Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  'This isn't working for you, is it?' Bob asks, dabbing antiseptic on my bleeding finger. I look down at my unspeakably filthy feet, black from walking through old campfire dust and cannot respond. 'We'll get you on a plane from Cape York. We'll leave tomorrow.'

  Every fibre of me wants nothing more than to get on that plane. But it means Bob will have to drive home alone, 4000 kilometres, along jaw-shattering and hazardous roads. Challenging enough with two of you, downright depressing alone. This is a turning point for me in many ways. I cannot let him go on alone. We are partners, through good and bad. With that decision, I find myself letting go of worry about danger, dirt, heat and discomfort. All that matters is Bob's safety. And my commitment to him shifts from starry-eyed to steadfast.

  I now understand that camping holidays are an achievement, a daily set of new challenges that stretch the mind and body, and emotions. At home, routines are safe and fixed and designed for easy comfort: Arrive, turn on a light, a tap, a stove, flop on a couch. With each new camp, though, home is built from scratch and there is no such thing as 'too tired'. If you are 'too tired' to pitch camp at the end of a long day's driving along rainbow coloured dirt tracks, there is nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat. Physical boundaries are pushed to the limits. But if it is exhausting at first, each day fitness levels improve. The aches and pains from unfamiliar exercise diminish, new muscles appear in my arms, and my stomach feels suddenly flatter.

  As my body changes, so too, do the frames of everyday life. It's bedtime not long after the sun goes down. There is no electric light to read by, no television to invade our lives. The birds wake you in the dove-grey light of pre-dawn. What would seem like punishment at home, becomes privilege in the bush. Every sunrise is a brilliant daily performance, every new campsite a home with a strikingly different view – hills the colour of wild salmon, silver deserts with soils that range from ochre to black, turquoise oceans, creeks the colour of old gold. After a while, we develop little idiosyncrasies. Bob combs his hair every day even though it is quickly blown by the wind through the open car window. I clean my shoes even though they are instantly dusty when I put them on.

  I eventually realise that this kind of travel is not about ticking the boxes ('been there, done that'), it's what you learn about yourself and your partner that is the gift. Most extraordinary of all is the shock you feel when you look in the mirror for the first time in weeks. Who is that middle-aged woman staring back at you? Because, of course, you feel young again. Adventurous, capable and physically challenged. The hammering of biological clocks is nonexistent in the middle of nowhere. How you feel becomes, for once, the true measure of age.

  Most of our camps are bush camps. What that means is no taps, no showers, no electricity, no dunnies (as they are universally referred to), no anything. But there's nearly always a river just metres away so clear I can see the catfish bottom feeding; shade from snowy ghost gums, pure and elegant in the morning sun and night skies so lustrous they make city lights seem dim and dirty. I learn, over days and weeks, to revel in the illicit freedom of being able to pee wherever and whenever I want. On the long, empty stretches of road, no-one sits cross-legged until a proper loo is reached (it may be days away!).You stop, squat by the car wheel (or in the middle of the road if you want to!) and that's it. If a rogue vehicle happens along at an inappropriate moment, no-one gives a damn.

  One night I wander from the campfire, flicking the torch around, looking for a good spot to pee. The earth flashes with tiny, bright lights. Thousands of spiders' eyes glow like a river of diamonds and I calmly move on to another area of ground when once I would have screamed. Hours slip by watching a pair of pure white herons soar like the Concorde, ducking and weaving in a magical courting ballet. One morning, six black cockatoos fly over us, their red tails flashing like airborne sirens and in the evening, when the thermals grow powerful, hundreds of kites spiral heavenwards, silhouetted by a sinking, orange sun. Some nights, we build up the campfire and sit into the late, dark hours, listening to fish jumping and the occasional hoot of an owl.

  At one camp, Bob goes fishing on an incoming tide, armed with live bait caught earlier in the day. I stand near him with my croc stick (useless, I know, in the event of a crocodile attack but it gives me comfort). I wear a headlamp torch (like a miner's) and scour the shore for unwanted company. We've been told about the over sociable fella around the bend who measures eighteen feet. We do not want to be introduced. As Bob whoops with the sound of success – a large bite on his line – I casually ask him what the two shiny red lights are further down our sandy bank.

