Author: samuel

This Foul Year of our Lord, 2020: the year something you can’t even see brought powerful men and governments to their knees and levelled the playing field in a manner only before seen in movies and books; fake and lit bright on a big screen and between the page, as far removed from reality as it’s possible to be.

This Pungent Year of our Lord, 2020: where the reality changed in such a way as to render the bare memory of it, even, akin to dust flying from a recently cleaned bookshelf; disrupted by something unseen and reduced to a brief cloud before settling elsewhere in a pattern unrecognizable from its original form.

This Turgid Year of our Lord, 2020: which saw the rise of a New One Percent, an assemblage not concerned about money (although, to be fair, it was required), but with time and space, place to ride out the tumultuous tempest that raged the globe over; not many had it, and those who did, revelled in what they’d forgotten they’d ever had, and how important it became.

Indeed, a silver lining, perhaps?

This Repulsive Year of our Lord, 2020: where silver linings were few and far between, as common as sense in the US presidential election, which is to say essentially non-existent; America, once a superpower, but now in particular just some place where dignity and democracy go to die, forced to face off against one another in what became a hideous game show, replete with flashing lights and clanging and slapping where everyone gets covered in metaphorical shit and the loser refuses to die.

This Obscene Year of our Lord, 2020: where death became all too common as demographics were designated High Risk and people died with, at first, an alarming regularity, and then with morbid repetition as ideologies and politics took the place of science and fact; and no one wins in that instance, not a single living thing.

And now we’re in Transit: last night the clock, which had all but stopped these twelve months now gone, ticked past midnight and a New Year began, and it’s nothing but symbolism (for, indeed, all is as it was yesterday), but perhaps the symbolic nature of the ending of That year, and the beginning of This one, is just what We need; a metaphorical Page Break which We can use to properly sever the past, if only for a moment, and begin again.

But Transit doesn’t last for long.

The kids next door started playing some old punk rock earlier, something kind of familiar but not quite. Probably it was the style that sparked some long dormant recognition, more so than the actual band, the song itself. Ian laughed and remarked on, essentially, how shit punk music was. How had it endured as a genre?

We didn’t know who was playing it (perhaps a solo dad, reliving his past), the house had been empty for days aside from the gang of builders who’d been installing railings on the three stories of back decking, up on the peak of the Tramican Street hill, overlooking Home Beach, down and facing east, the Pacific Ocean beyond it innumerable shades of blue stretching further than anyone could see.

I went out the front for a smoke at one point, the music had switched to Black Sabbath, and I looked over to see if I could see and it turned out it was a group of four or five kids, swigging beer and listening to music made far before their time, before my time, although they only played ‘Paranoid’ and the ‘Rat Salad’ instrumental before turning the music off and migrating inside.

I smelt BBQ, so I figured their dinner was done and so the punk rock party was over.

Down on Home Beach, visible through the dusky gums as the sun sinks on the other side of the island, and lit brighter than usual for the gloaming time due to the size of the moon, there’s some sort of event on, a professionally erected tee-pee sort of thing ringed with fairy lights, a couple of food trucks parked up against it on the soft sand.

They, whoever theyare, had begun putting it up yesterday, for a wedding was the prevailing thought up here on the Tramican hill, but Ian and Buff had walked past it with Piper earlier in the afternoon and it seemed more like a corporate Christmas party than a wedding.

Later on, as the Sabbath cranked up next door and intrigued by what could be happening down on the windy beach, Claire found a pair of binoculars on the side cabinet in the kitchen and trained them on the party far below. She couldn’t quite tell what was happening, but she reported one girl twirling on her own, then either “sitting down or vomiting” into the sand.

I asked for a look but by the time I’d put my drink down and brought the binoculars to my eyes, the girl in question had vanished, dragged back into the faux-tee-pee by a concerned friend, someone who didn’t care, or who wanted her to carry on.

The whole thing seem to have wrapped up by eight o’clock anyway.

We’d arrived on the island, swapping one beach for another, a couple of days prior to this, driving up from northern NSW, slowing to cross the border which was still restricted to parts of the state, veering off the freeway slightly south of Brisbane to head back east towards the coast where the barge pushes off from Cleveland and sluggishly makes its way through the green-blue waters of Moreton Bay.

Buff had mentioned that every beach has its own allure, every beach has its points of perfection and that’s’ the reason why you head to a beach, even if you live by one all year ‘round.

Home Beach, a long and slightly curving and deep set sandy run, the only dog beach on the island, has at present a natural lagoon cutting it in half longways, fed by the high tide which recedes and leaves this swathe of blue across white sand that gets quite deep in places and warms in the sun and so by late afternoon is like a bath, with shoals of bait fish swimming as one, leaping free as one, the late sun illuminating them bright and strong like some unseen giant hand is skipping handfuls of silver coins across rippled turquoise fabric.

We spend the afternoons there, Addy flapping about while Claire and I, knee-deep, toss my old football between us, laughing at the ridiculous things Addy says as she pretends to be a “rainbow fish”, a “sugar glider”, a “baby dolphin”, all within the same game which she tells us how to play as she plays it and the only thing we need to do is to be seen to be listening, even if we can’t hear her over the sound of the waves caressing the shore actual, across the way, and our own laughter.

One day not long before dinner we do the gorge walk, a short loop around the  North and South Headland Gorge at the southern end of Point Lookout, wooden walkways and stout steps and gravel paths, access out onto the rock above the action, the space lit dead-neon with Warning Signs but you can still get out there, above it all as the ocean storms about below, battering the base with gleaming white foam that sprays halfway up the face, the deep blue pulsating forever toward the gap and gushing faster as it’s restricted, eventually dying on the tiny patch of sand deep in shade far below at the narrow end that then changes into pandanus and scrub and the kangaroos sometimes venture down there to feed, if they’re done up top where the people are.

