Nobody Camps Here in July

There was nobody at Mannus Lake when we came in off the dirt, and the few who turned up over the next four nights did not stay long. We had crossed back over the Murray into New South Wales a few kilometres past the cattle, and it was no great run from there to the turn-off, then a few kilometres of dirt with a state forest of pines standing dark along our left. Not many people camp the southern states in July. It suited us exactly.

We took the best position in the place, right on the water's edge, and turned the bus so the windows faced out over it, which is a thing we now do without discussing. Grammy put her van into a similar spot. Mannus Lake is small enough to take in at a glance: farming country on the far shore with cattle grazing along it, and a few hundred metres of cold water this time between them and anything of ours. Behind us stood the pines. We had two and a half weeks in hand between Albury and Canberra with nothing owed on any of it, and this was going to be one of the long stays.

The wind came off the forest rather than the water, down over the pines with a bite in it that went through everything we owned, because somewhere out beyond that dark line of trees were the Snowy Mountains. Most mornings the ground came up white with frost. Most mornings the lake had fog lying on it as well, low and in no hurry, and it would stay long after the winter sun cleared the trees, thinning from the edges inward, going nowhere, until at some point we would look up and find it gone without either of us having seen it go.

Sal finished her last assignments at Mannus. Two years of them, near enough without a break, carried through more camps than we could count and through Japan as well, where she sat down to study in a country she had flown to for her children. Torrin was living there; Sophie and Shea had come too. She worked anyway. And then, at a small lake in New South Wales in the cold, she finished the final one. What was left of the degree was the placement, and the placement was in Canberra. She did not make much of it. Something went out of her shoulders that had been sitting in them a long time, and that was the whole of the ceremony.

What it left behind was the mornings. The bird life at Mannus was better than the place had any need to be, blue fairy wrens working the grass in short hops, red-capped robins, finches we could not put a name to, coots out on the water and pelicans riding it, and for the first time in two years there was nothing at all in the day that had to be done before we could sit and watch them. She had earned that on the Thursday. She had four mornings of it.

Then Sophie rang. She was going to Canberra to see Jess, who is Jan's daughter, who grew up alongside her, and in whose house we had stayed the last time we were in the capital. Our plan had us arriving after Sophie left. It was a perfectly good plan and we gave it up inside a minute, because two and a half weeks of unclaimed road is a fine thing to own and a small thing to spend on a daughter, and neither of us needed to talk it through.

The day before we left we took the bikes back out along the track we had ridden in on. The forest close to camp had been picked clean by whoever came before us, but a couple of kilometres down there was more than we could carry, and we filled two bags with it. Anth did the cutting with the bowsaw, a handmade Bear Essentials that has been aboard since Tasmania and has taken apart more fallen timber than either of us could account for. Grammy stayed at the lake. We rode back slower than we had come out, bags balanced, the cold coming up off the ground and into our hands.

Five nights, and we could have stayed a fortnight without using the place up. The camp after this one had been pencilled in for a week; we cut it to a single night, long enough to see what it was and no longer, and then the city. Two and a half weeks had come down to that.

It was a strange way to spend a freedom she had only just finished earning, and neither of us minded in the least. We went on the fifth morning, and the cattle on the far shore did not look up.Read more