I worried at being suddenly alone with my mother gone, the light out. After a further time I fell into one of those black ripples and found myself riding along its current in a little boat, replete with sail and friends, and me, free of family, leaving my world, dreaming of a sunny riverbank where Ratty and Mole boated and Peter the Pirate played, and I continued on my way down the river having adventures. Here and there a jetty beckoned and a path led up to Uncle B—’s failing farm with its barn full of the sweet, intoxicating smell of dried hay and my wonderful older girl cousins, and I felt my gathering shyness, my growing inability to understand what was being said and to say words properly and be understood, and so I continued heading down the river towards my destiny as the mine’s siren sounded, as the earth thumped with some underground explosion, and the rain slapped the tin roof.

  10

  It was in Rosebery that I decided at the age of four—absurdly, pointlessly, and for what reason I have to this day no idea, given that I couldn’t then write a word—that I wished to be a writer. My first efforts were little books I wrote for my big sister who had gone to teachers’ college in distant Launceston—a small provincial town which in my childhood evoked the metropolitan astonishment of Manhattan. I would write them on pink pad paper and my mother—acting on my wishes—would staple the pages together, bind them with black electrical tape and post them to my sister. Though they had sentences and paragraphs and pictures, the only vaguely comprehensible part were the pictures, for I was unable to write more than a handful of letters, and the sentences were illustrations of sentences and paragraphs—the idea and the architecture of a book, in other words, if not the exact meaning.

  On the back my mother would write out the story, my first translations, I suppose. But none of this was the point of the books: I missed my big sister greatly and the point of the books was to smuggle a message of love to her, and each book, every faux sentence and every scrawled picture of a word was simply saying that one word over and over. And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.

  11

  Many years later, when I went to Oxford, I studied history, an idea of time formed over 3000 years of human experience in Europe, which, I discovered, made perfect sense of European time, stopping at all stations of European progress and European thought. It was a straight railway line that perfectly mirrored an experience that became an idea, and an idea that became experience, and an experience that became European thought and then the European novel.

  But it made no sense of Tasmania.

  In Tasmania, history did not hold and reality was otherwise: history constantly failed, history constantly recurred not as answers or comfort, not as a story of progress, but as a massacre site, a napalmed logging clearfell, convict words that spoke of what couldn’t be spoken, mythical beings long dead that kept returning, haunting, asking of me something I have spent a life trying and failing to answer. I was the issue of a genocide and a slave society, and nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned, as I was to also. There was no straight line of history. There was only a circle. Everything, finally, was as the ancient petroglyphs depicted it: a circle circling within circles, the island’s great idea of time formulated over 40,000 years of human experience.

  12

  When I first attempted writing novels as an adult I wrote tales of cities and crowds, the great tropes of European modernism. Every word was rubbish. I’d never seen a city or known a crowd. My first experience of a crowd was in London at the age of twenty-four. I was frightened. It was inconceivable that there could be so many people and not one person knew you nor you them. And there amidst innumerable millions of fellow human beings I felt the most terrible solitude that was also an inconsolable fear. There was no anchor, there were no roots, there was no river down which I might return. All I knew was what I first experienced as a child, unsayable and unwritten, a world within which the measure of things was not man made and of which you existed as a minuscule fragment. Finding words for it was, in one sense, my life’s work and my life’s failure.

  Now that world we oddly disdain as the non-human—as though we are somehow separate of it—is vanishing. And with it, unnoticed, a different, larger way of being human than that propounded by western art and thought. Could it be what is being lost with that world is us?

  At some point I came to understand that I wrote from the frontlines of a war about which most have no idea. For a long time I could not understand that it was possible to be both on the side that has the power, that has unleashed the destruction, vast as it is indescribable, and, at the same time, be on the side that loses everything.

  To do that you have to return to a child blinking in the rain, staring into the darkness, looking for something that his parents saw only an instant before and which has already vanished for all time, never to return.

  That’s life.

