by Andrew McKenna

‘Our southern coast is the only coastline in the world facing the Southern Ocean,’ he said. He paused, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

I wasn’t sure what to say so I didn’t say anything. He watched me. I crossed my own arms.

‘Is that important?’

He had penetrating green eyes that reminded me of the sea and as he gazed at me I had the distinct feeling of an alien intelligence probing my mind. I adjusted my weight in the chair. Little natural light reached the basement.

‘It’s been isolated for 65 million years.’ He finally broke the silence. ‘That makes for some – interesting – species. More than ninety percent of them are found nowhere else in the world.’

‘Impressive,’ I said. 

We sat in his office in the basement of the Melbourne Museum. It was plain apart from a grey filing cabinet in the corner, a map of Bass Strait on the wall and a battered oak desk, across which we drank coffee in chipped mugs poured from a plunger. Outside the office were fish in jars and bones in cases and row upon row of shelves filled with grey boxes.

‘One of those creatures, for example – and a bizarre one – is the Paper Nautilus. It produces a white shell you often find washed up down on the Shipwreck Coast, around the Twelve Apostles. An octopus makes the shell. It has a type of … kamikaze … sex ritual. The male puts a sperm-filled tentacle into the gills of the female and then it dies. When she wants to mate, she pulls out one of the arms, tears it open and spreads the sperm around.’

I laughed then stopped. He looked at me. I sipped my coffee.

‘Another is the Gilbert Island Lairbuilder,’ he said. There came another of his pauses, a very long one this time, and he gazed down the rows of specimens for so long I thought he’d forgotten I was there.

‘Queen Victoria took delivery of one thousand skins in 1861,’ he said, and his voice had dropped to little more than a whisper. ‘Can you imagine that? One. Thousand. Skins.’ 

He shook his head and breathed out. ‘And she said of it; “It is the most beautiful beastie in the world”.’

Dr David Russell, weightlifter, raconteur, marine biologist versed in Renaissance poetry, had called me out of the blue a few weeks previously.

‘I’ve seen your work and I like it,’ he said. I was flattered. I’d just had a piece published in National Geographic. But people can say those kinds of things to writers. I’d almost forgotten about him until a letter arrived asking me to join him for coffee at the Museum. A letter? When he already had my email address? 

It unsettled me but at the same time I found it somehow endearing, olde worlde.  I imagined a chalky professor with leather patches at his elbows, wild hair and a school teacherish manner. But when I met him he dispelled that. He sported a crew cut under a baseball cap he wore sideways, a New Zealand green jade necklace of a fish hook, baggy jeans and an old NYU windcheater stained with sweat.  Close to sixty, I guessed, his eyes were clear and piercing, and were of the deepest green I’d ever seen. Grey stubble spread across his face like ocean spray.

‘I’ve been working out,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘Hit me.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Go ahead.’ And he slapped his stomach and held his hands out, welcoming a punch with a smile showing excellent teeth. ‘It’s like concrete. You gotta keep in trim.’

I thought about it a moment.

‘Look, I don’t hit people,’ I said. ‘Demolish their reputations in print, yes. Hit them, no. And I sure don’t punch concrete.’

He laughed. I guessed it was a good response.

After coffee he led me down one of the aisles crammed with boxes. It was dark down there, and lurking under the smells of the preserving alcohol and the dusty cardboard was something else – heavy, sweetish – that I couldn’t put my finger on.

‘There are very few of these left now,’ he said, pulling a box out from the others.  He placed it carefully on the floor. ‘This is the only one in the Museum’s collection, and it’s precious. It could be the last one in the world.’

He slipped on a pair of white disposable gloves.

He lifted the lid and pulled back tissue paper.

‘Notholutra viridis splendidis,’ he breathed. ‘The Gilbert Islands Lairbuilder.’ 

A greenish glow pulsed out of the box. He reached in and slowly withdrew what looked like a fur. I let out a long slow breath.

‘The Gilbert Islands Lairbuilder,’ he repeated quietly. ‘Australia’s third monotreme. I want you to come along and record the trip.’

‘Can I touch it?’

‘I want you to. Carefully.’

The fur was softer than goose down, a deep, tawny brown in the shadows of the aisle, but glowing an eerie, iridescent emerald when the fluorescent light hit it. The colour alone was exquisite, but as I held it something else came to me. The world seemed to expand around me and my arms filled with warmth that spread through my chest and down into my stomach. I sensed a warm ocean current swirling over my body. 

My? My ‘my’ started to disappear as I faded into an ocean around me. But it wasn’t that I was swimming in the ocean, I was the ocean, part of the plankton, a molecule of salt water. Somehow.

I felt radiance, oneness with … something, I can’t say, still, even now … as the shelves and fluorescent lights faded and sharp spines of coloured rocks and soft corals appeared around me. I heard strange sounds, fish talking, seals speaking, a distant symphony of whales. 

