A road trip, mix tapes, crosswords by torchlight. We were destined to be together
In this Herald series, we asked prominent artists, comedians, authors and journalists to write about their “summer that changed everything”.
By David Astle
We met in a publishing office in 1989. I thought she was Serbian; she was Albury-Irish Catholic. She thought I was annoying; I can be.
We started hanging out after Christmas, across the January malaise, escaping Sydney with a ratty tent when we could. Weekend getaways evolved into week-long adventures as our Time Life series Australians At War neared its Vietnam conclusion.
David Astle and Tracy O’Shaughnessy. A humid night in Micalong Creek acted as a watermark for over 30 years.
Perth beckoned. A road trip by Subaru and mix tapes, crosswords by torchlight, the giant kauri forests. We were 29 each, almost exactly destined to be together, except for those times I vanished.
Freelance puzzle-making allowed for that liberty, versus her office job that resumed mid-year. Hence, I stayed over in Western Australia, a derelict cottage in Pemberton, and we missed each other.
Later, after getting back east, I remembered why the absences hurt. We decided to move to Melbourne. A big move, as much in meaning as in miles. By then, the war series was dust.
We rented our first home in North Fitzroy, a place of elms and trams, only for me to vanish again.
Kundiawa, this time, a three-week trek in Papua, dreaming about Tracy every muggy day. And night. I flew back to Cairns, the reef nothing but a gimmick. To hell with Queensland. I wanted to see her, be with her.
Christmas loomed, our second as a couple. I bought her a backpack in Brisbane, catching the XPT to Sydney, reuniting at her brother’s house. We hung out with my family, too. Ate turkey. Wore paper crowns. The backpack was two sizes too big as my girl stood taller in my heart than the room.
Somehow, by December 30, 1990, according to my sporadic diary, we were playing pool in the Globe Hotel, Cootamundra, taking the long way home. Unbeatable, we held the table for hours despite the challenges from locals; the accumulating coins along the edge. No shot was too outrageous. She was on fire, her Albury girlhood shining.
“She your missus?” asked a bloke with square cuffs.
“My girlfriend.”
“Why don’t you marry her?”
Silently, the question teased me, weaving the road to Wombeyan Caves (sound horn on blind curves). Even by nightfall, sitting amid the bright karst, the stone still warm from the day. A mango each for dinner; travel Scrabble with sticky fingers. Later, sleeping under the fly or trying to sleep to the leather whump of bats.
New Year’s Eve was Wee Jasper, a private bend on Micalong Creek where we swam to foil the March flies. Reading novels in the shallow skirt below the rapids. We used the reeds to moor our booze, but nothing stayed cool for long.
Near dusk, the she-oaks exploded with cicadas, forcing us to shout our resolutions to each other as if the gods needed to hear them. The moon was full in my imagination since I still see her marble body in the water, both of us naked on the cusp of midnight, 30 years each. I guess I was kneeling, or hunched in the current at least, in fear of being carried away.
“Tracy O’Shaughnessy,” I popped. “Will you marry me?”
“Only if you’ll marry me,” she said.
What did that mean? I still don’t know, that humid night acting as a watermark for over 30 years.
We packed the tent the next day in silence, wondering if the fever dream was real. We made tracks for Albury, for 1991, for home, and eventually, a bandstand in Edinburgh Gardens, assembling with friends in the winter after the summer, the moment a creek called Micalong became our watershed.
David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for the Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
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