“The island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
Thirty years ago there were paddocks of cattle cane, low lying bottle brush bushes, rice flowers & shy marsh orchids flowering in the cool, damp places & it was all ours: the sea; the sky; the wild birds & the paddymelons that came & went along the shoreline. We fell in love.
My great~grandmother was a Skye woman; islands are in the blood. They are the last sanctuaries of a slower way of life. Quite simply there isn't room for all that high rise hustle & bustle. Where would we put it? Out on those blocks the shyster's sold to the gullible that disappear @ high tide?
Just the same, even islands change, even ones as small as ours. After the Brisbane floods of 2011 someone thought it was a good idea to move Woodridge & Inala onto the islands but they had no money & nowhere to go & as a social experiment it was a dismal failure. Different people came. The school became a normal sized school instead of the one room, two teacher entity it was when we arrived. Our dirt road is cement now. We have neighbours. They are sprouting like weeds in the scrubby paddocks, a house here, a house there, until all the yards join up & the curlews have nowhere left to go.
We bought our land for a $10 deposit we borrowed from the real estate man & we moved onto it with a 25' caravan & three children under 3. We had no water. No electricity. No plumbing. All our worldly goods were stacked to the roof of the caravan & the evening we arrived the drought broke. It rained solidly for the next month. Everyone got sick. You wouldn't be allowed to do it now but back then it was different. Those that couldn't hack it promptly departed. We stayed.