She didn’t doubt that I knew my limits. She simply knew that I was more interested in crossing them than I ever was in staying safe.
Clemmie was forever making dramatic declarations and going back on them. Owning a pet was akin to slavery, she announced over gelato when we were fifteen. A month later she owned a guinea pig named Skywalker, which she kept in a cage in the back garden. Piercings were an abuse of the body, she proclaimed on the platform of Strathfield Station, until she pierced her ears at twenty. Oral sex was disgusting because she did not like it, and on that I never heard her launch a counterclaim. When we were teenagers, I thought that she would wind up being the corrupt one, center stage, while I looked on from my bookish place in the audience. She could flirt, she brought summer into a room on the tail of her big man’s shirt, and I always thought she knew how to be in the world in a way that I didn’t. But it turned out that, once I got around to it, I never thought oral sex was disgusting.
The year she first cast her assessment on oral sex, Clemmie had stopped sitting cross-legged on the ground with me on the city-bound platform of Strathfield Station after school. Instead she stood, leaning against a pole. My mother said that girls who sit on the ground have low self-esteem.
That’s absurd, I told her, I’m not fucking standing.
For two weeks we waited for the train home, me sitting, Clemmie leaning against her pole, until eventually, and without acknowledgment, she wound up back on the ground with me, picking at the icing on stale strawberry doughnuts with her legs crossed. It occurred to me even then that I was, by dint of sheer stubbornness, forcing her down to my level.
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As the sun dipped we wrapped ourselves in towels and bought hot chips from the kiosk. We walked north along the headland towards Bondi, past the sandstone bluffs and Gordon’s Bay and the parking lot at Clovelly, up at last to Waverley Cemetery.
The warm breeze rustled the palm trees by the memorial to Irish sons killed in English wars. We walked towards the boardwalk that rounded the cliffs and down towards the beach. A couple of tourists walked by, holding hands, squinting expectantly behind their sunglasses at the glimmer of Bondi ahead. There were signs set up every few meters along the path, warning of unstable ground. The edges of the cemetery were crumbling. It sat upon a dyke filled with building waste, between two walls of rock. Below, the base of the cliff was being inundated with waves. It didn’t drain properly. The land was breaking up piece by piece. In fifty years’ time, once erosion and the rising waters had taken their toll, the cliffs would no longer exist. And who knew what would become of the bodies?
At the farthest outcrop of rock there was a lookout. I picked a flower from the bushes by the fence. Clemmie wandered ahead, looking north. I leaned against the fence and turned, looking back towards the blood-red pulse of the light as it sank. From the edge of the ocean, it was easy to see how seductive the west must have looked for those nineteenth-century men trapped at the edge of all this vastness, believing in the water that was Out There.
Back then, the British had believed an inland sea lay at the heart of Australia. They had stood right where I was standing on the edge of the continent and noted that some of the rivers didn’t terminate down there in the churning ocean below the cliffs. Some rivers flowed west. Turned their backs on the Pacific and slouched suggestively inland.
In 1817 the colony’s surveyor general, John Oxley, was sent out to explore and chart the Lachlan River. Dammed almost out of existence today, the Lachlan was a source of much excitement in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was one of those westward flowing rivers. Termination point unknown.
Oxley set out to trace the river’s course, to see whether it led into the inland sea. The sea would make way for cities, farms, great feats of engineering, all the bounty of the empire. The inland sea was the landscape’s logical promise for this scrap of land in the far-right corner of His Majesty’s maps. If there was no water in the interior, then what future could they possibly have in this country? Because the thing was, if you didn’t believe in an inland sea and all that ripe promise of the landscape, you might then have to face what you’d done—set up home on this drought-ridden ancientness that you’d stolen and didn’t understand. A land all dead grass and fire and pestilence. A ruined Eden you had convinced yourself, in some fever dream, to stake a future on.
I had known about the inland sea my whole life, but during this final year in Sydney I began to think about it all the time. Because John Oxley was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. A descendant from my father’s side, I had been told Oxley was somebody to be proud of. But I came to realize the story I had been told might not in fact be accurate. I began to think often of that feckless imperialist trudging through the landscape for all those weeks in 1817, slowly being overwhelmed by a sense of alarm that there was simply fuck-all Out There. No Providence, no Eden, no neat or rational conclusion to the narrative.
Except that wasn’t what he reported when he got back to the coast. Oxley, our flesh and blood, was a consummate liar. A swindler and a fuckup, whichever way you look at it.
Oxley failed to trace the course of the river, but he noted that the Lachlan did not stop flowing west. “I feel confident,” he reported to the governor upon his return to the coast, “we were in the immediate vicinity of an inland sea.”
Why? Because he had smelled something like seaweed out there.
He had seen a swan fly across the horizon as he’d looked out across the flat salt plains that looked so seductively like the bottom of some long-ago seabed.
He hadn’t seen the water.
But he believed in its promise.
I did not speak often to my father, but years ago, during a rare bout of affection, my father had sent me a copy of Oxley’s journals. He included a letter with the book, explaining that he thought it important for me to appreciate our ancestral stake in History, and Empire. My father would, if challenged, earnestly forswear any allegiance to the atrocities committed by the Empire, but deep in his heart my father was proud of Oxley, had more admiration for him than for his own parents or children, for any prime minister or rock and roll guitarist. My father inflated the importance of Oxley’s legacy so that it might overshadow any other aspect of our personal or national history.
I read the journals.
Here was what was in them: walking, heat, monotony. Men and desert and horses. A lot of talking about water.
“Nothing can be more melancholy and irksome than travelling over wilds, which nature seems to have condemned to perpetual loneliness and desolation,” Oxley wrote. “We seemed indeed the sole living creatures in those vast deserts.”
From the fence on the edge of Waverley Cemetery it was difficult to believe any place so beautiful could give way to the loneliness and desolation of the interior. Up ahead Clemmie held her phone down by her hips out of the glare of the sun, and the first flush of sunburn began to warm my shoulders. I turned my back on the west and looked down along the coast. There was something strange about the water heading south towards La Perouse. There were thin streams of algal bloom like slick oil or sewage spread out down the coastline. It was hard to be sure that it wasn’t some dead or deadly thing coming into shore.
The word auspice refers at its root to the Roman belief that one could apprehend the future by tracking a bird in flight. The word describes a belief in the meaning of patterns, and encourages the human mind to read significance in, say, couches that have been pushed across front doors, in sea snakes in the water, in the progression of an algal bloom, in rivers flowing west, in the distant shape on the desert horizon that might be a swan.