Auslantis

We putter along the street in our little motorboat. It is deep enough here that we won't hit the cars in the perpetual drowned gridlock, but it is still important to avoid the sunken mounds of what used to be our homes. It has been about an hour since we departed home from the Yarra Ranges, and now we're finally weaving the streets of old outer Melbourne. Julie has stopped asking how much longer we have to go, and is leaning over the edge as if to take it all in.

‘Is this where Dad lived, Aunt Kim?’ she asks.

‘Well, we're right on the very edge of the city, Julie,’ I tell her. ‘Old Melbourne was a very big place! I think this bit was called Croydon.’

I see her silently mouth ‘Croydon’ - seeing how the word feels on her lips - and turn back to the slumped houses.

It was her birthday yesterday, and I agreed to my brother to take her out to our old place. He doesn't know how to ride a boat because he gets awfully seasick, so he had to stay home. He trusts me, though he is worried, but Julie couldn't be more excited. She snaps away at the place with the new polaroid she got as a present.

‘Why are the houses in the water? Ours isn't.’

I sigh a little. ‘Yeah, we're just very lucky. We live on what used to be giant mountains, high above the water, which was where we used to go on holidays. We were up there when it happened.’ I stop and think how much I should tell her, as she's only six. It is important to know what happened, though.

‘I remember it was our last night there, and your dad and I were in our pyjamas about to go to bed. We saw on TV that the sea was rising real quick, and everybody hopped in their cars to drive away. Old Melbourne was right on the edge of the ocean, so it only took an hour.’

‘Hmm, how long's that go for?’

I try to think of an example. ‘About as long as it took to get here, I think.’

She nods, and then asks, ‘Kim, what's a TV?’ I laugh dryly, and wipe my eyes. I couldn't even live without TV.

It's quiet out here besides our motor, but it is occasionally broken by the calls of sea birds who love to nest in these places. We see their bundles of twigs on the roofs and bony old treetops we pass by, some with resting seagulls. They call to each other and don't expect chips from us anymore. I wonder if the buildings out here last long enough for eggs to hatch.

Ahead we are approaching a large structure we have eyed for a while now which looks to be holding together well. Some sort of shopping centre I think; they were probably better built than houses.

I turn the engine off and we are soon wrapped by the full quiet of the place, drifting above what used to be a carpark. I notice there is nobody parked underneath, unlike the streets and highways. We come to a stop with a gentle bump against the entrance's roof, and I pick the least rusted lamp post to tie our boat onto that is sticking from the wall. While I loop and knot the rope I hear the gentle water lapping the stained walls, and Julie digging through the bag to see what food Dad packed. I don't let her know I caught her.

I lift her onto the roof then pull myself up after her, bag on my shoulder, reminding her, ‘Remember to be careful, you don't want to fall in any holes.’

She looks at me and bobs up and down. ‘I have a life jacket though!’

I shake my head, ‘You don't know what's inside, Julie. It would still be dangerous to fall in.’

She pouts, and mumbles to herself, ‘It's just fulla water.’

There's not much on the roof, just some busted air conditioning units and a few knickknacks the airlifted survivors left behind. I sit by what used to be a glass roof above one of the hallways, eating my sandwich as Julie neglects hers. She is playing with a doll she found; wiping the hair and mud from its face with puddle water and whispering nice things to it, though I can't hear anything from here. I see a Bakers Delight under the water — or, more accurately, a B ker D  ight — and realise just how good Noah's bread is now. It's just as smooth as store bread used to be, so I make a mental note to ask him how he makes it.

‘You've gotta eat your lunch Julie, we need to get going,’ I tell her. Again.

She huffs and sits the doll down, smoothing out its sun-bleached dress, and wipes the mud from her hands onto her shorts. She comes and sits next to me, dangling her legs through the window frame, and picks bits off her sandwich.

‘What's in there, Aunt Kim?’

‘There's a bunch of shops, you could buy all sorts of toys and yummy food down there.’

‘Where did all the food come from?’

I haven't really thought about that. ‘They used to cook it up for you when you gave them money.’

She still looks confused. ‘Where did they grow it all? Did they have some farms in there?’

Oh Julie… everything is so different now. Does Mum and Dad grow everything you eat? Have you ever had a burger, or ice cream? She probably hasn't met as many people in her lifetime as walked this mall in a single day. I shake my head, ‘No, Julie, they got the food from somewhere else for us.’ She nods and takes an exaggerated bite of her trout sandwich. Her favourite.

