“Knew it to be a snow-covered Hydro-Electric Commission construction camp called Butlers Gorge that sat like a sore in a wilderness of rainforest. […] In those cowering corrals of huts had to live the workers, for in this remote highland country of the remote island of Tasmania that lay far off the remote land of Australia, there was no other human settlement for many miles. There were just wild rivers and wilder mountain ranges and everywhere rainforest that only ceded its reign over the land to the intermittent buttongrass plains, or in the higher altitudes to alpine moorland.”

From the perspective of Maria Buloh

“She drove along the road through the broken bush that arises after logging and fire until she came over a crest beyond which she saw the top of a dam giving way to an expanse of water so vast that it appeared an ocean. She halted, looking out past the wave-torn waters, to where rainforest and moorland and snow capped mountains merged into a single wild land stretching away as far as the eye could see. That land did not welcome her or care for her, any more than it had welcomed or cared for her parents who had come to live here so long before. And yet this land had shaped her, shaped them all. And they it.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“The corrosion of the years made it difficult to tell where the dam's concrete ended and the rock of the gorge in which it was built began. But there was no denying its power, its scale: she knew her hire car would appear only as a miserable minuscule scratch of red at the base of the huge black dam wall. The mossed and slimed dam seemed to her a relic from another age—an historical oddity as curious and as inexplicable as a Mayan temple in a Mexican jungle—part of a dream that sought to transform the end of the world into a place just like all others, and failed [...] She fingered an aged bronze plaque she found bolted onto the slimy black concrete wall, felt each upraised bronze letter with her fingertips. It read—FOR THE MEN OF ALL NATIONS WHO BY BUILDING THIS DAM HELPED HARNESS NATURE FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MANKIND 1955—and Sonja felt the emptiness of each word, the utter insignificance of each bold upright shape, and wondered if they were ever anything other than hieroglyphics which none divined.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“And then those fingers, those same elegant fingers with the chewed nails that had felt the smooth and sensual coldness of the stalactite-tears falling down the dam face, those fingers were scrabbling in the bush-covered peat in the middle of the rainforest, at a place only a kilometre or so from the dam site, where once stood a construction camp called Butlers Gorge and where there was now nothing called anything, only strange bird cries and wind and cold and ten elegant fingers with chewed nails clawing at the bleak earth at first slowly and almost respectfully of its secrets then with an urgency mounting into a fury. [...] Tall manferns dripped rain upon the ageing stumps of huge eucalypts felled long ago to clear the site for the camp. Above the soft noise of the rain were the desolate, harsh noises of Tasmanian rainforest, the wind high in the forest canopy, the cries of black cockatoos and crows.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“But when the sign indicating the turn off from the highway to Butlers Gorge was dimly illuminated in his headlights, it was simply as if he were being washed there by the rain, and he was some distance down the rough gravel road before he even fully comprehended what he was doing. And then, realising where he was going, still he did not consider why. He only thought that if it was to be in the darkness, in the terrible rain, so much the better. He would return but the night and the weather meant that he would not stay so long that it would trouble him. [...] As he approached the rise leading to the dam he became aware that far below the car, even though he could not see it, the Derwent River was in massive flood, huge rapids crashing through the rain and over the sound of his whirring, steaming engine. The gutters on the side of the road ran as rivers and the river far below ran as a huge cataract.[...] This dam, which he had with his sweat helped raise so many years ago, whose concrete felt entwined with his very flesh, whose form with his soul had set like rock—this dam was meant to hold everything within. But there it was, water falling with a fury, and he thought he had never seen anything so extraordinary in his life. The dam was spilling, a mountain of water avalanching down the spillway to end in a violent white maelstrom so huge houses would disappear at the point where the flume met the river bed.”

“When for the last time Sonja saw herself in that dream she was again eight years old, clad in a floral nightie, huddling up inside Bojan's bluey, again in phantasmagorical flight forever in the FJ with her father. They were where she knew they always had been: fleeing through a dark, frost-rimed night along the empty road to Butlers Gorge.”