Addy is, at all times, a pirate and a fairy, a princess and a rainbow bird, sometimes a kitten or maybe a baby dinosaur. We feel that she may not actually know how to walk, her only states of being either asleep or in top gear. She rushes places other stroll, particularly me, and I wonder at times if we’re related at all. When I tell Claire this, she rolls her eyes and says simply, “Look at her, of course you’re related.”

Her wild red hair whips in the salty wind. My beard does the same.

Time slows down. Things centre around the beach, the couch, naps and food. As it gets a bit later, Ian opens a bottle of bubbles and I reef around in the fridge for a can of beer. Buff bustles around the kitchen, Claire in there too. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stacked and unstacked the shitty dishwasher. Addy eats constantly, fruit and muesli bars and yoghurt and more fruit and toast. Since we’ve been here, I’ve read two books and maybe five newspapers.

This morning, our last full day on the island, we set out for the beach early, only to abort as Addy melted down about something (she’d not slept well the night before, she told us, even though we’d not heard her stir at all), so Claire heads beach-ward and I take Addy home where we eat more then come back down, but that’s aborted too when the tractors pulling full dive boats out from the dive centre onto the beach are too much for her to bear and so we head back to the house to read The Faraway Treeon the couch where it’s safe.

Claire, Buff, Ian and Piper arrive back from their own beach sojourn and so I head, solo, into Dunwich to buy the papers, some mushrooms for dinner, some panadol. I smoke a cigarette in solitude before driving the fifteen minutes north into town. I take my time. I buy what we need, more, three papers instead of two. I find a shady park and smoke another cigarette before slowly making my way back.

We lounge around, Addy entertaining herself. Buff and Ian go back to bed, Claire brings her book up from downstairs. I read one and a half newspapers in the chair with my feet on the small table, two cups of coffee, a piece of toast. This goes on and then we have lunch and quiet time is happening, Addy falls asleep almost straight away, Claire does too, and I read my book for almost two hours, on the couch upstairs with the hill breeze slowly wending its way through the permanently open swing doors off the deck, the lagoon brilliant blue down the way, the constant ocean sound part of why it’s all so perfect in its slow simplicity.

One beach for another. Tomorrow we’ll hop the barge back to the mainland and head back south, a quicker run on a Sunday night, back to our own beach. One beach for another.

The thunderheads appear as if from nowhere. Awesome in their size and seeming impenetrability, they’re just there, low across the range in the middle distance, lazily stretching across time itself encircling the town, preparing for cathartic embrace.

Working inside, yr suddenly aware it’s gotten darker and so you step outside and the clouds are there, the northerly which has been blowing all afternoon is gone and things are still and the air crackles.

Looking up, you fancy you see shapes in the encroaching cloud formation but they’re gone at a second glance.

Working inside, in air conditioning, yr hit with the heat when you step out, like the gravity has been turned up a notch. The air is hot and wet and clean. It sharpens the world, the pungent aroma of flowering wattle takes on a power that almost overwhelms, a cloying smell that sits like honey in the back of yr throat and threatens to throttle you with its pure sweetness.

The light is different and things old and dusty take on a sepia glow that makes them seem almost alive.

The first roll of thunder growls down the hills across the way, deep and low. You lean against the truck and light a cigarette, just leaning and being as the world changes around you. The smoke doesn’t blow away but hangs about and slowly roils about yr head and its like yr in the middle of yr own cloud.

You wave it away with a lethargic switch of yr hand.

The vast grey is slow moving. Ponderous and ever-changing. It seems to circle for a while, an atmospheric dance that threatens to never really happen but the thunder gets louder, echoing back of everything and then the first drops fall, fat and full, one on the back of yr neck, the next on the baking footpath in front of you, the next on the bonnet of the truck.

You stub out yr smoke and head back inside as, finally, the storm front comes over, lessening the humidity, the grey sky lowering as its moist loins gird and birth upon the dry and crackling north coast a torrent.

The earth, being showered, seems to steam at the same time.

***

I like the old gym in Brunswick. I’m there once a week, on Saturday mornings, for Addy’s swimming lesson in the small pool downstairs. You walk in the front door, up the stairs to the main floor, then down the stairs at the back.

In the two stairwells, there’s a large window, always wide open to let in any hint of a breeze, both with no screens, just large space looking out onto cracked concrete, the carpark in front, a narrow alley in back.

It reminds me of Queensland; open windows for air and to hell with what might fly in, still and hot, grass somehow growing through the cracks in the walkways, people moving slowly so’s not to raise too much of a sweat.

***

I run hot. At night, when the humidity refuses to die and the breeze is non-existent, I lie in bed and try not to move. Sweat beads my brow, my entire body. It’s not until I wake, sometime before dawn when the heat has finally dissipated, that I pull up the sheet, bundled down near my feet.

***

The palms wave in the breeze off the ocean across the swamp; black sand and scrubby weed, between us and golden beach. In spring, wild flowers bloom across the expanse, great swathes of colour that gather momentum and, before the heat and humidity of summer arrives, it all shimmers in ethereal fashion, as if some unseen artist, bigger than us all, has hurled their palette in an almighty rage upon a streak of blank canvas, inadvertently fashioning something so beautiful as to never again be recreated.

And the thunderheads return, silently, awesome in their size, ponderous and pregnant, grey and wet, rolling down the hills in the middle distance.

