The Boat

Ok, look at this:

This was taken sometime in the 70s to the early 80s from the ferry on the way to Magnetic Island, where the Monsoons is set. My sister Marina sent me this photo. Between the ages of zero to twenty, I crossed the bay to the island an incalculable number of times and can never remember seeing such a thing. I would have remembered it. It would have delighted me. It  would have thrilled me so much I would have a clear and shivery memory of it now. Dolphins swimming along side the boat to my favourite place from childhood. The only thing better would have been sharks but you can't have everything. Actually, I have seen sharks in the water up north but I have never seen dolphins, ever, once. It gets worse.

This picture was offered as an aid to my imagining Magnetic Island. Not only does it depict something I have no memory of but it is taken not at but FROM something I can only remember with great difficulty, which is almost a character in the story and which it is very hard to find pictures of: the Hayles ferry!

Really? There are no pictures at all on the internet? I mean at all? Well, there are and there aren't. I can find any number of photos of a lot of different boats used to carry Townsvillites from shore to shore but most of them are pre world war one. A few are from the between war period, a further few from the late 70s. From what I can glean, the boat that would have taken me over was one of about five that served around that time or were decomissioned a little later (after they might have served other short sea routes). All of these are infuriatingly different from each other.

Still, if a drawing I do for The Monsoons can't be disproven by an internet search I'm not risking too much by taking what I can find and just making it up, am I? No. But here's the problem. It won't feel like the thing I knew.

My memory is mostly from childhood when everything was bigger and stays that way until cruel circumstance intervenes. I have a friend from my uni days who will attempt to contradict every definite statement I make. She got away with it a few times and it doesn't matter how many times the decision must be overturned by arbitration she still tries this on. All she ever does, apart from the odd occasion when she's actually right (it happens), is guess. What she tries to do is convince me that I'm guessing or under a misapprension. But the thing about the boat is that I know I'm wrong.

All I can be right about is how big the thing felt when I was a kid and then, as an adolescent like the characters in The Monsoons, how it would much smaller it would have felt. I can't even picture how big a seventeen year old (even a short one like my protagonist, Gail) would look at its rail or standing on its bow. I can't avoid having it there.

So what I'm going to have to do is draw it until it feels right and then that will be the boat: a construction that never existed but one which ought to be right.

Then I found this. It wasn't there before.

That's it.