Daniel Miller
2
On what would be her last day on this earth, Mrs. Isabel Turner woke early. She preferred to sleep with the bedroom curtains open and did not draw them when her husband was away. She liked the way first light spread across the bedroom floor, suffusing the room with a filmy, unreal quality, as outside in the camellia bushes the dawn birds alerted one another to the indisputable fact that morning had once again broken.
Like so many mothers before her, Mrs. Turner had come to cherish the pale, early hour before the rest of the household stirred. Since the baby was born, she’d prized it even more. On the morning of December 24, 1959, she crept around the upstairs balcony, passing each child’s bedroom door in turn, picturing them asleep on the other side, dolls in a dollhouse awaiting animation, before moving silently downstairs, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards.
In the kitchen, with the door latched safely behind her, she was free to begin her morning routine. Her habit was to fill the kettle the night before because the pipes were noisy when cold and ran a direct path through the walls in her only son John’s bedroom. Now, she lit a flame in the gas range and started the water boiling atop the rings. The Wedgwood teapot was already in position in the center of the wooden bench, alongside her favorite teacup, which had come with her from England. A small silver spoon, part of the gift from her husband’s family on the occasion of their wedding, lay beside it.
A number of townspeople were to comment later that Mrs. Turner was “always just so,” and one of the elderly Misses Edwards, both of whom still lived in the flour mill their father had operated until the yeast virus of 1938 shut it down, expounded thus: “She had high standards where those children were concerned. Whenever I went to teach piano at the house, she made sure they were ready with their music books in their hands and clean shoes on their feet.” The latter report was offered approvingly, and one could not help but infer that such fastidious preparation was not always the case among the budding pianists of Tambilla. “She was English, of course,” Miss Enid Edwards (the older of the pair “by at least half a minute”) added by way of explanation. “A proper English lady.”
Mrs. TurnerwasEnglish, but she wasn’t a “Lady” and would have been surprised to hear herself described as such. Her father had been a scientist of natural history, her mother an artist whose lithographic plates of flora and fauna had been included in several published works. The three had lived a rich and varied family life, traveling together throughout the remote regions of the United Kingdom, observing diminishing numbers of sparrows, counting otters, and tracking the migration of wild bees. However, this bucolic childhood was not to last. Orphaned at seven years of age, Isabel spent the next ten years in residence as a pupil at the Woodford Dormitory School in Sussex.
It is perhaps the latter fact that best explains her attachment to protocol, an adherence that, in concert with her received-pronunciation accent, conveyed an impression of heightened civility. If a decade of boarding school had not been enough, four years spent in undisclosed wartime service had cemented a view that tried-and-tested procedures, whether familial or individual, large or small, were in place for a reason. Furthermore, that proper thought and planning were required to succeed at any tough assignment.
She was a woman of habit, then, and it was her wont to drink her first cup of the day, preferably before having uttered a word toanyone, while seated at the wicker table and chair on the north-facing verandah of the house. It was not the prettiest outlook afforded by Mr. Wentworth’s garden, but it was the place where the driveway met the house and therefore, in Mrs. Turner’s judgment, an apt vantage point from which to take stock. She always brought her journal with her. Some days she wrote reams; other mornings she simply sat, listening as the wind moved through the treetops and the rainbow lorikeets shrieked and swooped in the upper branches of the bottlebrush.
With an instinct for these things, Barnaby, the family’s beloved arthritic retriever, would appear soon after she did, padding patiently along the verandah to take up position on the concrete at her feet. He had been brought home for the children as a pup—another “surprise” with which Mrs. Turner had been presented by her husband (whose penchant for decisions of a unilateral nature was a source of some friction between them)—but Matilda and John had been young at the time and the dog’s upkeep had fallen to her. An additional duty, though one she did not mind. Barnaby’s company had proved agreeable, particularly as Mr. Turner’s absences from home grew in both frequency and duration. He was in London now, or so she was given to believe. She had stopped listening, truth be told, when he enthused about his newest fancy.
And so, on the morning of December 24, 1959, nothing marked the day out as different from those that had come before, nor did anything allude to the terrible events that the afternoon would bring. There was no sign that the lives of every soul still slumbering within the house, all of the men, women, and children down in the township, their countrymen and -women in cities and towns dotted around the coastal hem of this island nation, would by day’s end be altered. For few would forget where they were when they heard what had happened on the grounds of the big old Gothic house in South Australia that Christmas Eve. The news was to ignite every kitchen table conversation across the country, the name“Tambilla” becoming synonymous, for a time, with tragedy, shorthand for the unthinkable specter of children and death on a hot, festive afternoon.
