CHELLIE DID HER LESSONS WITH the School of Distance Education. Each month when Dad went to the mainland to collect the stores, he picked up a fat package addressed to Michelle Braddon, c/o the Post Office. Chellie liked opening her mail and looking over all the material she would study with Mum through the next four weeks. She and Mum eagerly checked what her other teacher, Miss Howe, had written on the assignments they had sent in last time. When it was Good work, Michelle, or Well done, they were both pleased.
‘Let’s make a cake,’ Mum would say, and the maths lesson for the day would be weighing and measuring the ingredients, calculating quantities and cooking time. Chellie liked helping to make bread too. The smell of it baking as she did her worksheets was one of the best smells she knew.
For a break she would help hang out the washing, pegging tea towels, pillowcases and knickers tight against the tugging wind. Or she weeded the carrots or picked the peas. When the chooks clucked triumphantly, Chellie would hurry out to hunt for their eggs among the tussocky grass and under the lime tree, before the crows could get them.
Then it didn’t seem long before Mum announced, ‘Okay. School’s finished for today.’
Chellie would be off at once – a sandwich in one pocket, an orange in the other. Off to visit the turtles if the tide was falling. Over the hummocky hills, through the wind-shorn bush, onto the sandhills, down to the beach. Running, laughing, somersaulting, skipping, splashing through the dancing waves, shouting to the turtles, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
She was as nimble and sure-footed as the goats on the island across the water. She jumped easily from rock to rock, across the crevices and gulches and rock pools where crabs clicked and scuttled sideways out of sight. The grey heron flapped into the air at her coming, and the oystercatcher out on the point where the waves were breaking piped a shrill alarm.
‘Silly bird,’ Chellie chided. ‘You know I’ll never hurt you.’
Lightly, she made her way up onto the ridge that overlooked the big pool where the turtles rested, wondering how many and which ones would be there. Sometimes there were seven, sometimes eight or nine or ten. Fourteen was the most she had ever seen. She was quiet now, as quiet as the turtles, squatting to count them. They were aware of her presence but did not move. Chellie was sure they knew her, knew that she was their friend.
Each turtle seemed to have a favourite place: resting half out of the water on a shallow ledge, or floating in the sun in the middle of the pool, or sleeping in the shadow of an overhanging slab. Chellie pondered each elegantly patterned, curved carapace, and marvelled at the way the leathery mosaic on the flippers, neck and head matched the hard shell. The mottles all merged into the dimples and dapples of the water, so that even such a large creature became difficult to distinguish when it submerged.
When one turtle stirred and began to swim, others followed. Chellie was rapt. Absorbed in watching their graceful movements, she did not feel the hard rock under her bottom, and totally forgot the sandwich in her pocket. All she knew was the slow rhythm of the turtle ballet.
The three biggest were each over a metre long. ‘They could be more than sixty years old,’ Dad had told her. Chellie marvelled. Twice as old as Mum and Dad. As old as her gran.
Dad called the biggest The Dowager. ‘She’s a matriarch and still laying eggs.’
It was awesome. Chellie tried to imagine Gran having babies, but couldn’t.
One turtle had a damaged shell. ‘Run over by a boat,’ Dad said sadly. Chellie called her Scarback. Another had a nick out of its shell, so became Nicky.
Flip’s back left flipper was missing, and Flop’s back right flipper was gone. ‘Probably grabbed by a shark. Or chopped by a propeller,’ Dad surmised.
Chellie shuddered.
‘Hard work for them when they have to cover their eggs. They use their front ones to dig the nest, but only their hind ones to backfill,’ Dad explained.
Most of the turtles were females. Ladies-in-waiting was Dad’s name for them. Waiting for the time when they would lay their eggs.
The males had much bigger tails and were more restless. Mostly they swam underwater, just popping their heads up from time to time to breathe. Sometimes it was not the male turtles that disturbed the peace of the pool. Other creatures lived there too. A fierce, long streak of a fish would dart out from under the seaweedy rock in the centre to chase the little fish, which flashed and skimmed in a glittering cloud. They would peel off into two smaller clouds to try to elude the predator pursuing them into the deep shadow.
Chellie moved quietly around the main pool, pausing beside each turtle at the edge. Then she went to check the smaller pools beyond, where other turtles might be resting. Sometimes a loggerhead turtle was in the furthest outlying pool. It seemed to know it was not part of the green family and kept apart. It had a different pattern of scales on its reddish brown shell, and its head was much bigger and chunkier, with a mouth that could crunch shellfish, crabs, sea urchins and jellyfish.
‘Not like the greens. They’re vegetarians,’ Dad joked.
‘What’s its scientific name?’ Chellie had asked.
‘Caretta caretta,’ Dad replied.
‘Caretta,’ Chellie repeated. ‘I like that.’ So Caretta it was, and this turtle became Chellie’s favourite.
When the tide turned and water began rising in the pools, swirling through the seaward channels, bubbling up through the crevices, Chellie knew it was time to leave.
‘Goodbye, turtles,’ she whispered.
If the tide was already rising when she reached the sandhills, she would settle in a little hollow out of the wind and gaze at Turtle Point disappearing under the waves. Chellie loved to think of the turtles moving out to feed, swimming free in the deep sea, which held no secrets for them.
But there were secrets right where she sat. Many years ago, Aboriginal people had sat in this very same sheltered hollow, talking and laughing where now only the wind in the casuarinas sighed a slow lament. Chellie sifted through her fingers the fragments of purple shells from their feasts, imagining women gathering oysters from the rocks below, while children played on the beach.
In her mind’s eye she could see men too, squatting here, patiently chipping implements out of stones from the shingle at the foot of the cliffs. She picked up spearheads, marvelling at the sharpness of the flaked blades, and discovered heavy hammers shaped to fit snugly in the hand. Perhaps the men had hunted turtles too, lighting a fire of driftwood on the beach to cook their catch. Surely they would have come in the nesting season, so that the women could gather turtle eggs.