~

I tell these stories as if they are mine, but I know I don’t belong to this place, or to Wheel’s family any more than an address or piece of paper says I do. But if I don’t belong here, nor do I belong in the place I was born – where my mother and father lived briefly and I might have been described as an anchor baby.

A few years ago, we travelled there to attend the wedding of Wheel’s nephew who had moved to Toronto to marry a Canadian. It was a chance to see my birthplace, even if I had no family or memories there to share.

The couple were getting married on Ward’s Island, in the city’s harbour. A couple of months before the wedding they were on the cover of a local newspaper, their smiling faces under the headline ‘Sinking Hearts’. They had become the poster-children for the city’s high-water problems. When it floods, the water in Toronto Harbour can be more than seventy-five metres above sea level. In a snow and ice-bound country, a few more days each year where the temperature is above zero means rain doesn’t freeze to snow, and melts what snow there is. Lake Ontario, fed by the other Great Lakes, fills faster than the St Laurence River can carry it to the Atlantic.

On the day of the wedding, we caught the ferry to the island, where the grass seemed to float at sea level. The water had receded, but the ground was marshy under foot, and fenced off in some areas. In the days after the wedding, the newlyweds invited friends and family to stay with them in a cabin at Charleston Lake. We slept on couches, shared meals, swam and boated on the lake, and sang songs into the evening. Wheel’s gift to the bride’s family was to sing all seven verses of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ – ‘The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee …’

The song sounds like an old sea shanty but it’s about an iron ore freighter that sank in a storm in 1975. Gitche Gumee, the Chippewa name for Lake Superior, means ‘great sea’.

That night there was an impressive electrical storm. I woke to a crack of thunder and rain drumming heavily on the cabin roof. The next morning the rain had stopped and I walked to the edge of the lake. In a clearing under some pine trees, there was a pair of Adirondack chairs and two yellow canoes. The lake was crystal clear, but high enough to lap the grass. At the water’s edge, there were three wooden stairs leading into the water that were mostly submerged. They looked like they had been there for decades, but when I put my foot on the top step, the whole staircase broke away, slipping into the lake, and I had to wade in to retrieve it before it floated away.

~

Back in 2009, we were visiting Wheel’s parents on the Murrumbidgee when a long drought finally broke. I went down to look at the swollen river, opaque with silt, like milky tea, and flowing fast, like it was thundering for victory – it hinted at what was to come.

The river’s edge here is not romantic or pretty. It’s a hardscrabble place, especially in drought. People come to mess around, riding dirt bikes around pot-holed tracks or cruising in cars at night. There are broken beer bottles, a dirty blanket left under a tree, a bong made from a drink bottle, glass pipes for smoking meth. The huge dead or dying gums are called widowmakers for the way they drop their boughs without warning, and the grass is spiky, alive with grasshoppers and likely snakes. Flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos congregate at dusk and sunrise, ripping up trees and making a cacophony until someone on the other side of the river fires a shotgun to scare them away from the crops. In the paddock, I came across the carcass of a Jersey cow, hollowed out and sucked dry. It looked like a cowhide rug lying on an overgrown lawn.

In 2010, the river flooded twice. The second time it licked the back doorstep of Wheel’s family home, built in the 1930s, but the house stayed dry. His brother was photographed for the newspaper, rowing a boat in the front yard and standing knee-deep with his gumboots in hand. In 2012, the river rose again and his parents were evacuated. They were moved into an empty house in the part of town that is protected by a levee. They had enough of their belongings to get by – bedding, some kitchenware, a television. There would be a couple of feet of water through the house and the floodwaters would take a while to recede. This time a news camera crew interviewed Wheel’s brothers as they began the clean-up afterwards. We watched on television in Sydney as they swept out mud and pulled up carpets. We could see familiar items stacked on the dining table in the background. The reporter was focused on the devastation, the inconvenience and loss, but Wheel’s brother, standing outside the house he grew up in, knowing it would have to be demolished, described the flood respectfully as ‘a great event’.

Months later, Wheel’s parents were still in their evacuation accommodation in town. We all met at the old house for a working bee. It was cold, mid-winter, with drizzling rain. There was still much to do before the house was demolished. Wheel’s mother sat on the porch in a plastic chair with a quilt over her lap. A makeshift barbecue was made over a fire in the backyard – sausages cooked in a wire grate held together with tongs. Nieces and nephews moved furniture out to be discarded. We paused sentimentally over some mementos, like the photo of Wheel’s sister as a child in a box-pleat uniform with cats-eye spectacles, and the house was slowly packed down and pulled apart as if it were a theatre where a family had merely acted out their lives.

