‘How did you get here, Dad?’
When I recall asking my father that question, I can see now, almost fifty years later, that I was in fact asking him two questions. Yes, there was the obvious how—was it by boat? was it by plane?—but also, somewhere deep inside that very simple, innocent question, there was a slightly more judgemental one: why did you get here?
I don’t remember exactly how old I was, probably six or seven. At primary school, exposed to the notion of cultural difference—and of indifference, and of offence—I was learning about the world beyond my family confines. And there, hanging on the classroom wall, I discovered/saw my first world map.
I found Europe. I found the Adriatic Sea, and I found that strange country that hardly anybody had heard about then, Yugoslavia, right where my father had said it would be. Then—down, and down some more, miles over to the right, I found Australia. And then, further still, at the bottom, just above the empty white waste of Antarctica—wow, so far away—I found Tasmania.
You simply couldn’t get further from a place on this stupendous globe before you started heading back to it.
But if that wasn’t far enough, or remote enough, or even ridiculous enough, there was, as I discovered, the west coast of Tasmania—a whole other once upon a time or far, far away entirely.
I’ve wanted to set a story there for some time. Back in the day, as a young kid in the 1970s, my father used to drive the family out there regularly, to visit our only other blood relations in the entire country. At the time, I used to wish they lived somewhere else.
I remember to this day the old horror drive on a precarious winding road, no seatbelts in the back, through dark forests that blocked out the sky … my father colliding with various forms of wildlife—once even with an enormous wombat that left a piece of itself under the car, wedged in above the exhaust pipe, where it subsequently roasted for the rest of the way, forcing our windows shut and my car sickness to hasten—and then down into Queenstown where our relatives lived … the bare, toxic hills, the roaring river the colour of pencil lead, the gravel football oval. The whole place was like another planet.
I am a child of migration. My inheritance is the result of an unpredictable reality, a conjunction of lives whose paths were conjured as if by magic. The realities of remote places, of the paths that people took to strange and incredible destinations—both willingly and according to the influences of chance—have fascinated me deeply.
In recent years, Tasmania has become more than a touch popular. Very Instagrammable. New stories replace the old ones. It’s only natural. And for a long time—ever since I asked my father the question ‘how did you get here?’—I’ve been thinking about how stories change and memories fade, and people are lost to time, their voices blowing off like smoke. We are all—in the final accounting—unearthed. But ghosts and echoes remain. All we’ve got to do is to pause and listen.
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