I remember waking to sunshine streaming through the new French doors made by a local man with a dog in his ute and with the gruffness that belied the finesse of his handywork, delicate artistry that made butter of hardwood. I stared at them, sat up in bed, for a good long while, marvelling at the patience and deft precision required to construct such things. It makes me think of my father, a sculptor who worked in an ancient form of Roman bronze, called the Lost Wax technique, expensive and painstaking but the very best medium, and dad was like that, a perfectionist in his work.
I would stand at a distance from the incredible heat of his foundry as a little girl, the roar of the furnace, beguiled by the radiating molten alloy being poured by my father and those assisting him, in full body overalls, heavy steel cap boots, a helmet with a full face visor and the thickest gloves that reached his elbows. I used to love trying them on, so big on me they stopped at my shoulders. They had not a skeric of skin left showing, dad and his helpers. They always reminded me of astronauts, protected from the atmosphere around them and their slowed, deliberate movements. When they were finished ‘the pour’, they would peel off the layers and be entirely wet through with sweat, literally dripping off them onto the concrete floor.
The pouring was one of the final stages in a very long and tedious process that sucked up months of dad’s life for every piece and completely consumed his mind; capturing detail as minute as a raised vein in someone’s arm, a shoelace, the thinnest end of a stockman’s whip, in bronze. Some of them, his sculptures that didn’t disappear to far flung places, stand on mantles at Moorfield now, and no matter how long they’ve been in my possession, they still stop my day some times and I stand and stare at the detail. The crease in a shirt, it’s buttons, the mechanics of a rifle, the buckle on the girth of a saddle, the ridges in the the hoof of a horse.
He built yachts before he sculpted bronze, having had the most minimal training. Dad had not even finished school but rather grew up in the bush in a family not his blood having run away at 14 from Newcastle to Far North Queensland on his own. The mountain ranges around Cairns became his classroom, his teachers the family who ran the local army disposal store in the 50s and took him in and the local indigenous community. And yet, despite no real formal education, dad seemed to have a natural provision for physics and engineering and a love of great literature that he would read to me when I was little. Stories about great battles, Australia’s Gold Rush, stories of the relationship between man and animal, of tall ship voyages and his beloved Africa, where his father’s family lived and where he had spent the early years of his marriage to my mum, living with the Maasai.
I remember the blue prints of his yacht, the ‘Ataruka’, an indigenous word for moon, like that of a draftsman that when I first saw them, much older, I thought they were the work of a professional. With them he built beautiful boats by hand, almost always alone, that not only stayed afloat but sailed vast oceans, like the South Pacific and often volatile ones, like the Tasman. He told me of a solo journey across the Tasman that he knowingly took at the wrong time of year but was impatient, where he locked himself inside the hull in huge swell that plunged his boat in and out of the waves, and rocked it sideways so far that the mast lay against the oceans surface a number of times, before rolling back upright. He waited there, inside the boat he had built, to go down, so his body might be found with it.
I imagine it was the only time he was scared, for he seemed fearless to everyone who ever met him and to me who spent a childhood with him in wild and unforgiving places where he was more at home than anywhere else. I imagine that was the only time fear ever really possessed him as a grown man, that time and the time my mum and I left. I saw complete terror in his eyes then too.
I draw a breath back, deep into my chest and hold it there, I steady myself and breathe out deliberately, my eyes closed. I keep them closed a moment. I remind myself where I am, how different my life is now, before opening them again. Peace. I can summon it now, these last few years has given me that and I lean back into my pillows pushed against the bedhead and a resolute smile returns. This, one of the many gifts this place has given me, a centredness despite being haunted by my early life, even still but it sits better with me now, smaller than it once was, like the child I had once been, sat always at my side, terrified and fearless in one breath for a period that spans those first 10 years of my life, into early adulthood, when my father died.
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