Alice surfaced, standing on the seabed with one arm raised, poised between water and air, the pounding of her heart a backing track to the crash of breakers. On shore, Jamie aimed the crosshairs of the theodolite’s main scope towards her. Alice had been assigned to the seaward end of the gully. Each time a wave came, she dived beneath the swell, and then swam back to her station. It was exhausting work. Eventually, Jamie gave a thumbs up and she clambered aboard the inflatable dinghy, calico collecting bag weighed down by iron shot, and headed back to Kingston Pier.
While most of the team had worked on previous excavations, it was Alice’s first time on Norfolk Island. When she was offered a place on the 1987 expedition, she reread the letter twice and punched the air triumphantly. Growing up in Perth, she had been spellbound when her primary school teacher stood in front of the class of 8-year-olds, talking about Dirk Hartog’s pewter plate. Miss Anker drew a rough chalk circle and little light blue wavy lines to represent the Indian Ocean on the blackboard. A week later the entire grade boarded a bus for the Shipwreck Galleries in Fremantle. For months afterwards, Alice lay in her bunk bed on stifling summer nights imagining she was the windswept Dutch explorer, nailing the pewter plate to a timber post on a remote island, her ship weighed down by chests overflowing with pieces-of-eight. Her mother, sighing, said she was a dreamer. Two decades later she had a diploma in maritime archaeology.
She had never been this far from home. From the window seat on the East-West Airlines flight, she glimpsed the volcanic stack of Balls Pyramid rising from the South Pacific, all sharp crags and guano icing. She consulted the in-flight magazine map, her finger tracing a northwest route to New Zealand and then northeast to New Caledonia. Over the intercom, the pilot announced that the plane would begin its descent. Alice checked her seatbelt and stashed her book in the seat pocket as they circled over rolling emerald hills, towering pine trees and rocky cliffs rearing up from azure seas. It was postcard perfect.
She had jumped at the chance to dive the wreck of HMS Sirius. Almost two centuries had passed since the flagship of the First Fleet had foundered on coral reef, the crew hauled ashore in perilous conditions. When the team first arrived, sea conditions were marginal. As the weather improved, dives became more frequent. Below the bubble screen there were clay pipes and copper coins, nails and ceramic shards. Exploring the ballast mound where Sirius had broken up was an unnerving experience, like simultaneously straddling two temporalities. Sometimes Alice sensed a spectral presence underwater. Perhaps it was a grizzled sailor smoking, jangling coins in his pocket as he staggered towards shore on sea legs or maybe it was just a Convict Snake Eel slithering past.
Stepping on land, Alice unzipped her wetsuit, peeling it from her body and loosened a braided ponytail. As she walked towards the boatshed, ready to unload the contents of her collecting bag, a sacred kingfisher darted past. Jamie watched as her eyes followed the flash of blue-grey wings. When Alice walked by, he said ‘that’s a nuffka’, adding ‘a Norfolker like me’. She smiled, taking in dark curls escaping from a hand-knitted red beanie and the geometric banding of a tattoo wrapped around his right arm. A weather balloon drifted above them, a white sphere rising higher and higher and then disappearing into the blue.
Inside the boatshed, a crew of museum team members and local volunteers were sorting and soaking the finds into ice-cream containers filled with citric acid, chipping away at those embedded in sediment concretions. There was so much to document. Olive green glass fragments, musket balls and bolts, clay bricks and iron shackles all jostled for attention. After the adrenalin of diving, the ordered industry of classification was calming.
The team broke for lunch and Alice ambled over to the Royal Engineers Office, plain Georgian proportions offset by the temerity of a faux Greek temple entrance. A light-drenched room had been assigned as a temporary drawing office. Alice watched with admiration as an engraved brass fire-grate leg was sketched, its slender proportions rendered to scale. She was never satisfied with her own drawings; she always wanted to rip them up and start again. On a shelf, a snake preserved in alcohol stared back at her, a log travelling tourist pickled in 1830. The salt-crusted sash windows faced the sea, framing the limestone contours of uninhabited Nepean Island, less than a kilometre south. Behind that loomed Phillip Island, a volcanic splodge of rust reds and ochre. As she bit into a sandwich, Alice thought about how the islands would look rendered in pastels or, maybe, impasto. They seemed so close; she stretched her fingers out to touch them.