“If this tale could be told properly it would be filled with everything. There would be an ocean of what had been and the dreams of what would be and you could swim within the shallows of those memories and surf the waves of those dreams as they rose up before breaking into nothingness. Watch as their foamy wash swirled up schools of reffos arriving day after day pushing their scant belongings to the single men's quarters in mangy old wooden wheelbarrows, them thinking that at last their journey was ended, in this, the strangest and most unexpected of places, all those Poles and Krauts and Czechs and Lithos and Yugos and Eye-ties and other Balts and wogs, the wheels of their wheelbarrows leaving thin muddy corrugations in winter and lifting roostertails of dust in the hard ruts of summer. If this tale could be told fully, you would be able to swim through the strangeness of the weather that could deliver four seasons in one day, snow and sun and rain and wind, and the men who took to dressing according to their moods rather than in accordance with the fickle nature of the alien weather, wearing coats when despondent and singlets when cheekily defiant.[...] The way the place was all so new and would soon seem so old, the way they worked hard to make the place nothing more than a memory for them, how they coped with the awfulness of it by dreaming that one day this would simply be something they would tell tales about in the comfort of good homes like they had seen on American movies, homes with electric kitchens and good plumbing and plush padded seats and happy families in them.”

“How cold that night! How white that snow! How completely the small camp of Butlers Gorge was already disappearing into that whiteness and darkness! The child Sonja stood at the top of the steps of her home, looking out at the shimmering mirage of what passed for a town, trying to catch some glimpse of her mother. It was hopeless, of course, though the child did not think that or think much at all. The child simply felt this. She saw the town as fragments of black shaped between intricate, ever changing patterns of falling white snow. She saw the town as lace. And she wondered how long before this—the only world she had ever known—how long before this too was gone.”

“How white the snow. How cold the night. How chill Sonja's small body. How dark the world outside her father's pungent, powerful arms. And how completely the small camp of Butlers Gorge seemed already disappearing into that whiteness and darkness and coldness as she turned inwards for that life before this life.”

“Sometimes a vast longing would come back over her. And when it did she would not fight it, but sought to celebrate it, would gather some things together in a carton and put the baby in the car and they would drive back. They would drive up that long empty road to that empty place where once stood a construction camp called Butlers Gorge and where there was now nothing, nothing but strange bird cries and wind and cold.”

“Upon arriving at the old construction camp site, Sonja would get out of the car and draw herself erect and look around the tall manferns dripping rain upon the ageing stumps of huge eucalypts felled so long ago to clear the site. She would do as she did every visit: look up and see the new trees that had grown since that time. Then, with her baby in one arm, and the carton under the other, she would walk into the desolate, harsh noises of Tasmanian rainforest, toward the scrawk of black cockatoos and the cries of teh currawongs, into the slow thrush-thrush of the wind up high in the forest canopy, and sometimes she thought she heard sounds most peculiar: of her mother singing [...] She would spend some time making sure her bearings were exactly right, then, when finally satisfied, push four sticks into the wet, soft warm earth. Out of the carton she would take a large reel of red ribbon and with it she would mark out the boundaries of what had been their home all that long time ago.”

“She reminded Helvi of the small-goods factory they had once worked in out at Derwent Park, Helvi full-time, Sonja after school and in the holidays, making salamis and sausages out of cheap meat.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“This day she transported herself back out fishing with Bojan in a dinghy in the middle of the Derwent River. Against the immense forested blueness of the mountain behind it, the pepper shaker sandstone spire of the old Cromwell Street church in Battery Point sat yellow and solitary. She could see, but only incidentally, only as blurs, the houses of the city beneath it. It could have been the 1840s or the 1940s. It could have even been Eastern Europe. But it was, as she had written across her schoolgirl's folder, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Universe. It was 1967.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh

“Sonja remembered the place as possessed of a certain violence of emotion. The wind cuffed the house with sudden wild blows, the rain fell upon their tin roof with the intensity of an avalanche, and afterwards the sun shone so bright she screwed her eyes up every time she went outside, where the steam rose from the hot blue-black bitumen yard in splendid vents between her toes. She would visit that place now, of course she would—that little hut in a backyard of a northern-suburbs home in Hobart, in which they spent that whole lifetime before this lifetime—she would, were it not that it would be disenchanting.”

“As she gathered her wits and looked about, she could see that her foolish fear had passed unobserved. In the great noise and overwhelming activity of the vast sewing room of that Hobart textile factory, everyone was too intently focused on meeting their daily quotas, to notice, far less care about the behaviour of a passing stranger.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“Once they had the FJ back on the road they drove through to Hobart in heavier and heavier rain that was blowing in with a fresh westerly front. Sonja was silent, Bojan, for once, out of guilt and sadness uncharacteristically talkative, his tone determinedly upbeat. "Don't worry about nothing, Sonja," he said. "A few months and I find a job in Hobart, I leave the hydro camp, find a place for us, and we live together." Sonja said nothing.”

