by Anna Romer
‘Sure.’
Margot opened a folder. ‘Thornwood originally belonged to Tony’s grandfather, but I expect you already know that?’
I shook my head. ‘This is the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well, you’re in for a treat,’ she said, drawing out a large colour photo and placing it on the desk before us. ‘That’s the homestead – gorgeous, isn’t it? It was built in 1936, a classic old Queenslander with four bedrooms. It’s fully furnished – I’m assuming Tony decided to keep the place intact for sentimental reasons. There’s a vegie garden, orchard, creek access . . . Also, hidden up in the hills surrounding the property, there’s a small dwelling that was probably the original settlers’ cabin, most likely built sometime in the late 1800s.’
The photo showed a magnificent residence skirted by a shady wraparound verandah. Stained-glass panels curved out from twin bay windows, and iron lacework festooned the eaves. The garden surrounding it was a maze of hydrangeas and lavender hedges, with a brick path meandering up the grassy slope towards wide welcoming stairs. Dappled sunlight danced across the lawn, where a magnificent old rose arbour sat smothered in crimson blooms.
‘The house itself is quite a feature,’ Margot went on, ‘but as with any property, the true value is in the land. The total land size is 2500 acres – that’s just over a thousand hectares. The property adjoins two other large farms, but most of it backs onto the Gower National Park. You have 200 acres of grazing pasture, with rich dark soil, dams, fencing, a permanent creek . . . and according to the report, the views are stunning.’
Bronwyn sighed. ‘Mum, it’s perfect.’
‘We’re not going to live there,’ I said hastily.
‘But Mum – ’
‘We’ll sell it and buy a place of our own here in Melbourne.’
Bronwyn gave me a mournful look, but I ignored her and resumed my inspection of the photo. After Tony’s death I’d vowed to forget him . . . for Bronwyn’s sake as well as my own; how could I do that if we were living in his grandfather’s house? The old homestead looked huge and rambling and mysterious. Probably full of secrets, riddled with ghosts, haunted by other people’s memories.
Tony’s memories.
Margot drew out another photo: an aerial view that showed the property as heart-shaped and densely forested. A section of cleared grazing land rolled along the southernmost quarter, a verdant patchwork stitched with fences and dotted with brown dams. Central to the photo was the homestead – a rectangular patch of iron roof, surrounded by sprawling gardens that rambled uphill and vanished into bushland. A ridge of hills swept to the north-west, mostly heavily treed, but there were curiously bald areas where stone formations pushed through the rust-red earth.
‘If you did change your mind and decide to live at Thornwood,’ Margot told us, ‘there’s really not a lot to do. The paddocks are mostly in agistment, which means you’ll have additional income from farmers grazing stock on your land. The rest is natural bushland, so aside from general maintenance near the house, it’s the sort of property you can simply sit back and enjoy.’
She collected the photos and slid them back into the property file. ‘Now, I expect you’re keen to know how much it’s worth.’
Shadows were creeping across the room; the light filtering through the window had taken on a grey tinge. My chair creaked as I shifted my weight. A rundown old house on a chunk of wilderness, miles from anywhere; a few grazing paddocks, some muddy dams. Nothing to get too keyed up about, surely?
I nodded.
Margot wrote on a notepad and tore off the top leaf, then placed it reverently on the desk in front of us.
Bronwyn gasped.
The lawyer smiled approvingly. ‘Certainly worth the trouble of a quick look, wouldn’t you say?’
2
In early October we disembarked at Brisbane airport. As we walked across the shimmering asphalt, the winter greyness thawed from my bones. Under my heavy cardigan, I began to sweat. Bronwyn was already peeling out of her tracksuit top, baring her lily arms to the sun. I knew that within minutes she’d be a lobster, but the warmth was so delicious after months of cold that I decided to let her enjoy it while it lasted.
After all, we were only here for the day.
