by Lorna Hendry
With only a couple of months to go before our trip ended, James and I had started to think about work. A friend had emailed him about a full-time, permanent job that had just been advertised. It was in James’s field, started at the beginning of the year and – the real kicker – was only ten minutes walk from our house. We spent an evening huddled around the laptop writing up a resume and an application letter. Inspired, I emailed an organisation I had worked for in the past, asking if they thought there might be any work for me the following year. At the time it felt like a dress rehearsal for real life but a few days later James was asked to fly to Melbourne for an interview. He bought a pair of decent pants and a nice shirt and booked the cheapest flight we could find. He was gone for forty-eight hours and when he got back he thought it had been a complete waste of time.
At Nambucca Heads, 285 kilometres south of Byron Bay, we discovered that the rock wall that served as a breakwater had been turned into a community art project. Anyone could paint whatever they wanted on the rocks. People had documented their holidays or their family or their special interests. We chose a large flat rock, painted a wonky map of Australia on it and marked out the route of our travels. We colour-coded the years and painted our names around the edge of the continent.
‘We’ve been almost everywhere’, said Dylan.
We stood back and looked. The map was circled and crisscrossed with red, blue and yellow lines. ‘Not Tasmania, though’, he said, spotting an empty bit.
With only a week left before we were meant to be in Sydney we decided to do some proper camping at Myall Lakes, just an hour north of Newcastle. We were astonished at how beautiful this part of the coast was, and how wild and isolated it felt. The freshwater lakes were protected from the Pacific Ocean by a stretch of huge sand dunes. On the ocean side of the dunes, waves crashed onto empty white beaches that stretched as far as we could see. One morning, as I was sitting at the base of a sand dune and watching the ocean, a squadron of fighter jets from the nearby Williamtown Air Force base roared over a dune and flew directly above me. The sound was deafening and my heart pounded in my chest for minutes after the jets had disappeared from sight. The contrast between the complete isolation of the beach and the sight and sound of the planes was extreme and disturbing.
On the other side of the dunes, the campsite by the lake was quiet and sedate, at least when we first arrived. Every evening, though, a stream of cars drove in and parked close to the water. Entire families piled out, hauling chairs, buckets, torches and long green nets attached to sturdy poles. In groups of three or four, mostly men, they waded into the lake, carrying the nets with them, and disappeared into the dark. We watched with the women and children, slapping at mosquitoes as they bit through our long pants and sleeves. Voices floated over the black water and sometimes we spotted the twinkle of a torch, much further out than we had expected.
An hour or so later, they came back in, their nets heavy with tiny freshwater prawns. Most of the catch went straight into large white buckets that were weighed immediately on rusty old bathroom scales. The results were shouted loudly, to cheers or jeers, then the buckets were heaved back into the cars. A few of the older men had set up camp by the lake for a few weeks. They tipped their prawns straight into big silver vats that were perched on gas rings and filled with heavily salted boiling water. When the prawns were cooked, they were bagged up and put into a chest freezer that hummed busily all night.
As we were packing up, one of the men brought us a bag of prawns that they had caught and cooked the night before. They were small and tightly curled but they tasted sweet and salty and we ate them faster than I could peel them.
Still reluctant to drive into Sydney, we detoured to the Blue Mountains. On the advice of a ranger, we camped at Burralow Swamp on the eastern side of the Blue Mountains National Park. The campground was basically a paddock. It was a barren stretch of dead grass, swarming with flies and one of the most unattractive places we had ever set up our tent, but that night we walked along a rough bush track to a tiny waterfall that was shimmering with glow-worms and fire flies. We sat for an hour watching them twinkling in the air around us before stumbling back to camp in the dark, listening to howling dogs in the distance.
The next day, a different ranger warned against walking around in the bush in the evening. ‘We’re having to shoot feral dogs’, she said. ‘They’ve started hooking up and travelling in packs.’
Finally we arrived at the caravan park in Sydney, filthy and foul-smelling. We deposited three huge loads of washing in the machines, and had four hot and indecently long showers. When we were clean, we rang all our Sydney friends and organised to meet up with them for dinners and barbecues.
The next day, as we were happily wandering around Circular Quay in clean clothes, James’s phone rang.
‘That’ll be them telling me I don’t have the job’, he said, looking at the caller ID.
As he listened, he gave us a big grin and stuck his thumb in the air. The Manly ferry hooted its congratulations and Dylan ran to James and clutched his leg, shouting, ‘Dad’s got a job! Dad’s got a job!’ People walking past smiled at us and James flapped his arms, trying to quiet us down so that he could hear what his new boss was telling him. Yes, he had the job and yes, they understood he couldn’t start until early February. They would send him his contract that day.
Stunned, we bought ice-cream cones to celebrate and sat on the grass and watched the yachts float on the harbour.
‘I feel like it’s all over’, said James. All of a sudden, despite the bright sunshine and the million-dollar view, his shoulders sagged. ‘I don’t think I’m ready to go back.’
‘We’ve still got to go around Tasmania, though’, said Dylan.