“They sat in Helvi's old Blue Corolla, looking across the narrow road from where they were parked next to a dog-torn garbage bag, at a squalid run-down weatherboard cottage, set tightly in a street of similarly withered houses. At one end of Barracouta Row was a closed video store, at the other an open pizza parlour, with nobody about either. As Helvi talked their eyes wandered over the dilapidated exterior: the broken letterbox overflowing with junk mail, the blistering paintwork faded to the colours of the earth, the rusty corro of the verandah roof, the partially rotted window frames more humus than homely.”

“After they left Ahmet's house, it sleeted on the top of the large blue mountain that rumped and fingered the shivering town of Hobart, and then the sleep tstopped and the coulds dissolved and the sun came strangely fierce as if angry at being denied and then the wind was gone and the mountain was still. From the vast wild lands of the south-west of the island, and beyond it an expanse of ocean that stretched unimpeded by land fully half of the planet to the west before its waves swept upon the beaches of South America and a quarter of the planet to the south before it began reforming as the icy shoals of the Antarctic, the weather most always came this way to Hobart: wild, mad, its reason lost somewhere out in the aching emptiness of the fish-fat sea, its rhythms those of the roaring forties and breaking waves huge water-walls rising only to suddenly fall into frothy flatness, hot sun succeeding sleet succeeding harsh hail storms shrapnelling the sea succeeding snow succeeding sun, and all the world's weather experienced not with the steady waxing and waning of seasons, but known in a morning or an afternoon, all time and all the world and all the seasons of life in the infinity of an hour.”

“Back then, Hobart was empty, and the emptiness was exacerbated by the vast violence of the fire that had come upon the place like the most terrible war, and a huge silence wrapped itself around everything, even around large busses lumbering through the town with only a handful of passengers all lost in their journeys, even around Sonja, heading into the heart of Hobart with the intention of leaving it forever.”

[...]

“In the silence of Hobart then that is not like any town in the world now, the only sound was that final chimed note of that music box's song.”

“Sonja gave the bar a perfunctory polish with a counter towel. Through a window she watched the rain outside, falling in shudders and shakes, wild scratchings across the dull, greasy light of the streetlamps. Across the road, the neon blue angel continued to fly above the seamen's mission through the mizzly night.”

[...]

“Bojan had now intention of telling Sonja about the damburst. Or how he had been standing outside in the rain for the last half an hour wondering whether or not he would come in, his clothes so saturated that their weight pulled him earthwards and held him anchored to the pavement with the force of roots, and him staring up at the neon blue angel that flew above the seamen's mission, its extended arm pointing across Morrison Street to the waterside pub in which his daughter worked.”

“There had been a few rare weekends when he had come to visit in the new car and they would spend all Saturday cleaning and washing and polishing the car until it shone like a precious jewel in the sun, and on the Sunday, much to Mrs Maritza Michnik's chagrin, they would drive down the Huon to pick mushrooms or to the beaches for a swim. The FJ had been almost new when Bojan had purchased it, and the object of envy on the part of many who knew him. It was a lovely car at first, and at first Bojan possibly saw it as the future into which he could escape from an ever more unsatisfactory present. After all, it was what no-one he knew had had in Slovenia: a car like in the American movies. And it was proof to both those in Slovenia and Australia that he had become what he had set out to be: Australian.”

“Bojan Buloh drove down the twisty road to Rosebery and then on to Queenstown and in the last of the light turned eastwards, making his way up the serpentine road that clung at dizzying heights from that sad town's bald mountains. Somewhere past the ghost town of Linda he switched on his lights, and soon after, when the rain squalls hit, his windscreen wipers. As he climbed up mountain passes and slowly came down their treacherous flanks through that vast peopleless land, an occasional bolt of lightning lit up the FJ and he would momentarily glimpse the wild country through which he was journeying.”

“But, once the promise of a new Australia, the FJ was now, like its owner, aged and decrepit. The FJ was not the car it once had been, and, Bojan had to ruefully admit if only to himself, it had not been much of a car in the first place. So when the FJ went ominously silent as he was driving down Macquarie Street, Bojan was philosophical in his realisation that after two and a half decades the FJ's 138 motor had finally died, and he was looking forward to either buying a new car or never returning to Tullah.”

“Sonja knew although Helvi was wrong to think that any of what Sonja had done could be equated to success, there was in her story some small triumph that she had never before recognised about herself. But then Helvi had always made Sonja feel as if she were worth something. "Not bad for a scrubber from Moonah, though," said Sonja.”

