tasmania’s Hydro Electricity Commission, which with its dams was systematically destroying the wildlands that Truchanas was discovering, photographing, and fighting to protect’ (Flanagan, 2010; p.124). That irony was emphasised when the photographs later played a vital role in the campaign to halt the work. As history shows, the battle to save Lake Pedder was lost however Truchanas did not resile from his fight, instead focusing his efforts on the protection of the Pieman, the Gordon, and the Franklin Rivers. However, in 1972, Truchanas drowned in the Gordon River after slipping and falling into the current. His body was found, trapped beneath a log, by the photographer Peter Dombrovskis whom Truchanas had mentored (Flanagan, 2010). Dombrovskis is himself famous, not just for continuing the work of Truchanas in photographing the wilderness but for his photograph “Morning Mist”, taken at Rock Island Bend on the Franklin River. It is the seminal image of The Tasmanian Wilderness Society’s contentious but successful 'No Dams' campaign of 1982. Richard Flanagan says that his friend Dombrovskis felt ‘the natural world wasn’t something separate of us, but the essence of us’ (2010; p.124). Dombrovskis died of a heart attack in 1996 while on a solo photographic expedition in the Western Arthurs mountain range. ‘They found him kneeling, looking out to the south-west wildlands. Sometimes there is about an artist’s life a profound and terrible poetry’ (Flanagan: 2010; p.127).

In Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) the main character is also ultimately at one with nature. Flanagan combines all three of the main narratives of Tasmania: its convict past, the massacre of its first people, and its emergence as one of the world’s great wonders of nature; all this constructed as the backdrop to a man’s last minutes of life before he drowns. It is a book not just about the landscape of river, forest, and mountain but of the landscape of Tasmania’s past. A reader can move beyond the

190 view of landscape: to a way of seeing who they are, to achieve some sense of identity and ‘belonging’, or, as Bruce Bennett says when discussing the pre-occupation with landscape of Australian writers, ‘gaining one’s bearings physically and emotionally’ (2006: p.223). Death of A River Guide explicates not only ‘ways of seeing’ the landscape of river, forest, and mountain but also the landscape of Tasmania’s past. Flanagan invites the reader to move beyond a landscape, into history, to consider their feelings of the past, possibly to achieve some sense of identity and ‘belonging’: to consider not only the universal themes of life, death, relationships but also the primal energy of nature. The novel’s focus is a man’s last minutes of life before he drowns, trapped among the rocks of a rushing river. He is Aljaz Cosini, the river guide who relates the events of his life, the memory of such swirling about him just like the waters which will soon claim him. Throughout the book, wilderness looms magnificently against the puny machinations of humans, no matter how interesting their lives may have been. While Cosini lies trapped in the mighty Franklin, the reader is guided through the richly tenanted lives of his forebears, from 1832 and on through subsequent generations to the present day. There are a multitude of characters in the book, all of whom form the warp and weft on history’s loom. The narrative goes back and forth through time and in and out of the lives of the characters: all seemingly larger than life, stretching across the pages of Tasmanian history from the convict era until the moment of Aljaz’s death. Each character reveals the pain of the human condition, no matter their place in history. Of Ned Quade, a convict, called the ‘stone man’, the narrator asks, ‘Why this curious name? Because ... upon the triangle where he is flogged for possessing a wad of tobacco, or, once for singing a song, he betrays no pain’ (p.148). Aljaz’s wife Couta Ho, who bore him his child, is presented as a woman unable to overcome the tragedy of the death of that same child and seemingly lost in the grief of it all. She had wanted family and home, she had wanted a ‘place’; to Aljaz she says, ‘I thought maybe one day we could belong. Like people with families do, having their own time and their own place and growing old and crotchety and full of love in them’ (p.111). The story is subtle, bound as it is in the threads of magic realism which weave a vast and richly populated history of various people across the landscape of history. The river guide’s story is like the river, part of a landscape which tells its own story:

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Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs so undercut they call them verandas, and in eroded boulders and beautiful gilded eggs of river stone, and beaches of river gravel that shift year to year, flood to flood, and in that gravel that once was rounded river rock that once was eroded boulder that once was undercut cliff that once was mountain and which will be again. (pp.14-15) The narrative returns repeatedly to the never-ending beauty of nature: a beauty so powerful that it is as if the entire world and humans are a part of it. Even the facial features of the river guide are of nature: it is a desolate visage, all sallow angles and stubbled, strangely high cheekbones looking as though they have been cable-logged of most of the vital signs of life and further eroded by the passage of time, and, like a clear-felled mountainside, not without a perverse attraction. An eroded black-bedrock wasteland of a face... [I]n its darkness, there is something suggestive of experience and suffering, perhaps even knowledge. (p.18) The river guide’s ultimate affirmation of himself as part of nature is juxtaposed against the discomfort of the customers, the ‘punters’ on the trip to whom this is ‘an alien world’, the river ‘writhing like a snake in the wild lands at the base of the huge massif of Frenchman’s Cap’ (pp.14-15). Cockroach, the river guide’s companion on the trip, can sense something changing in Aljaz: The Cockroach had a nose for fear and he could smell it on Aljaz. But fear of what? The Cockroach began to wonder how this trip with such a driven man would end. After a time, he decided that it could only be badly. (p.130) When Cockroach sits round the campfire with the paying ‘guests’ he tells them the stories they want to hear and regales them for effect (not because he believes them) with fantastically exaggerated horror stories, not of the aborigines or the deaths of the convicts but of the lives of the local white people who slept with their daughters and butchered animals and beat and chained up their children: the punters greeted the stories with nervous laughter and nods and shakes of the head meant to convey bewilderment at such horror but which was rather them affirming that Tasmania as they had always conceived it in