My mission: To inspect the old homestead Tony had left me and make a note of any maintenance it must certainly need. Then I’d enlist a local real estate agent to sell it. According to Tony’s lawyer, Thornwood was worth more money than I could reasonably comprehend . . . but that wasn’t why I was keen to offload it. Of course, the money would be a life-changing boon. My income as a freelance photographer was often patchy; as it was, I’d dipped into my nest egg to get us here. My qualms were hard to put into words, but I knew what lay at their heart: Tony had caused my daughter a great deal of joy in her short life . . . and also a great deal of grief. For Bronwyn’s sake – and my own – I knew it was time to shake free of Tony’s shadow and move on.
By mid-afternoon we’d escaped the city traffic and were cruising along wide country roads, cocooned in a bubble of aircon. The gleaming late-model hire car flew over the tarmac like a bird, barely registering the potholes and gravel traps as it sped us south-west in the direction of Magpie Creek.
Bronwyn had chattered all the way from the airport, but the moment we left behind the bleak flatness of the city outskirts she’d fallen silent. Now she sat staring fixedly through the windscreen, as though willing the car to eat up the road and get us there faster.
She wore her customary jeans and tank top, and restrained her pale hair beneath a polka dot headscarf that her father had given her last birthday. The gesture wasn’t lost on me. She’d worn it for him, and just the sight of it framing her flushed face made me uneasy. I wondered what she was hoping to find at Thornwood. Relics of her father’s childhood, or perhaps clues as to why he’d withdrawn from her life in the last six months. Or maybe, like me, she was curious about the world Tony had kept hidden from us for so long.
The road climbed steep hills, then nosedived along the rim of sprawling valleys. We passed a few scrubby patches of bushland – but the countryside was mostly farms. Paddocks of freshly ploughed rust-brown soil, or green pastures colonised by herds of sleepy cattle, were offset against a backdrop of sharply peaked hills and craggy mountains. My modicum of pre-travel research had revealed that the formations surrounding Magpie Creek had once been part of an active volcano, now dead for over twenty-five million years. When the early settlers arrived in the 1870s they’d harvested the surrounding brigalow scrub to build their cabins and then their towns. Logging became a major industry – forests of pine, red cedar, rosewood, and eucalypt were culled and hauled away, and the land sown with grass to accommodate dairy cattle. Now, the hills stood mostly naked, their volcanic origins jutting from the velvety mantle of pasture, as though the giants who slept beneath were all bony knees and elbows.
‘Why didn’t Dad ever talk about where he grew up?’ Bronwyn asked suddenly.
‘Maybe he wanted to forget his old life and move on.’
‘Why?’
‘Sometimes people outgrow the place they come from. As they get older they start to feel cramped, so they go in search of a home that fits them better.’
‘You mean like a hermit crab? When it gets too big for its shell?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But he didn’t really move on, though, did he, Mum?’
‘How’s that, honey?’
‘All this . . .’ She waved at the windscreen. ‘The pointy hills and grey old trees, the big wide sky. It’s like we’re driving through one of his paintings.’
She fell silent, and I found myself viewing the passing landscape with fresh eyes. Suddenly, everything I saw reflected Tony’s familiar palette: dusty-lavender hills, earth-red verges, ash-white tree trunks, lime-tipped leaves, a cloudless cerulean sky.
Tony must have loved this place. The volcanic remnants, the spiky grasstrees; the bushland dotted with palms and s
oaring river gums, the rolling green paddocks. And yet he’d never spoken of his home, his family, his schooldays, his friends, or the land that had so obviously inspired his life’s work. I couldn’t begin to guess why, but one thing was clear – bad memories lurked in Tony’s unspoken childhood, memories which he’d found too painful to face, even as an adult.
I recalled the Courier-Mail article I’d found: Human remains discovered in a muddy dam, presumably those of a man who’d gone missing twenty years ago. Back in Melbourne it’d been easy enough to dismiss it as coincidence, but driving through this vibrant landscape so reminiscent of Tony’s paintings, I had to wonder. They found him, Tony had said. They found him. Had he known the man in the dam, after all?
Unclamping my fingers from the steering wheel, I patted my jeans pocket. The big iron key I’d stowed there was a solid reminder that we were driving straight into the past. Tony’s past. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a brilliant idea, and if it hadn’t been for Bronwyn I might have turned the car around and gone home.