Then Russell’s hand was on my arm and he eased the skin away and replaced it in its box. I didn’t relax my grasp. He didn’t say anything. But he knew.

I came back to dry land in an aisle of the storage space at the Melbourne Museum, standing on the floor and gazing stupidly at a cardboard box.

‘You’ll come on the expedition?’ he said.

‘Expedition?’

He nodded and I watched as he put the box back on the rack.

‘It’s special, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘It’s more than special.’

‘What happened to them?’ I asked. ‘The animal? Those one thousand skins of Queen Victoria?’

‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Lost to time. Up in smoke.’

I followed him reluctantly back to his desk. I wanted to stay there and pull the thing out again. And hold it.

‘In three months the islands are changing. They’ll be off limits. I’m leaving in ten days,’ he said, without turning around. ‘I’d like you to come. Write about it. Will you do it?’

‘Do these things still … live there?’

He smiled a secretive smile. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out. Are you in?’

‘What just happened?’

He reached under his desk then slid a pile of books and papers over to me.

*

The Gilberts are a chain of scrub-covered islets 70 kilometres east of Cape Barren Island. The size of two dozen football fields all up they don’t make it onto most maps. Their highest point is the grandiosely titled Mt Gilbert, a rise of twenty metres in the seascape. The islands have only rarely been visited since the 1940s. Never hospitable, they served briefly as a penal colony in the early 19th century, and the ruins of convict buildings still stand on the main island, Gilbert’s Arm. The convict settlement was short-lived and unsuccessful. Sealers, pastoralists, property developers, all played a part in their history. Ecological disaster was the common theme of each.

Lairbuilders, Australia’s third monotreme, after the echidna and the platypus, were – are – a little over a metre long, lithe and powerful. Think of a marine version of the platypus, without the flat tail and the duckbill and you’re getting close. Maybe twice as big. Like a marsupial otter, but one that laid eggs and suckled its young. They had tough flippers that doubled in length and dexterity in the weeks before the breeding season. Although the animals did not develop opposable thumbs they could grasp objects with considerable strength.

During their breeding season, around April, lairbuilder males swarmed ashore in the Gilberts in their thousands, tens of thousands, and climbed into the scrub, seeking the local species of strawflower (Helichrysm bombycinus), that grew in thickets. Matthew Flinders first recorded the strawflower, a beautiful plant in its own right, on his voyage to Bass Strait in 1803. They had thick, strong stems and the petals were likened to golden silk. The appearance of the lairbuilders among the flowers was apparently too much for some colonial diarists.

‘Several members of my party broke down into states of virtual catatonia,’ wrote John Batman in 1835 on his way to Port Phillip Bay.

‘The whole spectacle was as if we had been delivered into Arcadia, only to be Thrown into the Abyss. I myself wiped away Tears at the beautiful display of Nature’s magnificence, and was Rendered speechless for long Minutes after the battle was Over.’

The ‘battle’ he referred to was the ritualised, pre-mating combat of the males. They tore out clumps of strawflowers and used them as clubs, battering each other in a tremendous display of machismo. The noise was, apparently, ferocious, as thousands of animals screamed and roared and barked into the night. Although the battles looked terrible none were killed.

The uprooting and battering of the strawflowers broke their seed heads open, spreading seeds through the bush and along the beach and into the air as the lairbuilders took back to water.

At sea the male animal (for a time they were thought to be fish) used the stems and leaves of the strawflower to build elaborate underwater labyrinths for his partner. It was a ritual repeated year after year, puzzling to scientists because lairbuilders were strictly monogamous and paired for life. They wooed their partner over and again every year. La Perouse, whose French expedition brought the species to the scientific community’s attention late in the 18th century, described the lairs as ‘underwater chateaux fit for a French gentlewoman’. 

Described variously as ‘underwater castles’ and, perhaps with a little exaggeration, ‘phantasmagoric palaces’, lairbuilders conducted an elaborate courtship ritual in and around these intricate and beautiful ‘lairs’.

The ritual dance culminated in the female laying two or three eggs into the lair. The male would shift the eggs to a waterproof pouch on his belly, where he fertilised them through a porous membrane. He would give birth to live young, around 29 days after the mating ritual, and ‘suckle’ them with a milky secretion from a gland at the base of his flippers.

I was impressed by Russell’s description of the paper nautilus but the lairbuilder surpassed that. Among the material he gave me were copies of old newspaper clippings from the Melbourne Argus, advertisements offering pelts for sale.

The pelts became the object of fascination in 19th century Melbourne, luring men and women from all corners of the world in the rush to possess them. Lola Montez wore suspenders made of sewn pelts over her skin-coloured body suit when she performed her spider dance for miners on the goldfields, sparking a fad as a ladies’ fashion accessory. As the gold ran out, the lairbuilder caused another boom, its improbable pelt prized and traded from here to New York. Men, and sometimes women, killed to possess more. A series of articles followed three murder cases in the 1870s, related to theft of pelts.