The humidity is back. I used to like it – moving from the south where cold pervades most of the year, up to the sub-tropics where grown men sweat 24 hours a day, was welcome respite.

Now though, it irks. Particularly when it first arrives, usually in early November, that first day when the air takes on a weight and things wilt under it. Walking out the door in the morning is to morph into another climate, pushing your way through it all, straining a little. Then dusk approaches, gloaming, turning to night but the weight remains.

You lie in bed not moving and the sweat beads on yr brow.

That first taste of the humidity is to taste change, and yet yr never ready for it. Yr not done with the cooler weather, not yet prepared to take the leap into the summer months. And so it irks, if only for the fact there was no warning, no kind word a few weeks back gently urging you to prepare.

There’s not really a spring up here, merely a move between cool and hot that lasts weeks, sometimes only days. It’s the same with autumn; less a season than a short transition. It does get cold, to an extent, but it’s the heat which takes centre stage, sticky and wet in the shade, same in the direct sun but with the added burn. Skin is slick and things slip from yr hands. People’s hair hangs limp and they move slower than they otherwise might.

Despite my misgivings though, the change in season – the onset of the hot and wet summer months that lie ahead – heralds a time that fair sings with a lightness. Here, summer lies over year’s end, over the festive season, people are winding down and preparing to take time off. It’s hot and people are finishing up and cold and sweating bottles of beer appear earlier than usual and it’s always warm enough to duck to the beach before work for a swim, gather in groups at twilight with a bottle in yr hand and yr feet are barefoot in the grass.

Indeed, you’ve not worn shoes for three and a half days.

In the mornings, out running the winding tracks into town, feet one after the other in a seemingly endless shuffle, out through the trees and across the oval; nowhere to hide, the sun beats and the sweat paints an odd pattern on the front of my t-shirt. Back under tree cover along the winding river bank, tide up, water glass-green and crystal-clear slipping by on the right.

On the way back, humidity too high to bear, and so shirt and shoes off, scramble down the bank into the still water, under and cool again. Stand and look out at it, the noise off Tweed Street up and behind of little consequence as you look at untouched glass and sunlight reflecting back. The birds sing in the building heat. A lightness to it all.

And so it ended much as it began; as a bad joke, a parody of itself, something at which to laugh, long and loud, if not for the four years of carnage – financial, social, economic, racial, environmental – that had preceded it.

And sandwiched between a funeral home and a sex shop, no less, a presidency of fools and fuckups essentially laid to rest outside a landscaping store in a sad and sagging strip mall on the outskirts of Philly, languishing between dead bodies and dildos.

Everyone knows this; it’s old news now.

No one knows what will happen next (court battles and potential coups, a tidal wave of misinformation laced all the way through to its rotting core with the inane rantings of a man who doesn’t know how to lose, how to concede, how to graciously fade off into the night, good or otherwise). No one, though, is confident it’ll be graceful and easy.

The Day itself, over here across the Pacific, unfolded in slow motion; Election Day, the cornerstone of American democracy, the one day every four years when The People exercise their right to choose, and exercise it they did, a record turnout across the US, both in person and via mail, wave upon wave of people intent on Voting, on casting their ballot and choosing who they thought was Best.

The original intent here had been bloody marys and the Count up on the big screen, starting as it did late morning, wending its way through lunch and the long and hot afternoon, into the evening where things got vicious and strange.

Bloody marys were scrapped though, events beyond our control, and so devices were flicked between over the course of the day before beer and whisky were brought out late in the dusky afternoon and we settled down to watch properly. I’d been monitoring across five or six outlets, an information net cast wide in order to catch as much as possible – Presidential, Senate, House races running across the country, slowly at first but building as the heat intensified and then popping with alarming regularity.

Numbers varied widely across the board, some News outlets not calling until certain points, others rolling the dice and making calls early – states turned red and blue, others remained white, numbers ascended in real time, the Popular Vote, while the Electoral College ticked steadily, slowly, interminably onward as the sun set here, rose over there, preposterous claims emanating from the flailing blowhard, Ol’ Mate 45, with the same velocity as the virus ravaging the very country he was intent on leading.

I’d not heard him speak much these four years past, preferring print as my principal news source, and so to hear his voice and watch him perform, so intent as he was to cast doubt and confusion, was to bear witness to something so obscenely gauche and dangerous as to almost defy reality. Had this person truly been the Leader of the Free World these past years? Of course, I knew it to be true and yet to hear him actually talk was to make it seem all the more real and desperate, and how did this happen and how has it been happening for so long?

For here is a special kind of person, one so lost within the miasma of his own mind – an alarming place, one devoid of compassion, respect, civility and tolerance – that he truly believes what comes from his own mouth; he’s not lying to the American public, to the people he professes to care so deeply for he wants to be their Leader, no – he’s speaking the utter truth. It’s just, unfortunately for sane people all over the globe, that it’s his truth – he believes what he’s saying, he just has no idea that what he’s saying is wrong. And this is truly dangerous.

And so he blew hard, Ol’ Mate 45, he cast aspersions upon all and sundry and we watched it from across an ocean, gaped at what was happening, not really able to believe that this man was saying these things, the pure hypocrisy dripping from his being like honey from the hive, almost visibly pooling on the lectern behind which he stood.

Elsewhere, Biden urged calm as he waved from behind black face mask to crowds across the country, gearing up for what they saw as a slowly dawning reality; that is, the demise of the unreality, and some sort of Hope for the future. We watched it too, leaning forward on the couch toward the flickering big screen, scanning for some sort of definitive answer.

