By Les Wicks
There was no plan that day, not too many plans anyday back then.
Came up from Sydney to stay with Taye, see how she was going with a new job & beachside hut. She had been out snorkelling the afternoon before, we all had a feast of abalone & goldcaps for dinner. The sun had struggled with the floorboards in a contest to see who would wake us up first. After a lot of coffee we were down to the beach.
Peak Beach is so photogenic it has always appeared somewhat phony. Huge granite pinnacles at either tonsured headland above the whorls of foliage. Sand punctuated by only a scarce Morse of footprints, the surf somehow both staunch & deceptive. We were all naked, I had my eyes shut & body was sun-tranquilised to a reptile torpor. The three women approached, circled around me before squatting down to etch their art in the sand about my body. Pretty soon I was surrounded by sunrays, branches, leaves & fishes. My partner Maggie, taller than me, had an athlete’s body but had chosen raw canvases for her future. Beside her Lissa was getting more & more elaborate in her design; she’d come from & had a sturdy body built for the Western Plains — but her mind, up on the ridge lines, was always a host to vibrant mental squalls. She was at the same art college as Maggie. Taye was scary skinny — finally truly home both in her job at the research centre shepherding millions of shrimplets & daily out beyond the breaks amongst the dolphins & sharks. The sun had already begun to tattoo her narrative, she’d be dead by 40.
As they danced in, then out I was a passive beast in the heart of that mandala. Perhaps feeling transcendent but also concentrating on the imperative of “no obvious arousal”. How much could be built, how much dismantled if I had reached out to touch them? If they’d touched each other? If they’d touched me? This was a time of so much experimentation yet that experimentation was uncontextualized, not talked out thereby somewhat formless or incomplete. The beach had touched us.
Nearly 50 years later Lissa runs a regional gallery out deep in sheep country. Maggie & I barely lasted a year beyond that date though we remain friends. She’s aged better than I have — paint-specked gunmetal hair & five grandkids. None of us ever spoke of that morning again, just another crossroad. But today, back at that shore, something opens.
