Listening to Mondrian (14 page)

(3) HIS FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

Day 2 at least had good weather. A still, bright winter’s day. The ocean as they headed west along the coast road was a blue that Ant tried to find from the little palette of colour words that he held in the thesaurus of his brain.

Ultramarine, cobalt, Prussian, indigo, lapis lazuli, sapphire, turquoise, peacock . . .

If he were painting it he would mix a big blob of Prussian blue with a fraction of lemon yellow and a slightly bigger dab of cobalt, then blend in white for tone and lightness. Making the colours was one of Ant’s favourite bits of painting, more important to him sometimes than the images he got down. He hadn’t brought his paints on the holiday – it was too messy to travel around with oil drying on canvas boards – but he did have his sketchbook and a bundle of 8B pencils in his Land Rights bag. Would he dare get them out? Wouldn’t Tony think it – sissy somehow, or stupid, or just a sheer waste of time? Tony would no doubt prefer bushwalking, hiking, rock climbing, clambering up mountains, or plunging down caves into the bowels of the earth.

Ant was aware that the car had turned off the bitumen onto a sandy track leading through coastal scrub towards the sea. ‘Thought we’d have a bit of a hike. Stretch our legs,’ Tony said, right on cue.

Ant left his sketchbook in the car but he did sling his camera around his neck as they set off along the bank of the wide river outlet that took them to a deserted stretch of beach between two rocky promontories.

He glanced at his father: cameras were respectable, weren’t they? Not wimpy or anything? After all, he was a tourist . . .

But Tony just strode on along the hard strip of beach at the surf’s edge, while Ant floundered through the soft sand a few metres to his father’s left. He was damned if he’d move across and walk in his father’s footsteps.

Reaching the further promontory Tony stopped, and Ant took a couple of photos. They were too low down, however, for the view he wanted, looking back over the dunes to include the river estuary. Tony saw his problem, produced the solution. ‘If you were to climb that hill . . .’

So they clambered to the top of the dunes, and then up the nearest hill, but now the sun was in the wrong position, Tony noticed. He thrust on ahead to the next hill, so Ant could get his shot.

Following his father through the maze of scrub, Ant had to keep a hand in front of his face to protect his spectacles from the ricochet of branches swinging back at him.

At last they reached the second hill and Tony pointed out a place where Ant could tuck himself into the slope to avoid the sun getting into the lens. Ant took the lens cap off, checked the light, focused, clicked, but got no joy from taking the photograph that his father had set up. It wasn’t his picture any more.

‘Ready to go back to the car now?’ Tony inquired politely before spurting ahead again. This time, to avoid the backlash of branches, Ant stayed some distance behind.

And predictably was soon lost.

This scrub was really horrible: sappy green coastal bushes just a little higher than Ant’s head, so he couldn’t see his way through the maze.

But stay calm. Think logically.

The ocean had to be on that side – didn’t it?

Which would put the river somewhere over there?

And so the car must be . . .

It took an hour of burrowing headlong through tunnels of scrub, following pathways that petered out in gullies, fiddling back and forth, even gazing helplessly up to try to get his bearings from the noonday sun. (If he were a Queen’s Scout, he’d have a compass.)

At last out he popped into a clearing that contained the red car and his father.

Tony was peeling a banana. He just nodded, tossed another one to Ant.

Ant peeled it. He hated bananas Didn’t his father remember anything? He’d always hated bananas, ever since he was a baby. Mum knew that, and never bought them.

(4) PORT FAIRY, WHERE THE PAST IS EVER PRESENT

‘Port Fairy, where the past is ever present,’ Ant announced in a stilted reading-around-the-class voice. Tony had asked him to check through the tourist brochures they’d picked up in Apollo Bay, to see what there was to see, where there was to stay. The afternoon was getting on, and they still had a few kilometres to go before they reached Port Fairy.

‘Go on,’ Tony urged now.

Ant cleared his throat, but read the article silently.

Port Fairy, Where the Past is Ever Present

The Port Fairy district of Victoria is a meeting point for
Past and Present, with a unique history going back to
the beginning of Time.