None was forthcoming of course, and this indeed came as no surprise to anyone, other than the man spouting all manner of misinformation, refusing to believe that there was no concrete result on Election Day, as if this had never happened before. Indeed, in a country where over 150 million votes were cast, counting will take time. Days. Perhaps even weeks.

And so it continues now, more than a week later. But that night, that Day, as it all unfolded across an ocean, was intensely interesting to watch – parts in the vein of Hope and a better future for fellow human beings, parts for the pure theatre, the grotesquery, the ugly and viciousness that even at that early stage, was sagging under its own weight, slowly going under, a fetid candle now little more than spent wax and impending darkness.

Indeed. And then the presser outside the landscaping centre, where it all came to a sloppy halt, finally dying, left to decay among the ashes of human beings and rubber dicks, cock rings and black plastic corsets. Apt perhaps. Or, seen from another light, about fucking time.

I buy a bucket of sweating chips and a sausage wrapped in stale white bread. It costs nothing, a bi-weekly fundraiser for the old and leaning wooden church, defying progress, tucked onto the side of the hill that Caxton runs down, the ICB booming beneath it, the pub encircling it, lit garish yellow and orange by the football stadium across from it. 

It’s buckled from decades of wet heat and is obscured by thick mango trees, Moreton Bay figs, their fallen leaves a dense carpet covering the cracked concrete underfoot.

***

James lobs insults from three seats down. I’m not listening. My right thigh is sore from the thumping I’ve given it over the past half hour, clenched fist against the faded denim of my old jeans. In my left hand is a plastic cup of slopping beer, three or four empties scattered at my feet.

Directly behind us, high in the western stand are the commentary boxes. Andrew Moore, calling for the ABC as he has done for decades, has the glass pulled open and is leaning out into the sticky winter night, microphone attached to his head, eyes glued to a pair of binoculars calling the Game for an unknown number of unseen listeners, a good deal of them no doubt in the same stadium as he, ears packed tight with buds, pocket transistors tuned to his rapidly undulating tones, hearing their own booming cheers played back at them via the wonders of technology as it rains down about them in real time.

The score begins to blow out and the Faithful wilt under the strain and so start to make exit, which is fine for us as it makes for easier access to the bar and so I switch to bourbon, James to rum, and we run down the clock, him heckling while I roll my eyes and bemoan to myself the state of it all, the knowledge that it is, indeed, just a game and so it’s all right, and yet it still pains.

***

Claire’s breathing changes, and I know she’s asleep. Lying beside her, I stop what we’ve been watching on the laptop, and pull up an old Game, one I’ve seen a dozen times, one in which my Team wins and wins big. Quietly, almost guiltily, I relive past triumphs, I revel in glories long gone, I reassure myself that the Team, which this year has sunk to lows never before seen, was once Good and so surely will be Good once more.

***

It’s Father’s Day, afternoon, the sun is slowly sinking and the opposite side of the stadium is doused in warm light. The turf is verdant, the crowd undulates, itself a sea of colour, all lit as bright as if the contrast has been turned to Full and everything is alive, from the smallest blade of grass to the plastic seats to the arena itself.

Wives and kids are at the house and three of us, Dads, are watching the Team play another team, and they win and they win big. Feats of unearthly athleticism abound and I, with skin in the game, rise with the Faithful spilling beer on the worn concrete beneath my feet, on my pants. I don’t care, no one cares. Noise from the crowd, from the tannoys, from the players, the referee’s whistle, the chanting and the cheering, the two big screens at either end of the field shifting constantly with light and colour and the ball swings wide, through hands, into space and they’re away, down the eastern edge in the bright, late sunlight towards the Line, and we rise as one, spilling beer as we go.

***

We always end up at the Paddo. Everyone ends up at the Paddo, at least those heading north. The rest are at the Caxton. The sheer volume of beer that would get poured on these nights would bring tears to the eyes of many a teetotaller. But we get a few in, maybe switch to bourbon, smile at complete strangers on the way back from the bar for no other reason than they’re clad in the colours of the Team and so you’re kindred and your ethos aligns and tonight was a Good Night. There have been bad nights, but this was a Good one.

***

We used to play in the front yard, a handful of local kids, maybe three a side in homemade jerseys with an old ball one of us had brought from home. The battles were as intense as those we absorbed on the teev every weekend through winter. The arguments, which never came to blows, were heated though, it was all on the line, not just bragging rights but the Feeling, the Feeling when a kick lands just so and someone’s there to jump on it and plant it in the corner with seconds to go and we’re up by two, kick to come, but it doesn’t matter because there’s not enough time for them to come back and we Won.

***

It doesn’t even fit over my head anymore. Hoops and bands in State and City colours, logos on each breast, the colours of the Team, my first jersey and a real one at that, worn proudly over years and years. I was eight then, and am 40 now, and so it doesn’t even fit over my head.

I’ll give it to my daughter when she’s a bit older and she can wear it, while I content myself with a scarf draped around my neck, and the two of us can sit in front of the teev, or drive across the border to the stadium where we’ll sit with all the rest of the Faithful, and she’ll be one too, and we’ll cheer as one as it all unfolds below us on the hallowed turf and my left thigh will ache from her small fist pounding on it as she follows the fortunes of those playing a mere game, but a game that means more than just that.

***

Something erupts from nothing. Maybe over on the left edge, maybe in the middle, the result of Possession, ball in hand and a keen eye, a left-foot step preceding a canny pass. A little bit of luck, perhaps, that morphs imperceptibly, then thunderously, into a sweeping backline movement and the gaps begin to open up and players slide through, throwing desperate glances over both shoulders, keening for support, it looms large on the inside and it’s suddenly, from nothing, two on one, a pass at just the right time, gallop to the line, swan dive, try time.

