In the cold of the morning, Patrick O’Reilly lay sleeping and dreaming by his dying fire.

As the moon set behind the mountains, the sun rose, clear and sharp into a sky swept clean by the wind. After a week of gales that had ripped at the leaves on the trees, and dry storms that had left him sleeping fitfully and waking with the taste of dust in his mouth, it was quiet and still and the bush sparkled from rain that had come and gone in the night.

Patrick O’Reilly stirred. He pulled his blanket over his head and listened to the sound of his heart beating against his brittle ribs. In his sleep they haunted him still, the dreams that wrapped themselves around him, as insubstantial as the pale, delicate moss that trailed from branches and tree-trunks in the hidden river valleys. Dreams that were his own yet not his own, dreams that were part of the mountains as he himself had always been part of the mountains. But in his waking hours, the bush and the mountains were his own, shaped in his own image; the dreams that the long-vanished black men and women had thought were spirits come to torment them vanished too, like last night’s rain in the soft earth. If he shuddered as he woke, it was not from fear; the cold sweat in his armpits meant only that he had moved too close to the fire in the night as the rain dripped down on to him. And now it was morning and he was awake and it was cold.

When he saw the sun climbing through the trees and lighting up the peaks across the valley, he laughed at himself, a fragile laugh that broke open the silence of the bush around him. A bird flew up out of the undergrowth with a sudden startled beating of wings, making him shiver. Pulling his blanket around his shoulders, he huddled over the remains of the fire and waited for the sun to find its way on to his face.

Sometimes in the early morning before the heat of the day dried the moisture from the corners of his eyes, before the lizards spread themselves across the rocks and the eagles soared above the valleys and the flies swarmed over the rotting flesh of dead wallabies, sometimes he knew that this was not the life he would have chosen, if the choice had been his. He thought of his father and before him his grandfather and his great-grandfather, old men as old as the whitened trunks of the Huon pines on the high, forgotten plateaux where the rivers rose and the bushfires could not reach. Three old men for whom the mountains had always been home, three ageless, whitebearded wanderers who had known all the rivers and plateaux and cliffs and caves and all the uncertain paths that led away into the bush behind the farms where the children tossed and trembled in their sleep and on waking never could remember why.

One after another as the years passed, they had slipped away into the hills, disappearing up the lost, scrub-choked valleys of rivers that had no source, condemning him to wander for ever in their footsteps, chained to them by shackles he could not see to strike off. Like his great-grandfather, hardly more than a boy, locked up in a hold full of thieves and rogues and vagabonds and enemies of the English king on their way into exile in the forests and mountains of Van Diemen’s Land.

A land made fertile by exile and death, he thought.

The sun came down on to him at last, stroking his face and bringing him to life again. He shrugged off the blanket and stood up, brushing his thick, dark hair off his forehead and stretching as he breathed in the new day. After all, perhaps death itself was no more than another form of exile. He kicked a few sticks on to the glowing coals and watched the fire leap up suddenly, then pushed a log over the flames and heard it snap and spit as the bark shrugged off the night’s dampness and caught alight as well.

Picking up the billy, he went off through the bush to the creek. He washed his face in a shallow pool and, as the pool grew still again, stood frowning at the reflections of the tree ferns in the water. His hair felt thick and greasy like a sheep’s fleece at the end of winter. He knelt down and splashed water over it and scrubbed at it with his fingers until his scalp hurt. When he stood up, his shirt was dripping wet and rivulets of cold water ran down his back and between his buttocks.

He settled the billy on the fire and reached into his bag for the tea and found as well the loaf of bread the woman had given him, he could not remember when. He pulled off a piece and chewed on it slowly as he watched the water in the billy. When it boiled, he threw the tea in and let it foam up as if it would pour out over the fire, then reached across with a stick to hook the billy off and put it on the ground by his feet to stew. He ate one of the apples the woman had given him; so that he would not die of scurvy, she had said to him.