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their ignorance, a grotesque Gothic horror land – as if they knew the stories already, which really they already did. (p.132) And so they see the landscape in different ways: Aljaz sees as a ‘caress’ the huge rocks that arose from the water like monsters, past sandbanks bearing traces of strange animal prints, whereas the punters ‘saw what they knew and they knew none of it’ (p. 80). The anxiety of the ‘punters’ grows, ‘They felt consumed by the river, felt that they had allowed it to chew them up in its early gorges and were now being digested in its endlessly winding entrails that cut back and forth in crazed meanderings through vast unpeopled mountain ranges. And it frightened them, these people from far away cities whose only measure was man; it terrified them’ (p.81), ‘they took photographs of streams that looked like wilderness calendars, and rocks they fancied looked like a human face or a man-made form – a boat , a machine, a house’. They were looking for images of home and things they could relate to. Thus they only saw what they knew’ (p.80). Aljaz, by contrast, is ‘at home’ on the river and at peace with his ‘way of seeing’, aware of even the beauty in ‘the lousy leech-ridden ditch. Around him, the myrtles and sassafras and native laurels and leatherwoods mass in walls of seemingly impenetrable rainforests, and in front of him flows the tea-coloured water of the river, daily bronzing and gilding the river rock a little further’ (p.20). To Aljaz it is all as it should be and every element is part of its attraction to him. However the punters do not see it so: despite their protestations to the contrary, despite their assertions that this is the most beautiful country, [they] are already feeling a growing unease with this weird alien environment that seems so alike yet so dissimilar to the wilderness calendars that adorn their lounge-rooms and offices. It smells strongly of an acrid, fecund earth, and its temperate humidity weighs upon them like a straitjacket of the senses. Wherever they turn there is no escape. (p.200) The punters take their photographs so that they may be ‘decorations’ for their homes, and the wilderness experience a ‘decoration’ of their lives. Aljaz’s state of mind when he looks back at the sadness of his life has its parallel in his present situation. He thinks of the tragedy of the death of his child, ‘so many tears that we swam in them and began to drown in them. At which point I opened the door and the dam burst and out roared a river of stars, and being washed

193 away with that river was me, to be taken in its turbulent waters in a crazy serpentine course through the next thirteen years of my life all over this vast continent’ (p.79). The early heartbreak of his child dying and his Aboriginal lineage is as a river winding through his ancestors back to the 1830s of the convict grandfather Ned Quade and beyond through his Aboriginal grandmother, Jessie. His ancestors flow like tributaries down through his being carrying him to this place on the river where he is trapped and drowning. He reflects on the bravery of his wife, Couta Ho, at the death of their child and he realises that she ‘was stronger, she was surer, and he felt like a shallow creek whose babbling waters had just run into the silent current of a big river, moving swiftly and powerfully, though to where, he knew not’ (p.106). The reader divines however that the end is near and that Aljaz will be ‘one’ with nature, mirroring other instances in the novel of humans being at one with nature. When Aljaz’s father Harry is killed by a falling tree Aljaz buries him, then he turned for home and had taken at best six steps when something impelled him to swing around and look one last time at the grave. What he saw was miraculous. The stringybark was unfolding into massive lemon- coloured blossom, six weeks of summer compressed into as many minutes of winter. (p.74) Death of a River Guide references the contemporary view of landscape as powerful, beautiful, and nurturing; providing peace and a haven for humans and therefore worthy of protection. As noted, many of the rivers and forests have been, and still are, under threat from economic forces which see nature as a marketable commodity. The narrative is contextualised within that dialogue and Flanagan writes with a sense of identity and belonging strengthened by his birthright and his passion for conservation. His focus is the need for a conscious existence within nature, a partnership which will renew the symbiosis of the evolution of humans. The novel is the work of a person committed to the natural environment of Tasmania in the way of many in Tasmania’s past who have found inspiration and a ‘cause’ in the plunging gorges, rushing rivers, mountainous terrain, and the scenic beauty of beaches and islands. Haynes offers a detailed account of early attention to conservation and the environment in ‘Romanticism and Environmentalism: The Tasmanian Novels of Marie Bjelke-Petersen’. The realization of the special nature of Tasmania’s landscape was an early force in its protection. George Frankland, Surveyor-General from 1828

