She Had Until Monday

Tuesday afternoon, once Sal had finished at Trinity, we collected her and turned south for Mount Clear. It was the last of the Namadgi camps Anth had slept at the year before, and the one Sal had not seen since she was a girl. Last time Anth had come alone. This time there were three of us, and the one most eager for the bush was Sophie. She had until Monday. A bus to Melbourne would take her then, and none of us said much about it on the drive down.

We took our time. The bus never hurries anywhere. It could, but the fuel gauge would make us pay for it, and in almost three years we have rarely found a reason good enough. It is the journey, not the destination, as people say, and nearly all of our travelling has been that way. Nobody in the cab minded how long the road took.

Mount Clear is a tent-only campground, so the bus went where it had gone before, into the bay kept for cars. It sat right beside the camp and was every bit as good as the sites themselves. Sophie pitched the tent a short walk from the door. It was our tent, but the last one to sleep in it had been Torrin, at Wilsons Prom, where a wombat had torn straight through it. Grammy and Anth had mended it back at Gympie, and the repair was still there in the side if you knew where to look. Anth knew. He watched Sophie peg it out and kept the thought to himself: the same small tent, one child and then the other, and both of them out on their own roads now. One was in Melbourne, earning his way to Canada; one had a bus ticket for Monday morning.

Spring had officially arrived, but the camp sits low in a frost valley, and the cold settled into it each night the way cold does in a hollow. It was mild beside some of the places we had come through on the long way down from Queensland. Still, there was enough bite at dawn to remind us exactly where we were.

The Pomoly ran every night. It was Sophie's first time with it, and she took to the ritual quickly: the fire lit, the chairs drawn in, hands held out to the glass. All the usuals came off it across the week. Damper. Silverside. Pancakes. The woodsmoke got into our jumpers and stayed there.

By day Sal kept up her online placement work from the bus, and Sophie went out with her camera. She moved slowly around the edges of the camp, listening as much as looking, the phone held up now and then to catch a call. Every new bird went into her Life List on Merlin, the bird app, and each one seemed to please her more than the last.

Anth, never far from a geocache, found a puzzle nearby that nobody had solved in over five years. He solved it. The ride to the hiding place was three kilometres by bike, and when he reached it the container sat there as clean as if someone had tucked it away the day before. Five years of weather, and no one. He rode back with the private satisfaction of a man who knows nobody else will ever quite understand why it mattered.

Then we found the Settlers Track, a walk through the old high country huts of the valley. Rather than drive to the trailhead, we decided to walk from camp. Anth ran the numbers and announced it would be just over ten kilometres, and we believed him.

Soph saw it first. A Gang Gang cockatoo, in a tree beside the track. None of us had ever seen one. It is the ACT's own bird, the one on the Territory's emblem, and it had taken nearly three years on the road and our daughter's eyes to put one in front of us. She stood very still with the camera up, and we stood still behind her, and for a moment nobody wanted to be anywhere else.

The first hut was Brayshaws, built in 1903. We looked through its rooms and then sat on the old verandah to eat. Sal watched Sophie with her boots stretched out across the boards. She thought of the girl she had been the last time she was in this valley, brought here on someone else's plans. Now her own daughter sat beside her, and on Monday she would be gone again. The verandah had stood for well over a century. It had watched a great many families sit down together on those boards, eat what they had carried, and then go on their separate ways.

Halfway along we reached the second hut, Westermans Homestead, and ate again. We wandered through slowly, reading the age of the place in its timber and its quiet, and none of us was in any hurry to leave.

The walk back felt quicker, as return journeys always do. At the bus Anth checked how far we had actually gone. Just over sixteen kilometres. His sums, it turned out, had been wrong by six. Our legs had known for some time.

Sunday came too soon. With Sophie's bus to Melbourne leaving on Monday morning, we packed down reluctantly. It was our last drive in from a bush camp. The tent came down, mended side and all, and went back into the bus. Where it had stood all week there was only a square of flattened grass, already beginning to lift.Read more