This raw coastal idyll triggers memories of my mainland boyhood not far from water: higgledy constructions, grey sandy roads hopping with wallabies, tea-tree scrub once swarming with Christmas beetles this time of year that seem to have vanished now. The locals, different from visitors, also transport me eerily back in time. Many vehicles are old, mainly the regular visitors’ who buy plots and build shacks where they leave their ferried salt-sprayed wheels year-round because this beach is on an island twenty-six miles from the nearest town. These rusting, rattling dust-raisers remind me of those that passed my school bus a tough eternity ago. Should sensory reminders of childhood, however shameful that was, elicit joy?

Imagining an expression of slight concern crossing a woman’s face – women understand these matters – she agrees to my request but warns me to take care going there. Inside lies danger, spiders, reptiles, rotted floorboards. Anticipating treading softly on shards of glass from windows shattered long ago I step inside, catching an odour of mildew, yellowed newspapers curled at the edges of faded linoleum. I picture our old house being used as a large shed where unwanted things are shunted out of sight and forgotten. Though memory ruins us we devour the past.

A moored racing yacht’s mast tall against the horizon in our bay backdrops a songwriter tossing driftwood for her delighted dog along a straight sandbar. Councillors’ horizons are anything but straight. The island’s ozone seethes with corruption’s temptation. Signs of change are dollar signs. Publicity hounds would develop this community in aspic into a vulgar resort but the Roaring Forties blow mercilessly. Regular visitors prefer the teetering status quo. Locals refer to artists attracted by islands’ universal magnetism as ferals. They feud with visitors and each other as in my time and place when I was a boy. Ugly whining letters to the conservative newspaper that could be filed under Greed I find unintentionally droll. Yet this rough-hewn beauty could overcome all the sorrows of the world.

Emotions on overtime, I knocked. The owner, intelligent features, kindness evident, said: Do come in. I understand perfectly. Sipping percolated coffee amid renovations, dust motes dancing in a leadlight shaft of colour, I saw through a window of years, progress, not the ashes of boyhood dreams, bodies of cars rusted the colour of old blood like Armageddon sculpture where my father wasted several bullets slaughtering my dog Sandy after I had unearthed a small cache of banknotes from my lair and escaped. I thought of black-and-white photos from those bleak days of struggle as the owner brewed more coffee seeking historical information about his home, tales from the anarchic past, distant voices.

In marram grass, wary of snakes, I remember days smelling like this before the darkest months of my youth, deprived of liberty; bone, nerve, nail, sinew, vein, thought; alive, like the snakes I whacked fences to warn back then, a lonely yearning, mostly unhappy time, plotting that escape. Sheltered from the sea wind I wonder how many years I have left to keep flying to this place that touches me again, a quiet love of shimmering starlit shore wash, the comfort of the shacks’ evening lights (some illegal) the mopoke’s call by night for a mate, pathways through sand to the past, here, my ultimate escape. Harbour, at last.

…

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Southword, & Stand. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.