Here we all are in the Ford Zephyr, sprawled out and jammed up on the parcel shelf, out the window screaming into the rain and rainforest and spreadeagled over the transmission hump, one brother wearing a snorkel to avoid another brother’s farts, pushing and shoving and being shoved until parting when our father’s frustrated hand flails over the front bench seat into the back to re-establish order, his disembodied voice crying out in exasperation, ‘I don’t care who started it! I’ll finish it!’ before a wild swerve throws us all back on top of each other and the squealing and shoving start all over again.

  For a little longer steam will still drift from the forest floor in the sunlight that pierces the Gondwanan caravanserai enveloping that lonely crowded car making its way to our new home in Rosebery, a raw mining village in Tasmania’s still remote west: celery top pines, pandani, Tasmanian laurels and peppers and leatherwoods, the giant manferns and primeval sassafras and craggy myrtles, the rainforest that no one then knows is the second largest of its kind in the world with its plants and trees as old as the dinosaurs.

  If we were to rise above it, above the mountains, and the island at the end of the world in which they sit, would we be able to see advancing from another direction Western time—with its insatiable greed and its monstrous appetite, Western time with its new machines, Western time that will shortly dam the rivers and gobble the rainforest—would we see all that, and with it the coming reign of those promoting infinite theft from a finite world?

  No, for that world and its wonders still seem endless.

  3

  But even then the rainforest was being corroded. Soon it will be pocked with the scattered melanomas of cattle runs, pine and eucalypt plantations, fire-scabbed here and there, to say nothing of a general, growing inanity, roads to nowhere, tourist resorts, unworked mines and crowded geo-tagged Insta sites. These though will be but small insults compared to what is coming.

  Over the following decades the rain will lessen, at first imperceptibly and then dramatically, and what remains of the rainforest will slowly start drying out and dying off. For a moment or two more though the myrtles, cicatrices weeping fern and fungi, will tower and teeter, old thespians taking a final bow made more compelling by a dramatic backdrop of still steeply wooded gullies and ridges.

  Then they will start to burn.

  The intricate, myriad, miraculous relationships the sum of which is Tasmanian rainforest, a precise confusion of tree, fern, moss, fungi and microbe, of animal and bird and insect, fish and invertebrate, that might be better described as an unknown civilisation, will, along with these words, become no more than the lost jetsam of time.

  A silent revolution will sweep it all away, its Robespierres and Lenins and Khomeinis a conga line of faceless CEOs, investors, economists and politicians, destroying everything in which a soul—or my own at least—could once find purpose and resonance. For a great crime there should be a great criminal, not so many so small, so immemorable.

  In any case, what remains will be a wet gravel desert amidst which will be found impoundments of dead water, ash heaps and tailings dams, charred tree stumps and open-cut holes, rusting derricks and cranes and ancillary structures, bricks and corro where women once washed in the incessant rain and the cold, so much detritus mirrored in dark, toxic puddles oozing heavy metals and acid and poisons. But of that annihilated civilisation: nothing.

  A masked owl, the last of its kind, its riddling face outlined with a heart and bisected by a murderer’s beak, will spread its ermine spotted wings and leave the last tree, searching for a home now gone forever, chittering an imminent oblivion.

  We will have arrived back on Wells’s time traveller’s dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains.

  Nothing.

  4

  Far below the small lounge room of the little government timber bungalow into which we moved in Rosebery, replete with the miracle of an indoor toilet, perched on the edge of a deep rainforested valley, I was taken with the sight far below of a serpentine line curving in and out of mist-puffs through that endless green world. This new river captivated me. Whenever it first entered my consciousness—four? five?—I already knew the rainforest that lay between me and the river was too thick for a small child to find a way through. And I would again turn away from the window and back to the black-and-white television with its very small bulbous blue-hued screen set in a deep wooden cabinet.

  I would seek to make out what was happening through the lines of static that fell across the blurry images of The Cisco Kid, a cowboy show from the early fifties that formed part of the few hours of television on the single government station that were transmitted across the emptied wildlands and the silenced button-grass plains to our remote mining town. In bad weather—and the weather was mostly bad—we saw only squalls of static invading the screen as a hailstorm of dots. Cisco and his sidekick Pancho occasionally blurrily ventured out of the tempest inside the cathode ray tube only to be washed away by synoptic waves before vanishing altogether while my little sister and I took turns to stand up, holding the antenna, a horizontal wire spiral, this way or that in a battle, forever forlorn, to have them return.

  As the television’s squall continued, we would invent our own scenarios and add in other characters—ourselves, or someone like Chad Morgan whose remarkable buck-toothed visage we sometimes glimpsed between static storms on Reg Lindsay’s Country Hour, which we similarly attempted watching with our father on a late Saturday afternoon and during which our distant father would occasionally dance with us. He would pick us up and we would slowly waltz, my father dancing to a different time. I don’t recall him ever holding me other than those few dances.

