Book – Everything is Water

Author: Simon ClearyPublisher: UQPReviewer: Stephen Keim

Everything is Water (“Water”) is Simon Cleary’s fourth published book. His earlier three books, The Comfort of Figs, Closer to Stone and The War Artist are novels. Water is non-fiction and documents Cleary’s 27 day journey from, arguably, the source of the Brisbane River to its mouth. Mainly slogging it on foot, broken only by a pleasant and speedy canoe ride, with a boat trip from the city to Moreton Bay at the end, Cleary endured a harrowing month achieving his ambition of exploring the unexpected complexity that lies beneath what is lifelong familiar.

Cleary, whose father was the Cleary of the extremely respected Toowoomba law firm, Cleary and Lee, grew up in Toowoomba; spent lost childhood hours and days playing in the creeks that cascaded eastwards off the escarpment of the Toowoomba Range; and ventured, for various reasons, into neighbouring townships such as Helidon. Each of his novels have drawn upon Cleary’s childhood environs while also venturing far afield including, in the case of Closer to Stone, to the civil war torn Western Sahara.

Water falls into that pattern, involving a journey from a creek just like his childhood play haunts and whose waters form part of the same catchment and, guided by gravity and the fates, empty into the same waters of Moreton Bay. Familiarity is also found in the urban reaches of the river in that Cleary has lived, studied and worked in Brisbane for most of his life since starting university in the eighties.

Water, then, is a travel book. Travel books are a wonderful genre of non-fiction. The problem for the travel writer, however, is that the act of travelling, no matter how exciting the concept and the act of travelling, itself, is difficult to translate, in an interesting way, into three hundred pages or so of printed words.

Eric Hansen’s A Stranger in the Forest involved Hansen’s attempt to be the first person with a European heritage to walk across the mountainous island of Borneo. His journey involved thousands of kilometres on foot and seven months in sunless rainforest. An account of seven months of such struggle has a great capacity to be even less enjoyable to read than the journey, itself. The travel writer must, therefore, find ways to make the endlessly repetitious interesting. Hansen travelled with local Indigenous Penan people as his guides. One way in which Hansen entertained his readers was to tell the story of his shyness in joining his guides in their river shitting practices.

Every morning, the guides would undergo their daily personal hygiene by standing in the river, doing what was required, chatting as they did so. Hansen was torn between respecting his guides’ local custom and his own western shyness in sharing these daily moments. Hansen’s solution was found in gradualism. He started about two hundred metres upstream of his colleagues and, day by day, moved closer so that, eventually, he felt comfortable sharing a chat while he and his colleagues made themselves more comfortable for facing whatever challenges the forthcoming day brought. What reader could not enjoy travel adventure writing when such interesting anecdotes dilute the author’s description of his otherwise unremitting struggle?

Cleary was assisted in making Water fascinating by his misfortune in conducting his journey during the May flood rains which produced the second flood event for 2022. What had been planned as mainly a relatively easy walk on the edge of a relatively narrow running stream with ample dry ground on either side and an easy ability to rock hop from one side to the other to choose the best terrain turned into a logistical nightmare.      

Cleary and his walking companions were forced by the rising waters to the high banks of the stream where they found, variously, private property, head high weeds, dense lantana, continuous mud and, on one occasion close to impenetrable scrub as day by day challenges. What might have been the challenge of consistently walking 15-20 kilometres per day in passably good walking conditions gave way to a series of true mystery stories focussed upon whether Cleary would even make it to his planned bivouac location for that day. Sometimes, the mystery involved whether it was even worth setting out, that day, in the light of the barriers presented by the downstream flooding. Some days it was not worth setting out.

One of the most discouraging barriers to progress were the junctions of flooded tributaries with the main stream. In non-flooding conditions, the encounter with a tributary would be solved merely by crossing to the opposite bank. On a number of occasions, Cleary had to backtrack up the river to cross over at the last viable fording place. On other occasions, the only solution was to follow the creek upstream until it narrowed sufficiently to avail of a crossing. On one such occasion, the crossing was successful but not without a real risk of being swept away by the waters through which the walkers waded.

Even life threatening adventures, however, are insufficient, on their own, to maintain the reader’s interest in non-fiction writing. Cleary is aware that a tale of a journey needs more than the journey, itself. Cleary, to which his three novels attest, is a meticulous researcher. Water is as much the story of the Brisbane River and the country through which it flows as it is of Cleary’s journey along its course. Cleary’s research involved many hours in the library. It also involved many hours contacting and communicating with landowners whose properties adjoin the river.

The in-person research produced permission to cross private property. It also created friendships and offers of camping spots and accommodation for the journey. It also yielded folklore and yarns including, notably, a local Brisbane Valley variation on the tales that bushranger, Dan Kelly, survived the fire and escaped to live out his days, quietly, in anonymity and freedom.   

The scholarly research finds its way into Water in many different ways. The full title, Everything is Water is taken from Thales of Miletus and recalls a phase in Western philosophy in which answers to the nature of the universe question were being expressed in terms of underlying realities from which all matter was formed. Cleary, also, links his vision and finding of meaning of his river and other great rivers to the inspiration of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Cleary recognises with specificity the Indigenous owners of the land through which he walks and the river flows as well as recognising the colonial settler pioneers whose labour forged a means of living for the generations who followed them. Cleary notes the dispossession and dispersion of those same Indigenous owners by the colonial settler process and the massacres which were part and parcel of this process although, necessarily, Cleary’s treatment is less detailed than that found in David Marr’s Killing for Country, a text covering much of the same land traversed by Cleary’s journey.

Cleary also manages to relate the connections between John Clements Wickham (whose name is memorialised in a number of Brisbane Streets), Charles Darwin (whose name is memorialised in a northern Australian city) and the Galapagos tortoise who finally lived out its days at Australia Zoo. Wickham and Darwin were shipmates on the Beagle and it was Wickham who, as captain of that famous ship, on a later voyage in September, 1839, named Port Darwin for his former companion. The tortoise featured in a later interaction between the two men when Wickham had retired from the British Navy and had been appointed Police Magistrate of the Moreton Bay District.

As well as the struggles of getting from one spot to another, the many rich gems of the history of the land and people and Cleary’s observations of birds and mammals and plants, Water contains many of Cleary’s thoughts and speculations of the kind that four weeks of physical demands and limited human company are wont to produce. These are flagged early in a short statement by Cleary’s older son, Dominic, one of his early walking companions. Dominic said words to the effect that his father knew stuff and he should not be loath to share it with wider audiences. This was a bit unkind to a father who had already shared three well-researched and beautifully written novels with the wider world but family will always be family.

As if on cue, Cleary shares many of such stuff in Water, putatively, at least, in the form of his thoughts along the journey. What emerges in bits and pieces across the 320 pages is a philosophy of sorts. Cleary expresses wonderment at the workings of nature and the distances of space and time. He ponders the massive changes wrought by natural forces against a background of apparent unchanging fixity. Cleary admires the human capacity to love and be kind while, at the same time, he is saddened by humankind’s capacity for cruelty, rapine, murder and plunder. The despoliation of nature is an equal source of sadness revealed as it is in the evidence observed by Cleary at every point on the journey.

Cleary resists, however, a holier than thou stance of casting blame on others, recognising that many of the drastic changes to the river have been the source of benefits to him and his family as they live their suburban lives.

One lesson of Water is that we need journeys and time to ponder because finding a viable philosophy for life is neither an easy task nor ever a completed project.