All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘For this story to reach your heart, son, you may need to swallow it down with a sprinkling of salt from the shores of the inland sea,’ Oshiro said. ‘You should write the facts of this story only on tissue paper. But you should carve its meaning in stone.’

Greta gives a half-smile, eyes fixed on the narrow side road that bends now past a row of honeysuckle trees with showy orange flowers that look to Molly like big fat orange caterpillars who have enjoyed too much plonk, which is why they’re crawling aimlessly across the tops of those silvery fern leaves.

An empty dirt road separating bushland walls of banksias with furry yellow flowers that stick out from their branches like hot corncobs spitting butter, and these trees grow beside weeping paperbark shade trees that do their grieving in the open through outbursts of creamy white flowers that look to Molly like Greta Garbo’s eyelashes when they flutter in silver screen distress.

Molly knows the secret to a long walk. Never think about the destination. Just think about the air in your lungs, the motion of your arms and legs. There is a rhythm to it, and once you have found it that rhythm can tick-tock through time forever. She loves the great riddle of walking. The more you take the more you leave behind: footsteps. And she looks behind her to see her footsteps stretching as far as she can see along the road that winds back through ironbark borders. Don’t think of the destination. Think of the red-tailed black cockatoo up there in the stringybark, with scarlet panels beneath its tail flaps, like fire is fuelling its take-off. And marvel at the way it flies through the sky. It doesn’t fly like falcons and kites fly; instead its wings work hard, like the bird is rowing through the sky, rowing upstream through air.

‘What is this place?’ Greta hollers back to Molly. And Molly screams back to the actress in delight, ‘It’s Australia.’

‘And you wouldn’t believe what he said then,’ Tom Berry whispered to his enraptured audience. ‘He said he and his family saw no value whatsoever in all that gold. He said real treasure was a freshwater spring. He said the real jewels of the earth were gooseberries that grow on trees. He said a good dig in his world is when you stick your fist down a bubble in the mud and find a long-necked turtle to grab hold of. He said true wealth isn’t havin’ your pockets filled with coin but your belly filled with white turtle flesh cooked in its juices, shell down, on a bed of coals. He said the only use for gold was to glitter, and he said the glitter of gold was like the glittering smiles of us white men he’d seen in town dressed in expensive clothes. He said that gold can’t be trusted. He said we all got the gold disease and it rots our hearts. It poisons us. He said it changes who we are, how we behave.’

‘But one should never mourn the dead, Molly Hook from Darwin, for they have embarked on a journey far more wondrous even than the one that brought you here. You stumble blindly in your boots here on earth. But the dead take flight, Molly Hook, through light and through dark and through light again.’

‘Is there a land in this world more in awe of oblivion? Death resides in its branches, in its rivers, in its soil. Death crawls here and death slithers. It bites and chomps and infects and infuses. Tell me of a land more determined to kill those who would dare embrace its beauty.’