The idea of this book has existed in my imagination since I was a kid, but this is the first time I’ve read it. I tried getting my hands on it as a young’n after being captivated by the copy of Magpie Island I found in my school library: that picture book’s sense of loss and isolation — its confrontation with one of our greatest fears as social animals — was unexpected and appealed deeply. (In a similar vein, the Paul Jennings stories I most loved — and snatches of which I remember to this day: a man down a well with his head bent backwards, a child clothed in bats, a naked ghost — were always the few stories included in each collection that were melancholy instead of funny.) So, the story of a boy living in the Coorong always sounded to me like it would be my kind of thing.

We decided in a rush to go to the Coorong over the Easter break but, the decision being last minute, there wasn’t time enough to get my hands on a copy of Storm Boy. So I read it once we got back.

It’s a kid’s book, and it’s of a certain time and place, so it didn’t quite have the effect on me I’d hoped for. And I’m sure that, had I read it as a kid, I would have been disappointed by Storm Boy’s being sponsored to go to Adelaide to be educated as an ending. But what did strike me was the way Thiele describes place. I’ve never been so awe-struck by an ocean’s power and, once back, told others about it, breathless, before mentioning anything else. And it’s one of the first things Thiele hones in on. Here are some photos, and some of Thiele’s descriptions.

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To get there we had to cross the Wimmera.

There were dusts storms. The wind was ferocious and the rattling of my door with the broken seal threatened to drive me crazy. After a while I kept one hand on the wheel and the other pressed against the seal.

We didn’t have much of a map but ended up in Meningie and decided to keep driving along the shore of Lake Albert.

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I was starting to get nervous (it was past 5.30 pm) when there was a small sign pointing southward with the word ‘camping’. See, west of Meningie, that small green square of National Park? We travelled for maybe 30 minutes along a gravel road until we reached that bit and, soon after, the edge of that long strip of blue, which is the Coorong Lagoon, a 100-kilometre-long stretch that’s separated from the ocean by a sand dune peninsula.

There were signs stating ‘permit camping only’ — argh! There were also fishing shacks, so we went down to one to ask about the permit thing. Don’t worry, the beanied father grinned. Just set up wherever you find a spot and explain if a ranger comes along. (Turned out it wasn’t as bad as we thought: we found an honesty box the next morning not far away.)

Coorong Lagoon on arrival

Coorong Lagoon the next morning

The next day we camped further south at 42-Mile Crossing, where the lagoon ends. The campsite was nothing like the first, secluded spot, but you could cross the scrubby dunes on foot to the ocean.

The track to the dunes

Then up and over them

To this on the other side

Now tell me Thiele’s descriptions aren’t perfect:

His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray Mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles around the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible ruin of white water and spray. All day and all night they tumble and thunder. And when the wind rises it whips the sand up the beach and the white spray darts and writhes in the air like snakes of salt. p. 70

Now and then [people] sailed up the Coorong in their little boat, past the strange wild inlet of the Murray Mouth, past the islands and the reedy fringes of teh freshwater shore, past the pelicans and ibises and tall white cranes, to the little town with a name like a waterbird’s cry–Goolwa! p. 71

Do you have any perceptions or experiences of place that have been shaped by an encounter with literature?