Coming Up for Air at Picnic Bay: The Day

Black cockatoos. First I've ever seen.
There are over one hundred species of bird on the island.
I saw a few but heard them all before dawn.

I had one full day on the island. Dawn was easy: more photos of Picnic Bay and the jetty to cover that time of day. Then I had to get to Horseshoe Bay. That left a little time, depending on the bus timetable, to get to the Museum. The Museum was essential: what goes into the Museum stays in the Museum. They are not so good on the online sharing boogie so if they have something you want to see you need to go there.

Anyway, I couldn't even get to Horseshoe Bay before the first bus so off to the jetty by dawn it was.

The bus to Horseshoe Bay cuts through the island, west to east. Signage at the bus stops warn passengers standing between Arcadia and Horseshoe Bay. This is because of scary turns and climbs. While these aren't Himalayan you get the point of the warnings when you're on the bus. The road feels safe, the ride is smooth, but there are moments when it feels like you are on a banking plane.

Passing the Forts (couldn't fit them in) and coming out of the wiggly world, the bus brings you to Horseshoe Bay. It's the Island's biggest bay and is home to its biggest settlement. You wouldn't really know about that as most of the houses are nestled beneath trees in the exclusion one behind the shopping strip, a kind of stealthy ostentation. Meantime, shops. I'd left out my legs that morning when I sunblocked. In shorts they were o'er-exposed so I went and found some 50+ at a shop and remembered to grab some soap (the small tube of boutique shower gel had lasted all of two washes). And then I went to the beach.

I've long enjoyed the traveller's tales of my friends without once feeling the urge to do any travelling myself. I'm a little like my father in this as I tend to need a reason to be somewhere. I went delightedly to Arkansas in 2016 as I had extended family to meet and an aunt who remains the sole survivor of the original Jetnikoff settlement in Australia. Last year I found Wellington enjoyable but that was at a work conference. I think it might be because I can't imagine travelling with others and, while I can appreciate the newness of a place, one seems almost identical to the next without a reason for being there. But didn't I just say -- ? Yes, but here's the thing. I can't honestly say that, out of all the years I spent living with this lovely island so accessible to me, I have no memory of ever having been to this part before. It's not one of my memories of the Island. The old boat dropped us off at Picnic Bay or Arcadia. We would have driven around a bit but this bay is all the way across and ... and you need a reason to be there. Anyway...

So, taking some snaps and video I went back to the strip to find the more interesting pub/eatery had opened and it was time for a late breakfast/brunch/lunch/thing. Getting on noon, I ordered a pint o' Great Northern and the platter with chips. I took a snap of it and posted my first and only Instagram food shot of my plate with ... well, see photo.

Embarrassing bit: I cut this feast short to catch a bus that took me past Arcadia which reminded me that I still hadn't picked up any fridge magnets for the work fridge so I got off there and found some sounevirs and went to the beach and took some photos and got the next bus along which made a U-turn and went right back to Horseshoe Bay. Time was actually running out for my visit to the Museum which would have been easily done if the bus hadn't done that strange thing. Then it stopped at Horseshoe again for about twenty minutes while the busdriver went wandering, advising any there listerning to be there early as it fills up quickly. A had a chat to a lovely lady who was visiting her son. This was interrupted by a couple of deafening retirees who were trying to work out the best things to see around Rockhampton. Never did pick that conversation up again. Anyway, the driver came back and we made our windy way back to Picnic Bay with the clock a-ticking.

The bus was full and the driver had to get all the standers into billeted seats as per regulations. A lovely Maori woman sat next to me and we had a bright chat. I got off at the cop shop and ran to the Museum. Well, I ran to the gate, took a breath and passed into the yard of an old house on stilts, my feet crunching the bed of brown paper-dry leaves. At the top of the stairs I saw a silver haired matron who noted me with alarm and told me that she was about to close up. I explained I only wanted to see pictures of the ferry. She relaxed and took me to a display of photos of as many of the boats as they could find with a key to the years of service.