Just after two o’clock we entered the wide dusty streets of Magpie Creek. Passing a huge wirework sculpture of a horse, we hooked through a roundabout and entered a tree-lined avenue. An elderly couple sat on the verandah of a classic old pub, but otherwise the town appeared deserted. I counted two bottle shops, a BP service station, a Caltex service station, four tiny cafes, and a quaint little post office. There was even a historic-looking cinema complete with a billboard of curling movie posters and a mangy dog sniffing in the doorway. Flocks of pink rosellas swarmed in the upper branches of an enormous fig tree, their piercing calls the only intrusion in the stillness.
‘It’s a ghost town,’ Bronwyn said.
‘It’s just too hot for people to be outside,’ I reasoned. ‘They’ll probably come out in droves when the sun goes down.’
‘Yeah, like blood-sucking zombies.’
I smiled. ‘There’s a fish and chip shop over there. Do you want to stop for lunch?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She was staring through the windscreen with obvious impatience, her eyes aglow. I guessed that, hungry or not, she had no intention of delaying our journey with something as non-essential as food.
Soon the town receded behind us. The map Tony’s lawyer had given me was clearly marked with the name of the road we wanted, but nearly five minutes passed before I spotted the buckled old signpost. It was leaning dangerously low to the roadside, pockmarked with bullet holes, its chipped lettering almost unreadable.
‘This is it,’ Bronwyn said excitedly, ‘Briarfield Road.’
We sped past green paddocks and corridors of thick bush, manoeuvring swayback curves and bouncing over bone-rattling bridges and cattle grids. At one point we passed a large timber gate – behind it, a gravel track wound up the hillside to a dilapidated dwelling. I drove on, but saw nothing resembling Tony’s old homestead. After a mile or so, the bitumen road turned to dirt, then ended abruptly at a wall of bush.
Pulling over, I examined the map. Then I twisted in my seat to squint back the way we’d come.
Trees loomed at the roadside, sparse shade cowering at their feet. Beyond the heat haze stretched a horizon of prehistoric hills. I saw nothing I recognised. No buildings, no familiar rock formations. We might as well have just landed on the moon.
Bronwyn narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Mum, are we lost?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then where are we?’
I crumpled the map back in my tote, then revved the motor and cut a U-turn into the gravel.
‘We’ll head back to the main road,’ I decided. ‘This time keep your eyes peeled. We probably drove straight past it.’
I sped back along the dirt track, churning up a universe of dust in my haste to encounter something I recognised. Then, to my relief, I spied the hilltop dwelling we’d passed earlier.
Pulling over, I buzzed open the window and looked up the hill. The little weatherboard bungalow looked abandoned, but I noticed potential signs of life: two cars parked out front, and droopy singlets flapping on a clothesline.
I got out and dragged aside the gate, drinking in the wildflower-scented air. Cicadas screamed in the roadside grass, bullfrogs chorused in the distance. The only other sounds were the tick of the car’s overheated motor and the whisper of windblown leaves.
I drove up the track, pulling in behind the other vehicles. One of the cars was an immaculately restored vintage peacock-blue Valiant. The car next to it was an ancient Holden ute with bald tyres and cracked windscreen, its battered body half-eaten by rust.
I made a beeline for the bungalow. Paint peeled from its battered flanks. None of the windows wore curtains. The roofing iron had buckled up on one side like a sardine tin. Only the rampant grapevine shading the front door saved it from being a total loss; the broad leaves drank in the intense sunlight, swamping the entryway in cool green shadows.
As I climbed the stairs, a dog barked somewhere inside.
‘Pipe down, Alma,’ growled a voice, and the barking stopped.
The screen door clattered open. A tall scarecrow-like man stepped onto the verandah. He was perhaps sixty, with a halo of receding snow-white hair. His shabby workpants were stained black, his flannelette shirt threadbare. One lens of his glasses was patched with duct tape.
‘Sorry to intrude,’ I said, ‘but we’ve gotten ourselves a bit lost.’
‘What’re you after?’ the man asked.
‘I’m looking for a property called Thornwood. The address says it’s on Briarfield Road, but I’ve driven back and forth and can’t seem to find it.’
