by Lorna Hendry
Looking over at their five-year-old son, Letitia said that they would probably only stay a few more years. As much as they loved the place and their jobs they wanted a better education for him than he could get here. Most of the white kids were sent down south to boarding school as soon as they were old enough. The idea of sending my boys away to school was unthinkable and I knew that the man in New Mapoon would have to keep looking for buyers for his business.
Driving back down the Cape, we visited Lockhart River, famous worldwide for its contemporary Aboriginal artwork. We spent a couple of hours at the workshop, looking at the paintings and prints and chatting to the artists who worked there. We chose a few pieces that we couldn’t resist, justifying the purchases to ourselves with the fact that prices at the workshop were much less than we would pay in a gallery at home. They charged our credit card with a low-tech swipe of a carbon paper receipt and arranged to post the canvases to Astrid’s address in Melbourne for us.
We had bought one huge canvas and two linocuts by the same young artist and James commented that it would be a small windfall for him. The man wrapping the artwork shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t work like that. The best thing he could do would be to move away from here and go down to Cairns. That money’ll be gone in a few days. Once his family get to know about it, he’ll have to hand most of it over. The most successful artists from here, they all live in town. It’s the only way they can hold on to the money they make.’
We drove out, disturbed at how little we understood the issues that were part of everyday life in remote communities.
Chapter Fourteen
On our way down the Cape York Peninsula, I decided I should have a go at driving. James claimed to get horribly carsick in the passenger seat but he surrendered the keys with good grace. I should have been practising more. I drove too fast into a patch of sand and the car skidded sideways, all one tonne of it completely out of my control. Too scared to put my foot on the brake in case it made the car slide more, I wrestled with the steering wheel. In my panic I didn’t notice that the car was heading straight for the high bank at the side of the track. James leaned across and grabbed the wheel, pulling it round sharply and shouting at me to brake.
We came to a stop with the car at an angle halfway up a mound of sand and the trailer jack-knifed across the track. I tried to hand the keys back to James but, after calmly talking me through how to straighten us up again, he insisted I keep driving until we reached the sealed road. Very carefully and much more slowly, I drove us to Cooktown.
In Cooktown, the northernmost town in Australia, located on the mouth of the Endeavour River and just over 300 kilometres north of Cairns, we spent a long time reading the display panels that described what happened there in 1770. Captain Cook and his crew had spent seven weeks living alongside the local Indigenous people. Cook’s men transgressed local custom by killing sea turtles and refusing to share the meat and the Indigenous men expressed their frustration by burning down the sailors’ camp. Later, the two groups came together at a place now known as Reconciliation Rocks. Cook handed out clothing and blankets, but a few days later the gifts were found in a heap, discarded as valueless.
This story, with its layers of cultural misunderstandings, struck a chord with James and me. We felt as if we understood just as little about Indigenous culture as those white men more than two hundred years ago. We read the panels and talked with the boys about what had happened, and how it had all gone wrong. James said he was always wary of doing the wrong thing, like Cook’s men had. That was why he was so reluctant for us to go into Indigenous communities, even those that welcomed visitors. My argument was that if we didn’t make an effort, even if it made us feel uncomfortable, we would go home to Melbourne understanding just as little about Australia’s Indigenous people as we had when we left. The boys took the opportunity to remind us that, unlike James and me, they had never climbed Uluru, proving that they had more respect for Indigenous culture than we did. They were still only six and eight years old, so by the time we left the museum, their favourite part was a verse from one of the displays: ‘Captain Cook chased a chook all around Australia. He lost his pants in the middle of France and found them in Tasmania.’ But we had just had a serious conversation about racial tension in Australia and our feelings about it, and I couldn’t imagine that ever happening in Melbourne.
At Cape Tribulation, the part of the Daintree National Park that has been set aside to house and entertain backpackers and other tourists, Oscar entertained a busload of Japanese tourists by cracking a stockwhip and posing for photos. James and I laughed when we saw him holding court in the car park of the pub. With his filthy clothes, bare feet and long tangled hair, our son from the inner city must have looked to them like a genuine Aussie kid from the outback. As I watched him, I noticed an air of relaxed playfulness that I couldn’t remember him having in the city.
I had seen changes in both boys. They were developing a quiet confidence and could have serious conversations with adults without any self-consciousness. Many of the older campers we had met had told us how much they had enjoyed talking to the kids. Some of them were probably just missing their grandchildren, but I had overheard some of those conversations and realised that Oscar and Dylan sounded a lot more grown-up than they used to. The way I spoke to them had changed too. I used to have a different voice that I used for the kids: slightly higher pitched, a bit slower and much more considered than the one I used with adults. If I lapsed into that voice now, its patronising tone made me cringe.
Something else I had noticed was that I was no longer trying to protect the boys from my moods. We lived too close together for there to be any point trying to hide when someone was frustrated or angry or grumpy or sad. I had a tendency to sulk and then explode. Once, when they had been mucking around in the back of the car and ignoring me when I asked them to stop, I shocked all of us by unclipping my seatbelt and throwing myself into the back seat, slapping and shouting at them. We were all seeing each other in our most horrible moments, and we were all coping with it. It was dawning on me that this was what people meant when they said travelling with their kids made them a closer family. I thought that on this trip I would be getting to know Oscar and Dylan better. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have been a bit of a mystery to them at times too.