When they finished up for the day, she checked her dive times on the noticeboard and climbed into the waiting van. At Burnt Pine, they stopped to pick up supplies at Foodies. At first glance, the airy octagonal dome looked like a mega-church. Inside, the shelves were sparsely stacked. The freighter from New Zealand was due in next week. At the checkout, Alice baulked at the price of potato chips and tinned fruit. It was, as everyone liked to say ad nauseum, the price of living in paradise. At least they got plenty of fresh milk staying at the dairy farm. In the carpark, she patted a geriatric Labrador, with one hazel eye and bandy legs, out on a solitary stroll. Reaching into her bulging Mambo print shoulder bag, Alice pulled out an instant camera and snapped.
Back at the farm, she taped the polaroid to a mirror stashed by the bedside table. The one-eyed Labrador joined a Norfolk Blue cow munching on hibiscus, a cache of corroded ship’s fastenings and, recently added, a view of the seafront with Jamie in the far distance, striding towards the swell. Tracing the contours of his back, she exhaled.
‘What did you say?’ her roommate, Tess, asked.
‘Nothing’ replied Alice, sliding the mirror under the single bed.
When Tess started a rhythmical snore you could set a clock by, Alice plugged headphones into her Sony Walkman, thinking about indie bands back home, heading out to The Stoned Crow or Hernando’s late on a Friday, two-dollar jugs of Swan Draught and dance floors packed with swaying girls in retro op-shop outfits, their tiny tartan mini-skirts revealing tanned legs. She rewound the cassette tape again and again to the melancholy refrain of The Seabirds, one of her favourite Triffids songs. At the dairy farm there were no screaming gulls but when she took off her headphones, the keening cries of wedge-tailed shearwaters hollowed out the ink-black night. It was no wonder that locals called them ghost birds.

The next day, Alice had the morning free. She borrowed some snorkelling equipment and arranged for a lift to Kingston so that she could swim in the sheltered lagoon of Emily Bay, just a short walk from the dive site. From a distance, the wineglass curve of the sandy beach and the crystal waters fringed by Norfolk Pines seemed mirage-like. Up close, the reef was teeming with life. A juvenile green sea turtle glided past, flippers paddling; the iridescent yellow of a butterfly fish dazzled; a pack of trevally swept under the pontoon; a trio of Moorish idols flaunted their whip-like fins amongst finely pleated buff and beige corals. It was glorious. Weaving her way through the reef, Alice was in her element.
She shook the sand from her towel and lay on her back, the high cut legline of her duty-free bathers creating a new tan line. There were a few other people at the bay: a mother and her young child, hand in hand, picking their way along the seashore; an awestruck group of newlyweds and nearly-deads piling out of their tourist bus. She picked up her copy of The Fatal Shore, plucked from the new books display at her local library. Getting to grips with Norfolk Island history seemed vaguely professional. But it was certainly a miserable doorstopper—the displaced English poor condemned to transportation for petty theft, sadistic overseers and convict bones laid bare by flogging. It was difficult to comprehend such forced exile and its attendant cruelties. Going on a long and perilous voyage to Australia must have been like being condemned to deep space. Being sent to Norfolk Island was to sail even further into the vast unknown.
A shadow blocked the sun. She glanced up from her book and there was Jamie, looking down on her. She lifted her arm to shield her eyes. It was hard to read his expressions.
‘Not at the dive site today?’
Alice shook her head. ‘I have the morning off’, she explained.
‘You’re a reader, hey’, he noted.
‘Sometimes’, she said hesitantly, not wanting him to think of her as studious. It was Jamie’s turn to offer a fugitive smile.
‘Looks about as big as the Bible’.
Then, without another word, he walked off. She was glad he couldn’t see her spreading blush. She told herself it was only sunburn.
Jamie herded the gaggle of shore-strewn tourists. ‘I’ll be taking you out on your cruise today’, he told them. ‘You might have heard the story of the mutiny on The Bounty. I’m a seventh-generation direct descendant of those mutineers. In 1856 we arrived here from Pitcairn Island. And we’ve been here ever since. My boat’s a bit smaller than The Bounty but I’d still appreciate it if you didn’t throw me overboard.’ The tourists chortled on cue as they clambered aboard, strung out expectantly around the edges of its tempered glass bottom.
Seeing Jamie in a different context seemed like a coincidence, perhaps fate. But Alice knew that was silly. She reminded herself that on Norfolk it was just a matter of time, or perhaps moments, before you ran into familiar people. Everything was so close. For god’s sake, it only took a couple of hours to drive right around the island, even with obstinate cows flexing their right of way in the middle of the road. People even waved to one another as they passed, speedometers rarely reaching 50. Still, right now it felt like she was speeding.
