Canberra Tales by Margaret Barbalet

Author:Margaret Barbalet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-12T09:05:20+00:00

The Boatman Of Lake Burley Griffin

To look at the lake, you’d think nothing dramatic, scarcely anything human happened there.

Willows and poplars had been planted along the banks to make them look less naked. Now it was winter and they had no leaves. People said that, in a few years’ time, it would look like a real lake. They’d been saying that as long as he’d lived in Canberra.

Graham thought this as he bent down to get his fishing line and folding canvas chair out of the boot. He set up his chair on a level spot of ground and looked across at the steep side of Black Mountain. Where the soil had blown away, it was bone bare, a skeleton, and he turned his eyes away.

Since he’d been coming there at lunchtime, he’d discovered a surprising number of people. Driving over the bridge on his way to work, he’d never noticed them. Family parties. Asians. Vietnamese, mostly. They used corn for bait. At lunchtimes, people who worked for government departments came down to sit in their cars if it was cold, or to walk along the coarse sand. Some lit gas barbecues and the smell of frying meat reached Graham, who belonged to no party, but watched them, holding his fishing line in front of him.

The people who used the lake seemed to do so in much the same way as he’d done, half-contemptuously, comparing it in their minds with the sea, or with another lake, more alive, more real than this one.

He thought about how different environments shaped people’s ways of seeing, of living, even or perhaps especially, people who claimed their homes were elsewhere.

He thought about the self-denial he’d practised for years and was less willing than before to put himself in the same category as the men he worked with, who’d embraced self-denial for so long it had become a source of pride they couldn’t live without.

He had a reason for going to the lake. Every lunchtime, after he’d been to the hospital to see his daughter Francis, he drove to the same spot, got out his fishing rod and folding chair, and waited till the hour was up.

The brick hospital had trees planted around it. Those patients who were well enough walked up and down the shore. Others could see from their beds each morning a sunrise over water, perfect frost covering the reeds, and hear, morning and evening, ducks and swamp hens calling to each other.

Francis was eight years old. Her face was as still as if the last three weeks had taken from it even the inward expressions of dreams.

The boatman seemed to be looking for an opening between the reeds. He passed quite close to where Graham was sitting under his willow tree, close enough for him to see that the old man had dark eyes and grey hair. His clothes were khaki, the sort you could buy in army disposal shops. As he rowed past, just the other side of the reeds, he stopped for a moment.

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