The boat is a fourteen-footer with a fifteen horse motor that sounds more confident than it is. You load it the night before — rods, an esky with ice and sandwiches, two litres of water you'll forget to drink, sunscreen applied once and forgotten about, and a bag of frozen prawns that will thaw faster than you expect. Someone ties a towline to the bow just in case. It's always just in case with a tinny.
You put in at Myall Lakes just after eight, when the light is still low and the water is the colour of strong tea — tannin from the paperbarks and melaleucas lining the shore. The engine idles. You push off from the bank. Nobody says anything for a while because there's nothing to say yet.
Into the paperbarks
The upper reaches are narrow and sheltered, the water barely moving. The vegetation is dense on both sides — paperbark tea trees arching overhead in places, their pale trunks peeling like sunburnt skin, banksia scrub behind them, the occasional ancient cabbage palm standing apart from everything else like it wandered in from a different landscape. It's warm here. No wind. The boat barely needs the motor; you half-drift, the engine just ticking over.
This is the part of the trip that's hardest to explain to people who haven't done it. There's nothing happening. You're moving slowly through a corridor of trees and the only sounds are the engine at idle, something splashing once in the reeds to your left, and a black cockatoo calling somewhere you can't see. The call travels — that long, mournful whistle — and then stops. You keep moving.
Someone spots the cockatoos a few minutes later: a mob of eight or ten, working through a banksia stand, pulling apart the cones with a focused, industrial efficiency. They don't care about the boat. You cut the engine completely and drift past. One of them looks down with an expression of mild contempt, then goes back to work.
The lakes open up
And then the trees pull back and you're out on the lake proper and everything changes.
The wind comes from the south-west, which means you take it on the beam until you angle across. The chop picks up faster than you expected — it always does on the Myall Lakes, because the fetch is long and there's nothing to interrupt it. The tinny slaps across the small waves and you throttle up and someone holds the esky down with one hand. It's not rough. It's just awake. After the stillness of the upper river, the open water feels enormous.
You fish here for a while, drifting with the engine off, running prawn along the bottom. The first flathead comes up around ten-thirty — a solid fish, maybe forty-five centimetres, the colour of the sandy bottom it came from. The moment it feels the hook it goes berserk: violent, jackhammer headshakes that travel straight up the line and into your hand, the rod tip rattling. That's always the sign. A flathead that headshakes like that is a good one. It makes one heavy run toward the bottom and then comes up. You keep it. The second comes twenty minutes later and does exactly the same thing — three or four savage headshakes that nearly pull the rod sideways, then gives up the fight. You keep that one too. Someone suggests a third but the drifting has carried you too far and the mood shifts toward lunch.
After the stillness of the upper river, the open water feels enormous — and briefly, brilliantly, yours.
Pulled up on a sandbank
You find a sandbank on the sheltered side of a small point, just wide enough for the boat and a couple of bodies lying flat. You run the bow up into the sand and cut the engine and the silence is immediate and total. The water around the bank is warm — properly warm, the kind that makes you get in slowly and then not want to get out. Clear, maybe a metre deep, with a sandy bottom you can see all the way down.
Nobody planned to swim. You all swim.
You eat the sandwiches floating on your backs, which is harder than it sounds. The sun is directly overhead now and there's no shade and nobody cares. A pelican lands thirty metres away and regards the scene without apparent interest, then lifts off again in that improbable way pelicans have — like something that large shouldn't be able to fly but has decided to anyway.
A sea eagle appears above the treeline while you're eating, working the thermals in slow, wide circles. It drops suddenly, levels out, and hits the water with its feet about a hundred metres off. It comes up with something — too far away to see what — and carries it back toward the trees without looking back. The whole thing takes about four seconds and leaves you not quite believing it happened.
Through to Tea Gardens
The run down to Tea Gardens is the fast part. You've caught your fish, you've had your swim, the wind has dropped a little in the afternoon and the water is glassier now. The engine is up to three-quarter throttle and the boat is up on the plane and the spray is coming over the bow and everything is very simple for a while. Just speed and salt air and the shore sliding past.
The vegetation changes again here, gradually — the banksia and paperbark giving way to taller eucalypts as you follow the river south, the banks more open, the occasional jetty or moored tinny signalling that you're entering something that has the shape of civilisation, even if only barely. Tea Gardens has the shape of civilisation. Just barely.
You pull up at the town wharf around three o'clock. Someone ties the bow line to a cleat. Everyone is sun-drunk and slightly pink and walking a bit carefully on solid ground.
The pub, the ice cream, the tide
The Tea Gardens Hotel is exactly what it should be. Cold beer. A ceiling fan. A barmaid who knows what you're going to order before you say it. You sit outside overlooking the river and watch the ferry cross and come back and cross again. Nobody is in a hurry. Nobody has anywhere to be. This is the entire point.
Someone gets an ice cream from the shop on the corner. Then someone else gets one. You walk back to the boat with ice cream in the afternoon sun, which is a specific kind of contentment that doesn't have a word for it but should.
The tide is low when you leave town, which means the sand flats off the river mouth are exposed — pale and wide and almost phosphorescent in the late light. You come off the plane and idle through the shallows, watching the bottom come up to meet you, nudging the motor up with one hand, reading the water. There's a heron standing in six inches of water about twenty metres off, absolutely still, waiting. You go around it.
Home
You see the house from the river before you reach it — the upper deck visible through the paperbarks, the back fence, the lawn running down to the bank. Someone spots it first and points. You slow right down.
The bow touches the sand. The engine goes off. You drag the boat up the beach by hand, both of you on the rope, heels digging in, and pull it above the tide line. The fish are in the esky. The rods are still rigged. The sun is maybe an hour from setting.
Someone says: we should do this again tomorrow.
You should do this again tomorrow.