conglomerate
adjective & noun
gathered into a rounded mass; to bring together into a cohering mass; to collect or cluster together
ONE: 1985
It’s probably Saturday, or a day during the school holidays when my father had time off. We would hook up our little box trailer with Dad’s hand-made extensions that allowed us to stack wood well above the original short sides. With bottles of drinking water and Tupperware full of my mother’s meticulous sandwiches, we drove out of town and out of time, over the hills into silence. Traversing Gormy Hill slowly and drifting into the spectacle that unfolded on the other side—the low hard fist of Mount Lyell, the scattered and broken houses of Gormanston, decaying even then into edges. We descended onto the vast buttongrass plains, where nests of firewood waited for my father, my clumsy hands and his chainsaw.
The air is soon rich with wattle sawdust and sweat. Slowly the trailer fills - row by row, end to end, higher and higher. Later, with the lounge room open fire pulsing its heat through the house, Mum getting tea into the oven and the sun colouring the naked hills with the beginning of the end of the day’s last light, we unload the trailer and stack the wood neatly against the trellis at the end of the carport. When that is full it goes into the small humpy Dad built off the end of the garage. I have to bend over to get the wood in there. Once the trailer is unloaded, I sweep it out and then sweep the carport, shooing away spiders and fragments of bark and splinters and twigs. There is no more noise, the sweat cools on my skin, the air seems empty again and daylight dies on the eternal hills.
After a while, I go inside.
TWO: 19341
Great hands of cataclysm
Shape the known world,
Otherwise silent - the damage
Will not be permanent,
Though this is not known
At the time.
Fire has kept the train from running,
The cog and teeth machinery
of the Abt reclining,
benign and quiet.
And so we have to walk,
Follow the silent line
Breathing earth
Walking into a darkness
Kept at bay by wrath of fire,
Damnation on the right, salvation ahead.
In an otherwise quiet land
Abrupted by explosions of trees,
The echoes of generations
Combust in minutes,
The clock being reset
Punctuated by
the rhythm of our walking
into flickered shadows,
the night
Reinventing itself
Over and over and over.
We are hours in,
With hours to go:
All the while,
Our axes rest
angled
useless
on our flame-painted shoulders.
THREE: 2008
Alice2 pulls her small car off the slow bend of the hill, stopping where she can survey the town below. Since leaving, it is only the second time she has come back - the first was to meet her half-brother after his birth when she was still only nineteen, some eighteen years ago. Contact with Mum has been consistent. This negated Alice’s need to return in person. The only thing that would compel her to return is a funeral, and there are only two people even then for whom she would make the trip - her mother and Nugget.
Her mother is safe and well - growing older, of course, but a good mother to Daniel.
She gets out of the car, dimly aware of its ticking as it cools. Before her, Gormanston Hill slopes away towards the town, its ochre shades blending into one another as they recede towards the gully where the town rests. Alice looks down at the collection of buildings, constructed by human labour yet natural looking, sharing the shades of earth itself. Beyond the township, her eyes fix on the hills on the southern side of town.
There are trees.
In her living memory, Alice cannot remember there being any trees anywhere around Queenstown. Nugget explained the reason for it to her once, something to do with the mine—the details have dissolved in her adult memory—but the image comes back to her starkly, of the gentle slopes and curves and pinches of the hill line, devoid of vegetation. Alice is not one for miracles, but it does seem close to miraculous. Decades of punishment has not kept nature in hand, she thinks. It prevails.
She does not know how long she stands there, realising that she has come home when the act of coming home is never really possible. Behind her, cars are carefully snaking their way up and down the twisting road. The wind picks up as she breaths deeply. In and out. In and out. She could get back in her car, but Nugget waits in his own silence for her to say goodbye, which she hopes she will be able to do on her own. Her mother waits for her, and Daniel who she will never got to really know. Everything good and important will wait, she thinks, taking in this town that is now both there and not really there.
In and out. The air is clean. The world is mostly quiet. Alice remains still - this is something she has come to treasure. Tendrils of woodsmoke from the chimneys below her curl into the air and eventually they too dissolve.
Alice smiles into the stillness, leaning on her car, thinking about how small she really is in the shadows of this place. She is there, in the gathering cold, for a long time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 '1934' reimagines an incident from the life of Wal Stubbings (1913–2014), who was born on the West Coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania and worked as a timber cutter during his early adulthood. Stubbings, his brother and two mates walked from Strahan to Queenstown to participate in a wood-chopping carnival; they decided to walk because a bushfire along the King River meant the Abt Railway was not running. This incident is recounted in the book Wharfie by Stubbings and Lesley Synge.
2 Alice is the central character in the play I Am A Lake, by Cameron Hindrum.
Cameron Hindrum
Cameron Hindrum lives, writes and works in Launceston, Lutruwita/Tasmania. He has published a novel, three collections of poetry and had two plays professionally produced. His play I Am A Lake, was commissioned by Mudlark Theatre for the Unconformity in 2016. His novel The Sand, won the University of Tasmania Prize for best unpublished manuscript at the 2022 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards. Cameron completed a doctorate in Creative Arts majoring in Writing at the University of Wollongong in 2021 - his thesis has since been published as Curated Fiction: Novel Writing in Theory and Practice.