It made him think of the red-haired woman in the milkbar who had asked him to chop firewood on a hot summer’s afternoon. He had chopped until his arms and shoulders ached and she had given him not an apple but a strawberry milkshake while he sat dripping sweat on to the counter and stared into the mirrored wall. Her husband was away in the army, she said. He looked at her and wondered what she wanted, though it seemed clear enough. She was a big woman with large legs and soft arms and a light floral dress that he wanted to feel between his fingers. It fell forward at the front as she bent over to scoop out the ice cream, and he could have reached out and run his fingers down over the curve of her breasts that rocked against each other as she moved. She looked up and smiled and led him out the back and he found himself on an old iron bedstead, crushed beneath her large.legs and sweating stomach as the corrugated iron roof cracked above them in the heat and crows called from the trees outside. He wondered how he came to be there, his mouth sucked dry and his lips cracked and bruised, his balls feeling as though they had been trampled into the mattress after the second or third time she had climbed on top of him while he lay there, looking over her shoulder at the line of the mountains, blue and hazy in the summer sun, then dark and clear against the evening sky.

One day he would settle down and save enough money to buy a farm and have an orchard of his own, he thought. And maybe a wife and a few kids. He would teach them about the bush and on summer afternoons they would have picnics beneath the trees and the children would swim in the mountain pools.

One day he would live in a house, happy in the summer heat, undisturbed by the clear, bright nights when the moon was full.

He looked out over the valley and laughed; it was too late for all of that now. He knew he would never live in a house, even in the cold weather, even when the winter storms flung trees across his path and filled the creeks with boulders.

He wrapped his few belongings in his blanket and stuffed it into the old haversack he had been given after the war, a souvenir off the back of a dead Italian in the North African desert. Ten years later he still had to shake the sand out of it.

He thought about the war that had taken the young men away. He had tried to go too, but they would not take him, they had no need for old men, they said. And so he had stayed, alone among the women and the orchards.

When the war was over, the young men came back and set about the land with a fury he had forgotten, clearing and planting and building like their obstinate ancestors, a hundred years earlier, who had forced back the bush, driving out those who lived in it, building bridges and roads and churches and pubs, turning the wilderness of Van Diemen’s Land into the green fields and sunny orchards of England.

Only the mountains remained as empty as ever, cleared of the black men and women and the wild white men on the run from their prisons who would cut your throat as soon as look at you. They were all gone now, all dead and gone, every last one of them. They had left the hills to him, to Patrick O’Reilly, whose life and death would outlast them all.



No one else had ever seen Patrick O’Reilly, Cathy Connolly was sure.

Sitting on the steps in the late afternoon sun, she wondered what it meant, but did not mind that he was hers, and hers alone. He was an old man with eyes that were tired as they looked out from under his dark, shaggy hair. He did not frighten her, whatever they said about him.

She looked up from her book at the bush around her. Soon, as the sun slipped down behind the mountains, the gum trees, restless in the wind, would come alight, so bright it would be hard to look at them. She loved the bush and knew it was right to do so, though all around her people spent their lives chopping it down and burning it. What were they afraid of? Themselves, she thought, and the shadows they saw behind them. She laughed at the idea of it. She was at home in the bush, where she learnt more in a day than she ever would among the apple orchards spreading across the hillside.

In the orchards her father was pruning with a saw and a pair of secateurs. She saw him come down from the ladder and stretch his arms above his head to ease the ache in his shoulders, then move on to the next tree, setting up the ladder, testing it to see it was secure, slowly working his way along the rows as he had all day, and the day before.

In the kitchen, her mother sang to herself as she cooked and baked bread. Cathy breathed in the hot, heavy smell and grew hungry for gravy and potatoes and fresh green beans.

She put her book down and stared up into the trees that grew taller and brighter the more she looked at them, stretching up so far above her, further than she could ever reach. She felt herself gripped by a longing that she did not understand, that had something to do with the trees and the mountains and above them the sky, so far away. One day, she knew, she would find her way high up into the mountains, further than anyone else had ever been, high enough to look down on the sunset that so discouraged her as she sat, shut away and forgotten, at the end of the valley. One day she would go there, whatever it took. Even if they did not want her to, even if they tried to stop her, she would find a way. She could hardly imagine what it would be like, the whole valley ablaze, as if the trees were not really trees but something different, the way she had always felt they might be. And from there, what would she make of the rocks, that were so solid and so puzzling to her? Sometimes she leant against them in the middle of the day and they were as warm as if they had just pushed their way up out of the centre of the earth. It would not surprise her to look down from the mountains and see them glowing as if they were still liquid, as if they would never grow cold and settle down into the hillside to be covered with vines and roots and the droppings of wallabies. She smiled to think of it and shook her head. For all their day-time heat, they would grow cold at night and the frost and rain would break them up and roll them down the mountainside, over the fields and into the creek for her to stub her toes or bruise her shins on. She rubbed her leg, thinking about it.

