Simple but extraordinary

I was having lunch with Heather O’Connor at the Sundeck in Bermagui recently when a woman approached our table. Heather smiled and said to me, ‘Do you know Kathryn? Lois Irwin’s daughter. She’s visiting from California.’

I did – I remembered her from her father’s funeral.

‘Mum’s just finished your book,’ Kathryn said to me. ‘My brother and I were there the other day and she said that she wanted to read us a couple of pages.’

I knew what was coming.

There’s a scene in Garnet that’s set in a forest, where a logging crew wants to get to work but there’s been a hold-up. Someone has found koala scat nearby, there’s been a phone call from head office, and it’s possible that they’ll have to abandon that coupe completely. So there’s the workers in high-viz at one end of the clearing, all their equipment – bulldozers, knuckleboom loaders, chainsaws – lying idle, and at the other end a bunch of environmental protesters in their beanies and rainbow gear. There’s a stand-off. It’s tense. Everyone’s just waiting for a decision.

Then an older man emerges from the group of protesters, heads across the clearing, and does something so simple but extraordinary, so extraordinarily simple, that it turns the whole impasse on its head.

I’d love to say that I made it up, but I didn’t. Like a lot of the stories in Garnet, it’s true. That man was Terry Irwin, a giant in our community, someone who achieved huge things but achieved them so quietly that only rarely did we know it was his doing. Terry died, well before his time, in 2010.

Kathryn said, ‘Mum read us that story from the book, and the three of us had a bit of a moment there in the kitchen, that day.’

I wrote that scene back in 2010 and read it at Terry’s memorial in the garden at HOTH, Lois and Terry’s House on the Hill, down the coast a bit from Bermagui, with the breakers of the Pacific Ocean crashing below. A few days after the HOTH memorial, Lois rang and asked if I could send her a copy so it could be read at Terry’s memorial in the States. The memorial was held at his sister’s home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and was attended by family members, including his mother, and friends from his school and university years.

‘I was so proud that Lois wanted that piece read at his US memorial,’ I told Kathryn that day at the Sundeck.

‘I was the one who read it,’ said Kathryn.

And, just like that, a story that was born more than twenty years ago in a forest near Bermagui winged it over to Pennsylvania, back through Cobargo, then closed the loop on the veranda at the Sundeck.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A few days later I saw Lois. ‘You don’t mind that I recycled Terry’s story?’ I said.

‘Actually, I went back to my computer and found that eulogy of yours from back in 2010,’ Lois said. ‘And you know what? It was word for word. Can you charge an author with plagiarising herself?’

It’s true. Terry’s act fitted so neatly into that scene in Garnet that I hardly needed to change anything. I just dropped it in there, where it transformed a run-of-the-mill story into something quite different, quite extraordinary. Just like Terry used to do, whatever he put his hand to.

 

 

I’ll be at Bega Library speaking about Garnet at 10:30 am on Saturday 13 June. Would love to see you there if you’re around.