The road had ended in a short curve that wound into itself at the entrance to the caravan park. The only movement we had seen last night in the utter blackness on those last few kilometres had been hundreds of small hopping shadows reflected in the headlights. Some kind of marsupials jumping like abandoned soccer balls in an earth tremor.
I had finished Deliverance some time after midnight on the deck of the cabin under the yellow light of a single globe. This remote place is probably the best place in the world to read the book if you exclude the actual Chattooga River. Far off, a muffled crash of distant surf carried in on the wind. I went inside.
Now it was morning and the sun had jerked the black curtain back to reveal a bay washing onto a shore that curved around to a point at the western end and a lighthouse the other way. Directly in front of the cabin a pathway broke through scrub and led down to the water, probably fifty steps away. The children had stolen out of the cabin earlier and gone that way. Behind the row of cabins, a green swathe stretched across and up a long hill. The hopping pandemelons or potoroos or whatever they were had gone and the place was crawling with golfers.
Further around a bluff hung over the bay. The hill was tumbled with summer houses, mostly white, the kind that was common on the mainland about four decades ago: simple brick and timber with sun decks set in neat unassuming lawns reaching down through the wooded areas to hidden pathways leading to the beach. Some had grander picture windows or two or three stories commanding a higher view but the whole effect was of a village at peace with its own timelessness and simplicity. No reality TV look-at-me renovation madness here. Yet.
Buggies loaded up with golf club bags that looked like giant tool kits in case they broke down were zigzagging down out of the hills towards the green. In the bowl at the end of the street the sole shop had opened and a man was setting up trolleys of goods and A-frame signs and tables and chairs and stands of hats ready for the throngs of beach-goers that wouldn't come at this time of year. After a while the children came back looking like they had discovered another planet, and needed breakfast.
Green's Beach is at the top of Tasmania and the end of the world. A refuge for the overwrought, where doing nothing is productive, where green is a colour that you can see, and where the rumble of the world's most treacherous passage of water steals in your open window at night and the glitter of the stars is so bright you could read Ts and Cs by it. If anybody ever did.
I had finished Deliverance some time after midnight on the deck of the cabin under the yellow light of a single globe. This remote place is probably the best place in the world to read the book if you exclude the actual Chattooga River. Far off, a muffled crash of distant surf carried in on the wind. I went inside.
Now it was morning and the sun had jerked the black curtain back to reveal a bay washing onto a shore that curved around to a point at the western end and a lighthouse the other way. Directly in front of the cabin a pathway broke through scrub and led down to the water, probably fifty steps away. The children had stolen out of the cabin earlier and gone that way. Behind the row of cabins, a green swathe stretched across and up a long hill. The hopping pandemelons or potoroos or whatever they were had gone and the place was crawling with golfers.
Further around a bluff hung over the bay. The hill was tumbled with summer houses, mostly white, the kind that was common on the mainland about four decades ago: simple brick and timber with sun decks set in neat unassuming lawns reaching down through the wooded areas to hidden pathways leading to the beach. Some had grander picture windows or two or three stories commanding a higher view but the whole effect was of a village at peace with its own timelessness and simplicity. No reality TV look-at-me renovation madness here. Yet.
Buggies loaded up with golf club bags that looked like giant tool kits in case they broke down were zigzagging down out of the hills towards the green. In the bowl at the end of the street the sole shop had opened and a man was setting up trolleys of goods and A-frame signs and tables and chairs and stands of hats ready for the throngs of beach-goers that wouldn't come at this time of year. After a while the children came back looking like they had discovered another planet, and needed breakfast.
Green's Beach is at the top of Tasmania and the end of the world. A refuge for the overwrought, where doing nothing is productive, where green is a colour that you can see, and where the rumble of the world's most treacherous passage of water steals in your open window at night and the glitter of the stars is so bright you could read Ts and Cs by it. If anybody ever did.
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