Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (3 page)

They were an unlikely couple, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney, a hybrid of the silent taciturn plains of Winchelsea and the clinker-bricks and garrulous high collars of Melbourne, which was where Min had grown up. Her mother had died of meningitis when Min was six and although her father was nothing more salubrious than a barber in the working-class suburb of Clifton Hill, Papa Mahoney, as young Ron would come to know him, was a man who worked with a phonograph playing in the corner of his Spensley Street shop at all times, a man who lived for music and literature and who showered his two girls as they were growing up with an almost feminine affection of culture and emotion, acutely aware as he was of the absence of a mother in their lives.

Min met Len at a Footscray football club dinner, to which she'd been invited by her cousins on the Maribyrnong side of town. For those present it had been an important night, a fundraiser for the club that was trying to make a case to be included in the Victorian Football League. For Min, however, the night was important on an entirely different plane.

It was like earth meeting sky. As she sat opposite Len McCoy's handsome and healthy face at the dinner table, the muscularity of his torso showing through his tight starched white shirt, she'd never felt a physical impulse quite like it. Min was small, and pretty, with jet-black curls and dark eyes, and she could be very demure and sweet, but her father's education had also encouraged in her a tendency to be headstrong and aloof, and occasionally haughty as well, and now she found herself quite confused by the un abashed exhilaration that was coursing through her in this young countryman's presence.

Sensing Min's willingness, Len McCoy was not about to let the opportunity slip. Despite her mother's diamond brooch, her fine ways and the difficult things she said to him across the plates of lamb and beef and the FFC mono grammed bowls of peas and potatoes, he figured she was still working class and therefore within reach.
They danced amongst the club members and associates that night, Min suddenly more fascinated by life on a sheep and poultry farm at a place called Winchelsea (which he told her was a godforsaken place, famous only for introducing the rabbit to Australia) than anything else in life, and Len more charming and impressive than he'd ever imagined he could be.

His trump card, as he saw it, was that he was on the verge of leaving his family's farm and striking out on his own. He'd recently been on the scout and seen a bit of land on the coast at a place called Mangowak, and he was hellbent on buying it. He'd not told a soul about this but soon found himself describing it closely to Min. It was a tiny piece of land, barely six acres, cleared for the most part for grazing, but with the remnant of a pine windbreak which would provide perfect shelter for a house site. It was right on the ocean-cliff, perched above a series of small coves and beaches, where tea-coloured creeks ran down out of the hills to the sea every mile or so. Mangowak itself was not far from the timber and fishing town of Minapre, but it was just a rivermouth, with a cleared pastured riverflat, and until recently the block he had his sights on had been government land attached to a Meteorological Station. The six limestone buildings of the Meteorological Station were built in a cluster on the headland to monitor Victoria's prevailing southwesterly weather, but now that the station was becoming increasingly automated the few acres surrounding it were for sale.

In a sense he was right about this being his trump, for Min was excited, not by the land, but rather by the audacity of it all, of this young boy's willingness to leave behind everything he knew to make something independent of himself. He had already teed up work with a certain Mr Bolitho, who owned the large pastoral lease of the river flat and the upslopes, and who was prepared to offer Len McCoy a future. Given the extent of the attraction she was feeling it was all
Min really needed to know about his character. She didn't need to know, for instance, that for Len the move to Mangowak was nothing much at all, not compared with the move his boyhood friends had made, the heroic move against which he constantly measured his own inadequacy. No, it was enough for Min to have learnt that Len McCoy – from ‘Winch', as he called his home town – was an adventurer, and also that he seemed a gentle soul like her father, which she'd sensed from the moment they'd been introduced.

By the time the dancing was over at the end of the evening they both agreed it was a great stroke of luck that they'd met. They came together in the chill of the grandstand, amidst the cooing and rustling of the pigeons that roosted in its eaves, and as they looked out over the shadowy oval at the city lights beyond, they briefly touched before parting with an arrangement to stay in contact. ‘And the sooner the better,' Min had boldly suggested.