While I spoke, the screen door creaked again and a second man peered out. He was nearly identical to the other man, only taller, thinner. His jeans were rolled to the knee over skinny legs and bony bare feet. His sparse white hair stood on end, and his face was frozen into an expression of bewilderment. He studied me uncertainly.
‘What’s going on?’ he rasped, and I recognised the voice that had quieted the dog.
‘It’s all right, old mate,’ the first man said. ‘She’s lost.’
‘What’s she after?
A pause. ‘Thornwood.’
The taller man flinched and shot me a startled look. Without another word, he jerked back into the shadowy doorway and vanished inside.
‘No one lives at Thornwood,’ the first man told me. His tone had changed, his words more clipped. ‘The house has been empty for years. You sure you got the right property?’
‘Yes.’
The man regarded me with narrowed eyes, perhaps hoping for further explanation. When none was forthcoming, he stepped closer, peering down his nose with evident suspicion.
‘You’ve come too far. Thornwood’s on Old Briarfield Road, but that’s not on any of the maps. You see that hill up there?’ He pointed to a steep knoll behind the house, its base crowded with ironbark trees, its bare peak a mass of boulders. ‘Thornwood’s on the other side. Y’see that glint in the distance through the trees? That’ll be the homestead’s roof.’
I squinted, but saw only endless grey trunks and glittering, sun-spangled leaves. I looked back at the man. He was still frowning at the hillside, which gave me the chance to observe him at close range. His features were sharp, his skin leathery; his wispy ash-white hair seemed to have a mind of its own. It might once have been a friendly face, but time had soured it; frown lines bracketed his mouth and his cheeks were creviced. From behind the tape on his glasses peeped a ridge of scar tissue.
‘It’s only a half-hour walk from here,’ he was saying, ‘but a couple of miles by road. Just head back towards town. Old Briarfield Road’ll be the first on your left.’
I thanked him and headed back to the car. Behind me, I heard the screen door bang shut . . . then, in the airy stillness that followed, two hushed voices drifted from the other side of the flywire. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the muffled words sounded urgent, on the edge of panic.
I reached the car and got
in.
‘Are we badly lost?’ Bronwyn wanted to know.
‘Not lost at all,’ I told her. ‘We’re only a few minutes away.’
She released a stifled shriek, hugged herself deeper into the passenger seat, drumming her heels excitedly on the floor.
The car tyres crunched over the gravel. At the bottom of the hill, I got out and hauled shut the gate. As I secured the post chain, I glanced up at the dilapidated bungalow, but there was no sign of the two men. Behind the dwelling, a bloom of ink-black shadows infested the hillside, painting the bald outcrops of stone in shades of purple-grey.
Bronwyn was chattering. Happily, impatiently. Something about a family of black wallabies crouched at the roadside watching us drive past – but her words sailed right over my head. I felt suddenly out of my depth, an intruder in a world I had no right to be in. A city girl in an expanse of country that, though not exactly hostile, was making me feel distinctly edgy.
The car bumped along the dusty bitumen, its wheels jolting over potholes and cattle grids. I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles throbbed. It would be a relief to sell the old house, I told myself; to finally let go of Tony and move on. Yet I couldn’t shake the notion that fate had taken control . . . and – despite my efforts to pull free – was speeding me towards something I didn’t feel entirely ready to meet.
‘It’s a dump!’
Bronwyn flung open the car door even before I’d cut the engine. Dashing across the verge towards the old homestead, she ran along a brick pathway and up the front stairs. I heard her hammer on the door, then a moment later she vanished into the deep shadows of the verandah.
Climbing from the car, I stood on the springy grass and stared at the house Tony had left me. Perched at the top of a rise, glowing faintly in the brilliant sunlight, it was resplendent in all its shabby, rundown, neglected glory. Its paint was peeling, some of the guttering hung loose, and the verandah was choked by flowering vines which rampaged up the walls and escaped across the roof. More creepers and weeds overran the garden, and the lovely old rose arbour was derelict, its roses long dead. Thornwood was a far cry from the well-tended mansion in the lawyer’s files, and would need more than a few days of cursory maintenance to ready it for market.
