Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds Read Free Page B

surrounding it were for sale.
    In a sense he was right about this being his trump, for Min was excited, not by the land, but rather by the audacity of it all, of this young boy’s willingness to leave behind everything he knew to make something independent of himself. He had already teed up work with a certain Mr Bolitho, who owned the large pastoral lease of the river flat and the upslopes, and who was prepared to offer Len McCoy a future. Given the extent of the attraction she was feeling it was allMin really needed to know about his character. She didn’t need to know, for instance, that for Len the move to Mangowak was nothing much at all, not compared with the move his boyhood friends had made, the heroic move against which he constantly measured his own inadequacy. No, it was enough for Min to have learnt that Len McCoy – from ‘Winch’, as he called his home town – was an adventurer, and also that he seemed a gentle soul like her father, which she’d sensed from the moment they’d been introduced.
    By the time the dancing was over at the end of the evening they both agreed it was a great stroke of luck that they’d met. They came together in the chill of the grandstand, amidst the cooing and rustling of the pigeons that roosted in its eaves, and as they looked out over the shadowy oval at the city lights beyond, they briefly touched before parting with an arrangement to stay in contact. ‘And the sooner the better,’ Min had boldly suggested.
    By the following autumn of 1922, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney were married and living in a makeshift slab bark hut on the block of land they christened ‘Belvedere’, on the cliff beside the Meteorological Station at Mangowak. Together they fenced their land with post and rail, a chain back from the cliff edge on the ocean side and butting right up along the bullock ruts on the inland side. They left an entrance the width of a dray in the fence alongside the bullock ruts but just one small melaleuca gate on the ocean side to access the open cliff. Whilst Min planted a gardenia, a camellia and nectarine trees on the block, cooked and sewed and read inside the hut, and went for long familiarising walks in the skirts and frills of the tide on the empty beaches (they were strewn that autumn, she would always remember, with copious amounts of kelp and sea-cucumber), Len and his brother Dinny laid the yellow bricks of what was to be the McCoys’ only married home, and the house into which young Ron was born.
    *
    It was dangerous to leave him as a little child out on the cliff by himself but that’s where he wanted to be. Otherwise he would either howl and squeal in the house or mope in the garden. The roar of the cliff was a magnet, and anything else in his midst seemed dull by comparison, like ox tongue or tripe on his plate, like devilled kidneys when there were strawberries and ice-cream nearby. So, at Min’s suggestion, Len erected a chickenwire cage around the La Branca bench, to act as a playpen for the boy. On fine days then, Min could leave him unattended where he liked it most, out on the open cliff, and go about her chores.
    At first he hardly even noticed the restriction but when he eventually did, the little boy’s tears were panicky and Min had to sit beside him and give him the options. It was the chickenwire cage, or the kitchen, or the garden. Or, if he refused them all, the wooden spoon. Very quickly his tears were quelled by his preference for the clifftop, even if he had to view the wider world through the hexagons of the cage. Overwhelmed by all there was to see and all there was to do on the bench from within the chickenwire cage, by the ants and skinks and tiny whorling shells in the bindweed and dirt around him, by the passing birds and seaspray and cloud formations in the sky, he calmed right down and eventually grew content with his confinement.
    From the time he was two right up until he was six