She put her book on the step and called to her dog and they walked down to the creek in the bottom of the valley. Cathy led the way upstream where there were no fields and no tracks and they had to clamber over the rocks. Her dog followed her reluctantly; he did not like the bush or the cold, damp rainforest that lined the creek. But Cathy had ideas of her own. She wanted to reach the clearing she had found, higher up the creek where no one else ever went and where, one day, she had sat on a rock in a patch of sunlight and looked into the trees and seen, there in front of her, Patrick O’Reilly.

She had not told anyone, her parents or the other children in her class or her teacher who lived in the school house by the river. There were some things she could not tell anyone about, anyone in the whole world, especially those who loved her most. She knew what they were like; whether they believed her or not, they would stop her going into the bush, even with her dog. She let the thought settle in her mind and realised it was the worst thing she could ever imagine, no matter how hard she tried. It was as if suddenly she had come to understand something that had always been a mystery to her, what it really meant to be taken away and locked up with no way out and no hope of escape, like the convicts at Port Arthur that they learnt about at school, or the others who had broken rocks and built the roads - even the road she went to school on - with chains around their ankles. She could feel their suffering as if it was her own, and could see the hate in their eyes. She shuddered. It could not be like that for her. She would have to escape. Whatever it cost, she would find a way out.

She sat on the rock and looked into the forest. She was not afraid. He seemed to smile at her, an old man with a ragged beard and a ragged face that merged with the leaves and the trees in the dappled sunlight. She had seen him not well, but well enough; she would remember the smile, if not the face. It could only be Patrick O’Reilly, the old man they said had lived up there for ever, watching over them, toying with them, frightening them out of their wits, some of them, as they tried to go about their ordinary business of scratching out a living on the edge of the bush, at the foot of the mountains, his mountains. Now when she looked, sitting there on the rock in the clearing where once there had been a house, he was not there, she was alone. And yet she did not feel she was alone in the forest. She closed her eyes and let herself grow still. If she sat like that for long enough, she could look inwards, right inside her mind or even somewhere much deeper, reaching towards something she did not understand, something there were no words for. She grew so still that everything in the world faded away around her. Her heart beat slowly, loud inside her head, the only noise she could hear, loud enough to frighten her. But it did not frighten her.

In the end it was her dog whining that led her back to the clearing in the sun, to the rock on which she was sitting, to the rustle of the leaves and the movement of animals across the forest floor. She looked and saw nothing, but knew that he must be there, watching her.

She was not afraid.

She wondered about the people who had lived there by the creek, so long ago that nothing remained of them but a scattering of stones among clumps of yellow grass, with the forest creeping ever closer. She imagined smoke coming out of the chimney, chickens scratching in the dirt, a child standing, staring up into the darkness of the mountains. Like herself, she thought, and smiled, as if the child was there beside her.

Her dog whined again. Cathy wished she had not brought him. She would have preferred to sit alone and watch the almost imperceptible shadows moving up and down the creek and away through the trees, softly and silently as if they had never existed.

Somewhere up in the bush was the Frenchman, the sailor who had jumped ship on his way around the world. She wondered what he would be like. A stranger, speaking a different language, from somewhere even further away than Sydney. They said he was smart, that he knew a thing or two. But he would not understand this land, her land, a forgotten corner of a forgotten island that no one had ever understood. Talking to himself, singing of the sea, he would make his way through the bush as if he was alone, looking but not seeing, leaving deep footprints in the soft earth, snapping off twigs, marking out his territory like the cat that lived in the school house. He would not see Patrick O’Reilly.

Her dog whined again as if afraid. Cathy felt in her pocket for the grey stone that kept her safe. Her hand closed around it and she squeezed it tight and smiled. The dog became quiet and looked up at her solemnly, as if after all he could trust her. She laughed and clicked her fingers at him and they walked off down the creek together.

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