Ned began looking for a suitable camping site, but every beach he saw was too close to towns, jetties, shacks, pilot lights. When the river narrowed again the beaches were small, lumpy and exposed. For half an hour he worried that he’d got it all wrong, that there’d be nowhere for him to create the camp he’d imagined. But he kept looking and soon saw, on the banks of an inlet that ran back from the river’s course, a stand of tall trees. He tacked towards them, and when he rounded a small head he came upon a cove that hadn’t been visible from the river’s centre. The shadows of the trees were darkening the water. At their roots was a beach of pale, untrodden sand.

He coasted into the cove, to the shore. Took down the sail, leaped into the shallows and hauled the boat up. He walked the length of the beach, looking for markers of ownership. Found only trees, scrub and orange-ochred rocks. No tracks, no fences, no signs promising bullets for interlopers. The sand was soft and uncompacted, swallowing his boots at every step.

A settling shiver trickled down Ned’s skin. He made sure all his gear was secure under the boat’s seat, then began exploring the forest. For a few hours he stepped through the trees, winding among paperbarks and black gums and the ubiquitous coastal she-oaks. Walked off all the thoughts that came to him. Walked himself empty.

When he’d roamed all the wild land available to him, when he’d mapped the contours of it into his mind—something he found strangely satisfying, as if knowledge of this place was a possession that could enrich him—he returned to the beach’s softness. With the sun lowering, he pushed the boat back out but only into the little cove, looking for sandflats. With his handline he caught three flathead, which he filleted back on the shore. He corralled some river stones into a circle and filled it with strips of curling paperbark and a few handfuls of she-oak needles. He struck a match, tossed it in. When the flames bit he poked in twigs, sticks, driftwood, and when coals formed he cooked his fillets on a flat rock he pushed into the orange heat.

By the time he’d finished eating it was dark. He washed his hands and face in the river and crawled into Bill’s swag. Lay down between the fire and the boat. Watched green flames shudder up from salted driftwood. Fought everything out of his mind except the heat of the fire, the shadows of the trees, the pattern of the stars and the mouth of the river, and what it would mean, what it would feel like to be there again, what it would do for him.

~