Only the rider’s heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.

Judith Wright, ‘Bora Ring’ (1946)

When I was very young my parents built a house on a wooded hill with a strangely bare top. This was at the end of a country road that passed across a level plain, then out along one side of a precipitous divide cut by a river, the hills on our side matched uncannily by those on the other so that, when the light was right, you could imagine the space between was a mirror, and that you were looking back at yourself through miles of air. At the centre of our hilltop stood a tall and spreading gum, an old but vigorous tree where magpies nested in spring and learned, after a year or so, not to swoop us. We didn’t know the age of the gum, nor, at first, why our hilltop was bare. When my parents had gone to look at it the first time, my father was instantly convinced. Something in the hill’s extremity, the drive to reach it, the brawling river, and the mirror-land beyond, matched a story he was telling himself about his life — and so our lives, too. Despite the distance from town and the exposure to damaging winds, it was the perfect place to build a house, a high seat left unfilled by providence, one my father — and so, we — would fill.

Digging the foundations, my mother and father discovered a reason for the hill’s strange bareness. Beneath a shallow scalp of bracken, they hit a layer of basalt, inches thick, the skull beneath the skin of the hill, evidence of the eruption of a nearby volcano millions of years ago — the vast act of causation that set the bones of the place, invested its soils, funnelled its clouds, determined where its forests would grow, its waters run. Putting in the posts, my mother and father cut through the rock with bar and sledge, making piles of the plate-sized pieces, working through the heat of the day in a cloud of flies and rock dust while my brother and I slept or sheltered in a sweltering tent. I have an early memory of the dull peal of hammer on bar, the clash of metal and rock, the gunpowder smell of chipped basalt, and my father’s pleading exertions as he fought the volcano’s dispensation across that unimaginable stretch of time. The basalt that had resisted the raising of our house was put to use reinforcing its foundations.

Beneath the rock was deep black soil, rich and ripe from long sleep. The garden, once the beds had been hacked open for planting, grew with a strange, prehistoric vigour. Having had nothing to think about for millennia, the soil produced marvels — wrist-thick carrots, towering stands of brassicas, ribbed sails of silverbeet unfurling, runner beans overtopping their frames, deep-set potatoes in inexhaustible seams — all of it seething with minerals, unsettlingly muscular in its reaching for the sun. Fed on the garden, and on those things trying to feed on the garden, our chickens laid eggs with double yolks, sunset orange, firm to the touch.

We grew, too. As the house went up — frames made of local hardwood, floors made of the rare, red timber that drove invasion — we grew to fill it: tall, bright, vigorous children with a shallow history and a blank future. With no real connection to the place — my parents, both from Sydney, had moved us here on a complicated whim — and no real purpose or business with the land we neither farmed nor conserved, we could only love it as strangers; as something strange. My father hung a tyre swing from the gum, but something kept us from using it. When my brother and I played in the clearing the house now presided over — cricket, soccer, games of catch and chase — something kept us close to the front steps. It felt bad to stray too far past the gum. When we did, in pursuit of a ball or a toy, or to collect kindling for the stove, there were cold spots, currents of air, and a certain pressure where the bracken met the tree line, as if we were walking against the grain of the place. Turning back to the house, something dogged our heels, kept us moving, pushed us through the door; made us hurry to shut it.

To view the house, the yard, the garden, it was better, I found, to look at it from the trees that encircled it, then walk carefully through the brush to where the gravelled line of the driveway skirted the clearing, curving back on itself to arrive at the carport and the comfort of the backstep. Walking this way I saw rosellas, fantails, wallabies, echidnas, and, with my father, found the display ground of a satin bowerbird, a cleared space with a bower — two stands of thin sticks curving towards each other like hands almost meeting in prayer — made splendid with a collection of blue objects, including our clothes pegs and the lids of NORCO milk bottles. If we waited long enough, if we were silent and still, the maker of this perfect structure would return to preside over his installation, dazzling us with the quality of his attention and the richness of his midnight plumage, his carpet of objects spreading and intensifying his genius, enchanting and ensnaring mate after mate, a procession of lovely green females who came to his jarring, insinuating call. Similarly enchanted and ensnared, my father took the bower as a symbol — a kind of omen — and recalled it to me often, even years later when the house was broken and sold, and the land and its bower lost to us.

But as the house — his house — rose up, my father seemed to sink — to lose energy, diminish, fall into himself, his dream of a country seat falling prey to small errors, invasions, setbacks, disappointments, and shadow-touches of bad luck. With the establishment of the garden, snakes came. First it was red-belly blacks — handsome, benign snakes with pinched noses and comic body language that fell asleep in sunny places, hooping away from our footsteps, perpetually surprised. Avid egg-eaters, they denned in the chicken coop. I remember watching my father kill one there; its terrible thrashing when he split it in two with his axe; the way the thin ribs showed through the tissue and entrails; the rusty blood; the rich, red belly; the long, long time it took to die; the nerves that kept it twitching hours after my father flicked it onto the compost heap with a spade.

After the red-bellies came more dangerous visitors. Playing with toy animals in the long grass by the side of the house, I heard a rustling and had a glimpse of something yellow and brown starting to uncoil — and then my mother was there, hurling me aside and beating whatever it was with a mattock, teeth clenched in pure primate fear — a tiger snake, summoned, perhaps, by the plastic tiger I held in my small fist. In the woodpile on the verandah, funnel-web spiders, jet-black, the size of a child’s hand, emerged from chain-sawed logs, seeking fresh habitat in our shoes, probing the gap between the threshold and the front door. We learned to tap our boots out before putting them on, chilled by the example of our neighbour, the farmer, after whom the road we lived on was named — a vast, frightening man almost seven feet tall, whose dogs snapped at me whenever he and my father met along the fence line. Rising one morning before dawn to milk his herd, he was bitten when he stepped into his gumboots. The volume and potency of the venom were such that only his immense size saved him. He was helicoptered to hospital, and returned changed, his moods more erratic, his hands prone to cramps and spasms.

Deciding to build where he did — on the peak of the hill with very little shelter to the southwest, against my mother’s instincts and advice — my father left the house dangerously exposed. Fierce winds bowed the plywood walls, warped the glass in the windows, tore at the corrugated roof. The fireplace had been built too deep and gave little heat. The wood stove was temperamental, fuel-hungry, a liability. The water heater barely stretched to a single hot bath. Shivering through the winter nights, listening to the westerly howl in the white limbs of the gum, my brother and I caught cold after cold, burned up with fever, and spiked the sleep of the household with hacking, barking coughs.

Drawn by the basalt, lightning strikes were commonplace, falling, at times, from a clear sky. Eating dinner on the verandah as cumulus clouds banked and towered incalculably to the east, we were startled by a sharp crack, then pressed to the table by a crushing explosion of thunder. When we could stand, we found a near-perfect circle burnt through one of the clear polycarbonate roofing panels above us — the bolt had landed less than two metres from where we sat. Another strike hit freshly excavated earth out beyond the carport, spraying rocks and gravel with sufficient force to blow holes in the concrete water tank. Finally, a bolt struck the dead tree near the telegraph pole, leapt from trunk to pole, then passed along the wire and into the house, annihilating the wall-mounted rotary telephone, the table beneath it, and the wall beside it, blasting through into the bathroom, showering the house with gyprock dust and fragments of hardwood. In the bathroom we marvelled at the toothpaste tube, impaled with a perfect line of dart-sized splinters. It took weeks to find all the pieces of the exploded telephone. Parts of the receiver were lodged in the rafters.

Whether it was the lightning or the marked increase in the amount he was smoking against the sense of his dream slipping, something in all this began to affect my father’s internal electricity. Subject to epilepsy since an accident in his teens, he’d been free of seizures for years, to the point where he considered himself cured. Suddenly, they became almost regular. Waking from my midday nap one afternoon, I heard a sound I’d never heard before coming from my parents’ room across the landing, a frenzied scrabbling and soughing of bed clothes, and a gasping, diaphragmatic babbling. Alarmed, I ran into the room. On the bed my father lay on his side, eyes rolling, mouth sputtering, hands locking and unlocking in tortured, frightening shapes. My mother stood over him, intent on preventing him from injuring himself. In the aftermath of the seizure, my father wept, but reassured me this was simply a physical effect — he was not sad. His fingers still jumped and writhed; we laughed together as I helped him put on his socks.

As the house neared completion, my father dreamed more and worked less. A qualified carpenter and builder, he refused most employment, quarrelled with contractors, squandered what little money we had on projects that did nothing to improve the house, but rather seemed aimed at deferring its being finished and the reckoning — with the land, his life, himself — that would come with such an ending. Missing the ocean, he decided we must have a dam to swim in. Scorning the muddy oblongs of our farming neighbours, he conjured visions of a crystal pool, artfully landscaped with boulders and tree ferns, its banks free from the unholy traffic of hooves, a pure vehicle of leisure untainted by practicality or primary production, waters sparkling with windfall light. An excavator came, a dam was dug. Water was pumped in and quickly drained away. The bottom was unsound. My father lost interest, returning to his armchair, the television, smoke. I would join him there, sometimes, climbing into his lap, taking comfort in his momentary peace, blinking away the cloying scent of dope.

Sometimes my father would take me on walks to the west, beyond the boundary of our land. Down a slope, across a narrow paddock owned by the farmer, through barbed wire fences and fields of paper daisies, we would reach the skirt of a gently sloping hill, heavily wooded. The trees were different here — sassafras, coachwood, black wattle, white beech — remnants of the cool rainforests that had covered the region before they were stripped for rare timbers, ringbarked, torched for pasture. Under the canopy the light was green. Sprays of epiphytes lit up dark trunks like fanlights. Moss fell and hung in ropes and curtains. Tree ferns, the tallest I’d seen, grew in paired lines following the slope, a processional of woolly columns splendid with palmy capitals and curlicued shoots. Orchids bloomed strangely, feeding on the moist air. Turquoise butterflies courted pale flowers. Birdsong was varied, rapturous, constant. My father called it The Wilderness, and seemed to need it as a place beyond his interventions. When we came here, we spoke of making burrows, treehouses, nests.

On our hill, the garden fell increasingly into neglect. The macadamias and fruit trees planted in the cleared land along the steep drive were overwhelmed with bracken and wire-vine, pulled down or choked by weeds. The tree fern my father had poached from the bank of the brawling river to the east to mark the path to the front door was dead or dormant. The house’s inner walls remained unpainted or unpanelled, showing bare gyprock or rough hardwood frames. The internal stairs had no banister; my brother and I raced up and down on all-fours. The front steps were uneven, a rush-job, jerry rigged with stumps and boards that flexed and shifted underfoot. The verandah that stretched the length of the façade and partway round both sides had solid rails but was unfinished — a single line of rope stretched across the gaps. Riding my cheap plastic tricycle one morning, I saw a flash of something just beyond the rails — a rufous fantail, flitting between a sapling and the trunk of a tallowwood. Pushing closer on bare feet, I stretched out against the safety rope until the front wheel of the trike went over the edge. I remember it perfectly — the sudden lack of resistance as I passed between rail and rope; the ground rising towards me, tufts of grass and lichen-flecked rock; the stunning impact; the after-vacancy; the mineral taste of my concussion — how it made me think for a moment that I had eaten the rock. I remember the vividness of the sky when I rolled over; the colours I saw when the pain arrived; the way it made me shout rather than cry. I’d fallen two metres and landed face-first on a small basalt boulder, almost losing my right eye. My father stretched a second line of rope.

Somehow the beauty of the place made it all worse. Waking early, my brother and I could watch the winter sun illumine the gum, watch the bark glow, see the dew fall from the leaves, hear the chiming notes of crimson rosellas, the confident descant of the magpies. Perhaps once a year it snowed, white flakes falling in flurries and circles, slanting in from the southwest on a stern wind. One cold morning we saw three foxes, a mother and two cubs, pick a watchful path across the lawn, quiet breaths pluming in the frigid air, until the cubs found a deflated football my brother had left out. Some inner spring released, they dropped all caution and fell to playing with the football, nosing and pouncing on it over and over, wrestling, yipping, barking — until some noise from the house set them instantly on guard and they ghosted off to the west.

In spring the creeks and gullies creaked and droned with frogs. Mist and low clouds set jewels on every leaf. Clear water ran across grass. Cress grew. Swallows nested in culverts. Flocks of straw-necked ibis spiralled under heavy rainclouds. Ducks floated on every dam, rested on every riverbank, dabbled in every stream. Herons stalked the edges, eating frogs. Calves frisked at every fence, hid behind their mothers, screamed as they were loaded into trucks. Snakes came out, found sun, coiled up, basked. The bowerbird stole our blue pegs. Swamp wallabies haunted the tree line around the house, hoping to graze the lawn. Mobs of eastern greys drew up in sunny paddocks, flipped ears against the flies, scratched, cuffed joeys, sighed. Sometimes at night or very early, we heard the thin howls of dingoes.

In summer, there were doves — wonga pigeons, fruit doves, brown cuckoo-doves, white-headed pigeons — and raptors — grey goshawks nesting leggily in a gum, nankeen kestrels perched on fenceposts or floating motionless overhead, black-shouldered kites hovering tirelessly, pausing, plunging, stooping. Wedge-tailed eagles passed over from the east at speed, raising their high, fluting cries. My father and I disturbed one over a kill — a frightening angel, scaled and taloned, clumsy on the ground — the strange, jumbled form of a hare coming apart beneath it as it struggled to take off.

The grass yellowed, the heat peaked, the mirror hills turned sere, cars and cattle trailed dust, and then autumn brought storms, rising wind, unspeakable sunsets, and the high, funereal voices of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, ghost singers calling down rain. We were failing all of it — all the beauty, the superflux, the mixed economies of nature, the traditional horrors and felicities of pastoral life. None of it helped.

The unfinished house was falling into silence, absorbing effort, pleasure, cheer, darkening despite its windows. In these years I dreamed consistently of snakes — long, black, and undulating, segmented like centipedes and worms, tined with protruding ribs, winding down into the soil, into a thin and sandy hole that compelled my hand then dragged at my fingers, pulling me into some thinner, darker place. Waking up before dawn, the long, lightless hours seemed similarly to stretch. I became afraid of the dark, then bored, then afraid again. I waited for some sound below the wind, some stuttered footstep on the stairs, the rasp and tick of claws, a pair of yellow eyes in the limbs of the gum. This dark trailed me as the house woke up, spread its tendrils through the day, gave the shadows of the house a colder, blacker cast.

My mother, already overwhelmed with the work of cooking, cleaning, and raising two young children, all of it made more difficult by the house, worked harder, made the money stretch — baked, grew, preserved, mended — and finally suggested that she might get a job at the health food store in town. The suggestion, however practical and carefully phrased, made my father livid. He was the breadwinner, he was the builder, he would provide — if we just supported him — really supported him — believed in him — stopped undermining him — stopped tearing him down — his vision would come to pass. Turning his shame at the increasingly undeniable fact that he was unequal, inadequate to his dream — and that that dream was, at heart, empty, a suburbanite parody of Eden, a freehold destiny that could be planted anywhere but would never take root — to rage, he would rave for hours, his voice raised almost to a scream.

His grasp slipping on us and the house, my father began to demand greater control, to exert more violent ownership over my mother. When he eventually gave his permission to her working Saturday mornings at the health food store, he mocked her for how little money she brought in. We were discouraged from having visitors, whether friends or family. My mother was, increasingly, forbidden from going out, her spending scrutinized, her constancy — to him, to us, to the house — constantly under question. She became, inevitably, more remote, more unknowable. My father became more violent, holding her down and punching the bed beside her face; once, to my memory, pushing her down in the yard under the gumtree, screaming at her until my brother ran out to intervene, throwing his eight-year-old self between them. I watched from the verandah, numb, terrified, but keenly attentive to the lineaments of my father’s red face, my scrutiny whetted with something like hate.

One night in early winter I decided to run away. I can’t remember, now, exactly what catalysed this decision, only that it was some injustice my infant heart found intolerable — that drove me out of bed and down the stairs, where I put my coat on over my flannel pyjamas and packed a banana in a plastic bag. In the loungeroom, in the comfortable light of the fire, my mother was reading a book on astrology while my father smoked and watched television. On the threshold, shaking with nerves, I found it hard to speak, to disturb the discrete, adult worlds of their separate absorptions, so it was a long moment before they felt my eyes and turned to notice me. My father was angry I was out of bed, my mother concerned, but they both laughed when I explained, tearfully, that I was very sorry, but I had to go. They wished me well, warned me to be careful, and hoped I’d come home soon — they were glad to see I had a banana for the road. They reminded me of the story of my brother running away at a similar age, that it was normal, that they’d done it too as kids, and that they were curious, in an affectionate way, to see how far I’d get now that it was my turn.

In the way of children, I knew all this and didn’t know it at the same time — knew, fundamentally, that I wouldn’t get far, but knew, with equal intensity, that I must go. In my head I could see the journey as a series of junctions and tributaries. I would set out tonight, walk to the bottom of the driveway, then to the top of our road, then along the main road into town, stopping, perhaps, at the farm of our friends who lived ten minutes’ drive away (where my mother would find refuge when she finally left my father) to eat my banana, but carrying on, ultimately, to the coast, where all the towns would be shimmering and winking in the blue night, and I would sleep dreamlessly beneath the hoop pines, lulled by the sound of the ocean and the soft, coastal wind. I knew to be cautious of certain things, like trucks. I was worried about dogs and the police — and other things I didn’t name and refused to think about, things that might rear up from a creek bed or a stand of black trees. Closing the front door to keep the warmth in, I put on my gumboots and stepped out with the determined courage of a swimmer in turbid waters, refusing to consider the depth.

It was a long journey in the memory of my little feet: across the clearing, past the central gum, and past the circle of trees to where the roughly gravelled drive sloped sharply down to the road. The night was clear, the hilltop haloed with stars. To the southeast, a half-moon was halfway up, picking out glitters in the basalt, drawing my shadow ahead of me. The trees were alive with the wind, the crunch of my steps covered by the voice of the southerly in the leaves. Still I was aware of the noise I made — my coat, my breathing, the rustling of the plastic bag. Descending the slope, I was startled by the hunched shapes of macadamias drowning slowly in vines, then spooked by the mailbox, fashioned from the woolly stump of a turpentine, invested with presence by the sharp-cut moon.

Reaching the road, I stopped to catch my breath. The moonlight was stronger here. Leached of colour, the road was almost white. To the north, I knew, it cut around a series of cleared hills, dipped to cross the creek we pumped water from, then climbed up to the farmer’s house, his aviary full of trapped rosellas, his many chained-up dogs. To the south, it skirted the base of our hill, bridged a marsh near the pig farm, then rose through thickly wooded pasture to the tabletop plain and the main road beyond. The thought of passing between those darkly gathered trunks, that stark flatness, made my pulse race. There was something awful in the point on both horizons where the road disappeared, some occulting of vision that suggested unknown dangers in the complicated shadows of an old loading ramp, a mouldering set of yards, a line of twisted windbreak pines on a bank overgrown with blackberries and moss.

I crossed the road and looked east, bracing myself against the barbed-wire fence, hands fitting easily between the spikes. At the bottom of the valley the river was running like a train. It was dark down there. The steep paddock gave way to tree ferns and scrub and a massive burnt out stump, with board-marks where the cedar-cutters had balanced to fell it, crouched midway, a natural denning place for wild dogs, phantom big cats, Prokofiev’s wolf. I kept my eyes on the horizon line, on the whalebacks of the mirror hills, clear-felled flanks stitched with powerlines, poles stark and cruciform under the moon. The wind was rising, carrying the bellow of distant cattle. The lights of a farm ute traversed the summits, winking in and out of view. I felt calm and lonely watching it, imagining myself in the warm cab with the farmer, returning home to a quiet, orderly house full of yellow light, border collies, and cleanly purpose.

But even as I watched, half-dreaming, a glow suffused the eastern sky, pale and sourceless. Then a vast cloud, white and full of lightning, began to rise above the hilltops like a colossal limb, the moving emissary of an unimaginable body, changing, roiling, shaping. Now a river, a cedar, a serpent, a fist, it drew all light into itself, reaching across impossible distances for the moon. As the dragon cloud unfurled, I felt some shift inside myself, as if a spinning thing had stopped. Alone at the fence line, I forgot to be scared or wretched, angry or afraid and was lost in the motion of titanic bodies — of clouds, hills, rivers, valleys, forests, and living rock — moving in concert or opposition, resting in extance as in a calm sea.

As the cloud obscured the moon, something dragged at the tail of my eye. There was a prickling in my peripheral sense, a drawing down, a heavy presence growing heavier, a gathering of air. Against myself my eyes moved from the horizon to the roots of the hills, to the unstill, unceasing river, up the steep paddock to the stump. In the darkening night, it seemed to grow, pulling at my eyes with near-perceptible force. Senses swimming, I seemed to see the patterns on its grave-like face shifting and arranging themselves into a deeper darkness that opened into a further, darker darkness, and that darkness seemed to open, and I seemed to see within it— I dropped my hands, stepped silently backwards, and ran.