194 to 1838, compared the Lake St Clair region with that of Wordsworth’s Lake District. The literary promotion of the state's wilderness areas has its counterpart in the visual. The works of artists such as James Glover and William Charles Piguenit ensured an enduring pictorial record of early settlements as well as the highlands. Piguenit left a written account of his engagement with the scenic grandeur of the romantic landscapes in his paper to the 1892 Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (Haynes, 2001). Similarly, as Haynes recounts, records and declarations of the unique wild landscapes were provided by photographs of Lake St. Clair taken by Morton Allport in 1863, and in 1890, a photographer John Watt Beattie produced not only photographs, but lantern slides and postcards. He was one of the first to engage in environmental political activism, that being against a 1908 proposal for a saw-mill at Macquarie Harbour. He realised this would mean logging along the Gordon River and so he used his photographs to mount a campaign and give lectures around Tasmania in an effort to prevent the project. By lobbying such as the Royal Society of Tasmania, the Tourist Association, and the Government of the day, a reserve was declared encompassing an area around the Gordon and the King Rivers. Engagement with and protection of the wilderness is, for some, what it means to be Tasmanian and has resulted in the local political force of the ‘green movement’ (Haynes, 2001). The river, its ‘presence’ central to the narrative, is seen as a ‘character’ in Death of a River Guide. ‘The Gordon ran deep and black beneath him’, (Aljaz’s father Harry is rowing into the wilderness), ‘Deep and black and cold. Harry Lewis looked at the low hills, rainforest-rumped, humps like hunchbacks heading away from the river’ (p.42). It is that deep and black and cold water that traps Aljaz Cosini, ‘a mass of agonised, tortured flesh, whose sensations and impressions are only of the most immediately physical: the chill of the water, the fire in my chest, the jackhammer pounding in my head, the screams of my legs and torso’ (pp.310-311). He is trapped physically yet he can dream-walk through Tasmanian history, see again the beauty of nature and its many creatures. He hears the wind in the boobialla trees, the myrtles, the celery top pines. He listens for the wave on the beach and the sound of the cockatoo and the sea eagle. He is surrounded by the song of nature and then ‘for the first time the contours of my true country become clear in my mind as the clouds of life fall beneath me and the blueness of death beckons from

195 above’ (p.318). He realises the visions ‘have all been written before and there is nothing new under the sun, neither the pleasure nor the misery’ (p.320). In his drowning moments he understands that the water ‘is no longer destroying me but remaking me as something else, and I am no longer sure if I am me, or me the river or the river me’ (p.321). Finally he watches as people wave to him and point him out to others as a sea eagle perched first in a myrtle tree, then ‘he feels a warm up-draught, and rising with it his body, wings outstretched, feathers feeling every sensation of the criss-crossing air currents, rising in a spiral, a circle growing ever outwards’ (p.326). He is at peace with his fate and understands that in dying he will have a new identity self-inscripted in nature: he will be as one forever with all the people of history and his place will be with nature, biologically and spiritually: the final phase of Rossiter’s classification of identity with nature.

5. A FOURTH ‘WAY OF SEEING’ The novels discussed demonstrate Rossiter’s three phases of the ‘ways of seeing’ landscape or place: that understanding and engagement of place by writers involves more than the description of waterscapes, geology and vegetation, it must also encompass its use by humans, and the way in which landscape holds meaning and the possibility of developing a cultural identity. He suggests three linear phases in that process. The first is when ‘the relationship between nature and identity within Australian narrative begins with an observing, classificatory self with nature as Other. Huggan feels that the concept of ‘Other’ is ‘ossified’ (2007; p.x) but that it is useful as a reference point, particularly in regard to early reaction to the Tasmanian wilderness as ‘unoccupied’, alien and with ‘strange’ animals. Rossiter’s second stage is marked when the observation of or relationship with nature is seen as constituting an objective adjunct to the narrative, particularly of the emotional self. For example, when an emotional attachment is formed with the ‘bush’ and a familiarity builds so that it is seen and accepted as ‘a place’, wild and tough, much like the people who populated the early stories and poems of such as Lawson and Furphy. The bush represented not only the fighting spirit of the Aussie battler of the outback, but also that of friend and foe. Rossiter’s suggested third phase is ‘self-inscription within nature’, where ‘the gap between self and Other is closed’ (1997; p.80). This is the stage where the idea of

196 landscape is widened to mean the human environment, that humans are one biologically and spiritually located within the human environment the landscape. It is here that writers symbolically employ landscape to exemplify the ideal of the integration of humanity in a landscape. These three phases apply to the texts chosen for this paper: certainly Clarke is of the first phase, where the landscape is seen as different and ‘Othered’, McQueen and Drewe fit the second, and Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide the third, where the writer is intensely involved and the gap between self and other closed what Rossiter calls ‘self-inscription within nature’. However, I suggest that this ‘staging’ of consciousness is not linear: it is a spiral wherein the thought processes do not move away from the core idea, rather they circulate almost contiguously in the formation of another, fourth phase: an outward-looking stage. From the centripetal to the centrifugal, once the core has been reached (‘the gap between self and Other being closed’, Rossiter, 1997; p.80) the focus becomes outward-looking. Writers then move from the landscape of a regional self-conscious cultural identity to participate in what Huggan terms ‘transnational cultural traffic’ (2007; p.xiv).

