A Life On Pittwater

by Susan Duncan

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS after we marry, Bob’s pale yellow house on the ‘high rough hill’, which is the Aboriginal meaning of Tarrangaua, stays empty. I know he prefers the grand isolation of his home high above the waters of Lovett Bay to my shacky shed hovering over the shoreline, and yet I cannot bring myself to give up my house, where the earth, sky and sea surge through walls of glass. Where the moon prances on the bedroom floor and the sun spears rainbows of light on the timber deck.

  Tarrangaua, too, has its own particular beauty. It was built in 1925 for the rich and reclusive poet Dorothea Mackellar, and is a solid, quietly authoritative house – stately, even – made of bricks and terracotta tiles and surrounded on three sides by a gracious verandah. Through the day, light and shadow play on textured walls. It can look sombre, though, when the sun is masked by clouds and the spotted gums and ironbarks, rigid sentinels that enclose the building, turn black in the rain.

  Mackellar, who built the house as a summer retreat, was born in 1885. As she grew older, she led a lonely life, thwarted by death and lost love – and, later, alcohol – but she had the courage, and the heart, to write a poem that evoked the raw passion of a young nation tired of being seen as Britain’s grubby apron. In a single line, I love a sunburnt country, she embraced a land of droughts and flooding rains and made fools of an establishment that continued to yearn for green and shaded lanes. As though England’s ordered gentility was the promised land and home, and Australia nothing but a far-flung, feral colony.

  The poem, ‘My Country’, first published in 1908, made her famous and she was invited to recite it over and over throughout her life. It gave her a sense of achievement, a sense she would leave a worthwhile legacy.

  My Country

  The love of field and coppice,

  Of green and shaded lanes.

  Of ordered woods and gardens

  Is running in your veins,

  Strong love of grey-blue distance

  Brown streams and soft dim skies

  I know but cannot share it,

  My love is otherwise.

  I love a sunburnt country,

  A land of sweeping plains,

  Of ragged mountain ranges,

  Of droughts and flooding rains.

  I love her far horizons,

  I love her jewel-sea,

  Her beauty and her terror –

  The wide brown land for me!

  A stark white ring-barked forest

  All tragic to the moon,

  The sapphire-misted mountains,

  The hot gold hush of noon.

  Green tangle of the brushes,

  Where lithe lianas coil,

  And orchids deck the tree-tops

  And ferns the warm dark soil.

  Core of my heart, my country!

  Her pitiless blue sky,

  When sick at heart, around us,

  We see the cattle die –

  But then the grey clouds gather,

  And we can bless again

  The drumming of an army,

  The steady, soaking rain.

  Core of my heart, my country!

  Land of the Rainbow Gold,

  For flood and fire and famine,

  She pays us back threefold –

  Over the thirsty paddocks,

  Watch, after many days,

  The filmy veil of greenness

  That thickens as we gaze.

  An opal-hearted country,

  A wilful, lavish land –

  All you who have not loved her,

  You will not understand –

  Though earth holds many splendours,

  Wherever I may die,

  I know to what brown country

  My homing thoughts will fly.

  Mackellar built Tarrangaua when she was forty years old and employed a married couple, who lived in a cottage on the property, to care for it. Although we are told it became her favourite home, it remained empty for months at a time.

  Houses, though, are oddly living things. When they are deserted, they begin to die. Old houses are especially vulnerable, like old people. Unless there is someone to notice a crack, a leak, mould clinging to long undusted furniture, a slow rot sets in. They get a smell, too, of neglect, like the dank smell that floats from the pages of a book left unopened for too many years. Bob and I are aware we cannot leave Tarrangaua echoing emptily forever, yet the idea of tenants is abhorrent. To sell it is unthinkable.

  One day Fleury, a great friend and neighbour who has a travel business, asks if we’d ever think of opening Tarrangaua for tour groups.

  ‘What kind of tours?’

  ‘Small groups, mostly from the US. I take them to see the Aboriginal rock carvings on the Ku-ring-gai plateaus and give them a short Indigenous Australian history lesson. They get back on the bus to go somewhere to eat. Maybe you could provide lunch or morning tea? Sitting on the lawn at Tarrangaua would be quite special.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Bob about it,’ I reply, my mind already spinning with possibilities.