South of Cape Tribulation the rainforest gave way to cane fields that stretched as far as we could see. We were on our way to Port Douglas, the resort town 66 kilometres north of Cairns that would be our first experience of city living since Darwin eight weeks earlier. Astrid and Anthony were already there with their three children, having their annual tropical holiday to recover from the tail end of Melbourne’s miserable winter weather. We navigated the smooth asphalted roads that seemed too narrow for our big car and parked outside their apartment. Oscar spotted them hurrying towards us from the beach, lugging bags, damp towels and sandy buckets and spades. Astrid dropped her load to hug us all and I suddenly realised how much I had missed them. We spent the next few days catching up, although we had trouble dragging the boys from the apartment to do anything but eat. They were mesmerised by the television and the luxury of being indoors as the tropical rain fell in sheets outside.
James’s sister, Liz, was also in Port Douglas. She owned a restaurant in the main street with her partner, John, but they lived in Mission Beach, 140 kilometres south of Cairns. A month earlier, when they heard we had decided not to go home at the end of our first year of travelling, they had invited us to stay with them in their brand-new house. I was very reluctant. It seemed like a huge imposition and I wasn’t sure how they would cope with our noisy, half-feral boys. I had tried to explain this to James and Liz’s stepmother. She heard me out and then told me she had reached a point in her life where she had decided to accept all invitations as they were offered: with grace and generosity. It was good advice and I took it.
When Astrid and Anthony left, we packed up and drove straight to Mission Beach. Jo
hn met us outside the house with a huge smile, reassuring me that he really didn’t mind us landing on him. He opened the front door with a flourish and we looked past the swimming pool to the palm trees that lined the beach and framed a view of Dunk Island. We walked through in awe. Two bedrooms and a bathroom at the front were ours. There was a sleek commercial-quality kitchen with a plumbed-in coffee machine, a lounge room with huge leather couches and a deck by the pool that held a Balinese-style pagoda and a day bed.
Dylan and Oscar ignored the television and pool in favour of something far more exciting: ‘Soft beds, such soft beds!’
After eight months on the road, we were completely over camping.
Although there were only six weeks of term left, we enrolled the boys at the local primary school. They were as eager to go as we were to hand them over to professionals. At the end of the first day, Dylan had six new friends and assured me that he’d make more the next day. Oscar had a different approach. He had spotted a boy in his class who, just like him, had hair that was well below his shoulders and bleached by sun and salt water. It didn’t take long for the other boy to notice Oscar and they became best friends. Sometimes when I was calling them home from the beach, I couldn’t tell which of the two lean, tanned boys was mine.
The boys loved the routine of school. The only downside was that they came home with nits. It wasn’t my first encounter with head lice, but the tropical ones were a lot more persistent than the ones I was used to. Every night, I soaked their hair in chemicals and painstakingly combed out all the creatures and their eggs. In theory that should have broken the cycle, but whenever I checked I found more of the tiny, elongated eggs clinging to a hair shaft.
One afternoon I asked one of the other mothers how she coped with it. She looked a little guilty and then let me in on a secret. The local vet had advised her to use an animal flea treatment on her kids. ‘You just put it on their heads every three months. I do it in the holidays. They used to have nits all the time, and I haven’t seen one since I started.’ I seriously considered it for a couple of days before deciding to persist with my less drastic method for a while longer.
John was the manager of a local resort, the Horizon, and he organised jobs for James and me there. Built on a hill above South Mission Beach, looking out to Dunk Island, the Horizon looked as if it were gradually being engulfed by the rainforest. After a quick lesson on the coffee machine, I was rostered on the breakfast shift and James worked behind the bar in the evenings. Although we were back to tag-team parenting, the handovers were a lot less frantic than they had been in Melbourne.
‘Where are the kids?’
‘Dunno. On the beach, I think.’
‘All right. See you later.’
I had to be at work early and I came to love driving through the rainforest at dawn. Sometimes I surprised a family of cassowaries who were loitering in the middle of the road or nosing around a wheelie bin. Nature was always nearby at the Horizon. Guests were warned that the large resident male cassowary that patrolled the paths between the cabins should be treated with wary respect.
The open-air restaurant was visited regularly by a lace monitor called George. When I heard screaming from the dining area, I knew George was doing his rounds. Sometimes we broke an egg into a bowl and put it down for him. It was important to do this quickly. George could smell an egg a mile away and would sprint towards it frantically, his long, curved claws scraping along the floorboards. Snakes were also common visitors. One morning the receptionist had to be taken home after a tree snake fell from a door frame and draped itself around her neck.
‘You work at the Horizon’, a tiny classmate of Dylan’s said to me, after I had been at work for just two days. Oscar’s teacher had already introduced herself to James across the Horizon’s bar. We had been warned that gossip whizzed through the three small villages of North Mission, Wongaling and South Mission. A small minibus trundled from North to South Mission a few times a day, and I suspected that it had some kind of magical ability to transfer knowledge as it drove along. You could almost see people waving at the bus, absorbing the news that someone had just been sacked for turning up to work drunk, then going next door to tell their neighbours all about it.
