exile

At the end of September 1971 the shit hits the fan. A friend commits suicide on 16 June, leaving me contemplating not whether to continue life, but certainly what to do with it. My father and I have raging arguments about my opposition to conscription and non-registration for national service.

I buy a cheap tent and a plane ticket to Tasmania, stow a loaded pack with a friend in West Melbourne, and walk out one Sunday night while my parents sleep. I fly to Devonport—cheaper than Hobart—and hitch through the centre, spending the coldest night of my life in a ditch a few kilometres out of Bothwell.

I make my way down to Dover where the fishing boats anchor, hoping a skipper will take me round to the Southwest, but my nerve fails me on the jetty. I sleep in the scoreboard at the local oval, then hitch back to Hobart and out to Cambridge airfield.

A pilot named Dave Prince is flying a five-seater into Melaleuca the next day. I pay $9—the total fare is $45, but four tin prospectors are flying out. When I climb out of the plane onto an airstrip in the wilderness, Dave asks what I’m going to eat. He takes a list from me and promises me a box of tucker when he flies the Ludbrooks miners in again.

I camp in the visitors’ hut at Melaleuca. The fabled Denny King is not about. Cox Bight is seven miles south across sodden button grass plains and frigid creeks. A sheltered campsite nestles in the final curve of the east beach under Point Eric. I set up my tent. For two months this is my home. I am 20 years young, and stupid. Nonetheless, this is the great adventure of my life.

I explore the beaches, bush and nearby ranges. I sit naked on the rocks with the seagulls above the roaring tide. At night I walk up the beach to see the Maatsuyker light winking through the dark. I live on rice and dehydrated vegies and puff on my pipe as the sun sets. I am blessed with the mildest spring weather ever turned on by the Southwest.  

Friends answer my long letters. Even my sister writes to me. My parents send books: Joyce’s Ulysses, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Lawrence, always Lawrence. Dave flies his plane down to the bight and buzzes me each time he drops a food box for me at Melaleuca and I strap on the pack and hare across the plains.

Denny no doubt thinks me a weird young man. I admire his infinite patience when we change the wheel on his front-end loader. He feeds me, shows me his paintings, and plies me with South American maté tea. I help him ferry hundredweight bags of tin ore down Moth Creek in a punt and manhandle them into the hold of his yacht, the Melaleuca.

   

After two months that seem like two years I sail out of Port Davey into the Southern Ocean with him. I am seasick all the length of the south coast but gorge on his wallaby stew when we edge through the calmer waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

I return home to Ormond, my own man. Rock on.