He and Captain Phillip had brought eleven ships and nearly 800 convicts, poor starving wretches, white-faced and weak from prison, halfway across the world, the longest journey a fleet had ever made. Below him Cockle Bay gleamed in the sunlight. You can cure men of many things, thought Surgeon White, as he tramped through the trees with his two convict assistants. He collapsed onto the sand.Ĭ OCKLE B AY ( NOW D ARLING H ARBOUR ), 14 A PRIL 1789 But his legs had turned to whale blubber. He had to fetch fresh water before he grew too ill to move. He looked down at his hands, his arms, his legs. But they only muttered, their eyes blank, their minds lost in the land of fever. Had she run into the bush to find the others, or tried to swim out to cool her body? But even her footprints had been eaten by the waves. Why did his body feel like a jellyfish? He peered around frantically, looking for her. The sky grew grey, then pink, and a too-bright blue.
Tomorrow he would swim again, in the soft blue water. He dreamt that tomorrow the women would be out in their canoes, laughing and singing, the children feasting on the shore while the fish smoked in the fires, to keep for the winter days when the schools no longer gathered so near the shore. He slept uneasily, waking every time one of the others cried out in fever dreams. His skin burnt like the sun had kissed him. His mother lay in the wet sand, cradling her baby. She held the coolamon up to her daughters' lips then she drank too. Had the cold water driven away the illness? He helped the old man over to the fire, then took the water to his mother. His grandfather gulped the water eagerly, then shivered. The moonlight was making blue shadows under the trees. He climbed the tree and filled the coolamons, trying not to let the water spill as he climbed down and ran back to the beach. There was no stream near this beach, not even a waterhole, but he'd seen a half-burnt tree, hit by lightning before he was born. How could he have forgotten? He hurried to where his mother had dropped her net, and took out two coolamons.
There was a time for the settling of disputes, and a time to go west to feast on eels, a time when the bees wore fluffy yellow pollen on their legs, when you knew that in another season of moons the nectar would flow sweet and pale green when you poked a stick into the honey trees. When the wattle bloomed the fish swam once more in great families, so many that the lines were always heavy. When the sun rose higher it was time to travel up the river to Parramatta, to strip the stringybark sheets to make the new canoes.
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