  'I think,' he tells me, casually dropping his rod, 'it's a fuckin' croc!'With that, we both high-tail it to higher ground and sink into a reviving glass of wine, grins on our faces and feeling wondrously alive.

  Temperatures get searingly hot, insect life lethal. So daily rituals are quickly pared back to a minimum. Routines are simplified to a degree that would seem impossible at home. If it seems spartan at first, it soon feels quite liberating. One wash a day from a bucket of water, standing naked in an isolated camp site, with your partner washing your back. Going to bed with sandy feet is what I now call 'clean' dirt, the kind that comes from sand and dust, not grease and grime.

  A single hot plate over a fire is ample for creating the most sumptuous meals, making a mockery of my collection of pots and pans at home. Often I turn to Bob and say:'How good is this?'And he smiles just a little, looks into the flames of a campfire and nods. The ritzy array of expensive condiments I stocked up with soon taste over-complicated and is passed on to other campers. A little garlic, a little onion, a touch of chili or salt and pepper, and food tastes simple and pure. On good camps, we eat fish freshly caught by Bob – a smutty grunta, a bream, a mango jack. A much-coveted barramundi is undersized and lives again as Bob throws it back. Usually, though, it's chops, steak, whatever fresh produce we can pick up along the way. As a last resort, we open a can, usually of borlotti beans, or beetroot, or corn.

  Most mornings, the campfire is still warm and it takes just a few dried leaves and twigs to get it blazing. The old, blackened billy goes on, the smell of wood burning fills the air, and the prospect of a hot cuppa in an enamel mug holds more thrill than a five course dinner at the best restaurant in town. One day, on a rough, isolated track, we pull off the road for an easy lunch of salami on crackers, with tomatoes, cucumber and cheese. As we drop the tail gate one corner of Bessie slowly sinks.

  'AARRRRRH!' Bob storms, spinning in one spot. It is our third flat for the trip. The red earth, as fragile as pie crust, is covered in three-cornered jacks and needle-sharp spinifex so 'ARRRRH!' goes on for quite a long time.

  After weeks of being with your partner twenty-four hours a day, with virtually no privacy, outside entertainment or relief, I suspect only committed relationships survive intact. Time and again, we are each revealed at our weakest in situations where there is nothing to hide behind, no door to slam shut. Somewhere along the way, I watch a couple in their seventies roll up their inflatable mattress together – he at one end, she at the other, squeezing the air out to pack it as tightly as possible. As they meet in the middle, the old woman surrenders her grip on the mattress and cups her hands around her partner's face, kissing him gently on the mouth. He smiles and gives her a gruff, loud kiss in return. It is an image that will stay in my mind forever, one I hope Bob and I will replicate as we continue our safaris into the next two decades.

  We pamper ourselves just once – a bath and a flushing dunny in a ritzy motel. At first, the relief from our spartan regime is exquisite. But at night, when we draw the curtains, the bedroom seems tight and confined. When I wake in the hours before dawn, there is nothing but blackness.

  'I miss the stars,' I tell Bob in the morning. And the next night as I lie in bed, I ask: 'Where is the moon?' When I thoughtlessly tip my tea dregs over the balcony, camping style, and douse a passing young couple, Bob smiles.

  'Why don't we move on?' he suggests.
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br />   On the last night of our trip, we pitch camp in five minutes and have our first uncooked dinner of thick slices of Kassler with salad and tinned baby beetroot (too buggered to go searching for wood in the dusk). We sink into bed covered in red dust.

  'I think,' I mutter to Bob before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, 'I achieved a personal best today.'

  'Hmm,' he responds, faking interest.

  'I have worn the same shorts for eight days in a row.'

  But he is already asleep.

