“Four miles long and two miles wide, or thereabouts,” Matt said. “It’s fed by three creeks like the one we just seen, and presently I’ll show you it isn’t an inlet at all.”
The scent of algae met them, and when they were running beside the narrow strip of sand the gulls rose before the vehicle in indignant protest, and then settled again. Far ahead were the many buildings comprising the Rhudder homestead, and it appeared to lie hard against the tree-less, brown and dark-green sand-dunes, protecting it and the Inlet from the ocean beyond. Eastward were the open paddocks where cattle grazed, and in one, five hundred sheep. The fences were well maintained, and presently the buildings could be assessed. There was a garden, and, backed by a green hedge, several fruit trees. In contra-distinction to Matt’s homestead, the place looked unprotected from the elements.
“Prosperous looking,” commented Bony, and Matt said all the land was rich, adding:
“Jeff’s grandfather settled here. Took up land both sides. Him and his wife and his sons slaved their guts out clearing and fencing with logs and brushwood, growing stuff to eat and living off the bandicoots and possums and the fish. There was always plenty of fish. There was never any money. They took produce on a bullock dray to Bunbury, nigh two hundred miles through the forests, and exchanged it for axes and saws and cloth to make clothes. Boots! They didn’t want boots.” Matt chuckled without mirth. “My old man came and took up our place, and slaved his guts out too, to get a start. In them days men was hardy.”
The track skirted the garden-fence of posts and rails which probably had been erected a hundred years ago. Part of the house was built with tall six-feet-wide karri slabs, and part with modern machine timber, inset with modern windows, the whole now surmounted with corrugated iron painted red. On a wide and shadowed veranda appeared a man to wave to them, and Matt sounded his horn, saying:
“That’s old Jeff. We might call in on the way home. Don’t know how it is I call him old. Only one year older than me.”
Now the track was merely a mark on the hard ground, and soon they were being pinched between the Inlet and the inner walls of great sand dunes, until they could proceed no farther. Carrying short rods, and tackle in a gunny-sack with sandwiches and a thermos, they passed to the extremity of the dunes and so emerged on to a wide wall of sea sand stretching across the entrance to the rising upland behind sheer cliffs bordered by clumps of tea-tree. Matt halted on the sand barrier to face the Inlet, and said:
“Used to be all clear here, and the river ran out through a deep cleft floored and walled with rock. Don’t know what happened to make things different and old Jeff can’t tell either. Anyway every so often the sea piles sand into this entrance like it is now, bottling back the river and creek water. Got to be a real big storm to do it. Time goes on and the water from the hills rises and rises to what you see it, and after more time another big storm will shift away all the sand and let the water out. I watched it happen once. Make a film you wouldn’t forget.”
The summit of the sand wall was something like ten feet above the Inlet surface, and perhaps fifty feet above the sea at low tide. It was a hundred yards thick and four hundred yards long, and required no imagination to picture what would happen when next the Inlet water was released.
The wind blew softly and almost coldly coming up from the far-away Antarctic. Crossing the sand bar they left its junction with the rising slope of earth and tea-tree, and went down to the narrow beach. This was steep and floored with shingle rocks the size of footballs, brown and grey and dark slate. The waves came in languidly, to rise abruptly into towering surf-free faces before leaning forward to smash down upon the giant shingle.
“Not much of a place to bathe,” observed Bony. He stood watching for a few moments and then Matt saw him looking along the coast to the east. There were sand flats at the base of the dunes stretching for miles to terminate at a black headland. Off this section of coast stood rocks and rock-bars against which white water surged. There stood a large brownish rock and Bony asked what this was, as another farther on and farther seaward was grey.
“It’s a mountain of seaweed,” he was informed. “It’s often about. The sea gathers the weed into a mound and then takes it away and builds it in another place. In my time I’ve never seen it anywhere but off the dunes. Never along these cliffs.”
Bony turned in the indicated direction and was confronted by the picture of cliffs rising to four hundred feet, vast rocks isolated from the coast, great rock-bars extending into the ocean. It was an oddity how the dunes ended at the Inlet and the rock cliff-front began.
“The dunes wouldn’t give a hiding-place to Marvin, but these cliffs certainly would,” Bony said. “Let’s have a look along there.”
They trod water-logged sand, and climbed across rock-bars. They skirted vast towers of rock rising from the sandy areas. They crawled through rock tunnels where the sea swished and gurgled. They passed flat rock surfaces where there gaped great holes, Matt pointing out that to be knocked into one of them by a wave meant certain death. They came to a huge rock having seemingly sheer sides, and Matt said that there was only one way to the summit, and at the summit was a cave where a man could live in comfort.
Against the facets of the cliff-front were countless black patches denoting the entrance to caves, and these patches were at all heights above the ribbon of rock or sand beaches, now extended as the tide was out.
When Matt said that a large area of quiet water almost surrounded by a rock barrier was a good place to fish, Bony told him he wasn’t interested in fishing at this moment, and they went on, to cross over a low headland, to pass shallow bays, and be attracted by a vast rock mountain which was presently seen to lie athwart a bay of glistening sand.
It was a spectacular monolith rising from the sea a thousand yards from the cliff. It stretched across the enclosed bay, stopping at both ends to admit a channel of water between itself and jutting rock-bars. The summit was comparatively level: the sides were sheer. The inner face presented to the cliff was also sheer, and between it and the edge of the sand, the channel appeared to be but fifty yards wide.
“Tide’s about to turn,” Matt said. “You’ll see something when it does. We’d better take to this rock.”
They climbed a rock at the cliff base, and while Bony was continuing to be awed by the vast rock slab as high as the cliff and all of half a mile wide. Matt spoke again.
“Marvin wrote a poem about that. Wasn’t bad, either. He called it Australia’s Front Door. To each side you can see the ships passing, and he said they were bound for one of Australia’s Tradesmen’s Entrances.”
Chapter Six
The Fishermen
It was strange that, after thirteen years, and his heart heavy with rancour towards Marvin Rhudder for despoiling his daughter, Matthew Jukes should be unable to speak of him without evincing early admiration of the youth.
“Boy’s talk,” he went on. “Us two families were always proud of this place and that mighty rock out there. This coast belongs to us; every rock and stone and cliff and cave, the wind’s never stale, and it’s never hot like it can be inland. Either side that rock there’s room enough, and the water is deep enough, to take a liner. On the inner side of it two liners could pass each other and not touch. At the east entrance there’s a whirlpool what would sink a big ship. A door it is. Nothing afloat ever gets past that door: nothing afloat, no flotsam, no jetsam, nothing, ever comes ashore.
“Marvin put it right when he called it Australia’s Front Door, shut for ever against the foreigners on ships what has to take ’em to Melbourne and Sydney, and other tradesmen’s entrances. You might see a ship passing to left or right of the door, and looking no bigger than one of those gulls on top of it.”
“Could we get closer to it across the sand?” Bony asked, himself caught up by the allegory.
“Too late, Nat. You’ll see in a minute. With the change of the tide there’s a sneaker what comes in with a rush. You’ll see the water to the right