By the following autumn of 1922, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney were married and living in a makeshift slab bark hut on the block of land they christened ‘Belvedere', on the cliff beside the Meteorological Station at Mangowak. Together they fenced their land with post and rail, a chain back from the cliff edge on the ocean side and butting right up along the bullock ruts on the inland side. They left an entrance the width of a dray in the fence alongside the bullock ruts but just one small melaleuca gate on the ocean side to access the open cliff. Whilst Min planted a gardenia, a camellia and nectarine trees on the block, cooked and sewed and read inside the hut, and went for long familiarising walks in the skirts and frills of the tide on the empty beaches (they were strewn that autumn, she would always remember, with copious amounts of kelp and sea-cucumber), Len and his brother Dinny laid the yellow bricks of what was to be the McCoys' only married home, and the house into which young Ron was born.

*

It was dangerous to leave him as a little child out on the cliff by himself but that's where he wanted to be. Otherwise he would either howl and squeal in the house or mope in the garden. The roar of the cliff was a magnet, and anything else in his midst seemed dull by comparison, like ox tongue or tripe on his plate, like devilled kidneys when there were strawberries and ice-cream nearby. So, at Min's suggestion, Len erected a chickenwire cage around the La Branca bench, to act as a playpen for the boy. On fine days then, Min could leave him unattended where he liked it most, out on the open cliff, and go about her chores.

At first he hardly even noticed the restriction but when he eventually did, the little boy's tears were panicky and Min had to sit beside him and give him the options. It was the chickenwire cage, or the kitchen, or the garden. Or, if he refused them all, the wooden spoon. Very quickly his tears were quelled by his preference for the clifftop, even if he had to view the wider world through the hexagons of the cage. Overwhelmed by all there was to see and all there was to do on the bench from within the chickenwire cage, by the ants and skinks and tiny whorling shells in the bindweed and dirt around him, by the passing birds and seaspray and cloud formations in the sky, he calmed right down and eventually grew content with his confinement.

From the time he was two right up until he was six years old, Ron would be placed inside his chickenwire pen and left to his own devices, although by the time he was four and a half the chicken-wire and posts had to be raised to curb the growth of both his body and his tippy-toe curiosity. Straight out across from him the Two Pointers, King Cormorant Rock and Gannet Rock, loomed out of the sea to the same height as the cliff. On these massive discarded crumbs of the mainland, black cormorants and other large sea-birds – gannets and skuas and petrels – liked to roost and dry their wings after a feed. The boy was a natural witness and could watch their comings and goings endlessly. Until, of course, the milk ran
out in the bottle and he'd no choice but to cry until she came.

With the house built and her son growing, Min went about her daily business, but always with an eye open or an ear cocked to little Ron out on the cliff in his cage. It was a practical idea and he seemed perfectly content, but she had to be careful. It was safe all right, he couldn't go anywhere, but wallabies and foxes liked to graze out there and she wasn't absolutely sure they'd have no interest in him. Or his milk. More than that, though, it was the weather she had to worry about.

The blows came out of a wild source that was always brewing in the southwest. The bench in the chickenwire pen, on the cliff facing the wide and changeling sea, was first port of call for any squall that hit. She kept an eye on the ocean for bluster and flecks and on the sky in the west and south for inky tints in gathering cloud. With Len's help she learnt to pick the patterns. More often than not bad weather would pile up at the big rainforesty hills some six miles across the sea behind Minapre, and then it would split in two, in one direction along the horizon line to the south, out into the far ocean as a wispy tempestuous knot, and in the other direction along the faultline inland where the hills finally dwindled. In this direction it would then head away with the wet forest's tapering off, into the drier messmate and ironbark country to the north.