Amongst the attractions is a rich Indigenous
heritage. Shell middens right along the coastline provide
evidence of Aboriginal camps, especially to the west, in
the place known as the Crags.

The area awoke from its long sleep in the early nineteenth
century, when whalers and sealers from Van
Diemen’s Land built huts along the Moyne River as a place to shelter during the whaling season. Some of these
first settlers married the local women, and the Aboriginal
tribes were soon replaced by a thriving community.

In the 1820s a bay whaling station was established
on Griffith’s Island at the river mouth. Soon the East
Beach was littered with the massive skeletons of the
Southern Right Whales. By the mid 1840s the supply of
whales was exhausted and the whaling station was
closed.

No trace of it remains today on the little island,
home to a large colony of mutton-birds which arrive
each September from Alaska to lay their eggs, leaving
again for the northern hemisphere in April.

Today, Port Fairy’s colourful history is part of the
nation’s heritage. A variety of motels and restaurants . . .

‘What’s it say?’ Ant’s father asked again.

Ant provided a quick translation: ‘Well, for thousands of years, the Kooris lived here really happily. Then all these white criminals came over from Tasmania. They raped the Aboriginal women and killed the men, and stole the place. Then they slaughtered all the whales within twenty years . . .’

Ant was watching his father as he spoke, waiting for him to protest at this interpretation so that Ant could weigh in with his own beliefs. It wasn’t that Ant liked fights, but he somehow felt that he had to define the difference between himself and his father.

Tony just kept driving steadily westwards, however, his eyes on the road. At last he said, ‘Go on . . .’

‘So,’ Ant concluded lamely, ‘so there’s lots of lovely old buildings and heaps of places to eat and sleep.’

‘OK, read through the ads for caravan parks and find us a good one.’

Ant chose one that sounded all right, but when they looked at the on-site van they’d just taken, it was so filthy that even the curtains were mouldy. They booked out, drove back towards the centre of town, and Tony pulled in at the first motel with a Vacancy sign. He winced as the receptionist told him the price, but pulled out his credit card. Ant felt bad again about the tent. They’d tried to buy another fly and pole that morning, but couldn’t get one at Apollo Bay.

There was an hour of daylight left, and Tony thought a brisk walk along the river bank would help build up their appetites for dinner.

Ant already felt starving, but said nothing.

The walk was brisk enough, through a high wind that was blowing straight from the south, but when they reached the little causeway to the island it wasn’t just the weather that made Ant pull the neck of his jumper up over his nose.

The stench was indescribable.

At first Ant thought it must be the local sewerage outlet, but then he saw the mounds of sea kelp which the recent storms had washed up to rot on the rocks.

There was a sign erected by the Department of Conservation and Environment, warning people to leave pets in the car. Eighty per cent of the mutton-bird chicks that hatch on the island die, it said, mostly because of attacks by dogs and cats.

Ant and his father battled out along the track, through wind that seemed intent on pushing them back to shore. On a number of occasions they saw the bones and feathers of a mutton-bird that had been savaged to death. Ant thought of the whale carcases, littering the beach.

‘The stench of history,’ Tony said, turning abruptly back the way they had come. ‘The stink of the past.’

It was as if he’d read Ant’s mind.

(5) THE EVIDENCE

The next morning, at the Crags, history again forced itself upon Ant and his father.

The Crags were outcrops on the coastal rock shelf, framing a little cove of beach. This time, Ant left his camera in the car. Didn’t want Tony taking any more photographs through him. And besides, today the drizzle was even thicker. They did their parkas up tight, pulled hoods over their ears, and headed down the track that skirted the small cliff alongside the beach.

Despite the weather, you could see what a great picnic spot this would be on a good day. And sure enough, vast shell middens beside the track showed how the local people had picnicked here for 60,000 years or more.

Ant and his father stood silently, looking at the evidence, till the heavens opened and the rain sent the trespassers slithering back to their car.

