Island Home

  VI

  Waychinicup, 1987

  As we creep down the final hill the hidden inlet opens up to us gradually, blue and clear as a waking eye. We pause a moment to take in the view. The high sides of the valley are carpeted with heath and studded with granite boulders and vertical tors. Out at the narrow passage to the sea, swells boil against one another treacherously. But within the steep buttresses of the natural harbour the water is tranquil. The track is a bit rugged since last night’s rain but it’s nothing like the old days. When we reach the lumpy turnaround just above the water I park the van and the three of us get out to stretch our legs. The damp, bright shrubs are full of birds – fairy-wrens, wagtails, honeyeaters. Creek water murmurs in rivulets across the yellow-stained granites and spills onto a tiny pebble-strewn beach and our little boy wastes no time getting his shoes and pants wet. Before he was born his mother and I camped here often. When my wife was eight months pregnant with him she lowered herself into an achingly cold pool in the stream and felt him swirl and kick within her. I show our son the very pool but he’s sceptical about my story. In a week he’ll be three.

  I’ve been coming to this cryptic haven since I was a teenager in Albany. At certain points of my life it’s been a timely refuge. I wish we could stay a few days, but this is just a quick visit; we’ve made a big detour in order to stop by. Next week we’re leaving the country. And I don’t know why – perhaps to steel my nerves – but I need to see this place before we go.

  In my youth this was a secret place for south coast locals and hard to get to. It was unmarked – you had to look for the sandy track running off at an angle from a gravel road through coastal hills fuzzed with heath. Back then an old hermit lived out here in a jauntily painted tin shack perched on a granite shelf above the water. His name was Frank Cooper. With fresh water and a plentiful supply of fish, he was pretty self-sufficient. He had a clinker-built dory, nets and a fish-smoker. Now and then a mate of his would bring out a few supplies – kerosene for his lamps, and a bit of flour, sugar and tea to keep him going. His little heeler, Blackie, slept in a tin kennel with a chaff bag nailed across the door like a curtain to keep out the rain.

  Frank was basically a squatter in search of peace and quiet. In later years, when the area was declared a national park, he was allowed to stay on as its honorary ranger. He patched up the track with his wheelbarrow of marl and picked up the mess whenever kids from Albany drove out to run amok. I was a schoolboy when I first met him, one of a posse of country youths in search of a campsite free of adult surveillance. He was an old man, certainly no match for a ute-load of teenagers, but his quiet presence had a steadying effect. When I went down the track to admire his set-up he greeted me diffidently. His eyes never really met mine but he gave off an air of calm authority that intrigued me. And for years afterwards, well into adulthood, I sought him out whenever I was in the area to fish and explore the caves and thickets on the high ridges, but I couldn’t say I ever got to know him. He was a shy, enigmatic fellow and he rarely said much except to comment about the tides, the weather, the state of the track and where the herring were schooling. I used to camp in a clearing only fifty metres from his place. On especially rainy days I’d lie in my tent reading Melville and Dickens with half an eye on the path, hoping he’d come by. Doubtless I was a puppy-like nuisance intruding on the space of a bloke who treasured his privacy. Local people said he’d retreated here with shell shock after his war service, but I was never sure which war he’d served in. His face was largely unlined, his age hard to determine. Most of the time he was guarded, anxious even. For such a self-reliant man he seemed strangely fragile. But once in the early 1980s I saw another side of him, relaxed and ebullient. It was a stormy winter’s afternoon and a couple of his old cronies had driven out for a visit. As I passed Frank’s hut that day his door stood open and his stove was aglow and so was his face. He looked like a different man. He’d a long life I knew nothing about but for a youth like me his opacity was irresistible. He never invited me into his cosy shack. I never asked him a personal question. He always affected to recognize me, but I’m sure he never knew my name.

