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further in Oz’. He got Australian citizenship in 1989 but he’s ‘still a Pom and a Pom right through’, and if he had to – if he was forced to make the choice – he’d return to Britain. But he doesn’t have to make that choice so he’ll ‘die in Oz’. He left the UK in the first place simply because he had the opportunity to see other parts of the world for a tenner – ‘just adventurousness’.
    Ah, Uncle Higgy. Now just a mate. I remember him with a bubble perm.
THEN
    Curtiss Falls on Tambourine Mountain. Rainforest. The boy and his mother and siblings stand on a flat rock across a stream and the father takes a photograph and then the boy’s mother starts to scream, terrible shrieks that set birds frantically exiting the trees and bounce back off the thick and stone-like trunks. Theboy’s mother is kicking her flip-flopped feet in a loud panic and the father is exhorting her to keep still so he can ‘get it off’. The boy looks and sees the leech protruding from his mother’s toe, it appears to be half-sunk in her flesh and wriggling its way further in and it gleams blackly sleek like a seal and a deep disturbance begins to writhe in the boy that such things could exist and his father whacks the leech away with the side of his fist and holds his mother and comforts her, laughing softly, not unkindly, at her hysterical reaction. It’s just a leech , he tells her. Just a leech. It’s gone now.
NOW
    Mount Tambourine is a hilltop settlement of huge houses with startling views across the plain below and out to sea miles away, the Surfer’s Paradise towers glittering in the far distance like upright shards of glass. Signs everywhere read DROUGHT AREA – SAVE EVERY DROP. Curtiss Falls is little more than a dribble, really, and not at all like the pacey mini-river I remember it as being, but that could be due to the drought. Still, I like the hanging hairy vines and the prehistoric ferns and the trees that loom huge and the bush turkeys and the humidity and the steam and the vivid flashes of lorikeets between the plate-leafed wrestling branches. And we find the flat stone on which we stood for the photograph and by which the leech attached itself to our mother’s toe. I stand on the stone, in roughly the same place I’m standing in the photograph. Still here; three decades of the world’s turning has not shifted that stone and has spun me around the globe back to it. Mighty magnet. I start to think about numenism, and how subjectivethat necessarily is, the impossibility of an unknowable localised ur-spirit when that very thing plays and wonders and worries like a younger self, how emotional attachment and investment must always mould the numen to one’s own shape, but these are the thoughts of a man of forty and one of the opportunities I need and want, very much, to exploit here in this steamy jungle is a re-acquainting of myself with the boy I once was so I pretend he’s standing by me, holding my hand, looking down into the clear and rolling water underfoot.
    We stop at a bar for some food, driving back. I take an information leaflet and a cigarette onto the decking outside. A hawk, nearby, hovers in a thermal. His feathers are white. ‘Tamborine Mountain Sanctuary’ the leaflet says (no ‘u’, I notice), ‘between the coast, the clouds and the country’. The Curtis Falls walk (no second ‘s’, I notice) is praised as having ‘an enormous strangler fig’ and a ‘causeway [that] takes you over the creek and little fishes are usually visible in the clear water’. The ‘ Quick-Facts ’ column tells me that Tamborine Mountain ‘is a remnant of deposits laid down by volcanic eruptions 225 million years ago… Bush Turkeys and their eggs, Wallabies, Yams, Tamarind and Macadamia nuts are just some of the abundant bush tucker sort by aboriginal peoples for thousands of years on Tamborine Moluntain… At 550 metres above sea level it can be 5 degrees cooler than adjacent lowlands. It pays