The Plinths

I came scrabbling down through the rocks and trees and hit the beach at Bowman’s Bluff, its big ochre brow and nose jutting out above the sea. I crossed the Ocean Road warily and with a sudden rush to the other side, looking just like some shy marsupial no doubt. Then I stepped onto the sand with bare feet, stared at the waves like a twit, resisted the temptation to splash my face, and headed across the flat rocks under the bluff.

Once around the bluff it’s only half a mile or so to the blowhole: just the two last smallish coves that resist the southwesterlies and are consequently good for garfishing, a flat stretch with a big ocean pool at the end, and then up onto a raw limestone moonscape and down again to the entrance all purple with mussels.

It was good to see the keyhole of the rock again, the blowhole, one of nature’s true prosceniums, a golden arch of an altogether ancient order, a marine talisman, a natural front door to the house of the town.

Its orientation is east-south-east and the ocean pounds into its long wide gutter at high tides, sundering into the limestone and basalt with a satisfying woof and whack and then a subterranean boom. It slaps and shapes this little spot of the earth and creates the rhythmic turquoise upwellings my brothers and I dared so often to float on as children.

Looking down from the hills, I’d timed my entrance for an outgoing tide and stepped into the thigh-deep water of the ocean gutter with my swag held above my head. As the gentle waves approached and reached for my navel, I winced for the tickling cold. But with only a few slow wading steps I was directly under the arch, in the echoey acoustic of the blowhole. Then with a shiver and a pause I passed up and through to the quiet pool on the other side.

I’d arrived. I stepped carefully along the slickened flat-stones of the pool while above me the sky had cleared. On the small strip of sand beyond the pool I felt like a broken wave. A broken wave made to sigh everlasting, to flow on, to ripple without end. I laid my swag down, coated in weeks of bush-dust, and stretched. Then I got down on wet cotton knees and splashed my face.

It felt right. By returning this way, I already felt a tuning in me, a note struck well, a lightness, like the humour of the brolga. I felt a sudden rush of the power of the ground I knew best, and everything in a proportional relation to it.

Looking up with a salty face at the arch of the blowhole and then down onto the golden rocks on either side, I saw the letters and names, the dates, the proud claims and lovers’ gestures too, that had been carved in the stone over countless summers.

I sat down smiling at those carvings, remembering some, noticing others for the first time, waiting till I was rested. I picked up the swag then and headed for home, along the broad beach of the Heatherbrae Cove.

Of course I hadn’t expected to find balloons but as I came around the corner of the blowhole the beach stretching out in front of me was dotted with them. First a dot of lemon, then a dot of orange, then of black, then silver, then royal blue and pale blue, white, green and finally purple. I laughed – it was becoming a habit – my mouth opening skywards, and I walked along Heatherbrae gathering up the balloons.

By the time I got to the western end of the beach, where the steps lead up through the hook and the elbow to the clifftop car park, I held a bunch of balloons all tied together with their strings. I felt like I was headed to a party and, looking back, I suppose I was.

A man was coming down the steps. He must have thought I was quite a sight. The only mirror I’d seen in ten weeks was in the still upper reaches of the river, I must have been filthy, and now I had a bunch of balloons in tow as well.

On the narrow beach path we stopped to exchange pleasantries and he told me he’d seen the balloons strewn over the sand from his beach-house up on the headland. ‘Where do you think they’ve come from?’ he asked. ‘Do you think they’ve been blown in off a boat?’

Having had the vision to re-enter the town through the arch of the blowhole and then broken like a little wave on the beach, I simply smiled at him from deep within with my new attitude and said, ‘You know what? I think they’ve come from somewhere a little while ago, sometime back in the past.’

Suddenly then he had scribble on his brow, his frown full of nonplussed consternation, and immediately he began to look at me suspiciously, scanning me up and down with a landlordish air. Well, okay, I thought, if that’s the limit of your conversation ... so I did the same to him: white hair the colour of the shore-break, polo shirt yellow as tinned counter-lunch corn, blue shorts for Rhode Island kudos on the sunny winter beach, stringy calves of an elderly golfer, black sandals smeared with silver trackdust.

Finally I pointed out to him that one of the balloons, the magenta one in the middle, had stars and spirals printed all over it, along with the words ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR!’.

Given that it was July, his mottled jaw sprang open and he shook his head in a baffled way. I laughed again, this time a bit louder, said toorah and stepped on past him, off through the spinning cocoons that always seem to dangle over the handmade Heatherbrae steps, no matter the season.

I decided, given my state of dress and the bright handful of balloons, that I’d skip the roads and the smalltown gaze, and make my way home along the relative privacy of the clifftop track.

I made my way along the high part of the track, then down through Tupong Gully and up again until I was approaching Horseshoe Cove. It felt great to be back – even greater with eyes that shone anew and flesh that had its feeling restored. I virtually pranced around the lighthouse sitting out on the point in front of the meteorological station, excited now by the proximity of home. And then, as I descended through the bearded heath from the shoulder above the rivermouth, I saw them: the Plinths.

There were three of them, towering white above the water in the middle of the estuary. They were carved from the white local limestone, tapered, wedge shaped, in the manner of Romanesque piles. The front Plinth stood right in the mouth of the river, with sea and land water mingling uneasily on either side of it, and the two others stood side by side, about thirty metres apart and statuesque, further back in the stiller inlet water behind the dune hummock. And on the top of each one was a giant bronze bell, at least two metres tall. I could see each bell swinging ever so slightly in the breeze, and then gradually a little more strongly as it freshened, until finally they began to toll loudly in the wind.

I stood on the track digesting the scene. Three white stone Plinths in the grey-black river, with bells going clackety-ding-dong-clang. God knows how loud those bells would be if the wind really picked up, I thought. God knows what a racket they’d make in a storm!

Slowly I walked down the track towards the water, snorting through my nose, before laughing outright at the thought that I, little me, could ever think myself conspicuous merely by being covered in riversilt and bushdust, and holding a bunch of coloured balloons.

‘Come on, Noely,’ I said to myself out loud. ‘How could you ever compete with this?’

Stepping onto the sand by the rivermouth, I found our world-champion local earbasher Givva Way, standing patiently in his white house-painter’s overalls, his fawn terrier pissing by the sea wrack on the water’s edge.

‘G’day, Noel,’ he said, in a friendly way. ‘What’s with the balloons?’

I snorted, happily. ‘Never mind the balloons, Givva. What’s with the bells?’

He looked over to the Plinths, their giant bronze bells slowly oscillating and ringing intermittently in the salty midmorning air. He ran a hand through his black mop of paint-flecked hair and said with a lopsided grin, ‘The Plinths? Bloody amazing aren’t they?’

His dog finished pissing and Givva uncharacteristically left it at that. ‘Good to see you back, Noel. We’ve all been waiting for you to arrive,’ he said, before wandering off up the beach towards the road.

I stood still, swag on my back, fit but lean after my time away. With my left hand on a bony hip and my right hand clutching the string of the bobbling balloons, I stared in astonishment again at the Plinths. They were indeed ‘bloody amazing’, just as Givva had said, but more than that they were the first proof that although my exile in the clefts and overhangs was over, nothing in my life would ever be quite the same again. All ties were cut, all bets off, all melancholy and woodenness set free on a piteous chuckle.