  After he grew too frail to stay on at Waychinicup, his hut was left for a while for the use of hikers and birders. But today it’s gone and it’s a shock to register the absence. Only the mosaic paths with their broken rims of whitewash remain. Everything else has been carted off by the rangers or the weather. As we mooch around, my wife reminisces about the large metal sunflower that stood so long in Frank’s yard. Its petals were fashioned from flattened bits of tin, brightly painted, and these turned on the central axle every time a bird alighted to take the feed he’d left out. Once upon a time this place was just another part of my weird southern backstory, something my wife’d had to indulge, but now it’s precious for her, too, and she was fond of Frank.

  I’d always envied him – this home, his solitude. For a young man as brimful of romantic notions as I was, it was deeply affecting to behold someone so thoroughly imprinted by a place as to almost embody it. But now it’s sloughing him off. In a few years there’ll be no trace of him at all in this ancient landscape. Even the ringbolt he moored his dory to will have rusted away. But today the remaining signs of him are melancholy. And now that I have a wife and child his life has begun to look narrow and lonely. There must have been people he left behind, fears and sources of grief I can only guess at. Maybe Frank’s exile was a form of self-medication – I’ll never know.

  Returning to the car we see the stack of pine logs the rangers are about to erect for barriers and signage. The ubiquitous pine log, tinged green with copper chrome arsenate, emblem of franchised domestication, even here. The heart sinks. Perhaps they’re necessary. After all, people come in pretty frequently now. And yet, despite the exposure the power of the spot endures. Buried here beneath the rugged lonely hills, the tors and impenetrable thickets, this is still an enigmatic place, unsettling and unknowable. It’ll always be precious to me, but it’s odd, standing here, beginning to see the place in retrospect already. I’m right on site, feet on the ground and fully present, but it all feels as if it’s begun to slip from my grasp. A twinge of foreboding passes through me. Will it be like this a few years hence, when we eventually fly home, the whole country suddenly faint and strange? Like any islander I feel compelled to leave, overcome with curiosity about the great world beyond. And yet as anxious as a mutineer, afraid I’m burning all boats in going.

  We get back into the car, bump on up the track to the road that’s been widened and sealed. We head for the highway. The coastal farms are encircled by yellow bulldozers. The old paddocks are beginning to be ripped up for tree farms geared to tax-avoidance schemes. Mount Manypeaks shines in a distant shower of rain. The sky closes in.

  We reach the highway and head for Perth. Our little boy is asleep already. All the rest of the day I catch myself peering greedily at everything, cataloguing, hoarding country, provisioning myself for the pending voyage.

  The power of place

  It was comically presumptuous of me, but while I was still in high school I’d begun to think of myself as a writer. At seventeen I’d never met an author. My acquaintance with the world of letters was even narrower than my experience of life, and I wish I could say I went to university to quench a raging intellectual thirst, but in truth I enrolled for the sole purpose of writing stories. In fact I approached higher education in a spirit hardly different to that of my mates who signed up at tech to learn the plumbing game, or to train as sparkies. In my mind time was too precious to spend it waffling on about Literature. I intended to make the stuff – with my bare hands if necessary.

  So my years at university were just an excuse to hole up in a shed in my parents’ backyard and write. Because the way I looked at it you learnt to write on the job, by writing. Which wasn’t the most nuanced way to approach the craft of fiction, but not far wide of the mark, as things turned out. What I didn’t know is that you also learn to write by w
atching and listening and remembering and wondering. And perhaps most importantly, by reading. As a result of four years’ intensive reading I got a sort of education despite myself.

  My alma mater was an institute of technology, and all the utilitarian ugliness of the label was manifested in the campus itself. The aesthetic poverty of its buildings was bewildering and oppressive. With its nasty corrugated concrete facades and industrial-park sprawl, it had the air of a wholesale storage facility. I guess it’s one way of imagining a centre of learning – a bunker in which a billion units of information – bulk knowledge – are racked, stacked and filed. The interiors were worse: niggardly corridors, mean fittings, bolted aluminium windows, every seminar room reeking of cigarette smoke and nylon carpet. These chambers and halls were spaces that didn’t tempt a student to linger. I certainly never dallied a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Later in life I wondered what it must have cost people to work there year upon year. Imagine twenty years trying to teach Gerard Manley Hopkins in a Bunnings Warehouse. There are hospitals, air terminals and justice complexes more congenial.

