The House At Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  And they wander inside as though it has never been any other way.

  Through the summer, Gill and Obea walk along the front lawn of Tarrangaua every morning. He gets stronger, Gill gets fitter and slimmer. They are good for each other.

  ***

  'Obea would have made a good barge dog,' I tell Toby when he picks up Stef, Bob, Michael and me from the Lovett Bay ferry wharf on Clean-Up Australia Day.

  'He would've been a shocker,' Toby responds. 'Gone visiting wherever we tied up.'

  'Yeah. Probably,' I admit.

  Less than ten years ago, Toby was a slick advertising executive with glossy suits, crackling white shirts and shiny shoes. He traded expensive lunches in five-star restaurants for bologna sandwiches out of a brown paper bag in the wheelhouse of his working barge, the Laurel Mae. He's never had a moment's regret, he says. The sight of the grey barge, broad and flat as a duck's bill, working in the bays is so familiar that if it's missing for a day or two, you ask if anything is wrong. Toby has become an essential anchor in this waterside community of ours. Since Bomber and Bea traded Pittwater and the Trump for vegie patches and dams on the Central Coast, Toby is the one you call if you need a barge for a volunteer community project.

  'Ever get sick of it?' I ask, stacking our picnic baskets in the wheelhouse.

  'No, mate, no. You gotta take care of your space.'

  'Some people don't get it, Toby.'

  'Yeah. It's a shame.' He looks at the baskets. 'What's the snackettes today?'

  'Cheese and chili corn muffins. Vegetable frittata and an almond cake. Coffee, too.'

  He lifts the tea towel from the muffins and reaches in for one. The chili bites him back. 'Shit. These'd wake up the dead,' he says, his eyes watering.

  'Bit of a Sunday heart-starter,' I reply, grinning.

  There are three other volunteers on board, including one of the Annettes from Scotland Island, who works indefatigably for the community.

  'Marg not here?' asks Bob.

  'No, mate. She reckons she's getting a bit long in the tooth for lifting.'

  Marg is on the wrong side of seventy but not much slows her down.

  'Not sick or anything, though?' Bob asks.

  'Just age, mate. Just age.'

  Toby points the barge east towards Coasters Retreat, where volunteers have filled bags with rubbish collected from the beaches and the bush. They're stacked head high at the ferry wharf, full of plastic bottles, broken glass, old rope, smashed timber, dead kettles, a rusted tinny. There are crates of empty wine bottles left hidden in the scrub for so long they're sprouting, and even a rubber owl that yachties fix to their masts to stop real birds from shitting on the boat. And the remains of a cast-iron bathtub that's so heavy Toby has to wrap it in strong canvas slings and crane it on board, over our heads until Stef, Michael and Bob can guide it safely on deck.

  An unshaven, stringy-haired bloke who looks like he's rolled out of bed and straight into his banged up tinny rafts alongside. He has blue eyes and the faraway look of a dedicated seaman, and he won the annual Woody Point Yacht Club Put-Put Day Gentlemen's Launch race in a svelte wooden boat with the sheen of loving care. Toby, the out-going commodore, picks through the rubbish to the wheelhouse to reach for the winning trophy. A green glass ball, an ancient fishing net marker, is anchored to a block of wood. The trophy is as informal and laidback as the yacht club, created in 1987 by a group of social drinkers with a boating problem – anything that floats can sail.

  'Good on you, mate,' Toby says, passing it to him carefully like it's worth a squillion. 'See you on the water.'

  The Palm Beach water taxi idles alongside, looking for a place to offload a group of passengers carrying bags, ice-boxes, a pram (filled with food) and a case of wine. They're in a hurry so instead of waiting for us to finish stacking the rubbish on board, it ties up to the Laurel Mae. The passengers step from the taxi to the barge and pick their way through the growing piles of debris to reach the wharf. No-one says a word. They must be weekenders or someone's guests, we all think. Locals would stop and have a chat like the taxi driver, a slim young woman with long blonde hair who comes aboard for a chili muffin and a quick coffee poured from the thermos. Then her phone rings, and she leaps in her boat, turns the key, revs for a second and then spins away from the Laurel Mae with a cheery wave.

