Swallow the Air

HSC Belonging

Swallow the Air

Passage 2: Text version

Paradise Parade, built over the old Paradise Abattoir, bore two long rows of housing commission flats, unregistered cars, busted prams and echoes of broken dreams, all crammed into our own special section of Woonona Beach. Paradise, ha! Way down, past the flags and half a million dollar beachfronts, there hid a little slice of scum. From the wrong side of the creek, we'd had the privilege of savouring the last crumbs of beachfront property. Soon they'd demolish all the fibro and move us mob out to the western suburbs. For now we were to be satisfied with the elitist postcode and our anonymity.

The cycleway was the only thing that bound us to the estate properties that bred rapidly from the dozed clay beds. Big terracotta storage boxes. Here is my wife and these are my children and this is Bingo the dog, oh, and let me show you the patio.

The liquorice ocean blew its chilly Pacific spray against my presence, each quivered lip caught in the undercurrent of a quarter moon. She drew back her sea's crown and swallowed my fear. We were like the morning ladies, doing tai chi: out with the black clouds, in with the white. Clean.

I squinted through the darkened clouds, eyeing the serpentine cement path. Out of sight the sounds syncopated with the tide, like a basketball bounced against a car bonnet–the compressing of air and the jolt of metal. I drew behind a bottlebrush bush and pulled back a fresh branch, bending on bracket knees, trying to get a glance. The hard glow of suburbia cast patterns of destitute light on the openness. Nothing. The sounds twisted louder over my ears and through it I heard someone scream. The lads were out. I strained to see what was happening.

I once knew the cycleway well. Billy and me would ride this way to Bellambi Beach when we were kids, when the nor-easterly currents would get rounded into the southern bend of the beach. There, at the mouth of the creek we'd find blue swimmer crabs for cooking up. Only certain times of the year you could find the crabs though, all the months with the letter r in them Mum used to say. It wasn't often too that the channel would be opened up to the beach and as we got older we began to feel like we didn't belong on that side of the creek either.

Swallow the Air p 33

Questions

1. How does the writer identify the difference between the black and white communities?

2. Paradise Parade is where the Aboriginal community belongs—but in what sense do they belong?

3. Explain the reference to 'belong' in the last sentence of the passage.

HSC Belonging: Swallow the Air 1