  Seven

  1

  Given television in Rosebery had largely amounted to serial acts of individual creation by me and my little sister it was ironic that many years later I found myself returning there with a BBC documentary crew. We landed in a seaplane on what remains of the river: one of three flooded impoundments. We were picked up in his old ute by the town publican, moonlighting from his work. Driving down the mountain pass into the town, the show’s urbane English host leant across the dog-haired backseat of the battered Toyota Hilux. Placing a fraternal arm over the Peli cases of camera gear he asked if I’d seen the new Stoppard yet.

  When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had first charmed audiences in London in 1967, I was wandering the main street of Rosebery, forever crowded in my mind, taking in with a child’s wonder the fistfights, the strong odours of tobacco smoke and the fecund yeast of stale beer, sometimes venturing into pubs and bookies and being greeted affably and kindly in a forest of damp trousers and accents of Europe’s post-war diaspora, those I was chastised by my mother for calling reffos or wogs, I can’t recall which word, one of the words everyone then used, and she saying that when they came to church, as many of the Poles and Germans and Italians and Czechs and Yugsolavs did, they were all equal before God and we were no more than they. And perhaps among their number was someone who had witnessed his Czech family being rounded up and sent off to Nazi death camps. Or, equally plausible, someone who had helped round up or murder them.

  I felt an embarrassment bringing the BBC crew to Rosebery as the subject of their film was me, but more than me, an idea of literature of which I was to become part. Whatever Rosebery was, Rosebery was not literature. Rosebery and Tasmania with it were a world which had never really existed in novels. And denied the liberating lies of the novel, Tasmania tended to novelise its own experience. The island divined itself not through the prisms of ideology, religion, aesthetics, or politics as elsewhere, but through stories, endless and endlessly digressive, open to all to add and subtract, multiply and divert and reinvent. Sport was the only art allowed and its events and stars were most loved when they inclined to the operatic. Small jokes became freighted with larger meaning: when the governor was coming to Rosebery, some miners stole the official limousine with its vice-regal regalia and drove it around the town with an Aboriginal man known as Blacktracker sitting in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals, a bitter joke which cut every way and was all the more tragic for being comic for both black and white, and all the more comic for being bitter to all. Such was our theatre.

  How could I say to the charming English television host that there was an antiquity to this place, a sense of deep time if you just stopped and waited, which was inescapable and perhaps unreachable in literature, perhaps even unsayable as literature? That the feeling standing next to a 13,000-year-old Huon pine on Mount Read made all of European literature look like the wild posturings of adolescents: so much juvenilia. There was no Stoppard to be had in Rosebery, no literary allusions. There was nothing charmed in that broken, breaking world. And yet human beings had lived here for twice as long as they had in Europe, and amidst the latter survivors of one apocalypse there also dwelled the survivors of an earlier holocaust.

  No, I replied to the host, I hadn’t seen the new Stoppard.

  Mixed reviews, the host replied.

  2

  As we drove into the battered town, I could still see the people who once lived there—the carnival that was the main street of Rosebery, a marvellous mouth full of broken teeth and rancid odours, the pubs with their drunks and excitement and fraternity, the fug of fags and wet logs smouldering, the way so many homes smelt then, the welcoming damp astringency of burning eucalypt and myrtle, with an undertone of the ammoniacal closeness of laundry hanging from wooden racks roped up to the kitchen ceiling to dry.

  I am at a friend’s birthday party as a seven-year-old, all we kids happily feeding on fairy bread sandwiches and cakes, the first time I had seen the little pink lamington butterfly cakes with cream sandwiched beneath a flap that rose like an open dormer window, fringed with a tassel-edged frippery of desiccated coconut. The adults are a little giggly and loud and relaxed with beer and sherry. My schoolfriend’s father, a miner who played in the miners’ marching band, sits slumped in an old armchair. The armchair has large arms covered in a fraying fabric though of what colour I can’t recall. In one hand he holds a small six-ounce glass of the type in which beer was drunk in those days on the island, while with the fingers of his other hand he absent-mindedly plays with the coconut fibre jutting out of the ripped arm of his armchair, twirling the stiff curling threads first this way and then that.

