Samantha Trayhurn

Samantha Trayhurn

Samantha Trayhurn lives and writes on Biripi Country, on the mid-north coast of NSW. When she isn’t writing, you’ll find her surfing or roller skating. She holds a Doctorate in Creative Writing from Western Sydney University, where she was supervised by Gail Jones, Anthony Uhlmann, and Ben Etherington. This novel forms the creative component of her thesis, and her work explores the liminal spaces where nature, bodies, and ideas intersect. Her writing has appeared in Overland, Westerly, eTropic, Hecate, Scum Mag, and elsewhere. She also contributed a chapter to Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One (Sydney University Press, 2020). The manuscript of this novel placed third in the 2023 Hawkeye Publishing Unpublished Manuscript Prize. She is currently at work on her second novel.

Writing NSW

Facebook

from Chapter 1

My father is a bird. My father is an island. My father is a box of matches. My father is a chewed pen. My father is a silver coin. My father is the lint at the bottom of my handbag. My father is the colour the water turns when the light drains out. My father is a brown mirror.

Over the deck of the ferry, a flock of curlews obstruct the sky with outstretched wings. Their bodies are sinewy and gaunt. I wonder how recently they arrived from their long southern migration. How tired their bodies are. My father dedicated his life to the study of migratory birds, but I can’t understand why. Flying all the way to your breeding grounds in Siberia just to find your food source has hatched early and has already been depleted or plummeting from the sky like a torpedo from the hull of a plane, seems like a flaw in the evolutionary system. Surely, there must be a more economical way.

I remember my father flying among the birds in the painting, and I look for him above the boat, but I’m not sure what his defining avian characteristics might be. Whether human traits carry on between forms. A tangle of flight paths threads over and under as the last sunlight radiates through the loosely knitted clouds. I feel the tang of brine on my face and the cool flow of dusk into my body. It is six in the evening. Behind the boat, ripples rise from the engine and extend over Redland Bay. It’s not like the bays around Sydney that are fringed with expensive houses and speckled with small, sandy beaches. The water undulating against the ferry is brown and turbid and along the shore, laps against mudflats. A man with matted shoulder length hair, a neon green t-shirt and Hawaiian board shorts, looks me up and down while taking a long swig from his litre bottle of iced coffee. I guess that he is going home rather than visiting. There are islands in his eyes.

The vessel is full of locals laden with bags, returning from their business on the mainland. I sit in the outdoor section at the back of the boat, wedged between a metal railing and a gruff elderly woman. Her leathery skin reminds me of pressing against Grandma Sue on the bench seat of the old HR Holden that struggled to make it up the winding seaside hills on the way to school. I miss Grandma Sue. I miss her laugh, like a Kookaburra warming up, and the way she unleashed it generously. She surfed until she was fifty-five. Never wore a bra. She took me on hikes in the Blue Mountains, and we shouted our wishes into the vast crevasses of ancient rock. Merry, merry king of the bush was she. She was the closest thing to a father I ever had.

I think about the last time I saw my father; the only time I saw him since I was a baby. We met briefly before my trip to Europe, and he wore the clothes one might expect of a university scientist: high-waisted khakis and a short-sleeved button up shirt tucked into a cheap synthetic belt. He had an oily complexion pocked with visible pores and wiry hairs protruding from his face. He was in Sydney for a conference, and I had nervously dialed the number that Jill received from a friend when word circulated that Aki Matsumoto was back in the city. I pictured that it would be like a movie where an adult child comes to know her ageing, estranged parent and, rather than the obligatory love that evolves over a lifetime, they build a friendship based on a mutual like for each other. It wasn’t like that, though. When I walked into the sleek Glebe café, he was already sitting by the window. He had an expression of bored resignation, usually reserved for doctor’s waiting rooms. He stood up and greeted me with a handshake.