1988
That Christmas he went into the Budawang Ranges with Belle.
They had debauched in motel rooms and restaurants along the coast while he turned forty, bed sheets drenched with champagne and with all the smells and fluids that two bodies could be made to offer up in such dark love-making as, in their curious way, he and Belle were drawn into. But the conversations in the restaurants had become unproductively sadistic as they exhausted amiable conversation.
He’d gone increasingly into interior conversation with himself about ‘turning forty’ because she was too young to have empathy with his turning forty. And he was trying to salve the loss of his young girlfriend who was overseas and ‘in love’.
He also had some home-yearnings which came on at Christmas. His family was not in town for this Christmas, but anyhow his home-yearnings had been displaced over the years away from his family in the town to the bush about fifty kilometres away from, but behind, the coastal town where he had grown up – the Sassafras bush in the Budawang Ranges.
He’d put camping gear in the car when they’d left the city and they drove as deep into the bush as the road permitted and then left the car and backpacked their way.
As they walked deeper into the bush he kept glancing at Belle to see if she was being affected by the dull warm day and the bush. He knew the creeping hysteria and dread which the Australian bush could bring about.
She saw him looking back at her and said, ‘I’m coping. Stop looking back at me all the time.’
They walked for an hour or so and came to what is called Mitchell Lookout.
‘This is called Mitchell Lookout,’ he said, ‘but as you can see it is not a lookout in the Rotary sense.’
It was a shelf of rock with a limited view of the gorge.
‘Lookouts are an eighteenth-century, European act of nature worship which Rotary clubs have carried on. The growth is too thick – you can’t see the river down there. You’ll have to take my word for it.’
‘I can see that the growth is too thick.’
‘Laughably, the only thing you can see clearly from Mitchell Lookout is directly across the gorge – they could have another lookout which looked across at Mitchell Lookout.’
He saw her look across at the other side and back again. She made a small movement of her mouth to show that she didn’t think it was particularly ‘laughable’.
‘I don’t go into the bush for views,’ he said.
‘Tell me – what do you go into the bush for?’
‘I go into the bush to be swallowed whole. I don’t go into the bush to look at curious natural formations – I don’t marvel at God’s handiwork.’
For reasons he could not explain and did not record in his log book, he decided to put the tent on the rock ledge overlooking the gorge.
‘You’ll find sleeping on the rock is OK,’ he said, ‘it is really much better than you imagine.’
‘If you say so,’ she said, dumping her backpack.
‘I go into the bush for raw unanalysed sensory experience,’ he said, ‘I don’t go in for naming things geologically or birds and so on.’
‘You don’t have to apologise for not knowing the names of the birds and the stones.’
He cut some bracken fern to lie on, more as a gesture towards the idea of what made for comfort.
‘That’ll do a fat amount of good,’ Belle said.
‘It’s a gesture.’
He put up the tent, pinning each corner from inside with rocks and tying the guy ropes to rocks.
‘I’ve even used rocks as pillows,’ he said.
She sat, one leg crossed over the other, cleaning dirt from her painted fingernails with a nail file.
He instantly doubted whether she had ever used a rock for a pillow and whether sleeping on a rock was in fact OK.
‘There, he said, ‘the tent is up.’
She looked across at it, got up, went over and looked inside the tent but did not go in.
‘How about a drink?’ he said.
Sure it’s happy hour. Any hour can be a happy hour.’ She laughed at this to herself.
He went about getting the drink.
‘I’ll cook the Christmas dinner. That’ll be my contribution,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s OK. I’m used to cooking on camp fires.’
‘Look – you may be fourth-generation Australian but you’re not the only one who can cook on a camp fire, for godsake.’
‘All right, all right.’
As they had their bourbons he doubted whether she could cook on campfires. He thought about what they could salvage to eat.
‘I came through the Australian experience too,’ she said.
‘Do you know what to do if you get lost in the bush?’ he asked her.
‘No, I didn’t mean to invite a test, but you tell me, what do I do if I get lost in the bush?’
‘You stay where you are, mix a dry martini and within minutes someone will be there telling you that you’re doing it wrong.’
‘From a Bush Log Book I’, in Forty-Seventeen, Penguin, Melbourne, 1988