In 1885 Burmese Emperor Thibauw Min travelled to the Gilberts, leaving Burma leaderless. With Burma’s throne vacated Britain invaded and occupied Rangoon. The Emperor returned with a lone live specimen, which soon died. He took her stuffed and mounted form into exile in India and hung her above his favourite concubine’s bed.

The animal was hunted for its meat, likened to fish. Much of the ‘flake’ served in fish and chip shops in Melbourne in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was lairbuilder hauled in from the Gilberts.

Pull out one piece of the jenga tower and it wobbles, pull out more and it crashes.

The silky strawflower and the lairbuilder were dependent on each other to reproduce, I read.

The extinctions spread. I found in one of Russell’s books a section on the Gilbert Island dragonfly, an iridescent red insect larger than any other Australian dragonfly, which relied on the seeds of the strawflower for food. 

After the lairbuilder mating frenzy, the seeds drifted on the winds around the Gilberts for weeks and the dragonflies took to the air in their millions.

Their population disappeared with Helichrysm bombycynus, quickly followed by the Gilbert Islands Duck, endemic to the islands. The duck, described in the literature as a flightless, waddling bird, larger than a normal duck but smaller than the average goose, was curious about humans. Its plumage was a deep blue with a luminescent orange frill at the throat. It would walk up to sealers to peck at their boots, and was hunted without mercy. The duck hung on until the dragonflies were gone, then it too, stumbled off into the ecological night. 

Perhaps the final indignities for the Gilberts came with the arrival of sheep, the domestic mouse and a tragic plan by a Canberra tinfoil-hat think-tank.

The sheep stripped the vegetation on most of the islands before they perished of scabies; the mice ran rampant on Little Gilbert, also stripping the vegetation until they turned to eating seabird eggs and chicks. Over the generations and the shift in diet they grew to the size of rats. 

On South Georgia the British Government spent millions of pounds eradicating rats and mice, and the seabirds returned. But Canberra came up with a better solution for the Gilberts.

With encouragement from Washington, the latest plan for the Gilberts was to turn them into a short-range bombing target for the new RAAF bombers. The minister for defence gave the plan the go-ahead. The bombs would drop in a few months.

No official visits were made to the islands during the First World War, and during the 1920s they were all but forgotten. A few Tasmanian Aboriginal hunters visited, but it had never been their traditional hunting grounds and they didn’t speak about what they saw. Not, at least, to whitefellas.

*

The day of our departure dawned bright and golden. I drove early to Williamstown Marina where Russell had parked the Gilbert II, his 30-foot cruiser, for the journey to the islands. I never asked him what happened to the Gilbert I.

Gulls wheeled overhead as I humped my bluey down the concrete walkway, where waves sloshed lazily around the pylons. Russell had told me not to worry about sleeping bags, food, cooking gear. He would take care of the camping side of it. I had clothes and my slim laptop. Halfway down the pier I saw the Gilbert II riding jauntily at anchor, and I made out the form of Russell and a woman, who sat quietly at the back of the boat.

The vessel looked the worse for wear; the dark blue paint on its sides – should I call it a hull? I’ve never been that interested in boats – was chipped, and the railing around the edges was rusted and brown stains leaked down onto the … hull. The wind whistled through wires, which tinkled against the mast.

As I drew closer I heard Russell’s voice raised in anger. He seemed to be talking angrily to the woman but I couldn’t make out the words. He looked up and saw me approaching and the words stopped. He introduced me to Sharon, his blonde friend. She wore tight, cut-off jeans, which left little to the imagination, and the tiniest of bikini tops. I guessed she was thirty, and her blonde hair was tied back loosely and sprayed around her shoulders. She looked like a shampoo commercial. She smiled when Russell introduced us, revealing a mouthful of white teeth, and held her hand out. Her touch was firm and cool.

‘Found the boat all right?’ Russell asked me. His tank top was cut short at the shoulders, and the curve of his biceps revealed how much he’d been working out. He seemed ill-at-ease, casting sideways glances at Sharon. They might have been uneasy together, or it might have been my imagination.

He was still stowing gear down below, cases, bags, wet suits, scuba gear, a propane stove, a jaffle maker, and I made small talk to Sharon, keeping my eyes off her breasts and long, honey-coloured legs.

‘He’s batshit crazy,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows the lairbuilder’s extinct.’

‘I’d never heard of it until ten days ago,’ I said. ‘It’ll make a good story.’

She sniffed, and shrugged.

‘How do you fit in?’ I asked her.

‘I’m his babe for the moment,’ she said without batting an eye. ‘That’s his language, not mine. I’m also his prize PhD student. Oh, and I’m going to have his baby.’

I looked away.

From down below a hammer was clanking on metal.

‘My field is marine biology,’ she said. ‘Specifically the genetics of a rare deep sea fungus.’

‘Fungus under the sea? Sounds interesting,’ I said.

