Lonesome dawn

Wisdom of time spent with my grandfather

Often I lay awake well before dawn, bathing in the grey blue light while a fluffy terrorist lightly mews above my head desperate to be fed as she will surely perish at any moment, listening to the rhythmic click of my ceiling fan as I try to synchronise my breathing with my partner, lightly snoring next to me. Sometimes my anxiety tells me that her next breath won’t come, so I’ll pull her close and feel the warmth of her breath on my neck.

We’re on holiday with my family, our November pilgrimage to a once-sleepy fishing village on the mid-north coast, a place where time seems to loosen its grip and breathe slower.

Amber grey light filters through the windows and the breeze blocks of the converted shed I’m sleeping in. There is a word in Gaelic, “iarmhaireacht“, meaning the lonesomeness of dawn. I see it embodied outside: a single figure moving through the pre-day hush.

You can’t see him unless you zoom, but there was a curious little Marram (Kangaroo) on the bridge going through a fisherman’s bag

Pop shuffles with deliberate silence, clutching an oversized mug of double-strength tea. The sky bruises into purples, pinks, and oranges as he points wordlessly toward the creek.

He’s small, maybe five foot if he remembered to stretch, long arms, slender legs, nose permanently rearranged by rugby scrums seventy years ago. Ninety years old and he still moves like some primordial bush hobgoblin, unbothered by the passage of time.
We’ve been here before. There is no need for conversation. He drops me a handful of prawns, and the orange of the sunrise mixes with the purple of the darkness, accentuating his features. Though I look down to speak to him, I have always looked up to this man.

We’re on our first family trip away since Grandma shuffled her way up to Sky Camp and joined the rest of our elders among the stars. The last time she joined us, she coined mine and Hannah’s favourite quote, “ You can do anything in Hat Head, you can just go crazy”, then she sat in the sun for 12 hours and ate 32 biscuits… God, I miss her.

This small town and its caravan park come alive around us, we find ourselves fighting the tide, ending waist deep and calling it when endless Toadfish and undersized bream steal our last prawn. It’s these moments in silence, barely a word shared between us for 2 hours because there is no need to talk, he can’t hear me anyway, his hearing aids long forgotten back at the house- I’d get better conversation from the flies that insist on full force belting into my eyeballs and earholes.

There is a deliberate softness in the way my grandfather transitions through this world; he is a man who has known great love, loss and total heartbreak. He is the last surviving member of his family; 5 brothers and sisters have moved from this plane to the next, leaving him a patriarch among patriarchs.

Grandfather (Mick), Mother (Lisa), Duke (The Dog)

A few hours later, deft fingers blunted with time peel prawns and feed them onto hooks that might be a bit big for the fish we’re chasing but that doesnt matter, it’s easier for him to tie the knots that way. The sun has burned away the sea fog that rolled in just after dawn, pop stands stoic in the surf casting in silence apart from brief interludes to pet the dog

Words are seldom spoken as he enjoys his time waist deep in the shockingly cold ocean, Me and Duke dance around him, digging for surf clams and unsuccessfully catching beach worms. Sitting and chatting over our lunch of a single orange as I upload photos from my camera to my phone. He is taken aback by how simple it is, and I explain the process as best I can, the next second he is sanding the roof, ready to paint. Truly the definition of a multi-dimensional man. This may make it sound like all my family does is go fishing, and you’d be just about correct in that assummption. This holiday is for getting back to everything that we have always been, a cohesive unit.

Guardian of the intertidal zone

We fish together, we eat together, we laugh together, we tell stories together and, most of all, we cherish what remaining time we have left together. If there is anything I know it’s that this life we live is fickle, it can be drained out of you slowly over a decade while your brain forgets to know itself - or it can be taken from you in an instant.

Garlic chicken, despite much ridicule, proves to be the atomic bait for bream. Mum and Aunty Jodi clean up on the fish while me and Uncle Scott look on in disbelief.

Anyway, back to the fish. We’re mostly focusing on bream; however, Flathead and Whiting are a welcome substitute. Thick soot coloured clouds roll past the headlands behind us, sheltering from the majority of the bad weather. Rain days mean a break from the sand, salt and surf, but leave Duke grumpy against rain-splattered windows as we watch the Rainbow Bee-Eaters snatch wasps from mid-flight and smash them against the powerlines.


When you grow up in a blue-collar town like Newcastle, you truly never know the hubbub of a big city. Day trips down to Sydney and weekends in Melbourne often end in a meltdown of culture-shock induced overstimulation — but here on the Mid North Coast, life pleasantly slows down. While driving through lush green-as-fuck sub-tropical rainforest, you wonder why on earth we ever decided that life needed to be any more than this. A-frame houses nestled amongst giant Bird of Paradise’ with Kangaroos lounging everywhere but, yeah absolutely lets make an office building what a fucking choice.

I dream of nights spent playing cards, game count growing and laughs swelling as the night goes on. Tomorrow we might catch the big bream, or we might not.
For now, Pop has sunk a few Tooheys and is misty-eyed, rambling about a life well spent, travels to Singapore, laps of New Zealand, and decades circling this country like a slow, deliberate tide.
Outside, dawn will come again.
And with it that same grey-blue light, that same soft silence, and one less morning left between us.