by Gregory Day
Not having had books at home he experienced the joys of reading for the first time. For months he combed the pages of that one gold rush volume. He grew fascinated with the children of the diggings, who went about collecting the fallen scraps of gold in the leaf litter of the bush, just as he had dived for golf balls in the dam on the Devon Beach golf links. He admired the perambulant nature of the diggings too, the adventuring and the risk taking, the willingness of it all, and could imagine as he worked, fence building and hay carting with Hec Spate and the others during the day, the dry, pitted hills back in time, teeming with filthy tents and bearded prospectors.
Hec Spate described those steep hills around Blackwood as a ‘honey pot run dry’ and by the new year celebrations of 1977, having exhausted his fascination and deciding that his own gold lay elsewhere, Colin had moved on to the southern banks of the Yarra River in Melbourne with a thirty-year-old married woman from Gippsland. Then, through a one-night stand with a girl he met in the Lennox Hotel in Richmond, he got a job as a barman in the Sandringham Hotel, in the bayside suburbs. In Sandringham he was well liked, his bosses trusted him, particularly because he wore his hair unfashionably short, and before he knew it he had stayed for over three years and had enough money in his passbook to leave for London at the age of twenty-seven.
Colin Batty hated England. It was rainy and expensive, he made no friends, especially not of the opposite sex, and after only nine months of living despondently on the thirteenth floor of a council high-rise in Battersea whilst working at a snobby bar across the river on the King’s Road, he took off to France. He wandered through Brittany on his own before meeting a Spanish girl in a hostel and heading for Holland, but after only a few weeks the girl complained of homesickness and caught a train back to Granada. Colin flew out of the northern hemisphere in disgust, headed for New Zealand. He didn’t know it yet but after many years away from his home coast, he was about to find his way back.
It was in New Zealand that the wandering course of his life since he had left Devon Beach found its direction. He spent two carefree months hitchhiking from town to town, mountain to mountain, family to family, lover to lover, in the North Island and the South, until by the time he laid down his pack and pitched his tent at Whangamata Beach on the east coast of the North Island in November 1981, he was the happiest and most relaxed he had been in his whole life. When people asked him in years to come how he had ended up selling real estate in Mangowak he never described to them his hatred of his legendary father in Devon Beach and how he’d vowed never to return to his home town, but rather he’d talk about those little moments of inspiration that can change your life and that you often only experience when you pull the pin and go travelling.
So there he was, sitting in front of a newfangled one-man nylon tent on the beach at Whangamata, with a trumpet-shaped joint waiting to be lit in his right hand, when a rainbow appeared between the lap-lap of the rivermouth and the verdant little island not far offshore. All the travelling of the previous years, and in particular the healing of the previous two months, had prepared him for the moment. Without any warning he had a sudden and entirely unexpected desire to go where he never thought he ever would again – back home to the southwest coast of Victoria.
His vision did not include returning to the weighted treelessness and biting wind of Devon Beach, however, but rather he saw in his mind the town of Mangowak, some thirty or so miles further down the coast. Mangowak had always seemed a happy place to him as a child, due to the charming old Meteorological Station buildings dotted against the blue sky on the golden cliff at the edge of the town. He’d always looked forward to driving through there with Art. Now in Whangamata the vision of that cliff in Mangowak rose in his mind out of a Pacific rainbow, a rainbow which itself rose out of the lambent blue-black water, and over the silver-green pohutukawas of the little island in the bay. As he struck a match and prepared to light his joint, Colin Batty knew his travelling days had finally come to an end.
He returned to Australia and moved permanently into Mangowak in 1982, but ever since, Colin Batty had felt the annoying undercurrent of not quite belonging in his adopted town. This was largely due to his famous surname being synonymous in the minds of locals with Devon Beach. Each town along the coast had its own disposition, after all. Added to this problem, however, once he took over Des Mooney’s old pink fibro West Coast Real Estate office on the main road next to the CFA depot, was the fact that it was Colin’s job to sell properties that at times had been in the same family for what seemed like forever. He never ripped any of the locals off, he made sure of that, but nevertheless there were some elements amongst the more established families in the town who thought, as the older Devon Beach folk had thought of his father Art all those years ago, that Colin was a harbinger of no good.