  Rosebery was the wettest town in Australia in 1964 or 1965, wetter even than tropical Tully, traditional holder of the Australian record with its monsoonal rains breaking hard on the Atherton Tablelands. It was a world of water. When it wasn’t rain it was fog and when it wasn’t fog it was rain. We lived within rain’s tempestuous world, accepting of it, if sometimes astonished, occasionally annoyed, and every now and then marvelling for there was no end to it. I could check which year was the wettest, or whether either is even correct, but this is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory—its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions—is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle in that small lounge room while the incessant rain continues crashing on our uninsulated tin roof and brushes our windows, the tv again irrelevant, my father lost in another dance and other, older memories as we slowly circle his past together.

  5

  Sometimes one of my father’s cobbers would drop by. Joe D—, another POW and champion boxer who ran the Williamsford pub and who in 1939 famously beat the celebrated Victorian Archie Kemp, a Chinese-Australian from Tasmania who later died in the ring. His brother would marry my Aunt Muriel and then abandon her and their children, leaving Muriel to raise her family in appalling poverty in Fitzroy. In the end her children were taken away from her.

  Then there was Bunny D—, an Aboriginal piner who had been in the camps with Dad and who was famed for his bush skills. Bunny liked a fight. Once he took Dad to one of the miners’ pubs for a drink only to do all he could to incite a fight, saying to my father, as he sought to restrain Bunny and keep the peace, ‘If she’s on, I know you’ll back me.’ When no one would bother with an old drunk, Bunny looked ruefully at my father and said, ‘You don’t get rats out of mice.’

  Another time Bunny turned up at our house worse for wear. ‘He’s a good little bloke,’ he said of one of my brothers, and gave him a pound note. Rather pleased, my brother went out to the kitchen and when he returned Bunny said, ‘Here’s another good little bloke,’ and gave my brother another pound note. My brother, sensing a pattern, returned a third time, and was rewarded with our mother cuffing him, making him empty his pockets and give Mr D— back his money.

  Bunny lived with a woman in a solitary hut at Parrawe. There was nothing else at Parrawe that I remember. The hut was by the side of the road backing onto a button-grass plain that to me as a child seemed to run away into infinity. In a way it did, one of a series of grassland corridors through the rainforest created over millennia by Aboriginal burning. For all that, it was a lonely place that seemed the beginning of some portal, something down which I didn’t yet wish to travel, and which I suppose I now am.

  6

  In 1966, head on my mother’s lap and her hand on my head, I was lying across the front bench seat of the family car, now an EH Holden wagon. For once, my father was driving. It was night, I was five, in pain from another ear infection that was pushing me deeper into an inner world, and we were driving the winding muddy track, the one road out of Rosebery through the Tarkine’s primeval forests, headed towards Turners Beach on the northwest coast, and the other great pole of our lives, our shack, a vertical board hut with a fire and tank with a single tap and little else, the only home my parents owned until they moved to the island’s capital when I was nine.

  I watched as great myrtles and giant manferns momentarily loomed over us, as if we were passing through an avenue of some ancient world throwing noirish shadows before sliding back into blackness as we drove on. Stumbling on Angkor Wat’s ruins would not have made any greater an impression on my child’s mind as we slowly made our circuitous way down that track into Hellyer Gorge.

  I woke pitching forward as the car abruptly slew to a halt. Within moments my parents were outside searching in the weak glow of the car’s headlights on that lonely road for the Tasmanian tiger—even then a mythical creature—which had just crossed in front of our car. I followed, confused, feeling the wetness of fog beading on my face, seeing only puddles in the dimly lit muddy gravel.

  Following on from another Tasmanian government-sponsored program of extermination, the last-known tiger—a remarkable wolf-like marsupial with the striping of a tiger, the male with a two-headed penis and the female with a pouch in which she carried her pups—had died in a Hobart zoo in 1936. Sightings such as my parents’ in remote wildlands continued for a few decades but it was already by the 1960s a mythical creature. Thylacinus cynocephalus was declared officially extinct in 1982. So much of the world from my childhood has gone with it. I was born into the autumn of things.

  7

  One of my strongest and most enduring memories of that time is of something that might never have happened: it is me as a very young child in Williamsford, still then a small mining town a few miles south of Rosebery, near Montezuma Falls, with a mighty haulage way that always astonished me as a child with its vertiginous wonder. We are visiting someone my mother knew and we are taking biscuits still warm from the oven to have with the tea. We make our way along wet, greasy planks that trace a rude path through the mud that slops behind a street of wooden and tin cottages, dilapidated and makeshift. Women are hard at work out the back under rudimentary lean-tos to shelter them from the incessant rain, in the mud and squalor, boiling clothes, stirring wood-fired boilers with long paddle sticks, worn grey and feathery from time and wash water. From the rear the cottages are little more than shanties cheek by jowl. The poverty of the sight shocked me even as a child.

  Now I wonder if I ever saw it at all.

  For the memory seems much more of the 1930s than the 1960s. Was it some newsreel or some conflation, some trick of memory? The women, the kids around them, appear to me now as ghosts and one woman’s dark eyes stare at me. I don’t know why she singled me out to remember her so many years later. I remember her so vividly yet I cannot even say if she ever truly existed. The town she lived in is gone, not a house left, and all that remains is one more spectral west coast Tasmanian landscape of broken bricks, moss-mottled, crumbling concrete footings, rusting corro fragments, and occasional inexplicable gravel hillocks overrun with rainforest and heath.

