by Robert Drewe
In the sleepy and conservative 1950s the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know about the three huge atom bombs that were detonated there, but they lodged in the consciousness of the young Robert Drewe and would linger with him for years to come.
In this moving sequel to The Shark Net, and with his characteristic frankness, humour and cinematic imagery, Drewe travels to the Montebellos to visit the territory that has held his imagination since childhood. He soon finds himself overtaken by memories and reflections on his own ‘islomania’. In the aftermath of both man-made and natural events that have left a permanent mark on the Australian landscape and psyche – from nuclear tests and the mining boom to shark attacks along the coast – Drewe examines how comfortable and familiar terrain can quickly become a site of danger, and how regeneration and love can emerge from chaos and loss.
1
THE FATS DOMINO VOICE
It was that fabled occasion, a dark and stormy night, the sea just a blacker inked line in the distance, and I was lying in bed in the deep gloom of three a.m., singing Blueberry Hill in my Fats Domino voice.
We were on the trailing edge of a cyclone and wind buffeted the timbers of my rented cottage on the cliff edge at Broken Head. The house’s rocking gave the sensation of being in a sailing ship. Palm fronds lashed and rasped against the window, more rain, endless rain, thundered on the tin roof, and I’d hardly have been surprised if the cottage, an architectural folly that resembled a nineteenth-century schooner almost as much as a house, sailed over the cliff onto the sodden sugarcane fields below.
If we’re speaking of the true life, of genuine self-awareness, it was a night of pivotal moments when things could go either way. I could either plummet to the depths or shape up, brush myself down, pick myself up, pull my finger out, turn a frown upside down. Basically, get a grip. The odds at that stage favoured plummeting.
Anna, my anxious seven-year-old daughter and my youngest child, was insisting I sing to her, and had chosen the song. As the rain crashed down, she complained, ‘You need to sing louder.’ If I sang any louder I’d lose the throaty timbre of Fats Domino. Anyway my breathing was still shallow and irregular because I’d just killed a brown snake by her bedroom.
She was propped up beside me in bed, clasping my left hand. I was lying on my right side, and the hand-holding and singing position twisted my old lower-back injury. I seemed to have pulled a muscle while killing the snake. How it had slithered indoors was a mystery, but on Anna’s insistence (perhaps there was a nest of them under the house?) I’d closed every door and window against more invading wildlife.
The bedroom door and door-frame were so swollen with damp that I had to body-slam the door with my shoulder to shut it. I’d also closed the sliding glass door leading into the dripping tangle of bougainvillea, palms, camphor laurels, ferns, vines, lantana, cane toads, water dragons, brush turkeys, bats, owls, spiders and, obviously, snakes, that surrounded our lives this January night in the rainforest hinterland of northern New South Wales.
Storm-blown bougainvillea petals were streaming down the windows like gouts of blood. I turned off the light so we couldn’t see them, and then the humid room was dark as well as stifling.
‘Again,’ my daughter ordered, adjusting her grip. Blueberry Hill was one of the four numbers in my lullaby repertoire. For the others – Summertime, Blue Skies and Sentimental Journey – songs still to be rendered this turbulent night, my normal voice would suffice.
I started over. ‘Ah found ma thrill . . .’ If only she’d fall asleep so I could open the window. We’d been awake since two a.m. I’d thrown the dead snake out into the bushes. We’d drunk soothing warm milk and eaten toast and plum jam in the kitchen while I tried to get her mind off the snake.
As a going-to-bed or long-car-journey diversion she liked to enviously count the excessive number of pets of her school-friend Gemma Frith. So once more we counted Gemma Frith’s animals: forty-three, if you included ducks. As usual, Anna (six pets only) said, ‘Don’t you think that’s too many? I don’t think people should be allowed to have more than thirty-seven.’ I agreed: ‘That’s plenty.’ Now we were back in bed, having trouble falling asleep.
