Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds Read Free Page A

assuaging the guilt that he carried with him always, that so many had died and that he had stayed behind, seeing blue for green and never seeing red at all. At least now he had said his piece in a permanent fashion, and although the words of the La Branca poem were an integral part of his bench, it was in actions rather than words that a man like Len McCoy could express himself.
    They were an unlikely couple, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney, a hybrid of the silent taciturn plains of Winchelsea and the clinker-bricks and garrulous high collars of Melbourne, which was where Min had grown up. Her mother had died of meningitis when Min was six and although her father was nothing more salubrious than a barber in the working-class suburb of Clifton Hill, Papa Mahoney, as young Ron would come to know him, was a man who worked with a phonograph playing in the corner of his Spensley Street shop at all times, a man who lived for music and literature and who showered his two girls as they were growing up with an almost feminine affection of culture and emotion, acutely aware as he was of the absence of a mother in their lives.
    Min met Len at a Footscray football club dinner, to which she’d been invited by her cousins on the Maribyrnong side of town. For those present it had been an important night, a fundraiser for the club that was trying to make a case to be included in the Victorian Football League. For Min, however, the night was important on an entirely different plane.
    It was like earth meeting sky. As she sat opposite Len McCoy’s handsome and healthy face at the dinner table, the muscularity of his torso showing through his tight starched white shirt, she’d never felt a physical impulse quite like it. Min was small, and pretty, with jet-black curls and dark eyes, and she could be very demure and sweet, but her father’s education had also encouraged in her a tendency to be headstrong and aloof, and occasionally haughty as well, and now she found herself quite confused by the un abashed exhilaration that was coursing through her in this young countryman’s presence.
    Sensing Min’s willingness, Len McCoy was not about to let the opportunity slip. Despite her mother’s diamond brooch, her fine ways and the difficult things she said to him across the plates of lamb and beef and the FFC mono grammed bowls of peas and potatoes, he figured she was still working class and therefore within reach.They danced amongst the club members and associates that night, Min suddenly more fascinated by life on a sheep and poultry farm at a place called Winchelsea (which he told her was a godforsaken place, famous only for introducing the rabbit to Australia) than anything else in life, and Len more charming and impressive than he’d ever imagined he could be.
    His trump card, as he saw it, was that he was on the verge of leaving his family’s farm and striking out on his own. He’d recently been on the scout and seen a bit of land on the coast at a place called Mangowak, and he was hellbent on buying it. He’d not told a soul about this but soon found himself describing it closely to Min. It was a tiny piece of land, barely six acres, cleared for the most part for grazing, but with the remnant of a pine windbreak which would provide perfect shelter for a house site. It was right on the ocean-cliff, perched above a series of small coves and beaches, where tea-coloured creeks ran down out of the hills to the sea every mile or so. Mangowak itself was not far from the timber and fishing town of Minapre, but it was just a rivermouth, with a cleared pastured riverflat, and until recently the block he had his sights on had been government land attached to a Meteorological Station. The six limestone buildings of the Meteorological Station were built in a cluster on the headland to monitor Victoria’s prevailing southwesterly weather, but now that the station was becoming increasingly automated the few acres