‘Are you bullshitting me?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes as she gazed out to the bay where the sun was glittering over a heartbreaking blue sea.

‘Because I can’t deal with two bullshitters on one trip.’

‘Not at all,’ I replied hurriedly. ‘It’s not my field.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you were a journalist. Isn’t your field bullshit?’

‘Touche,’ I said. ‘Point to the girl who documents the funguses growing on whale turds. What’s your minor paper? Seahorse whispering?’

‘You know,’ and she slipped a shirt on as I just might have glanced at her breasts, ‘the plural of fungus is fungi. Like the plural of journalist? Dickheads.’ 

She sniffed and turned her gaze back to the water.

At that moment, Russell’s head appeared above deck, interrupting the growing good will between us. He smiled.

‘Time to cast off.’

He glanced around, looked at the sky.

‘Treasure and gold be theirs, Who to a frail bark would entrust their life,”[1] he announced.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Sharon muttered as she disappeared downstairs. 

I thought there was a little too much geniality about his smile, his tone, he was laying it on too thick. He even whistled a few bars of the Gilligan’s Island theme song. He fired up the engine and with an oily puff of smoke it burst to life. Sharon reappeared and made herself busy untying ropes, and I stood there watching with an inexplicable sense of dread rising from the pit of my stomach. It was hard enough to stop myself from calling out to them to stop and let me off. Regret twisted in my stomach as I watched the city recede.

We left the heads and the weather turned rough. The little boat was dwarfed by sky and the slap and thrust of waves, which an hour or two out turned from deep blue to a heavy, metallic grey, flecked with froth and clumps of weed. A school of porpoises dipped in and out near the front – the ‘stern’? – for twenty minutes, then disappeared.

My breakfast sloshed wet and murky in my stomach and gradually climbed up my oesophagus, throat, and then out into the water as I clutched the rails and heaved. I was coming unwrapped with waves of nausea and Russell smiled and shouted over the wind.

‘You want to go lie down? You might feel better.’

I staggered down the ladder to the cramped bedroom-kitchen below. Sharon was stretched out on the lower bunk reading a book, some treatise on Southern Ocean invertebrates, and I smiled at her and climbed the ladder. She glared over the top of her book. I looked away.

The cabin reeked of mince and coffee, none of which helped my state. A pot of greasy mince bubbled on the stove, held in place by clamps, and when Sharon got up and messed around with it and offered me some I declined, turned to face the wall then pulled out my notes.

For a brief period before World War II, their numbers rebounded and lairbuilders were trapped and sold live into the Hong Kong restaurant trade. That restaurants in Singapore and Macau might have achieved in a decade what a hundred years of whitefella incursions into the Gilberts did not was somehow ironic, but the species was probably in terminal decline by then anyway. Ecologists call what they went through a ‘genetic bottleneck’, when the genetic diversity was so reduced even a minor virus could wipe out any remaining population.

The advance of the Imperial Japanese army put an end to the restaurant trade, however. A little-known aspect of Japan’s Pacific War was that the Emperor Hirohito had been bitten by lairbuilder fever. On the Japanese midget subs sunk in Sydney Harbour, divers found instructions for the submariners to pick up male and female specimens live from the Gilberts, maps of Bass Strait with the Gilberts clearly marked, and equipped cages and aquaria.

Professor Wellington Chong of the University of Hong Kong wrote a paper in 1983 claiming the whole Japanese war effort was the whim of an Emperor smitten by ‘the most beautiful beast in the world’.

There is evidence Hirohito had success with a breeding program with specimens picked up from restaurants in the occupied zones. He had saltwater pumped in and planted a species of Japanese flax near the ponds, which approximated the size and rigidity of the silky strawflower.

Whatever success he might have had was obliterated in the Tokyo firestorm at the end of the war.

Somehow, despite the foetid stink in the cabin, and that if I glanced over the edge of my bunk I could see the full curve of one of Sharon’s thighs, I managed to drift off to a feverish sleep. I dreamt of her legs. I was kissing them from their graceful ankles, up her shins, over her knees. The delicate hairs were golden, and I continued upwards over her thighs. Instead of her cut-off jeans, though, my teeth snagged on a patch of greenish, glowing fur. I looked up at her, and from the waist up she was an otter, with deep brown doe-like eyes, long whiskers and yellow tusks. I choked on the fur and woke. The boat drifted at anchor and the wind howled. My pillow was damp with drool and a smear of cornflakes. We’d arrived at the Gilberts.

*

I don’t know that I was expecting a temperate rainforest, streams bordered by sassafras, southern beech and dripping treeferns, or even dry sclerophyll forest redolent with the scent of eucalyptus and the screech of black cockatoos. But what greeted me was less.