Bruce Bennett has positioned the novels of Christopher Koch, particularly The Year of Living Dangerously, at the ‘beginning of the trend’ which saw novelists contribute to an ‘enhanced literary and cultural interaction’ with the Asia-Pacific region’ (1998; p.263). Koch, Tasmanian born but possessed of a Northern Hemisphere ancestral heritage, originally intended his novel Out of Ireland (1999) to form part of Highways to a War (1995) but it eventuated as a stand-alone text, the story of the antecedents of characters who appear in Highways to a War. Out of Ireland extends Huggan’s notion of transnational cultural traffic in that Koch writes ‘away’, much further from the Asia-Pacific region, to the northern hemisphere. The novel is in part an exploration of places and a landscape far removed from Tasmania: places which are the threads tying the characters to their memories of ‘being’. The significance of the concept of ‘place’ in the novel gives rise to an analysis of self and identity. Out of Ireland recounts the experiences of five exiled members of the Young Ireland political party, each of whom ultimately ‘sees’ Van Diemen’s Land in a different way. Theirs is not the usual experience of those transported to Van Diemen’s

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Land. They live in relative freedom although allocated to certain police districts throughout the state and are forbidden to meet each other. At the conclusion of the novel two have died (one by his own hand), one has found a new life in Van Diemen’s Land and two have managed to escape to America to join up with Irish compatriots. The text presents a reflection on life, on people, their identity, and their ‘place’. The narrative is multi-layered, weaving the lives of the five men into the background of life in the colony. However only passing reference, however, is made to the genocide and removal of the Aboriginal inhabitants: ‘not a dozen of those poor creatures are left. They and their hunting grounds are gone’ (p.440). These are the words of Fitzgibbon, who is haunted by his change of circumstances and longs to be with his wife and children in Ireland. The conditions under which the ‘normal’ convicts live, those transported for theft, burglary and assault, are rarely mentioned and only in relation to the two political prisoners who are incarcerated for a time at Port Arthur where they are kept in solitary confinement, removed from the general population. Fitzgibbon, once freed from Port Arthur and able to meet briefly with his compatriots, attempts to describe the gaol but realises, [y]ou cannot conceive of the atmosphere of that place. It sits on a pretty blue bay, among virgin wilderness but they have filled the air with melancholy; with dread. I seldom saw a convict of course except when I went to church on Sundays, which the poor wretches were obliged to attend. But I was always aware of them; their misery hung over the settlement like a stench. (p.432) It is the dilemma of place and landscape which is the overriding theme of the novel: the enduring struggle of the political exiles to come to terms with their exile from Ireland. Most have been sentenced to fourteen years. Some optimistically feel that during the period of exile they may become accustomed to the way of life and once given their freedom will choose to stay. For two others of the group however, Ireland sings its siren song and they are beset with homesickness and longing. The ambivalence of their dilemma, of their ultimate decisions to stay or go, are evident in the aspect of landscape. On arrival, as he travels up the Derwent aboard the transport ship, Devereaux, the protagonist, observes the forested hills and is at first surprised that the ‘dread penal island is actually beautiful. Nothing had prepared me for its stern, outlandish beauty’ (p.175), which he compares to the ‘far north of Scotland, near Skye’ (p.176). However, as he observes more of the scenery he remembers that it will

198 indeed be his prison, and his thoughts then turn to despair: ‘here was the world’s end, here at the rim of the Roaring Forties. Here were the walls that would pen me in’ (p.176). He is speaking of the mountains and ‘when forests appeared along the shore, these too were like a prison, resembling dark olive ramparts. Opaque, sulking and monotonous, they instantly induced despair’ (p.177). He takes note of the ‘jarring’ unfamiliar calls of the birds, and of the strange foliage of the eucalyptus trees, ‘their bark, which hangs in long strips like torn and tattered clothing’ (p.177). As he draws closer to the settlement of Hobart he notes the soft blue hills, ‘tender as any in Ireland’ (p. 179), the neat white houses, and the expanses of green lawns. His feelings become conflicted, ‘were I not in exile, I could almost fall in love with these hills’ (p.179). Throughout the novel Koch juxtaposes the wild beauty against the quaintly tended and manicured settlement which sets up an ambivalence that continues within all of the characters throughout the novel. They do seek to make lives within the constraints of their exile. They farm, print a newspaper, teach and tutor others, yet all the while another life, another hemisphere, calls them. Devereaux, dreaming of escape, speaks of the ‘weirdness’ of the dry flat land (the midlands of Tasmania), and his longing for the vivid green of Ireland instead of the olive green of gum trees. Later his friend Fitzgibbon is exhilarated by the ‘rolling park-like virginal spaces’ (p.503) and comments that he feels ‘liberated’ and had found his ‘first ease’ since being transported to Van Diemen’s land. (Sadly, events conspire against him, he is branded a social outcast, and with no hope of returning to Ireland to his family, he drowns himself). The men long to be back in the political fight of The Young Ireland cause: that longing imbues the idea of home with an identity that they lack in Van Diemen’s Land, so they struggle to live without it and to endure their homesickness. Some do find a measure of happiness, even family, and learn to enjoy their surroundings, although unbidden thoughts of home still beset them. Paul Barry who, like Devereaux, eventually escapes to America, is tormented by dreams of Waterford in Ireland: ‘I rode up on to a hill behind Ross here and sat looking at the view below. It was beautiful, to be sure. Yet suddenly, I longed for the true, lovely green of home, instead of that strange, dry, olive hue that is underneath everything here – like a hint of death’ (p.445). To some of them their ‘sense of self’ is so much a part of their political lives, and hence remains in Ireland. Tasmania is as a desert and provides no way to quench their thirst for life.

