Writer
It’s a wild place, my place.
The beach changes its mind at least four times each day. My eyes walk from my house to the sea, and the sand is never the same twice. One day it throws prickles and greying moondust, the next crunching salt and quicksand. Sometimes smooth, sometimes rippled, seabeds peel a kilometre out to sea.
The Styx is set in and around Queensland’s vast Great Basalt Wall National Park, a natural stone labyrinth of lush remoteness. In the dry season, the basalt maze confuses, taunts your sense of direction. In the wet, it’s easier. You can swim from basalt ridge to ridge, snacking on wild fruit as you climb out of one channel of black ink, before slipping into the next.
The channels are deep, but you try not to touch the bottom and you certainly don’t look down. You try not to look down because the water is so black: not muddy black, but black from its depth and black from its basalt lining. At each rise, you emerge swiftly, hoping that the thing that touched you was your imagination.