Leeward Read online

  My father talked to managers in offices on the wharves, such as short plump Mr Bagley, standing with thumbs in the pockets of his navy blue waistcoat, in his glass-partitioned office on a wharf that had a ginger Manx cat, a rodent hunter par excellence, that held its face up waiting to be patted.

  Late one afternoon my father took me into the front bar of the Blues Point Hotel. I was about six years old. Some mates of his were drinking there. He sat me on a tall stool and placed a glass of beer in front of me: ‘Here, drink this son. It’s good for you.’ I took one small sip and recoiled – it was like salt water on fire. The men along the bar laughed.

  For a few Christmases after the war my father took us to Manly in the Liberty. We tied up to a wharf, slept on-board and went swimming in a nearby public baths. Although he owned some black woollen swimming trunks, with the Jantzen bathing girl discreetly sewn into the corner – the standard men’s swim-wear for that era – my father usually wore a pair of oversize khaki work shorts that ballooned in the water.

  He had no personal vanity. He looked in a mirror only to shave, and had no interest in trimming the small tufts of dark hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils. In the last twenty years of his life he wore second-hand clothes, picked up in auction rooms.

  I was painfully slow learning to swim. My father encouraged me to float on my back, holding his hand under my shoulders, the water popping and tingling in my ears. At other times, when I was hesitating, he emerged from the water spluttering and roaring and waving his arms, and I backed away up the beach. Then one day, dog-paddling by myself in the Manly Baths during one of our Christmases, I found I was swimming in deep water. At last I could swim! Although not well.

  During our Manly Christmases we slept on canvas stretchers. The Liberty rocked gently, tugging at the ropes securing it to the wharf, night-lights visible through the sheets my mother hung up against the windows for privacy. One Christmas morning, I found pieces of a Meccano set, sharp angles distorting the shape of the white pillowcase that hung by my stretcher. My father and I spent hours scrutinising printed diagrams and screwing pieces together.

  The cabin was pungent with the fumes of fat and kerosene when he pan-fried fish on the blue flame of a Primus stove. Early one morning I hauled up his wire fish trap, set the previous night. There were dozens of small tailor, yellowtail and a silver fish with black stripes. I tipped them, panting, on the deck and started throwing them back in the water, as my father appeared in the hatchway, too surprised to protest as I threw the last of his catch into the harbour.

  My father once took a party of my sister’s school friends around Sydney Harbour on the Liberty – girls aged about ten from Ravenswood Methodist Ladies’ College in Gordon. My sister’s closest friend at school recalled this party when we met fifty years later. She and her school friends, who still regularly met, wanted to see Diana again, she said. But Diana showed no interest when I mentioned this invitation. My sister never talked about her school days and never went to old girls’ reunions. After her death I met her school friend again. She told me her classmates, who still met regularly, had admired Diana’s fortitude – she was one of their best runners.

  A few years after the end of World War II, ‘Leeward’ (the grey weatherboard house rented by my father when he married my mother) caught fire and was burned to the ground. My sister and father talked about it with shocked disbelief as we ate dinner that night. I had no memory of living there and the fire meant nothing to me.

  Since the early 1920s my father’s profits from the Liberty and watch-repairs had been several times the average weekly earnings. His frugally accumulated savings had allowed him to lash out and buy a couple of good-quality suits when he was single. He may have been wearing one of these at the party where my mother and he first met.

  In 1948 my father sold his launch and stopped working for the Adelaide Steamship Company. He was fifty-six. The Liberty was converted to a houseboat by its new owner, a retired man, and a year or so later was burned to the waterline, when a Primus stove accidentally tipped over.

  My father’s occupation noted on documents had been ‘launch proprietor’. It was now ‘property owner’.

  THE HOLIDAY IN QUEENSLAND

  We were walking through the crowds at the first post-war Royal Easter Show in 1946. I had a blue balloon bobbing at the end of a string – the only balloon my parents ever bought me. A monkey in a cage reached out and scratched it. There was a bang and it burst, and I cried bitterly. I had enjoyed it for just two or three minutes.

