Best Australian Yarn: The Desolation of Colour by Catherine Ooi

When I first set foot on this strange koala-bear and beer land on a sponsored internship-cum-holiday, I was nineteen years old. The professor who bought me here, who wasn’t my professor, asked me what I thought of his country. In what way, I asked suspiciously. Is there punishment for giving the wrong answer? Would I be sent packing? The question felt loaded; I didn’t know what varnish to apply. Answer when you feel safe, Prof said amicably, and left me alone with a list of errands whilst he took himself to his favourite bar. I thought about this question for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile in between typing out fountain-penned letters, taking minutes of meetings I don’t understand, and organising shopping lists, I let the dry radiating heat of Victoria slowly bake ideas of home into my bones. I learnt how to climb a tree and grill chops on an electric barbie; something I’d never seen before. I wrestled a goat named Molly who initiated - and won - every round of wrestling we ever had. I collected real pinecones; a sparkling fantasy for equatorial children who’d only ever held them as glitter-coated foam baubles at Christmas. One day at dinner, I told Prof that Australia was the loneliest land I’ve been on. But why? he asked. He was a Gandalfian-looking communications prof, spindly and old, with legs like a grasshopper and a head full of clouds. You could afford be like that, back in the day. Dreamy. Kind. He took everything a nineteen years old girl said seriously, especially after a few drinks. Why do you think Australians are lonely? I didn’t say Australians are lonely, I said very fast. I was eating his lamb chops and living in his house, I wasn’t about to unhouse myself. Only as an adult do I realise now how truly fragile I had been at that dinner table, how thin the paper of my skin. As I said, people could afford to be kind to children in those days, when there was much less weight pressing on the soul. Well I said, casting about for an out; I think the land is lonely. So the land is lonely, Prof pressed. In what way? I shrugged. I had no idea. Back then I hadn’t discovered how old this Grandfather land really was. This blood-ocre-soot land that just stared impassively back at you, fierce and tired and bloody sick of your tricks. Prof wouldn’t leave me alone with the whole loneliness thing though. And how about the people, he asked me the next night. Are they lonely too? I tried to puzzle his true intentions out. Are you asking me if I think you’re lonely? Pftttt, says Prof, and opens another bottle of wine at five o’clock. Verily I am made of loneliness. I’m sure he followed that up with a quote, but I don’t remember it now. I think the black people- Natives, Prof corrected. Native people are lonely. They look really sad. And sometimes angry. I’d seen the native people by then of course, the ashy cobwebbed silhouettes of them drifting around like empty question marks. Curiosity and an inexplicable longing had lead me to following them around sometimes, from a safe distance. They never minded me. I was skinny and yellow and harmless; back then, their anger wasn’t for me. Perhaps I too, looked like a ghost when I was young. Prof knows I sometimes follow them, and he’s never stopped me. Why don’t you say hello? Are you afraid of them, he asked, liberating a second glass of wine from the bottle. No they’re gentle, I answered, after thinking about it for two second. My country too had native peoples; we have hundreds of tribes. It wasn’t like this in my country though. Prof insisted I explain what ‘this’ is, and I had a hard time doing so. Quite frankly I was far more interested in being allowed to eat lamb chops. There’s nothing quite so luxurious waiting for me back home. Prof waited another day. He was shockingly patient, and I could never tell if these conversations were for me or for him. That day I remembered sweping up his porch and watching the grass dancing. I had a vivid imagination as a child and frequently saw double visions of the large objects in nature: trees, big rocks, and animals would all have superimposed, neon outline. I think it was my brain’s attempt at visually ejecting all the things I couldn’t find words for. (It could also have been all the drugs I took for asthma that would sometimes make me hallucinate.) Here, these subtle hallucinations seem to fit well into the landscape. I didnt feel out of place. I tried hard, to think about ‘this’. Nobody had asked me before, and to be honest, nobody cared after. Only Prof ever cared to know what I thought of something. Meanwhile, Molly graciously gave me a collection of bruises that bloomed like blue-green moss up and down my legs. I displayed these legs to the skies and trees, seeking belonging. The sky didn’t say anything back. I thought about ‘this’ often, not least because I knew I could only foist Prof off with non-verbal shrugs for so long. But I could never make sense of my own thoughts, and I thought this was an assignment it felt like something set up to fail. At best I could say that for me ‘this’ was a thing that hung from the trees, cawed out of the beaks of crows. It was thick and soupy. I couldn’t explain it, but I could hear it quietly bubbling in the water. I only met Prof’s ex-wife once. She was old before her time, and she had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. Her daughters had a quiet kindness to them, a wellspring of deep waters, dug at unspeakable costs. Prof definitely wasn’t a saint, but I could sense how desperate he was to be one to somebody, anybody. Even a nobody nineteen-year-old like me. Little. Yellow. Different. The next night, I tried to explain the cry of certain birds, at twilight, bleeding into red skies. The fox that didn’t belong, colourless in the moonlight. It was like trying to describe what a particular smell was like using interpretive dance. You could manage something, but most of it gets lost and nobody’s sure of the point at the end. An exercise in futility, I groused. Definitely an exercise, not necessarily futile, answered Prof. Easy for him to say. At some point Prof gestures expansively at the house he’d built himself (that I was back then, too clueless to appreciate was a fine and solid piece of work). This is the house I’ll die in, he says. He probably thought the words came out of his mouth smoothly, but they actually came out like one of those Holstein cows sitting on a piano by accident. Self-awareness is a terrible thing I agreed politely, whilst eyeing the piece of meat he’d pushed aside. I wondered if I could persuade him to give it to me. Prof drank all his calories. I was initially bewildered, and then I learnt it was a white people thing and didn’t care