  'Thanks,' say the Coasters mob when the rubbish is loaded.

  They hand Toby a chilled bottle of white wine. 'Have it with lunch!'

  'Thanks. Very kind of you.'

  And the barge slips away for Scotland Island like a dignified grande dame who refuses to be hurried. We cut thick slices of roasted vegetable frittata slick with cheese and eat from enamel plates. Annette hands around chicken and salad tightly wrapped in pita bread, which is a lot less messy to pick up.

  At Cargo Wharf on Scotland Island, there are mountains of sharp-edged and bulky rubbish. Rusted water tanks, dead tinnies, stacks of timber pallets, a mishmash of discarded building materials. The Laurel Mae's crane swings load after load onboard. Ryan, a young fella who's making a name for himself as a top builder, lifts a clapped-out boat engine like it's no heavier than a hat and chucks it on top of a pile.

  'Got muscles in his eyebrows, that bloke,' says Toby, full of admiration.

  At Bells Wharf we pick up two battered fibreglass dinghies destined for the dump and fill them with the last of the junk. On our way to off-load on the mainland Cargo Wharf we hear shouting. 'You've taken my boat!' yells an anxious young fella, frantically waving his arms.

  Toby looks around the deck, sees it under a heap of crap. He turns the Laurel Mae back to Bells Wharf. 'You'll have to come with us, mate,' Toby tells him. 'Grab it when we get the rubbish off it.'

  'Yeah. Right.'

  'It's clapped out. What d'you want it for?'

  'Might be able to save money by rowing instead of taking the ferry,' he replies.

  Toby looks at the dinghy uncertainly. 'Yeah, well . . . you might live longer by using the ferry.'

  When the dinghy is finally free, Toby eases it overboard. It lands in the water with a heartening splash. The kid, who only seems to have a single oar, jumps in. There's a sound like a burp and the dinghy starts to sink, water pouring in through a long, slim rip in the hull.

  'Better get out, mate, before you get too wet,' Toby advises calmly. The kid, his face filled with disappointment, scrambles over more wrecked tinnies tied to the wharf, to the safety of the shore. 'We'll give you a lift back to Bells, mate,' Toby says, trying to ease the sting of a bargain gone belly-up.

  'It's ok. I'll walk to The Point. Get a lift there.' He sets off, barefoot, shoulders hunched. The hubris of youth and optimism flattened.

  'We'll find you another boat,' Annette shouts encouragingly. 'There's got to be one hanging around that isn't being used. A safe one. I'll make some calls.'

  He waves a thank-you without turning back.

  At the end of the day, when everyone's too buggered to lift more than an icy cold beer, we chug across glittering blue water into the shelter of Lovett Bay. Michael lights a fire in a pit at the base of two smoke-stained boulders on his lawn. Toby cooks thin sausages and fries heaps of onions. We slap them between pieces of bread with some tomato sauce and it's better than five-star.

  5

  AS THE DAYS GROW colder and night falls so early there's still a couple of hours before it's time to prepare dinner, I drift into my study and browse through Barbara's research and reference books. Drawn by the past, as though if I dwell on it for long enough, it will somehow find a way to talk to me and the bagged brick walls of this sometimes sombre house, where there could not have been much of a difference between the hopes and dreams of people then and now, will give up its secrets. It begins to feel like blasphemy to wander its corridors or blast through the waters of the bays or tramp the tracks without any understanding of the way it once was here.

  Pittwater, I learn, was changing fast by the mid-1920s, when Mackellar bought her land. Ro
ugh slab huts were being demolished to build grand holiday homes for Sydney's elite. The farms and orchards of the 1800s that supplied food for an ambitious, young Sydney colony were slowly fading away under the pressure of development. Palm Beach established a golf club with a clubhouse. Cars were becoming common. The jazz era was in full swing. The Depression loomed but few people saw it coming. This was still the Roaring '20s!