***

An unlikely victory, late in the season, by another team, leaves the Team on the bottom. Wooden spooners. Literal wooden spoons litter their training ground the next day, wags having thrown them over the fence under the cover of darkness. Darkness indeed, for most an entire season. It’s just a game, though, just a game?

I get an email, late in October telling me my membership is due, for next season; if I do nothing, it’ll automatically roll over. I remark to my wife, that I wonder how many people, after the season now mercifully finished, will hit the Opt Out button, their Belief fleeting and so they’ll not pledge any support, whether vocal or financial. She says, surely not many will. Surely.

I do nothing and my membership rolls over. That’s why they call us the Faithful, right? Good Days and bad ones… dark days and Bright… Swan Dive, Try Time…

I’ve got these two mates.

In the grand scheme of things, they’re new mates; we’ve met within the past few years. They don’t know each other – if there’s a thread binding the two of them, it’s me – but I regard both of them as close friends, the kind of friend you make later in life and that you value more than those you made when you were younger, when people were more disposable, when life seemed to stretch out before you and so a friend lost, at that point, was no big deal – there’ll always be more.

As you get older though, even if you feel you have ‘enough’ friends, the good ones are the ones who just pop up, the ones who you connect with on a level that you didn’t realise was possible, or even a thing, when you were younger.

So I’ve got these two mates.

One is a man of fine standing, one who, quite literally, follows the letter of the Law. I admire him for his knowledge of all things, for his dedication and for his beliefs, for his generous nature and his ability to see things for more than they appear.

The other I admire for his tenacity and his keen eye, for his ability to adhere to what’s right, and execute it, and then find the fun behind it.

If there is a connection between the three of us then, aside from myself, it’s a love, a passionate love, of football.

Rugby League, that most blue collar of blue collar sports, brutal in its primal simplicity, to the untrained eye not that far removed from what would have occurred in arenas the width and breadth of the Roman Empire, back in the good ol’ turn of the BC/AD times. But with, perhaps, less lions.

Regardless, I’ve got these two mates, and it’s the two of them who, in these times of global pandemic and general disarray, I can reply on to be (at the very least), by their phones when Thursday afternoons turn to evening and so the Round begins – whether or not any of us have skin in the game, there’s football on, and so we’re all watching.

My love of rugby league began in the late 1980s, when I was seven, and Brisbane entered a team into what was, back then, the NSWRL. The Broncos were upstarts, despite being captained by the immortal Wally Lewis, the national captain, but upstarts none the less.

They began the season, and their existence, by beating the reigning premiers, Manly, 44-10. For my eighth birthday, towards the end of that maiden season (where they missed the finals by a single defeat), I received a team jersey. I still have it – it’s (far) too small for me, and too large right now for my daughter, but it’s a treasured possession, if only because if signifies such an important part of my life. The beginning, if you will, of a lifelong obsession.

Claire, my wife, has utterly no interest in the game and so abides this rabid obsession during the season quietly and with admirable fortitude (and, indeed, thinly veiled amusement), to an extent that I can only admire.

For a long time I lived in Melbourne, AFL heartland, a town that, until the advent of the Melbourne Storm, thought little, if anything, of rugby league. Moving up here, to northern NSW, the friends we initially made were from the same background and so were AFL expats and I had no one with which to share not only the ups and downs of the mighty Broncos, but rugby league in general, and so I kept it all to myself, which was fine, but one needs an outlet when one is concerned with such a pastime as rugby league, no?

Indeed.

And so I have these two mates.

One is a rabid fan of a team. The other swears no allegiance, but is a student of the game itself. Both are devotees, both are lovers of this pastime, both are men of principle and both live and die each weekend by what happens on a 100×68 metre piece of turf, eight times over four days, and we back and forth, usually via text, on same.

Occasionally, I think it’s ridiculous that people of intellect could possibly follow this with such passion – watching 26 grown men, dressed the same, chasing a ball in order to score more points than the other team.

But then I realise the bigger picture, which encompasses why the three of us share such a bond – the game itself is a reason to belong, a familiar presence in lives that twist and turn like so much leaf litter on windy, autumnal days. It’s about allegiances and bitter rivalries, it’s about a sense of belonging within a likeminded tribe.

It’s about winning and losing, surviving and hanging on by one’s teeth in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity; it’s basic in its premise but iron-strong in its ability to appeal to the common man, not because of its seeming brutality but because of the relationships it manages to forge amongst the faithful. It’s sport, and we know it so well.

And so I have these two mates…

It used to run the Melbourne lines.

Dark laps of the underground City Loop before exploding – rattling like crooked death on twin steel pins – into the faded southern light and heading east to Lilydale, north to Upfield and Craigieburn, across the top of the Bay and south to Williamstown, further west to Werribee.

Now though, almost five decades after its initial commission, it sits idle in a field back off the Richmond River, a single Hitachi EMU carriage (a Martin & King stainless steel), surrounded by swaying cane crop over from the Pacific Highway on the western side of Woodburn in northern New South Wales.

We find it online and book days there. The photos, aiming to show how it’s been converted and how comfortable and ‘left-of-centre’ it is as accommodation but still showing its rustic surrounds, remind us of time spent in the Deep South – reimagined places to stay set in wide and open spaces in rural Mississippi, places like here where hard work and dirty trucks, sweat-stained caps and faded flanno shirts define how it all works, the ease of time this carriage now offers a far cry from how real life unfolds about it.

