AustLit

'Navotas Port. Trawlers cut through seafoam as they moor. Sun-pruned dockmen swarm the transoms, drawing nets up onto iron decks. The boy could smell the copra and sponge even from here, at the top of the coconut tree he’d climbed. Wind sends the trunk forward and back in loping excursions. Like a crow’s nest, the boy imagines, like the first Spaniards sailing their carracks into the Bay. They’d have followed the southwest trade winds through brothlike fog and known that their wandering had ended. (It doesn’t occur to him that he’s looking the other way. More likely this was what some centuries-old hill-tribesmen saw. What they felt. Bewilderment and wonder and then, well, fear? Despair? The heat of fire, a burial somewhere shallow and unmarked. But he’s only a kid, let him have his fantasies.) Gulls fire slantways across the concrete berm. The boy’s father has materialised, slumped and bird-boned, at the base of the tree. What the hell is Child doing up there? It’s time to work.' (Publication abstract)