Blood Secret by Jaye Ford Page B

drive from the main street and you were in hushed bushland that felt like an eternity from anywhere.
    It was the first place Max had taken her. Not on a date – he’d just convinced her it was sacrilegious to live in Haven Bay and not walk through it at least once. She’d only been here a month and it’d sounded like a line but she went because she wanted to know what it was like to be a local.
    He parked up near the ridge where the tarred road ended and they walked the rutted tracks as far as they went, then the foot trails that led to the top of the hill. Clumps of long native grasses crowded the path so she could barely distinguish its beaten earth. ‘If you see a snake, just stand still,’ Max had called back to her and she’d almost turned and left him to it. At the highest point, he’d spread his arms and cried, ‘Isn’t great?’ It just looked like a bunch of bush to her and she wondered if his Steve Irwin-style enthusiasm was an act for the new girl in town.
    Then he led her off the trail through the tangle of scrub to a huge, flat rock ledge at the top of a steep drop on the south side of the finger. Down below was Garrigurrang Point Road and rocks and the shore, but he stretched an arm out towards the rippling, watery, deep green expanse that lay in front of them, told her the Awabakal people had stood right there, looking out to the long neck of channel on the opposite side that led to the mouth of the lake and the ocean beyond it. They’d called it Garrigurrang, meaning ‘the sea’.
    Not that Rennie had seen the ocean. After fifty years of conservation, the native growth was too thick for a clear view. Although, the enormous guns that had stood up here during World War II were testament to the vantage point it had offered back then. The gun emplacements were next on Max’s tour: five sunken, circular, concrete pads where the weapons had sat, spread out in the bush like the footsteps of a giant elephant.
    He showed her the dark, hollow cubes of concrete underneath that were the bunkers and ammunitions storage, explained how he and James and the other local kids had used the anti-aircraft command centre as a playground. During the war, it’d been manned day and night to protect the seaplane base on the other side of the bay from the feared Japanese invasion. According to Max, the abandoned structure had later made an excellent fort, warship, dungeon and cubbyhouse.
    He’d shown her the hawk’s nest and the resident mother and baby koalas and the almost vertical short cut down to the road, pointing out the rock halfway down where he and James had carved their initials, back when they were too young to understand the concept of ‘leave only footprints, take only photos’.
    She’d realised well before they were back at the car that his enthusiasm wasn’t an act. Max knew every square metre of the bay and the point and all that lay in between. The whole place had been one big backyard for him growing up. He loved it, had never lived anywhere else, couldn’t fathom what Leanne had wanted to escape from. It hadn’t taken much to talk Rennie around to its charms, although she didn’t have his passion – only Max could pull that off without sounding like a nutcase. In five years, the place had managed to burrow its way through the stone wall of her heart like no other place had in her nomadic life.
    After the night her mother had fled with Rennie and her sister, twelve months anywhere was a long stay. Pursuit and fear kept them on the move for years and ‘home’ was whatever caravan, on-site cabin or dingy flat they stored their backpacks in. Later, after her mother was dead and her father was serving his first sentence, Joanne upheld the rules, finding new schools, new jobs, new towns every six months or so. They never became attached – to places or people. They weren’t staying; there was no point. When