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Koch references the dreams of many who wish to travel and to see new sights. When riding near a mountain range the protagonist Devereaux, ‘experienced an exhilaration in riding such as I’d never known before: we were riding as our ancestors must have ridden across the grasslands of earliest history’ (p.285). Later on his journey, images of other places flood Devereaux’s mind – the mountains of Connemara in Ireland, Lake Como in Italy, or Windermere in England. And later as he thinks of a friend the reality of his exile hits him: ‘his name echoed here in a manner that was infinitely mournful, dying among the empty, dry-grassed spaces, among the lichened stones. And a shaft of desolation went through me. We’re lost I thought. Are not all three of us lost?’ (p.290). Devereaux draws comfort from his friends and once with them feels a sense of liberation and the realization that he had ‘come home to myself” (p.292). Here the novel is exploring the effect upon people of the conflicting allure of new places and the comfort of familiar faces and a sense of home. Still Devereaux ponders the mystery of wilderness and the unknown. He speculates on how Jean Jacques Rousseau, driven by a love of nature, would have found joy in Van Diemen’s Land or what William Wordsworth might have cherished in the mountains of the Western Tiers – would he have found his consolation in the local Lake Sorell as he did at Windermere and Grasmere? Devereaux ponders the lure of unknown lands and how long, or even whether, people will settle into a new landscape – how long it will take them to ‘see’ the new horizons – and on reaching them find satisfaction and a sense of belonging. Devereaux is thinking of his other self – the one he is in the process of becoming – someone to whom Van Diemen’s Land is beginning to feel as a place to be. Yet just as swiftly he is again ambivalent and returns to the idea of escape to America and a new beginning. Despite his sadness at the thought of leaving his friends he recognises his compulsion. He resolves to put behind him the despair that he may not ultimately be able to escape his confinement: he builds a new life, sets up a farm, calling it Clare after his home in Ireland. Forming a loving relationship with a young Irish girl, he throws himself into his new life. All appears to be settled. However, when the woman dies he leaves his baby son with his friends (forever, we later learn) and effects a daring escape to his long-dreamed of new life in America. Whatever Van Diemen’s Land could have offered him, it is the lure of America and a return to his political ideals that

200 compels him to his ultimate commitment to go to a country of his choice – and a life of his choosing. Koch seems to give the lie to the label of ‘Tasmanian’ writer, for he quickly superseded the role of ‘gate-keeper’ or ‘custodian’ of a regional, national, identity, his ‘writerly’ landscape having jumped the ‘sea wall’ early in his career and expanded globally and off-shore, to Asia. Although in many of Koch’s works there is a see- sawing back and forth between two points of view, two time frames, or two geographies, one of which is Tasmania and consequently the notion of an ‘island identity’. In each of his works the protagonists seem to be looking outward seeking to escape or reflect on ‘place and identity’. There is a duality of geography embedded in each work, of places distanced from each other; which positions them within the context of the ‘transnational’. Koch in his essay ‘A Tasmanian Tone’ (1993) recounts an incident that occurred ‘a long time ago’ when he and the poet Vivian Smith with whom he went to school were making a journey to Maria Island off the East coast of Tasmania. As they approached the shore they remarked to each other that it looked like the Hebrides. Koch relates that they both made the same appraisal despite the fact that neither of them had ever been to Scotland, nor seen the Hebridean Islands. Koch and Smith realised at that moment that they were ‘victims’ of ‘a colonial habit of mind – always seeking other landscapes in our own’ (1993; p.106). Koch describes how, in that moment, Smith reflected that 'a country and its landscapes perhaps don’t fully exist until they've been written about – until poets and novelists create them’ (Koch, 1993; p.106). However, they concluded that what they were looking at ‘probably resembled nowhere else: it was simply itself, and Tasmanian’ (Koch, 1993; p.106). Their experience is an example of a ‘way of seeing’: the inclination of people to find a marker of some import in what they see - the allure of a different location, a place which conjures a myth or a story, or a reminder of some event. The thought that flew to Koch and Smith at that time, was one many Australians feel: a need to form an identity with something of the ‘old country’, to claim some of that geography, some of its spirit, some history, and as Australians some common heritage which could transport them outside the boundaries of the island at the bottom of the world. Koch continues ruminating on the idea of writers ‘creating’ landscape and reveals that Kenneth Slessor once observed that the breadth of Australia and the expanse of differing climates on the continent were being increasingly delineated by