  Those years I was a student I was rarely comfortable on campus and I couldn’t quite commit to the institution. I was shy and a little wary, always keeping my distance, and in some ways I regret this now. It was such an exciting period – my world and my mind seemed to be glowing and expanding as never before and rarely since – and it saddens me to have so few friends from that time and such scant affection for the university itself. It might seem particularly ungracious to say this of a place with a lecture theatre named after me, but it’s the truth. As the first child of my family to finish school and go on to tertiary education, and to do so in the immediate aftermath of the Whitlam enlightenment, this opportunity was precious. I always understood it was a gift, mindful that I was riding on the shoulders of two or three generations of family members taken out of school before puberty. But I never got over my physical aversion to WAIT.

  In retrospect I see I was a victim of my own expectations.I’d grown up with leafier campuses in mind, like the long-established University of Western Australia whose riverside grounds at Crawley I’d walked through after picnics and prawning expeditions and in whose theatres I’d seen plays during high school. In fact I’d had an offer to study at UWA fresh out of school but in the 1970s the high-status uni made little provision for creative writing. It boasted a respectable arts course and many excellent lecturers in literature, but at the time I could only see that pathway leading to a life in the classroom and I had no interest in being a teacher, or a critic. I thought I’d leave the commentary to others. I wanted to be a player, a practitioner, and the newly established WAIT, later Curtin University, offered the country’s first degree in creative writing. I was a son of the working class and I took a workmanlike mindset into seminars and workshops. I genuinely saw myself entering a trade and this view was perceived as mildly eccentric by many of my teachers, and a few of my classmates. But that didn’t mean I wanted to work in a factory, and that’s certainly what WAIT looked and felt like.

  Still, for all my reservations about the place, I prospered at university. Feeling forever out of sympathy and out of place I often worked independently, even secretively. I learnt to show certain work and withhold the rest, to participate in class but quarantine myself to some degree. I guess I didn’t want to be co-opted. Perhaps, too, I didn’t want to be exposed as a fake. But it meant I found my own style and subject matter in my own time, on my own terms. And I was to discover that isolation can be a boon, as much as a handicap. This is something an islander – the kind who resolves to stay and make peace with life at the margin – has to learn over time. I had several sympathetic and skillful teachers, a couple of whom were writers with an artisanal pride I instinctively understood. The most influential of these was the New Zealand writer Michael Henderson (1942–98) whose spare prose style and aesthetic passion inspired me, and under whose protection I wrote my first good stories and my first novel.

  Generous study breaks between semesters gave me the chance to head south and recharge in a physical environment I loved. I dived, fished and surfed, slept in my van and read the next term’s set texts under dripping canvas in a fug of wood smoke – Faulkner, Twain, Hardy, Conrad. And in one six-week binge I tore through every Patrick White book in print, mostly on an iron bed-frame slung up in the boughs of a moort. What I responded to in these writers was the way they embraced the particulars of their place and the music of their own vernacular. I wanted to do something like that on the southern coast, which felt as if it harboured secrets and stories in every hidden cove and estuary. For all their melancholy shabbiness there was an antic spirit around some abandoned shacks and salmon lookouts. Whimsical furnishings, dunnies with sea views, hand-fashioned letterboxes where no postie had ever been. Sometimes there was nothing left but a midden of longnecks and cans, a sauce bottle, a teapot. I stumbled on the rusted trypots and remnant hearths of whalers. In deep gullies and matted clearings where the shells of a thousand feasts crunched and clattered underfoot, I sensed a profusion of resonances I didn’t understand. It was like stepping into a room vacated only moments before. Everywhere unresolved events and unfinished conversations seemed to waft like the spider webs I could feel but rarely see. There were sorrows I didn’t yet connect with – the absences articulated by so many Noongar names for places, creatures and plants – for the moment I was caught up with trying to find a vocabulary and a diction to match the strangeness of the places I loved and the taciturn people who inhabited them.

