‘Could you tell me how to get to Cudgegong, mate?’
He crinkles his already generously lined face and pushes his thick woollen beanie so that it comes down over his forehead almost to his eyes. Behind him, down the embankment, a mob of sheep circles in the yard where he has just penned them. His dog—a scruffy, black and white, bright-eyed bitzer—is sitting at the closed gate of the yard observing our discussion. He looks as if he’s concentrating.
‘Cudgegong?’
I show him ‘Cudgegong’ on the map. I don’t tell him that for the past ten uncertain kilometres, my wife had been wondering with growing conviction whether it wasn’t Rylstone we should be heading for.
‘Yeah, well—if you go a mile or so up the hill here, on your left you’ll see a sort of caravan park. Lotta flowers, painted rails, fancy name—all that sort of shit. Well, a bit further on, you’ll be able to look down on the lake.’ He points to the blue spot on my map. ‘That’s it’, he says. ‘That’s Cudgegong.’
‘But I’m looking for the town, not the lake.’
‘Mate’, he says with a huge and tolerant sigh, ‘the town’s under the lake. Has been these 30 years past. I was born and bred there. But I haven’t got bloody gills, have I? The whole outfit went under the water in—let’s see.’ He’s searching the cold, cloud scuffed sky for the date, but I laugh and thank him. I’ve obviously got the wrong town in my head.
‘I can see it’, I say, ‘couple of pubs, post office, store, even a restaurant—I think.’
‘Cudgegong only ever had one pub’, he says. ‘I oughta know. Bloody nearly had shares in the bastard. I reckon you must mean Rylstone, though I haven’t heard of any bloody restaurants in this part of the world.’ He says this as if ‘restaurant’ is a synonym for a serial killer or an exotic, deadly disease. But anyway, he’s right—and so is my wife. I did mean Rylstone and when, following his directions, we finally arrive there, it’s just as I remembered it, with the Cudgegong River flowing through it.
How I came to make this mistake is curious. I knew Rylstone. It wasn’t as if I was struggling to summon up memories of it. I concluded that a lifelong interest in Henry Lawson must have somehow hijacked my imagination. Because, of course, Cudgegong was central to that