  It is more than a year since I sat in a crackling, slippery chair with a needle in my hand, being swamped, drop by agonising drop, with a poison that was supposed to save my life. My soul shifted during those grey days where we patients marked time with empty eyes, too frightened to look beyond the moment. I used to crane to see the sky through a window, always careful not to rip the needle from its slot. And later, when I stepped from the chemo ward outside into the physical world, everywhere I looked I saw the small miracles of daily life.

  I doubt I will ever again have the kind of strength it takes to drive through peak hour traffic to a suffocating cubicle in a high-rise building to toil all day sealed off from birds, flowers, trees, the sea, sky, wind and earth. So Fleury’s idea is appealing. It gives me the opportunity to work – a powerful ethic instilled from childhood – but on my own terms and in an environment that I believe sustains me.

  Bob is hesitant and for a while I wonder if he is unwilling to tamper with what has inevitably become a shrine to another life.

  ‘It is a way of breathing energy into the house. Without disturbing it,’ I suggest.

  He is still noncommittal. I mull for weeks, writing lists with plus and minus columns.

  ‘Be a chance to do some cooking,’ I say one day. ‘Could be fun.’

  ‘It’s a lot of work. Do you know what you’re doing?’ Bob asks, sighing loudly.

  ‘Haven’t got a clue. It’s a challenge, though, don’t you think? And there’s no real downside. If it doesn’t work, we pull the plug.’

  ‘A challenge? Yeah, well, challenges keep you young.’

  ‘And they’re harder to find as you get older.’

  ‘You could go back to journalism?’

  ‘No. Well, maybe an assignment here and there if it appeals. But that’s all. I cannot bear the thought of working unsatisfyingly anymore. I sometimes look back and wonder what the old rat race was really all about.’

  ‘You must have enjoyed it once. And it paid the bills.’

  ‘Yeah, well, now I’d rather live more lightly with less.’

  ‘It can be a mistake,’ Bob adds seriously, ‘to turn your hobby into a business. It can kill the passion.’

  Instead of listening carefully, as I usually do, I plunge into a new career.

  2

  MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE 1999, when I moved to this sleepy little enclave where there are only five houses.

  My friend Veit, with the ceramic blue eyes and gentle humour who helped me through chemo, has quit his job at the boatshed next door, lured by fishing for lobster somewhere near New Guinea. He dreams of untold wealth, so the rumour goes. We don’t know for sure. When boaties move on, they begin again without the past weighing them down, which is part of the seduction of the sea, I suspect. You can reinvent yourself in every port.

  Jack and Brigitte, who live behind the Tin Shed, have a third son. He is tall and strong though barely two years old. Stef and Bella, who bought the house at the mouth of Salvation
Creek, are no longer weekenders. The city, for them, has lost its gloss and they come home to the peace of Lovett Bay each night. Bella leaves us from time to time to work for the International Red Cross in Bosnia, Jerusalem, Timor, China. Lovett Bay, when she returns, brings her back to sanity.

  Raoul and Larnce work at the boatshed now, so different from each other they could be from separate planets. Raoul is dark. Dark skin, dark hair – occasionally, dark mood. Larnce is golden: hair, skin, even his eyes, when they catch the yellow of the sun in the late afternoon. He threshes through the bays in a wild, mauve fibreglass boat he calls the Ghost Who Whomps. Nose pointing to the sky, his bony backside finely balanced on a sliver of the stern, engine roaring. Constantly on the edge of flipping, as though he is as immortal as the Phantom himself.

  ‘You go too fast, Larnce, too fast,’ we all tell him when we pass by.

  He shrugs, a cigarette hanging from his fingers. He looks at the burning tip then back at us. ‘Always something’s gonna get you,’ he says. But you can tell he thinks he’s invincible.

  At weekends, Raoul brings his little boy, still a toddler, to play in the bay. By early afternoon, you have to watch where you step. He falls asleep suddenly and haphazardly, on bare floors, dirt, grass, concrete steps. Even, once, on the roof of a boat cabin Raoul was painting, his scruffy blanket clutched tightly under his chin, his smooth face angelic.

