On a beach south of Albany, close to where the ANZACs departed, I stand at the raging Southern Ocean. My phone doesn't have coverage so I can't tell you exactly which beach I am on, only that the waves here are deep, rolling, serious. On the other side is Antarctica. If my eyes could see beyond the horizon, it would be right in front of me. But I can only feel the chill from this side of the Southern Ocean, from this shore.

I have never been to Antarctica, have only had the merest of brushes with it, through images and in books.

I always want to know more, imploring those with firsthand knowledge for details. I want something other than cold. I want there to be something else, something magical, something mythical.

This stormy beach, however, is the sort of place that you could write about for days, and yet you might only emerge with a tone that is melancholy, slightly gothic, Rebecca-esque. Not the red rhododendrons, but the location of the murder itself. The boathouse. But that was another coast, another continent, another ocean.

This ocean, this gateway to Antarctica, is something else. The Antipodes.

I recall in Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire there were two British brothers in Wellington waiting for their father, an Antarctic explorer. Helen observes them at a local dance. She is already in love with Aldred. She wonders what their ‘explorer-father' had taken to read.

What do people take to read in Antarctica? I would start with The Transit of Venus.

On this beach the clouds are very low. I could reachup and touch one, scoop it out of the sky and serve it as a dessert. I never imagine Antarctica as cloudy. In my head, there are clear blue skies and the whitest of snow.

In my head it looks like a ski field, with penguins. But that is too clich.d to be real.

I find a thin pink canister of sherbet, from a town in England, lying on the sand. It is the size of my little finger.

The wording is embossed on the plastic. I wonder who ate the sherbet within, how it ended up here? How many years ago? It seems quite old, like something people ate in the 1950s. I must look it up, find this sherbet factory online. Trace its path to this beach.

I read about Lego washing up on English shores from cargo ships sunk twenty-five years ago. I spend a lot of time thinking about Lego, how it will be here when we are all gone. Circling in some shape or form. It will outlast all of us. The Ninjago dragon, the Guggenheim model, the lighthouse (with flashing light accessory).

Lumps of coal from the bottom of the ocean floor wash up in Albany sometimes, from the previously coal-fired ships that are buried beneath. There are so many of these ships, dormant until a snorkeler or diver finds a plank of wood, a treasure chest, a coin. So many

shipwrecks, we have museums dedicated to them.

We are near Cape Vancouver. I lived in the other Vancouver, but that was twenty years ago now. This beach reminds me of that rugged Pacific Ocean coast, the islands and inlets. Wreck Beach. The tempo of the waves are the same, somehow. I think of my friends and how we used to eat salmon sushi and drink Long Island Iced Teas. It was our first experience of living away from home.

After an hour I have a canvas bag full of cerulean plastic pieces, rope, the sherbet canister. If everyone did something small, would it fix the problem? I know it's all too far gone for that. But I will always love stormy beaches like these, on the brink of somewhere colder beyond.

I wonder if we come back next year, in twenty or forty years, will our footsteps be underwater? Perhaps this will not be a beach at all. The sea higher, Antarctica further

away. Not a shipwreck, but a wreck of some other kind.

 

 

 

 

 

© Emily Tsokos Purtill. From Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs, edited by Laura Keenan and Casey Mulder, and published by Night Parrot Press, 2024.

 

 

 

Emily Tsokos Purtill enjoys being part of the Night Parrot Press community. She also has fiction in Westerly and Griffith Review, and her debut novel MATIA will be published by UWAP in 2024. Emily currently writes and curates the literary subscription Kaló Taxídi available at etpliterary.com