As far as the Mangowak locals were concerned the place where they lived could speak for itself but as the 1980s rolled by and Colin started to get the knack of his trade, they started to overhear him at auctions spruiking about their ‘gorgeous Mediterranean climate’, their ‘riviera cliffs’, and ‘champagne lifestyle’, and they quickly concluded that he was a con-artist, not to be trusted. Every now and again Colin would attend a real estate industry conference at which he would be reassured that local resistance was one of the standard obstacles of a progressive agency, and that nine times out of ten this resistance ended in local resignation, but for Colin this overgeneralising truth was not enough consolation. The whole issue was touching a raw nerve. It was an old familiar feeling. Ever since he was a boy in his father’s shop he’d felt somehow bogus, an outsider. He had blamed his father for it back then, and ever after for that matter, but now that he found himself stuck with the same feeling as an adult he didn’t quite know what to think or, for that matter, who to blame.
Being bypassed over the sale of Ron McCoy’s land therefore really got under Colin’s skin. He’d always been very kind to Ron and his old mum, he’d employed Ron to fence his own property when he first bought it and also to shoot his horse when it broke its leg. He’d always bought the District Association raffle tickets Min sold in front of the general store, and always had a bit of a yarn with Ron in the pub, but obviously it had done him no good. He felt that it had been casually implied that he would be the man Ron would turn to if he ever needed that kind of help. ‘The fucken old bastard has gone behind my back,’ was how he put it to Craig the day that he discovered the news of the sale.
Craig was taken aback at the vehemence of Colin’s reaction but knew him to be intensely competitive and so patched together a version of what could rile him so. The McCoy land was important, with large acreage for a town block, and it was in a prized position. There were many different agencies vying for land and house sales on that part of the coast and a bluechip property like the McCoys’ took a business up a notch. What Craig could never have understood about his boss’s reaction was that, after all these years, Colin Batty did not feel entirely welcome in the town. Ron McCoy had just rubbed salt into his wounds.
Exacerbating Colin Batty’s feeling was the fact that for a solid eighteen months after the construction of Dom Khouri’s house got under way, nearly every tradesman in Mangowak, and therefore nearly everyone he bumped into at the pub after knock-off, was working on Dom Khouri’s house, and thoroughly enjoying it. In the bar they’d talk about it nonstop and Colin would be on fire inside. It was the biggest architectural event in the town since the building of the Meteorological Station buildings over a hundred years ago and he’d missed the boat. He imagined how pleasant it would have been to be the agent who’d facilitated the whole glorious affair, how he would then have been able to talk freely over a beer about it all, how the cut the earthmovers had made nestled the house into the cliff so perfectly, and how artistic the glass and stonework was. But as it was, the whole incessancy of the talk about Dom Khouri’s place drove him spare.
One Monday afternoon, as Dom Khouri’s house was in its very final stages of co
nstruction and Colin could see some relief from the whole affair in sight, Craig came into his office unannounced and sat down with a worried look on his face.
‘What is it?’
Craig pulled his lips back over his teeth and hesitated before speaking.
‘I don’t think you’re gonna like this, Col,’ he finally said.
‘Like what?’ Colin Batty shot out, alarm bells ringing. He knew Craig was astute enough by now not to bother him with some minor issue. ‘Spit it out,’ he said.
‘You know the Morris house at Bonafide View?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you know it was gonna be sold?’
‘What do you mean “it was gonna be sold”? Leo Morris left it to his nephews in his will. They’re never gonna sell it. I ring one of them from time to time just to check.’
Craig pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, pulled at his shirt, stared out the tinted window towards the old children’s playground on the other side of the road, did everything he could to avoid telling Colin what came next. Eventually he straightened his neck and just stared knowingly into his boss’s eyes.
‘Fuck, Craig,’ Colin exploded, standing up. ‘What are you trying to tell me? Are you saying they’re selling it? How the fuck would you know, anyway?’
