(Longlisted in 2023 Best Australian Yarn thru The West Australian)

To me it looked like a four metre long, deflated goon bag that had washed up on the shore, but Yusuke said the Japanese saw it as a predictor of seismic events, a messenger from the Sea God’s Palace, the Earthquake Fish. It reeked. Dogs were drawn to it, children too. Crabs were working in teams, digging the giant oarfish back into the Minjerriba sand.

The first tremor struck that night, its epicentre directly beneath the shack Yusuke rented for us at Dunwich Beach. He’d only broken bread with me the week prior to my release and we were sitting around a smoking fire, only just poking at the edges of our fractured relationship. That was when my parole officer called to announce he’d found a job for me in the mining sector, up in the Gulf of Carpentaria, at a place called Urquhart Point. There was zircon, rutile, ilmenite, and bauxite to be dug out and shipped. The company’s dust trucks needed mechanics. “Temperatures might get to fifty, the humidity will turn the dirt to slurry in the creases of your armpits,” he said, “but the pay is good, and they don’t care about your record. If you can get there, quick-smart, there’s a one-man demountable with your name on it.” Urquhart Point was on the border of Koknar and Kurtjar country, where I couldn’t get into too much trouble. It was just a pity Yusuke had flown all the way from Osaka, Japan to spend time with me.

He’d grown up with a single mother. She was a backpacker when I met her, then she was a front-packer too, with Yusuke in a baby sling. She was twenty-three, powered by a marathon runner’s heart, in it for the long run, but I wasn’t. The only thing I was committed to, was to trial. She flew back to Japan, watching, waiting for me to be paroled nearly twenty years later. Now she’d paid for our kid to fly over to Australia to rehabilitate what I could have told her was unfixable. They say you should be consistent with your children. I was being consistently a bad bet. When I left for the job in Urquhart Point, Yusuke said goodbye to me with an acid smile. 

The second tremor happened on the job, one year into my northern tenure, but I was the only one who felt it. I was running my hand, slick with axle grease, over my sunburnt neck when I noticed a variation in the hardened topography. The camp nurse said it could be a melanoma and she offered to excise it, to send it off to a pathologist for analysis. I handled the wait for results by driving to Kowanyama for grog and ended up with a six-month ban from any non-work travel.

The third tremor was a little more serious, something like a six on the Richter Scale. Yusuke’s mother died suddenly of a medical complication in a hospital in Osaka. Her body was moved from the morgue to the familiarity of her own futon, a white cloth draped over her face. Yusuke called me from the vigil in a maelstrom of grief. I told him I was unable to come to the funeral because of my travel ban. He told me he hadn’t ever expected me to.

There were other tremors after that, tectonic shifts in the weather. A pattern was developing, a closing of their frequency. Cyclone Tasha came out of a wind shear, 370km northeast of Cairns, spawned by a La Niña in full-on Modoki mode. She drowned the eastern states in rivers of unstoppable rain. Blackhawks plucked people off roofs. A dam dropped its guard and gave up. It was quiet for a while then came a different pulse from the Madden-Julian oscillation. Townsville was sent to the bottom of the pool. Two people died of melioidosis, ten were hospitalised. One year later, the southern states were turned to ash through a turbo-charged Summer of fires. While everyone was trying to catch their breath, a worldwide pandemic struck, and isolation orders were issued. Up in Urquhart Point it was mandatory, solitary confinement for all. And no mixing with the vulnerable locals.

I spent hours on the metaverse. The cold room panels of my demountable at least insulated me from the Carpentaria heat but I was interned with the internet. Down the information super goat track, I was held hostage by trivia. I found myself staring one day at the Constitution of the Athenians, its papyrus, crumbled and disintegrating. I viewed the Vindolanda tablets with their instructions for the soldiers who manned the fort at Hadrian’s Wall. Outside my demountable, inbound from across the Arafura Sea, the first nations’ ancestors surfed into Urquhart Point as they’d done every year on the seasonal shockwave of an atmospheric inversion, the thousand-kilometre-long Morning Glory Cloud. Water tanks filled. Creeks became seas of crocodile and barramundi.

I stayed down the goat track for weeks. One day I was viewing images from the Gargosian Gallery in New York, works by Americans, Warhol and Schnabel and the Englishman Damien Hirst. I felt a slight tremor, one I thought I had imagined, while viewing a painting by (I guessed, because I was learning stuff) American, Mark Rothko, but in variations of only white. The goat track corrected me on the detail. The painting was by a Japanese Australian artist whose work had been reverberating with the critics. I phoned the artist himself from the epicentre of my shock. 

