At nine o'clock on the Friday night the island's generator failed. The men had gone to the mainland for their night off. The sea was turbulent. The manager was away, which left only Mara at the helm, ostensibly to cook for a bunch of laid-back writers on retreat, but also to take charge in the event of an emergency.
Bleary-eyed guests were still at the dining tables, plying themselves and each other with wine and other alcoholic concoctions as belated recompense for the heaving seas of the morning’s crossing, trapping the terrified retreaters in a boat that seemed no match for the vertiginous swell and troughs, when the lights lurched into a drunken semaphore: on/off/on/off. After the spasms stopped, the lights stayed on, and most of the guests were too disoriented to register Mara's exit into the night, clutching the keys to the admin hut. Her usually imperturbable face was set and pale, but the back-up system had kicked in, the lights were on for the time being, the co-ordinator of the weekend retreat and a couple of volunteers were dishing up the sticky date pudding, and a convivial atmosphere pervaded the cosy hub of the island's only site of habitation.
Outside the comfort zone, clouds scudded across the face of a late-rising moon, the sea gnawed uneasily at the intertidal rocks, palm fronds rasped against each other in a discourse of harsh consonants, leaves of eucalypts were restive, stirred to sibilant exchanges. Beneath the tensions of this surface activity lay an unnerving sense of expectancy.
A couple of hours later, one of the men who'd gone to the mainland on leave appeared out of the wild night, summoned by Mara, his face raw from the windy crossing, and went straight to the shed housing the generator.
The guests dispersed to their bungalows, where the hardier souls sat out on the verandas, drinking, musing, chatting before turning in. Our cabin was the only one left from an earlier generation - fibro on a concrete slab with a rainwater tank at one end almost the height of the low roof. We were sheltered from the wind by the row of bungalows on the foreshore, by dunes away to one side and a fringe of casuarinas between us and the sea. The conversation was flowing in spurts and gushes, becoming desultory before flaring up again.
I was reflecting on an event that had occurred late that afternoon, as the sun was slipping behind pillows of dark cloud along the horizon. I'd set out towards the spit at one end of the nearby beach, where the rocks shelved in layers, bridging the intertidal zone, and the land behind rose to a bluff, covered in speargrass, topped by pandanus.
At a certain point on the way to the rocky spit, I'd been stopped in my tracks by what felt like an invisible wall, a field of force, an alignment of energies. At the point where this happened, a white heron or egret was fossicking in the small rock pools, apparently oblivious of the charged atmosphere.
Among the pandanus on the bluff above, something was stirring. The rustlings were not caused by the breeze, and sounded faintly sinister and hostile. I heard a few rusty carks from crows, caught sight of what looked like a Brahminy kite, but could not shrug off the sensation that I was being observed. But by whom? Or what?
While aware that this island had a history of brutal dispossession involving the forcible removal of its Indigenous custodians, I knew little of the details of those events. However, the invisible resistance I had encountered before reaching the spit prompted the thought that my presence there might be a transgression. I didn't know what had happened in that place, and I knew nothing about the people who had belonged there. Feeling uneasy, I turned back.
* * *
It was around midnight outside our cabin, and only one other woman and I were left sitting under the awning. The activity at the other bungalows had all but ceased. We could hear possums scurrying about on the ground among the coconut palms. Then soundlessly a curlew emerged into the penumbra cast by our single light. It fixed uncanny shaman eyes on me like wild half moons, pupils dilated, then began to move towards my chair.
I knew what curlews were said to portend. While feeling privileged that the bird had no fear of me, I wondered why it had singled me out. Some Indigenous peoples believed curlews to be messengers from the other world - spirit birds, psychopomps, couriers of souls.
Approaching so close that I could have touched it, the curlew took a few more steps on its spindly legs until it was in the shadow of the table beside me, still watching me intently. Curlews are creatures of darkness and obscurity, of liminal zones, not only spiritually but physically, where their elongated bodies and tawny streaked and speckled plumage can camouflage them to resemble sand dunes, tree bark, dried branches and foliage. By day they escape detection by freezing in postures that make them indistinguishable from their surroundings.
After a few minutes the mysterious visitor withdrew, leaving me wondering what its presence might have signified.
Although I resisted the temptation to regard the bird as an omen, as I lay in a hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking, sensing the play of intertidal energies in my own consciousness, I seemed to hear voices in the wind. The voices had a disembodied quality, as if they were coming from the ether, and were intermittently drowned out by the sounds of the sea and the air currents passing through foliage. They possessed the timbre and tone and pitch of women's and children's voices, coming from some liminal time and place. Their cadences were those of people grieving.
In the morning, I casually asked my two cabin-mates if they'd heard voices during the night, but they shook their heads.
When I walked along the beach late on the second afternoon, the sky had been clarified by wind and rain to a wintry purity. The mainland coast and the hills and mountains lunging away into the hinterland were vividly defined in violet, indigo and cobalt, while the horizon's western rim simmered with liquid gold.
Again I approached the point where I had been repulsed the previous day. The white bird flew up, startled, but I sensed no resistance to my passage on this occasion. Nevertheless, I turned back. Dusk was falling, and there was a brooding undercurrent in the air, too diffuse to be called a sense of foreboding, but clearly not welcoming.
That evening around the dining tables as the wine flowed freely, I heard a loud-voiced woman asking another member of the company if he'd found the cave that lay somewhere just beyond the spit I had failed to reach.
She had recently attended an open day on the island, where visitors had been told that the cave was used as a place of grisly punishment by one of the first foreigners to annex the place for raising livestock. Any signs of non-compliance on the part of the Indigenous residents of the island with the terms of dispossession imposed by the pastoralist were met with the utmost brutality. Indigenous men, whose home the island had been for millennia, were chained by their necks to the cave walls, and left there as the tide flooded in.
After dinner, when the chatter from other cabins had died down, the curlew came again to where I was sitting outside, and lingered, observing me as before. The wind had abated, though not entirely. Later, lying wakeful in the ionised atmosphere, I listened again for the voices I fancied I had heard the previous night, but the only sound disturbing the fretting tide was the wild keening of curlews. Not the drawn-out wail from the spirit realm that is said to portend a death, but the agitated flurry of voices one hears when they all cry at once, as if in alarm and warning.