Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  He and Miriam had gone to the beach at Sorrento only once, decades back. A relentless westerly, stinging water and stinging sand too: they had crouched in borrowed windcheaters and Charlie had peeled orange prawns and put them, one by one, into Miriam’s mouth until they finally gave up and retired to the glazed windows of the kiosk where he had bought the prawns. They ended up eating greasy potato chips and slurping bad coffee, comparing disaster beaches in Mexico and on the Aegean coast.

  All the home units offered appeared to be made almost entirely of glass and rust-resistant but vulnerable looking metals. Charlie suspected aluminium. Inner walls were almost certainly concrete slabs, papered or painted. Jacuzzi abounded. All promised fabulous views, some of them so close to the water it was as if nobody had bothered about possible beach erosion or cyclones. The pile of discards grew, and the latitude inexorably moved northward.

  The Gold Coast did tempt. One eighteenth floor unit overlooking the white extended beach (and all the neighbour high rise units across the road and along the strip) boasted it also had fine views back to the ranges, Springbrook and Binna Burra, and the Macpherson range with Mount Warning. Charlie remembered that time he and Miriam discovered the mountain pool up there, deep in the ferny underbrush and with its huge glossy rocks and precipices. There was a waterfall, cold and almost black behind the white froth of its activity. They had swum, naked, and screamed at the chill of the water, then they had picknicked and sunbaked languidly, deliciously free and private but aware that perhaps less than a kilometre away there was the main road and sweating tourists stuck to their fixed maps. It had only taken a little detour and the attraction of a small dirt road which, in a moment of random daring they had turned into and, voila, their own special rockpool and waterfall. That had been in the ecstasy days of their partnership.

  It seemed the obvious thing. Charlie booked a flight up to Coolangatta. He would get a hire car and be practical. After all, he might yet decide, for convenience, on an apartment in South Melbourne.

  +++++

  Beatrice had been, from the outset, the star. She led the rowdy singing around the kitchen sink during chore-time, she whipped up her own special malted-milk drinks from café-style grooved glasses and with long stemmed spoons to scoop up the ice-cream from the bottom. The glasses and the spoons were her gifts to the family, for having her. The malted milks were her own invention. Charlie still remembered (with a certain astonishment) his particular Beatrice-favourite: coca-cola flavoured milkshake. Would that have been ­possible? What were the other Beatrice-flavours? Mango milkshake, which had astounded everybody – such a combination had seemed almost bizarre, mangoes were what you slurped out over the back stairs, dribbling their acid sweetness over your wrists. Today, of course, mango flavoured ice cream was ­everywhere.

  Beatrice had also persuaded Jane to help her with her very special Christmas cake, which used unheard-of quantities of nuts and glazed cherries and raisins and almost no actual cake, just enough rich brown paste to bind it all together. It was memorable, an instant hit.

  Years later, in Adelaide, Charlie had gone with Miriam into Ditters where they bought small and highly priced replicas of exactly the same Beatrice-cake (as the family traditionally called it). He had asked the woman behind the counter if she knew the origin of the recipe. ‘Old Mrs Ditters saw it in an Australian Woman’s Weekly years ago’, she said. ‘It was, I believe, an American recipe.’

  In his heart, if not in his voiced expressions, it remained still Beatrice-cake.

  Miriam had fingered a small piece, but put it aside. Charlie placated her with a box of chocolate coated macadamia nuts.

  How many other ‘traditions’ had their genesis in that first Christmas with Beatrice? Charlie found he could not think of Shelley Beach without her somehow present. Though, on their earlier holidays, they had been exploring for shells on that rocky, pool-miraculous stretch. It was Beatrice, of course, who had found the unbroken Nautilus shell, cast up on the one small turbulence of sand between the rocky cliffs and the jumble of basalt tors, ‘ancient volcanic activity,’ their father had said.

  The Nautilus was much prized, but at the end of the holiday Beatrice had presented it to Jane. By that stage Charlie felt he had a certain precedence. He had been astonished.