The view from the deck was blighted. The sky had dropped and a wind roared in my ears and forced me to hold onto the boat or risk being blown overboard. The sea was chopped up, rank and black. The islands – if you could call them that – were low, greyish and covered in what I took to be weeds; scotch and artichoke thistle. From our vantage thirty metres offshore I made out plastic bottles and other debris bobbing at the shoreline. I wanted to go back downstairs and turn the boat around, but Russell was at my side, grinning stupidly like a kid at a railway station.

‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’ he said, and cast me a sideways glance.

‘I wouldn’t have said that,’ I shouted above the gale. ‘Looks like an abandoned sheep paddock.’

‘It is!’ he shouted. ‘After the war they tried sheep here. But the sheep all – ‘

The gale flung the words away.

‘What!’ I bellowed.

‘They died after stripping the vegetation. Then they tried tourism. They cleared most of the vegetation that was left in 1951, but the developer ran out of money and the dozers were dumped in the sea. You used to be able to see them off that point,’ he pointed to a dirty rise of land off to the left.

‘But the hotels were never built, and most of the stands of strawflowers were obliterated and the soil washed away.’

‘It’s not the Bahamas, is it,’ I bellowed, but he didn’t hear me and seemed not to mind.

Sharon joined us while Russell was talking, dressed for the Antarctic in a goretex jacket, gloves and a woollen beanie.

‘A mining geologist recorded strawflowers at the water’s edge last year,’ she shouted into my ear.

‘What was he mining?’ I shouted back.

‘Looking for lithium. Never found it. Over millennia the strawflower lost its ability to disperse seeds naturally, and the species became dependent on the animals for its survival. This meant wherever the strawflower grew, there would be breeding lairbuilders. The doctor thinks the lairbuilders have come back.’

‘Have they?’ 

‘Dead as the dodo,’ she shouted at me, and smiled at Russell, who couldn’t hear a word. 

‘He was a geologist, not a botanist. Couldn’t tell a scotch thistle from …’

‘From what?’ I screamed.

‘His own arsehole,’ she yelled back.

*

Russell and Sharon spent much of the afternoon ferrying supplies back and forth to the shore, insisting I relax. I spent the time checking my camera and started work on my article.

‘If David Russell could be deterred by fact or circumstance, it hasn’t happened yet,’ I wrote. ‘The trim, 63-year-old biologist is convinced that one of southern Australia’s greatest secrets is still alive and well, and breeding. On tiny, wind-swept islands off the north-east coast of Tasmania, Dr Russell believes he can prove to the scientific community and the world that the Gilbert Islands Lairbuilder – Australia’s mysterious third monotreme – is alive and well.’

It wasn’t Pulitzer Prize-winning material, but after an afternoon of throwing up it was a start. 

Finally, around five, Sharon reappeared in the dinghy and I climbed aboard. The light was fading, the weather eased, and she was deft at the tiller. We passed a sprinkle of basalt rocks on a small island on the way in, and she told me it was the former convict settlement. I pulled out my camera and lined up a shot, and as I stared into the viewfinder I saw something move. A man – a couple of men – in leg irons. I snapped the picture and then looked, and I saw them still in the fading light. They carried a rock between them.

‘Look!’ I shouted to Sharon and pointed, but she was staring straight ahead, negotiating our way through a narrow channel. 

‘I can’t,’ she said, and when I looked back the men were gone.

‘What was it?’

‘I saw people there, at the ruins.’ She nodded as if I’d said nothing unusual.

They had already set the tents up on the main island, a short way up Mount Gilbert where there was a good stretch of flat ground. A large one for them and smaller for me, although it was a two-manner so I had plenty of room.

After dinner I asked them about the figures I’d seen at the ruins. We were drinking hot chocolate and the night had fallen still. By now there was not a breath of air, and over the crackle of the campfire I couldn’t even hear the sea.

‘What do you think you saw?’ Russell asked, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

‘A ghost?’

‘I don’t know, I’d like to see what’s on my camera.’

I pulled it out and went through my day’s shots. A picture of the boat’s floor, mysteriously showing a portion of Sharon’s thigh, seabirds, then the rocks. They were deserted, empty rocks, no ghost convicts. 

‘That’s disappointing,’ I said. 

‘There are all kinds of stories about these islands,’ Russell said. ‘Ghosts, broken dreams, murder, convicts. You can’t believe most of them.’

‘There were some that were just … too fantastic,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘The Second World War. That it was all about Hirohito wanting to start his own colony.’

‘That’s true,’ Russell said.

‘Why has no one ever heard of it before?’

He stared at me like I was an idiot. He stood and poked the campfire with a stick. 

‘No one? This is the talk of the scientific community. This is the story. Forget the Tasmanian Tiger, forget the, the, woolly mammoth. This is the story of the new millennium.’

‘Mmmm,’ I said. ‘Every history of the war you read though, there’s no mention of Hirohito wanting to catch lairbuilders. Imperial ambitions, overseas possessions, breaking the embargo, those things certainly, but not a guy who wanted to breed marsupial otters on his back patio. So he invades the Pacific.’