201 writers constructing ‘regional’ characteristics’. Slessor had then commented on the ‘glacial characteristics’ in the poems of Smith and Koch, and of a ‘Tasmanian style’ that may have been emerging. ‘Nothing conditions a writer so much as the place in which he grew up’ continues Koch (1993; p.116), and quotes a stanza from the poem ‘Tasmania’ by Smith: Water colour country. Here the hills rot like rugs beneath enormous skies and all day long the shadows of the clouds stain the paddocks with their running dyes... (quoted in Koch,1993; p.116) Those with a sense of the aesthetic who have spent time in Tasmania will confirm that Smith’s exquisite image is precisely the view, and the ‘feeling’ of the Tasmanian landscape, and although he knew it intimately and ‘created’ its being in his verse, he did not cleave only to it. Koch, in his essay, observes that ‘Smith has gone on to become a poet of universal themes’ (p.110). The words ‘gone on’ are key in this discussion of stages in ‘ways of seeing’: Smith, like Koch, demonstrates the suggested fourth ‘way of seeing’, when the ‘view’ has moved away from the landscape of a regional self-conscious cultural identity. Vernay, in his substantial discussion of Koch’s work, describes the novels as ‘odyssey adventures’ which ‘invariably start with an escape and end with a homecoming’ (2007; p.155). Vernay suggests that in the novels he critiques, the male protagonists, no matter the different location of the narratives, are bound to ‘voyages which allow one to confront one’s self with otherness and to expand the boundaries which confine individuals to a limited geographical space, (and) are an experience in separation or in weaning which allow the cutting of the crimson thread with home’ (p.155). Koch’s early work, The Boys in the Island (1958), describes the innocence of life in its paradise of landscape and wilderness. Set against the dangerous temptations of the mainland and the distractions of such for boys, there exists the dilemma of whether to go or stay, the problem of knowing ‘home’ but thinking of the ‘Other’. In Koch’s second novel, Across the Sea Wall (1965), he engages with another culture, that of India, and relates the experiences of two young men leaving Tasmania for Britain, the ancestral ‘home’ of the colonists and their descendents. On the way the men visit India and are fascinated by what they find, having at last crossed the ‘sea wall’ into ‘difference’. The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), perhaps one of

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Koch’s best known works (in that it was made into a film), again engages with Eastern culture, specifically Jakarta under the rule of Sukarno in the 1960s . It is the story of those who leave Australia to cross the ‘sea wall’, and is also concerned with dual identities. In Koch’s Highways to a War (1995) – published before but actually the sequel to Out of Ireland (1998) – there is again contrast and duality. Highways to a War recounts events in Vietnam and Cambodia in the mid 1970s and is the story of a descendent of Devereaux, one of the Irish political prisoners exiled to Tasmania in the 1840s. Using Koch as an example of a possible fourth stage of ‘ways of seeing’ landscape and place is not to suggest that writers progress automatically to another stage. (Rossiter has not made his position clear, though a reading of his theory with his use of the word ‘stage’ lends itself to the idea of a progression). I am suggesting that writers, depending on a complex melange of elements, ‘see’ landscapes in different ways at different times. That ‘way of seeing’ can be either in a geographical sense or the social- cultural. It is evident in the shift from Clarke where the carceral landscape, the masculine aggressor, subdues the population, to Drewe's description of a ‘landscape’ which invites a reading of the social and cultural problems of the settler colony. In the works of McQueen and Flanagan the shift has been to the strength of nature in providing peace and a haven for humans: ultimately a way to ‘be’. Koch in his various works turns his gaze outward and across the globe to Ireland, India, and to Asia. This is the fourth stage of the spiral progression, the centrifugal force: outward- looking, with writers moving away from the landscape of a provincial, regional, and self-conscious cultural identity: they move across borders.

6. CREATIVE RESPONSE My interest in John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing and the notion of a ‘hidden’ force within the viewer led me to ponder how long it took people to ‘see’ new places and how much of the way we experienced a place was a result of forces both external and ‘hidden’. I realised that people living in the same place could have intensely contrasting viewpoints of the ‘place’, and that people’s memories of place would also diverge. I wanted to attempt a narrative in which the characters experienced ‘place’ in very different ways. I wanted to tease out the many factors which affected our ‘ways

