tempest 146 - Bitly

 Ideas. Writing. Culture.

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Words from FIONA WRIGHT ASHLEY HAY ROHAN WILSON MAGGIE MACKELLAR DAVID MCCOOEY MARIA TAKOLANDER BROOK EMERY MELINDA SMITH LENNY BARTULIN JAYA SAVIGE and more

THE BUS STOP Taking shelter from climate fury ENDLINGS On love and extinction TO RUN AWAY FROM HOME At home in the body and the world ACTS OF DISPLACEMENT Valerie Sparks’s Prospero’s Island TEMPEST PRAYERS Shouting to the sky THE FOUNDERING POLITY Australia’s maritime horrors FRAGMENTS OF PLACE Questioning landscape art

VOL.146 3/2016 AUD $16.50

ISLAND 146

ISLAND

TEMPEST STORM • EXILE • DISCORD • DISCOVERY • REFUGE

ISLAND q Ideas. Writing. Culture.

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Cover image: Modified from a photograph by Matthew Venables of Fiona Wright, 2016. mvenables.com

Editorial

Interview

Poetry

Tempest

Acts of Displacement 41

From ‘You want ghosts’ 20

Play, exhibition, condition  6 Geordie Williamson

Essays The Bus Stop 11

Taking shelter from the weather’s fury Ashley Hay

Endlings: On Love and Extinction 49

Eliza Burke talks with Valerie Sparks about her art wallpaper Prospero’s Island

Art A river settles its own cairns underwater 38

Fragment of an artwork to come Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward

Winner of the 2016 Wildcare Nature Writing Prize Harriet Riley

Amphibious Architecture 55

Atlas du Voyage 59

Fragments of Place 63

Encountering Tasmania’s coastline Delia Nicholls

Refuge From the Storm 75 A Chatter Matters literacy journey Perrin Scarborough In Sympathy: A Fugue 90

On loss, a bird, a daughter, a father Maggie MacKellar

To Run Away From Home 101 The unsettled, unhomed body Fiona Wright

What does the Derwent want? Natalie Jeremijenko

Questions of wilderness and landscape art featuring Elizabeth Barsham, Matthew Armstrong and Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Andrew Harper

Fiction Eaglehawk IDC 25 Rohan Wilson

The Mind’s Eyes 70

Brook Emery

Hossegor 21 Jaya Savige Voluntary Inundations 22 Martin Kovan

Tidal 23

Roland Leach

Music for Hospitals / Not to Disturb 78  David McCooey

Not to be / Contemplating the Gap 80 Melinda Smith

Daddy / Argument 96 Maria Takolander

A Dream, London, November 24 98 Claire Potter

Negation 99 Jo Langdon

Danielle Wood

Our Country 83

Commentaries Tempest Prayers 34 Shouting to the sky James Boyce

Lenny Bartulin

The Teeth and the Curl 109 Robbie Arnott

The Foundering Polity 36 Australia’s maritime horrors Damon Young

Image on spread: Tacita Dean, When first I raised the tempest, No.17599, 2016, chalk on blackboard, 244 x 976 cm, courtesy of Tacita Dean, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Tempest exhibition Photography by Fredrik Nielsen.

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The Teeth and the Curl: A Note to a Cousin Robbie Arnott

T

he sand is cold and clumped as we fiddle through it, hunting for cowry shells, under the eye of our grandmother. Cowries are rare treasures on this beach, and she has spent the spare parts of her life searching for them. A large jar, three-quarters full, sits on her mantelpiece. She is in her early seventies. Let that roll through you, cousin: seven decades of searching on a single beach – for this beach has been her only hunting ground – has yielded a single not-full jar. And now our young eyes and bendy backs and buttery fingers are doing the searching for her. It is a family tradition. When she spies the toothy curl of a cowry she inhales sharply, a rip of breath, before recomposing herself as she digs it out and tips it into the jar. You and I never find one – we can’t concentrate on the endlessly similar sand for long enough – but it doesn’t matter, because there are aunts and uncles hunting too, as well as our mothers and brothers and sisters and other cousins. The workforce has grown far beyond anything our grandmother ever imagined. It grows so large that we stop bothering. Others will find the shells, and shells aren’t really for us, anyway. We turn our backs on the beach and head inland, high and far from the sea and sand and her. I am two years older, which at nine and eleven is a gaping yawn of experience and authority, but it’s not just the age gap that draws you along – it’s mostly because we are so alike, from our skinny limbs and muddy hair to our stubborn moods and our love of rushing. Rushing is what we do best, and it is what we do now; the rolling interior of the world pulls at us with a grip far greater than the clumpy sand of our grandmother’s beach, and we hurl ourselves into it with no caution, no thought. 109