  The boatshed belongs to a new couple, Michael and Mary Beth. They have a young son and Michael has three grown sons and two daughters from a former marriage. Michael is whippet thin with a long face and flowing hair. He works like a demon, as though a moment of rest is a moment wasted. He comes from a family of ten children, two of them fostered. His father, he told us not long after he arrived, worked two jobs to provide for his brood – all day as an accountant, then as a cleaner in the hours before dawn.

  Like his father, Michael also has two jobs. He spends mornings at the boatshed, where tired yachts and boats are scraped, painted and restored – even, in some cases, made glorious, like the wooden cruiser with rot so deep and sustained it seemed she would never float again. The boys worked every day, hard and fastidiously, repairing what they could and rebuilding what was beyond saving. A year later, Blaxland slid into the water like a dowager queen, gleaming, her lines sharp and refined. Truly resurrected. In the afternoon, Michael jumps in his car and drives to Manly, where he works as a psychiatric nurse. Which is another form of restoration.

  Mary Beth, who is also a mental health nurse, is from the US and has a Yankee accent thick as mud. She is good-hearted and tender. Blunt, too, if she thinks it is the only way you’ll get the message. Then her blue eyes focus, her hips thrust forward, her arms fold across her chest like an iron gate. That’s how she stood the day a local politician told her he was amazed at what he called the new civility of people who live offshore.

  ‘You’ve got rid of all the ferals,’ he told her, his tone ripe with approval.

  ‘Oh, they’re still here,’ she replied, her blue eyes glacial. ‘It’s just that we take care of them.’

  Bob and Michael are similar men. On hot summer evenings they stand, slightly slumped, on cool concrete, beer in hand, the setting sun framing them like electricity. They stare, not at each other, but at white-limbed mangroves dancing on the far shore, at an incoming tide filling the empty bowl of Salvation Creek. Proud, in a silent way, of their day’s darg. Neither man ever gives in, only paddles harder. It is the bond between them, this quiet understanding of how to go about daily life in a way that is satisfying.

  ‘In the States,’ Mary Beth says, ‘we’d call Bob a good neighbour.’

  ‘Here, we call Michael a great bloke,’ I reply.

  Not long after they take over the boatshed Andrew, Michael’s son from his first marriage, who is lean like his father and has the same hawkish face, brings home a pup from the dog shelter. Jessie, she is called. She is brindled with brown, grey, black and white. Long-snouted with light-tan eyes and fur soft as mink. At first she is shy and skittish, slow to trust. Perhaps because beginning life in a dog shelter is rarely a good start.

  ‘Got some cattle dog in her,’ we say. ‘Bit of kelpie, maybe?’

  Then we notice she moves with the silence and stealth of a dingo. She has the same aloofness as a wild dog, too. We didn’t hear even a light thump the day we found her on the table on the verandah, licking the cream bowl as though she had every right. Soon, she rides the bow of Andrew’s tinny with the grace of a dancer. Before long, she and our tarty little terrier, Chip Chop, get into trouble.

  The complaints begin. Chip Chop is locked up, Jessie learns what a leash is. They still escape from time to time, but always by accident. When they do, Brigitte is immediately on the phone or banging at the back door. She’s a furious guardian of our wildlife, although her passion faltered the day a brush turkey shat on her keyboard. A friend, dressed in a cloche hat and white overalls (for tick protection) and clutching a frail butterfly net, tried to help her catch the beady-eyed bird with its scrawny yellow neck and bulbous head. Chasing. Pouncing. Chasing. Pouncing. It escaped in a hysterical flap up to a power line, where it pitched backwards and forwards, clinging to the narrow wire like a red-faced drunken sailor, until she gave up and went home. The keyboard never recovered.

  Mary Beth’s father, old Bob, lives at home with his daughter and son-in-law but he is peripheral in our bay life, confined to bed, his heart worn thin by the years, his body reneging on even the most basic instructions. He is cared for by a string of family and hired help. We all know he is there, waiting for death, urging it to come get me! But death is taking its time.

  ‘Wanted me to get his suit ready the other day,’ Mary Beth says.

  ‘What for?’ she asked him.

  ‘For the funeral!’ old Bob shouted at her, as though she were an imbecile.

  ‘Why would I burn a perfectly good suit?’ Mary Beth shouted back. And together they laughed and laughed. Death, by then, was her father’s friend.