Rough mix of the picture of the Mandalay and the key
that refers to it from the museum display case

Getting the ferry right is as important as getting the jetty right. There are a few candidates as there would have been a few different vessels in service by Hayles at any time. The key was useful but not as precise as I had hoped. Candidates are the Mandalay, the Minerva or the Luana. This is much closer than I've been able to get just through online searching. I'll pick one (probably the Mandalay) and stick to it.

That is the same kind of problem I talked about in the Jetty post; getting the physical thing in the landscape right can both relieve and inspire. But there's another issue which this day brought up and it has to do with a deeper connection.

A few years back I found a bunch of photos of Picnic Bay, including the jetty from 1979, the year The Monsoons is set. There was even a photo of the Hayles office in Flinders Street. It got me drawing again. But the further I got into this the further away I seemed to get in terms of getting the location and the story to play with each other. There was a disconnection that emerged which made drawing real places or crafting imaginary ones daunting. Too real, it was stilted. Too creative and it was a cop out. There are scenes where the surrounds take on a kind of unreality.

Character studies, imaginary botany, a go at
local houses, the boat and the dining room of the house.
Scraps of years of drafting and my wandering aesthetic.

It took me until this year, a multi-decade anniversary, to understand that the only way I was going to resolve this was to return to the physical location. I could take as many photos and videos as I needed but I needed to smell the sea and feel the heat. The idea, set out in the Prelude, was to scrape away the mythology I'd plastered the real place with and to see it again as a real place.

This is why this entry is so dull dull holiday diary.  I'm just getting on buses and taking pictures. But two things are also happening: the place, its sensuality and people, is affecting me and I'm relaxing into it. This is not how any of my characters experience it at their age and era (they're young and bitchy or young and naive) but it allows me to imagine it with a greater confidence. It allows me to imagine the fiction in a physical setting, beyond nostalgia or mythology. They walked here because they were here. Not "me" in "that amazing summer that turned me from a boy into a man" but a crew of names and personalities composited from life and imagination whose interactions build a story called The Monsoons.

I had deliberately not compiled a soundtrack album for this excursion the way I had when I started drawing The Monsoons. That mixer was made of hits 'n' memories from 1979 and had some great stuff in there like The Dickies and Jonathon Richman along with a lot of stuff that sounded like the radio (which I also loved). I didn't bring that along because I needed this to happen in the present tense. I needed (not fond of this word) to be mindful. The old songs just crank up the nostalgia and I needed to know the location now. That was mostly done by being busy with the camera. But there was something else.

All day, at dawn on the Picnic Bay jetty, the ride to Horseshoe Bay and Arcadia, I was increasingly aware of a feeling. It was something that started early in the day. I just hadn't marked it. I'd started this entry with it but then realised it was better at the end as, by the time the next one starts, I am aware of it. Not only was I gathering information and dispelling the nostalgia to get a clear connection with the place and the story, I was relaxing, having fun: I was on holiday. The first indication went like this:

I woke at 4 in the morning. I'd worked on a hangover after all that physical tax and exhaustion and wine dropped me fathoms down in sleep's great ocean. I surfaced slowly to the sounds of birds. A shriek here and whistle there. A squawk and ... well, I found my old notes so here they are:

Not even borrowed light through the blinds. I lay still, woozy from drinking and heavy sleep. I began to discern minimal detail of the room and then, rising though my slowly pulsing head came the sound. Whistles of curlews finding echoes. Bright unidentified voices of birds like lost children screaming in the dark. Clucks and scraping nearby which, when it found some reverb, became a flying fox's squeals and shrieks. And more detail appeared, chirps, caws, searing ululations and squawks turning the aural blackness into a canopy of bright cacophony that told distances outside and the dark between them. Rapid footfalls  scurried on the roof and a banging against a sheet of metal. Possum? I had left my field recorder at home, thinking I wouldn't be able to use it and the memory of that made me wince. This was treasure and it was slipping from me. I dozed as it continued, fading back to sleep.