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And soon we are so distracted we don’t look for shells at all, not even when we come back to visit. We have grown tall and stiff and cold. We’ve rushed into day jobs with dry hands and straight spines. We’ve forgotten about the cowries. When she dies, the jar is still not full.

wondering: how has this happened again? Whose idea was it? And the truth is that we don’t know – most likely the fault lies with both of us. We told each other the heavy snow on the low, initial section of the walk was sure to melt as the day went on. We scoffed at the greying sky as we traipsed around the teardrop tarns that hustled up to a stiff climb of chunky dolerite. All we noticed was the faded lichen, the blossoming tea-trees, the whirling patterns of the snow gum branches and the clomping figures of ourselves, ignoring or not seeing the dropping temperature and the thick-falling snow. At the top of the boulder field we beheld the shrouded plateau and muttered to each other that it was no problem; that we would simply follow the markers until we hit the forest on the other side. And so we wandered, together, into the snow and mist and unending printer-paper whiteness that is now the entirety of our physical world.

But before she does, where does our distraction take us? To many places, but mostly to heights, and not the metaphorical kind: with our deep lungs and gluey fingers we find ourselves climbing things. Trees, hills, mountains and cliffs, like this cliff, the one we are currently perched on. The cliff that juts up and out of Bass Strait at West Head, past the lookout above Badgers Beach, high and craggy over the sea I told you was boiling with kingfish, the one species in these waters that has eluded our hooks and nets and spears. The cliff I said we could easily climb. The cliff we backed down, cautiously and perilously, rods and tackle boxes in our spare hands, sliding three metres for every one we stepped, until we reached our current ledge. The cliff that (we have now discovered) is cut off from shoreline below by a fourmetre overhang, one we can’t possibly climb down without falling onto wet, edged rocks. The cliff we now realise we can’t easily climb back up – that slipping and crashing our way down was the easy part. The cliff upon which we are looking at each other, both of our zippy minds halted by the same thought: that we must climb back up, and that we can’t climb back up. And here on this cliff, as we wobble and sweat, is a good place to view one of the few differences between us. Look past the matching china-plate foreheads and twiggy bodies and into our eyes: there it is. Mine are running panicked while yours are patiently waiting. I have led, and you have followed. I am brash, and you are trusting. The dark waves lick the rocks clean below us. This is all my fault.

In us there is arrogance, or stupidity, or both – the assumption that outside our homes and cities the world is still designed to bend to our will. That we will roll through it uninhibited and unchallenged. That unclimbable cliffs and impenetrable fog will morph beneath our touch. This is youth, I guess. And the privilege of our upbringing. And our ever-burning need to rush. You find no cowries by rushing. She told us that, once. Many times. The coarse beach climbing beneath our nails as she spoke. Harsh rocks stubbing our toes into jammy mash when we ignored her and sprinted into the shallows. Oyster shells blading through the skin of our fingers as she said slow down, slow down. You have a whole life. We rolled our feet in Dettol and stuffed toilet paper into our cuts, before hurtling back outside, barefoot and bleeding. A whole life, she told us. We never listened. On the mountain we are saved by our feet. Or, rather, your foot – the one that plunges half a metre through the powder and into a slow-flowing stream. You yelp at the freshness of the water, colder even than the snow, but in your cry there is hope. As foolish as we are, we remember the colours and lines of the map we’d studied that morning; we know that running water will lead us to the trees. So we follow it, hauling ourselves up and out of the snow with each lunging step, only to collapse back down through it, feeling for the icy grip of the stream. You have forgotten your gloves, so we rotate mine between us, taking turns to feel our hands become numbed claws that blaze with pain every time we fall forwards. An hour later we find the trees. Each of us collapses onto a lichen-scarred boulder, like seals hauling out on a cold shore, dragging skinny air into our lungs. When we rise we find a marker; a faded strip of pink ribbon tied to the brown-white whorls of a twisted snow gum. From there we walk, our legs heavy as logs but finally free of the sinking snow, until the trail coughs us out

We make it back up, despite the sliding rocks and greasy saplings and small falls full of gut-flipping weightlessness. At the top we iron out our nerves and wander down the coastal path back to our car, talking not about our stupidity but about the kingfish, about how we will get them, one day, just not this day, maybe a different cliff, another way down. Back at our shack we tell our mothers nothing and our grandmother, deep in her cowry jar, even less. But do we learn anything, cousin? Technically we learn plenty of things – how to change tyres, to pay bills, to hurt girls, how to earn, save, lie and hate – but from the cliff and the kingfish we learn nothing, because a few months later we are standing on a mountain plateau, unable to see more than fifteen metres in any direction. An ocean of mist surrounds us, hiding the rocks and bushes and trees that we had hoped to use as markers. The actual trail markers are gone, too, hidden beneath a thigh-deep layer of snow. We are staring at each other, 110

