The Best Australian Stories Read Online Free Page A

out, in a twinkling, under watchful eyes. My mother was frightened, yet she let us play on the back beach, dragging our bits of driftwood to and fro, making up the games that children do, on sand.
    She trusted us, she said, to stay out of the water. ‘Yes, Mum,’ we replied, quietly obedient in her presence, and in our father’s, who became an increasingly shadowy figure after we moved, having taken a second job in order to keep up with the mortgage payments. On Sundays he worked on our house, on carpentry he did not think it worthwhile paying tradesmen for. He let us help with painting. We painted the whole outside of the house, my sister and I on stepladders with a plank between, proudly wielding brushes, at first clumsily, then with growing skill.
    Our mother worked inside, and in the garden, where she built windbreaks to keep the gales from f lattening her vegetables, and spent precious shillings on bags of loam to spread over the poor, sandy soil. Increasingly, she left us to our own devices, and we did not ask why.
    â€˜You didn’t go in the water, did you?’ she might ask when we came back, wet with salt spray, our shoes with lines of rusty white up to the instep.
    â€˜No, Mum,’ we always answered her.
    My sister, who was two years younger, more truthful and obedient than I was, might add that a wave had tried to catch us, and we’d run away.
    Our mother told us cautionary tales then, repeating names I have since made it my business to research, though not a great deal is known about most of them. The earliest wreck for which proper documentary records exist was the cutter Lively, on her way to investigate sealing and whaling prospects in the Antarctic. The Princess Royal smashed to pieces on the Lonsdale Reef, followed by the schooner David and the barque Victory. The names of all the vessels lost will never be discovered.
    One story my sister and I did take to heart. The first ship bringing animals to the Melbourne zoo foundered on the rocks, not breaking into pieces, but stuck, unable to lift, or be lifted off. Lions and tigers, bears and elephants were unloaded on the beach, that very beach my sister and I were in the process of claiming for our own, impatiently, and with a silent, stoical super iority to other children we encountered there. We did not stop to think of the unlikelihood of what our mother described, or ask questions such as: how were fierce wild animals unloaded onto such a treacherous beach? Who accomplished such a feat? And what happened to them then?
    We rather took the story in good faith, and made of it what we wished. A possibility that did not occur to me till I was grown up, with children of my own, was that our mother was deliberately feeding our young imaginations with exotic tales in order to keep them busy, to furnish us with material for games, so that she would be left alone to occupy herself without us. I never wondered about this at the time because our mother was nearly always alone, surrounded by bush that may or may not have reminded her of her own childhood, left behind in a part of the country she had never taken us to see.
    One night when we were returning in the autumn dusk, there was a large black shape under the porch light. We saw it from way down the street, and took each other’s hands, and ran. The shape was large and black and still as one of the burnt tree bodies, cleared to make room for our house. But it was just our mother, ghostly and watchful underneath the yellow light.
    â€˜You’re late,’ was all she said.
    Quickly we apologised, and quickly ran ahead of her to take off our wet shoes.
    Our mother was outwardly good-tempered in the evenings, discussing projects with our father after tea. We listened to the rise and fall of their voices from our still-unpainted bedroom. The outside of the house must be looked after first, our father had explained, because the salt air would soon rot untreated boards.
    At the back