Heart of the Grass Tree Read online

  About the Book

  When Pearl’s grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl and her family—mother Diana, sister Lucy—return to Kangaroo Island to mourn and farewell her. Each of them knew Nell intimately but differently, and each woman must reckon with Nell’s passing in her own way. But Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana and Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind—her stories, poems, paintings—and unearths a connection to the island’s early history, of the European sealers and their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people.

  As the three women are in grief pulled apart from each other, Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her, and will ultimately bring the women back to each other.

  Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Grass Tree

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  Stokes Bay Road

  Nell

  Murray Lagoon

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  Melbourne

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Nell

  Near Antechamber Bay

  Lubra Creek

  Glossary of Ngarrindjeri Terms

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia

  For Sally

  Each island represents a victory and defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they’d been torn. They acquired grace—some grass, a beach smoothed by tides.

  Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

  Saw the gigantic rollers that set in, which, when they break, cause the very earth to vibrate. Perhaps some of those grand undulations had come from the South Pole, and, like the lives of many, finished their career upon a wild, barren and unknown spot.

  William Cawthorne, ‘Journal of a Trip to Kangaroo Island’, Observer, January 1853

  The weaving pattern represents life.

  Stitch by stitch, circle by circle.

  The lands, waters and all living things

  are connected like family.

  Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Kungun Ngarrindjeri Miminar Yunnan

  Grass Tree

  if fire could renew my heart

  as it does yours

  seeds polished shiny as hope

  would transform within me

  the sweep and rage of flame

  cracking open each hidden tendril

  flowering with possibility

  birds supping from this alchemy

  but your heart grows and swells

  to an ancient wildfire rhythm

  and mine is renewed simply

  by the strange architecture

  of your beauty

  King George Beach (Sandy),

  Kangaroo Island, South Australia

  My mother kept bees: Apis mellifera ligustica, the Ligurian bee, which exists in its purest strain here on Kangaroo Island. The bees were born in the Ligurian Alps in the days of the Roman Empire and were introduced to the island in the early 1880s by a certain August Fiebig. Because of the island’s isolation from the mainland, it is its own protected entity, and here the Ligurian bees have found a sanctuary in which to build their pristine citadels. My mother used to say that the honey of her bees was the island transmuted, that in its viscous gold you could taste hints of salty coastal heath and white mallee and sugar gum and ti-tree and the very tang of the sharp midnight air, or the midday sun, robust and concentrated. And I liked to think, because of the Italian heritage, a hint of something alpine, windswept, exotic.

  Once upon a time I was in love. I was only fifteen, so what did I know of love, except that when it rained it was the fecund smell of our love-making, and when the sun shone it was his warm hand on my breast. And I thought it a private, secret thing, our love. Schoolgirls were not to know what men and women really did together. But I knew. I knew, and I didn’t want it taken away from me. I also knew what the terrible consequences would be if we were to be discovered. Not just for me, but for him, too. In his family, there were complex laws that governed who belonged to whom, which were far beyond my naïve understanding. Yet we were beautiful together; we fitted. I remember our fingers entwined—mine luminous pale, his velvet dark—a perfect chiaroscuro.

  I was only a girl. I didn’t realise then that when two people make love together, impassioned concentrated love, there is a contract made. Call it a spiritual vow. What I mean to say is that one can only truly give of themselves to another if they are willing to bear the fruit of that union. And I don’t just mean in the biological sense (although I learnt about that only too well); I mean that something is made by and between lovers so precious that they are rendered vulnerable, completely vulnerable, to that precious thing breaking. I knew nothing of this when I loved Sol. I was just being carried on the wings of something much larger than myself. Loving Sol felt right. Now that my body is softer—like worn velvet—more slow, less mine, more mine, I look back and know that we were only learning. We were novices—at sex, at love, at being ourselves—but we were gentle and kind and reverent with each other. And we laughed. We were innocent to the consequences of our being together, of being drawn to each other’s honey.

  Mother started beekeeping when Father got ill—a bout of influenza that left him so depleted it was months before he could get through a day’s work without shaking, without stopping to sit down every half hour—so Sol and I must’ve been about thirteen years old. For a good while, Mother’s honey was in high demand, and it helped tide things over while Father was recovering. Her Hog Bay Honey was not sold in the Hog Bay Store; our neighbours would come to the house directly to buy honey. Soon enough, Mother was also selling honey biscuits, honey cake and honey apple tarts from the kitchen door, just about as soon as they came out of the oven. She became known simply as ‘the honey lady’.

  In my memory of the honey harvest of late summer, Sol is always there. He’d wander over from his family’s farm, which neighboured ours, but was a good hour’s walk away, in his bare feet, and with his skinny yellow dog, Gem-Gem, in tow. I remember Sol as a streak of blue. I don’t know why. Perhaps because his shirt was always blue. Or perhaps I have gazed out at this ocean for so many years that somehow the glinting blue out there and Sol, dear Sol, have become one and the same. He is always moving, always mercurial, always on the edge of things, and blue blue blue.