When Mrs. Turner, wrapped in her robe of pearl satin, pulled on her field-muddy boots and sat with her tea and her journal on the wicker chair on the north side of the house, though, all of that was yet to come. Her children were still asleep inside, the Christmas gifts were wrapped and tagged beneath the tree. The outlook from the verandah, as Mrs. Turner opened her journal to a fresh page and recorded the date in her precise hand, was the same as ever: directly ahead, on the other side of the driveway, the summertime foliage of the enormous oak was so dense that she could barely see the children’s tree house in its middle branches. An old tire swing dangled from a bough of the nearby plum, and beyond that, behind the lattice, the newfangled rotary clothesline that Thomas had ordered from a local factory down at Edwardstown struck its elbowed pose.
Much would be made, over the following days and weeks, of what she wrote in her journal that morning—and of what she didn’t. In recent months, Mrs. Turner had leaned more heavily than usual on her journal, and it would prove a useful voice from beyond the grave. She had been introduced to the practice as a child. Her parents, through their work, had been observation makers and record keepers, filling copious leather-covered books with sketches, both textual and pictorial. Their influence had been long-lasting, cemented when young Isabel Turner found herself cast into the strange new world of boarding school. She had clung then to her routine of confiding thoughts on paper, and the habit never left her.
Throughout 1959, Mrs. Turner had been grappling with an all-consuming problem and her entries had often been lengthy and tortured. But by Christmas Eve morning, a decision had been made, and her uncertainty of tone and content was replaced by serenity. She made no mention of her previous dilemma; nor, explicitly at least, of any plans she might have held for the afternoon. Indeed,Mrs. Turner wrote only a few perfunctory lines, a record of the day’s weather conditions:
Fog in the valley again, but the sun rises on the hill. The mist will clear soon, and the day will be hot. The threat of fire lurks, as it ever does this time of year. The sun-bleached fields crackle and shimmer, but a storm is forecast for tonight. Hard to imagine that the change will come, but the man on the wireless says that it is so and who am I to argue? It is of no concern to me. I know as well as any that change, like solution, often comes suddenly.
Police would later speculate as to whether the entry contained a coded message. “The bit about the mist clearing, solutions coming suddenly...” Mounted Constable Hugo Doyle would muse past his chewed pencil in the Tambilla police station. “Maybe she was talking about her own plans?”
But Sergeant Liam Kelly, who had been around the block a few more times, remained dubious. “Sometimes when a person says there’s fog down in the valley, they just mean there’s fog down in the valley. What was the weather like Christmas Eve morning, MC Doyle?”
“It was hot, sir.”
“Earlier than that. Was it clear?”
“No, sir.”
“No?”
“There was a fog, sir.”
“There was a fog down in the valley.”
There was indeed fog in the valleys surrounding Tambilla as the sun rose on December 24, 1959. In the Adelaide Hills, it is possible to wake to a world shrouded in mist at any time of the year. In winter, when the temperature dips below zero most nights and the days are wet and bitter, but in the summertime, too, when despite the blistering heat of early afternoon, the evenings tilt cool and crisp and one cannot help but sense the desert plains to the north as darkness deepens into night.
Mrs. Turner had often sought to explain her conviction that the fog was different here in her adopted country than it was back home. Glancing through her bedroom window, having woken to find the natural world shrouded, never failed to make her shiver. To describe the effect as “menacing” was too melodramatic for her tastes, but there was something undeniably charged about it—secretive, even. It was the ghostly gums, she had decided, their smooth silver limbs like ladies’ naked bodies in the mist.
There were eerie sites in England—the haunted cliffs and caves of Tintagel, the ruins of Ludlow Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, and Stonehenge—but their mysteriousness stemmed from their role in the human story, the crumbling vestiges of people from the past. In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language—or outside her own language, at any rate. It told its story in far more ancient ways and only to those who knew how to hear it.
Her children had brought home a tale once, from wherever children learned the things they knew, about a bunyip. “A what?” she’d asked. “A bunyip,” they’d said, appraising her with wide, direct gazes that impliedof course.Mrs. Turner found it a somewhat unsettling proposition to raise children in a land other than the one in which she’d been a child herself. Their points of reference were different from her own and they sometimes felt quite foreign. On such occasions, they were her husband’s children: alien creatures whom she had birthed but could never really know.
The bunyip, according to their telling, was a shifting, nebulous, amorphic entity with feathers and scales and ill-fitting ears: “A hideous, monstrous thing.”
“Like a swimming dog.”
“Or a seal.”
