petcheys bay

From Cygnet you can go over the hill to the east through Nicholls Rivulet and Oyster Cove. On a clear day the scene goes all the way across Bruny Island to the Tasman Peninsula. Or you can go over the hill to the west and look across the Huon estuary into Tasmania’s dark and wild heart. Petcheys Bay lies on the Huon shore.

Nothing much happens at Petcheys Bay: apples grow, drizzle dots the silent sluggish Huon, an occasional car stirs the brown gravel road that runs around the coast, south, east, then north through Lymington back to Cygnet. It’s here in December 1982 that I find myself for a month in an apple pickers’ hut looking after my two children, aged three and one.

I have blown up my marriage with Marilyn, returned to a lover in Victoria who doesn’t want me, come back to Tassie while Marilyn goes home to NSW to have Christmas with her parents and siblings. For me it’s a month with my kids before I lose them again when she returns.

Although I hate Christmas, this one is the loneliest day of my life. It holds no significance for my children. Too young. I drive to a vantage point up the hill, gaze into the distance, feel nothing in particular, return to our pickers’ weathered paradise.

The new year turns. In January Rock and Lummo drop in en route to walking into Federation Peak via Breakfast Creek. I drive them to their start point in the wilderness. Ten days later they return for a day or two. Rock tells me he loves watching me ‘work’ with my children: no fuss, no bother, no baby-talk, no bullshit; gentle care, quiet doing.

The kids and I spend lazy days at the water’s edge, fossick along the roadside, fly a kite into a tree, forever, dodge endless showers of pissy rain from the west. This January has no warmth.

Marilyn returns. The plan is for me to find a place to live and work in Hobart, an hour’s drive from the land we have bought on Mt Cygnet where she and my children will live. The Honda CX500 Shadow takes my away over the hill, house-hunting. I inspect a couple of share places, try to imagine myself in them. No dice. I attend a job interview in Glenorchy. No dice.

I stay a night at Petcheys, bestride the Shadow again next morning. Finally sun with some warmth. I opt for the longer ride around the Channel coast, focus too long on the oyster beds at Gordon, miss a 90-degree left, crash the bike. It’s a write-off, me too: four days in Hobart Hospital, ballooning shoulder the radiologist describes as ‘mashed’.

Marilyn drives me back to Petcheys Bay one last time. I lie on my back, can’t move, can’t sleep. She fucks me one last time, weirdly frenzied, a death throe for a relationship. I fly back to Melbourne to convalesce in a caravan on the turnaround in the steep driveway of my parents’ home at Menzies Creek.

At 32, I have reached the nadir of my life.

   

Rock on.