Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page A

Coochie Mudloe island. He misses it when he’s not on it. He has his photograph taken sitting on the beached treetrunk, big and warty and gnarly chunk of near-petrified wood, and when he looks at this image in later life he will recall the sharp tang of the sea and the crash of waves into his body and the happiness and promise of the island, all salty and sunbaked and secret, the constant joy of discovery.
NOW
    I’m excited, again. I can see Coochie Mudloe getting closer to me, over the waves. Magical land, again, over the blue sea. A leaflet on the boat tells me that the island’s name means ‘red earth’ in the local aboriginal dialect; it was from there that theaborigines got the clay with which to paint their bodies during their mystical rituals, the equivalent of the Native American ghost-dance. There’s me, Tony, Chris, and Nickie. I feel that pleasant thrill in my chest that I get whenever I travel over water; I’ve had that feeling since I was a child, and it’s never left me. I’ve had that feeling for as long as I can remember.
    On the beach, we watch a fish eagle circle high over the breakers. Nickie, a wildife photographer, gets her camera out and snaps away. The bird soars, pivots on a wingtip, turns and circles, its eyes remaining locked to the water, spiralling down lower until it snaps into a dive and snatches its talons in the water and rises clutching a silvery-wriggling, violin-shaped fish. I am amazed. I’m breathless.
    I love this island. It’s remained with me for thirty years. The wooden huts on the beaches are no more, replaced by tables under a free-standing roof. We ask a man basking in his garden what happened to them and he tells us they were burnt down, ‘set alight by Briddish soccer hooligans’. We talk to him about the island, about holiday-house rents. He tells us that the water supply comes all the way from the Blackall Mountains, ‘best warda you’ll ever taste’, and he holds up an empty glass which his wife wordlessly takes into the house and comes back out carrying a tray with several glasses of water on it. The average Aussie male needs reconstructing, but the water is wonderful; ice-cold and clean and clear and it makes my head feel full of mint.
    The noise of a hairdryer comes up from the dusty street. A full-grown man putters past on a motorcycle the size of a child’s trike, his knees up to his ears. Chris, all six foot eight of him, watches him pass with a slow turning of his head. The confusion of scale here is brilliant. I laugh a lot. An old andchunky dog befriends us on the beach, follows us everywhere. I don’t recall much of this island – what I remember most vividly are the beach-huts, and they’re gone – but I love being on it, nevertheless. But then we return to the jetty and instead of turning left we turn right towards the Melaleuca Wetlands and it all comes back; the trees flanking and striping the dusty track, the sunken wooden steps down to the beach and the rocks and pools at the tideline and the small waves and, yes, the large piece of driftwood, the tree-trunk, still there, exactly the same, just a bit whiter with the sun and the salt. The me of thirty years ago, he’s everywhere here. I sit next to him on the tree-trunk, I overturn rocks with him and marvel at the scuttling life we reveal. I walk with him along the beach and we throw sticks for the old and friendly dog. I see a bar in the trees with tables outside and I want to take the young me over there and buy him a Coke and myself a beer and tell him what’s going to come, what heartbreaks and wonders and joys and pains to expect. I want to talk with him and be with him but I see the ferry coming in. Fuck it. Don’t want to go back to the mainland, even if it will be my last night in Queensland. Want to stay here, with me.
    * This is taken from a Guardian interview with the Brisbane band The Saints, written by Keith Cameron, called ‘Come the evolution’, printed in the edition of