  There was a new ferry service from the city to Manly and then a regular coach to Mona Vale which made Pittwater easily accessible for daytrippers. They trekked here in crowds, beguiled by the bush, the wildflowers, the beaches and surf, and hikes along the stone pathways built in 1895 when there were ambitious plans to make Pittwater a wilderness playground like Yellowstone National Park. They picked pretty, soft flannel flowers and pink boronia in spring, picnicked in a cool, dark cave where it was fashionable to pause and boil a billy for tea. A few metres beyond the cave, on a flat rocky outcrop with a sheer drop on the water side, the same strong men who probably built the stairways cut a socket for a flagpole into the stone and hammered in four hooks for guy ropes. They named the walk Flagstaff. The socket and hooks are still there.

  'You'd see a flag for miles around,' Bob says one day after we have walked to the top. We are puffed and sweating as we sit on the iron and wood seat at the lookout beyond the cave. Below us, Pittwater sprawls in shades of blue. Yachts look the size of bathtub toys, jetties are like teeth reaching out from the mouth of the shore. Beyond, the Pacific Ocean stretches in a thin misty streak, paler than the sky.

  'Must have been emotional, seeing a flag flying in the wind,' I say, because the sight of an Australian flag when I am far from home can easily make me cry.

  'We could bring a pole back here, you know. To hoist a flag on special days. Australia Day, Anzac Day. Could be our own community celebration. Wouldn't be too difficult.'

  The idea takes hold.

  'A little plaque, very small, with Barbara's name and dates,' we both agree, would be inoffensive. Barbara Story 1943–2000. No different from the graffitied initials and dates carved into the top of the table in the cave, each one a memorial of a kind.

  A couple of days after Bob brings home the glossy white, twenty foot long flagpole, we drag it through a tunnel of cabbage palms, around scratchy hairpin bends, up steep flights of hand-cut sandstone steps, across massive rocks folded on each other like thick lips. Then through the murky ancient cave to the pinnacle. Flagstaff. Bob rigs the pole with wire and rope clamps to hold it strong in even the most severe gales. Then we do a test run with a satin flag we've made for Bella's daughter's twenty-first birthday. Happy b'day Simona, painted in letters so large we ran out of space to spell birthday in its entirety.

  The Australian flag is in the cupboard, waiting for Anzac Day. 'Thing is, with the flag, it's got to be raised in the morning and lowered at sunset,' Bob says. 'That's protocol. Who's gonna do a sunset run to Flagstaff on Anzac Day?'

  'I will,' says Stef, when we ask around for a volunteer. 'Our house is closest.'

  It is a tradition for the offshore community to attend an Anzac Day service at The Point. At close to eleven in the morning, we float from Scotland Island and the bays like a small naval invasion. Engines are cut and our tinnies slide noislessly onto the beach for the final few yards. Children, dogs, teenagers and adults crawl over the sides and wade to the water's edge – although the little kids stop to splash if the day is warm enough.

  Old-timers Stacky and Jake, so frail they seem hardly to exist, arrive in wheelchairs from local nursing homes. They wear brass-buttoned navy jackets that their bony shoulders no longer fill. Marg from Little Lovett Bay pins a sprig of rosemary to their lapels and cannot resist kissing their foreheads, running a fond hand through their wispy white hair. They are not long for this world, anyone can see that.

  Each year someone is elected to give a speech. Once, Di Watts from Scotland Island talked about her father, Charles Hume Baldwin, who was a tall, handsome 21-year-old boy from the bush with a larrikin smile and laughing eyes when World War II broke out. He worked on his parents' property in Queensland, but he dreamed of flying like a bird over the land where he rode horses and mustered brumbies. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1941 and trained as a fighter pilot in Manitoba, Canada. From early 1943 to July 1945 he completed thirty-three bombing missions over Germany, France and Italy with one of the many RAF Lancaster flying crews which included Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians. The average life expectancy of the men in these crews was five missions.

  Although my father spoke of his missions quite rarely, we came to hear of some of his most vivid memories . . . Late on the night of August 15, 1943, 214 Lancasters set out from England carrying both incendiary and explosive bombs which they dropped on the cities of Milan and Turin in Italy. We believe that on that particular night, my father's duty was that of bomb aimer. The bombs were dropped. They flew home. Eight Lancasters and their crew didn't make it back.

  . . . Dad also spoke of the agony of waiting on the ground to see who came back and who didn't – and the horror of seeing aircraft shot down over the channel and even on approach – when they were so very close to home.