We pack up, get back into the boat, and I untie us. Before heading off I take out the map and spread it flat, showing Julie and myself where we will go as we head deeper into the city. The buildings get taller and more cramped, and Julie is increasingly glued to the approaching, somehow standing, skyscrapers. But, before we get there, we reach home.

‘We're here, I think. There's a park under us that we used to go to all the time.’

It looks different, though. The real plants are all dead, uprooted, and washed away, of course, without so much as a skeleton left. It's just a big muddy mess. Fish dart about a hole that should be a pond, duck into the thick seagrass long in need of a good mowing, and trace sloughed away footpaths that lined little gardens. Julie spots something in the water, and asks ‘Aunt Kim, what's that thing?’

I look over and see strange metal tubes and beams sticking out of the ground, weird plastic architecture and nonsense structures. I recognise it immediately.

‘That was a playground Julie, kids like you would play there all the time.’

She shakes her head, ‘Nuh-uh, it's scary and I hate it. I wanna see your house now.’ I can't blame her.

We drive around the block, past apartment complexes, and stop at the one we used to have. I point at the floor just above the water with the busted windows, ‘That was our apartment right there.’

It's dark, so Julie fishes out a flashlight from the bag and shines it inside, revealing our bedroom. She finds Noah's bed first, and then mine, both of which have shifted around a bit. It's just barely recognisable.

‘Sorry Julie, it looks like all my toys and stuff washed away. I wanted to give you something,’ I tell her. ‘Do you want to have a walk around inside?’

I briefly think she didn't even hear me, but then she reluctantly answers ‘Yeah, it's all messy though.’

I tie our boat onto the balcony and lift us both inside. The carpet squelches under my feet and bits of furniture clink against my shoes, and it smells salty and damp. The wallpaper is replaced with plaster stained with black fungus, and our family portrait no longer hangs on the wall. It's not a bedroom anymore. Julie pinches her nose and kicks some junk around, barely moving it, but finds something underneath. She stands up with Noah's muddy, wooden firetruck, and puts it in the bag, making me wince a little. At least we have already eaten the food already.

‘It's smelly in here,’ she complains, entering the hallway but then stopping. I follow and see the rest of the house has collapsed.

‘Oh well, I s'pose we should check out something else then.’ She nods, and goes back to the boat a little bit too quickly. I take one last look around my bedroom. For years after the flood I wanted to come back here and lay in my own bed again, play with my toys again, and wear my favourite dresses again. But now, standing here, it feels no different to anywhere else in Melbourne. There's only a deep, buried ache for the life and people we left behind. I shift my eyes away and follow Julie to the boat, untying and heading for the city.

Eventually she relaxes, then points and asks ‘What are those big things over there?’

‘Those are big buildings we called skyscrapers,’ I tell her, ‘They used to have a lot of people in them.’

‘How many?’

I shrug. ‘A few hundred, I guess.’

‘What! No way, what were they all in there for?’ she asks, not quite believing me.

‘I'm not sure, I think they went to work in there.’

‘What kind of stuff can you do inside a big thing like that?’

‘I don't know what they did.’ I think it was offices and things like that. What did offices look like? What did they do in them? I was only a kid when that world was washed away. ‘I think it was important stuff we don't do anymore.’

She huffs, unsatisfied, but leaves the questions there. I think I would like to know more than that, too. I feel hollow knowing so little about how things worked.

Before long we reach the city centre. The smaller buildings are completely swallowed here, with only skyscrapers coming up for air. Julie gawks and leans so far back I worry the boat might tip, taking photos until her film runs out, and then just stares.

‘What do you think?’ I prod.

‘I didn't know anything was so big,’ she tells me, ‘I can't see the tops, they go up forever.’

I laugh, ‘Not quite, but yeah, they're very big. I went to the top once and I was so scared it made me sick.’

She looks at me expectantly. ‘Can we go up Aunt Kim? Please? Please?’

‘No,’ I tell her, ‘They could fall over. We need to stay in the water.’ She doesn't seem that disappointed, though. I think she knew it was a long shot. I ask, ‘So, what do you think? Did you have a good day, Julie?’

She nods. ‘It was so cool, I liked all the buildings and birds and stuff… but I wanna go home now. We saw it all.’

I nod. We saw anything that matters anymore, at least.