The Best Australian Stories Read Online Free

if he wanted, Banerjee could not be close. Not only to his wife but to all other people, to things and events as well. It was as if the air was bent, holding him just away.
    *
    On the day in question the officer inspected the paint job from all angles, as the men waited. It took more than an hour. He came back, rubbing his hands. ‘Well done. That should do the trick. Tomorrow we go onto the next.’
    The Americans looking on had their arms folded.
    â€˜Only one way to test it.’ The pilot put on his hat. ‘You with me?’
    Banerjee hadn’t flown in a plane before. Soon the earth grew larger and the details smaller, reduced to casual marks, old worn patches, blobs of shadow. He twisted around to see the aerodrome. At this point the pilot tilted away and began diving; just for fun. He went low, then rose in a curve; Banerjee’s stomach twisted and contracted. As always he composed his face.
    Levelling out, the pilot now looked around for the aerodrome.
    He gave a brief laugh. ‘You sure as hell have done a job on the ground.’
    Banerjee thought he saw wheel marks but it was nothing. The earth everywhere was the same – the same extensive dryness, one thing f lowing into the next. When Banerjee turned and looked behind it was the same.
    Climbing, the plane reached a point where it appeared to be staying in one spot, not making any progress. It was as if he was suspended above his own life. Looking down, as it were, he found he could not distinguish his life from the solid fact of the earth, which remained always below. He could not see what he had been doing there, moving about on it. Knees together, the dark hairs curving on the back of his hands.
    Everything was clearer, yet not really. Plane’s shadow: fleeting, religious. In the silence he was aware of his heartbeats, as if he hadn’t noticed them before.
    Now the earth in all its hardness and boulder unevenness came forward in a rush.
    Briefly he wondered whether he – his life – could have turned out differently. Its many parts appeared to converge, in visibility later described as ‘near perfect’.

Two Wrecks
    Dorothy Johnston
    Of the many wrecks I learnt about when I was a child, only two retain anything like a reliable place in my memory. These two, while undoubtedly stories of shipwrecks, were also much more ambiguous affairs, and one was almost certainly untrue.
    Early settlers arriving at the bit of coastline where my parents lived had far from an easy time getting there. Many drowned, in the days before a permanent lighthouse was erected on the point, their ships turning to splinters on the rocks at the mouth of the rip. My parents, both self-taught past the age of thirteen, when, for different reasons, they’d had to give up school, were curious people, with acquisitive, restless minds. It took them no time at all to learn the names of wrecks and pass them on to me and my sister.
    They had come, my father from the city of Geelong, my mother from the bush, to build their own house at Point Lonsdale. They borrowed a lot of money to do it. As a child, my father had made many trips to the seaside, but my mother, growing up inland, on a farm, had seldom had holidays of any kind, and had never learnt to swim. As for me, I soon took the ocean in my stride. It was within running distance, at my fingers’ ends.
    When we were not at school, or helping in the house, my sister and I built our own shelters and cubby houses out of driftwood, in the bush between our new home and what was known as the back beach. Elegant bungalows fill that land now, and gardens full of European plants, but in those days it was tea-tree scrub, acacias and eucalypts, and then, closer to the beach, small bushes flattened by the southerly winds.
    The surf was wild and dangerous, and we were not allowed to swim. Life savers patrolled on summer weekends, but even then a rip could lift a person off her feet and carry her right