Today, it no longer smells like hot brakes (dank rubber on shining steel discs), but takes on the olfactory hue of what’s happening in its place of dotage; hot cow shit in damp straw, wet earth under pomegranate trees, the perpetual aroma of cane syrup let loose via the sharp beaks of crows and the cockatoos that constantly forage the sweeping and swaying green-thick fields mere metres from the back doors, the doors that once disgorged weary commuters but that today see only happy travellers and those who want solitude, set nowhere with little company other than the cows, the crows, the long-legged sea-birds flown inland from the sea across the river and the way, ten clicks to Evans and the pounding surf beyond.

We park out the front, having navigated through the cane fields, unload and carry inside – food and a couple of bags of clothes, a pile of Addy’s books and a few of her stuffed guys, a pile of old newspapers to start the fire, a couple of bottles of good red, a bottle of single malt. No shoes allowed inside, so we kick them off and slide about the polished wood floors in our socks.

We potter about for a couple of hours, exploring the train, wandering down the edge of the house paddock to talk to the cows that mill about over the barbed wire fence down the bottom where the young fruit trees struggle in the hard earth, cracked and rigid from months with no rain.

It’s still green though, the grass thick, if sparse. We talk to the cows until it’s time to think about dinner. The cows ignore us completely.

The clouds appear not to move and yet they’re obviously being blown to oblivion up high, stretched across the dying blue sky toward the encroaching black from the west. The breeze whips in and plays with the fire, pushing the deep orange flame high, wittering through it and snapping it to breaking point where it disappears and another forms in its place.

I feed it. Thick blocks from the yellow bag bought from the servo in Bruns for fifteen bucks the day I filled the truck with diesel in preparation for this exact moment.

It consumes greedily in the background as we do crosswords together and Addy eats cut sausage from the barbeque dipped in cheap tomato sauce and talks incessantly, bits of lettuce hanging from her young mouth, sauce staining the front of her old t-shirt.

I duck inside and come back out, a yellow tin in hand which I top off and sip from, the cold and wet beer staining the back of my throat with that happy soft burn and I smile at my little biscuit and ruffle her hair and she smiles up at me with her mouth bulging full.

Claire stretches her long legs across from chair to bench seat and picks up the Good Weekend magazine to find the quiz and Mum leans back and sips from her glass of sparkling wine, the setting sun highlighting the sheer volume of her grey and curly hair.

I stand and pace and poke the fire and look about, across the open spaces, listen to the throaty, deep burr of trucks gearing down as they come into town across the river, a sound which backs the myriad birdsong and the gentle lowing of cattle in the field adjacent.

It all feels like nothing but a quiet, gentle and strong contentment – where you’re perfectly at ease with little, in a place where there’s nothing, but in terms of now and then, you’ve brought with you everything.

Later, Addy asleep, we cook ours under the tin out the front, sausages on the barbeque, a heaping salad bowl in the middle of the table. I uncork a bottle of French pinot noir, an indulgence for the occasion.

Across the way, the cane harvest has been in full swing all day, brutal and unearthly looking machinery all whirring corkscrews and spinning blades that’d look more at home on the Fury Road than here, trucks on tank treads boiling the mud alongside catching the threshed fibres. The clanking has back-dropped the scene, along with the truck burr and the birdsong, the cattle low and the tiny chatter, for most of the evening.

And when it’s bare, when the field has been stripped, they burn the stubble.
From the dark springs a pyre. It starts low and orange but builds and blows up and out and turns an angry red, then orange again, then yellowing into the darkness of the night. It’s dry and hard and it crackles across the flat ground to where we’re standing, almost lit orange too against the glow which burns hard and fast and is gone almost before you can properly take it in.

The burning crew circle the field, keep it contained, make sure it dies along with what it’s killing then, into dust-coated trucks, they head across the river to the squat little tavern on the old highway and drink their weight in beer in celebration of a good day’s work.

We watch it all in the space of time it takes to cook our dinner.

***

Later still, as I pace around out the back by myself, doing laps of the decrepit pool table, a bent cue in one hand, an almost spent beer in the other, the heavens open. It’s gentle at first, a smattering on the tin over my head, but the low-slung cloud soon enough loosen their collective grey loins and a torrent is unleashed.

The water pools at the base of decking posts and around the wheels of the truck parked just past the steps, running thick rivulets down its off-white doors, cutting lines through the dust accumulated after only a day in the middle of nowhere.

It eases but stays all night, the next morning bringing no respite; Claire sits up in bed and pulls back the curtain and can see nothing across the wide fields but white and wet mist. We’re hemmed in and more than happy to accept it.

The day is whiled away reading newspapers and books, batting about loose balloons from the previous night’s festivities. Mum’s come down for the first night, and around lunchtime, she heads home.

I’d driven into town to buy the papers earlier, finding nothing in Woodburn and so heading into Evans, stopping at the IGA, which only stocked the Daily Telegraph, moving on to the newsagent on the main drag to find something worth spending my money on. I get soaked in only the few metres from door to door.

I run back out, heaving open the door and jumping in in a single motion, tucking the papers onto the dashboard and heading back to the train where the day is whiled away.

***

We stack raincoats in the back of the truck, along with a small bag full of water bottles and apples, a bag of chips and some loose muesli bars. Time is of no consequence. I realise, minutes out from Evans, as the sun finally bursts from behind thick and grey cloud, that I’ve forgotten my sunglasses, and so we swing right into a side road and u-turn and head back to get them.

There are kangaroos grazing off the side of the road, so we stop and pull in to look. They straighten, stopping mid-chew, regard us from behind impossibly long eyelashes. We stare at each other for ages.