  EPILOGUE

  I STARTED WRITING THIS book down the hill in the Tin Shed (I never did get around to renaming my house Geebung), where Bob and I lived when we returned from our honeymoon. Now, as I finish it, I sit in the room that was once Dorothea Mackellar's bedroom in the pale yellow house on the high, rough hill, looking through a forest of towering spotted gums across Pittwater to Scotland Island. We swapped houses because I couldn't bear watching Bob run up to his shed whenever he wanted a tool, or whenever he wanted to fix something. I guess we really moved so Bob could get his shed back. I thought it would be a terrible wrench to pack up my life again, but it was easy. Home is where Bob is. And Chip Chop.

  Almost two years have passed since we first carried lots of boxes and armchairs along the back track – or Lover's Lane, as Barbara called it, and I now know why. I drink abstemiously these days – a glass of champagne to celebrate, a good red on a winter night.

  Pia has moved to a coastal town in northern New South Wales, where she works hard for charity and the local community. She's built herself a gloriously glamorous house and turned into an awesome cook. She's even been known to deviate from a recipe. Only slightly, of course.

  Lulu has a lovely, gentle, funny partner and they've been living together for a few years. Bella still drops twigs in your lap, but she's grey around the muzzle and her black fur is turning brown. In her heart, though, she still thinks she's a puppy and if we let her, she'd join the dog race in a flash. But we hold her back. She's too old. Obi has a new family and wanders much less now he is more settled.

  My stepdaughter, Suzi, has a child of her own, a wonderfully smiley little boy with huge blue eyes and a passion for olives. She asked me to be godmother and it's a role I relish.Now that she and her partner live in Sydney, we see each other as often as we can. They are splendid parents.

  Our little ghetto in Lovett Bay has changed quite a lot since I moved here. Ken and Jan have sold the Lovett Bay Boatshed to Michael and Marybeth, a fantastic family with big, generous hearts who work hard and meticulously and are building a fine reputation. Ric and Robyn have settled into the house next door to the Tin Shed and are great friends.

  The people who live in the Tin Shed, John and Terese, are a vibrant, engaging couple and wonderful to be around. And up the hill behind the Tin Shed, Jack and Brigitte have three boys instead of two. As the Buddhists say, change cannot be halted.

  At first when we moved into Tarrangaua, I wanted to plant grand native gardens and tame the bush. But every time I visualised borders or clusters of ordered shrubs, I found them unappealing and dull. One day, the thought occurred to me that there was no way I could improve on nature. So it was better by far to let the burrawangs and xanthorrhoeas, the acacias, banksias and casuarinas, find their own places to set down roots. They are, after all, more suited to this rugged terrain than any strays I might bring in, native or not. In any case, wallabies seem to have developed the most exotic tastes and soon devoured the few shrubs I planted in my first wave of creativity. So I am content, now, with a lemon and lime tree, and a few white magnolias in the courtyard at the back of the house. Barbara, I think, would be pleased with that.

  The first Easter we lived here, we held an art exhibition of linocuts of Pittwater scenes and Pittwater's wonderfully quirky boatsheds by Katie Clemson, a friend. (Some of the boatsheds appear in this book.) To open it, we invited Australian author Di Morrissey, who grew up in a house just beyond Frog Hollow. In her evocative speech, Di talked about the day she met Dorothea Mackellar. She was nine years old and a lonely child, living here at a time when there were few weekenders and even fewer full-timers.

  'Dorothea, or Miss Mackellar – she was only ever known as Miss Mackellar – asked me what I was doing,' Di explained, standing in the long, beamed sitting room in a misty pink suit, her bright blonde hair piled high on her head. 'I told her I was looking for fairies.'

  Dorothea asked Di:'Have you found any? May I help you?'

  'And so we set off looking for fairies together,' Di continues. 'After a little while, when we returned to the house after hunting unsuccessfully, Dorothea asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  '"I want to be a writer," I told her, wide-eyed and innocent of her fame.

  '"Do you?" she replied. "Well, I write a little, too. Would you like me to recite a poem I've written?"

  "Oh yes, please," I said.

  'Dorothea, in her lilting voice with its trace of a Scottish burr, began "The love of field and coppice" and did not stop until she'd recited every verse of her iconic poem, "My Country".

