litlinks 2025

Illaroo – Dharawal and Dhurga Country

by Megan Cartwright, Hawker College

We arrive just before sunset. It is May, and the nights are expanding to make room for cold. The homestead looms on the hill, a sandstone and white balustrade anachronism. Artists in residence are housed at a distance, nestled in a basin amid skinny gums, ferns, and wombat burrows. We navigate the slanting trail, disturbing a kangaroo who stops her grazing to regard us with tired knowing. She moves towards the treeline, hunched like an arthritic grandmother, hind legs rolling forward in long lollops. A large buck rises on his haunches. He is alert to threat, but satisfied to assess us from afar, for now. I look back toward the ridge; a mob of kangaroos are stamped black against the purpling sky.

Even when the sun shines there is a damp to the air that makes skin slick, primed to slip into an older world. Bundanon – deep valley. In the evenings we gather around the empty fireplace in the Musician’s Cottage and speak of sleeplessness. Sticky insomnia of slugs and frogs. There is a presence that keeps us awake, vibrating from the stone Amphitheatre’s cliffs. I sense it in the knock-kneed bird’s wail. Curlew calls pierce the night, conjuring tales of sailors led astray by Siren song, of mothers lured away in search of keening shadow-children.

Everywhere, there is history: the topography of Permian rock, ledges like shelf fungi, gasp-breath-sharp, is mimicked in red slashes across unfinished paintings lining the Artist’s studio. Abandoned canvases, left exact, still pungent with linseed oil. Their ghosts whisper in the night, words brushing soft as bristles of bundled baby hair, bleached like the horse’s skull mounted on the wall, its long leer replicated in gouache, raised in goosebumps. A guide mentions the Artist exhumed the animal’s skeleton himself. I imagine him, tormented by the ramox, a demon of his own imagination. Haunted by bones.

On the last morning a lyrebird perches in the tree outside my bedroom. The window sash shudders against the wooden jamb, bloated with years of condensation. I dislodge it with an upward blow that dusts the pillowcases with flakes of paint. Chill air hangs filmy and I am aware of my own animal musk, pungent in the clean morning. The bird cocks its head. No totem of yours, visitor, but you may listen. Clicks and trills skip across the fog, then rise, rebounding off surrounding rock outcrops. Sounds echo, folding into themselves like the Artist’s brushstroke repetitions. Time is undone and remade in the song.