“Back then, it was the summer of the great fire the monstrous like of which even the oldest could not remember and which the youngest, huddled like nervous whiting in teh shallows of beaches along the great Derwent and Huon rivers, would never forget. Early one morning a great wind had begun to blow, and as the day continued the sun burnt hotter and the wind grew fiercer and the sky darker and a few sparks grew into a number of small fires and the small fires grew into numerous bigger bushfires and then the many bushfires joined together in invincible alliance. People stopped trying to fight what was now a single monstrous fire-storm as large as the land and the sky joined, and realised that the best they would be able to do now was simply escape the terrible conflagration that was eating the island. As Sonja observed it from their Moonah home—the fire forcing itself into the very city—watching the air turn into smoke, seeing it turn as dark as night as ash filled the sky and the heavens rained cinders  she had found herself feeling both terrified and excited. Before the sun rolled earthwards that terrible day like a huge ball of boiling blood, over a thousand homes were to burn to the ground, countless creatures, domestic and wild, to be incinerated, and sixty-two people to perish. In the following weeks, in whichever direction Sonja looked, the view always ended in the most silent and desolate blackness. Nothing was like anything people had ever known. The town was numbed, full of refugees who had lost everything in the moving maelstrom of flame that had sucked half the island into its transforming heart. The once blue forested mountain that backdropped the town was now a black blasted rock. Where once had been vast forests, a dense and mysterious dank green world, now only the trees' skeletal essence remained, great stags arising from the scorched earth like accusing pillars of salt and beneath them soot and ash. And beneath that black earth? Beneath it, Sonja found when she had one morning walked into the hills and scratched at the ground, the first evidence of new life—embryonic green shoots of the new forest.”

“When Helvi's shift finished they had gone to a cafe down at Salamanca. They sat outside, at a small round table, a penny of a table really, beneath which they continued clasping their hands together like schoolgirls. [...] At that late hour of the afternoon Salamanca was oddly empty of people and of movement. Where behind the venerable sandstone warehouses there ought to have been the architectural accumulation of the centuries, there was only the cold wilderness of the mountain. Sonja was momentarily distracted by this thought, by the incongruity of this place that failed at being cosmopolitan but succeeded at being something altogether rarer: itself. It was a world at once skewed and strange and beautiful, and Sonja suddenly saw that Helvi was actually a bird from a foreign land that had accidentally alighted here--heard Helvi's English with its Finnish warble as a finch-like twitter, saw Helvi's small, lithe movements as those of a sparrow darting from branch to twig to branch.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“"Where you stay?" "The Sundowner Motel," Sonja said. "Out Warrane."”

“Something had seized her like a cramp, had gathered her guts together and cast them downwards that fateful morning in Sydney only a week before, somethingshe at first only understood as a longing, curious and big and strange as the sky above. A wanting to once more see the peculiar Tasmanian light and what it touched upon, what it was that stood between the sun and the earth, that strange light of negative images, whereby the sky could be dark as pitch and the earth could glow ruby gold, and only shadows holding the two together.”

“She did eat apples again, of course she did, but it was only many years later, long after she had become an adult, when she lived in Sydney and she felt sure that the sensation of torn skin and ruptured flesh and sweet acidic juices filling her mouth would not bring the power of the old world back into her life. There were in Sydney neither Geeveston Fannys nor Jonagolds nor Tassie Snows nor Cox's Orange Pippins to be had, and the fruit stall in teh crowded railway station had only the ubiquitous Golden Delicious. But upon biting into the apple, Sonja tasted only total emptiness and loss, for the apple was mealy and tasted of pap. And then she knew that all she had was what she carried within her, and she had denied that for so long that it now seemed not possible to reclaim any of it and, feeling everything had gone, she abruptly sat down in front of the fruit stall on the pavement and burst into tears, as thousands of commuters stepped around and finally over her.”

“Sonja remembered how upon arriving in Sydney all those years ago she had been struck above all by the indifference of the city. In the airport she had suddenly screamed out her father's name and there was no reply, and she had laughed, out of fear and out of relief--and people studiously avoided her, rathern than as before, simply not seeing her. Sane or insane, the city did not care, went to pains not to know, and within it she felt a sense of liberty, of having joined some huge fraternity of the fallen, all refusing to acknowledge the devil was on their tail. Lives lived with purpsose existed only in rumours and advertisements. In the big smoke there were a billion particles of smog, caustic residue of millions of similarly incinerated lives. The city filled her with the anonymity of others and in that vast wash of a shared nothingness, where people were ordered like factory hens and worked like mules and only in their nightmares were human, Sonja finally found relief.”

“And then a little past Tungatinah, as he was approaching Tarraleah, he found himself overwhelmed by the ineluctable desire to finally return to the one place he had vowed never to return. Why that night of all nights such a strange passion came upon the sad, soggy Bojan Buloh, remains as inexplicable now as it was improbable then.”

