Member-only story
On Near-Death Experiences…
Sometimes how you travel through life is greatly shaped by those moments when it got close to ending.
I’m about 9 years old playing in the sand dunes down at the 90 mile beach near Woodside. I’m with my uncle Jim, his mate John and John’s two kids. The men are surf fishing with big home-made bamboo rods laden with star sinkers that allow them to cast deep beyond the pounding surf. Us kids are playing a kind of tag where getting ‘tagged’ requires chucking a hard gum nut at your opponent and hitting them.
There’s a well used walking track from the car park, and I’m crawling up a sand dune alongside it to try and surprise my mates who got 1 minute to run and hide. The sun is setting on the other side of the sand dune. I pause listening but can only hear the surf. Then I look straight ahead.
There’s a small hole directly in front of me, maybe 5 or so cm wide. The sun reflecting off my face is bouncing slightly into the hole. My face is maybe 10cm from the hole.
The hole is completely black except that I can see two small dark reddish ‘diamonds’ in the hole. I’m perfectly still and I look intently at those diamonds for a long time wondering what they are. I don’t reach for the diamonds. Instead I wander back to my uncle busy wrestling his surf rod and tell him about my discovery.
He swats me across the shoulder, calling me an idiot (in what is a caring swipe) and tells John who goes and gets a shotgun.
My uncle was a big man, 6.5 and the head of the snake, an eastern brown, touched the sand as my uncle held his arm straight out. The middle of the snake was thicker than my scrawny 9 year old arms. Near death: 10cm.
I’m about 10 years old and my father is in a drunken rage in the lounge room abusing my mother. I come out of my bedroom and try to stand between them. I’m dragged by my hair out the backdoor to the garden shed. Then I’m dragged back inside, only now I’m soaked in petrol. My eyes are stinging and I’m on my knees, my father is ripping at my hair to hold me down. He’s screaming at my mother ‘I’ll fucken burn him, I’ll fucken burn him’. I hear my mum…