203 of seeing’, factors such as memory, plans for the future, disappointment, happiness, or family connections. The Territory of Truth explores the ‘need for place’ in humans and the roads by which people travel to find or construct that place. It also suggests what may happen to those who do not. The novel shares a concern with the function of landscape and place in relation to concepts of identity and belonging: it considers the forces at work upon an individual when they move through differing landscapes and what it might be about those landscapes which attracts or repels. The novel examines interior feelings such as loss, loneliness, and fulfilment, and the ways in which identity is derived from personal, especially familial, relationships. Set in Tasmania and Britain, the novel is narrated as a ‘voice play’ in which each character speaks from their ‘way of seeing’, their ‘truth’. This form of narrative was chosen because of the way stories, often those told to us, find a place in our memory: part of the oral narrative of family, they affect our sense of self and our identity. The Territory of Truth suggests that identity is linked to a sense of self-worth and a belief that one ‘fits’ in to society. In terms of the four ways of seeing discussed earlier, I have tried (without being too prescriptive) to develop characters that demonstrate those four phases, the first three of which are those posited by Rossiter. The first phase, seeing landscape as ‘Other’, is demonstrated by two characters, Meg McGill and Emily. For Meg, ‘place’ is the memory of someone else. Meg’s character demonstrates the first phase of seeing in which the landscape of Tasmania will always be ‘Other’. ‘When I met Jock, so handsome and filling my head with ideas of travel and new countries .... I must have had too much of my Da in me because I said yes, to the marriage and to the travel. I wanted to go, to see the world. But I’ve not seen much as it turned out. Not much at all.’ She has not found a place to be in Hobart, or in Australia, or in the family. Only her son (who is growing up and making his own way) provides her with any sense of completeness; all else is Gothic ‘Other’. The second character to demonstrate this first phase is Emily, the author of the journal which concludes the novel: for her everything in Hobart is ‘Other’ and she is aware that she is an outsider and does not ‘fit’. The character Jock demonstrates phase two, where place is separate from self and an observational process is involved. I have tried to show how Jock, having travelled to the other side of the world, finds himself within a landscape yet separate

204 from it. He cannot be involved: he can only observe. He has invested the ‘place’ of Hobart with the idea of family and clings to it despite all being hopeless. He does not betray his wife for that would threaten the fabric of what he is trying to hang on to - the ‘place’ of family. Place represents a longed-for life which he cannot live. A third ‘way of seeing’ is demonstrated by the brother, Eoin, for whom the concept of ‘place’ is internalised, natural, and he sees no other. As an adult he has escaped the family of his past and now is totally at one with his own family in the ‘place’ of his birth. The fourth way of seeing is that of looking out and away. This is demonstrated by the story of Maeve who has so thoroughly known the place of family and of Hobart that she is now looking outwards, to other, dreamed-of shores. During her travels she experiences disappointments with what she has learned about places, of herself, and of other people. At times when she feels she has spoiled a chance to forge an identity in a new and beautiful place, she has to get away, to start again. It is the way she is, much as she will tear up a drawing or a painting which is not ‘working’: she needs a ‘fresh sheet of art paper’ and the chance to begin to make another self in another place. The chief questions the novel seeks to answer are: What constitutes identity and belonging? What is ‘sense of place’ and where does it come from? The answers are not so much direct ‘answers’, but rather an exploration of the possible. I have tried to suggest that much of our sense of place comes from memory, those which sifted into our ‘selves’ from our earliest days: the smell of the classrooms, salt, seaweed, the tang of eucalypts, the particular smell of slight rain on parched, dusty ground – that sense of memory which stirs both positive and negative thoughts. I have tried to show that the way we see, or hear, or remember specific events can be very different from the way others do. Further, that memory shapes our links with our past in specific and persistent ways in that what we experience in the present can be used as a foil for the past, sometimes as a dichotomy of the good and the bad: that what we live in the present will affect how we find a ‘use’ for our past and that it can be renewed, remade, rediscovered, in every telling. In writing the novel I have tried to use the lives of its characters to explore the way in which people need, and want to be bound to, a place: to have it as an identity. This is a universal desire, evident in other cultures, and example being the declarations by Australian Aboriginals of their special relationship with places; the builders of Stonehenge or the Standing Stones of Callanish in the Hebrides, also the

205 placing of tombstones on ceremonial grounds, or on battlefields such as Culloden in Scotland: all such acts expressing a relationship through landscape. In Australian culture there are also the sites of ‘valour’ – Gallipoli, La Somme – in urban culture some would even say football or cricket grounds have become the secular equivalent of shrines and holy days (Gillis, 1977). In The Territory of Truth I also attempt a discussion of the role of memory: of place or sight, sound, and smell, and the hold they may have on people. I try to tease out and find answers to what it is in searching for ‘place’ that we really desire: perhaps a safe stockade, a cool oasis, or the hubbub of humanity? Is ‘place’ substantiated through the satisfaction of work or relationships, or through the ability to make a home and to be comfortable and ‘safe’ in that home, in that place? And what of those who have no family, who travel and trawl the world for experiences and the making of memories? Perhaps the novel will encourage readers toward a reflection on life, on themselves, their identity, and their ‘place’. At the core of the novel I have placed an examination of how our ‘selves’ may be partly constructed by other people. I’ve tried to show that Maeve has learned that people make up their own truths about people, and they pass these ‘truths’ on to others so that the person they see is their truth. Her mother did not consider her a ‘real’ part of the family, and this perception has become part of Maeve’s brother’s truth. In a negative environment such as that, some people, like Maeve, will take on that knowledge (that ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’) and come to see themselves as an outsider, a trouble maker, a loner. They become caught within the web and weave of peoples’ opinions, caught in the driftnet of their judgments and may find it difficult to close in on an identity and a place. Those who have made their judgements (often on the basis of whispers) may find it difficult to discard them. Readers may feel a kinship with the protagonist as she struggles with her perception of herself as an outsider, and merely temporary in the landscape. In writing The Territory of Truth I was influenced by the themes of two Australian writers, that theme being the journey to find a ‘self’ (I contest the view held by some that such a theme, the journey, is a cliché). Maeve’s journey – a search for ‘self’, and a search for some meaning to all her ‘weary’ days – is akin to that of the character Heriot in Randolph Stow’s novel To the Islands (1958). This novel resonates with the many who feel that life is indeed wearying, that when one’s future seems to be in the past, the attachment to life is anchored merely by the thin strands of an