While I was trying to kill the snake, it had tried a desperate ruse. In one quick movement it shed its skin. The skin flew off in a single life-sized piece, landed beside the real squirming snake and wriggled alongside it, like a twin. This was nature’s trick to confuse the enemy, and it worked. Then – a final defence – the real dying snake suddenly exuded a terrible acrid smell. It stank as if it had been rotting in the sun for a week. I felt a guilty nausea. I couldn’t get this cadaver smell out of my sinuses.
I wasn’t focussed on Blueberry Hill but I could have sung it in my sleep. Even as I lay twisted on my side, holding hands and singing The wind in the willow played/Its sweet melodee /But all of those vows you made/Were never to beee , my mind was racing backwards and forwards from the snake. My thoughts were scattering even more wildly than was customary in my pre-dawn decline of morale. Eventually they stopped and settled around an icy realisation. As of yesterday I was old. My step-mother and last surviving aunt and uncle had just died within weeks of each other (each death a heavier emotional blow than I expected) and I was now the oldest person on each side of the family.
I was shocked by the realisation. Admittedly, I was no longer young (I could see that was probably going too far), but neither was I old. I was barely middle-aged. All the parts, except for close vision and lower back, still worked well enough. I was youngish.
Along with cheery birthday commiserations from my brother Bill and sister Jan, eternally five and ten years younger, a letter had arrived right on cue from my insurance company. AMP Life crisply pointed out that my particular life policy had expired that very day. For obvious reasons, including seeing the words expire and life in close conjunction, this came as a blow.
Until yesterday, if any misfortune from disablement to death had occurred, my loved ones were all covered. It was an expensive policy, chosen because I’d been self-employed for twenty years, since leaving journalism to write fiction, before the days of compulsory superannuation; also because of the financial risks inherent in writing literary fiction, the second-least lucrative genre (poetry wins, hands down) in an ill-rewarded industry, in a lightly populated country of chiefly non-fiction readers.
And because, highly unusually for a writer (or anyone these days), I’d had seven children – the youngest two of whom were still at school.
A marriage break-up out of the blue had walloped me. I no longer owned a house, and it seemed unlikely I ever would again. I was also a recent arrival in a regional town of hierarchical habits and an obsession with residential longevity. My old friends and adult children, however, all lived in the cities. So, I presumed, did any potential female partner.
I envisioned a future as a melanoma-dappled pensioner in a one-room flat above the Lennox Head fish shop. If I got lucky, maybe while beach-combing, I’d meet a dolphin-tattooed old hippie chick – Frangipani Blossom or Zenith Sunbeam: someone in the colonic irrigation or tantric trades. Unless fortune struck in an improbably immediate and imaginative way, that was me in ten years. Dead or alive, I was up the proverbial creek which, thanks to this endless rain, was currently in flood. Woe was me.
My literary agent had recently asked me, ‘Where do you want to be in ten years?’ Well, at three a.m. that got me worrying. At that hour who mulls over their successes? ‘You should have had me knocked off last week,’ I remarked on my birthday to the woman who until two years before had been my partner for twenty-five years.
‘Don’t even think it,’ she said. ‘Don’t send such thoughts out into the cosmos.’ With New Age breeziness, she suggested a financial plan for me. I should write a letter to the angels, asking politely for riches. I should state the exact amount I needed and leave the request on the bookshelf above my work desk w
here the angels would be sure to see it.
‘Should I include my ABN and bank details?’ I wondered.
‘Treat this with due respect,’ she said.
This monsoonal night the cosmos was receiving all sorts of wildly depressing data from me. Self-pity. Bitterness. Sorrow. A longing for intimacy and an affectionate female touch. Two years was a long time between drinks. Granted, there was one non-related female who cared deeply about me. I was always on her mind; indeed, she was obsessed with me. Unfortunately she was a stalker.
She was a self-described psychic who’d taken to writing me devoted spidery epistles in red biro on the back of old Christmas cards. She wrote that she had regular visions of me in supermarkets ‘buying tinned goods and looking pale.’ How she longed for the day when we could meet ‘for our mutual benefit and the consumption of fresh fruit’. She suggested her place on alternate Thursdays, when she was ‘spiritually unencumbered’.