  'When she finished, she smiled at me and I looked at her gravely and said with surprise in my voice: "You know, that was really quite good."'

  After her speech to open the art exhibition ended, I asked Di what Dorothea Mackellar wore the day she met her.

  'A long, dark dress and a hat, I think.Yes, that was it. A rather dull coloured dress, navy or black, in a heavy fabric. The hat was quite big. Straw, I think.'

  So Barbara's fleeting glimpse of a woman in a dark dress and straw hat, the roaming wraith, was laid to rest. I wish Barbara had been able to hear Di's words.

  Our life here is rich in all the ways that count. Rich in love, in family and friends, in community life, rich simply because we are able to live in such a stimulating and accessible physical world. When I look back, I realise many of the times I thought were so tough that I might not recover taught me instead what I needed to know and understand to grow stronger. They led me, eventually, to more joy than I ever thought existed. I guess what I learned above all else was to never give up, and to accept change instead of using it as a means to escape the hard episodes.

  It is now six years since I was diagnosed with breast cancer and the great big crashing fear of those first days of diagnosis and chemo has abated. I know it will always be there in some form although I do not think about cancer often, only if I find myself worrying about small problems and need reminding that life is finite.

  As I write, it is raining, which is a blessing because we've had drought for four years and the bush is powdery and brittle. The lack of water has brought shy lyrebirds to the garden looking for food. Wallabies, skittish and unapproachable in good seasons, wait at the back door, swaying with hunger, for a few scraps. I find I cannot begrudge them food, even if it means letting them decimate the lemon tree and strip the herb garden until the plants give up and wither.

  The drought has been so mean even the kookaburras laugh less and brush turkeys that usually flee hysterically at the approach of a human simply fly to a high branch and hover until you go indoors.Then they scrounge desperately once again. The desire to survive makes heroes of most of us, I think, as I watch them.

  As I write today, though, Lovett Bay is grey, like the sky. Every so often, when heavy black clouds roll in thickly, I cannot see beyond the trees.That's when I feel like I am sitting high above the world in my private paradise. Chip Chop sleeps at my feet under the table and waits impatiently until we go for our afternoon walk when the bush is alive. She still can't be trusted not to run off occasionally so I take her on the lead and she is used to it now.

  Each day here holds some surprise. A goanna on the lawn or marauding the eggs in the chook shed, a python slithering along the hallway, a cheeky antechinus making a nest in the piano. Not a moment is empty or idle. There is not a day when I don't give a silent thank you for being alive.

  And of course, there is Bob.

  Read on for an
extract of

  Gone Fishing

  Available October 2013

  CHAPTER ONE

  With the early-morning sun beating through the cabin window and a dawn breeze pleasantly cool on the back of his neck, Sam Scully steers the Mary Kay off her mooring, checking behind to make sure the stern is well clear before pushing forward the throttle. Through the cabin windows, he looks rock solid. Square. Shoulders as wide as his hips, powerful legs, all muscle. His hair is a helmet of tight squiggles — as though it’s been singed all over by a sudden burst of flame. His clothes, faded by the sun, look dusty: he could have stepped out of a drought-stricken paddock instead of onto a working timber barge. He spins the helm with a single finger, his ear tuned to catch the slightest off-note from the diesel engine thrumming under his feet. At one with the sea and his vessel.

  The light, more orange than pink now, fires up the escarpment, treetops; it drills into the water before bouncing back, poker sharp. He is struck, as he often is, by his good fortune. How many men can claim they live and work in paradise? He quickly reaches to touch a small overhead trim made from golden Huon pine. Like all good seamen, who understand the deep blue waters are dark, mysterious and endlessly unpredictable, he’s as superstitious as hell.

  In the distance, he sees Kate Jackson’s half-cabin, snub-nosed fibreglass runabout explode out of the shadows of Oyster Bay, going so fast it skims the satin-smooth water like a bird. A dead ugly commuter boat but stable as a cement slab, it barely rolls in even a heart-stopping sea. Perfect for over-confident novices who often fail to grasp the force and fury of the physical world until they are threatened by it.