Oceans and Mountains of the Flood-Plain

Land that was once open fields filled with nonchalantly grazing cows and the occasional horse is now covered by tarred roads and tile-and-brick villas. Slim Dusty once agisted his team there. Suburbia has usurped the flat flood-plain I once roamed as a budding Robin Hood. It is sad to see it vanish without a requiem.

Perhaps it is only when we are young that we fully, completely enjoy a landscape, when our flowering imagination sees within it so many exciting, evocative frames. Back then the paddock opposite my parents’ house appeared flat from a distance, yet it was an illusion since, in reality, it was composed of many folds and depressions. On the horizon, ranged against the rich blue sky, were the grey skeletons of the ringbarked legions, remnants of the dense forest mane that shrouded once-brilliant creeks.

Traversing the paddock, you rose and fell at each wrinkle, each mound, each miniature mountain chain or peak. You looked ahead, taking care not to stumble and trip and plunge headfirst into its folds. Size exaggerated this relief, made it more pronounced, added an extra dimension. Everything looks bigger when you are four feet tall.

In summer the rain would sweep around the hills that hemmed in the valley. I would stand still and watch its progress: it began in the north-east corner, a vague white slanting veil creeping westerly from one banana plantation to the next until it reached the head of the valley where the northern railway plunged through a long tunnel to the hinterland. At that point I knew I had about ten minutes to reach shelter before the rain caught me. After that, the rain would curl back on itself and crawl along Robinson’s Hill above the family home.

At that point the rain, having encircled the valley, would remember its job was unfinished and turn in on itself and fill the empty cradle in the middle with heavy swollen raindrops thundering down on tin roofs in a succession of running waves, rising to a crescendo, easing off, then picking up again, in an endless assault. It was deeply satisfying, as reassuring as the pumping thump in one’s chest, life marching to the drumbeat of the rain.

Afterwards, when the rain cleared and the sky was brilliantly clear again, nature was sharply etched, every detail, each leaf, a masterpiece. I would venture out across the paddocks. They were transformed into a wonderful world of my imagination. I surveyed the extending spread of continents and oceans, mountains and deep seas, newly minted countries suddenly rising up and surrounding me. Water filled the depressions, unlike any sea one would ever encounter. The water was clearest crystal, every grass blade in the bottom sharply visible. I would plunge forward, a giant Gulliver in Lilliput, wading through each created sea, each Lake Michigan, mastering each craggy Rocky Mountain top, obliterating cities and towns with each footfall.

It never lasted long. The roasting sun would emerge after the rain and suck up my oceans and draw them skyward. In a week Lilliput would vanish. While it lasted, while the seas were full and brimming with new life, tadpoles and frogs and tiny dark creatures that wriggled in plague formations, this wonder world filled my head and became any country—the Aegean with its many islands, complete with surging triremes, the West Indies with prowling privateers and Spanish treasure galleons. Never Cook in a frozen Antarctic sea, the Endeavour’s rigging swollen by tangles of jagged icicles, scurvy sailors and glassy decks. Mine were always sunny seas, warm and clingy around my legs, unimaginably deep, waiting for a breeze to ripple their glassy faces. These were happy seas of adventure and discovery.

Each daily trip to the dairy was a trans-continental journey through a wilderness of the unexpected. I carried no maps, not even crudely ancient ones with fantastic thrilling monsters from the depths in their empty spaces. I startled the occasional eel that had paused to rest on its overland dawn journey. At my approach they would wriggle away in haste across the wet grass in a series of rapidly unfolding S’s.

It is all gone now, lost to development. Progress saw to that. New people have come. The poet’s father who greeted me at the dairy bails in the morning with a squirt of hot milk direct from the teat is long gone. The grog got him in the end. His son writes Australian haiku from Watsons Bay. The house on the hill with its wondrous aviary of parrots and exotic birds is gone also, the daughter now an education officer at the National Gallery in Canberra. The rough plantation workers, free men locked in the weekly ritual of chipping, cutting, dipping, packing and loading the taut timber banana cases on the railway track for the Friday pick-up, they too have disappeared. The price of freedom and independence, hernias and backs wrecked from stumbling up and down steep hillsides, shouldering heavy bunches, are all departed, removed and released for the final rail trip to market. The plantations are sold off for housing, which clings to the steep hills where once there were rough timber-packing sheds of iron with burlap walls and the best sea views in all the world.

The valley is empty now, though it has never been fuller, more congested, noisier, or seemingly more prosperous. The unemployed gather around the McDonald’s in the mall each morning. They like the warm weather, the surf, and the easy lifestyle, in what is promoted as the most livable city in Australia. Or, as Mother used to say, “The best of all cities for flying foxes, the unemployed and developers.”