Storm Boy

This edition published in Australia in 2002 by
New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Sydney • Auckland • London • Cape Town

www.newholland.com.au

1/66 Gibbes St, Chatswood NSW 2067 Australia
218 Lake Road Northcote Auckland New Zealand
86 Edgware Road London W2 2EA United Kingdom
80 McKenzie Street Cape Town 8001 South Africa

Copyright © 2002 text: Colin Thiele
Copyright © 2002 illustrations: Robert Ingpen
Copyright © New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

ISBN(13) 978-1-86436-804-8

e-ISBN 9781921655524

S
TORM BOY LIVED between the Coorong and the sea. His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles round the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible ruin of white water and spray. All day and all night they tumble and thunder. And when the wind rises it whips the sand up the beach and the white spray darts and writhes in the air like snakes of salt.

Storm Boy lived with Hide-Away Tom, his father. Their home was a rough little humpy made of wood and brush and flattened sheets of iron from old tins. It had a dirt floor, two blurry bits of glass for windows, and a little crooked chimney made of stove pipes and wire. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, and it shivered when the great storms bent the sedges and shrieked through the bushes outside. But Storm Boy was happy there.

Hide-Away was a quiet, lonely man. Years before, when Storm Boy’s mother had died, he had left Adelaide and gone to live like a hermit by the sea. People looked down their noses when they heard about it, and called him a beachcomber. They said it was a bad thing to take a four-year-old boy to such a wild, lonely place. But Storm Boy and his father didn’t mind. They were both happy.

People seldom saw Hide-Away or Storm Boy. Now and then they sailed up the Coorong in their little boat, past the strange wild inlet of the Murray mouth, past the islands and the reedy fringes of the freshwater shore, past the pelicans and ibises and tall white cranes, to the little town with a name like a waterbird’s cry—Goolwa! There Storm Boy’s father bought boxes and tins of food, coils of rope and fishing lines, new shirts and sandals, kerosene for the lamp, and lots of other packages and parcels until the little boat was loaded like a junk.

People in the street looked at them wonderingly and nudged each other. ‘There’s Tom,’ they’d say, ‘the beachcomber from down the coast. He’s come out of his hideaway for a change.’ And so, by and by, they just nicknamed him ‘Hide-Away’, and nobody even remembered his real name.

Storm Boy got his name in a different way. One day some campers came through the scrub to the far side of the Coorong. They carried a boat down to the water and crossed over to the ocean beach. But a dark storm came towering in from the west during the day, heaving and boiling over Kangaroo Island and Cape Jervis, past Granite Island, the Bluff, and Port Elliot, until it swept down towards them with lightning and black rain. The campers ran back over the sandhills, through the flying cloud and the gloom. Suddenly one of them stopped and pointed through a break in the rain and mist.

‘Great Scott! Look! Look!’

A boy was wandering down the beach all alone. He was as calm and happy as you please, stopping every now and then to pick up shells or talk to a molly-hawk standing forlornly on the wet sand with his wings folded and his head pointing into the rising wind.

‘He must be lost!’ cried the camper. ‘Quick, take my things down to the boat; I’ll run and rescue him.’ But when he turned round the boy had gone. They couldn’t find him anywhere. The campers rushed off through the storm and raised an alarm as soon as they could get back to town:

‘Quick, there’s a little boy lost way down the beach,’ they cried. ‘Hurry, or we’ll be too late to save him.’ But the postmaster at Goolwa smiled. ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘That’s Hide-Away’s little chap. He’s your boy in the storm.’

And from then on everyone called him Storm Boy.

The only other man who lived anywhere near them was Fingerbone Bill, the Aboriginal. He was a wiry, wizened man with a flash of white teeth and a jolly black face as screwed-up and wrinkled as an old boot. He had a humpy by the shore of the Coorong about a mile away.

Fingerbone knew more about things than anyone Storm Boy had ever known. He could point out fish in the water and birds in the sky when even Hide-Away couldn’t see a thing. He knew all the signs of wind and weather in the clouds and the sea. And he could read all the strange writing on the sandhills and beaches—the scribbly stories made by beetles and mice and bandicoots and anteaters and crabs and birds’ toes and mysterious sliding bellies in the night. Before long Storm Boy had learnt enough to fill a hundred books.

In his humpy Fingerbone kept a disorganised collection of iron hooks, wire netting, driftwood, leather, bits of brass, boat oars, tins, rope, torn shirts, and an old blunderbuss. He was very proud of the blunderbuss because it still worked. It was a muzzle-loader. Fingerbone would put a charge of gunpowder into it; then he’d ram anything at all down the barrel and fix it there with a wad. Once he found a big glass marble and blew it clean through a wooden box just to prove that the blunderbuss worked. But the only time Storm Boy ever saw Fingerbone kill anything with it was when a tiger snake came sliding through the grass to the shore like a thin stream of black glass barred with red hot coals. As it slid over the water towards his boat Fingerbone grabbed his blunderbuss and blew the snake to pieces.

