Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey

Author:Gabrielle Carey
Language: ara
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2013-10-07T21:00:00+00:00

15

In the month of March the heat in Perth can still be intense so when the festival was over I was pleased to see my cousin Carey arrive at the hotel in a Mercedes – a car with air-conditioning and leather seats.

Carey and I had agreed over the lunch in Cottesloe to make a pilgrimage together, to the old family homestead outside Geraldton. We were both curious about where his mother and my father had grown up. It was also an opportunity to become reacquainted after many lost years, each of us filling in parts of family history the other knew nothing about.

Before we’d even left the Perth suburbs, Carey and I had bonded like, well, like long-lost cousins. Like Andrea, Carey had known my father as Uncle Alec, the slightly whacky odd one out in the family, in contrast to his father, Stuart McDowell – a quiet, conservative Trans-Australian Airlines pilot. Strangely, both men had ended their lives in the same way.

‘How did he do it?’ I asked now, tentatively.

‘Hanged himself.’

Perhaps this was part of the bond I had instinctively felt the first time we’d met. The children of suicide carry a very particular kind of burden.

*

The drive to what poet John Kinsella describes as Stow-country was long and hot, the landscape scrubby and monotonous and the road noisy with gigantic trucks going back and forth to the mines. I recalled that, after moving to England, Stow never owned a car again; he cycled or walked everywhere.

When we finally came into the outskirts of Geraldton, there was a place I wanted to see first. Ellendale pool is the setting for the most disturbing scene in A Haunted Land, Stow’s first novel, written when he was nineteen during his summer holidays. It also features in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and the poem ‘For One Dying’. Nowadays it is a popular local swimming spot and a tourist stop-off, and yet for all its beauty there remains something undeniably eerie about the opaque water and the strange, overhanging cliffs of red sandstone. Ellendale pool was said to be bottomless.

We drove into the car park and walked around the water’s edge. Somewhere in the surrounding cliffs on the other side of the pool, there was a cave where Stow, as a child, had seen the imprint of a small indigenous hand that had sent his imagination wondering.

He felt the cold rock under his hand, where a dead boy’s hand had once rested. Time and change had removed this child from his country, and his world was not one world, but had in it camps of the dispossessed. Above the one monument of the dead black people, the she oaks sounded cold, sounded colder than rock.

As a teenager on these banks of Ellendale pool, Stow had imagined Anne Maguire making love with Charlie, the Aboriginal help in the novel. In these same waters, he had imagined Rick and Rob swimming naked. The place was inhabited with stories and spirits, ancient and modern, layered like the coloured streaks in the sandstone rocks.

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