Chapter Five: Ursula's Cleavage
Two years before the Queensland territories (then still part of New South Wales) were availed to free settlement, 1840 unofficially claimed township in its titular year. This was six months after the closure of the "Queensland penal colony"; resident convicts were shipped to Sydney or Port Arthur on Van Diemen's Land; British families were incentivised to leave the soft green pastures of home, face the harrowing voyage across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and strike fortune or subsistence living in the flat, dry plains of Australia's northern frontier.
While the future city of Brisbane still bore its Scottish-hybrid "Edenglassie", eager men with homesick, often pregnant wives and obedient children took to weathered buggies, packed with food-stock, guns and ammunition. Travailing the harsh, unpredictable country - usually with the help of a trusted if illiterate "blackie" for guidance – they would seek out land for farming, build their homesteads and begin a largely thankless life of cattle-herding, wool production or crop growing, shipping their produce to whichever port towns then held interested merchants.
1840 never itself served as a production town. Too far north of Brisbane, blockaded behind the gargantuan shelf of the Great Barrier Reef, it never aspired towards any mercantilism.
Instead its focus was domestic security. As it grew into a coastal "white man's haven" - a sanctuary for nearby farmers unable to fend off "indigenous harassment" - it established a localised fishing market that fed right back into the community. Wild poultry, until over-hunted, proved another efficacious source for foragers. 1840 contented itself with becoming a quiet little fishing town, was granted official recognition by Her Majesty in 1863 and remained, until the present day, a mere date upon more detailed maps of Australia's most northern-reaching state.
Leave it to the locals then, to take matters upon themselves when somebody, once flying over the township, noticed something peculiar about its smattering of lagoon islands.
In amongst countless smaller spots of naked rock - little protrusions from the ocean you could hardly stand five people on – two larger, strangely near-symmetrical islands sat adjacent to each other, shaped like tear drops. Or, if you noted the rocky southern tips of each – "and let's not forget the voluptuous streak of coral reef that snakes between them," quoth a local in the Townsville Bulletin, using his big words – the two islands, themselves nameless, "kind of look like a big giant pair of women's titties".
Hence the name given the bay containing the historically Lutheran 1840, the shallow bowl of lesser reef kept secret due to the prestige of its World Heritage neighbour and the breast-shaped off-shore islands, was the democratically voted Ursula's Cleavage. "Ursula," explains our Bulletin friend, "because of the hottie in the original James Bond. The one who comes out of the waves in a bikini, holding seashells, singing Under the Mango Tree. Cleavage because it actually sorta sounds like it doesn't mean what it really does. Like it could really be a place name or something. Like how people sometimes call a place something junction or, I don't know, that kind of thing ...
We wasn't gonna call it Ursula's Tits, were we?
That would have just been tasteless.
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Graceful Abaddon
General FictionAs something of a refuge when I hit writers block with my novel, 'Pluto Belt', this book is a very large collection of short stories and novellas which I am writing at the same time. Some are short, most are long, but I hope each of them has somethi...