  We filed past displays in the Agricultural Hall – jars of preserved fruit, wool, sheaves of wheat, green and red apples, and massive pumpkins in many shades and fantastic shapes. The art deco exhibition halls set in manicured lawns and beds of orange marigolds and pink petunias symbolised our post-war revival, a self-conscious blend of the bush and the city, the wholesome Australia of Chesty Bond singlets and the two reigning radio quiz shows: the American Bob Dyer with his call of ‘Happy motoring, customers’ at the end of his Atlantic show – Atlantic was an American-owned petroleum company – and Jack Davey with his ‘Hi ho everybody’ and mellifluous voice – Davey began his radio career as a crooner and was often the voice-over in Australian newsreels.

  The Royal Easter Show had a seedy side, a long alley of itinerant sideshows, spruikers in top hats, fat ladies and freaks in tents, ghost trains and dodgem cars, which my sister and I glimpsed as our parents hurried us on elsewhere. Even as a five-year-old, I despised the confected wholesomeness of Jack Davey and the Royal Easter Show. As soon as I was a teenager I refused to go. I may have been more interested if I had been allowed to visit Sideshow Alley.

  In 1948 my father was flush with funds from selling the Liberty. That year, when we went to the Show, he made inquiries at a Queensland Government stand about sugarcane farming and took home some literature. It is hard to imagine my mother with her Englishified ways as a sugarcane farmer’s wife, but she had entrusted herself and her children’s lives to this man who was like an alien to her, and I heard no arguments. My father was keen to go on a quick reconnoitre in Queensland.

  There may have been another undiscussed reason for this expedition – my sister’s congenital condition, which was ‘fixed’ by a series of surgical operations. Her months away from home in the children’s hospital were over. She was well again, and it was time for a family celebration.

  Plans for our family holiday in Queensland began months in advance. We visited the Queensland Tourist Bureau. All four of us sat down at a desk, for discussions with a bureau official, and collected colour brochures for the Barrier Reef islands. Two weeks in September were chosen.

  We took our cheap, carefully labelled brown fibre suitcases to the Trans Australia Airlines depot in Phillip Street and waited for the airport bus. Once we were past the shops and office blocks and innercity slums, the bus took us through a bleak industrial landscape of factories and large grey hangars, devoid of human beings, with just the occasional boarded-up house. There was an overpowering symphony of smells: rotten egg gas, rancid fat smells from boiling-down works, ammonia and tannery smells. I was secretly thrilled and dubbed this devastated stage set ‘the street of a thousand smells’.

  Kingsford Smith Airport was a flat windswept place. To board the plane, we climbed up a metal stairway on wheels. How my mother managed this, with her fear of heights, I’m not sure. With urgings from Leo and clutching the handrail tightly I suspect. The air hostesses, in navy blue uniforms and caps, and blonde hair tied back in buns, helped strap us in and solicitously pointed out the paper bags we were to vomit in, if we were airsick. They handed out barley sugar lollies as an extra insurance. We touched down at Brisbane and took off again for Townsville.

  Waiting on the Townsville railway platform that night, I read a comic-book version of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The train pulled slowly in to the platform, its engine hissing like a sea- monster, the warning bell slowly clanging and the carriages lit up like strips of h
oneycomb, jolting and groaning, as they eased to a halt.

  We struggled down a corridor with our luggage and found our compartment, easing back the sliding glass door, and stowed our bags in steel-mesh luggage racks suspended above leather bankseats facing each other. Our compartment had varnished timber walls with sepia photographs of tourist sites set in panels above the seats, and glass water beakers suspended on metal brackets.

  The smell of the tropical night air and the sounds of the steam train, like the heavy panting of a horse, as it careered across the landscape, were intoxicating for an eight-year-old. We travelled past burning sugar cane, a rim of fire moving up the sides of hills in the dark. Pineapple fields were briefly lit up by the windows of our train and quickly engulfed in darkness.

  Next day, with suitcases parked beside us, waiting on the pier at Bowen, there was a further surprise. The pier stood on pilings well above the water. It was built for 12 foot tides, dwarfing our Sydney Harbour tides of no more than 6 feet.