  I watch him, he is looking a little bleary, perhaps exhausted from his work, or perhaps something else, he clearly has had a few drinks, and a woman—his wife?—brings him a black case from which he takes a piece of elaborate, ornate brass tubing. Before picking up the trumpet he wipes it a few times with a piece of old rag, then begins tap-tapping out tunes. He stops and smiles, his exhaustion giving way to a lazy, ecstatic energy. A life spent listening to music since has been for me no more than an endlessly recurring attempt to recapture those moments in which a drunk miner enchanted me with his trumpet playing, some clear, joyful wonder that pierced and uplifted the wounded world around it.

  The music ends, it is morning and the whole main street of Rosebery is as I have never seen it: crowded and yet silent. Moving through the crowd is a long column of people following a car. My mother and I watch. She is holding my hand firmly as I have a tendency to wander away. When I ask my mother what is happening, she tells me it is the funeral of a miner who was killed at work. And I cannot understand how a man would be allowed to be killed doing his job. Through the people on the street I feel the grief flowing, the immense gravity of living in the wake of death.

  That’s life.

  3

  When I grew up it took me some time to understand what people meant when they talked about women’s hands being beautiful when the hands about which they talked seemed unformed, so slight and unmarked as to appear as if they had never lived. My mother’s hands were not like that. They revelled in life. If her tongue was vivid her hands were eloquent.

  Large-fingered and strong, bearing cuts and scrapes from housework, the crescent of her nail cuticles frequently white-rimed with flour, these hands plied me with affection and food throughout my childhood. They lived and were lively, volatile and emotional.

  Sometimes when we were on her beloved northwest coast driving along the new highway—and it was she who mostly drove, not my father—which was then being cut through the region’s rich chocolate red basalt soils, she would bemoan the sadness of such beautiful earth being buried beneath a road. At the large cuttings she would abruptly stop—she always drove the family car with a certain gusto, and spoke admiringly of Gelignite Jack, a rally car driver of the 1950s famed for throwing sticks of gelignite out of his car while he raced to deter competitors—and have us fill discarded superphosphate bags she had got from one of her brothers with the red soil.

  I still seem to be holding that plastic bag as my mother shovels the heavy red soil on the highway’s verge, watching horrified as cars fly by and in my shame turning my stare to the dirt, fat and full as some lardy dough, as it slowly peels off the shovel’s spoon, sensuous and so full of life, while she, excited, is not there with me or us, but somewhere else in time and space, standing on the sled her father’s beloved Clydesdale, Prince, drags across the paddock with lunch for her father, until she and I both begin dissolving into the lengthening shadow thrown by the road cutting’s embankment in the late sun, both of us growing vaporous in our fallible labour of memory.

  When we made it home to Hobart in the island’s south where the soil was miserable grey clay, she would empty the bags over a patch of the backyard that was henceforth decreed the potato patch, her hands picking up the greasy lumps and crumbling them.

  ‘Soil!’ she would cry triumphantly—and it was as if it were not her talking to me but her beloved long-dead farmer father talking to her, the one he had always called his little tomboy.

  And as I looked up, the fecund red earth crumbs trickled through those rough fingers.

  ‘Now that’s soil, son.’

  4

  She was impetuous, adventurous, boisterous, funny. And all these things were beaten out of her by Mate and the convent school to which she was sent. But they were never destroyed. ‘Oh, she was cruel,’ my Uncle Pat said of Mate, and then told me of how he, the eldest, had been what he termed ‘a love child’, and Mate never forgave him the shame and guilt she carried in consequence, beating him and the next born, my mother, with great violence.

