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Thirty millennia ago, give or take a thousand years, the first inhabitants arrived, possibly from Indonesia, settled and became a tribe in the Noosa region. A federal court determined, in 2003, that the name of the tribe was the Kabi Kabi. To celebrate this monumental decision, the judges all went to the pub and got righteously pissed.
It had been generally promoted that the name Noosa came from the local Aboriginal word ‘noothera’, or ‘gnuthuru’, from the Kabi Kabi language. This stood for shadow or shady place. An 1870 map showing the Noosa River as ‘Nusa River’ however suggested that perhaps the name was derived from the Indonesian word for island.
The first Europeans to blunder into the region, way back in the 1820s, were believed to be escaped convicts. The first European settlers arrived in the 1860s, roughly a century before Hayden Kenny came and discovered the classic, surfing points.
Thankfully, those early settlers appreciated the beauty of the place enough, particularly the bays, that they set aside a reserve to protect the area. This happened way back in 1879. The reserve officially became a national park in 1939. The 1960s saw a menagerie of surfing hippies and tree-hugging greenies form the Noosa Parks Association. The Association was chiefly responsible for fending off nasty, ‘Nazi’
developers who wanted to build ugly skyscrapers everywhere and turn Noosa into another ‘palm-greasing, excrement magnet’, along the lines of the ‘hideously-named’ Gold Coast.
As a consequence of all these things, nothing ever changed in the Noosa National Park. Time never got a foothold there. It was, and is, a bubble of space where time does not exist, where nothing changes. The Park looked exactly the same in 2123 as it did in 1960, in 1879 and even 28,000 years before Jesus Christ walked the Earth.
And a million years from now, when a surfer rounds Dolphin Point and witnesses those perfect lines breaking in Granite Bay, he will see the same thing and get the same feeling that all those young surfers got all those thousands of centuries before him, because unlike all places in the common universe, this one, this magic one, is timeless.
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2
By the end of the 1960s, enough surfers had made it a habit to walk the extra mile beyond Teatree, to Granite, that they trampled out a permanent walking track. The waves were always a foot or two bigger in Granite and much less crowded. By the time the seventies rolled around, the tourists began discovering the delights of Noosa, and a wider, much more permanent, track was established by the National Park authorities. By the time Travers Comet arrived, this track was even paved.
In 2123, there was no track at all. Everything was once again overgrown and impassable because everything man-made was destroyed by two giant tidal waves.
Gradually, over the decades, nature returned to its balanced state. The vegetation regrew and the ocean currents settled back to normal. The coastal current, running from south to north, brought the sand into the bays. This sand filled the gaps between the rocks and boulders, smoothing out the bottom and causing the waves to peel with pristine perfection.
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It was the morning of Monday, October 11, 2123, the day after all the kerfuffle over the arrival of the Americans. They arrived in a huge transporter ship and after scouting up and down the Noosa River, they decided to park their shipping container about a hundred yards up-river of the first settlement, roughly where Noosaville used to be.
Everyone was planning a big get-together to celebrate the Americans coming to Australia, but they decided to postpone the festivities until the group sailing up the coast arrived. That gave the Americans a little more time to establish their camp. They set up their tents, dug the latrines and prepared the fireplaces. To their delight they discovered an abundance of seafood there and fertile soil supremely suitable for growing anything one desired. The men collected firewood as well as fresh water from a nearby creek. They found the river water to be a tad too briny for drinking due to tidal influence. The river was much less salty than the ocean, however, and everyone had a swim and was delighted with the clarity and warmth of the water. Their first night was so pleasant that many of them slept under the stars.
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Slater and Thebe bobbed up and down on their surfboards waiting for a wave. They sat well inside the bay because the swell was only a couple of feet.
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Granite Bay had always been a swell magnet and almost mysteriously, while all the other points were flat as a lake, Granite sucked in the imperceptible energy, focussed it, and produced a perfect, two-to-three-foot peak that peeled off mechanically, for about fifty yards, across a shallow, underwater shelf.
They knew that the wave would not begin to break until about an hour before low tide and that it would only break for a couple of hours at best.
Parked, levitating a foot above the tiny beach located half way out along the point, not more than twenty yards from where they waited to catch a wave, was their open-topped saucer. A number of these saucers had been brought over from Rama, in some of the larger space ships, during the time just prior to the arrival of the time shifters.
Slater and Thebe had been surfing for about half an hour, and each of them had ridden a few pleasant waves, when they noticed a boat, with two red sails, come gliding around the point. They could make out four people on board.
‘I think it’s the people we’ve been waiting for,’ said Thebe as she waved.
They noticed the boat’s jib furl in and one of the crew attend to dropping the mainsail. They observed another crew make their way to the bow and get ready the anchor. They then noticed the boat turn in their direction and silently glide towards them.
