This was published 3 years ago
'Her eyes sparkled when she talked about it': the magic of Lord Howe Island blessed me, too
The summer before everything in my life changed, a friend from an earlier phase of it came to visit me in Sydney. She had been my work wife in New York for many years and still lived there, while I was a recently returned expat with a garbled accent and a shaky understanding of the metric system.
We tried to decide where we should go on holiday together once she arrived. This was not a straightforward question to answer: she did not care for the beach, could not bear hot weather and studiously avoided sunlight. (We all should, of course, but it’s hard to forgo altogether when touring Australia in January.) Preferences which had not been a problem when we worked in Manhattan and wore puffy coats half the year suddenly became difficult to reconcile. The Reef was out, as was the entire coastline north of Sydney.
"All I could think of when we landed was Tahiti, or an imagined vision of it – the prototypical Pacific island, with a peak at one end just undulating enough to entertain the eye."Credit: tom-archer.com
Obviously we couldn’t go inland, and Melbourne didn’t seem sufficiently exotic.
In the far corners of my mind, I reached into a dusty filing cabinet labelled “PRIMARY SCHOOL” for three words I hadn’t spoken since: Lord Howe Island. My year 5 teacher had been obsessed. As an 11-year-old, I noticed her eyes sparkled when she talked about it, which she did a lot. I didn’t ask why. When you’re a child, you assume everything in the world is as fascinating to others as it is to you. Dinosaurs, unicorns, bike riding: it’s only in adulthood you lose interest in objectively interesting things.
Anyway – by the end of the year, having completed multiple assignments on the topic – I could practically recite the Microsoft Encarta entry on Lord Howe Island, an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. It seemed like a good fit for my friend, in that it was hot but not too hot, pretty close by, and with plenty of hiking trails through foliage which would hopefully provide cover from the sun.
We were lucky enough to nab a reservation pretty late in the year. This is hard to do because it turns out that lots of people are obsessed with Lord Howe Island, and go every year. And the island is small, small enough that there’s only one flight a day from Sydney. It’s the kind of flight where you have to tell Qantas how much you weigh beforehand. Dispersed according to girth, everyone aboard already knows each other from summers’ past. And as became quickly apparent, they are all corporate lawyers. Don’t let that dissuade you, though. (Sorry, lawyers.)
Even though I’d read everything there was in the school library about Lord Howe Island and had probably plagiarised large chunks for class presentations, nothing prepared me for the island’s preposterous beauty. It’s lazy to say a place looks like another place, particularly somewhere I’ve never been, but all I could think of when we landed was Tahiti, or an imagined vision of it – the prototypical Pacific island, with a peak at one end just undulating enough to entertain the eye, surrounded by water so clear you can see the fish from the plane as you land.
My friend and I spent our stay not on the beach with paperbacks in hand, as I might have favoured, but pounding the proverbial pavement – in this case, meandering paths through subtropical greenery, along grassy basalt cliffs, and among the rocky detritus of volcanoes past.
The water is so clear you can see the fish from the plane as you land.
All the while, over many miles, we talked in that particularly candid way that bushwalking facilitates, without self-consciousness, because your eyes are trained on where you’ll next put your foot and not on each other. Emboldened by her foray into nature, the New Yorker ventured into the water on our final day to commune with the trevally and green turtles cavorting just off shore. She hadn’t swam in the sea for years, and emerged with a wonder you could only describe as child-like.
That last evening, we sat in deck chairs on a dock at sunset. It happened to be New Year’s Eve, and we were surrounded by the miraculous result of a series of freak geologic events. Feet dangling in the warm ocean and half a bottle of semillon in, I allowed myself to acknowledge my life was moving from one stage to another. In the year that followed I’d get married, change careers, move continents not once but twice, and prepare to welcome a baby into the world.
I couldn’t know then that my friend and I would never enjoy a conversation quite as candid as those we engaged in that week. But I did know my year 5 teacher was absolutely right. Lord Howe Island is magic.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.