  He died one cold winter morning. Not in bed, as we all thought he would, but in the car after a visit to the doctor.

  ‘I parked at Church Point,’ Mary Beth told the story later. ‘“Come on, Dad, let’s go,” I said. But when I looked at him, his head was slumped, his face smooth as wax, like he was cold as the morning. I felt his pulse. Nothing. Put my hand under his nose. Not a breath. I’m a nurse, I know what death is. So I got out of the car and called the ambulance. “My dad,” I said, “has just died in the car. Can you come?” Then I called Michael. Sobbing.’

  Michael jumped in the boat he calls Bethie, after his wife, and flew across the water. At The Point, locals gathered around to comfort Mary Beth. She bought a coffee from the café in the General Store at Ferry Wharf, lit a cigarette as she waited for help, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Then I went back to the car, to sit with Dad.’

  ‘Can I have a puff of that?’ old Bob asked.

  ‘Dad! You’re supposed to be dead! The ambulance is coming because you’re dead!’

  ‘Dead or not, I’d still like a puff.’

  His pacemaker, it turned out, had kicked in, saving his life. His time wasn’t finally up until a year later. By then he was cursing the pacemaker from dawn to dusk.

  There have been so many changes in so few years in this little cluster of houses in Lovett Bay, and yet I suspect that I have changed more than all else. I do not racket heavily like I did once, trashing through days and nights in a blur of booze and desire. I have a knowledge, now, that comes from an intimacy with death and grief and fear. Hard won but priceless. Live so there are no regrets.

  Sometimes I pick up a book that turns out to be about searching for the key to happiness. Once I would have devoured it. Now I set it aside for a civilised thriller or to revisit a classic. For this short period of my life, I need no gurus. And I have learned that only I hold the key.

  I am not smug, though, because I am aware the unexpected can drop like a hai
lstorm from the sky and steal joy in a flash. And if you are not careful, it might take years to rediscover it.

  Fleury’s first tour group is due in November, on Melbourne Cup Day. Lunch on the lawn for one hundred corporate wives on a junket with their husbands who have a golf day scheduled. Not quite the small group we anticipated. ‘No problem,’ I tell Fleury airily, wondering where I’m going to find one hundred plates, knives, forks and spoons.

  ‘What about tables and chairs?’ Bob asks.

  ‘Chairs are easy. Saw some blue plastic ones on sale the other day. Tables are harder. Thought I’d round up all the tables in the bay.’

  ‘I could use the timber from the old deck and build three trestles,’ Bob offers. ‘Make ’em big enough for ten people each.’

  I am amazed, as always, at being married to a practical man. My father was so technically inept we wouldn’t even let him turn the radio on. ‘Thank you. That’ll get us sorted completely.’

  I come up with a ridiculous, overly complex menu from flicking through glossy food magazines. The recipes all seem to have at least fifteen ingredients, each one of them expensive. Naturally, I’ve never cooked any of the dishes before and it doesn’t occur to me to do a practice run.

  Lisa, from Elvina Bay, agrees to help on the day. She is bouncy and blonde and holds nothing in. Laughter, she always says, cures most ailments. She is a master cook, catering local weddings and parties, and she never shirks when there’s a fundraiser, or the fire brigade is doing a back-burn before the heat of summer turns the bush tinder dry. She coddles the fireys, making them exotic sandwiches and homey cakes. It’s food so luscious, there’s never any trouble finding volunteers.

  Marie, from Scotland Island, is quietly efficient. Not so much a cook as a subtle, dark-haired and aloof major-domo, she sees the details, aims for perfection, and is scrupulously careful to waste nothing. ‘Scrape the pan,’ she tells me as I rush around. ‘The dog will eat it.’

  And there’s my friend and neighbour Caro, who studied to become a divorce lawyer and then turned her back on the petty squabbles of people who married before they grew up. She searched instead for finer pursuits, spurred on by the clear-sightedness of nearly anyone who has had cancer. She offers to lend a hand, as long as she doesn’t have to stir anything. Which is weird because she’s a great cook. Just doesn’t have the confidence to do it as a job. Neither do I! But I bludgeon my fear. Confidence is everything, and planning and preparation – right?