I like fruit well enough, and mutual benefits as well, and I was quite prepared to be unencumbered on Thursdays. But as my spiritual stalker had neglected to include her name, address or phone number, I guess she thought I was psychic too.
To be frank, ever since a startling moment on a certain early autumn day two years earlier, I’d been unreceptive to anything or anyone spiritual, mystical, New Age, alternative, counter-cultural, hippie, zodiacal or even standard-issue North Coast conventionally unconventional. The day before this pivotal couple of minutes I’d returned home from Writers’ Week at the Adelaide Festival, Australian literature’s oldest and biggest celebration, vaguely hungover from the round of publishers’ parties and still chuffed at having been invited to deliver the opening address.
I’d had a quick swim in the surf, eaten dinner, made homecoming love with my wife, and gone to sleep. Next day, Monday, 13 March, I returned to the work desk – my self-satisfaction ebbing back to its normal level of vague anxiety – when something made me enter the marital bedroom and open the bedside drawer on her side of the bed. Something made me. Why? In twenty-five years I’d never felt the need to do so. And in the drawer was a handsomely bound, professionally authored, multi-paged horoscope.
This didn’t seem such an unusual discovery. She was into astrology. I opened the book, which was headed His Stars: Your Partner’s Horoscope. How sweet of her to get my horoscope done professionally, I thought, flipping through the swirls of charts which pointed out my sense of humour, love of family, even my love of the outdoors. Despite my distinct reservations about astrology, a topic I’d been known to mock, I had to admit the astrologer had me pretty accurately pinned down. Except in the final sentence: ‘To sum up: your partner is intriguingly unconventional for a Pisces!’ Pisces? I’m a Capricorn.
. . .
She’d already rented a white cottage on the top of the nearest hill, and she moved out of home immediately. The cottage (which to her annoyance, I would refer to bitterly as ‘the love shack’) was starkly visible from the veranda, the yard and most rooms of our house. Although he would nose it deep into the shrubbery, so was the Piscean’s red Mercedes.
Married life, family life, imaginative working life – life as I’d known it – jolted to a halt. There was an expression used of politicians that came to mind: rooster one minute, feather-duster the next. The date 13 March, 13 March rang in my mind now as the storm raged in the night and my sense of self – how pathetic and stupid was I? – was again fading by the second. Where was my life, my career going? (The career: the last card in the depressive’s pack.) In my recently acquired daze, where was I going? This was not the me I was used to. Who was this person?
Only the week before, a woman in a Land-Rover with Queensland licence plates had stopped me in the Woolworths car park to seek directions to the Big Prawn fish and chip shop on the Pacific Highway at Ballina. Apparently she had trouble finding a bright pink, six-by-ninemetre concrete-and-fibreglass prawn which towered over Australia’s main highway. She beckoned me to the car window and asked, ‘Do you speak English?’
That threw me. Now I looked foreign? ‘Yes – I – speak – English,’ I enunciated. I gave directions to the Big Prawn very crisply and grammatically. I wanted my English to be impeccable. This Queenslander with unsophisticated dining habits should be in no doubt about me or my antecedents. The woman gave me a strange look, thanked me briskly, quickly wound up the car window, and accelerated away.
Now I lay twisted up in the humidity, the stink of dying snake in my nostrils, imitating an old New Orleans entertainer. This night of the soul was growing much darker than the usual abyss. Could this be karma? In the past I’d left women for other women. I, too, had made children unhappy.
Psychologists say you can’t miss a life stage; having missed my wild-oats period by marrying at eighteen, I’d sowed a few oats in my thirties. But that was yesteryear. And not during the marriage.
Creatively, I was also tussling with something Don DeLillo wrote in his novel Point Omega : ‘The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the sub-microscopic moments.’
Fair enough. At the moment I was certainly ‘lost in memory’ all day long and ‘dreamingly self-aware’ of ‘sub-microscopic moments’. But I found it hard to set any of these moments down – or anything else either – without lapsing into maudlin self-pity. The critic in me, the person who prided himself on his literary bullshit detector, was having trouble with imaginative objectivity.
