Healing Waters, Hidden Treasures

Glenorchy for the hairdresser and the laundromat, which is a fair description of most town days: one person doing something for themselves and the other watching a machine.

Then Sorell for the post office, and by then the day was gone, so we did what we always do and opened WikiCamps to find somewhere within reach. A strip of beach at Lauderdale came up.

Before that, though, the after-hours doctor.

The shingles had not cleared and Anth had picked up an infected throat on top of it, which is what happens when your immune system has already been given something else to do. It had got to the point where it needed looking at rather than waiting out. So an evening in a waiting room, and antibiotics, and the particular indignity of being unwell in a place where you have no house to be unwell in.

We got pizza afterwards. Partly because neither of us was going to cook, and partly for Sal, who had finished the trimester and deserved something better than the celebration she had received so far, which was a mechanic's yard.

Pizza in the bus has a specific association now. The last time was Launceston in April, the four of us crammed into Grammy's hired Hiace on the final night, eating out of boxes and going back over three weeks of convoy. That was seven months ago. It does not feel like seven months and it also feels like something that happened to different people.

We got to Lauderdale after dark and set up quietly, curtains across, lights low, the way you do when you are on a beach strip rather than a proper camp. The surf was close enough to hear all night.

The next day was caches, which meant leaving in the morning and coming back at dusk, because a bus that is not there all day attracts no attention at all.

Then the result came through. High Distinction.

First trimester. Enrolled in July, started in September, and completed across a bush camp at Chauncy Vale, the waiting area of a truck workshop, several paddocks with borrowed internet, a fortnight in Queensland emptying a house, and a fortnight in Japan. She has not been a student since before the kids. She got a High Distinction.

We went out to the South Arm Peninsula on the strength of it, chasing a cache Anth had been looking at for a while: twenty-one years old, placed in about 2003, still there, still being signed.

It is at Goat Bluff Lookout, where there is a Second World War bunker on the headland. Concrete, half sunk, built to watch the approaches to the Derwent when there was a real prospect of something coming up it. Nothing ever did. The thing has sat there for eighty years being weathered, and at some point somebody put a small container near it, and for two decades people have been coming out to find it.

Then down to Opossum Bay, where the road ends.

Sal stayed with the bus. Anth walked the five kilometres out and back through the Gellibrand Point reserve, which was the furthest he had walked since Japan and about as much as he had in him. He got it done, slowly, and came back knowing he was not right yet but was closer than he had been a fortnight ago.Read more