  I was interested in spiritual retreat and contemplation in nature, and susceptible to romanticized notions of solitude, so I was curious about hermits like Frank Cooper and fascinated by the enclaves of squatters that still clung on in those days beside remote creeks and inlets. These blokes were odd-bods (for some reason they were always men). Holding out in flat-tyred caravans or tin humpies, they were not seekers or idealists so much as refugees from consequence and responsibility. Where the sand tracks petered out there were cabals of alkies, petty crims and cheapskates. Many were on the lam from the law, the tax department, their wives and their children.

  But it was the real recluses who stirred my imagination, the scowling misfits in barely accessible hollows, those who retreated to the shadows until you gave up and moved on. Enchanted by Blake and Wordsworth and steeped in the eremitic characters of religious history like Simeon Stylites and Julian of Norwich, I found their stubborn isolation irresistible. Now and then one might show himself, trade a few litres of tank water for a rare carton of milk, or let slip a secret campsite for the price of a few shucked abalone or a bit of rump steak. Some consented to a few minutes of stilted conversation. They must have wondered what my game was, why I wouldn’t just piss off and leave them be. They looked as if they’d sprung from the lonely places I found them in. The bowers of peppermint and tea-tree through which they stalked and hid seemed to have shaped their language and their personalities. Their roo-dog leanness, their cragginess and their brooding silences captivated me. I noticed the residual hints of the nineteenth century in their vocabulary, the austerity of their expressions. These men weren’t quite modern. Some of them had a peculiar shifting gaze, a tendency to look over my shoulder into the damp, dark thickets pressing in from the ridges above. They had secrets, stories they could or would not share with a gormless kid. To me they were haunted figures in a brooding landscape, their pasts as impenetrable, as eerily palpable as those louring thickets that hid them.

  To the apprentice novelist, men like these were irresistible characters. They gave off such a storied air. Their evasiveness invited invention, elaboration. I was young enough to be startled by the living force of the past upon them. The few I got to know were damaged men who seemed to have reached an accommodation with themselves and their surroundings. Some knew the poetry of Browning and Longfellow. They spoke about French mapmakers, English navigators and American whalers as if their ships had only minutes befor
e cleared the headland. They alluded to ancient Aboriginal middens, springs and footpads. Their knowledge of local species was supreme. At times all these strands interwove and snagged, as if memory and lore became too dense; their train of thought broke up and skated away; they ranted or glowered or simply got up and went indoors, and in later years, reading John Clare, I associated them less with the milk-eyed seers and eccentrics of romantic poetry and thought instead of that poet’s great torment in trying to hold the beloved world together in his fractured mind. For that was the thing – many of those poor old buggers were mad as meat axes, shattered by war or undone by events I was too young to comprehend. Under the brothy spell of the sublime, I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.

  Teachers of creative writing used to urge their students to write about what they know – perhaps they still do. But when you’re eighteen or nineteen and keenly aware of how thin your experience really is, it’s hard to put a directive like that into action. The truth is, a family and a hometown will afford you material to last a lifetime, but when you’re a youth neither seems important enough to address. It’s as if only distant places and other families are worth writing about. Even young New Yorkers and Londoners must feel this. For somebody writing from the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere – which is more or less what it felt like when I was first writing and publishing – the feeling is acute. When you’re starting out, it takes nerve to write about home and to do it in a language that’s unapologetically local. Some voice in your head is telling you to moderate the demotic and the specific, to accommodate the ‘cosmopolitan reader’. You waste a lot of time second-guessing this abstract stranger from somewhere far more important, and sadly, in time, you’ll get to meet him or her and realize they weren’t entirely imaginary. For writers at the margin there will always be an imperial pressure to relinquish particularity and conform to something more familiar, and what is most familiar to the world of publishing is an urban and largely denatured life. Whether they acknowledge it or not, many editors like to see their own lives reflected. Readers in New York and London often prefer a friction-free reading experience, so when you stubbornly write about regional lives in local vernacular you test the cosmopolitan reader’s patience. These were lessons I had to learn at home before I began to be published abroad.