Mueller River estuary
Over the curve of the dunethat bars the old mouth of the estuaryand sends the freezingchocolate-silted water flowing east half a clickbefore it disgorges in the sea,still stands the same tall eucalypt,wind-ripped to the shape of a claw,and to landward a coast banksia,a black-green mawbig as a building.For fear of that claw above,and the deep darkness below,we would not take that waythrough the dunes at night.
All else is gone. Wind and tide destroyand remake, traceless.Creepers have takenthe warm stretch of sand in the lee of the windwhere we once made a man-trapof sticks and spinifex. The windhas flattened the dune-grassed bluffwhere we sat to drink warm filched beerwith the boys from the next camp, so giddywith the idea of ourselveswe could barely speak.
When I pierce the taut sheet of the windat the crest of the dunesand stagger to the shore,Ninety Mile Beach is entirelyitself: too bleak for beauty, salt-haze thickeningto an inconsolable horizon. But the foreshore dunesare a dough rebakedas a wholly different loaf;sand fills the granite poolswhere we once caught crabs in buckets,bares unknown rocks.
Something I thought to be truehas proved to be false, and I stand holdingthe charlatan's empty hat.Such a relief, never to have had children,not to have propped above another's doorthe bucket of this foolishdesolation.
Still an angry pair of plovers patrolsthe vanguard line of dunes.Their kind lives twenty years —this may be the same wicked pairthat made me run and scream.Is this my consolation? It fliesstraight at my eye, yellow-beaked,crying out like a woman struckfrom a height, and falling.
I am driving with my father
I am driving with my fatherin a place where green and stony hillsrise like mesa, thin and steep,like the holes in Swiss cheese inverted.A narrow road winds upand down and around.We have to hurry.My tires plough the verge:dirt falls to nothing,starbursts of mustard-gold.I am trying too hard not to die, to worryif my father is angry.Someone else is in the car:who?
Now we're in Port Arthur, where Mum and Dadwere once together, still in love.A ruin of sandstone brickson a plateau washing away from within,holes in the ground beneathas if we're looking down the barrel of stalactitesfrom a hole in the roof of a cave.I am so careful, so slow.
No, it's not Port Arthur, it's College Crescent andall the students' dormitoriesare falling down in the holes in the ground.I try to drive but all the studentswant to talk to me, they have