When I was a wide-eyed little bloke with shirt tails that wouldn’t stay tucked in, and shoelaces that refused to stay done up, a beatific Presentation nun undertook one day to explain to me what "eternity" was. "Imagine a solid steel ball as big and round as the earth," she said. "And imagine that every ten thousand years an eagle flies by and brushes the steel ball with its wing. When the eagle has worn away that entire ball of steel," she concluded with saintly breathlessness, "eternity would only just be beginning."
Well, the only answer to that is, "Bloody hell!" but I wasn’t equipped with such ripostes in grade four and no doubt I was suitably inspired to hit the moral straight and narrow, just as she had intended, because to land in the wrong place for an eternity like that would be, as Phillip Ruddock might say in one of those immoderate, passionate outbursts for which he is well known, "inappropriate".
But that image of the brushing wing—the ghostly eagle cruising through time’s ethereal dominions on his ten thousand year circuit to flick imperiously at the shining steel (in later years I have seen the eagle as a Wedge Tail)—often comes back to me, not as its intended warning about the longueurs of eternal damnation, but as a metaphor for the machinations of fate.
Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, towards the end of a cold, rigorous Clare Valley winter, during which frost after white frost had scythed through fragile plants and the kangaroos and wild ducks had decided that our pea straw mulch had been put there for them to nestle into, the higher power declared that we had earned a break. We went to Port Douglas. After the shortest week in Time’s quiver and daily temperatures of 28 to 30 degrees under flawless blue skies, we found ourselves back on the shuttle bus bound for Cairns airport and home. And as we left Port Douglas we passed Steve Irwin’s caravanserai going the other way. I didn’t actually hear the brushing wing of fate at the time, but a few days later I realised that its eerie warning must have sounded. If I could have glimpsed the bigger picture, from eagle height, for example, I would have seen our path crossing one that was doomed. Very sobering.
From eagle height, though, I might have also seen