Continental Drift, 1984
I was born beneath a wild fig tree one humid afternoon. My arrival cut short my parents’ camping trip and within minutes a hard rain baptised me. Rivers burst their banks. Drought transformed into flood, but the van, inclined to falter in the slightest drizzle, staggered up a collapsing pass, and carried us home to Armidale.
My birth is a family legend. The story has been repeated so many times, with so many details thrown in, that it’s not clear where truth ends and fantasy begins. Dad said the afterbirth was seized by ravens. Mum said it was left to nourish the tree. He said my hair was wild and orange, she said I was bald and calm, but neither of them told me I’d been born into a web of deceit that contributed to the endless years of our continental drift.
They said I learned to walk on the dunes of K’gari, that I first spoke on Bama Country near Cairns, and that my first attempt at swimming was on the Great Barrier Reef. I began school in the sweaty heat of Darwin, and in Top End towns like Kununurra Dad found work on cattle stations. The years we lived near Albany were my happiest. There, on the Great Southern Ocean’s coastline, forests seemed endless and small granite islands basked in a turquoise ocean. I made my first friend when I was ten, but my parents insisted on moving on.
Dad played guitar in Coorong pubs and we lived in a houseboat on the Murray River. He took to carpentry and boatbuilding and plied these skills as we moved slowly across Victoria. Back in New South Wales, he helped friends build a mud brick house in the Snowy Mountains. But whatever he did and wherever we went, he had poetry in his rucksack and his guitar on the back seat.
Mum’s archaeology textbooks sat in neat stacks while she worried daily about our bank balance. In the gaps between casual work and studying long distance, she sometimes home-schooled me. And as for me? I knew nothing yet of the promise in my past or the island in my future.
Our aimless wandering coincided with Mum’s earth mother phase and although our unsteady lifestyle tired her, when I got anxious about starting at new schools, she said it would give me backbone. It didn’t. I longed for stability. My parents yearned for the next place along the scenic route.
In Bermagui, when I was twelve, Dad and his workmates formed a syndicate and won big on TattsLotto, so we visited his family in Scotland, then went to Aotearoa, to the skinny South Island, Te Waipounamu, with its ridge of snowy mountains, where we camped in their shadow, beside a glacial river.
One impeccable morning, with the sun lighting up the long, wet grass, we went for a walk. Foxgloves splashed purple along the path that ran beside the riverbank and up to the clifftop, high enough to alarm my mum. I tried to join Dad at the edge, but I didn’t anticipate the giddi- ness that would overcome me. As I lurched against him, Mum whipped me back. Transfixed with terror, we watched as in slow motion Dad teetered against the big blue sky then with an anguished yell, vanished over the edge.
That elongated moment haunts me still. Whenever I hear a sound like pebbles tumbling or a large splash, or encounter purple foxgloves, I’m back there at that river.
Moment as ghost, is what Nan called it.
‘Wheeler!’ Mum screamed.
‘I’ve killed him,’ I howled, as we watched him being swept away,
and, panicking, rushed down that path, to where we could help him out. He collapsed on the grass, blue-skinned, teeth chattering, grazed all over. Blood spurted from a gash on his leg.
Back at the van, I sat beside him sobbing and apologising. Mum bandaged him and covered him in all the clothes and blankets we had to prevent hypothermia. She gave him whisky and insisted he sleep, then she and I lay in the sunshine discussing the debacle. I believed we were both thinking about how in that one elongated moment we had realised how important we were to each other, but she had our lifestyle on her mind.
‘I’m going to assert myself, Nicky. It’s time.’
The next day we left the campsite. Dad had cracked some ribs, so Mum drove. We followed the river past rapids he was lucky he hadn’t gone over. I was lucky too, because then I’d have been a murderer.
Downstream that river became a loose, liquid plait, all silvery along the wide valley floor. I was thinking how serene it seemed here when I heard Mum having a serious conversation with Dad.
‘We’re going to settle down in Hobart and live like a conventional family. Going home is hard for me, but I want stability and Nicky needs it.’ She looked across at him. ‘This adventuring life hasn’t always been fun. It’s been difficult, especially for Nicky,’ and she smiled at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sweetheart, we’ll find you a good school. And here’s my promise – we will never move again. And Wheeler,’ she added, ‘you’re wasting your talents and your degree. You must start teaching.’
That is exactly what she said. She was a new person.
My throat felt too tight for speech. Yesterday I’d cried because of what I’d done. Now I was crying with relief because our travelling days were ending, even though more than once during that long conver- sation, Dad said through gritted teeth that the way she’d gone about it wasn’t fair. We were driving slowly, the road was winding. He said, ‘Maybe for a year or two, Freya,’ and we both said, ‘No, forever!’
‘Talk about getting stuck into a bloke when he’s down,’ and he winced as we went over another bump.
Mum smiled at me conspiratorially. ‘The girls finally get a win,’ she said, and I leaned back and started dreaming about making real friends and finally getting to know my nan.
The fact is, if we hadn’t gone to Aotearoa, Dad wouldn’t have fallen in the river, and we wouldn’t have come to Hobart, and without that happening our story wouldn’t have unfolded in the way it did. For instance, after crossing Bass Strait on the overnight ferry, we met a lost dog running beside the Midlands Highway, where, on either side of the road the hills looked bare for miles and the trees were shattered and dead. We picked him up and he certainly seemed relieved to have found us.
‘Probably out on the scrounge for a new life,’ said Dad. ‘Like you two.’
The dog sat beside me, gazing out the window. His feathery tail waved, and whenever he opened his mouth, he broke into a smile. Mum wanted to drop him off at a pound. She thought his owner might be looking for him and worse, he might infect us with hydatids.
Dad and I agreed he was a little bit collie, a wee bit kelpie, perhaps a sheepdog gone AWOL, and Dad said his snoz was distinctly Afghan, lending him a certain aristocratic air. The dog kept looking out that window, then glancing quickly back at me as though he wanted to share a joke and as we’d been taking turns reading Kes by Barry Hines, and as this hitchhiker had a kestrel’s eye for the sky, his name was decided.
Mum insisted on silence as we swooped down to the bridge. Across that wide and beautiful estuary with Storm Bay beyond it, I saw the city nestled in the foothills of the purple mountain.
‘Home,’ she sighed, touching a finger to her eye.
Dad sadly hummed ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. I hugged Kes, bursting with happiness. The city was exquisite.
At first we stayed with Nan and then we rented a house. Dad found temporary teaching jobs and charmed his way into a band, and Mum was excited she could study archaeology on campus. Home was sunlit and warm and full of music, with Dad bashing about on his guitar and Mum happy to go exploring with me and Kes, up and down the mountain she knew so well and along the river. I made friends. Nan was wonderful. I even learned to sail on the river with my best friend, Sally, who lived down the road.
After a year or two, tiny tensions began to grow. Mum said that by staying in one place, we were simply finding a new balance, and I believed her.
I hadn’t yet learned that parents should never be trusted.
