The Australia Stories - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Todd James Pierce

He entered her life like thunder, and through his presence, she was able to reshape her own life, slowly and through a keen understanding of both herself and her upbringing. At this point her narrative rhythm changes, becomes freer, picks up a lighter vocabulary. As a young woman, her understanding of Australia was tainted with convict overtones, but now it opens toward a new Australia:

   It is amazing that his family has overcome in ten years what my family has
   not accomplished in three generations. He doesn't thirst for his old
   country the way I did. He doesn't live within the elaborate rules we've
   made for ourselves. On walks, he identifies native plants for me. The
   warratar, gravillia, silver gums, a violet creeper. He picks up seeds and
   calls them by their common names: a gumnut, a gooseberry, a bush devil. A
   bush devil, I've learned, is a small round seed, a face really, complete
   with horns and eyes and pointed nose. For me, the whole country expands,
   filling itself with mystery. I'm a Commonwealth citizen, but the life I now
   long for is a new life. I'm too old to be falling in love with a man, a
   country, and myself, but I am. I don't know how to stop, but already I see
   the danger. (31)

In April, 1967, my grandmother leaves my grandfather, both of them citing unresolved difficulties as the official reason for divorce. She gathers her belongings into two trunks, allocating the rest to the Salvation Army, or The Salvos, as they were called. She boards the three-thirty train that will take her past Paramatta, past Lidcombe and Emu Plains, until she arrives at Katoomba, not more than 100 meters from where, as a girl, she used to buy rock candy and licorice. She takes a part-time position as a seamstress. On her days off, she walks through the valley, learning more plant names, blue gum, spiny fern, lemon shoot, until her mind is an encyclopedia, her heart opening to the only thing that will fill it, the presence of the land itself, the sky, the trees, the water that runs through it. She's happy here, happy in a way she had not known she could be. She writes of a satisfaction often hidden from women, the pleasures of a solitary life. When she's sixty-three, she becomes the first female tour guide in the mountains, leading public expeditions into the Jamison Valley, perhaps beyond. She's allowed three more years before she finally walks down The Giant Stairway, Mrs. Judith O'Neal spotting her along the way, and is swallowed up by rocks and leaves until only her hat and scarf remain.

It goes without saying that Yasar Hasim didn't join her in the mountains. Years before, he was offered a job as public groundskeeper, his lot taking him to Melbourne, where a different Royal Gardens awaited him, its land colder, its soil darker, a small gardener's unit his for the asking. After the missing manuscript was uncovered, Mr. Ed Horner from the Historical Society traveled to the Melbourne Gardens to find him. Yasar Hasim had died three years earlier, the only trace of my grandmother found ironically in a hybrid rose he had successfully developed. It bore her middle name.