It was the end of the day, April 2005. I’d just sent Michael the last changes on the last set of proofs. We’d worked hard together, and discussed every sentence in detail. Now I stood at my desk, aimlessly moving pieces of paper into piles. The frantic notes to myself, the lists of changes, the mail that had gone unanswered, even unopened, during this last race to the finish-line: I jumbled it all together and put it on one side of the desk.
It was over. Next time I saw those words I’d written, they’d be a bound book. Too late for any more thoughts.
It should have been a joyful moment, but it was an anticlimax, even something like panic: a gap in my life where this book had been for the last five years. What now? What do I do now?
Outside, the sun had set but it wasn’t quite dark. I couldn’t bear that desk, that window with the yellow sticky notes all over it, that lamp, that laptop, for one more moment.
That good feeling, calling out to Bruce that I was going for a walk, swinging out the door and pulling it closed. Out the front gate, along the footpath.
I was heading downhill tonight. Down to the park and the harbour instead of up the hill towards the pub. It was probably not as safe, but it was nicer, and there was still a bit of light in the sky to frighten away the rapists.
As soon as I reached the park the air changed. It was like walking from a small room into a huge open atrium. Sounds could go further before they bounced back. I could smell the harbour: salt, seaweed, diesel. A sense of water restless in its bed of land.
It was high tide. The water swelled up sumptuously against the weed-streaming planks of the dock, tossed a wave at the sea wall, broke into foam. It was like something living: turning under and over, through and along, dancing with itself. It caught the light from all around, the surface reflecting the lamps along the dock, the glowing honeycombs of the apartments, the flashing signals on the mooring-posts further out. The coloured surface of the water—restless patterns of orange, of red, of white—slid over the satin blackness underneath.
Straight across the water, so close I felt it would only be a few strokes of freestyle, was a bulk of land, a headland on the opposite shore. Above it was the sky, holding the last glow of sunset. Below, the water taking the light in from anywhere and making its own artwork from it. In between, this solid mass of darkness.
It was too steep to build on, so they made it a park: all rock ledges, cliff-faces, the grass that cuts your hands if you grab it to stop yourself falling. Up on the top, on an open platform, a big fish was engraved in the rock.
They’d walked us down from North Sydney Demonstration School to see that engraving. It was beside the road, behind a white council fence. The grooved image had been filled in with a thick white line of high-gloss paint, making it crude, lifeless, utterly unlovely.
We hung over the fence, glanced, ticked the box on our Excursion Sheet—Aboriginal Engraving—and turned away.
Ball’s Head, that promontory was called now. It was named after Lieutenant Ball, a marine with the First Fleet. One tiny fact in all that reading I’d done. It was so easy to imagine them: the boat with the oars dipping in and out of the water, making its way under the great prow of the headland. Two or three bays back were the eleven ships of the fleet, the thousand souls free and convict, the piano brought along by George Worgan the surgeon, the bags of rice and flour.
And watching them, the others.
The people who had another name for Ball’s Head. The people who scraped out the groove of the fish every year so it was always bright, and who would have had a story about it that they taught their children.
While Lieutenant Ball and the others were working their way around the headland, there were people watching them. Standing, probably, more or less where I was now, down at the water’s edge, looking across at the headland and the boat under it.
Behind them, there’d have been a creek running down a little valley. The valley floor had been filled in and flattened now to accommodate the oval and the public toilets. There’d have been rock ledges and overhangs on the steep valley walls on both sides. In summer they’d have used the ones on the south-facing slope. That was posh Louisa Road now. They’d stay cool, they’d get the breeze. In winter they’d have wanted the warmth of the sun, and gone over to the rock shelters that faced north. The backyards still tumble down the slope, every house looking over the head of the one in front.
I’d laughed with the other kids at that fish up on Ball’s Head. All I could see then were the wharves and buildings, the streets, the glitter and bulk of the things that were on the surface of the place that was my home.
Writing The Secret River was the opening of a new set of eyes in my head, a new set of ears. Now I could see what was underneath, what was always underneath and always will be: the shape of the land, the place itself, and the spirit of the people who were here.