  The more I look at her the more she resembles my father’s mother who died long before I was born: scrawny, consumptive, worn out, hollow-cheeked, exhausted by life. The memory is bathed in an aura which only makes me more suspicious but I remember the warmth of the home-cooked biscuits I wanted to eat, the boards through the mud over which we threaded our way, my mother pulling on my hand to draw me away, to stop me staring.

  And yet, thinking on it, I am no longer sure if these are true memories or tricks of my mind as the mud shapeshifts into something it is not, a track from which my mother and I gaze up through the rainforest at Montezuma waterfall—was that the same day or another? Yet with my already poor eyesight what grips me is not the fall’s violent grandeur but the intimate green world at its base, moss gardens of tiny peach-tipped myrtles and luminous fungi growing out of fallen tree barrels. Whole and seemingly solid yet rotted completely, the tree barrels collapse into peat the moment I touch them, the way my memories crumble into questions now.

  8

  Once, other people lived here, moving in and out as millennia passed and Ice Ages came and went and the rainforest and heaths followed, swapping places as the Earth warmed and cooled and warmed and finally began to overheat. They marked the land in many ways, some still evident in the corridors of button grass, their petroglyphs of circles within circles and the profoundly moving remains of their villages, their massive middens of seashells now washing away as seas rise, the clusters of large circular cups out of which their beehive homes once arose. If this book were the forty thousand years they have existed on this island, Europeans would enter the story only in the last page and a half.

  But then came the invasion. It was, as an 1830s Van Diemonian attorney-general wrote, ‘A war of extermination,’ a war the Tasmanian Aboriginal people finally lost.

  There remains to this day debate as to whether this war was a genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the remarkable Jewish lawyer who in the wake of the Second World War coined the word, the concept, and the legal definition of genocide, was under no illusion. After a lifetime of study and reflection, Lemkin concluded that the crime of genocide was one with deep historical roots. Amidst the chapters of his unpublished history of genocide was one devoted to the fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

  Exiled to slums and an island reserve and silence, renamed and reviled as islanders and abos and boongs and half-castes and troublemakers, they could be called any vile humiliation imaginable but what they were: the original human inhabitants of the island. Whenever they stood up and gave tongue to that truth, they discovered it was an obscenity, the most insulting lie, and they were told that most Tasmanian of jokes: that the last of their kind had died out a century before. That they didn’t exist.

  9

  Of a night our mother read to me and my little sister. Books had an odd place in our home, both revered and absent. We had perhaps a shelf of them on a bookcase as small and plain as a kitchen cupboard. My father’s mother and father—my grandparents—were, as I earlier mentioned, illiterate. My father had, I suspect in consequence, a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn’t. He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft? He would often recite poetry from memory—the nineteenth-century English poets, Shakespeare, the early twentieth-century Australians, Lawson, C. J. Dennis, and the bard of the Australian-Irish peasantry, John O’Brien. He would pause to repeat a turn of words, a phrase, marvelling at it, and then he and my mother would parse the phrase, the meaning of a word choice.

  My favourites were two river books, The Wind in the Willows and a picture book called Peter the Pirate that Mate had given me for a birthday. Each night’s bedtime reading by our mother would be followed by our evening prayers, which always invoked the same formula: God bless—followed by a roll call of family that swelled and shrank according to my mother’s patience.

  My five brothers and sisters, my mother and father and Mate were many nights more than enough to list but sometimes the idea of family would enlarge as my sister and I competed to include those of the fifty-one first cousins we could remember along with uncles and aunts and great-aunts and great-uncles and then the ever more distant and unreliably related. After all, we lived in a clannish way with at one time an aunt taking ill and her seven children coming to live with us until she was better, and all thirteen kids then going down with chickenpox.

  It intrigued us to see at what point our mother might break, our first taste of how overt piety begins in perversity. Inevitably, such calling for marathon divine blessing would collapse under the weight of numbers, the way in which lists always exclude, and who was listed only reminding you of the unlisted and raising ethical questions that remain beyond me to this day: why her and not him and him and not her? If not all why bother with any? These questions that no one really worries about other than philosophers and wedding planners are, I suppose, fundamental, for they pose riddles about who we love and why we love, none of which worried our mother when she told us she wasn’t playing this game any longer.

  As a child all these thoughts would sometimes leave me dizzy, until my mother with her soft voice, that northwest Tasmanian brogue rich with its slight smoothed-off gravel, would tell us our family was enough for tonight, that God looked after the rest, her rough working hands and large fingers sweeping the fine blond hair on my forehead into a part, her touch and smell of soap reassuring, and after she left I would lie there, enwombed in the rain that fell with a tremendous cacophony on the tin roof, the incessant rain that fell night after night, week after week, month after month, and watch the occasional car headlights throw long rippling shadows across the far wall.