  It is the later beekeeping years that I remember most clearly. I would find Sol waiting on the back doorstep in the shade of morning, drawing in the dirt with a piece of fencing wire which had a small loop at one end and was bent into a curve so that when he wasn’t using it, he could hang it around his neck for safekeeping. I would bring him a steaming cup of tea, which he gulped down in three big slurps before springing to his feet, and saying something like, Than
k ya, gorgeous, while winking at me in my long sleeves and baggy trousers, and then smoothing over his inscriptions on the ground with his heel. Sol never wore anything but his regular clothes when bee-handling, his frayed straw hat pulled down so low as to almost cover his eyes. And I only saw him get stung once. It was right on the chest, under his shirt, and I remember that all morning before the sting, Sol had been in a particularly bad mood. The bees were cross that day, too—butting against us angrily, their drone a higher pitch than I was used to, and Sol frowning and cursing. I wish I could remember more clearly what he told me later that afternoon, but all I can recall is holding a cool flannel against his left chest, and his agitation, and his eyes of a darker colour than I was used to. But that was a harvesting day out of the ordinary.

  Mother thought Sol made the bees calm, which is why he became known as Smoky in our house. She thought he didn’t need to use the smoking canister to subdue the bees, but of course he did need it. I’m not that crazy, he would say. He was fearless, and the bees knew it, but he was also sensible. I never called him Smoky; to me he was always Sol. Sol of the bees. Sol of my heart. And of course, he has another name too.

  It is time to write of him. Time to write of us. But how? I’m afraid. I’m afraid of words. And what unloosing them will bring. Once written, they are so set down, so finite. I’d sooner paint. I know how to speak in pictures. When I paint it is heart to brush to canvas. Nothing in between. Beyond thought; beyond feeling. Beyond words. But now, I’m afraid. I’m afraid that if I don’t utter these words they will be lost. And I want them released. I want them found.

  The house is swept, dusted, mopped, scrubbed. I’ve started another sculpture. A thing of bones. I’ve walked and swum and scraped a new supply of salt from the rocks for the pantry. I’ve been in to Kingscote for groceries, and I’ve phoned my granddaughter, Pearl. I heard something in her voice—a catch, a holding back. We must talk again soon. She thinks my cough sounds serious. From paint fumes and smoking, she says. She worries too much. I’ve been to the doctor about my chest, but she just says that I need to rest. Stress. It’s more than that, though. If I don’t set these words down, this tightness around my heart will only get worse. The stuck words will stop me from breathing. Please help me. Today the sea is glassy flat. A blank page. So bright it throws the sun right back at your eyes.

  I take down Sol’s story-wire from its place on the ledge above the window. I haven’t touched it in years. The wire is thick, heavy, slightly rusted. I place it in the centre of the kitchen table (my mother’s oak table) that has seen so much. I walk tentatively to my bedroom. Slow, like I’m performing a Japanese tea ceremony. I find the pale-green shoebox, stashed away at the back of the wardrobe, and carry it carefully back to my writing place. I am uncertain. When I paint, I fly. When I write, I might break.

  A white-bellied sea eagle skims the water, dipping into a mirror. I think of my daughter, Diana. I don’t want to be angry with her anymore. She is too much like me. A mirror. And Pearl’s turned out fine. More than fine. Stronger than all of us.

  I arrange the contents of the box in a semicircle around my notepad, with Sol’s wire at the centre. The periwinkle necklaces spread out on one side, and the black glass scraper and woollen caps on the other. The smell of the patchouli leaves I’ve scattered through the box is pungent, grounding, overpowering.

  And I have a jar of Ligurian honey beside me. The island transmuted. I will eat spoonfuls as I write. I take up my pen—fine-tipped, felt—and I smooth my hand along the page. I begin with trepidation because I am afraid of what it is I have to say. Until this very moment, the words were taken from me, fossilised, so that now as I turn them in my palm or line them up beneath the glass (my own exhibition), I am forced to see again, but worse, to feel again that long-ago moment frozen in time. I carry this fossil of memory.

  Sol and I worked together to collect the honey, while Mother worked alone on the opposite row of bee boxes. I would puff the smoke into the entrance of the hive, just two puffs, and then wait until Sol let me know that the bees were ready. Nothing was more harmonious than those suspended minutes. We hardly spoke, but what passed between us as we stood listening to the changing pitch of the bees felt something like relief, something like excitement, and something like an incredible descending grace, light as the smoke that encircled us. The bees—those little drops of light—taught me to listen. And Sol taught me to listen, too. I couldn’t exactly meet his eyes, veiled as I was by my apiary hat, but I felt him. I followed his lead. He knew exactly when to pry open the lid of the box, and I would be ready with the smoker, three puffs, while Sol whispered to the bees, Shh, shh, busy ones, show us what you’ve been up to.