A little way past the Golf Club, there’s a road called Blue Pool Drive, and so we head down there, in search of potential blue pools. There’s nothing but deep bush and heavily rutted dirt track, huge and muddy puddles which paint the white truck a filthy brown. We reach the end and find a Private Property sign. No matter, we u-turn again and head back.

Time is of no consequence.

We end up, the three of us, on Chinaman’s Beach. The world is grey and blustery, but it’s fresh and the salt smell fills us to the brim. The sand is hard packed and pockmarked with the rain just gone. Addy finds a pelican feather and carries like in her little fist like it’s the most valuable thing on earth.

The wind whips us from front on. Her golden curls catch it and fly behind her. Her jacket, the lining of it, is pink. Her hair and the pink lining are lit bright on the low-colour scene, she runs past me and looks up at me and her eye-lashes and eyebrows are vivid in contrast to the comparative dullness of everything around her. She glows naturally.

I turn to see where Claire is, and find her just behind my left shoulder. She smiles and she glows too.

As we round the rocky outcrop at the end of Chinaman’s, crossing onto New Zealand Beach, the headland rises dramatically, a small but sheer sandstone cliff writ red with white and off-yellow streaks, towering above us, bright against the grey sky.

We find a cave set into the rock, just back of the water line and dripping but with enough dry spots in which to sit. We open the bag and eat chips and an apple each, eventually tossing the spent cores into the ever-surging ocean. Low tide but eternally hungry. They wash away before we can even count to ten.

Addy runs down the sand, finds a tall rock in the middle of it all and asks me to help her climb it. Claire takes a photo and we’re in silhouette against the tempestuous sky, climbing what would seem like, for Addy, an almost insurmountable peak. I swing her off of it, around in circles, and almost drop her to the wet sand as she laughs and wants to do it again.
We get to Snapper Rock as it starts to rain again, and we huddle under a low rocky shelf and eat the strawberries. Above us, Pandanus Palms have rooted in the impossible earth and their huge and knobbly pods have dropped on the beach. I whip one into the water, it hits a rock and bounces back, neither broken in the slightest.

Walking back, we take the inland track, back off the beach, unsigned, a goat track worn into the scrubby grass to white sand, veering north and up onto the headland, a plateau of sorts that extends as far as we can see, nothing growing higher than a metre but the vegetation thick and unyielding – I say to Claire it’d be a desert scene if not for the fact it was verdant from rain and rain, we need to push through sopping boughs and prickly branches which wet our jeans and, as we crest it all, up the top with nothing to protect us, the rains come again, sliding in fast and angular, blown by unseen wind, wetting us all the more and we run, squealing, laughing, cursing the timing. My jeans are soaked through.

Addy stops in front of me, forcing me to pull up short, to pick a single purple flower, the rain and wet of no consequence to her at all.

We step, eventually, out of a thicket into the carpark. A sudden emergence. It’s full now, it was just us a couple of hours ago, and the truck is there, glistening under wet mud. We jump in, turn the heater on, head back to the train, sharing the last of the chips as we drive.

***

That night, heading home tomorrow morning, as if to finish it off properly, as the footy winds down and the whisky supply dries up, the wind whips in and drives a last bit of rain sideways under the flimsy roof, moving me closer to the weather-board walls, zipped up with arms folded against the cold but loose and happy to bed down within the old train’s steel walls, no longer rattling death but somewhere in nowhere to take stock and slow down, surrounded by the cane stubble and truck burr across the river.

The days have seemed endless, and righteously so.

There are times, in life, where one must let go. Times where, despite the passion and fervour inherent in one’s worship of an ideal, an institution, an expectation perhaps, that one just has to stop; to breath deeply; to accept.

I’ve  watched, as have many others, the demise of a behemoth. And yet no one can tell me why it died.

I’ve watched the queering of a culture, and no one can explain to me the twists and turns it’s taken to get here, why something once so mighty now rests in sullen repose, any excuse benignly offered mere background drone to the cacophony that’s ringing, reverberating almost permanently, from the belltower of the Church of Here & Now.

Fuck that noise, I’ve thought to myself on myriad occasion these months past. And yet I’ve not come to truly believe even myself, because what manner of man am I, if I believe the word of someone becoming, however incrementally, a non-believer himself?

Oh, how thou hast forsaken me, I’ve thought in drunken moments of biblical bastardry, turning the word of Jeremiah to my own whim with little, if any, thought to heavenly repercussion. To what end can this come, at what sordid conclusion can we possibly arrive?

The short term endpoint is inevitable, if unsavoury. It’s at this point that one must, as aforementioned, just let go, accept the consequences of a behemoth humbled and turn one’s thoughts to what’s next, and how this will play out; the far-reaching ramifications, if you will, of what’s unfolded and what is souring the blood of even the most staunch of believers.

For blow upon blow has rained down upon the object of the faithful’s devotion, a sight almost sickening in its brutality. Akin to the latter stages of a prize fight in which the challenger, his face battered beyond recognition, is still swaying on his feet, even the most hardened of fight fans silenced by the one-sided nature of it all, just willing him to fall, to meet the mat, to put an end to it all before more serious damage can be inflicted.

Except, in this case, it’s not the challenger that’s punch drunk and bloodied.

Of course, one must be sanguine about it all, for there’s never been a power that hasn’t eventually faded, a civilisation that’s not ultimately failed. And from these ashes grow new opportunity and, in time, greatness will likely be achieved once more.

In the heartland, the hot and dreary suburbs where the faithful worship, in fibro and twisted wood abodes, draped in the colours and sipping from yellow tins, this is where it will all begin to rebuild. It’s said that the devoted are the grease to the wheel of the machine – this blue collar grime will form the essence of the New Opportunity.

