Extract:

The Colour of Water

The colour of the Barron River is dependent on the weather: an angry storm will stir up the sediment and redden the water. On calm days, it is almost teal. The mineralogist Abraham Gottleb Werner created a nomenclature of colours as a reference to describe objects in nature in the pre-photographic era. The best way to describe the indescribable is to place it next to something else. Each hue is prescribed an animal, a mineral and a vegetable.

But the colours of nature are so gradual, so various. Werner knew this too, he showed it when he wrote: When one colour approaches slightly to another, it is said to incline towards it… When it approaches very near to one of the colours, it is said to fall, or pass, into it.

The Barron River is like this: it falls – or passes – into the ocean. The brackish water (spot of a guinea pig, breast of a hooper, iron flint) passes into a wood brown (hazel nuts, mountain wood) and then falls into a leek and bluish green (egg of thrush) at the mouth of the river. From here, the water flows into the ultramarine blue of the open ocean (upper side of the wings of a small blue heath butterfly).

ii.

This summer, The Barron river rose up and burst out, cut furrows, amended the shoreline, swamped the neighbourhood and the highway, swept livestock from their contained fields, and ran shotgun from the front to the back of the house, erasing my nephews height notches from the walls. It left behind its own marker: a brown watercolour wash on the wall. My brother used his body as measurement to describe the height of the stream, chest height, he said.

The Bureau of Meteorology assigned this storm a name – male, of Arabic origin. The practice of naming individual storms is a way of keeping lines of communication clear. A storm is like a message, or a messenger, that carries intel about the state of things.

It leaves other marks: a thick sludge on the floor , a dead cane toad turned upwards, the orange flash of fish spilled from their tank, silt on the boy’s plastic toy cars, and a smell that permeates everything.

It's not just the house and the trees uprooted from the strength of the roaring water, but the orchids, ferns and mosses that grow at their roots, the crocodiles and their years of evolutionary mastery discombobulated as they find themselves displaced in a nearby drain. A soil borne illness entering the lungs and porous hands of the residents and animals as they attempt to resurrect their lives.

I thought of all the memories that house contained – the birth of both of my nephews, a violent police raid, a baby shower where my brother wore a sheepskin like a cloak, now wet and mud soaked, explosive family feuds, birthday parties, eight puppies born, weaned and rehomed, and walls I had helped paint green, now stained with black muck. When the water recedes, the contents, or discontents, of homes are excavated, lugged out, and placed in piles like shipwrecks lining the streets.

iii.

Colours, like a storm, come with a message. Skin that turns purple is cold. A wound that goes red is infected. Coral that turns white is dead. Blue lips, red cheeks, dark eyes all say something about the state of things.

What happens when a storm hits is all the colours get mixed up, spilling like brush water onto a pallet, combining into clumsy swamp. We’ve learnt from these waterways that nothing is ever clear. There are always particles of debris, sediment, algae, and salt. Even a cleared spot of land is rich in soil, seed, worm, history. We can dig it up but we can’t rebury it. All we can do is try to make something new out of it, and hope the water will wash us clean.