  As we set out for Hayman Island late in the morning, I mentally compared my father’s old workboat the Liberty with the palatial motor launch, its chrome fittings and varnished timber cabin. My father was chatting to the skipper and crew. He liked talking to strangers – a knack honed by dealing with passengers on the Liberty – but it embarrassed my mother. I looked over the side as an occasional large purple-brown jellyfish with stinging skirts went past and the turbulent wake spread out behind us. The water was an electric turquoise blue – much of the tropical Pacific lacks algae and is a marine desert. After some hours we were abreast of the Whitsunday Passage. My father pointed to the distant spouting of a whale. In the late afternoon we dropped anchor a couple of hundred metres out from the island, a heavily wooded volcanic outcrop in the ocean.

  I was wearing sandshoes as we waded ashore through warm tropical water only a foot deep across a long stretch of sand. On our right there was a bleached coral reef. I referred to this moment in a poem which I wrote when I was fifteen:

  I remember

  The warm sleepy waters of the lagoon

  The ripples and spray splashing from my legs

  Breaking the calm.

  I remember

  The blue nightfall, the golden horizon,

  The sand crunching beneath my feet

  As I waded ashore

  Slowly approaching the dark looming island ahead.

  I remember

  The pride at being the first

  To reach the ghostly shore, the night darkened palm,

  And my fears when I thought I was lost

  When those who came,

  Came long behind me.

  We were shown to a basic family hut among pandanus palms, one of a row along the beachfront. Our evening meal was with other guests in an airy dining hall full of cane furniture and tropical-coloured cotton cushions. For dessert we had pawpaw, grown on the island. I had my first cautious taste of its wet, aromatic flesh, and liked it. My father boasted about my soprano voice, and one night I sang ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ for the manager.

  The island’s motor launch took us on day excursions. We viewed coral and fish through a glass-bottomed tender, moored beside cliffs crowned by hoop pines. There was a stampede of adults to commandeer the best positions around the glass viewing panel, their large bodies crouched together, peering down and jolted by the rocking of the waves. When I was able to get a glimpse, I saw large fans of red-brown coral with white tips in the blue-green depths of a remote world – something I could never be part of.

  One afternoon we were taken to an uninhabited island. I was bathing by myself in a sandy bay away from the main group of people. In the water floated a glittering blue glass-like bubble, with long tendrils. As it drifted closer, I screamed out, my thigh burning. My father hurried across and carried me out of the water – my first encounter with a bluebottle.

  Insects thrived in the tropical warmth. I watched large brown butterflies with cream markings fluttering around a bush in lazy circles, and a cat leaping, trying to catch them. My bare legs collected scabs from sand-fly bites. There was a family panic when our hut was invaded by a large hornet, my father chasing it away and announcing when it was safe to come back.

  Despite the island management’s advance publicity – ‘It’s close to the outer reef ’ – our first encounter with a living coral reef was a disappointment. After travelling for an hour by motor launch we disembarked and scattered across an exposed khakiyellowish mass of coral, much of it dead, stretching for acres. It felt like a gigantic graveyard.

  The only exciting thing for a child was the occasional giant clam, its richly coloured mantle exposed between open jaws. With the tropical sun beating down on my small canvas hat and water squelching in my sandshoes, I plodded aimlessly across a wilderness of barely surviving coral, through the shimmer and glare reflected off pools and wet surfaces. It seemed we would never reach the far-off line of white waves breaking on the ocean edge of the reef. Some of our group did. We didn’t.

  I have two hand-tinted photographs, taken by my father, of this place. In one I am wearing a blue-tinted canvas hat (it was white) and standing in a flat expanse of stag-horn coral tinted a dirty yellow. In the other I am hatless. In both photos I am in profile, a small boy in a large landscape looking despondent. John Blight’s sonnet ‘The Coral Reef ’ encapsulates this type of reef at low tide: ‘this mass of death’ and ‘its vast progression’. I was relieved when we were told to return to the motor launch.