(6) LAYERS

It was on the third night that the storm really started to build up. Ant and Tony were snug inside the pub at Nelson, where the Glenelg River ended its long journey down from Gariwerd and spilled into the sea. On the map the straight line of the Victoria–South Australia border ran down through the forest, but the river snaked its way back and forth, heedless of stuff like governments and states.

Over a counter meal, the travellers felt the warmth of the log fire start to dry their muddy jeans. Afterwards, they sat up at the bar, Ant with his Coke, Tony with the remains of the bottle of Merlot that he had ordered with his dinner. Ant felt that they appeared really out of place among the fishermen and timberworkers who were the pub’s clientele in this season, but his father didn’t seem to notice the fact that everybody else looked as if their families had been here since the Ark. (Talking of which, the rain was drumming relentlessly now on the pub’s tin roof. If this kept up, Ant found himself worrying, they might get flooded in here, and he wouldn’t be able to get home until the end of the holidays . . .)

‘Thar she blows!’ an oldtimer shouted as suddenly the door to the car park opened and someone struggled in. The newcomer was so swaddled in his wet-weather gear that it wasn’t until he had peeled off a number of layers that Ant saw it was a boy – no, a man perhaps, but he didn’t look much older than Ant. He was short and slight, and he was obviously from the city, but Ant observed how all the locals greeted him and asked him, ‘Howzitgoin?’

‘OK,’ the young man said as he festooned his wet scarf and gloves around the fireplace. ‘Bit muddy up top but nice and dry down my hole.’

‘You’re like an old wombat down a burrow,’ the publican told him, and he laughed.

Ant found himself getting more and more curious about why the young man was at Nelson, but it was Tony who shifted his stool a little, made a remark about the weather outside versus the warmth in here, and got around to asking the stranger what brought him to this neck of the woods.

He was a student, he explained, doing post-grad studies in Ecological Archaeology, and he was studying a thirty-metre shaft that had been a natural animal trap for twenty thousand years or more.

The young man was a bit reticent at first, as if he thought the question had just been pub politeness, but Tony gently eased out his story in a way that was far more comfortable than how he talked to Ant.

Ant’s mind did one of its out-of-the-body clicks, and he found himself observing the two chatting away at the bar, and thinking how they looked like a father and son who were enjoying a holiday together. But then who was this other person, who was the spitting image (except for the specs) of the father figure? Why was he sitting by himself, speaking to no one, like the proverbial wet blanket?

‘Do you use radio-carbon dating, or is that old hat these days?’ Ant heard Tony ask, as he clicked back into the conversation.

It seemed that the archaeologist was trying to chart climate changes over the last twenty thousand years, as they were revealed by the different animals that had fallen down the hole. His job was to measure the layers of time down his shaft, gently unearthing the skeletons of creatures ranging from tiny lizards to big mammals and then identifying and dating them. The ultimate aim, he said, was to be able to project possible climatic patterns of the future. ‘Hopefully, anyway,’ he concluded.

Tony began to mention some documentary he’d seen, about ancient tree trunks that had been unearthed in a swamp in Tasmania. By slicing through and examining the growth layers, scientists had been able to measure the experience not just of that particular tree but of the whole ecosystem going back thousands and thousands of years . . .

If only, Ant thought, it were so easy to slice through the layers of himself and his father; if it were possible to measure in one glance the experience of these last five years, as they had been growing apart. But then, Ant realised, they’d been apart, even when they’d shared the same house. He had very few memories of living with his father: it was as if those pages of the past were missing.

Later that night, in the pub bathroom, Ant noticed his father touch a fingertip to his eyeball, lift a contact lens, place it in a small white plastic container. On the first two nights, in motels, they hadn’t used the bathroom at the same time. Ant felt he was staring, and assiduously brushed at his teeth, but Tony caught his glance in the mirror as he repeated the performance with the second lens.

‘It’s vanity, I guess,’ Tony blushed.

And Ant felt suddenly a little easier with the man. Bad eyesight meant there was something else they had in common.

(7) A LIMESTONE GORGE AND CAVES

Over scrambled eggs and bacon, Ant read silently from the brochures put out by the Department of Conservation and Environment.