206 enduring curiosity. For Heriot, that curiosity was to stand at last on a cliff and look out to sea, at the islands he had long heard of: Heriot woke and found the morning standing at his bed like a valet, holding out his daylight self to be put on again. (p.11). So begins the journey of the protagonist as he wends his way through the outback in search, not only of his ‘self’ but of some meaning to all his days in his ‘vague and wearying occupation’ (p.11). Stow's reference to the ‘self’ as something to be put on, or contrived, invites an interrogation of how humans forge an identity. Is it just from ourselves, or is it from where we are, our place ‘to be’, or our relationships and memory? Heriot travels through a harsh landscape on his journey and although there are times of great difficulty he survives, as Stow suggests, because he is in effect moving through his own self: he is landscape; he is the earth; he is the rugged terrain. The narrative reveals our almost subconscious comparison of ourselves to the landscape. His sense of self changes, and is as variable as the landscape. The character Maeve in Territory of Truth is an outsider on a journey, similar to Theodora in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story (1959). Theodora is uneasy in the world and is on a quest for a place to be. She is haunted by visions of her childhood landscape, of the bones littering the ground at the pastoral station on which she grew up: ‘I too come from a country of bones’ (p.112). In her journey she is moving away from those memories, and seeking a new place to be, her own life, with her own memories. In The Territory of Truth the main character, in searching for that lost ‘place’, removes herself (like Theodora) from reality. The use of ‘voice’ in the novel has been influenced by William Faulkner’s As I lay Dying (1930). It employs the device of ‘story-telling’ and multiple narrators: as a book about family and stories, and how ‘stories’ are central to the development of the idea of a family culture – we know our ‘family’ because of what we have been told; the telling develops the narration of family history. The first person narration is also used as a device to reveal aspects of the lives of the characters of which the other characters are unaware, such as Meg the mother talking about her childhood, but keeping the truth from Maeve. That ‘truth’ is not revealed to Maeve until much later in the novel, however the reader is aware early in the narrative that Maeve is proceeding in ignorance. I’ve attempted to show that we know our family because we live with them (for a while), we see what they do, and we listen to their stories: there is a

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‘confessional’ aspect to the telling of family history, but there are also the ‘gaps’; the telling of family history which is not necessarily ‘truth’. Indeed the truth can be subverted in ‘truth games’ and this is evident in the novel. I have also posed a question: if part of our identity is formed from family stories what happens when those stories are untruths? Maeve contrives ‘gaps’ in her life as a reaction to what she ultimately learns. When she discovers that the truth has been withheld from her, the shock that her father, so newly loved, was complicit in a trivial but cruel deceit, has the effect on her of wishing to keep her own truths to herself. Like her artwork, the composition of which allows her to leave out details she is not happy with (an ugly tree, a lamp post, rubbish in the gutter), she too begins to leave out truths of her life. Eventually however, she is forced into a revelation and the act of doing so is an epiphany: she suddenly feels herself to have a ‘place’ in life; has become ‘someone’, and has an identity. The novel invites readers to consider that inside each of us is a ‘place’, or a landscape: sometimes more than one. Some are built of tragedy, longing, or homesickness, some from happiness, thoughts of adventure, or aspirations ... and there are those that are private. Maeve experiences difficulties travelling through the ‘territory of truth’, finding that its borders are defined haphazardly by emotion and by the ‘stories’ of others. The Territory of Truth attempts to demonstrate the four ‘ways of seeing’ that people may pass through, and to show that some do not progress to another phase. The novel also asks ‘what is truth to any one of us?’ Truth is indeed fluid, complex and intricate. It involves movement, is continuous, contradictory and variable. The novel asks if an identity can be formed outside of ‘truth’, and it also canvasses the concept of untruths – the way people lie even to themselves, or exaggerate, become confused, and forget. Ultimately, the identity of a family cannot be fixed because no one has a purchase on actual truth – it cannot be fixed – it is as fluid, depending on context and interpretation as the identity of an individual. ‘Ways of seeing’ can be poles apart.

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