In the few years we’d been disaffected, Yusuke had made excellent use of the distance between us. His exhibition was described as a symphonic work of purity and restraint, but it looked to me like he was exploring some vacancy. The goat track was proving insufficient, I needed to see his works in person, in life. So, when we spoke, I asked him if there was a local gallery exhibiting him. Yusuke told me he was to be part of an Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane when lockdowns ended. I planned to meet him there, to get a private tour from the artist himself. 

His first question was as uncoloured as his paintings: “How is the mining business?”

“It is what it is,” I replied with a nod to our truncated past. “But how about all of this? Congratulations. You’re an international success.”

He was generous with his time, naming every one of his pieces as we passed by them, his arm close to mine, our feet in step: “Picket Fence, Oatmeal Child, Silent Christmas…” And on he went.

“I like what you’ve done with the colours.” I didn’t know what else to say. Every piece, every work was a canvas of white. Every title was pointed.

“I didn’t expect you to get it,” he replied. And a tremor was registered somewhere deep in the seams of my tough outer crust. A solid six-point-five. 

“I suppose you get a lot of tremors up there in Japan?” I asked him later. I reminded him about the earthquake fish we saw on the beach in Minjerriba all those years ago. 

He said, “We’re living on a fault line.” Then he pointed to the scar on my neck. 

“It’s okay, they caught it in time,” I told him. Later, I asked him about his mother- if she’d been happy in her life. He told me she had never married or even met another man, which wasn’t the version I wanted to hear.

On the flight back to Urquhart Point, I saw everything was verdant and green across the Precambrian rocks of the Isa. So too, the Jurassic and Cretaceous sedimentary basin, all the way from the Burdekin to the Gulf. The graphite deposits near Croydon with their lithium battery potential were flooded and muddy and wild. Meanwhile, the plans for rutile and ilmenite mining of the mineral sands at Urquhart Point had been expanded and fast-tracked by the Government in Brisbane.

There was a rapid uptick in fly-in-fly-outs, laboratory technicians and chemists. I put my boots under one of the chemists’ beds. I asked her what all the interest was in rutile and ilmenite. She said they manufactured titanium dioxide out of it, that there was an implementable theory doing the rounds of the United Nations’ scientific community that proposed we could bring a halt to global warming if just two percent of the Earth’s surface was reflective and white. That meant carparks and highways, bridges, the tops of buildings, industrial infrastructure, anything manmade and exposed to the sun.

“What’s that got to do with titanium dioxide?” I asked her. 

“It’s called titanium white, a pigment, CI 77891,” she replied. “As a white solid, it’s insoluble in water. Stable enough to do the job.”

“White paint?”

“That’s right,” she said, “white paint.”

I was only there in body for the rest of our conversation. What she had said about white paint made me think of Yusuke. I wanted to believe his canvases were a statement on the death of his mother, an abstract representation of the white cloth draped over her face during her vigil. But now the chemist had given me a different interpretation. Was his work an environmental statement, exploring the promise of titanium white?

A squadron of butcherbirds carolled in the trees above us. They drew me outside, down to the beach at Urquhart Point where the sea had changed from jade to cool blue under cloud and where the dirt of the boat ramp stained the shallows bauxite red. Yusuke should see these colours, I thought. A young man like him should be working with these tones, not with a palette of bloodless white. Yusuke should leave all that white alone, leave white in the hands of old men like me. We’re the ones that should be using it to fix all that we’ve destroyed. 

I suspected Yusuke’s white hadn’t been a reference to the environment, or even to his mother. It was about me and how missing I’d been. But the chemist had told me something else: that I wasn’t so unusual, that I was, in fact, typical. I was like a lot of men who had been missing from their duty, the one they should have been performing for their children. We should have been setting them up for their future, seeing them safely through their lifetime. My failures were not just personal ones, they were generational. I realised I had a new role now, that I could play a different kind of parent. Not the kind I thought I needed to be for Yusuke, because that ship had sailed. I could only do what I had time to do now in this place, with the tools that I had at my feet. 

I was there on the beach in Urquhart Point, burying my toes like a crab, deep into the mineral sands, when the giant oarfish returned. It swam up to me from the depths, bringing with it a message from the Sea God written on its flank, a four-metre-long silver banner: You’re living on a fault line, it read.