The Turning Tide Read Online Free Page A

water and rust-red sand and ruffled green mangroves, the familiar sweet lines of a lugger winging off into the distance. One of my brother Liam’s painting. Well, half-brother really, but the distinction was pointless. He was ten when I was born, and always my protector and best friend.
    Liam and I had a sister too, Anna. She was only a year older than me so we were rivals in childhood, but almost friends by the time I went away to university. She was in Perth at secretarial college. Anna was happy, her scribbled letters told me, caught up in the thrill of war and the glamour of young warriors.
    My parents had a small lugger-building business in Broome. Luggers were sailing boats especially designed for pearl-shell fishing. But the industry was hit hard by the Depression so we didn’t have much money when I was young, at least not until my parents received a legacy that made life a lot easier. It came from my English godfather, but I don’t remember him.
    I do remember his wife though, my godmother Min-lu, because she came back to live in Perth after he died and we’d go to visit her every year when the summer got too hot in Broome. She was small and fine-featured, with kind eyes and beautiful cheekbones, and silver hair pulled up on her head with golden combs that fascinated me as a child.
    She’d lived in this country for many years before going to England, and I remember her saying in her precise, beautiful voice, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to be home at last and to forget that appalling weather.’ She’d gained her Australian residency before Federation in 1901, which was a good thing, as otherwise she’d have been barred from the country.
    You see, my godmother was Chinese. Her son Sam had been a sailor with my father and a close friend of my parents – they gave me the middle name of Samuel. When Mum’s own mother died when she was only fifteen it was Min-lu who’d taken care of her.
    Brought up in Broome, I didn’t realise having Japanese friends or a Chinese godmother was odd, at least not until I went to boarding school in Perth. Then boys would pull up the corners of their eyes and chant imbecilities that were nothing at all like the gentle murmurings I’d known since I was a child. But I learnt a lot at boarding school; when to lie low and when to attack, and after a while I had to do neither. I was stronger and more savage than anyone had realised, and wisely they left me alone.
    As I said, Broome was a very different place from the rest of the country.
    Mum and Dad met me off the steamer and with the other passengers we took the little tram along the jetty to shore. Dad put my bags in the boot of his new car parked under a tree, saying, to my delight, he’d give me driving lessons.
    As we passed along the foreshore I looked out at the lugger camps. It was the lay-up season but there were fewer boats drawn onto the beach than I had ever seen.
    ‘Are some of them still working outside?’ I asked.
    ‘No, love,’ said Mum. ‘That’s all that’s left. There’s only about sixty luggers in Broome now.’
    ‘Sixty!’
    ‘There’s maybe another fifteen or so at Onslow and Cape Leveque,’ said Dad, ‘and Captain Gregory’s taken ten or twelve to Darwin over the last few years. But that’d be all.’ ‘There used to be hundreds,’ I said, astonished. It was the first time I’d realised what I’d assumed from childhood to be unchanging was nothing of the kind.
    Thankfully the house was much as I remembered, with its shady latticed verandahs and white paths of crushed pearl shell winding around the garden, but even then I noticed the trees had grown and there was new furniture in the lounge. Still, the usual ritual of tea and cake on the verandah was comforting, followed by the familiar afternoon doze: in midsummer Broome, a siesta was a necessity.
    That evening a storm in the distance blew cool breezes as we ate at the table on the verandah and gossiped about friends and family. I heard my sister