The Teeth and the Curl: A Note to a Cousin

onto the road, not far from my car. I drive us back to the city, barely trusting my custardy calves that leave my left foot trembling over the clutch. That night we are due for dinner with our mothers. We want nothing more than beds and warmth and sleep, but they are our mothers. Soon after showering we are down at the Thai restaurant they have booked. Soft lights. Crowded tables. Our mothers, in the corner, waiting. How many hours have they spent waiting for their sons? They chat and drink and speak in seamless synchronisation, even more similar to each other than you and I. We are so tired we can’t muster much more than grunts in response. Feeling is only just now creeping back into our toes. Behind our eyes we see a white wall of snow and mist. As our mothers’ questions bear down on us we dip and sway in our seats, dodging the barrages like drunken boxers. Rice cools and congeals in my bowl. You can hardly lift a forkful of pad thai to your skinny bird-lips. And now our mothers have realised we aren’t drunk or angry or lovesick. Their questioning intensifies, in the way that only mothers can question their stubborn sons, and we can only fob them off for so long until we need to change the subject, which is when you ask: how’s Gran? To which my mother, or your mother, it doesn’t matter – even the grooves in their cheeks look alike – gulps down a sweaty broth of restaurant air and says well, boys. Not good.

don’t like sunny days. Maybe there are never any kingfish here. Maybe we are not meant to catch them. After ten more minutes I reel my line in, strip down to my underwear and grab the snorkelling gear I’d thrown into my bag. Fins, abalone knife, spit swirling around the inside of my goggles, cleaning out the grit. You hand me my spear and I submerge. The reef flutters up at me from the sand and rock, and for a few seconds I hyperventilate, trying to calm my body as it reacts to being underwater. As I paddle I see many kinds of fish – leatherjacket, cuttlefish, boarfish, one or two morwong, countless blue-throated wrasse – but I spear none. There are no kingfish, either. I kick my way to the edge of the reef and pull my neck above the surface. If I strain I can just make out the beach that we came from. The beach where she would bend her back and narrow her eyes, hunting, always hunting, as the jar awaited back at her shack. Soon I will return to the rocky shore and toss you the snorkel gear, insisting you have a go. You will launch into the sea and trace a sharp arc through the water, diving low, fossicking beneath rock shelves, surfacing with a tiny whale-spray of air. But before I come back to you, I will slide back beneath the waves. Back to where the kingfish aren’t and the sandy floor is. I will suck in all the air my lungs can hold and dive down to the bottom, where I will dig my wrinkled fingers into the seabed. I will comb my eyes over the smooth humps of sand, searching for the teeth and the curl of a cowry. Just one. One will be enough, cousin. We only ever needed to find one.

But she is not gone yet; no, she is strong, she is faithful, she has seen off cancer once before, and she will see it off again. Only – she doesn’t. We go home. Winter is ending but the cold northerly wind is still whipping, slashing a low curtain of loose sand across the beach into our shins, exposing buried shells of all kinds, but we aren’t searching. Our eyes are high and unfocused. In a few days we bear her coffin through the aisle of the church. Our grandfather lets his small hand linger on the dark wood before the hearse is closed. They’ve known each other since before they could talk. As children they’d shared a fence. Small town, God-large love. Goodbye, he mutters. Cousin, I don’t know if you noticed this – it took me a while to notice it, myself – but after she dies, we stop rushing. And it is not until a few years later that we find a way down the cliff, the one at West Head where we had become trapped in our hunt for kingfish. Two bends around the path from where we’d got stuck we discover a safe, meandering track down to the shore. A track that’s easy to find, if you only show a bit of patience. We cast out and wait. There are no birds, no broken water, no flash of scales, no movement on the surface at all. Twenty minutes pass. Zero strikes. Maybe it’s too nice a day. The sun is yolking down on us from a hard blue sky, with no clouds or wind to cushion its bite. Fish

Robbie Arnott won the Tasmanian Young Writer’s Fellowship in 2015. His fiction and nonfiction has been featured in many Australian publications, including Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Seizure, Review of Australian Fiction and Island. Image: Louisa Anne Meredith, Tasmanian Shells, 1870s; pencil, watercolour, Chinese white and gum on woven paper, 13.9 x 18.6 cm; courtesy of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Tempest exhibition

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