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They watched the boat glide to within about a hundred feet of them and drop anchor. They decided to paddle over and say hello to the crew. As they approached, they noticed the word Mecca neatly painted on the stern.
‘Ahoy there in the water,’ Lloyd called out cheerfully.
‘Hello,’ responded Thebe, ‘we’ve been expecting you. How was your journey?’
‘Full of surprises,’ said Lloyd. ‘Would you like to come aboard and have a cold drink?’
Thebe and Slater were helped aboard from the stern. They tied their legropes to the pushpit as they left their surfboards floating upside down so the wax wouldn’t melt in the hot sun.
Everyone introduced themselves to everyone else.
‘Ben told us you were coming,’ said Thebe accepting a glass of cold water from Eva.
‘He told us that he met you in Sydney Harbour.’
‘Yes,’ replied Lloyd. ‘The craziest thing about it was that he met us with his dad, Adam, who I had known way back in our university days. The encounter was positively surreal let me tell you.’
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‘On many levels,’ added Alex.
Sophia handed a glass of cold water to Slater. He took it and thanked her.
‘As we understand it, you are establishing a settlement in Noosa,’ said Lloyd.
‘Yes,’ replied Thebe, ‘it is our favourite place. This bay,’ she panned around with her arm, ‘is one of the reasons it makes it so.’
The Mecca foursome looked around Granite Bay for the first time in their lives. In that moment they experienced a strange feeling, a sensation not unlike dreaming. They thought they felt a mother, a huge mother, as huge as the whole bay, wrap her enormous arms around them and welcome them there in a loving embrace.
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They talked for over an hour. During that time, Adam, Ambriel and Ben flew over from the settlement. Ben and his mother flew in their levitation suits, while Adam used his lev-pack.
To the Mecca crew, the sight of them flying over the hill into the bay looked like something out of Superman. Even though they were fairly-substantially exposed to gravity flight back in Watson’s Bay and Pittwater, they nonetheless still experienced a mild, surrealistic mind spin when they saw it.
‘It just doesn’t compute in my brain,’ said Lloyd.
Sophia didn’t seem to have any such problems.
Nine people on board the compact sloop turned out to be quite a squeeze. Adam kicked off the conversation.
‘Let’s see if I can remember. I know Lloyd and Eva, and you are, er, Alex, and this lovely creature is, er, don’t tell me, don’t tell me … Sophia?’
‘You have the memory of an elephant,’ said Sophia.
‘Not bad for an old basket,’ said Ben.
‘I know what he really means by old basket,’ said Adam having a laugh.
Ben turned to Slater and asked him the oldest question in surfing.
‘Get any?’
Slater gave him the oldest answer.
‘A couple.’
‘What a splendid place this is,’ said Lloyd, referring to the bay.
‘Wait till you see the rest of it,’ said Adam.
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‘The tide is still a bit low for crossing the bar,’ said Ben. ‘About four hours and it’ll be good, and it’s as flat as a tack over there. It’ll take you about half an hour to get to the river mouth. You can see it from here.’
Ben pointed westward towards the river mouth. Lloyd picked up his binoculars and had a look. ‘I see it,’ he said. ‘It looks completely calm.’ He put the binoculars down and suggested, ‘You know, Ben, you are most welcome to ride on board with us if you wish.’
‘I might just take you up on that,’ replied Ben.
Alex asked Slater about the saucer parked above the small beach half way out along the point.
‘A few were brought over from Rama,’ said Slater. ‘Unfortunately for you, they are all telepathically controlled.’
Ben chimed in, ‘My step-uncle, Zeke, who also built dad’s lev-pack, has built a manual saucer, with hand controls, that is suitable for non-telepaths.’
‘We met Zeke in Pittwater,’ said Lloyd ‘He brought us the gravity sail that he designed for Mecca.’
‘I have actually had a short flight in that saucer,’ said Adam. ‘You can all pick his brain about it yourselves because he is here in Noosa, although I think that he’s popped off to Rama with Iapetus for a few hours to pick something up.’
‘Before Zeke came to Rama,’ said Ambriel, ‘there was no interest in developing non-telepathic levitation devices. But he changed all that. He is a constant frenzy of design and invention.’
‘He’s always been like that,’ said Adam.
Adam looked at Ben and pointed at the small beach, ‘That little beach is where you picked me up.’
‘That’s true,’ said Ben nostalgically. ‘It’s hard to believe that it was over a hundred years ago.’
‘We never got time shifted,’ explained Adam. ‘We spent the century living on Rama.’
Not long after, Adam and Ambriel returned to the settlement by the river, Slater and Thebe resumed their surfing while Ben stayed on board and kept company with the crew.
A few hours later, they set off for the Noosa River Mouth to catch the high tide for the bar crossing.
…….
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