Some, though, have lost hope, and this is not of the realm of surprise. Some, not accustomed to the quagmire in which the object of their worship finds itself wallowing, have literally thrown their colours at the door from swiftly passing cars, the throbbing of muscular engines barely drowning their howls of rage, of disappointment, as they hurl their symbolic love with a passion and accuracy that’s been sorely missing from the Real Thing these months gone.

As if gestures like these will affect some sort of miracle, a realisation among the Team that there’s more at stake than they realise and so a rebirth happens before the very eyes of those who have doubted, a reawakening, a reunification, a new beginning, before this horrid end has even reached its inescapable conclusion.

For in the heartland, the hot and dreary suburbs where the faithful worship, these people need. They’ve become, over the years, accustomed to a showing of pride and devotion that matches their own. And their own, it is powerful indeed.

And so, one must stop, breath deeply, and accept. The search for answers is a fucked and fruitless exercise that brings forth little other than excess agony and despair, adding to an already overwhelming supply. The faithful must be just that; faithful to a fault and they need to continue to believe, and almost as importantly, to believe that the ship will right itself and the ideal, the institution, the expectation perhaps, will once again prevail.

Some of the spiders are still here.

Fat and long-limbed golden orbs stringing their thick webs from wattle to decking post, laden with slung bugs and wayfaring Jacaranda stems.

Most of them are up high, hanging off the teev aerial, shooting yellow-ish strands to the palms against the fence. Some come down low and thread across the path to the clothes line, across access through the back gate. They get dissuaded quickly though, and so we’ve come to an easy impasse.

In the dark, on Thursday or Friday nights, when there’s footy on and I’m drinking beer though, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll tangle on my way to piss in the garden. No one wants eight legs on their shoulder when their business is out. Ain’t that the truth.

The news is all the Same. And yet it’s news you can’t do without. I’ve got people down south, as do many, and I read and talk and listen and try to understand.

At the bottle shop, life goes on and then some, the constant human flow rarely abating. People need a drink, and I am not one to judge; Don’t Judge, is my watchword. It’s hard to abide. To be honest, I judge constantly. And not as you’d think, not judging people by how much they drink – I could not possibly care less.

But I do judge by character, by how people carry themselves, how they interact with other people.

I don’t like people. Not really.

People need to follow the rules. At least in this day and age.

I’d not give a shit in hell if not for the fact I work in retail. If I didn’t, if I didn’t constantly come into contact with people who do things the Wrong Way, why would I care, really? But I do, and it grates, and just because we’re not in Victoria, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the floor and follow the arrow directions marked on same.

I’m wearing a mask. So, it’s fine right?

Some people thank me. Others don’t bat an eyelid. I don’t care. I don’t judge.

The front garden is a blank canvas, one which Claire and I have started to paint upon, at least in theory. It’s coming to fruition though, slowly, a labour of love that will pay dividends. Once we get down to Ballina and load the truck with gravel, bring it back, scrape it out, spread and compact it – plus red-clay dirt, solid turf, expert paving courtesy of yours truly, who’s never paved a square foot in his life.

But you do it, right? You pave the squares, you make it level, you lay the stone and fill the gaps. You pave it.

Tonight, my plan was to watch football and drink beer. A simple, inelegant-yet-fulfilling evening; well spent, to my mind. I executed it well.

Around halftime – during a match in which I had no skin in the game, and so was watching for pure enjoyment – a round of phone-tag matched up and so I spent the second half, and then some, speaking with an old mate from Melbourne.

Where before we used to talk about rock ‘n’ roll and smoking weed, now we talk about where our kids are at. We talk about politics and the pandemic, about our work and our wife’s works, what we’re doing and what we want to be doing.

And we talk about rock ‘n’ roll and smoking weed.

For the two go, undoubtedly, hand in hand.

A few years ago, at Bluesfest in Byron, I walked over to watch Iggy Pop with nothing in hand other than a can of beer, and emerged half an hour later high as a kite. And so I walked back to where I’d started, where Claire was, perched in the back of someone’s ute on the raised road between the two major stages, and watched the rest of Robert Plant’s set as he took time-honoured Zeppelin songs and reworked them in his own way.

Purists hated that set, but it was one of the best we’d ever seen.

At one point, before I left to see a bit of Iggy, a photographer walked past and, glancing towards us, stopped in his tracks and took a shot of Claire, sitting on a milk crate in the back of that ute. She had tears running down her face as she listened to Plant do ‘Whole Lotta Love’, in his re-worked way, a song she’d grown up with. In the foreground, elbow on the truck’s side tray, was me with my mouth open, listening to the same song I’d heard since I was maybe five, done in such a fashion as to render me gobsmacked.

Would have been a cool photo. I wish I’d seen it.

Now, Claire is asleep. Addy is asleep too. I’ve finished my phone call, but not my bourbon. The air is moving in such a way as to amplify the highway, as opposed to the surf, and so there’s B-Double noise, not crashing waves.

It’s still. The wind, blustery all afternoon, has gone. It’s just airflow now, just the way the air is moving, that moves the sound. No one else in the neighbourhood is up. Just the trucks and the odd bilby (our local guy), and the tapping of black keys onto a white screen.

Which is nice.

The air is cold. There’s a last-ditch wintery cold snap on the way. I’m wearing jeans and boots, but could do with a jumper.

But I like how crisp it is.

And just occasionally, just every now and then, there’s a gap in highway traffic.

And it’s quiet. Perfectly quiet. Like nothing is happening and everything is fine. And that’s nice too.