‘I’m saying they’ve sold it,’ Craig said, deadpan, lowering his head.
Colin Batty immediately sat down again, and assumed an air of calm, a kind of dormancy. Although Craig was not frightened of Colin as such, he decided at that moment that this man he worked for was a scary individual indeed.
When Leo Morris had bought his house in 1938 it had been a hotel for the previous thirty years, a long, two-storey timber building set into the first ridge across the Ocean Road from the beach, with verandahs along its front where patrons used to dance and drink and look out over a salt-streaked en-tout-cas tennis court at the romantic vista across Bass Strait. Leo Morris couldn’t believe his luck when the hotel licence ceased and it came into his possession. Increasingly, because of the building’s history and the further kudos it accrued with the famous Doctor of Music buying it, as well as the fact that it had survived the bushfires in which so many other old buildings had been destroyed, the Morris house had become one of the unofficial local icons of the coast.
‘Who sold it?’ Colin asked Craig impassively.
‘Nobody.’
Colin sighed wearily now and placed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in his nostrils. Craig noticed that on the desk in front of him was a travel brochure for the Maldives.
‘Well, come on, Willo,’ Colin said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Tell me what you know.’
Craig Wilson also leant back in his chair and told his boss how a friend of Liz was married to Givva Way, the painter working on Dom Khouri’s house, and how Givva had said that the sister of the architect who designed Khouri’s place had bought the Morris house at Bonafide View. Apparently the architect’s sister had asked if there might be anything on the coast for her and her husband and through Ron McCoy she was put in touch with the family, who subsequently sold.
Craig waited for Colin Batty to absorb the information. As soon as possible he planned to get the hell out of that office. But it was too early yet. On the other side of the desk, Colin held his stare.
‘You’re fucking joking?’
Craig snorted. ‘Yeah right, Col. This is the kind of thing I’d joke with you about. I don’t think so.’
Colin Batty’s face squinted up before he turned his head away.
‘That old prick,’ he said, gazing out the window with his jaw dropped in wonder.
Craig’s distaste for his boss, which had been building for months now, couldn’t help but surface. ‘It’s not the end of the world, Col,’ he said derisively. ‘It’s just one house.’
Colin turned his head back to meet Craig’s eyes. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said.
‘What don’t I understand? Is it only one house, or isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is more than just one house, Craig,’ Colin said, in an angry, patronising tone. ‘It’s about the real value of things, get it? It’s about a bit of fucken respect, that’s what. The rest is just shit, mate. Dime a dozen beach houses. Fake Murcutts and yuppie one-upmanship. White-trash shit. But this is more. It’s a dignity outcome. Get it? Can you get it, Craig?’
Colin Batty stared at his employee, with green eyes flecked with fury, a hardness in them like the granite in the hills. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘but I’ll fuck myself up over whatever I want, all right? There’s things you don’t get till you’ve been around here a while. What applies generally across the board, say in Melbourne, doesn’t necessarily apply here. Right?’
Craig had heard enough. The last thing he needed was someone else making him feel like an innocent newcomer. He stood up and said, ‘Well, anyway, I’ve told you. I’m off to Minapre to see about the permits for the Patterson units. I’ll see ya.’
He turned and made for the door. As he stepped out of his boss’s office he heard Colin say, ‘Thanks, Craig,’ in an almost contrite voice. He didn’t feel like responding.
He walked past the front desk to the glass doors and raised his eyebrows to Angela at the computer terminal as he went past. ‘Good luck, Ange,’ he said over his shoulder, going out the doors. But Angela couldn’t hear him, not with her dictation headset on.
TWELVE
THE SNOUTCAT AND THE TINWHISTLE BIRD
Once Ron was old enough to be let out of the chickenwire cage on the clifftop, he spent his time helping his father as Len McCoy enacted what he’d outlined for Mr Bolitho’s pastoral lease. More interested in the rotation of the crops than making sure his sheep weren’t having their tongues eaten by foxes, Len left his son to watch over the riverflat stock, setting him up in an old hut at the bottom of the Boatbuilders Track with instructions, checking in on him from time to time to make sure he hadn’t fallen off the bush-wood punt he loved to push along the river, or that he hadn’t been snakebitten.