  +++++

  Coolangatta airport was full of families in Hawaiian colours with brown faces. Even the tribes of children looked bulky, and their inevitable clutter of surfboards, backpacks and gaudy luggage like sausages from a Purple People Eater, left Charlie pushed into a corner, as if there were a corner in the huge hangar of a building. But the Purple People Eater did amuse him, gallumphing out of his memories of those teenage ‘novelty songs’ they had so loudly yodelled in those holiday years. ‘The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane’, and ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ had been favourites, but the former only because Beatrice had brought the sheet music with her and sang it with her almost husky voice. ‘Ghost Riders’ was one the boys liked – but not the Bing Crosby version. Charlie collected his small Qantas Frequent Flyer black travel bag from the carousel and moved out to the Hertz hire car booth, humming quietly to himself.

  He had booked no accommodation. That was the new relaxed man. In the years of his constant overseas travel, Charlie always nursed a tight coil of anxiety until he had organised accommodation for at least a week ahead. Miriam was utterly careless, and always seemed to come upon quaint little hotels or pensiones or even serviced rooms and chalets. She passed the details to Charlie but inevitably if he arrived in Vienna or Amsterdam or wherever, some months or years after Miriam had discovered her special hideaway, it would be fully booked, or under renovation, or would turn out to be a fifth floor attic with no heating and a view of lead-roofs or down into some stables or factory. He had begun to suspect that Miriam tended to glamorise her little ‘discoveries’. Though he avoided the glassy international hotel chains, Charlie ended up booking ahead through Qantas, telling himself that the cost was, after all, income tax deductible.

  To drive through the highway north, towards Surfers and Southport was to be suddenly swirled in a double series of shocks. One shock was to recognise small locations out of his childhood past – that row of Norfolk Island pines north of Kirra looked exactly the same size as when he had been initiated into the mysteries of alcohol at eighteen, lurching out to vomit under, surely, precisely that same pine across the road from the hotel. The hotel itself was still there, but completely altered. That was the other shock: the streets and layout were remarkably preserved, but the actual buildings: that was another thing! Where he remembered fibro cottages on stilts or brick-veneer bungalows set in big lawns with perhaps a mango or frangipani as the only gardening evidence, now the whole strip was bricked up into apartments with concrete slab patios and rusting iron railings, or the occasional Tuscan villa, all white porticos and tubs of bougainvillea.

  The new highway cut through the back of the hill at Currumbin and it was at that moment Charlie knew he could not settle here, on the Gold Coast. It had become overgrown and overbuilt, but it had been always so. Before the building booms of the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties this whole strip had been largely sand and marram waste, or ti-tree scrub and wilderness. He remembered no Christmas bells in this stretch. Surfers’ Paradise itself had an entirely naked foreshore, bitumen and then shops and the Surf Lifesavers’ Club. He recalled times when they returned to their cars (in the years when they had graduated to cars) and the seats were so hot they had to throw their damp towels across them before they scrambled in, avoiding the metalwork and commiserating with whoever was driving, as he attempted to handle the steering wheel with whatever was at hand – one of the girl’s caps, or a tangled handkerchief or the shammy from the glove box.

  Brisbane itself produced an ache to the very heart. Was it just three years ago when he had last been in the city? But that was a passing visit and he had been driven directly from the new airport to St Lucia and the University, so much of it old famil
iar territory. It was surprising how the city of his mind had been defined by trees, specific trees. If they were still there, then stability of a sort was assured. If some roadway project or building site had demolished some avenue or tree he remembered, then the whole area had been ruined by concrete, high rise, greedy speculation. The flourishing green suburbs around St Lucia restored his belief in mankind, Charlie felt. He remembered a botanist friend, many years ago pointing out that there were now more flowering native trees, like callistemon or buckinghamia or bauhinia, than at any time before white settlement.

  Coming from the Gold Coast, the new roads were confusing and Charlie became aware that the city of his boyhood could now only be traversed by referring to maps and directions. He was across and onto the Bruce Highway before he realised it. As he had moved, so glidingly and swift, up the coast highway he had been contemplating an overnight stay in the city. There were a few friends and acquaintances he might look up, surprise them with a phone call and an offer of a meal somewhere. He assumed that even Brisbane possessed a few tolerable eating houses by now. His last memory, of a meal at Lennons, still coated his palate with mayonnaise and quickly unfrozen prawns, overripe beef and greasy baked potatoes.