‘Number One bad fellow, tiger snake,’ he said. ‘Kill him dead!’ Storm Boy never forgot. For days afterwards every stick he saw melted slowly into black glass and slid away.

At first, Hide-Away was afraid that Storm Boy would get lost. The shore stretched on and on for ninety miles, with every sandhill and bush and tussock like the last one, so that a boy who hadn’t learnt to read the beach carefully might wander up and down for hours without finding the spot that led back home. And so Hide-Away looked for a landmark.

One day he found a big piece of timber lying with the driftwood on the beach. It had been swept from the deck of a passing ship, and it was nearly as thick and strong as the pile of a jetty. Hide-Away and Fingerbone dragged it slowly to the top of the sandhill near the humpy. There Hide-Away cut some notches in the wood for steps, and fixed a small crosspiece to it. Then they dug a deep hole, stood the pole upright in it, and stamped it down firmly.

‘There,’ said Hide-Away. ‘Now you’ll always have a Lookout Post. You’ll be able to see it far up the beach, and you won’t get lost.’

As the years went by, Storm Boy learnt many things. All living creatures were his friends—all, that is, except the long, narrow fellows who poured themselves through the sand and sedge like glass.

In a hole at the end of a burrow under a grassy tussock he found the Fairy Penguin looking shyly at two white eggs. And when the two chicks hatched out they were little bundles of dark down as soft as dusk.

‘Hullo, Mrs Penguin,’ said Storm Boy each day. ‘How are your bits of thistledown today?’

Fairy Penguin didn’t mind Storm Boy. Instead of pecking and hissing at him she sat back sedately on her tail and looked at him gently with mild eyes.

Sometimes, in the hollows behind the sandhills where the wind had been scooping and sifting, Storm Boy found long, white heaps of seashell and bits of stone, ancient mussels and cockles with curves and whorls and sharp broken edges.

‘An old midden,’ said Hide-Away, ‘left by the Aborigines.’

‘What’s a midden?’

‘A camping place where they used to crack their shellfish.’ Fingerbone stood for a long time gazing at the great heaps of shells, as if far off in thought.

‘Dark people eat, make camp, long time ago,’ he said a little sadly. ‘No whitefellow here den. For hundreds and hundreds of years, only blackfellows.’

Storm Boy looked at the big heaps of shell and wondered how long ago it must have been. He could paint it in his mind…the red campfires by the Coorong, the piccaninnies, the songs, the clicking of empty shells falling on the piles as they were thrown away. And he thought to himself, ‘If that time were now, I’d be a little black boy.’

But his father’s voice roused him and he ran down to the beach to help dig up a bagful of big cockles for their own tea. And when they had enough for themselves they filled more bags to take up to Goolwa, because there the fishermen and the tourists were eager to pay Hide-Away money for fresh bait.

Storm Boy stood bent over like a horseshoe, as if he were playing leapfrog; his fingers scooped and scraped in the sand, and the salt sea slid forwards and backwards under his nose. He liked the smell and the long, smooth swish of it. He was very happy.

Storm Boy liked best of all to wander along the beach after what Hide-Away called a Big Blow. For then all kinds of treasure had been thrown up by the wind and the wild waves. There, where the wide stretch of beach was shining and swishing with the backward wash, he would see the sea things lying as if they’d been dropped on a sheet of glass—all kinds of weed and coloured kelp, frosty white cuttlefish, sea urchins and starfish, little dead seahorses as stiff as starch, and dozens of different shells—helmets, mitres, spindles and dove shells, whelks with purple edges, ribbed and spiral clusterwinks, murex bristling out their frills of blunt spines, nautilus as frail as frozen foam, and sometimes even a new cowry, gleaming and polished, with its underside as smooth and pink as tinted porcelain.

In places the sand would be rucked and puckered into hard smooth ripples like scales. Storm Boy liked to scuff them with his bare soles as he walked, or balance on their cool curves with the balls of his feet.

He grew up to be supple and hardy. Most of the year he wore nothing but shorts, a shirt, and a battered old Tom Sawyer hat. But when the winter wind came sweeping up from Antarctica with ice on its tongue, licking and smoothing his cheeks into cold flat pebbles, he put on one of his father’s thick coats that came down to his ankles. Then he would turn up the collar, let his hands dangle down to get lost in the huge pockets, and go outside again as snug as a penguin in a burrow. For he couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet.