I

It was the machine attached to someone’s arm that woke me up. That type of machine on wheels they use to monitor blood pressure, take your pulse, drip meds into you.
It was beeping loudly. They always seem to.

I became aware of feeling cold. Hospital cold. I was lying on my back. I felt like I was perfectly straight. I pulled the covers up to my neck. I nestled into the warmth of the bed as best I could but I still could feel the cold all around the room above me.

I kept very still. What else was there to do? At least I was back in familiar surrounds. Here, I know how things will play out. It’s my own version of being invaded and occupied. I reflected that myself, the mother I barely knew, my ancestors, and countless other Aboriginal people over the years have all had to contend with the glacial pace with which these colonial institutions ‘help’ people.

I turned my head and looked over to the side table. I saw the book I’d been trying to read—Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. I’d been struggling to get through the chapters. How about Growing Up a Fuckwit in Australia? I’d breeze through that; I’d be able to relate to my own kind. I’d also be a walk-up start to have a piece published in that—based on my outstanding record in the field of fuckwittery.

Usually, I get my resilience from thinking about how fucked up the outside world is. About how slight the difference is between the inside unwell us and outside functioning us. Often, there seems to be practically no difference at all, so far as I can tell.

You just spend time in hospitals and other health facilities because the experts think you should. I do admit though that in the lead up to this latest event, some of my ideas seemed a little erratic.
Is the boundary between being a leader or visionary and being a madman found among the stares of those gathered around you? If they focus intently on you, on every word you say, then are you a ‘leader’? And if they look away blankly, or (worse still) nervously glance at each other as you are delivering your shining truths then you are crazy?

Funny. You ask for a medication but they refuse you because they know best. Then, out of nowhere, they give it to you anyway without any request, again because they know best. I could have simply told them what I think will and won’t work for me, but they seem to be operating on their own program and so you become this kind of afterthought, this subject, to be acted upon—for mostly unclear ends.

I don’t even bother asking for anxiety medication anymore. A new nurse or doctor appears, so I open up, lie down, say ‘ahh’ and swallow the pill, as instructed. What’s the point of objecting or requesting? They know they can just override anything you need in any way they like.

Is there a more maddening, Kafkaesque place than a hospital? Where things happen so slowly, so mysteriously, in such an inhuman setting? I haven’t spent a lot of time in abattoirs, but the methodology of an abattoir and a hospital can’t be too dissimilar. Meat goes in one end, gets processed to the design of the wider population’s needs, and comes out the other end sanitised and neatly packaged.

So why not enjoy all the restful comfort this present slaughterhouse can offer?

II

I knew the morning shift had begun when two nurses strode past my room. I heard their muffled talking through the heavy door using their confident, business-as-usual voices.

Then with a sudden loud snap my door was opened. ‘Good morning, Mister Lake, how are you feeling?’ said the nurse quickly in that same friendly yet firm voice from outside. ‘You’ll be seeing our psychiatrist, Doctor Cindy Pendergast, soon.’

‘Oh, ok,’ I said.

Because of my act of treason at Botany Bay, I knew that her Doctor Cindy would have a lot of questions. Maybe she’d have questions about my increasingly subversive activities. Like subverting the cosy idea of everyone on this continent being happy little campers for their big British invasion called Australia. I’d wondered if I’d get any pushback, given how sensitive they are to terrorism these days.

The nurse left and the heavy metal door clanged shut behind her.

The room went quiet.

It was very uncomfortable, the waiting. I was still determined. Just as I’d been before when I talked to the police about the rightness of what I was doing. Yet, I questioned my sanity, again. This is where they get you—you think you aren’t mad but then they lock you in a mental ward. They’re halfway to breaking you down already, and they haven’t said a word, or proven a thing.

Anyway, what could they say? It is an invasion. If it isn’t, then what are all our people doing marching against invasion day, waving their fists in the air? What is a Union Jack doing on the flag of their country, which is so far away from Britain? Why does most everyone (including me—my DNA has been invaded too) look British? Is it me who is mad, or the historical predicament Aboriginal people are subjected to because of their ill-conceived invasion?

When Doctor Cindy finally did knock, I immediately said ‘come in’.

All of a sudden there she was.

Fuck, I thought, she’s beautiful. I felt uneasy, my resolve compromised. I’ll be swept away by her attention. I’m such a predictable fool. Growing Up a Fuckwit in Australia and all that.

‘Hello, how are you?’ she said in an almost embarrassed tone, as though she felt awkward for me in this situation. ‘Did you sleep okay?’

‘Oh yes, thank you, it was fine,’ I said. ‘I missed my morning train to get here for our meeting, and I’m not at all dressed for it, but I’m just fine.’

She laughed warmly. Sometimes when I make an attempt at lame humour it gets skipped over. Not with Cindy. She laughed at my joke and she’s gorgeous. I’m in love.

‘Gavin, I’m just here to do a preliminary debrief. To see if you’re okay. Nothing you say will ever be used against you by me or anyone here at the hospital. You’re safe. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Cindy, that sounds fine. I mean, I don’t believe I’ve done anything wrong so I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to answer for anyway,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Now to start with, have you had issues with substances before?’

‘Okay. Well, yes. Alcohol.’

‘Nothing else?’ She was looking down at her iPad.

‘Nope. Not really. Alcohol is my big downfall.’

‘You went to a rehab?’

‘Yes. A few years ago.’

‘You haven’t had a drink since?’

‘Nah. Totally clean. Seven years.’

‘That’s wonderful, well done,’ she said, looking up and meeting my eyes with a smile.

‘God yeah. I just can’t drink anymore. It’s like poison for me.’

‘You weren’t drunk last Friday night?’

‘No,’ I said, puzzled.

‘So why did you try to kill yourself?’

Until the beautiful Doctor Cindy reminded me, I had blocked out all memory of Friday night. When she raised it so starkly, so matter-of-factly, it was as though I’d been punched in the face.

How is it that trauma and shame can make the rational human mind erase something so recent, so important, so immediate, so … true?

III

‘Sorry to put that so bluntly. I’ve shocked you.’

‘No. Not at all. Um …’

The events of that night, my reasoning and my feelings, came to me all at once.

‘Well, the thing you have to understand, Doctor, is that—’

‘Cindy, please.’

‘Okay, Cindy, the thing that you need to understand is that whatever happened then isn’t separate from what happened with my mother.’

I took a deep breath. ‘I caught the train up to Sydney on Wednesday. That was a big deal for me. I’m adopted and I’d finally got in touch with my mum. We had a few phone calls. The last was the weekend prior to my arrival.’

‘How long had you been in contact?’

‘Oh, maybe a month or so. She wanted me to visit right away but I couldn’t just drop everything at once down there.’

‘Down where?’

‘In Albury. Where my adoptive parents live. Albury is where I grew up and where I’ve been living again the past few years. So, I arrange it all, I get a room to stay in near Central, check in, and then head down to see Mum.’

‘She’s nearby?’

‘At La Perouse. I got myself dressed up. You really don’t know what it was like. I was terrified.’

‘You must have been.’

‘I mean, you’re meeting your mother for the first time at the age of forty-one. How do you prepare for that?’

‘You can’t. No rules. You just do your best, no expectations.’

‘That’s what it’s all about—expectations. That’s why I reacted so intensely, you know. I had a lot of expectations about my mother. I’ve dreamt about this all my life if I’m honest.’

‘Totally understandable. What happened when you went to La Perouse?’

‘Well, I had Mum’s address—and I went there. I was to meet my sister there as well.’

‘Had you spoken to her before that?’

‘No, never. Seeing her was going to be one of the big surprises. My mother and I planned that.’ I paused. ‘So, I get there and there’s a lady waiting there looking a bit preoccupied. A young lady.’

‘Not your mother?’

‘No. My sister Cammi. She introduced herself in a fairly distant way. A bit distracted, you know. I felt a little taken aback because I thought there would be a whole lot of tears and hugs and all that.’

‘The problem is that it’s all so individual. You never know …’

‘So, we introduce each ourselves and then she interrupts me, saying, “Gavin, I hate to have to tell you this but Mum passed away on Monday night.’

‘Oh my god,’ exclaimed Cindy. ‘How? What happened?’

I think then my body slumped, re-thinking the scene.

‘Well, Mum took her life.’

Cindy paused as if trying to find a place of comprehension. She looked down.

‘I’m so so sorry, Gavin. Can you wait here for one moment? Are you okay? Do you need anything? I’m sorry, but they didn’t tell me about any of this.’

‘It’s okay, Cindy, they wouldn’t have known.’

She nodded. She walked to the door, held it open, paused, looked back at me, then walked out. The door closed with a loud clank.

For some reason, music came into my room through a small speaker in the roof I hadn’t noticed before. I’d thought it was an air vent. The song was INXS ‘Burn For You’. Even though I like that song, having that come on was all the more remarkable for the fact I’d been listening to Dekadance on my phone for the entire last week, especially during the trip up to Sydney. It had been kind of burned into my brain, even as I made my way on the 392 bus down to Lapa when I went down to see Mum that day.

Spooky that the song was being piped directly into my room right now. It was in my brain already. Was I really losing my mind? There was no way I could mention the coincidence or they would think I was crazy. Still …

After a while, Cindy strode back into the room looking re-professionalised.

‘Gavin, I’ve just spoken to Doctor Lewis, the chief psychiatrist here. If you don’t mind, we’d like to just let you rest for the rest of the day and we can resume our chat tomorrow if you like.’
‘Is everything okay?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, it’s just that we weren’t aware of the circumstances around your mother and given all that, we’d like to re-assess to get everything sorted out more clearly. Just so we don’t put you through needless stress, if you understand?’

I felt reassured by what Cindy said. I still didn’t trust her; people in these situations are usually most interested in what I call towelling. Covering their arses, like you do with a towel. But she could have just disregarded my story and ploughed on. Instead, she seemed shocked, and in a way I kind of felt for her. It threw her off, and that showed she was caring. Human. That felt reassuring.

‘That’s fine, Cindy. Please, don’t worry about me. Besides, this gives me time to think about what happened on Wednesday too. In a way, you’ve helped me. Thank you,’ I said with a smile.

IV

With nothing else to do after Cindy left, I slid my hands along the contours of the bedspread in front of me. I was still startled. That old institutional feeling. INXS had stopped.

What I hadn’t begun to mention to Cindy, and what was going to be an insurmountable task of reaching into my shattered psyche and describing what had led me to collapse so completely, was that I had spent the past six months of my life embracing the reality of my Aboriginality.

I had always known about it. I always felt that there was no other place for me to belong to than in Sydney. Here. When I was younger and nihilistic I felt there was nowhere else to go. But as I got older, it was that I didn’t need to be anywhere else—unlike so many gubbah people who live on the coastal edge of this giant southern continent, as if pondering their lands of origin—which lay somewhere beyond.

Is this why white people are so possessive of ‘their’ beaches, because they make them feel closer to ‘home’?

I feel completely the opposite. For me, this is it. This island is the universe. On the few occasions I’ve had the chance to leave the continent I couldn’t wait to return home. Home is often stark, empty, lonely, but it is home. It makes sense.

And I’d found out about my primordial connection to it a year or so earlier. It came in the form of a government document which, among all the other regular adoptee information about my parents eye colour and occupation, read:

Your birth mother CHERYL GAARI MILTON is of Aboriginal ancestry.

What does one do with completely unexpected information like that? Is there a hotline to ring? When I showed my white adoptive mother, she looked at me all strange as though I’d told her I’d been diagnosed with cancer.

Not helpful.

I didn’t know what to do next. I was paralysed with fear.

I did the only thing I felt I could do—retreat to my world of anonymity. I was no longer sure of my state-imposed adoptive white identity and had no idea about how to be black. So I turned to books and reading and the internet. This seemed safe and gave me time and space to try to learn.

I began following activist sites. I became interested in the fight for land rights, for secure Aboriginal housing, for justice. I empathised with stolen generations people. In a way, I too felt removed from family and culture and identity.

I felt an anger burn deep inside me about my past, fuelled by the travesty of being born into a society in which I had no past, no background. I was a constructed white. I’d turned out a self-loathing unit who knew what I didn’t accept of my identity but not what I did. I felt numb, except when despair or anger cornered me.

I applied the revolutionary zeal of my undergraduate Marxist days at uni to my new circumstance. I looked for hope. Perhaps I could identify by bringing hope to my fellow, yet still-estranged-from-their-own-mob Kooris? Find a way to belong before my eventual grand homecoming to community. What a day of joys and sorrows that would be!

I began agitating. White Australia had a lot to answer for. It was so clearly a criminal enterprise. A big, bad, British invasion. A fact’s a fact and all that.

I went to forums, treaty negotiation seminars. Who is he? You could see the puzzled look on the faces of the old people. ‘I’m Koori,’ I would say. ‘I don’t know who my mob is, they won’t tell me.’ They sympathised. I was so confident that the gaps in my story would be filled in that the only question that mattered, who I belonged to, was just a trivial side point.

I wrote an essay. The ‘Sovereign Koori manifesto’. I printed it out. I handed it to people at NAIDOC celebrations as they were lining up to get their sausage and bread. I was so sure of the rightness and truth of my cause—it became my identity.

I went too far. I pissed off other Koori people who were healthily grounded in their community and balanced the burning need for justice and sovereignty with their practical community obligations. I had none of those obligations, they’d been stolen from me by the invasion. I was overeager to be Koori. I lacked the patience which every elder I spoke to advised me I needed.

I felt that my manifesto made some strong points. But it was the appeal to certain forms of ‘direct action’—born out of a fairly justifiable frustration—that landed me in trouble.

V

‘Fucking hell, brah,’ said one sister in our online activist forum when I mentioned what I was planning for the Cook sestercentenary. ‘Them cops are dogs but you think we haven’t had enough misery?’

No-one seemed to be interested in fighting the good fight so I took it into my own hands. There wasn’t a lot of time left before April 29 so I couldn’t build the canoe I had planned, let alone pilot a symbolic traditional bark nawi across the bay.

In the end I had to go to Anaconda and buy a bright green plastic kayak. I was going to paint it brown, to at least look like bark, but the one tin of paint I bought—I’d woefully underestimated how much I’d need—barely covered half of one side. It was probably a pathetic sight but I couldn’t be concerned with that when I was making history.

A friend of mine who was into paddle boarding lent me her car for the day. Everyone was in Covid lockdown anyway, so she said take it.

I took the intervention of Covid-19, the great modern plague, as a sign from the ancestors. The arrival of Cook and the later First Fleet brought with it a plague which had caused so much suffering for our people. That original British plague was as much the invasion as any of the land theft crimes, the rapes and the murders were. It’s curious how much the smallpox catastrophe is skipped over by the heirs to the invasion. If it was their ancestors there’d be obelisks and cairns all over the place.

They were treating this latest plague with deadly seriousness though. I personally saw this plague as a sign that the dastardly Cook celebration must be resisted. It must be that the ancestors had let the plague come to thwart the planned festivities. They would have had a big display over at Kurnell, nothing surer. They can’t help themselves, even though they won’t readily admit they are still heavily invested in their origins.

I’d picked up my friend’s car the night before. I loaded my nawi onto the roof and I had a full jerry can of unleaded fuel in the back of the car. It was heavy but I was sure I could get it across on the boat. I had a life jacket, too. Even though that wasn’t what the ancestors wore, I was still wary of being picked up by the coppers out on the water. Better play it safe so I can do the deed.

I drove down to Lapa about 4 am. I needed to have the cover of darkness for the important anti-imperial act of sedition. I parked at the loop looking across to the landing site. It was a cool morning. Still dark. Clouds. I had to make two trips over to Frenchman’s Beach with the nawi and the petrol can. They were too heavy and awkward to carry all at once.

Funny, but I heard the rainbirds squarking. The black cockatoos were loud too. Enough for me to notice and wonder what the meaning was. Be careful maybe? I nodded a quiet thank you in their direction—somewhere over near Yarra House.

Finally, I launched. There was no-one on the bay that day and it wasn’t choppy. It took ages to get over to Kurnell but I was determined. I was paddling furiously at times, trying to keep in a straight line. When I felt spent, I made out the obelisk marking the site of the original crime and the rising fury within me gave me resolve again, the burning injustice of the whole rotten invasion.

When I finally got across, I landed around the point closest to Lapa. It was a bit rocky there, but it was more private in case someone random did decide to straggle early along the beach. The monument marking the 1770 landing place was about five hundred metres away. I jumped out, pulled the boat up onto the rocks and took my vest off. I’d need all that later for a quick getaway.

The petrol can was surprisingly heavy but eventually I made it.

I was standing in front of the obelisk. There were some new sculptures and artworks they’d commissioned for the occasion which I hadn’t seen before. They looked impressive in the shadows but I had my eyes on the old, slightly shabby centrepiece of Cook’s invasionary misadventure. A sacred site for the British invaders—their dreaming.

But then I pondered … What would I actually do now? In the scant thought I’d given to my arrival I’d pictured myself climbing up the structure. I realised I’d never actually been here before, just viewed it from across the bay from the safety of Lapa. Turns out it’s quite an isolated and desolate place, truth be told.

I did my best to splash the fuel as high as I could onto the plinth and the trunk. Perhaps it would somehow catch alight and go up? Does stone burn? No matter, I was performing my great act of defiance; I must finish my historic task.

The can emptied surprisingly fast. I’d half-soaked myself in the splashback from the frenzied swishing and swaying of the can. Better be careful lest I go up in flames myself.

I moved to the edge of the platform and lit the end of a trickle of fuel with a lighter. The petrol burned instantly and I jumped back. As the rotten invasionary structure came to life, I slowly paced backwards, keeping my eyes on the decolonising pyre before me.

Burn, you cunt!

I was turning toward my own landing place when I heard a deep voice from the bush behind the brightly burning obelisk.

‘Stop right there!’

A gunji. What the fuck is he doing here?

Defiance pulsed through me. Oh no you don’t, I thought. Not on this day!

‘Stay away, you fucking cunt,’ I said. I held the lighter up to my petrol-soaked shoulder. In my desperation to make my statement I wasn’t going to be taken like this. With the amount of fuel splashed over me I would go up like that monk on the street in Saigon. Fuck you and fuck you all.

‘Get him,’ said the voice. Before I could light up, a vice-like hand gripped my forearm carrying the lighter and ripped it around behind my back. A rip that damaged my shoulder tendon; it still aches.

The only other thing I remember is a tremendous force pushing me forward. There must have been two or three of them forcing me down, right down into the rocks.

That was the last I remember of the sestercentenary of the arrival of Captain James Cook FRS at Botany Bay in 1770.

VI

Sitting in their miserable dining room was meant to be one of the privileges I received when I’d displayed enough wellness to be let out of the isolation of my room. This wasn’t the first time I’d been in the mental ward but it was the first time I’d held been completely involuntarily.

‘Australia’ is an illusion of invasionary gubbah belief held together by the magic of their shared British culture, I thought, as Doctor Cindy stuck her head into the common room.

‘Gavin! I was wondering if you’d be out here. How are you feeling today?’

‘My arm really stings again,’ I said. Even though I couldn’t recall any of the fuel catching fire, I had a terribly painful burn on most of my right arm.

‘Has someone seen you about it?’

‘Yeah, a bit earlier. They put some cream on it. And the painkillers will work soon,’ I said.

‘Good. You might get drowsy soon then. Can I have a little word to you in the office first though?’

We walked to the small office attached to that part of the mental health unit. I spotted the oversized DSM-5 in its violet hardcover stuffed between copies of Toxic Parents and Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway!

If only they had The Bell Jar in here. Give me something I can use!

‘Sit down there if you like,’ said Cindy, pulling a chair out from under the desk.

‘So … I just wanted to tell you that your family have been talking to us and they gave us every assurance they will take care of you,’ beamed Cindy.

‘My mum contacted you?’ I said. Why would my adoptive mother in Albury do that and how could word have got all the way back down there? In all the dealings I’d had with every official in the past week or so—hospital staff, doctors, police—I had deliberately not mentioned a thing about my parents.

‘No, no, your sister at La Perouse,’ said Cindy.

‘My sister?’

‘Yes, she’s been here a few times since you arrived.’

I was shocked. I hadn’t once considered that my estranged-at-birth Koori family would want to find me, want to care for me, want to know me at all after the stunt I had pulled.

‘She came to see me?’

‘Yes, Gavin. She did. Your sister Cammi. She gave every assurance she would care for you. We just needed to make sure that you wouldn’t try to harm yourself again,’ said Cindy.

I tried to get to grips with yet another unexpected turn of events.

‘Um, but Doctor Cindy, I’ve been thinking … I really didn’t try to kill myself. And I’m sure I didn’t burn myself either. I don’t know exactly what has happened to me.’

Without pausing, Cindy replied, ‘This is what the police who were at the scene have reported to us, Gavin. They have saved your life.’

I knew enough to know that someone in my situation (poor, anxious, Koori, improperly housed) couldn’t expect to have their story accepted when it came to matters important to the powers-that-be. So, I deferred on the question of self-harm to get the fuck out of the hospital as soon as possible.

In many ways my world had collapsed: what I’d thought would be a scary, yet exciting step forward in at last finding out who I was and where I belonged, led me to losing my mother and almost to losing my own life.

VII

If I thought the ride back to Cammi’s place at La Perouse would clear things up about the sestercentennial events, I was wrong. I piled into the front of her van and her four gorgeous kids sat in the back looking at their ‘new’ uncle. She said she didn’t know much more than me. But she did a lot to help ease the shame and bewilderment I felt around what I’d done.