That evening the team were invited to a reception at Government House. Looking across kikiyu grassed fairways, the Administrator made polite chitchat with guests, comparing the virtues of various fishing spots on the island and reminiscing about his days in Port Moresby. His dazzling white uniform was bedaubed by jaunty epaulettes and striped insignias. When it was time for a speech, he flattered with remarks about the wonderful work being done by maritime archaeologists. ‘The 1790 wreck of HMS Sirius is a tangible link to our shared colonial history’, he lectured, his arm grandly sweeping across his own mansion, the military barracks, gaol ruins, and Kingston Pier. He smiled warmly, raising his glass. ‘Let’s raise our glasses to Australia and Norfolk Island. I hope to see many of you here next year for the Bicentennial celebrations.’ One of his aides began to clap, and the assembled company followed suit. Alice could swear that, on the far side of the wide verandah, a scowl passed across Jamie’s face before he reset his features. And there he was again, all laid-back charm, chatting up a couple of young women ladling punch into tall glasses, chunks of tinned pineapple splashing onto the flagstones.

The following morning Alice was scheduled for another dive, assigned to the stranding site beyond the outer swell zone. But the weather got worse, and they were all directed to work inshore. She followed a trail of spiky sea urchins scraping the reef platform, creating hollows in ballast iron on their meanderings. Amongst the rocky rubble there was a golf ball and the corroded jagged bottom of a beer can. Disappointment turned to relief when she spotted a musket ball concreted into the seabed, signalling to shore to plot the coordinates of her discovery.
On land, the boatshed was buzzing with excitement. One of the other divers, Jack, had recovered a brass sextant. He offered it to Tess and then to Alice. Held in her hand, it seemed remarkable that this elegant instrument could establish the angular distance between the Moon and a fixed Star. She reverently turned it over, reading the engraved word London, visible in copperplate script on the side of the cross-bar. Her own finds seemed, by comparison, inconsequential; she had never possessed the gift of navigation.
Late that afternoon, most of the team descended on Hotel Paradise. On Fridays the place was packed. Although it was slated for demolition, declared an affront to the heritage values of the historic convict site, people were determined to enjoy The Paradise while they still could. As Alice walked toward the sprawling hotel, fibro and timber buildings leaning drunkenly against each other, she spied Jamie sitting on an upturned boat outside. The one-eyed Labrador sat by his side. He stroked its head absentmindedly as they both stared out to sea, watching flocks of ghost birds gathering in rafts offshore, the sun slipping over the horizon. Alice positioned her camera to capture the two of them, silhouettes against the burnished sky. She pocketed the polaroid, unnoticed. Strolling under the whale bone entrance arch, she joined the swill inside.
‍ ‍Walk Like An Egyptian was playing on the radio, the volume turned right up. Girls zigzagged across the tiny dance floor, drinking shots of Kahlua and Baileys as they jabbed their arms in the air and then crossed them over their chests, imitating reanimated mummies. Four elderly men played Euchre, shirt-sleeves rolled up, taking it in turns to deal, showing off their shuffling skills. A couple of younger guys took a swing at one another, their argument spilling down the stairs as they were cheered on by an enthusiastic audience. Jamie was drinking at a corner table with a woman. They were both hunched over. Although the woman wore a prim calf-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse, there was something threadbare about her. She turned and locked eyes with Alice, flicking long dark hair from her gaunt face. In the dim light, Alice thought she could just make out a purple bruise spreading down her cheekbone.
The team bought each other drinks, comparing notes on their dives and speculating on what secrets might still be buried in the deep. Tess had found a pinkish coloured clay brick. Jack was bragging about the sextant, measuring his success in a teetering beer can pyramid. By the time Jamie approached the bar, ready for another round, Alice had made up her mind to avoid him. She’d been down that road before.
Instead, she found herself inching across the sticky carpet towards him. Suddenly she was parched. Up close, it was hard to find the right words.
‘Saw you at Government House’, she ventured. ‘I thought maybe you were a bit upset.’
He shook his head dismissively and turned to walk away. Then he hesitated, turning back, forced to speak over the music and the hum of voices.
‘This all belongs to our people’, he said, gesturing through the picture window towards the stately row of Georgian houses and the rolling hills behind, ‘to Norf’k Ailendas’. ‘That’s the history that matters.’