  Near our hut, hidden among the stilt-roots of a pandanus, my father found some trochus shells with reddish banding and spiral pearl interiors, a melon-coloured bailer, some bleached clams, and a large glazed orange-pink spider shell. Despite a whiff of decay, he bundled them into one of our suitcases. He disapproved of collecting live shells, and (I suspect) enjoyed frustrating some unknown despoiler of the reef who was planning to come back for them after they dried out.

  The island management warned against going on foot around the eastern shoreline. There was a risk of being trapped between 12 foot (3.6 metre) tides and the cliffs. One afternoon we put on stout sandshoes and slipped away. We walked along the main beach past a mass of bleached coral at the southern end, where a channel separated Hayman from Hook Island. We rounded the corner and were now out of sight.

  My mother was unafraid at first. Glancing down, she saw rubbery black strips about 9 inches (20 cm) long, resting in the sand, just below water level. She thought they were tree roots. Then she noticed them swaying slightly in the wash of a wavelet. One of these torpid creatures had extruded a white, cotton-like, sticky mess. She let out a gasp of horror. ‘Iris, they’re bêchede-mer. Sea slugs,’ my father laughed. ‘The Chinese eat them.’

  My mother’s feet had bunions and corns, from fashionable tight-fitting shoes, worn in her youth. She insisted on stopping halfway, sitting on a boulder. She may have been attended by my sister, then twelve years old. More probably Diana continued with my father and me.

  Our father had chosen for our walk an afternoon when there was one of those tides referred to by W Saville-Kent in his 1893 book The Great Barrier Reef of Australia as ‘extremely low springtides’. Our visit to the large, half-dead outer reef had in no way prepared us for what we now saw. We had stumbled upon a living coral garden, a long strip on the sloping leeside of the island, away from the wind, and sheltered by the nearby bulk of Hook Island.

  The garden was vast, some of it exposed to the air or pricking the surface of the water: tan-coloured boulders of brain coral; large fans of pink-brown table-top corals with pale yellow or pink growing tips, like the tiers of a wedding cake; pillar corals; cabbages; stags’ horns of blue, green and violet, with splashes of rose pink and lilac; ledges that dropped into pools of blue water with sandy bottoms where iridescent fish streaked, some spotted, some with black or orange bands.

  I was enchanted by the striped lionfish with its poisonous reddish-brown and white spines, patrolling like a sedate little zebra. A huge
blue brute of a fish, as big as my eight-year-old self, glided past just a few feet away, making its way through the maze of connected pools. A groper, my father explained. He took several photographs with his cumbersome Zeiss reflex.

  We walked carefully past the open jaws of clams, some a brilliant turquoise, others a rich browny-crimson, and may have given one a prod with a stick, to watch it clamp shut, with a small jet of water. We also stayed clear of the black spines of the sea urchins. I felt they were watching us, strangely alert and intelligent.

  As we made our way along the steep shoreline, we came across what looked like small plastic columbines, draped across the rocks, and other much larger creatures like a giant rubbery leaf, pale green and buff yellow, exposed to the air, almost a metre across. These large, languid creatures were mysterious and alien. In adulthood I began to wonder whether I had imagined them. Then I found them in Saville-Kent’s book: the Great Barrier Reef Giant Anemone or Haddon’s Carpet Anemone.

  The Great Barrier Reef is an oasis in a marine desert. Like a great city, its species have multiplied and specialised. Judith Wright’s The Coral Battleground (1977) notes that Fred Grassie found more than 100 species of polychaete worms in a single 5.8 kg lump of Barrier Reef coral, which was more than the total number of species he had found elsewhere in the world. The reef is in constant motion, bleaching and renewing itself. At the start of an interglacial period, sea levels rise more than 100 metres – and the 1600 kilometre length of the Great Barrier Reef moves in a procession over miles of coastal land. When an ice age returns and sea levels drop, the reef retreats again.

  When we ate in the dining hall that evening, we told no-one where we had been. After our week on the island we briefly stayed in Bowen and had a night at the open-air cinema. Bowen is in a rain shadow and we watched the screen sitting back in canvas deck chairs with no roof, apart from the stars. A night in 1948 at the cinema involved two feature films and newsreels. For the newsreels Jack Davey would have been the mellifluous voice-over.