  Miriam had been with him that time, it was one of the few occasions they had intersected – Miriam for a seminar at the Princess Alexandra and him for a week’s research in the Oxley Library. They had chosen Lennons because Miriam remembered her first ‘grand meal’ there with a business friend of her father when she had ordered Bombe Alaska to the horror of her parent and the delight of the business acquaintance, who was paying. Lennons, during the Second World War, had been the headquarters of General MacArthur and the American military presence. It had been a cornerstone. The time Charlie and Miriam made their ‘sentimental journey’, Lennons had been demolished and a substitute high rise hotel erected over in Queen Street. They should have been warned. The dining room was a revolving affair on, presumably, the top floor. You looked out on the lights of other buildings.

  But they had laughed, later, and they reinvented almost childish delight in the fripperies of their bedroom, turning on the television and ordering up champagne and a snack of something unmentionable like tacos and Miriam had stuffed Charlie’s toilet bag with all the shampoo, conditioner, soap and cottonbuds on hand, while Charlie had placed the shower cap upon her head and swathed her in the big white towelling robe. While Miriam reclined in sartorial splendour on the queen-size bed, Charlie had strolled naked to the door when the waiter appeared with the tacos and champagne and then elegantly scrawled his signature on the chit. Miriam described to him in detail, later, exactly the range of expressions on the young man’s face.

  It was when he found himself crossing the Storey Bridge that Charlie realised he had lost it. Not worthwhile turning back into the downtown part of the city now. Funny, it seemed almost irreligious to refer to the city centre, curved into the armpit of the Brisbane River in one of its wide loops, as ‘downtown’. Such an American term. Brisbane had been the most Americanised of Australian cities during World War Two. Charlie still remembered stopping Yank servicemen for chewing gum. Quite blatantly. And they always obliged. Most of them were not all that much older than Charlie’s eldest brother, had he thought of it. But they were so imbued with glamour and spending power that no comparison was ever made. Coffee was introduced with the Yanks. And avocado. And waffles, but who ate waffles now? With Maple Syrup? And jeans. Charlie was the first in his family to come home with a pair of blue jeans, it must have been 1950, 1951. He had worn them up on the holidays at Caloundra that year. And the rayon lairy shirt. He had been the first of the boys to wear rayon, too, and in those technicolour hues: yellow and orange and red. There was a photograph, still, of him standing on the top of a dune over on Dicky Beach near the wreck of the ship that was submerged in sand. Looking so cocky and full of himself, and he had been. Beatrice, he remembered, had taken that snap.

  No. The photograph was no more. It was one of the ­thousands he had consigned to the fire. And what need to keep all that memorabilia? See, he thought to himself, I can draw it up from my own memory, clear as any visible evidence. Clearer, if the truth be known. Photos cannot carry the resonance. At most, they can only hint at it, or falsify as often as not, including details irrelevant to the point, or placing a perspective on things as if even the big moments were only relative. He remembered, still, the painful disappointment when photographs were returned from the chemist, and all the figures were too far away, or too small, or dwarfed by objects not even intended – that other couple on the sand dune, not even noticed at the time. Or that other photograph of Beatrice taken that Christmas, when he had particularly wanted to catch her delight as they all crowded round the picnic hamper Mum had prepared specially the day they hired the boat over to Bribie. She had pickled pork, which was Charlie’s favourite, and all sorts of things in aspic – tinned asparagus and beetroot and peas. By the time they settled to the picnic lunch the aspic was dangerously gelid but the pork was a triumph. Beatrice was delighted with the aspics and promised to try the recipe when she got home, it would be just the thing for her unhappy mother on those hot summer days. The photograph had turned out as a muddle of faces, too many of them, and you could not even make out the picnic things. Nor Beatrice’s happy laughter, just a sort of smirk under her shady sun hat. It was the sort of photo that should be tossed right away. Charlie had kept it in his album all these years, as if it could be even an aide-mémoire. Well, it was that. But it had long lost any relevance or even intention. The last time he had actually looked at that particular set of holiday snaps was when Julie, his daughter, dragged them out. And that was only to laugh at the grotesque fashions of another era.