  My mother needed adventures and vistas, movement and variety. She should have raced Formula 1 or built a vehicle to tackle the land speed record. But in the mid-twentieth century she had to make do with stillness, a suburban backlot, an EH Holden and six kids. She was Lawrentian in her fervour and life force, but there was nothing tragic about her. There was too much life in her for that, too much largeness for it to be contained or crippled, and somehow, in a vast achievement that only now do I begin to appreciate, she never gave in to the narrowminded resentments that are sometimes visited on children by frustrated parents.

  Once—but once only—I saw another side. In her seventies she came to visit me—no doubt she brought some food, she never arrived empty-handed, and when she was leaving we somehow—I don’t remember how—ended up sitting in her car and she spoke of how difficult our father was, how since his retirement he would sort out her cupboards and drawers expressing dissatisfaction with the way she kept them. Her cupboards and her drawers, her smallest of dominions and one of the few allowed her. And she began to cry, there on the street, sitting in her car, my tough old mum, crying, her large hands all the time grasping the steering wheel, as though there was still some turning down the road that she might yet take, just as her father’s hands had once grasped the plough handles as Prince took the weight, the leather harness tautened, and the plough began to run, with her, a child, following behind in the furrow, watching the rich red volcanic dirt turning outwards with its perpetually welcoming hands.

  5

  In my memory her hands are always wrinkled. Perhaps as a fair-skinned woman she had wrinkled early and I was in any case born late in the family lineage, the fifth of six children. She was forty-two, and I never saw her naturally auburn hair that Mate used to speak of as beautiful. My younger sister, who arrived two years later, once daringly asked my mother what menopause was like, and she replied she had no idea as she was too busy looking after her.

  In her final days I would sit with her, rubbing her arthritic hands, marvelling at their leathery feel, kneading them as she had taught me to knead her bread dough daily, as she told me stories of making bread on the small farm where she grew up, how when the yeast plant (as she called it, and what today would be called a sourdough starter)—you—she used this pronoun, so I guess it meant her, and it sounded an adventure the way she spoke of it—you would have to go from farm to farm to see if you could get a little of somebody else’s yeast plant to make your bread.

  Making bread was my mother’s way back to her past. She never really left the embattled northwest coast farm of her childhood, dressing until the end of her days like the impoverished farmer her father was until her clothes fell apart, still baking bread daily, still saving dripping and eating it on her toast with relish, still eating leftovers off the plates of others when dinner was finished, still fearful of what she termed waste.

  Strong and forceful and proud as she was, she had no confidence whatsoever outside of the home. Eating what others had left was part of her pride inside the home. She tried to demonstrate her willingness, her strength, her pride in her humility. But there was some abasement about it I hated. Some surrender, some acceptance of a profound wrong that was too vast to have a name.

  To this day I cannot eat food off another plate. I see it as scraps. My mother didn’t. And to this day I can only remember my mother as fiercely living her code of love and loyalty in a world and a time and a place that allowed her so little else, this strong, remarkable woman who couldn’t be who she really was. And yet how I wished she hadn’t done that.

  6

  Hands impressed her. Some people had clever hands while others were all fingers. Her beloved father was good with his hands. She used the word clever in its archaic sense of meaning good with your hands, possessing practical skills. Straying too far into the world of ideas was beset with dilemmas and even dangers. Good hands made for a good life but too many ideas made only for trouble.

  Her hands were capable of other things—they could, when she was angry, which was not infrequently for she was fiery and impetuous, deliver what was called a whack—a resounding blow from the open hand, or slamming the flat of a kitchen knife hard across the back of a hand or, in a wild flailing, hitting one or another of us with a wooden jam spoon (the intimidatingly large, as well as the small soup variety) which she sometimes broke on us. On one memorable occasion she chased one of my brothers around the lounge room with an iron fire poker trying to crown him—hit him in the head—with it. None of us was in any more doubt that she intended to hit him as hard as she could if she had her chance as we were united in our judgement that he had deserved it and brought it on himself. When we got too much for her she simply uttered one word: scram.