  Once he’d removed the inner cover, and more smoke had sent the bees clinging like little clusters of raisins to the bottom of the hive, Sol would gently lift out the wooden frame, brushing away the bees with a branch of dry leaves, making soft crooning noises as he did so.

  Nell, is it sealed enough?

  I would quickly scan the combs checking for holes or gaps or fissures. No gaps.

  Sol, glancing around to check that Mother wasn’t looking, would press the side of his hip against mine, That’s right, Nell, no gaps at all, and then together we would carry the honeycomb carefully to the collecting shed, giggling quietly to ourselves.

  I still remember his fingers, quick and sure, as he sliced through the wax caps of the honeycomb with a knife warmed in hot water. Even now, when I heat a knife to cut through my neighbour Marian’s famous chocolate mud cake, I think of those days in the shed. I would wait, holding the wide uncapped jar beneath the honeycomb, ready to catch the honey as it flowed out thick and slow—Sol and I locked together in concentrated stillness, guided only by the fall and glug of honey. Afterwards we would lick the drips from each other’s fingers, but only if Mother was elsewhere. The smell of fresh honey—subtle, spreading, spiced—has never left me, not to this day; it is the smell of vulnerability.

  At the end of the honey harvest, there would be at our house a meal shared by Sol’s family and mine. While Father scored and basted the leg of ham, poking cloves into each of the diamond-shaped spaces, I would stand at the kitchen bench rolling beeswax into balls, running them up and down my warm cheeks remembering Sol and the way our teeth sometimes tapped together when we kissed.

  Out of my way, Nell, hot saucepan coming through, Mother would say, and she would bustle past with honey and ginger syrup for drenching the semolina cake.

  Father would interrupt my reverie somehow, flicking me on the legs with the tea towel, or blowing sharply down the back of my neck, Make yourself useful, Nell. Stop daydreaming and chop some carrots or something.

  The meal was always the same, even if the day had been a scorcher, and often we ate on the wide verandah because the kitchen was airless. Sol’s aunties smoked, and Mother didn’t approve—mostly because Father would end up having three or four as well, but also because she didn’t want the kitchen all smoked up. The women puffed away on roll-up after roll-up all evening, the glowing ends of their cigarettes sometimes all you could see in the blackness, like the roving eyes of night animals. I preferred it when we ate under the stars, because Sol and I could grin away at each other in the shadows, Gem-Gem trotting between us, with no one to give a thought to my blazing cheeks. Or so I thought.

  Looking back, I guess I had it all wrong. As I understood it, my family got on well with the Walcotts and I thought Mother had a particular soft spot for her bee-whisperer, Smoky. She was always praising him and slipping him bags of biscotti and fresh apples to take home to his little cousins. One evening, after the honey harvest meal, and after the Walcotts had left—though we could still hear their voices carrying across the nearby paddocks—Mother grabbed my wrist as I stood drying dishes for her. Never before or after did she look at me in quite that way. She was holding back tears but holding back fury and despair also. Her words, however, she did not hold back—The Walcotts are our neighbours, but th
ey will never be our kin, so you better stop making eyes at Smoky. It will come to no good. I will say no more.

  I was so shocked and embarrassed that I ran from the kitchen, rubbing my wet and soapy wrist where she’d gripped me vice-like, and sobbed until I was wrung completely empty.

  I heard Mother and Father squabbling in the kitchen, Leave her be, she’s just a child.

  My point exactly. She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into.

  They’re just good friends—

  Don’t be so naïve, you want a black for a son-in-law?

  Mother really got him on that one. He was silenced. And after that Sol and I were hardly ever alone. Father was attuned to my whereabouts like Gem-Gem was to the sheep.

  But had they not noticed my swollen breasts? Did they not know it was already too late? After that night, Mother and I hardly spoke, and I kept my friendship with Sol a firm secret. I was stopped, shuttered, silenced. Only Sol could make me cry out. And now that the something new and fragile growing between us had been disturbed, everything turned for the worse.

  I have hexagon-shaped holes in my memory. Where did the details go? I don’t remember now whether the last time I saw Sol before everything went wrong was down by the creek at the bottom of the paddock, where we sat together on an uneven rock, my body leaning deliberately against his, as he trickled creek water over my bare legs. Or if it was the day he was stung on the chest. I don’t remember because everything is out of order now. So how do I tell my story? I have a beginning and an end, but the middle leaves me lost for words. How do I spiral into the heart? Aunty Hettie would say, Begin in the centre.