anymore. What do you think of it, Prof asks. I know he means the house. After a long pause, I offered the thought that nobody could have built a finer and more generous coffin. It made him smile for real. Perceptive girl, he muttered. Don’t know why you’re studying business. Such a waste. He told me to get out of business school a lot. Said he’d clear a path for me into Communications, where he was head of school. He told me repeatedly that business would kill my soul. When I look back through the lens of 20-plus years, I definitely should have listened. But I didn’t trust adults at that age, and I didn’t know back then that 90% of the weight I carried around me was shame. I also couldn’t figure out why the hell anyone would want to ‘study film’ instead of just watch it and forget about it; and anyway I was too frightened of my mother. What I should have done was take up his offer. Prof was a very grey man: he’d have made certain papers disappear and other papers appear. Things were much easier to fudge back in those days. My mother would never have found out, and maybe I would have graduated instead of flunk out and feel obliged to leave the country for however many decades it took to forget what the stupid things I’d done, or until I was sure some form of punishment wasn’t waiting for me when I returned. But those are growing-up stories. My yarn is about being nineteen and asking Australia who it was; what it had to teach me. I always felt a kind of expectation in the air from the space around me, like the farm itself was waiting for my wits to sharpen. Like I was a particularly slow and bovine student. In my second month I grew bolder and persuaded a retired (so he claimed) but very gallant Hells’ Angel to give me a countryside spin on his dirt bikes and one of his three Harleys. We ate not a few flies doing this. When I first arrived, Prof had pointed out a few bars and said NEVER go in there. So of course I had to – with my new bodyguard. And I went on country radio and flirted with boys; and was mildly scandalised when they flirted back. I kissed my first boy on this land, which left us both a little shocked and me feeling vaguely disappointed. Prof watched all of this, slightly jealous, slightly amused, definitely bitter. I wished he’d take better care of this beautiful house. It was so lonely. It needed love, not empty bottles and cobwebs. This was the year I fell in love with the idea of home. A place to be lonely in, drink wine in, die in. As the final days of my first overseas holiday wrapped up, I gradually fell in love with the idea of a good place to die. In the late afternoons I’d lean against the fence smoking a rollie, trying not to let the dread of going back get to me. I’d look at Prof’s house, framed with solid pine, set against a field of sheep. I could quite easily imagine someone building a house to die in with his own hands; the rich, transformative awareness of it. The building of layers upon layers over oneself, like a shroud. It would stand long after Prof was dead, wiped cleaned of his thumbprints. Somehow, I could understand that this pine house was Prof’s love song to the land, the only way he knew how to express it. Remember me, his hands whispers to the land. Remember me, I have no one left but you. But the land wouldn’t remember. That would turn out to be my job instead. After I went home, I was stupefied for months trapped between hazy remembrances and half-forgotten impressions whose meaning I couldn’t quite tease out. And then J died suddenly, and S died pretty much deliberately, and I couldn’t stay anymore, in a world I no longer recognised. I had to go. So I dropped out of uni and travelled, working in pubs, trawling nightclubs for forgetfulness. I didn’t look like a newbie because someone had once taught me to hand roll cigarettes like an expert. I looked cool. In my hurry to leave my past behind I forgot about Prof too. I’d put all my memories into a box and sealed it up. It would be decades, long after Prof was dead, before I opened them back again. Prof the lonely. Prof the Grey. I only contacted him once, breaking my silence in my mid-twenties, when I was going through intense self-harm and suicidal ideation and couldn’t see the point in soldiering on. By this time I was residing in Singapore, or maybe Amsterdam, who knows. Every anniversary of J’s death I’d have a massive breakdown and do something stupid. This went on for decades, until one day I stabbed my rollie into the crook of my elbow, stood up, and wrote to Prof about my enduring grief that wouldn’t go away. Everyone else had moved on, everyone but me. I had been smoking and looking at people’s homes, their gardens. Little boxes to die in. The thought gave me comfort; maybe someday I’ll have box of my own. Prof wrote back within a day with an opening sentence I would remember forever. He said: C, in all the time I’ve known you, you have never valued anything of yourself, least of all the thoughts in your head. But words aren’t meant to be cheap, least of all for someone like you. Words have power - just look what they’ve done to you. I don’t remember the rest of it, but that opening phrase has stayed with me since. It rises into the air whenever I start to drop pieces of myself on the floor, hoping to shed enough of myself to vanish into the ether. Something in his words tied me to this world. I know Prof wrote those words, but they didn’t come from him, not really. I swear I could hear the land calling me from across the seas. The land too, tied me to life. If I closed my eyes I could see this blood-ocre-soot land simmering in the heat; pressing against my temples with a physicality that remained vivid even in dreams. Years and years after Prof himself was dead and buried I came back to this lonesome land, and beside a beautiful river crowned with swans, I said thank you, and poured a bottle of wine into the riverbank in his memory. Ostensibly I came back to salute the memory of Prof, but truly I went back to return these borrowed words to the land which had once saved my life. As for Prof, I heard he’d drank himself to death some years ago. I’m sure it surprised absolutely nobody. Prof told me once; the hurt in me recognises the hurt in you. And you hurt so much C, because you recognise everybody’s hurt. Prof never told me about his hurts. And neither did the land; nor the natives of the land; they never told me about their hurts too. But we pass each other, and the ghosts of recognition light up in our eyes. I bought a small house on this land, and hoped the dreams would go away. Its early days yet, but yesterday I stood in the middle of a football oval and watched the auroras, pink and mysterious, and I didn’t feel blue at all. Instead, everything was in shades of grey. It was perfect.