There was no time to cry out — there was simply a desperate, scrambling flight with the terrifying certainty of pursuit. On the steep driveway I fell once in the rough gravel, bruising my knee, but did not stop until I cleared the front steps and shut the door behind me. “That was quick,” my father said, amused. My mother laughed and put her hands in my cold hair. Mute with terror, I could not reconstruct what had happened: the hills, the cloud, the stump; what I had or had not seen. My father carried me upstairs to bed. I dreamed flat dreams of pencils, drawing, and my book full of coloured plates of Australian birds.

Eventually my mother left and took us with her, then came back, then left again. My parents separated and agreed to shared custody. My mother moved to a loft over a small, converted barn on a daffodil farm. When we visited her, we slept under the eaves, stars shining sharply through the slanted skylight. My father stayed on in the unfinished house, until the silence became too much, and he struck out for the coast. My mother moved soon after, remarrying, having a child with her new husband, restarting her life. We had held on for only five years.

For a while, the house was tenanted: first by a woman who loved it and made an offer on it (my father, still grieving it, refused to sell) and then by a wild-looking couple with two young children, who, after a while, became sporadic with the rent. Having refused to engage an agent or draw up a lease, my father took my brother and I with him when he went to tell them they would have to leave. On the drive up from the coast he explained that friends of his had tipped him off — the couple were addicts. We must, he told us, be very careful not to provoke them. To justify their eviction, he had invented a fiction — his sister, he would claim, needed somewhere to live, and he would need them to leave the house so he could finish it.

We parked on the drive near the gum. The yard was littered with scrap iron and motorbike parts. A rusted-through trailer lay on its side near the rock pile, bed pierced with a totem-tennis pole. Walking up the path, I noticed a single green shoot curling tentatively from the top of the sunburnt tree fern. The house was unchanged. We found a young boy on the front step, one leg encased entirely in a plaster cast. He told us his parents weren’t awake yet, and that he’d broken his leg falling off his motorbike. My father knocked; my brother and I retreated to the car. A blonde man answered the door in football shorts. He was shirtless, barefoot, and, even from the car, visibly angry. He and my father spoke for a while, their voices getting louder, until the man began to push my father, his mouth twisted into a snarl: “Who the fuck told you we were junkies?” My father retreated, hands raised, almost tripping over the roots of the gum. My brother leapt out of the passenger seat to intervene, stepping between the two men. I stayed in the car and watched through the window, numb, until my father and brother got back in and we drove away. In the resulting court case, the couple made much of the unfinished state of the house, how it wasn’t approved or safe; how their young son had fallen down the front stairs and broken his leg.

After this, the house stood vacant. Despite my mother’s demands that he should sell it — her second husband had had some sort of breakdown and weighed like another child on our household, so we were, again, desperately short of money — my father resisted. He would not live in it; he would not finish it; he would not prepare it for sale. Until one year in early June a storm of unusual intensity built up in the west. Gale-force winds raked the countryside, felling trees and scattering livestock. On its exposed hilltop, the house held firm, but a tree fell on my parents’ old bedroom, snapping rafters, smashing windows, puncturing the wall. My father took us up to survey the damage, crying openly at the extent of it, at how much it would cost him to fix, at how beautiful his dream had been — at how no one had supported him in it. My brother and I nodded doggedly as we prepared beds for the night. It was cold in the house, so we camped beside the fireplace. I did not sleep. The house sold, well below its value. We were, in one sense, free of it.

*

Decades later, married, expecting a child, and having reached a terminal point in my academic career, I moved with my wife back to the region my parents had chosen for their experiment — on Gumbaynggirr country, at the far eastern edge of the New England Tablelands. Coming back, sensing the old shadows, I read everything I could, and began to learn something of the history of the district my parents and so many others had chosen precisely because it seemed to have no history at all. We’d built our house on a battlefield, within walking distance of terrible atrocities. The creek we pumped water from was a tributary of a stream named after a shepherd who’d been killed by an unknown group of Aboriginal warriors, perhaps in reprisal for mass poisonings committed by another man who held property further to the west. The old parish map recorded the same name for our land and the farms around it. In retaliation, local landholders, many of them veterans of extra-Imperial wars, rallied and set out on horseback, heavily armed. They rounded up Aboriginal men, women, and children of multiple Nations and drove them over the cliffs formed by the crater of the volcano my mother and father had fought as they cut our foundations. This had taken place a few kilometres from our front door — even the slightest inquiry would have set the bones rattling beneath our feet.