‘It would make him too human, wouldn’t it?’ Russell smiled. ‘Couldn’t have that when we were fighting a war against the Japs, could we?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. I winced.

 *

I went to bed. I heard arguing for a time but I was glad to be on terra firma again. I dropped into sleep but something woke me in the night. I had no idea of time. Through the wall of my tent a faint green glow pulsed and as I lay there, my body filled with something. Better-ness. I write that now and can’t even imagine what it means. My skin prickled as from the beach a terrifying roaring arose, barking, as if a troupe of sea lions were tearing at each other. 

Or lairbuilders. 

I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. The green glow grew immediately brighter, emanating from the beach. The sky, lit by a full moon, was imbued with an emerald hue. Maybe the Southern Lights. The roaring swelled on the wind. The sea, never far from any part of the islands, bubbled and glowed iridescent in the moonlight. I stumbled down there.

The world expanded around me and my arms grew warm and the warmth spread through my chest and stomach. I sensed a warm ocean current swirling over my body. I stood transfixed. Turning, I noticed Russell’s outline, standing naked under the moon. He was waist-deep in the water, and the waves rose to his chest and fell to his knees. He said something, and I asked him to repeat it.

‘It’s an echo,’ he muttered.

‘What?’

I looked back at the beach. The roaring ceased in a breath and the glow faded. The moon lay still and cold on the water.

‘An echo,’ he repeated.

He turned side-on and I saw his penis erect as he stood in the shallows. This was getting weird and I took a few steps back up the sand.

‘He first deceased,’ he yelled heavenward, ‘she for a little tried,

To live without him; liked it not, and died.’[2]

He ran up the beach past me as if I weren’t there, his dick whipping up and down, a fishing rod of bamboo. Then by the limp light of the moon he stooped and disappeared into his tent.

I stood for a time, staring at the sea, not sure what I had just seen and heard, but when I found myself shivering I went back into my own tent and zipped myself into my sleeping bag. 

I was concerned for my future. 

I lay in the dark for a time, listening to the waves roll, unable to sleep. I fixed my miner’s light on my head and pulled out more of Russell’s notes.

I came across passages written by Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in 1853.

‘Oftentimes at Oxford I saw her in my dreams, before I ever knew her,’ de Quincey wrote.

‘I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is she? Reader, she is a Roman goddess. My understanding, which formerly had been as active and restless as a hyena, could not come to terms with her magnificence. Throw out a science of regular proportions, the lairbuilder is a miasma, a phantasm, a flight of ecstasy.’

Then tucked into the sleeve of a book on – hallucinogenic mushrooms – I found two yellowed and fragile London newspaper cuttings.

Dated 3 September 1967, the first was about a drug bust in Camden Town. A fuzzy black and white picture accompanying the article showed some long-haired kids being stiff-armed by Bobbies.

The article was standard fare except for a reference to what they had been smoking. 

‘British health authorities have become concerned over the rise of ‘green fur’ many young drug users have been using. Authorities fear more scenes of wanton mischief will become evident in London as have already been witnessed in Camden Town, and the craze will lead to deaths, or worse.’

I wondered what the worse could be. There was no description of what ‘green fur’ was. The second article, undated but about the same vintage, was stapled to the first.  

‘Three glory boxes belonging originally to her majesty Queen Victoria were lost today after they were removed from storage at Buckingham palace,’ it read.

‘A palace spokesman was tight-lipped about the loss, but confirmed the boxes had fallen off the back of a lorry in transit to the British Museum.’

A palace spokesman was quoted at length, said he was ‘livid at the incompetence of the Master of the Household’s Department’.

‘The boxes contained mostly gifts from foreign dignitaries during her majesty’s reign, particularly from the Antipodean colonies and the Argentine. Police have launched a most urgent investigation into how the boxes could have been lost, and inquires are continuing with the Queen’s private secretary.’

Antipodean colonies. Glory boxes. This was a laugh. Wanton mischief, better.

I rolled over and stared a restless sleep in the face.

*

The morning dawned bright but as we breakfasted clouds lowered and a wet fog darkened the western sky.

‘We’ll explore the islands today,’ Russell announced in his too-cheery voice as he cleared the dishes. He was whistling again

‘Great, what’s our plan,’ I said.

‘We’ll take the dinghy.’

I waited. This could be momentous. He looked at the sky, the horizon, checked his watch.

Held his arms out in that ‘punch me in the gut’ gesture. 

‘We’ll do a little reco, what say you?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, a vision hitting me of Russell running up the sand, dick flapping like a demented flagpole. I blinked and shuddered.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yep. Just a bad memory.’

‘Seasickness is a bastard isn’t it?’

‘You could say.’

Russell and Sharon loaded the dinghy with boxes, spare clothes, food. 

‘A little picnic on the shale,’ Sharon chimed in, I thought in mock cheerfulness.