After a week in Sydney, we had a family Christmas with James’s cousins in Wagga Wagga and spent three days overloading our brains in the museums and galleries of Canberra. On New Year’s Eve, we didn’t even make it to midnight, falling asleep on a friend’s couch as the kids watched television and ate chips and chocolate in peace. The next day, we stood at the lookout at the base of Mount Kosciuszko: just six kilometres to the highest mountain in Australia. It was late in the day, we had no food or water, everyone was in shorts and t-shirts and a storm was coming in. Normally all that would have been irrelevant, but we must have been tired because we decided not to do the walk.
We had a few reasons for spending the last three weeks of our journey in Tasmania. The first was the weather: James would only agree to go that far south in the middle of summer. Secondly, we knew that the closer we got to Melbourne the sadder we would be about our trip ending. If we could put Bass Strait between us and home for as long as possible, we were more likely to finish on a high note.
Then there was the third thing. We hadn’t actually done any research, but we were pretty sure there had to be a sign somewhere on the south coast that said it was the southernmost point of the continent. We needed a photograph of the four of us standing next to it.
When we drove off the ferry, dawn revealed Devonport to be cold, wet, grey and closed. The clouds seemed to hang just metres above us. We had booked into a caravan park, but we drove past to check it out and couldn’t imagine what we would do on a small patch of gravel for a whole day.
James did what he had been doing for nearly three years when things weren’t working out. He drove. ‘We’ll go and have a look at Launceston.’
I was on map duty. Out of habit, I didn’t bother to look at it until we had been driving for nearly an hour and we nearly missed the turn-off to Launceston. By nine o’clock we had found a caravan park and were all set up. By midday, the sun was shining and we were swimming at Cataract Gorge.
We had gone into a ballot for camping spots in Freycinet National Park and they had given us four nights at the campground at Coles Bay at the northern edge of the park, close to the small fishing town of the same name that serviced the area. On the first day we had planned to walk to Wineglass Bay but the weather
had turned hot and very windy so all the walks were closed. We settled in for a day in the tent. Two hours later, Oscar started vomiting. By the end of the day all three of my men were sick, lying around the tent refusing to eat and requesting jugs of cold water. Finally, on our last day there, we managed the 12-kilometre trek up and over the pink and grey granite mountains to Wineglass Bay and then back down and across a narrow isthmus to Hazards Beach.
At Wineglass Bay, a perfectly curved beach of pure white sand, I realised I had forgotten to pack my bathers so we walked down the beach to get away from the other hikers. On the way we noticed some dead bluebottles washed up on the sand, presumably as a result of the strong winds over the last few days. I stripped off and jumped into the sea. Safely submerged, with only my head poking up, I looked around me. The water was covered in a soft, pale blue foam and the tingling sensation from the cold water wasn’t wearing off as quickly as it usually did. In fact, my face felt as if there were tiny needles sticking into it. My arms jerked as little electric shocks went off just under my skin. I looked more closely at the foam. Apart from the colour, it looked a bit like frog spawn. Tiny blue globules floated on the surface, clumping together and rushing in and out on the waves, collecting in drifts on the sand.
It dawned on me that I was swimming in mashed bluebottles. The stings spread down to my stomach and legs. To get out I had to stand up and risk getting covered in even more of them. But there was no option. I raced out of the water, trading modesty for speed, and danced around on the sand naked, yelping as the stings fired tiny shots of pain all over me. It took several hours for the sensation to fade.
The next day we drove to Hobart. We hadn’t expected it to be hard to find a campsite but everywhere was either booked out or only had gravel sites that were designed for caravans and motorhomes. I flicked through one of the tourist booklets lying in the pile under my feet in the car and booked us a room in a youth hostel. My timing was perfect. The gastroenteritis I thought I had escaped caught up with me and I spent most of the night curled up in the shared bathroom, hugging the toilet.
When I recovered we moved on to Port Arthur and were relieved to find a beautiful campground that allowed campfires. Port Arthur’s historical sites were imaginatively presented and, as it was the summer holidays, there were heaps of things to do. We went to a series of open-air plays that dramatised stories of convict life, spent time at the archaeological dig looking at broken tools and old household items, took a harbour cruise, found out about the boys’ prison at Point Puer and played quoits on the green lawns. We had decided before we arrived that we wouldn’t talk to the boys about what had happened here in 1996, but we banned their favourite game – shooting each other with sticks – for the duration of our visit. On the way out of the site on our last day, Oscar stumbled across the plaque outside the memorial garden that briefly explained the events of that day.
He read it, silently, then looked over at me. I was sitting on the edge of the reflection pool, preparing myself for his questions about how something so evil could happen in this world.
‘I get it’, he said quietly and put out his hand.
We held hands all the way back to the caravan park. I knew that there was a lot of debate amongst families travelling in Tasmania about whether or not to visit Port Arthur. I was very glad that we had. That day I caught a glimpse of the adult my son would soon become, and I loved what I had seen.
The three weeks in Tasmania flew past and soon we were reluctantly counting down the sleeps until the end of our trip. A few nights before we left, I made everyone sit down and write a list of the best things that we had done on our trip. I read out the suggestions and we voted for our favourite. In third place, below ‘Living at Lombadina’ and ‘The helicopter ride at Mitchell Falls’, was ‘Leaving in the first place’. I looked at the list for a long time, remembering the night that James and I had decided to go on this crazy adventure. The boys had only been two and four back then. They were nine and eleven now, and I wondered how the past three years had changed them, and if we would ever have any regrets about what we had done.
