Cave Rock Creek, Lamington National Park
After the city we drive to a cabin in Lamington National Park, which I remember for its blue scarps, its antartic beech, ironbark orchids and waratah sunsets. I remember a few years ago, feeling stranded, my daughter burning with a fever and unable to walk. I remember carrying her through the rainforest, the flame kurrajongs and back to the carpark. A mentally retarded boy had wandered off from his group. The teacher’s assistant found him crouched low in the bush, playing with a stick in the dirt. There is something alien and hard and empty in this wilderness.
All day I feel paralysed, observing the hierarchy of birds. Knife-sharp magpies skitch the pink galahs, who crane their necks to crack open seed. Before them the rainbow lorikeets. A sequence of flights measures time, and time intersects with travel. I am interchanging the past for the present tense, chapter by chapter. I am testing words as they retract into something shiny and dangling, and almost whole. Splitting the kernel of words bursting with new taste, I call this life because it feeds me, or as a friend says, What else can one do? When David and Tegan drive into town, I fall asleep and never want to wake. I must be exhausted by worldly things or else immeasurably content, seduced by wave-forms of wing-scatterings and the broken, uneven light.
Next day we try to climb inside the cave rock; in the heat of midday the entrance is a cleft, bewilderingly narrow and too steep for Tegan. Coming downhill she trips and wants a band-aid, her cries echoing in the forest. We have locked ourselves outside the cabin and she is sore. Inside, it’s Technology with a capital T to the rescue. She plays her nintendo for a peaceful hour or two. I love hearing the sound of her sweet voice calling the names of those playful and obedient electronic pups.
There are pademelons in the tall grass bent over bark and berries. I walk along the creek late afternoon, and spot the mottled figure of a platypus in the sand flats. Moonlight floods the valley spilling over fields of rye. Soon a few stars appear in the sky. Pine, citrus and manure stings the air. The nothingness fills me. I walk back over the cold gravel to the cabin and to the fire, with its dancing roses.