The sky was a bruised indigo and a cloud bank was rolling steadily towards us. 

‘Keep an eye on that,’ Russell smiled as our little boat nosed into the waves. 

We motored through narrow channels between the islets and nothing stood out apart from the bright purple of thistle flowers. The islands were flat as crushed cans and a few of those sloshed in the shallows. Beyond the excitement of Gilbert’s Arm, the islands were mostly flat rock with pebbles. Weeds leaned at impossible angles with the wind. 

‘We’ll start at the far end of the chain.’ He broke into my thoughts. 

Then the wind whipped my mind clear. It was rising in intensity and the cloudbank rolled closer. 

‘We’d better be on land before it comes,’ Sharon yelled, her blonde hair flapping. The roar of it built and Russell cast a glance over his shoulder. 

‘Here.’ Sharon called. ‘Here.’

Russell steered the dinghy into a narrow inlet between two shelves of basalt, and we clambered out onto the larger of the islands, the size of a house block. A weedy sea sloshed against rocks pitted by a million years of erosion. They tied the boat up to  a pinnacle of rock.

‘Take this,’ Russell said, handing me a jacket. They pulled on their own jackets. Sharon rummaged through one of the boxes and tossed me a pair of ski gloves, a fur cap. 

‘Really?’ I asked. 

‘Put it on, you’ll need it,’ Russell said. 

He handed me a cushion. 

‘More comfortable, you’ll need that too.’

The fog was on us. 

They sat and held hands, snuggling together as if they were at the cinema. I shrugged and sat on my cushion.

The fog was surprisingly luminescent and glittered around us, sparkling with particles of light from a sun not yet obscured. I looked up and saw its faded disc still gleaming, whorls of mist pinching its edges.

The world expanded and my limbs warmed and that spread into the rest of me. I smelled an ocean current swirling over me. I leaned back. A whale symphony played somewhere. 

A forest of silken flowers sprang from the earth. A billion shining petals glittered around me. Their perfume floated on the air. 

Me? I was melting into the earth, into the petals. I became a buttery sauce, my mouth watering, the aroma filled my ears and eyes. 

The straw flowers were tall, a full two metres, and the susuration of their leaves caressed the air. I could have sat like that for hours, and maybe, even, I did, until a gap cleared in their centre. 

A red-sailed ship rocked at sea on the far side of the island, a Chinese junk. A small party of Asian men walked towards me from the sandy beach. They were dressed in shining robes and one beat rhythmically on a brass bell. The man at the front, whom I took to be the leader, an emperor maybe, stooped and picked up an otter – a lairbuilder – a squirming emerald from the sand. It turned into a jewel as the flowers quivered and the men and the red sails disappeared and a bulldozer roared towards me from their midst, pumping diesel fumes and tearing through soil and flowers.

A woman sat in the driver’s seat, round and portly with a crown on her head, Queen Victoria dressed in a robe of emerald fur, waving to me.

I called out, nothing coherent that I could hear, and the bulldozer turned, driving rocks and foliage in its bucket over the top of me.

Light extinguished, I floated above an immense pool of empty, a small glowing orb far below. I fell and it grew, shining with green pulses of light. 

My arms sprouted wings and in turn they, feathers, burnished, shining, deep blue. I carried a handsome ruffle of orange at my throat. 

I stood next to a lairbuilder on Gilbert’s Arm, a green otter, and it looked at me with deep brown eyes that held answers to mysteries. A group of men approached, a small hunting party armed with clubs. 

They laughed and spoke in loud voices I didn’t understand, bloody green pelts and blue ducks with their necks wrung hanging from their waists. 

One drew close to me and raised his club as I tasted his boots with my bill. 

The dark came and I was at the bottom of a well, deep and dripping. Red light shimmered above. I rose at speed and emerged into light amid a cloud of scarlet insects. Darting dragonflies. 

I flew among them, our wings lustrous in the sun on a cool, blue sky morning. 

Below us groups of men sat on the ground holding hands, staring into the sky. They were soldiers in red jackets, black breeches and black boots, their rifles discarded on the ground next to them, and convicts in rags, sitting together, soldiers and convicts all together, holding hands, staring into the sky. 

They gazed at something and through the gleam of a trillion scarlet twinkling wings I followed them. A formation of aeroplanes approached and grew larger until their drone outweighed the buzz of insect wings. 

As they came upon us silver metallic eggs poured out of their bellies and the air was filled with orange heat and the black came again.

*

When I woke my back ached and I was lying on hard black rock. My cushion was a metre away. I sat up slowly and coughed. The sky was clear apart from a bank of fog receding to the east. A light breeze blew. I blinked stupidly into a weak sun, my limbs heavy and an overwhelming nausea coursing through my head and guts. Pale cream clouds drifted.

‘Time to go,’ Russell said. 

I squinted at him through a greenish mist in my head. He and Sharon were standing over me, fresh, clear-eyed.

