Time to leave was forced on us. We had been living among the industrial side working class, among neighbours staunch and supportive to our young family. At night we heard the ticking of the Westgate road deck that towered above, and in the morning scraped soot from our window sills.
Who would have thought that within a few days I would be regaling in a new home town far distant, hearing a joyous song that had come from nowhere but seemed to encapsulate the most promising of futures there?
Moving day was poised exquisitely. There was Steve’s breakdown and our long anxious wait for his arrival. He turned out to be a warm mountain of a man who as I remember grimaced broadly as he first perched each club chair on his shoulders, which then disappeared with only legs underneath toward the new home lower down the hillside.
We shared a beer. The neighbouring house lights came on at different times and levels along the gully walls, and when we looked out the back window, we saw a cathedral arched over with dark eucalypts.
Our two young girls would settle intuitively, they were blond nomads well used to the wandering life under tall timber on our river camps under canvas every holiday or long weekend. The birds came to them as the days passed. They were all sorts and colours and seemed to sociably come and go by way of introduction; they were prolific along the creek corridor we now shared with them.
The time I heard the song.
I arrived home at dawn after working all night. Aware or people sleeping close by on all sides, I stepped carefully toward the gate, not wanting to be the one to break the fragile attenuated silence.
But when my tread snapped a dry stick, immediately a single shrill call rose from somewhere in the canopy right overhead.Then another joined in and it had soon spread into a rhythmic pulse that birds in their hundreds took up among the unflinching treetops that had not moved, even when the entire gully was ablaze with the magnificent repetitive dawn chorus.
It was the song that celebrated the good fortune of the noisy mynas that lived there but had preceded us, and also our own since we had now joined them. Those fiercely industrious honeyeaters by day, braced for their working day ahead by perching meditatively and pouring out their impetuous harmonies.
They rode the trilling rhythmic boat that dawn, to welcome our little family it seemed, at the beginning of our lives that still continue in this delightful place,