  For his own part, Dad was badly burned in two crashes and sustained a number of other physical injuries, although it was his psychological scars that proved to be the most enduring.

  He returned at last to Australia and was discharged on March 18, after four years and 102 days of service. In his post-war life he worked for the Agricultural Bank in Innisfail, Northern Queensland, helping new European immigrant farmers establish their properties. A few years later he bought a dairy farm on the Atherton Tableland.

  Life on our farm was quite normal and yet we all felt the effects of the war. As a small child, I had difficulty understanding why Dad was so sad so often, and later, why violent nightmares would always follow a war movie or whenever the smell of smoke was in the air.

  . . . On what can truly be described as a fateful day, Dad met an Italian family south of Cairns. They had come to Australia after the war . . . They had lived in Northern Italy until a terrible bombing raid occurred on the night of August 15, 1943.

  When my father realised it was his raid, and quite possibly his bombs, that had wiped out this man's family, a sense of remorse and guilt overwhelmed him. Something inside him came unstuck, his grip on reality was lost, and he spent the best part of a year in a psychiatric ward in a Brisbane hospital.

  When he eventually recovered enough to come home, he and this man spent many hours together. The friendship . . . grew and grew. As my sister said, our two families became as one. Although I was only five years old, the huge spaghetti meals we shared on their verandah in the cool of the afternoon are crystal clear in my mind. In fact, this man came up with a plan for our two families to intermarry – the only minor complication being three boys on their side and only two girls on ours!

  . . . That they could be friends at all seemed like a miracle under the circumstances, but somehow, in each other's company they found healing and comfort. Not only did the friendship help my father make a full recovery but it lasted for the rest of their lives.

  . . . My father discovered first hand that the horror and the dreadful tragedies of war can only truly be overcome by love, forgiveness and compassion – and that we can, if we so choose, share these gifts with each other.

  . . . I am proud to be here in my father's place, a little more than a year after his passing and his eighty-fifth birthday, to tell his story on Anzac Day.

  Di folds her notes and steps back from the microphone, her head bowed. We stand for a full minute, silent. It is impossible not to remember everyone we've loved who has died, soldiers or civilians. How can we not?

  The bugler, Di's husband Duncan, begins the 'Last Post', which he's been practising at home for weeks. He reaches for the high note and wobbles up to it. All our hearts break. The Australian flag is raised. Old Jake, tears streaming down his nursing-home-white
face, tries to struggle to his feet from his wheelchair. Two blokes move to his side, link their arms under his shoulders like comrades. They hold him upright and steady so he can raise his arm in a trembling salute. In the distance, looking no bigger than a handkerchief, our flag flies from the summit of Flagstaff.

  Within a week, we get a call from National Parks and Wildlife. There have been complaints. The flagpole, even though no flag is flying, is an eyesore.

  'It's part of our history,' we argue. The rangers are polite, even sympathetic. But the pole must be removed.

  'Where is the harm?' I want to know.

  'It's not the point,' we are told.

  Nick and Ann, Caro, Stef and Bella, and Bob and I make a pilgrimage to retrieve the pole. On the way back, Ann, an energetic and committed grandmother, picks a branch of dried baby gumnuts.

  'What are you going to do with those?' I ask.

  'Use them as tips on knitting needles.'

  'Bit rough, aren't they?'

  'For you, perhaps, but not for little children. Give them a couple of pieces of dowel and some sandpaper, and then the gumnuts, and they can make a good strong pair of knitting needles. Then you teach them to knit. That's the hardest part.' And her words take the sting out of the day.

  Bob erects the flagpole on the front lawn at Tarrangaua.

  'Even more appropriate than Flagstaff, I reckon.'

  'Why?' he asks.

  'Because this was Barbara's home and where she was happiest. Let the plaque rest here.'

  A couple of years later, a friend visits from the US. It is her first time at Tarrangaua and I show her Barbara's pottery, the photograph of her laughing with Bob, the plaque on the flagpole.

  'How can you have all these reminders of his first wife? I would be jealous. I'd get rid of them,' she says.

  'How can you be jealous of someone who is dead?' I ask. It is the moment I understand that I have settled comfortably with the past. And accepted the house.