This was the pattern by which most of the rain and bad wind dispersed to either side of their headland but if it did come straight on and scudding across the open expanse of water from the hills in the west, it could rip straight off the sea and scare the little one clean out of his wits. Perhaps, she dreaded, it could even blow him away, dash him onto the rocks below. He was game enough, the wind didn't seem to bother him at all, whereas other children would've howled along with it, but at the very least he could catch his death out there in the wrong weather. At the mangle or the sink she was always near enough to a window to watch the fronts develop. She'd watch them
pile up like bruising and then see them separate, as if at some kind of crossroads, out over the sea and back into the distant timbered hills. That was where any danger would come from. The northerlies that came from behind them were no trouble to the cage. They held hot desert fire within them during the summer but as a city girl she was proud she'd learnt to pick a northerly three days in advance.

The boy was, in fact, caught in the weather once. His father burst out of his open shed amongst the bushes along the cliff to find him drenched and frightened underneath the bench as an October downpour came out of the blue. Len was incensed. Where in Hades was Min? With Ron slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain he rushed back through the clicking melaleuca gate in the rain and into the house. He found her on the floor in the laundry, unconscious. He shook her awake and her eyes opened and he realised. A miscarriage. She'd fallen down and the world had gone black. The boy may as well have been as far away as Melbourne for all she knew. He stood Ron on the floor and told him to get his clothes off and dry himself. He threw him a gingham tea-towel. And in his arms he gathered up his little birdlike wife and carried her in to the bed.

Min was out of action for two days. As soon as she felt the blood had all passed from her she started making soup. Then she made bread, almond biscuits, and then more soup, with the fish heads and frames from Len's daily catch, and then a series of jams from fruit Len had procured in his travels. Apricot, cumquat, plum, marmalade, preserved and graded in the pantry. As it drew towards Christmas her chirp started to return a bit. She began to sing again. Amidst her work ‘My Coral Delight' came to her over and over, a Hawaiian string tune that had been popular with her father and his friends in the weeks before she had left town. The deep, relaxed sway of the Pacific song helped her restore. By the time she had, the next winter's jam cupboard was stocked up to the hilt.

For Ron the sea of diamonds had all begun in the chickenwire
cage. It was the fox that had first told him. Unbeknown to his parents Ron was quite familiar with the fox, whose lavish coat would appear from time to time at the edge of the tea-tree in a smudge of russet. The fox would sniff, snout in the air, or dart through the clearing after bristlebirds or small bush mice.

Any fool could see it, the fox had told Ron. All you had to do was look. The glitter out on the water was proof. The sea was full of diamonds. It was bursting with them. Of course the fox was casual about it, as diamonds were of no use to him, but looking out there it made sense to Ron, it was right in front of his eyes, and he was off. So much so that with the new information he quickly left his conversations with the fox behind. For he was a boy, after all. A fox might like meat best but a boy preferred diamonds. Just look at them!

Now, from the sea of diamonds all the magic came. Seabirds would dive deep, gather them up in their talons and build their nests from them on the Two Pointer rocks. Diamond boats would float by, all a-glitter, the booty strapped to the decks with ropes made from his father's jute and from Min's furry pelargonium stems. Red-haired giants would pick at the sea with enormous mattocks to prise the diamonds out, and that was bad weather. What Ron felt he had to do, and time and time again he did this over the years, was to find a way to overcome the chickenwire and plunge into the glittering sea. In his gazing, his infant surmising, sometimes sitting on the bench with his corduroy-clad legs tucked under him, other times lying on the ground around the bench, sometimes standing with his fingers in the hexagons of the wire, he built flying foxes, from wire and coathangers, out to King Cormorant Rock to chat to the birds there about their gleaming nests and to try to convince them to take him with them as they dived under the water and away. He dug tunnels with his mother's weeding shovel, down, down through the honeycomb of the cliffs beneath him, past the brown soily cities of worms and the golden tessellated cities of bees,
under the shoreline rocks and out into the turquoise rock pools on the beach below. He would upmerge, look about and smile, and then continue on his quest. He saw many people as he went, all of them looking for the diamonds as well. He saw Rhyll and Sid Tra-herne, and Leo Morris, and Papa Mahoney, and Fred Ayling, but he could not talk to them, for he always had to wear a special diving mask, to protect his eyes so he could properly see the jewels.