  Pickled pork. Well, that had really been years back. Hard even to remember what it tasted like. Salty and soft, perhaps? So many things had changed, so many things had improved. Those meals his mother had so strenuously prepared in the family kitchen over the stove – and even over the wood stove in Pen Y Sarn. Nobody would contemplate such slavery today. And certainly not such stodge!

  Miriam had shocked him deeply, that time in Lennons, when for breakfast, again delivered to their room, she had wolfed down a large plate of bacon and eggs.

  He was driving through northern suburbs of Brisbane now, crossing corners and streets suddenly familiar with an ancient tiredness, or broken and transformed with super­markets and glassy offices or emporia, but he noted the shallow, flat neighbouring streets and on the low stunted ridges the eternal Queensland houses, in timber and faded paint, louvres and creosoted slats imprisoning the under-the-house, and always with straggling fences and wide, dry grass blocks with acalypha, allamanda and scrawny rose bushes, and shrubby, stalky street trees, no higher than the garden gate most times: bauhinia again, bottlebrush or shrivelled melaleuca. The hot parched summers of his boyhood returned. The humid afternoons waiting for an evening thunderstorm. The times spent hosing, in the afternoon glare, his mother’s hibiscus or the fruit trees, or the vegetable patch behind the kitchen. None of the new monstrosities or the glossy facades of supermarkets or Branch Headquarters could disguise that old familiarity. Why had he even thought of returning to these tired streets with their memories of heat, of boredom, of a perpetual sense of nothingness?

  Well, he had left all that behind, and life indeed had been more busy and more memorable even than he would have imagined in his boyish dreams. It had been with its miseries too, but somehow even disasters and mistakes and damn silly decisions proved those old boredoms were simply part of adolescence. Perhaps young men everywhere, no matter how rich the environment around them, are tugged into those afternoons of indirection and self-demoralisation. It is called growing pains. It has to be universal.

  Suddenly he was into the real countryside. Once he had crossed the Pine River things became greener, lusher, the trees higher, the hard glittering ridges replaced by water meadows and a vegetation that he recognised as he had recognised those bl
eached suburbs. But it was a recognition that promised abundance. He recalled those long drives up to Caloundra and the highlights along the way: the first sight of the Glasshouse Mountains rising like solid ikons from the plains and with the long row of timbered mountains beyond. The huge forests of pinus radiata that followed the Bruce Highway – ecologically deplorable, he knew, but massively impressive – as well as the edges of real rainforest, impenetrable still and alluring, a thick melee of leaf shapes and dense shadows fringing the road and stretching back he never knew how far: if they had retained at least a token of these, he would be satisfied. Revived and satisfied.

  The new road was smooth, divided lanes and almost before he knew it Charlie was into the area of the Glasshouse Mountains, and paused, and wondered yet again, before he pushed on. Why did they hold him so? They were presences. They were more than that, they were like manifest expressions of all his growing up, of all the growing up of himself and his brothers and sister, of his parents even, and no doubt of generations earlier, much earlier into the Dreamtime of the original tribes in this area. Things to be worshipped, and to remain Other.

  Then the stretch, before the Caloundra turn off: that vast wilderness of forest, despite the highway, was there still, and he could not explain even to himself the satisfaction that gave him. Turning the loop and into the flats and hillocks of the Caloundra road, Charlie glanced back. The ranges rose and swelled and were green and fertile around him. Though he had never actually said it, they were among the most beautiful landscapes he had ever seen. And he had seen many. A quiet exhilaration descended upon him and even though it was early evening now and he would make Caloundra before dark, he found himself driving slowly – so slowly other motorists honked and overtook at risky intervals – as if he were reabsorbing some spirit of place that he had once been connected to but which had become lost to him. He had forgotten the Gold Coast utterly. Brisbane was merely an interruption, as perhaps it had always been. Though this area had only been a holiday site, a place of interruption from the worries of real life, yet it had its own powers. The powers of recuperation, as they used to say; but it was more than that.