Below the flood line, which was knee-deep inside the house, the silty mud had coated all the objects left behind so that they resembled forms thrown in a pottery class. Every bowl, glass, pot, and pan needed to be soaked to lift off the clay and reveal what was beneath – a blue and yellow salad bowl or cut crystal wine glass. We wrapped them in pages of The Wagga Advertiser and packed them into boxes to go into storage.

The window above the kitchen sink looked out onto a lemon tree. On the windowsill was a framed drawing of Shakespeare and the quote, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’.

Artefacts emerged from the mud that had been lost or forgotten. There was a case of wine in one of the sheds, cellared under the cool silt – no telling whether it was from this flood or a previous one. The labels were gone but the corks intact. Someone would be game to try it – Wheel’s dad often hid bottles in strange places. I once found a bottle of Grange in his sock drawer.

(photograph by the author)

Under the willow near the back fence was a pale-blue fibreglass canoe that had been hidden in the undergrowth but had now reappeared covered in a blanket of flood debris. Wheel said it would have been the same canoe the older brothers had rowed away in when the water rose in 1974.

In another shed were two Wiradjuri grinding stones. They looked just like large river pebbles but felt satisfying to hold, worn smooth, one with a thumb groove. They made you look at the land differently, wondering whose hands had held them before you, whose land you were standing on, and how it had come to be divided up and claimed. I could look out and imagine the topography without the sheds and clearings, almost see the smoke from a campfire rising.

Floods are rated somewhat arbitrarily as ten-year or one-hundred-year floods, but that’s settler history. Last year, when the Wilson River flooded in Lismore, it surpassed previous records by a full, almost unthinkable, two metres. What do patterns observed over thousands of years reveal? Yarri and Jacky Jacky knew.

~

Wheel’s parents raised the ground by a metre on the footprint of their old house, bulldozing a mound of earth into place, before building a modern kit home on it and moving back in. They were there less than a year when Wheel’s father died in his sleep on a harvest moon. He had spent his last days pulling up vegetables in the field.

(photograph by the author)

Wheel’s brother, the one in the rowboat with the gumboots, took over the farming duties and is gaining a reputation for his chemical-free produce, experimenting with sustainable techniques. He weaves fat bulbs of purple-stripe garlic into plaits for the Canberra markets and digs up Instagrammable heart-shaped potatoes and entwined carrots. Each flood deposits fresh layers of rich top soil on the plain, so it’s a good time to plant things. There’s nothing like the taste of the beans, tomatoes, and pumpkins he grows, and nothing like the sense of contented security it gives you to fill a box with them when they are plentiful. Plenty water.

~

When I got a notice about fumigation of the common areas of our apartment block, I read the accompanying information sheet about the chemicals that had been used. Safe for humans, used in hospitals and schools, it said. But I thought about the cicadas and crickets, their throbbing purr each night in the narrow strip of grass below around the rainwater pipes – was it safe for them? Would anyone other than me notice they had been silenced?

At what point does something that was acceptable become unacceptable? There are things that were normal when I was a child that have all but disappeared, like CFCs, page-three girls in the daily newspaper, and smoking on planes. It’s inevitable that other behaviours we take for granted will one day join this list. Each time I put petrol in the car or tally the plastic packaging in my shopping basket, my mind rings with cognitive dissonance: I know I’m part of the problem. I don’t need a talisman, like the Wiradjuri stones, to show me the truth.

The unease you feel when your behaviour doesn’t accord with your values.

‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’

Can we climb out of the blackwater?

~

It took a few months to repaint and put everything back together in our apartment. I retrieved some boxes from the garage one day and began placing books on shelves. I found one written by a former colleague who used to come and sit on my desk sometimes, not caring if he was interrupting. He loved to ask the kind of questions that made you question everything, such as ‘What would you do if you won a million dollars?’ When he died suddenly, I wondered if he had been questioning everything on the night he died. On his inner arm he had a tattoo of a David Foster Wallace quote: ‘This is water’.

A neighbour came to the door and broke my reverie. Wheel answered and I overheard the conversation. She had separated from her husband. He had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but she had left him before realising he was ill. Wheel had helped her with something and she was dropping off a bottle of wine as a gift.

‘You think it’s going to go on forever,’ she said, handing him a bottle of shiraz. ‘You think everything’s going to be okay.’

I wondered if he had become strange and difficult, if she had shouted and shamed. Had they each said things in their frustration that couldn’t be taken back and painted themselves into corners of indignity, as couples do?

I finished unpacking the books and drove to the beach for a late swim to wash the dust off. Afterwards I sat in the balmy air and watched the waves. Change can be hard to observe with the senses. You can’t catch the turning of the tide or the point at which life seems to move from in front of you to behind. You just notice that you have become nostalgic for things you once took for granted.

I stayed until twilight, that space between day and night that is also its own time, watching the blue shadows deepen on the sand. 

‘Flow States’ won the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Calibre is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. The judges’ report is available on our website.

ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.