From the age of eight the boy was furnished with a gun, a fern-hook, a stockwhip, a black and white Border collie named Gluey, rabbit traps, and told to keep his wits about him, which is what he did. He combed the grass and river, shaping and bunching the sheep, singing out to the dog in a high voice, watching the sky for signs above the hill on the western side of the flat. Min worried herself sick, about him doing a man’s job with a brain full of a child’s dreams, and more particularly about him setting the savage spring-loaded teeth of the rabbit traps, which were heavy and could mangle a limb and crush through bone in the most violent fashion.
The tiny Meteorological Station schoolroom that had previously existed in Mangowak had been closed when the station’s operations became largely automatic. In years gone by, at least three scientific families were resident at the station and the few children that there were from the surrounding hills and coves would traipse or ride to the small gabled school on the rivermouth side of the headland to join the scientific families in their lessons. By the time Ron was born, however, only one meteorologist lived at the station at any given time, the schoolroom became empty, and so Min worried also about his lack of an education.
On this count, Len would assure her that tending sheep had always been a job for boys and a good way for Ron to learn the ways of the world. Min knew that by ‘the ways of the world’ Len meant the way the sheep reacted to the world, to the weather as it moved across the sky, to the foibles of the birds and the rhythms of the foxes, to the budding and withering cycles of the native fruits, the conversation between moon and sun, river and ocean, that would allow him to predict the day ahead; and so she’d wander down to the valley to seek her son out at lunchtime, sitting with him on the riverbank or in the hut in colder weather, teaching him what she could as together they ate whatever food she’d brought. During these lunchtimes, Min would try to foster other kinds of knowledge in Ron, of numbers, and written-down things, of cities like
the one where she had grown, of science (what little she knew of it), of history and of music.
It was difficult, however, for words were clearly not his currency at all. He’d pick at the plaiting of his whip or peer endlessly at the dun or twinkling leaves on the western hill, munching the food between his fleshy lips, seemingly uninterested. Frustrating as this was, she did not blame him but tried to tease him out, to conjure the fluency from the Mahoney side of his blood to accompany the silent knowledge of the McCoy side.
There was a poem she had in her book which together they would read, or, rather, she would read and he would stare away from, a poem she thought might resemble something of his world. Called ‘The Hermit’s Song’ she would speak it to him repeatedly during these lunchtimes on the flats, believing he might turn towards it as any child might to a story, or at the very least have it in his memory always. She would show him the spelling, the way the lines ran and ended, trying to interest him in the subject, trying to convey the fact that there was a lot even in books which he might like and even want to know about.
The poem was centuries old and constituted a hermit’s list of the difficulties and bounties a life amongst nature afforded. Min had been read the poem many times back among the cobbles and railway-clanking sounds of Clifton Hill, so far from the scenes it described. Now in an airy chant on the riverflat she’d say the words and encourage her son to insert the lines with his own local creatures, sights he’d see every day. Yes the ‘black cap’ mentioned in the poem could be a tern, the ‘hips and haws’ replaced with the white fruit of the bearded heath. The ‘oak’ the hermit lived beneath in the poem could be an ash and the geese flying over were the swans. Ron couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of something called a ‘pignut’, but the cress the hermit ate was the same and so was the thrush, at least by name, the honey and the salmon, the trout, the skies, the summer. He told Min he’d like to see a real woodpecker and hear its tapping sound but the nearest they had was the clicking bird he’d seen climbing tree trunks in the bush. The bleating of Mr Bolitho’s flock could replace the lowing of the poem’s heifers, though, and even still he knew the sound of ‘lowing’ from the occasional dray that would come on by. But he would never agree with the hermit that wrens could be teary, nor with the idea of a gull coming inland. His father agreed it was just too strange, and nothing Min could say about the origins of the poem would explain it.