The only other public transport was one taxi, which was also a minibus. If you had drunk too much in one of North Mission’s bars, you had to call the taxi and hang around on the street waiting for it to arrive. Eventually it would turn up and collect you and anyone else who had been wondering how they were going to get home. You worked out who was going where, although the driver already knew where you all lived, and handed over some money when you got out. It was a nice system, a bit like someone’s dad coming to pick you and all your friends up from a school disco.
It would have been a very bad idea to drive home at the end of a big night out. The local police did a lot of hiding behind trees with radars and often set up roadblocks on the one road that connected the three towns. One night James was breathalysed in the front garden after coming home from work. A police car that had been hiding further up the road screeched to a halt across the driveway as he drove in and the policemen jumped out and grabbed him as he got out of the car. The breath test showed traces of alcohol and James admitted to having had one beer when he knocked off. The police officer finally conceded that he probably wasn’t over the limit – or at least he wouldn’t be by the time they took him to Tully, 40 kilometres away, for a blood test.
Until recently, Tully had the honour of being the town with the highest rainfall in the country and it still had a Big Gumboot right in the centre of town. Mission Beach regularly had more than seventy days of rain in a row and, when the wet season arrived, it was bombarded by electrical storms and tropical downpours. As lightning lit up the sky and the rain was so loud we couldn’t hear each other talking, we were very glad we were not in the tent. And when the humidity hit 100 per cent, the temperature climbed into the high thirties and the sea was off limits because of stingers and crocodiles, we were very grateful for Liz and John’s pool.
By Christmas, we still hadn’t decided what to do next. Every day we had a new plan, but nothing seemed quite right. Sometimes we considered putting down roots in Mission Beach, perhaps even buying a house and starting a business. But then we would start daydreaming about heading back on the road and we couldn’t imagine making a commitment that serious. For now, though, as rain continued to fall for thousands of kilometres in every direction, it seemed wisest to stay right where we were.
The Horizon closed for renovations in January and James stayed on as a labourer. It was hot and humid and every night he came home exhausted, drenched in sweat, covered in insect bites and streaked with mud. He distracted himself by talking about how great it would be if we had a boat. After weeks of nagging I gave in and agreed to spend $2000 on it, providing he came up with a system for getting it on and off the car without needing me to help.
James spent an evening designing an attachment for our roof rack so that we could carry it on top of the car. He took it to a welding company in Tully for a quote. The man looked at the drawing he had done in texta on a paper napkin, raised his eyebrows slightly, and said it would cost $980.
The next weekend, James drilled and screwed and bolted together aluminium struts and boat rollers and attached them all to the roof rack. On the way back to the hardware store for more screws, he spotted a little boat with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. ‘Do you reckon I could get that on top of my car?’ Of course, the salesman said. It had been on a roof rack before. In fact, he had originally bought that very boat for himself. He had just been to Cooktown and he and his kids had cruised up the Endeavour River in it.
He couldn’t have come up with a better line if he had been spying on us for six months. Although, given the way information travelled through Mission Beach, perhaps he had.
‘How much do you want for it?’
‘$1200 just for the boat. But I could do you a package deal with a motor for $3000.�
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That afternoon, James told me the bad news. ‘I know it’s more than we wanted to spend. I’ve already wasted a bit of money, but maybe we should forget the whole thing.’ His chin quivered a little. ‘It’s just, you know, I really thought it would be fantastic to have a boat. For the boys, they’d love it. Wouldn’t you, Dylan?’
‘A boat! A boat! We’re getting a boat!’ Dylan shouted obligingly.
The next day, we went to pick it up. As James and the salesman struggled to load it onto the car, it became obvious that this boat had never been upside down in its life. At one point, a wooden box on the floor of the boat clattered open, revealing a rusty battery.
‘Probably have to nail that shut’, the salesman muttered.
When he picked up the motor, James almost fell over. It weighed 50 kilograms. Next came the anchor, four life jackets, two oars, instructions on how to change over the registration of the boat, advice about how to get a boat licence because it would be illegal to drive this boat without one, details about how to mix the two-stroke fuel and run the motor in properly and a reminder to have the whole lot serviced regularly.
I looked into the back of the car. When we were on the road, it was packed neatly to the roof with boxes of food, school books, our fridge and two eskies for fresh vegetables and cold drinks. Now it was full of boat stuff. I tried to catch James’s eye but he was handing over the rest of the cash and wouldn’t look at me. We drove out of the yard silently.
At home, the boys and I watched as James wrestled the boat from the roof of the car. When he finally got it to the point where gravity was on his side, he managed to get out of the way just before it landed on his feet. Looking at the car, it was obvious that James’s homemade boat rack had bent quite a lot during the very slow 4-kilometre trip from the boat shop. He hauled the outboard motor out of the back and dragged it into the house. Although he lowered it to the floor as carefully as he could, there was an obvious dent where it landed on the wooden boards.