Then, then, as often happens – and how grateful I am for this familiar habit – just when worry and longing and guilt could have swept me into a hellish vortex, a thought struck. Not an epiphany exactly, but definitely the leap of insight when an idea suggests itself. I was actually galvanised by melancholy. I stood aside and saw the snake episode and its anxious aftermath, this concurrence of fear and family-defence and sadness, from a writerly distance.
I saw the ridiculousness in the situation: the snake, the tempest, the self-absorption, the high anxiety level, the Fats Domino voice, and I felt oddly calmed. My daughter was finally asleep. Her grip relaxed, her hair and breath brushed my cheek, love – overwhelming, indescribable love – enveloped me and, for the moment, I was saved.
. . .
Over the next few days I relate the snake story over and over. Try stopping me. There’s no credit coming from the country folk, however. They grumble, ‘Sounds like a whip snake to me.’ (Bite venomous but not fatal.) Or, ‘I bet it was a tree snake.’ (Harmless.) Even, ‘A brown snake? Are you sure? That sounds unlikely.’ But city friends all ooh and ahh and regard me as intrepid, the women among them shaking their heads in awe. One woman, unable to bear the ferocious excitement engendered by my re-enactment, even puts her hands over her ears and makes that irritating la-la-la noise.
The story so impresses them that I have no need to embellish it. For the purposes of the narrative I backtrack an hour before Blueberry Hill , before the toast and warm milk and the tightly sealed doors and windows. Suddenly, I relate, I’m woken at 2 a.m. by a heavier than usual cloudburst thundering on the roof. Padding to the bathroom through the living room, I spot the snake wriggling across the bare floor between my daughter’s bedroom and mine.
A snake! The slick floor is hampering its progress. It’s unsure which way to go. On the floor-boards it stands out in sharp relief: a young brown snake, a bit longer than my forearm. Apart from being born with enough venom to kill a cart-horse, brown snakes are notoriously aggressive at any age or length. And now it’s trying to crawl into her doll-house.
For a moment I stand there stupefied. I’m hardly snake-proofed. I’m barefoot, of course, and wearing only underpants. The snake is nosing into the doll-house’s second floor. Its coils are tipping over tiny tables and chairs and cupboards and people: little plastic mummies and daddies and children. This is overdoing the imagery. It’s like a Pedro Almodovar film about marriage breakdown.
My mind is whirling. At two o’clock in the morning I can’t phone a wildlife rescuer, one of those noble volunteers who care for the region’s inappropriately situated wildlife. In this greener-than-green area, snakes and goannas have greater status than horses or dogs, and the signs at my nearest beach saying Do Not Molest the Sharks are regularly souvenired by disbelieving tourists. However, I’m not totally immune to the local environmental ethos that a poisonous snake is a beautiful creature: forget its venomous reputation, just stand still, don’t disturb it and it will silently vanish.
But I don’t want this snake to silently vanish. My biggest fear is that the snake will silently vanish. I don’t want it slithering off into my daughter’s bedroom, or my teenage son’s room upstairs, or disappearing into the melange of toys and clothes and sofa cushions. I don’t want it to surprise us, reappearing at a time of its choosing to bite the children. Or, indeed, to poison Life-Policy-Expired-Only-Yesterday me.
I’m also species-territorial. People Inside – Wildlife Outside. Especially brown snakes that can kill you. And a brown snake is inside the house. And inside the doll-house. I can’t wait until wildlife-rescue business hours. I’m going to have to deal with this.
How? I don’t have one of those wire hooks that local snake handlers flourish so casually. I’m also lacking snake-killing weaponry. Somewhere in the monsoonal downpour outdoors, in the red mud and dripping shrubbery, is a shovel. There are grass clippers and tree trimmers. There is an axe, and a mattock with a split handle, and various bricks and heavy rocks. The axe would be best. But even if the snake waits patiently for me to find the axe, I can hardly chop up the living room.
All these thoughts flick by much more quickly than their retelling. Now I run the contents of the kitchen cutlery drawer through my mind. I decide that the only utensil in the house approaching a suitable weapon is a barbecue tool for turning steak and sausages and scraping fat off the grill of the Beefmaster.
