Jack’s eyes pass over the letter. He closes them. And he remembers.

~

The police courtesy visits happened a few times a year, when the large boat from Hobart took its tour around the Bass Strait islands. When they first started visiting, Jack would entertain them, making tea that they would sip, gingerly, from his stained and chipped cups. He would offer them a leg of cold muttonbird or a sugared doughboy, which they always politely declined. After Jack’s Uncle Donnie left the island, he began to hide from unexpected visitors. He did not fear them — far from it. He was simply setting boundaries: any interaction with outsiders was on his terms, and generally only through necessity.

He’d first come to the island in 1997, on a trip organized by a local Aboriginal organization. Back then they’d brought large mobs of the community across to the islands to camp and explore. It was a way of returning to their roots — to the places where many of their modern families were established.

Of all the islands they visited, Jack felt the most at home on Badger. He was fascinated to learn about his own family’s connection to the place. Above the grassy foreshore on the eastern side of the island, the camp leaders pointed out the ruins of old structures. One place, Jack discovered, had belonged to his great-grandfather, William Beeton. The remains of that hut consisted of a barely discernible granite foundation; strewn chimney bricks, darkened with soot and lichen; and a few scattered timbers. Some remnant garden vegetation survived: an agave plant, patches of naked ladies, and eggs and bacon daffodils — their appearance garish and exotic against the dullness of the dried summer grasses and native reeds. The hut faced the distant blue hills of Cape Barren Island — William’s birthplace. To the west, and a stone’s throw from Badger, was Chappell Island with the sinister volcano-shaped mountain at its center. Generations of the Beeton family ran muttonbird sheds there.

Jack left the island after the trip that day knowing he would return. But it was not the serene beauty or the call of his family’s history that eventually brought him back. It was a prolonged bout of depression following the death of his infant son. In the darkness of those days, the solitude that came with the island’s remoteness and isolation seemed like a slender ray of light. And for a long time, it was the desolate and lonely characteristics of the island that resonated deeply with the broken man.