Sunny Garden

    On the eighteenth we go to Bribie. We take the surf skis from under the house and load them in your car and set off from Golden Beach, over the drifting sandbars and the oystered outcrops of rock and the deep dark band of the water of the passage. We pull the skis up onto a narrow beach and walk until we find a path (p. 171).

But at the end of the day it's just us.
    At the end of the day the phone calls are over and it's just us on Moffat Headland at the top of Queen of Colonies Parade. We swam and you chose to come this way back from Kings and we stopped at the crest of the hill. I don't think I've ever stopped here before, even though I've spent all my summers close by. I've looked at the headland from beaches, I've driven past it, but I've never stopped just here.

    And there's a sandstone pandanus stump carved with the name Queen of the Colonies, and the story in brass of the ship's boat that was driven onto these rocks in a storm a hundred and thirty-two years ago next April. And the survivors were marooned for fourteen days, it says, living on shellfish and berries until rescued by a search party from Brisbane.

    And all my life Brisbane has been less than an hour by road. There has been no reason to contemplate life and death and shellfish and berries, just a dull drive up a straight road with two lanes each way. Even the name of the boat seems so old. Queen of the Colonies, part of some lost empire.
    I'd never even thought about the name of the street before. It had always just been there (p. 181).

Continue with the After January tour.

Excerpts from After January are © Nick Earls and are used with permission.

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Sunny Garden is designed, written and maintained by Liz Perkins, in cooperation with Nick Earls and Penguin Books. Any questions about Sunny Garden should be directed to Liz

All original contents are © Liz Perkins.