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Back The Burning Island Save as PDF
Chapters (31)
  1. COVER PAGE
  2. TEXT LOGO PAGE
  3. ABOUT THE BOOK
  4. EPIGRAPH
  5. MAP
  6. THE INDIAN
  7. MY FATHER IN THE LEAF LITTER
  8. THE MOONBIRD
  9. EMBARKATION
  10. THE WONDERS OF THE WUNDERKAMMER
  11. RODONDOINTO THE FOG
  12. SEABIRDS AND SEALS
  13. THE NIGHT, GIBBOUS MOON
  14. HUMMOCK AND THE BOTTLE-ACHE
  15. GRASS ELEGY
  16. THE CUTTER
  17. PRESERVATION
  18. ST ANTHONY’S FIRE
  19. THE BOWSPRIT ACHILLES
  20. THE SYMPLEGADES
  21. GUN CARRIAGE
  22. THE UNTHREADING OF THINGS
  23. CHRIST’S REDEEMING MISSION
  24. THE INDIAN RETURNS
  25. THE PINNACLE
  26. EMBERS
  27. FIFTEEN HUNDRED FATHOMS
  28. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  29. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  30. ALSO BY JOCK SERONG
  31. NEW MARKETING PAGE

THE WONDERS OF THE WUNDERKAMMER

THE WONDERS OF THE WUNDERKAMMER

image Over the course of that afternoon and through the next day, my father drank steadily.

You will say I should have stopped it happening, that it was my stated responsibility on this voyage to save him from himself. But anyone who has lived with such a man knows about getting between him and the bottle.

I tried. I watched him sliding through smiles and laughter, slurred words and stumbling, into staggers and falls and shouting and curses and silences and lost consciousness and revivals and more shouting and the aiming of blows at imagined assailants. I found rum among the provisions, commercial stuff, thank God, and Hollands gin. Not the rotgut again. I moved the bottles to other places I thought he would not look: I did not throw them overboard—not yet—out of consideration for the others on board who may have needed them to get themselves through long watches or for medicine or simply because it was a seafarer’s entitlement to drink and not be beholden to my father’s sickness.

But every time I moved the liquor he found it. He retained a fierce instinct for its whereabouts, this poison that owned and imprisoned him. I knew that my father loved me, but I had learnt many years before that there were forces in the world stronger than the best of love. The need for booze was one of them.

He fell asleep in the late afternoon and could not be roused, not even by another brawl between the brothers. Better in any event to leave him snoring in the shade of the cabin wall where Dr Gideon had taken the sun the previous day.

Argyle, regal in the white dress, announced we would anchor at Jervis Bay. Over the southward miles I watched the distant shoreline, wondering if this bay, or that, might frame the forest where Srinivas had found his home. I had no way of knowing where the Walbanja lived, or the Thaua, or where was the dark glade where his father had met his terrible end. I looked for a wharf or a stockpile of felled timber, but I saw very little evidence of human occupation, native or settler, even now. The place was wild and beautiful; it resisted taming.