The Basin

One strange era ago, I went for a few days to stay at an isolated shack above on a waterway north of Sydney, near to which lies a mysterious circular land/water formation known as The Basin. We had to catch a boat there, the only way in and out.

Somebody died that weekend.

The landline phone was ringing in the night for a long long time.

The room was lit by candlelight because we had turned the generator off earlier after a few beers as darkness came in, cold and half-moon-lit in the silent bush.

She didn’t want to answer the phone because she knew for certain it was bad news. Why else would it be ringing for so long?

Eventually she did answer it, and the news was worse than could be imagined.

Left clinging to a bed beneath an old mosquito curtain, we raged through the night, exhausting ourselves so we could sleep, seeing the deepest of deep waters of The Basin shining silver down below in the moonlight as we saw life from the inside out.

The next morning, we caught the first boat back to the “mainland” and re-entered a world where everything had changed.

The draining of the Basin

The tree-view, lost time

The bottles that were drunk

Time now gone

Convict ghosts

The warp of wood of old Australia