The room was hushed, and then the chatter and joking started up again.
When the publican began singing ‘Show me the way to go home’, they took the hint. It was nearly midnight as they all straggled out. Jamie caught up with Alice.
‘Would you like a smoke?’
He extracted a joint from his pocket. Up ahead, the others were climbing into their hired van. ‘I’ll miss my lift’, she replied.
‘I’ll take you up country later’, he offered, gesturing towards a battered motorbike. And just like that, they disappeared into the dark.

Jamie led Alice through the golf course, skirting its manicured edges. At first, she thought she heard his name being called, an insistent pleading carried on the breeze. And then silence. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To the burey-groun; it’s quiet there’. ‘We nawa gwen forget dem’, he added, hand on heart, chuckling as he repeated the local Returned Services League motto.
As they entered the cemetery, Jamie whistled, a mournful hymn that overlay the insistent slap of the sea.
‘Stop it, you’re giving me the creeps’, Alice protested.
‘I’m only sending my ancestors’ ghosts back to their graves.’
He wove in and out of the headstones, beanie tucked over his ears to ward off the cold, thumb hitting striker, a flickering spotlight for worn inscriptions: ‘Beloved daughter’, ‘Infant son’, ‘Faithful pastor’, ‘Honoured mother’, ‘Native of Pitcairn Island’. They both jumped when they heard a loud panting. It was only the one-eyed Labrador, joining their midnight jaunt. ‘Meet my mate Wednesday November—he keeps a good look-out’.
‘Why is he called that?’
‘That’s when I first met him.’
‘Is he your dog?’
‘No, he belongs to everyone.’ Jamie affectionately tickled the back of Wednesday November’s floppy ear. ‘We’re all a pack of strays, hey’, he added.
The three of them lay on the grass between the headstones, listening to the waves in Cemetery Bay and the haunting calls of ghost birds. Jamie and Alice passed the joint back and forth, inhaling the star splashed sky, connecting the familiar lines of the Southern Cross, the Milky Way a web to catch their straying thoughts. Joining the dots, their minuscule anonymity was their armour against the grandeur of the velvet night. Alice pictured island sea stars swimming above her, their slow-moving limbs searching out the chemical signatures of astral prey. Jamie pointed towards the nearby ruins of the gaol, stone outlines of radiating arms of cell blocks stretching towards Slaughter Bay.
‘When I was a kid, we used to play there—crawling through all them bloody dungeons.’ He shifted his gaze towards the row of chocolate-box houses lining the road. ‘Them houses on Kwaliti Rau belonged to my sullun. We were evicted. Pack of mongrels.’
The moon emerged from behind a cloud, a pearly glow momentarily illuminating the cemetery. Alice heard the shrill strains of a violin in the distance. ‘Wow, I must be really stoned’, she thought, and started giggling. Wednesday November let out a sudden booming bark, hackles rising. When Alice looked in the direction the dog was facing, she caught sight of a lonely figure standing at the edge of the bay, staring out to sea, her pale face strangely luminous. Then it started to rain. This made Alice laugh even harder. Jamie stood, offering her his hand. ‘It’s time to go.’

In her single bed, she dreamed she was a girl swimming in the wide blue ribbon of the Swan River, the gleaming reflections of tower blocks bending around her as she broke the surface. When she reached Crawley Bay, she tried to float but, instead, sank to the sandy bottom. She rose back up, transforming into a moon jellyfish, her perfectly round transparent bell drifting with the current.
An alarm clock rang, and Alice drowsily swung her legs over the side of the bed, rubbing her eyes. She could only just recall the trip back to the farm, the way she tiptoed in a side entrance like a teenager. But she could still feel her arms around his waist, the soft rain falling as they travelled down the road, his petrichor pulse. When Tess went to shower, Alice pulled the polaroid of Jamie and Wednesday November from her shoulder bag, grabbed the roll of masking tape from her bedside drawer and added the sunset image of the upturned boat to her mirror collection. Behind the polaroids, the puffy face of a stranger stared back. She really hadn’t had enough sleep.

‘Daun’taun’ Alice was assigned to conservation, fastidiously chipping away at the past. The list of finds grew ever longer. There seemed almost no end to the detritus left behind by a sunken supply ship—pieces of brass sheeting, keel staples, heads of planking nails, salt-glaze stoneware, a glass decanter stopper. Jamie stopped by to check their progress and to discuss the handover to a local restoration team. He walked straight past Alice, as though she wasn’t there. Tears welled up, so easily undone by his indifference. They fell, unnoticed, on a tray of grapeshot.