I wondered, too, about the hilltop my father had chosen, its bareness, its single, central tree; the strange fact that no one had built there previously or held the land for long — it seemed to slip through many hands. I read about bora rings, dancing grounds, scar trees; about the place to the southwest where three nations met on the precipice of the crater, the watershed of several major rivers, and how the rocks drew lightning there. I checked National Parks maps, satellite pictures, and title claims. I was, I came to realise, trying to account for what I’d seen and felt that night — trying, perhaps, to add a specific transgression to the general one of our having taken the land so lightly — hunting up a ghost. Stricken with a complex form of colonial narcissism, I was chasing knowledge I had no business holding, about land I’d barely touched, for reasons I didn’t fully understand. And so I stopped looking for specific information on our hilltop and read with more care and less hunger — until, by chance, as a part of my new job, I attended a NAIDOC day event.

The day was presided over by two elders, one sunny and voluble, up from the coast, the other older, more guarded, arrived from the west. Of the two it was the sunny one who performed the Welcome, his demeanour changing instantly, the laughter vanishing from around his eyes. He spoke in Gumbaynggirr while the older man watched on, tapping his cane against his chin, and a woman to his left, his student, offered brief, murmured translations: “Don’t be angry”, he asked the country; “Don’t hurt us”, he implored. When the smoke passed over me, I realised it was the first time I had ever been welcomed to the place where I’d grown up — to the place, despite everything, I loved most. I felt an unexpected rush of emotion, a slow-spreading lightness in my limbs and head, and struggled to maintain my composure in front of my colleagues.

Later in the day we sat in a circle while the older man related the history of the tableland. In a soft, firm voice he recited the names of its prolific colonial murderers; of those farmers who had cheated and harassed his mother and father, his sister, himself; of the agony of working as a ring-barker, bringing down towering rainforest trees; of his parents forbidding their children to speak in their language for fear of the police; of his work as a veteran land rights campaigner, his meetings with politicians, his dazzling knowledge of property law; of his grandmother who told him why he had two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth, and prophesied the world ending in ruinous winds and sheets of flame. As he spoke, I saw faces in the audience become rigid or closed, and realised some were descendants of the men he’d named — men who’d withheld wages, shunned, terrorized, hunted, killed — who still held land. When he finished, some rushed from the room. He stayed seated, his face unchanged.

Ashamed, I stayed behind, gathering my bag and jacket, then walked over to his chair to thank him. He shook my hand and asked me where I came from. Here, I said, and explained that my parents had built a house on a wooded hill with a strangely bare top, towards the end of a road that crossed a level plain then ran above a loud river. He knew the road, he said, and the farmer it was named for — what was my family name? I told him. He did not know it — had we lived there long? No, I said, barely five years. And then my voice failed. I found it impossible to explain to this man what my family had been doing there. He smiled, remembering something: “Years ago some men from here and over west decided that spot across the river from you was the place to put the nation’s capital before Canberra. Went all in on it, spent lots of time and money. And now — nothing.” Rising to his feet, he took his stick and walked out.

The day ended with the sunny elder leading us in song, laughing delightedly as the descendants of the district’s great landholders struggled to pronounce Gumbaynggirr words and stay in tune. As we filed out, streaks of cloud gave way to heavy, incessant rain. I ran to the car. Sitting behind the wheel, rain hammering on the roof, windscreen white with mist, I saw it with such clarity: the cursed dream of freehold working through my father, and every piece of folly, poor husbandry, and neglect that followed. The stupidity of building on a bare hilltop; of letting the grass grow long around the house; of excavating with no knowledge of soil or geology; of letting young children play unsupervised on a building site; of thinking you could found your home, your church, your gleaming city on a rock or piece of land without knowing it; that you could speak your vision over the earth and expect the earth never to answer. And in the void at the heart of all these visions — of my father fighting the volcano and destroying his family; of those men from the west who saw the domes and spires of the nation’s capital floating above the tree ferns and the waves of the river at the base of our hill — I understood what had shown itself to me in the compounding darkness at the base of the stump. It was nothing — and that was what had scared me — there was nothing there.

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