We sailed out of Devonport at dawn and sailed back across Bass Strait to Melbourne, back to our home, our friends, the boys’ school and a new job for James. By late afternoon we were in our street in Fitzroy, looking for somewhere to park our dirty big LandCruiser and even filthier camper trailer. It was all over.
Chapter Twenty-one
After being away from home for 1000 days, driving 90,000 kilometres and setting up our camp nearly 200 times, it was lovely to be home. The joy of having a dishwasher and a big fridge and a washing machine and hot water on tap and shops around the corner and all our old books on the shelves and friends right around the corner was overwhelming at first, but quickly it just felt normal.
James started his new job. It was the first real nine-to-five job he’d had for years and he was struggling a bit with that, but it was important that one of us had a regular income. The work wasn’t physically hard, but he sometimes lost the strength in his hands for weeks at a time. It was a remnant of the Ross River Fever he had contracted at Mission Beach. I decided to work from home because neither of us could bear to think of the kids coming home to an empty house at the end of the day. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement, but I found that I enjoyed the quiet and solitude during the day and I was in no hurry to move into a studio or office.
For the first few nights, the boys crawled into bed with us and we all slept together in a queen-size bed that felt a lot smaller than it had three years before. The room they shared, despite being right next to ours, was too far away from us for their comfort. Oscar also refused to be left alone in the house.
‘There’s spirits here. In our house. And I don’t like them.’
I laughed the first time he said that. ‘You had too much of that talk at Lombadina, I think.’
Spirits had played a big part in the stories that the older Aboriginal people had told the kids when they came into the classroom to teach them about their culture and country and language. I remembered one in particular: the old lady who lived in the mangroves.
‘She’s got really, really long … boobies’, Dylan had told me, embarrassed. ‘You know, with milk, like for babies. And she catches the kids who go in there and she makes them drink the milk and they go to sleep. Forever and ever.’
It made perfect sense to me. You didn’t want kids messing about on their own in the mangroves where crocodiles could be lurking. As a cautionary tale, that one would definitely do the trick.
I wasn’t immune to the spirits either. In the first few months of being home, I followed Sue’s lead and filled our house with reminders of our adventures. I printed out photographs, bought frames and put them up all around the house. I had the dugong tusks, which Jumat’s father had given the boys in Lombadina, polished, capped with silver and strung on black leather thongs. I got the canvases we bought in Lockhart River stretched and hung those too. But my favourite artwork was a Wandjina that I had bought on impulse at the Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre on one of my trips from Imintji to Derby. Painted in dark red ochre on a solid black background, the Wandjina had transfixed me with his star-shaped eyes when I unrolled the canvas that day. Now he looked down solemnly at me from the top of the stairs, reminding me of a day when clouds had gathered in the sky because I had spent too long in a place I shouldn’t have been.
Three of the Sibosado girls were starting at a boarding school in Melbourne and Robert had flown down with them. When he came for dinner, I told him about Oscar’s spirits.
He listened carefully as Oscar described how he felt. ‘Oscar, the thing is, there’s spirits everywhere. You have to tell them who’s the boss. Don’t let them mess with you.’
Oscar nodded and wandered off. I shook my head at Robert. ‘That’s not what you were meant to say.’
‘It’s the truth, though’, he said. And he was right. Oscar made peace with the spirits and grew comfortable with being in t
he house again.
That wasn’t the only incident that brought home to me how much we had changed while we had been away. A few weeks after we got back, coinciding with the third anniversary of the day we originally left Melbourne, we had a barbecue to welcome ourselves home. I had bought a couple of boxes of soft drink, but that afternoon I heard nearly all of our friends telling their active, healthily skinny kids to find the non-existent sugar-free drinks. I could laugh that off, but it was trickier when someone said they were worried about the standard of education at our local school. I wanted to shake them and tell them that – in this country – some kids were lucky to come out of school with basic literacy and numeracy skills. All of the schools near us had resources, great teachers and fantastic outcomes for all their students.
Four days after arriving home, but not without an argument about why they had to wear shoes and sunhats, Oscar and Dylan went back to their old school. Dylan had a warm welcome from his class. One of his friends had even saved a seat for him when they set up their new room before the summer holidays. They were excited to have him back and he was inundated with invitations for sleepovers and movie dates. He was happy at school and talked a lot about what they did each day. I was surprised when, months later, his teacher said she was pleased he was finally getting used to being in a regular classroom again.
‘I thought he was fine’, I said.
‘He is. It’s just that sometimes he just … wanders off in the middle of a lesson. He’s not at all rude about it. He just goes and sits in the corner and reads a book.’
This was exactly what Dylan had been encouraged to do for nearly two years. When lessons were pitched at a level that was far below what he was capable of, his teachers had told him to ‘go and read a book’. It was a hard habit to break and he still disappears into a book at every opportunity and carries his Kindle wherever he goes.