On their final full day, the team visited Mount Pitt Lookout. In the foreground a sea of green foliage, the silver-grey of sage giving way to the rich, deep shade of Norfolk Island pines. In the distance, the South Pacific lapping the shoreline, skittish clouds imitating the rocky outlines of Nepean and Phillip Islands, that vast blue reaching to the curved horizon. It was some view. The weather balloon floated above, a diminishing dot. Jamie sidled up beside her. He pointed towards a row of pines in Kingston.
‘If I ever become a centenarian, a row of 100 pines will be planted in my honour’. He spread his arms wide, ‘green parrots resting in my spreading boughs.’
‘Wow, I didn’t know you were so poetic’, Alice retorted, trying to cut him down. He looked sorrowfully at her. And she was ashamed of her impulse to diminish his arboreal grandiosity.
She tried to make up for it at dinner, a farewell fish fry on the west coast. Once they’d finished scoffing baked bananas, she watched some of the kids practicing their Tahitian dance moves. Alice joined in, swaying her hips from left to right. The kids fell about laughing. ‘Keep your shoulders still!’ one of the girls instructed, throwing a lei over her head.
Alice took a group portrait of them all, posing. At dusk, she found Jamie deep in conversation with one of the senior archaeologists. She waited, standing a few metres away, catching the occasional phrase—data collection, artefact photography, sealed display cases. When they finished talking, she walked up to him, smiling. A scowl crossed his face.
‘What are you wearing that for? You’re not a bloody tourist.’
Apologetically, she removed the lei, letting it dangle awkwardly.

‘Let’s get out of here’, he said, taking her hand.
She rode pillion, night closing around them both. He parked his motorbike and they walked along a ridge and then into a forest.
‘This is as high as we can go’, Jamie said, lighting the narrow path with a torch, her arm brushing against palms, fronds dripping. Even the air felt damp. He shone the torch on a tiny orchid perched on a branch.
‘The bulb looks like a cupcake’, Alice exclaimed.
‘Feel the clouds around you’, Jamie whispered.
He shone the torch on the upward angled branches of a giant Norfolk Pine.
‘See how it intercepts the moisture. That’s why it’s called a fog drip forest.’
Alice rested her head on his chest. They listened to the leaves rustling in the breeze, the low-pitched hoot of an owl.
‘Who was that woman?’ she asked.
‘What woman?’
‘The one you were drinking with at The Paradise’.
He pushed her away, staring intently. ‘I was on my own.’
Alice felt cast adrift. She couldn’t tell if he believed what he said. For a moment, she wondered if she had dreamed everything. She didn’t want to cry. Instead, she began to sway, swivelling her hips. His facial expression didn’t alter. Frustrated, she jabbed her arms in the air, humming the tune of the Bangles hit, her audience impassive as alabaster. She escalated into The Swim, holding her nose with her right hand, lowering her torso in a rhythmic jerk as she swung her knees from side to side, drowning. Jamie shook his head.
‘I know you won’t come back’, he reprimanded, then walked through stands of moon-washed white oaks, out of the forest.
Alice stumbled close behind him, afraid of being abandoned in the dark.
They drove back in stony silence. At the gate, he simply said ‘You’re a wanderer at heart’. And then he mounted his motorbike and disappeared.

Alice was woken by the familiar sound of feral chickens scratching around under the bushes outside. Tess came back from breakfast, saying ‘We’re due at the airport in 40 minutes; you have to pack right now.’ Alice grabbed her stray belongings, forcing her wetsuit into a distended rucksack. She slid the mirror out from under the bed, carefully peeling tape from polaroids. Soon there was only her face looking back. It was disappointing to have changed so little. She shuffled the images like a deck of cards—there was the hibiscus guzzling cow, the concretion covered artefacts, an affable Wednesday November in the parking lot, the kids practicing their Tahitian moves. But there was something missing. Where were the photos of Jamie? She lowered herself to the floor and searched under the bed, hands reaching into dusty corners. There was only some old Brut deodorant that had rolled under there. It was as if he had never existed. And then she noticed another polaroid, face down at the bottom of the pile. She turned it over and breathed sharply in. She saw herself standing in a moonlit spotlight in a forest, eyes closed, dancing.