No one took Covid-19 more seriously than I did. In the space of one breathless week in March 2020, I cajoled my 80-year-old father-in-law to move in with us, leaving his wife to run their family’s accommodation business alone. I wrote out dozens of relief lessons, informing the WA Department of Education that henceforth I’d be either be working from home or on carer’s leave, their decision. I forbade my 12 and 14-year-old children from leaving our one-acre property for the foreseeable future, even for school. I bought a chest freezer and proceeded to fill it and our pantry shelves with thousands of dollars’ worth of food. On March 21, I padlocked the gate and we went into self-imposed lockdown.
For the longest time I had been beset by recurring dreams of a far-flung post-apocalypse. In these dreams, I zoomed high above the cliffs of a rugged coastline on the edge of a vast, unpopulated wilderness, my heart soaring with the promise of a future spent in pristine isolation. I wanted this vision. I willed it into being. On my honeymoon in Tasmania in 2016, I found a real-world manifestation of these visions on the Tasman Peninsula. Back home in Western Australia, I yearned to return to a home I’d never had.
The two months we spent in lockdown were among the most peaceful in my life. I tell people I would have gladly extended this exile if only my employer had allowed it, and it sometimes takes them a while to realise I’m not joking. On this single acre we had all the sunshine and fresh air we needed, and one of my wife’s friends delivered fresh provisions once a week. Had it not been for the internet, I might have forgotten about the turmoil of the outside world altogether. But it couldn’t last, the spell finally broken one morning in May when I made my first brief foray into town. Now the world was overflowing with Covid-19 posters and social distancing circles on the floor of the local supermarket. It wasn’t long before I was back behind my desk in my classroom, reluctantly ushering the remainder of the school year toward the exit.
As a child in England in the 1980s, my parents took my sister and me on a series of short holidays around the UK. My most cherished of these memories was a trip to Wales, where we climbed Mount Snowdon. To a child of six, it was a transformative experience. Even now, more than three decades later, my eyes moisten as I recall the vistas of mountain lakes and tarns, the final ascent through the clouds to the craggy summit. Now I am close to 40 and yet I am no closer to returning to Mount Snowdon than I have ever been.
Kafka said the value of literature was to take an axe to the frozen sea within us. During lockdown I had purpose, a sense of the apocalypse and my small role in surviving it. Now I had nothing except for murdering the work days in my diary planner. I fell into depression like a stone.
. . .
A recurrent motif of my dreamscapes is that of lighthouses set against backdrops of crumbling cliffs and cast-iron skies. My favourite lighthouse is at Cape Bruny, from which you can gaze out at the Southern Ocean or across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to mainland Tasmania. The siren cries of the dolerite cliffs call me to the edge and repel me at once, the long drive back to the caravan park at Adventure Bay like the awkward aftermath of a failed suicide attempt.
Early one morning in July I awoke to teeming rain, my head filled with visions of the mountains of my youth. I was crying profusely, which would have been more surprising had I not recently stopped taking my antidepressants. I was crying for my lost childhood and my long-thwarted ambitions as a writer. Fifteen years of high school teaching had taken their toll, my heart frozen over.
I applied for a PhD in Creative Writing at Curtin University, my proposed research topic Tasmanian Gothic literature. In August I was informed that I’d been accepted into the course and in November I found out I’d been successful in obtaining a Research Training Program scholarship from the Federal Government. Before long I was immersed in reading about Tasmanian colonial history. For a time, I was content learning about George Augustus Robinson and Truganini, George Arthur and Port Arthur, but I knew it was no substitute for the real thing. I had to go back, and soon.
Above the desk in my bedroom cum study are pinned three maps of Tasmania. The bookcase is filled with fiction and non-fiction by the likes of Favel Parrett, James Boyce, Rohan Wilson and Cassandra Pybus. Three coffee-table books are featured: Coast: Tasmania, The Photography of Peter Dombrovskis: Journeys into the Wild and Keeping Culture: Aboriginal Tasmania. These are the last things I see when I go to bed and the first things I see when I wake up.
. . .
My daughter Ella, now 15, flew to Melbourne on New Year’s Eve to visit her uncle. The night before, Victoria recorded its first cases of Covid-19 in the community in two months. I explained to Ella that the WA Government would likely restrict travel between the states, potentially stranding her. I told her that if she got on the plane I might not see her for nine, 19 or 90 days. She was determined to go regardless, as I knew she would be. The airport that morning was full of news crews filing stories on the unfolding drama, but Ella was able to board her flight without incident. Later that day, WA Premier Mark McGowan announced the return of the hard border between WA and Victoria. Although she has applied for an exemption on compassionate grounds, Ella has not yet received permission to return home.
My PhD journey starts on February 1. Providing the state borders remain open, I’ll be flying direct from Perth to Hobart the same day to begin my research. But as I write these words in early January, I still don’t know if I’ll be able to go. All it will take is a handful of Covid-19 cases in either state to ruin my trip. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that the certainties of hassle-free travel to another state, let alone another country, are behind us. But travel I must, to begin my frozen sea’s long thaw.
Read more of the Van Diemen Decameron here, or submit a story to editor@fortysouth.com.au.
Guy Salvidge’s intermittently award-winning fiction has been published in Australia and the US. His stories have been awarded the City of Rockingham and Joe O’Sullivan prizes and he has twice appeared in Award Winning Australian Writing. Guy is currently studying a PhD in Tasmanian Gothic at Curtin University.
