Walkabout Read Free Page A

they were, were asleep: invisible in the sediment-mud. They looked in the trees for birds; but the birds had vanished with the dawn. They looked in the bush for animals; but the animals were all asleep, avoiding the heat of the sun in carefully chosen burrow, log or cave. They looked among the riverside rocks for lizards; but the reptiles heard their clumsy approach, and slid soundlessly into crack or crevice. The bush slept: motionless: silent: apparently deserted. Drugged to immobility by the heat of the midday sun.
    The game wasn’t amusing for very long.
    Eventually their search led them away from the stream, into less luxuriant vegetation; into the open bush. They could see farther here; could see to where, a little way ahead, a ridge of low, slab-sided hills were tilted out of the level plain. The children looked at the hills. They looked friendly; familiar; like the foothills of the Alleghenies. The boy reached for his sister’s hand.
    â€˜Mary!’
    â€˜Yes, Peter?’
    â€˜Remember when Daddy took us on top of Mount Pleasant. Remember all the lots of sea we could see?’
    â€˜Yes, I remember.’
    â€˜P’raps we could see the sea from the tops of those mountains.’
    It took them half an hour to get to the foot of the hills. They rose in a low escarpment, an outcrop of granite and quartz, jutting abruptly out of the level plain. The stream, moat-like, skirted their feet. There seemed at first to be no way up. Then the girl spotted a dark shadow: a gully, cleaving the escarpment like the cut of an axe.
    Except that it faced north rather than south, it might have been the gully where they’d spent the night; it had the same smoothly rising sides, and the same rock-fringed tumbling stream. It took them four hours to climb it.
    If the stream hadn’t provided them with water, and the sides of the gully with shade, they would never have got to the top.
    As it was the sun was setting as they clambered on to the rim of the hills, and saw the country to southward stretching away in front of them, bathed in golden light: a magnificent panorama: a scene of primeval desolation: mile after hundred mile of desert, sand and scrub. And in the far distance, pools of silver; pools of glinting, shimmering light; pools which shivered and wavered and contracted, and seemed to hang a fraction above the horizon.
    The boy danced with delight.
    â€˜Look, Mary. Look! The sea. The sea. It isn’t far to go.’
    She caught hold of him and pulled him against her and pressed his face to her breasts.
    â€˜Don’t look, Peter,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t look again. It isn’t fair.’
    She knew what the pools of silver were: the salt pans of the great Australian desert. She sat down on the thin tufted grass and started to roll and unroll the hem of her frock.
    After a long time she got up, and led the protesting Peter back to the gully. At least there was water there. She told him that tomorrow they’d walk down to the sea. Tomorrow they wouldn’t be hungry any more.

CHAPTER FOUR
    S UN-UP brought the kookaburras, the gang-gangs and the finches. It brought warmth and colour. And hunger.
    The girl woke early. She lay on her back, thinking. Outwardly she was calm; but inwardly she was damming back a gathering flood of fear. Always she had protected Peter, had smoothed things out and made them easy for him – molly-coddled him like an anxious hen her father had once said. But how could she protect him now? She knew that soon he’d be awake; awake and demanding to start off for the ‘sea’. It would be too cruel to tell him the sea wasn’t there. She’d have to think of something else: have to tell him one of those special sort of lies that Mummy said God didn’t mind. Her forehead puckered in concentrated thought.
    Too soon Peter was awake.

    They spent the morning searching for food. It would be foolish, Mary said, to start walking seaward