Forecast (15 page)

For her last twenty days, my husband and I spent much of the time just a five-minute walk from Wesley Hospital as guests of Marilyn and David, who live high up in a unit overlooking Coronation Drive and the river. (Marilyn and I were at university together; her husband, David, for two years a whaler at Tangalooma, then an officer with the Australian Special Forces in Vietnam, has been an invaluable source of information for two of my novels and for one whaling story.) Each morning, over coffee on their solarium-balcony, we would watch the sun rise over Brisbane and see the Cat and the first ferries and the sculls and racing fours and racing eights. We would take our daily morning walk on the river path, dodging cyclists moving at the speed of light. Then I would head for the Moorlands Wing and sit with my mother.

When the frail bark of Elsie Morgan Turner crossed the bar and put out to sea – that last great sunless sea – on the morning of May 23rd, compassionate nurses left me alone with her for an hour. I held her still-warm hand and read to her, for the final time, her favourite psalms: the 23rd and the 91st. I kissed her goodbye.

And then, tear-blind, I went walking on the bicycle path by the river.

 

On 23 November 2008, the six-month anniversary of my mother's death, Alan and Judy, always generous, take my father and me to visit my mother's grave. (Judy and I were at university together with Marilyn; Alan and my husband were at high school together in Rockhampton.) And now we are all on David and Marilyn's glassed-in balcony.

The river is turbulent. Cyclonic winds have been ripping through Brisbane and scattering trees across roads like matchsticks. The river is dark as chocolate and slaps high and angrily against its banks. The debris are so thick and dangerous – from time to time I can see whole branches and the cabbage crowns of entire trees bucking about like leviathans – that the ferries and the City Cat (I believe for the first time in its history) are not running.

Inevitably I think of the floods of 1893.

I think of Grandpa Turner and of my mysterious great-grandfather Charles Henry Turner, a man not unlike the flamboyant John Joseph William Molesworth Oxley, I suspect: brilliant, ambitious, devious, rash and hot-headed. Oxley, like my grandfather, shipped out from England as a mere slip of a boy. A midshipman in the Royal Navy, he rose to become surveyor-general for Governor Brisbane after having connived with Macarthur to
overthrow Bligh, and after having then escorted the deposed Bligh to Van Diemen's Land on the HMS
Porpoise
. (Oxley, first lieutenant on that ship, was a man who hedged his bets.) Macarthur rewarded Oxley's support with the most desirable match in the colony – engagement to his daughter – but the bond was dissolved when Macarthur discovered the extent of his prospective son-in-law's debts.

Yet Oxley left his distinguished mark on the colony. He opened up the Liverpool Plains and surveyed the Macquarie and Lachlan rivers. He believed in the vast Inland Sea. He charted the Brisbane, which, he was convinced, flowed from that Inland Sea to the Pacific. He had wide-reaching though hopelessly inept commercial aspirations as an agent for businesses in London, Capetown, and Calcutta. When he eventually married in 1821, he already had two daughters from two previous amours. (And I ask myself, suddenly, how many unknown second or third cousins might I have in Brisbane, offspring of the possible passions of that ne'er-do-well Charles Henry Turner?)

John Joseph William Molesworth Oxley, born at Kirkham Abbey in Yorkshire of aristocratic stock, received huge land grants but managed to die in 1828 in such pecuniary circumstances that
the executive council of the colony of New South Wales had to pay for his funeral. And there is nothing to suggest that my great-grandfather, once a bewigged denizen of the Inns of Court, died otherwise than impoverished and drunk.

But here is what really grabs me as I gaze at the rubble-choked river. Marilyn, a member of the Brisbane History Group, has shown me a copy of Oxley's journal. One year after first sailing up the Brisbane, he returned in the
Amity
and camped again at the mouth of Breakfast Creek. His reception by local Aborigines, he wrote, was hostile. Indeed,
o dies irae,
one man had the temerity to steal his hat. The
Amity
continued up river and the journal of Monday, 27 September 1824 recorded the following:

Below Wesley Hospital there are steep stone steps down the riverbank to the bike path. That is where a creek (now a culvert) once entered the river. That is where the
Amity
weighed anchor. That is where I picture the tense encounter between my grandfather and Charles Henry Turner. That is where a man was shot for stealing a hat. That is where, in a room high on the slopes above, my mother died.

The turbulent river rushes on.

Everything flows,
wrote Heraclitus,
and nothing stays fixed.

These stories, in slightly different form, have been published in the following literary journals:

‘Blind Date' in
The Monthly
, Melbourne, Australia, June 2005, pp 46-49 (Included in
The Best Australian Stories 2005
)

‘Republic of Outer Barcoo' in
Griffith Review
, December 2010.

‘Salvage' (as ‘Weird People') in
Overland
(Melbourne, Australia) Sept 2010.

‘The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman' in
Nimrod International Journal
(USA), Vol. 49, no. 1, Fall 2005, pp. 142-150. (Finalist for Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction)

‘Hurricane Season' in
Sunday Arts Magazine
,
The Independent
, London, Jan 25, 2004. Included in
The Best Australian Stories 2004
.

Also in
The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection
, 2011.

‘Moon River' in
One Book, Many Brisbanes: Fourth Anthology of Brisbane Stories
, Brisbane City Council, 2009.

Janette Turner Hospital grew up in Brisbane and was educated at Wilston State School, Mitchelton High, the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers' College. She taught high school north of Cairns, but since her post-graduate degrees in Canada, she has taught in universities in Canada, Australia, England, France and the United States. She has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and three short-story collections, which have been published in numerous languages. In 2003, she won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award and the Patrick White Award, and received a Doctor of Letters
honoris causa
from the University of Queensland. For twelve years, she held an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. In 2010, she was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York. She continues to teach a course at the University of South Carolina as Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita.

The Ivory Swing

The Tiger in the Tiger Pit

Borderline

Dislocations

Charades

Isobars

The Last Magician

Collected Stories

Oyster

North of Nowhere, South of Loss

Due Preparations for the Plague

Orpheus Lost

Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2011
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2011

The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942-

Forecast: turbulence: short stories and moon river, a memoir / Janette
Turner Hospital.

ISBN: 978 0 7322 9444 1 (hbk.)

ISBN: 978-0-7304-9877-3 (epub)

Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942-
Autobiography.
Short stories, Australian.

A823.3

Cover design by Natalie Winter
Front cover images: Tornado in Sky by Nancy Sams/Getty Images;
   Woman on Swing © Ocean/Corbis
Back cover image by shutterstock.com

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