Settlers in Wadawurrung
water Whadjuk water
by Nadia Rhook

Here, we celebrate that we are, toward the end of our brief history, still visitors. The caravan wheels are chocked for the summer. My grandfather wakes at sunrise to sit on the pier and watch the tides rise and fall. Rod in hand, bucket at feet. He skins his catch in the caravan annex. There’s nowhere to hide from the smell. Nana crumbs and fries the fillet. Golden fruit of the sea. Oil running into carefully folded paper towel. Crinkle cut potato fries in the pan.

We swim until our bathers are full. When the sun dips, we shower in the cubicle with sisters and cousins and laugh at the clumps of green and brown plants stuck to our bellies. The fresh hot water is bliss. Not because it’s fresh and hot but because it’s a sting-less imitation of the salt river-meets-ocean water we’ve reluctantly left for the day.

Years later, 350,000 kilometres west, on another Country, my mother and my out-laws and my love and I play in the Indian Ocean. After, we lie on grass to air-dry then drive inland, to a new home, and laugh about the piles of sand tucked into bathers. We dump them onto the bathroom floor. Messy, unplanned sandcastles. Our laughter showers us with childhood, the place where land and sea do not need to be the same thing, do not need to be gentle, do not need to submit to each other, in order to exist in the same word.  

A disease is spreading, unevenly, across the world and there’s something bigger than Australia about swimming together in this Ocean (highway to England, backroad to Montevideo). We struggle to push nostalgia down. It’s so buoyant now, always bobbing on the mind’s surface. The caravan. The pier. The seaweed clinging to belly. The nostalgia floats until the next wave arrives.

‘Beach’ visits me here, over and again, rocks me, foetus, to sleep. 

Nadia Rhook’s debut poetry collection is ‘boots’ (UWA Publishing, 2020). In early 2020 her flash fiction ‘Settler Dawns’, was shortlisted for the Writing WA ‘Flash the Cover’ Competition. Nadia has scholarly publications in international and national journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Australian Historical Studies, Itinerario and the Journal of Women’s History. Her poetry and creative non-fiction works are published in journals including Cordite Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Authora Australis, Portside Review and Westerly. Nadia’s poetry has recently been published in the anthologies ‘What We Carry’ (Recent Work Press), and ‘Twice Not Shy’ (Night Parrot Press).