Hawkesbury River Loving
Give me a boat that will carry two,
And both shall row, my love and I.
The water is wide. As I perch in the bow of the our little outboard motor boat—a “tinny” in the unsentimental dialect of Australians—it looks deep and cool. Rising up on each side, the red earth of the hills seems primeval. The slopes are thickly forested with eucalypts, their leaves flickering between shades of darker and lighter grey-green in the breeze. The single layer of trees that we can see atop the ridge looks tufty, like a collection of upright broccoli stalks. I’m reminded of an old recipe book I once worked my way through when I shared a basement kitchen in Cambridge with vegetarian flatmates: Molly Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Several deliciously plump pelicans are piercing the sky like low-flying Zeppelins; a smattering of white cockatoos erupt in their raucous, croaking call; snake-necked cormorants are cruising for snacks. A few houses cling to the banks, boats like ours bobbing at anchor in the water, flags bearing the Union Jack signalling human habitation, as they have since Captain Arthur Phillip brazenly planted the first flagpole around the coast from us, one summer day not that long ago, in Sydney—the place that is now, astonishingly, my home.
A huge rock that slithered down the slope and has tumbled to rest precariously atop a pile of its fellows by the riverbank surely predates the arrival of Europeans. Probably it even predates the arrival of those earlier people who trudged across Europe from Africa, over the Baring Straits into the nipped-waistline hourglass continent of the Americas and finally, somehow, crossed the ocean to this strange land. Australia has been like this, surely, since we humans accidentally washed ashore at the end of a long and terrifying sea voyage: most people still live clinging to the edges of the water, around the coastline and along the fringes of the few fingers of water that reach tentatively in towards its deep red heart.
I fell in love with Australia a year ago and now, at least, we are tentatively in a relationship. I hope one day it will be a de facto marriage. And I’m in another new relationship, too, with the skipper of this boat, who is squinting into the sun, his huge, freckled left hand wrapped snugly around the tiller, the red emergency brake chord encircling his wrist like a rakhi bracelet.
New relationships are thrilling, but they are also precarious. They feel less like the smooth sailing of a tinny and more like clambering onto a surfboard. And I am an inexpt surfer, ready to be dislodged by the slightest motion of the sea, swept into the water by the first enthusiastic wave, like a visitor at a dinner party, crouching down in the hallway to untie her shoes when she is knocked off-kilter by the affectionate attack of her host’s golden retriever.
I lean over the tinny and rake my fingers through the water: it’s surprisingly warm because it’s deceptively shallow: orange buoys mark the most navigable channel. And beneath the surface, there are thousands of milky white jellyfish, their fronds kneading the water as they swim. There is no mistaking their resemblance to circumcised penises, attached to girly skater skirts. I slip off my kaftan and recklessly give the ferocious southern sun full access to my body, including the tender white places that my halterneck swimming costume has marked with its imprint like a photographic negative.
Later, I cannot resist taking a dip, although the jellyfish are all around me. Head down in the water, I feel two sharp stings—pop, pop—on my right thigh and then, right on my bottom lip, the sharpness of a jellyfish kiss. I emerge with a splattering of red dots on my leg and my bottom lip resembles Angelina Jolie’s in her prime.
This is how a new relationship can so often feel. There are orange buoys to mark the no-go zones, the places where your hull will stick in the mud or scrape the slimy rocks that line the river bottom. And hiding within the water, unforeseen stings and kisses that burn.