‘Whar jush …?’ I said, my tongue thick and clumsy. ‘Wha … ‘

Russell handed me a bottle of water.

‘Drink. The first time’s the roughest.’

I looked at Sharon and her features gradually identified themselves through a fog of green fur.

I drank from the bottle.

‘Easy there cowboy,’ Russell said, and he prised it away from me. ‘Time to go.’

I stood unsteadily and the rock beneath me swayed, a ship in a storm. 

They grabbed me by both arms and the world went black.

*

‘ … flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself, it only …’

It was Russell’s voice and he seemed in high spirits. Sharon was humming, laughing gently. 

My eyes were crusted over and I rubbed and opened them. 

‘But if that flower with base infection meet, the basest weed outbraves his …’

I was on the bottom bunk. The engine throbbed, I felt it before I heard it, and the Gilbert II rocked gently. We were at sea. I sat up, the sound of a drum in my ears. 

‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds.’

‘Oh yeah, too true,’ she said.

‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than …’[3]

I hauled myself up the ladder and on deck. Bright sunshine made me squint. I looked around, the city in the distance, the heads behind us, Williamstown Marina ahead, the Gilberts, somewhere gone.

‘The sleeper wakes!’ and they both laughed. 

Russel sat with one hand on the wheel, Sharon leaned against him, stroking his leg. She patted a small drum on her lap. I smelled incense. 

‘We’re nearly home,’ I observed.

‘Ahaaaa, will we ever be,’ he said and she beat on the drum. She gazed at him as if he were a precious jewell.

I got little sense out of them. They hadn’t surveyed the islands for remaining stands of straw flowers, they hadn’t walked around the small archipelago as far as I could tell.  

‘It was a wake up and smell the fog-type trip,’ Sharon said.

‘Wake up, man!’ Russell echoed, and they giggled.

‘What about your research?’

‘Science,’ he said. ‘Science. Has no grip on the truth, my friend. Sometimes you’ve just got to go and feel things. With your heart. You have to, we have to craft. A new relationship with the world, and that doesn’t …’

‘ … come through looking down the barrel of a microscope,’ Sharon chipped in.

‘No, no, my friend, you have to feel it – ‘

She joined him with a ‘with your heart ‘. 

I stood on deck as we approached the shore, familiar traffic noises soothing my ears.

‘Did you find any?’ I asked. ‘Lairbuilders? In the end?’

He looked at me a long moment, his head tilted to one side.

‘They’re. All. Gone,’ he said quietly. 

I watched them working together, landing the boat, tying up, not an ill word spoken. 

‘I’ll be going,’ I said.

‘ … What, yeah.’

‘I’ll let you know when the article is published.’

‘Lovely.’

‘I’ll be seeing you.’

‘ … Hoo-roo.’

I walked back down the pier to the carpark with the hair prickling on the back of my neck. I turned to take one last look back at them, and they were holding each other, kissing.

*

I didn’t see Russell again. I called his office a few days later, left a voicemail, but he didn’t return my message.

A couple of weeks later I read he’d been dismissed from the university for stealing an artefact from the museum. No prize for guessing.

In the end maybe he was right. Maybe the bones of the animal, the pelts, the flesh dissolving into sand and scree for millions of years left a trace, an echo, an energetic imprint in the rocks, the sand, on the electrons they were made of.

I did see Sharon once more, years later, passing through an airport on the way to somewhere else. She had a small boy in tow, but of Russell there was no sign. She looked tired, irritated and twitchy, a mother with not enough sleep. The boy had the deepest green eyes of anyone I’d ever seen.

I never heard if the bombers did go there, if the Gilberts were wiped off the map, finally, by an aerial raid. The stuffing had long been kicked out of them by then anyway. It gives me some comfort to think they are still there. If I’d seen a headline about the bombing I would have clicked on another story anyway.

Because if we can do something we’ll do it. People. No matter how perverse or obscene or savage, we’ll do it. That we would annihilate Australia’s exquisite third monotreme for skins and fish and chips was … well. 

Expected. 

We obliterated what was pure and good in a short century of commerce, greed and stupidity.

Nature’s pearl, her star burned bright, hurtling across the sky for a time. Everyone longed for a piece of her until she flickered out, and was gone.

---

[1] Luis de Leon

[2] Sir Henry Wotton

[3] William Shakespeare

Andrew McKenna has been a journalist for more than 30 years, with work published in Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada. McKenna’s theatre works have been presented on stage in Australia and on national radio, with fiction published in Australia, Canada and the USA in Antipodes Magazine, Carve Magazine, River Teeth, Dead Mule, New England Review, Terra Incognita, The Petroglyph Review, Gowanus Books, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, the Montreal Review, and in Australia, in Kalimat,  Sūdō and Island.

McKenna contributed to ‘Journalism at the Crossroads’ by Margaret Simons, Scribe Publications.

In 2005 he was awarded an Australia Council Emerging Writers grant.