“Once this weary pastoral land had been open forest through which blackfellas hunted and camped and of a night filled with their stories of which one had no end: that of the fierce war against the invading whitefellas. Then the surveyors came with their barefooted convict track cutters and they gave the land strange new names and by their naming and by their describing they announced the coming of a terrible revolution. Where their indian-ink maps cut the new country into neat counties with quaint reassuring English names such as Cumberland and Bothwell, the surveyors' successors, the hydro-electricity engineers, made their straight lines reality in the form of the wires along which the new energy, electricity—the new god—hummed its song of promise, its seductive false prophecies that Tasmania would one day be Australia's Ruhr Valley. The island busily, almost hysterically tried to bury its memory of a recent, often hideous past in a future of heavy industry, of gigantic furnaces and enormous machines that were to be powered by the huge resources of water energy that the place possessed in abundance, and for a time the island was falsely praised as a virgin land without history.”

“She asked him how he felt about all the rivers being dammed, whether he thought it good or bad, and he grew garrulous. "Of course it's bad," he said. "It's fucken wrong. I tell you, I used to walk up the banks of that Murchison River and the Mackintosh River and the Pieman River, up that bloody rainforest and I love it up there. All fucken day and then sometimes even the night and the next day. I'd just make myself a nest like a fucken bird I would make this nest beautiful it was bloody beautiful branches of myrtle lined with the soft dead-man fern fronds. I would catch trout and cook them for tea and for breakfast when I woke so beautiful I sleep you wouldn't believe the things I seen and then even more strange this one morning I am lying in my nest and I see him, a fucken Tassie tiger."”

From the perspective of Sonja and Bojan Buloh. 

“Bookending either end of the Tullah pub were two massive fireplaces in which huge logs were daily burnt in vain, for the pub was always cold and had the mildewy look of a building that, like many of its patrons, had never properly dried out. [...] The pub's future was as uncertain as that of the remote mountain hamlet it serviced, and perhaps this explained a certain melancholia Sonja felt as she sat there. It had taken all changes and all types in its stride: both the boom that came when Tullah was made the base for dam-building projects in the mid-1970s, and the winding down that was now under way. Every day more men were leaving, heading out of town early to avoid being caught on the winding mountain passes behind the semi-trailers slowly hauling the mobile homes and single men's quarters away to be used as the new housing of the poor elsewhere.”

From the perspective of Sonja Buloh.

“For Sonja, the town of Tullah did not so much nestle in that high valley with wild mountains around all sides as appear to be an industrial accident swept up into orderly piles, left sinking into swampy ground. Everybody, everything was temporary. Except the rainforest and the buttongrass that would come back when this brief intrusion was over. It was not a place in which people were born or would wish to die, but a place that they simply longed to leave. The promise that had been made to the migrant workers, the offer of a better life in Australia than in war-ruined Europe, the elusive rainbow of prosperity and easier, more peaceable times, had grown thin and distant [...]Everybody brooded sullenly in the sour swamp that was Tullah, waiting for a moment of catharsis that might relieve the monotony: a death building the dam, a brawl at the canteen ending with an urn of boiling water being thrown, some prostitutes over from Melbourne for a hard-working weekend beginning with their being raffled at the pub.”

“Like a bar-room brawler who won't give up laying inot his opponent even after the poor bastard has been reduced to a pulpy quivering mess that won't or can't get back up off the blood-puddled floor, the rain continued pummelling the tin roof of the bereft Tullah single men's quarters on that miserable winter's night. The wind, a banshee from the west, shrieked and beat the single men's quarters with erratic thumps. In Bojan's lousy room a small bar radiator sitting on the floor etched a thin red line, promising but not delivering heat.”

“Bojan Buloh felt the mist sitting low in that treacherous marsh of a town that was Tullah, a foetid swamp in which water and men festered in a bleak valley's sag, a rotting hammock slung between high blue mountains, and was grateful to feel it, to feel the blanketing white wetness reducing his horizon only to that of his FJ, upon the roof of which he was tying furniture.”

“After a time the road headed into the forest. Following the spirit animals blindly, he eventually arrived back on the main road, at which point they vanished as inexplicably as they had appeared. At the crossroads Bojan did not turn west to head back to Tullah but without hesitation swung the car east, toward Hobart, toward Sonja.”

“But when Bojan disappeared after three weeks—evidently back to Tullah and his melancholy existence there, his holidays spent—Sonja felt it keenly.”