‘Fuck them cunts celebrating that thief Captain Cook. It was good someone tried to do something about it,’ she said, laughing.

In the world I’d been brought up in, what I’d done was a blasphemy, treason. It was an act against the Father of Australia himself.

‘Well, it was on the news. We watched it just to see what they said about it.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘What did they say?’

‘Not much. They said it was a lone protester. Didn’t see much else on there. They just raised a flag and did a salute. You know what it’s like. For the Queen and all that gammon shit.’

‘Did they show the obelisk?’

‘The pointy thing?’

‘Yeah, Cook’s dick.’ I laughed. ‘Ah shit. Sorry, kids,’ I said. ‘Ah … sorry about saying shit,’ I said awkwardly. They giggled.

‘It was all clean. They must have cleaned it up for the ceremony in the morning.’

I felt relief that the act had been brushed aside as just another minor act of protest. Driving with Cammi, I realised how the act of just being Koori was resistance. The invasion was so overwhelming, so ridiculously successful, that any act of resistance could—let’s face it—only ever be a minor disruption.

But there was another thought which gave me a deep satisfaction: there didn’t actually need to be acts of Aboriginal sedition and disobedience for the entire British invasionary project of 1788 to fail. All that was needed was the truth.

Instead of trying to torch down some bullshit little facsimile of England which anyway looked ridiculous sitting there like a rigid phallus across the bay from Lapa, all I, or any Aboriginal person, had to do was defiantly assert: I am not Australian. That’s the greatest act of sedition possible. If every Aboriginal person said it every day, the lie of the invasion would be exposed for the confidence trick that it is. One only had to point to their silly flag, their English head of state, the geographic absurdity of the names of their ‘sovereign’ creations (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland) to realise how fictitious their nationhood is. Who do these people think they are if they aren’t British? It’s as plain as the nose on their face.

We pulled over and parked outside Cammi’s place near the old mish. I felt comforted by the fact that my sister lived communally. So far as I could tell, all of my relatives at Lapa lived in Aboriginal housing. I wanted to live in housing, too. I resolved to apply at the first instant. There was a symmetry in the state of New South Wales providing for me and my mob, here on our very own land.

It was the least they could do.

The kids slid the van door open and ran inside. ‘Are you coming inside, Uncle Gavin?’ they said.

‘Tell Dad we’re just going for a drive. We won’t be long,’ Cammi said.

‘You’re not going to KFC, are you, without taking us?’ said the eldest daughter.

‘No!’ said Cammi. ‘Get inside!’

The kids, to a one, furrowed their brows then ran in through the side gate.

‘Hey, where are we going, sister?’ I said.

‘I wanna show you something.’ She smiled.

‘Fuck me dead, you’re joking!’ I said laughing. ‘But … who did it? Won’t they come and scrub it all off?’

‘Yeah, of course they will. Probably today. They don’t muck around. This is serious shit for them. They’ll bulldoze a burial mound or blow up an ancient cave, no worries. But this shit! No way. This is like the most important thing ever for Gubs,’ Cammi said.

Cammi had driven all the way around the bay for me to see that sacred object—the obelisk that I’d tried to defile on the holiest of invasionary white sacred days. There in gorgeous blood-red letters someone had spray-painted along the length of the shaft of the phallus:

          NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE

I looked at Cammi beaming and I slapped my hand to my forehead as we both doubled over laughing.

‘Oh, fucking hell, that is so great,’ I said. ‘But who did it. Not you?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘I wish!’

We walked for a bit along the path, eastwards, toward the heads of the bay.

‘I never get over here, you know. I didn’t realise Lapa was so close.’

We looked back over at La Perouse. I could see Bare Island, the cars parked on the loop, Frenchmans Beach, Koori cove, the cranes over at the port, the runways at the airport. It all looked so beautiful with the water sparkling that I’d quite forgot the ordeal I’d gone through the past few days locked up and scared in the hospital ward.

‘Hey, you’re not hungry are you, Gavin?’

‘Yeah, I am actually,’ I said. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘How ’bout KFC?’

‘Sure,’ I laughed.

‘There’s one at Miranda. On the way back. We’d be done by the time we got home.’

‘Yeah, why not,’ I said.

‘Ah, one thing though …’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t tell the kids about it, hey.’

I smiled.

‘Because, you know, this is just to celebrate a special occasion.’

‘Protesting that prick Captain Cook and getting away with it?’

‘Nah … getting to spend time with my brother!’

Read the rest of Overland 246

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