TICKY-TOCK TIME TRAVELLER

Matter cannot be destroyed, or disappear, even when earth becomes a solid, desiccated, dead lump of rock hurtling through time and space, impacting with another space travelling body.

Matter, converted to energy, in a cataclysmic event to witness.

We time travellers have been pondering this issue for eons. Will we still exist? Will the cycle start over again and we pop up on another planet and if so, to whose benefit? In a physical sense we are all ‘matter’ and technically should still exist somewhere in space and time regardless of shape and form.

Fifty years ago I became a time traveller and even though earth may not exist as a planet in the unforeseeable future, I’d like to think I will still be – something – somewhere, in space and time.

Whatever form that something might be is currently before the everlasting Grand Master of Time to decide. The last time I was in his office he was reading a book about dinosaurs. I shuddered, roared and looked away.

However, man has been building houses, towns and cities on unseen sub-surface geological fault lines forever and earthquakes, tidal waves, tsunamis, and volcanos have hovered as the unseen threat. The most recent seismic-slip under Turkey and Syria is but one example.

Santorini is the earliest I’ve been to in 1630 BC and Pompeii in 79AD. These two places have been my most interesting romps through space and time. However as a Time Traveller I was at neither place during the actual eruptions. The further back in time one goes, the longer time-travel takes us.

The speed of light is 300,000 km per second and for us Time Travellers, that’s as fast as we can hope for. My Twatch equates each 100 years to be about 4 minutes. Whilst I could not have countered the incredible forces of nature involved in those two volcanic events, or the methane that killed most of the 2000 soles in Pompeii, I did save a bloke called Pliny the Younger and his mother. Got them on to a fishing boat. She was a bit intense. Tried to drag me over the side of the boat with her. A good chance to polish up my Italian, she implored.

Another issue is that the Grand Master of Time (GMT) just doesn’t give us sufficient notice. For example, I was in Aldi wrangling a new bar fridge onto my trolley when GMT sent the message about Türkiye. Türkiye? Where in the world is that place? Initially I thought Ukraine, but by the time it took me to pass through Aldi checkout I was too late!

There is just so much we Time Travellers can do. Like my attempt to navigate the SS Titanic through ‘iceberg alley’ off Newfoundland. I was there in time, and on the bridge, pointing and waving, shouting even, but two big sailors strong-armed me back down to the party in the Captain’s Lounge. I blame that failed attempt on the paper streamers hanging around my neck and that silly party hat on my head. That was a classic blunder.

After that I tried to give ships a big pass for cold water interferes with my sinuses. Mustn’t grumble. It was my constant sneezing that enabled the life boat crew to find me on that cold, dark titanic night.

GMT gave me a shellacking over that effort. But I did save a fisherman on Fraser Island from being swept out to sea one night.

There I was, on the beach, minding my own business catching tailor, when this bloke wanders out of the darkness to check what bait I was using. Ascertain why I was catching fish and he wasn’t. I didn’t know he was there, and he shouldn’t have been, not in that wild surf with waves washing right up the beach. To fish in such conditions you must be experienced. I tried to give him a quick lesson. Except he wasn’t agile enough in his too-big, too floppy-footed waders. Knocked flat by a wave, waders fill with water, and he’s heading for Hawaii.

I flicked my line out over him and reeled back in quickly, jerking my rod tip to sink the hooks. Luckily the 5 big 7/0 hooks jagged him right across his buttocks. Some blokes just don’t want to be saved. The screaming, yelling, kicking and cursing was insane as I pulled him back up the beach feet first to allow the water to drain from his waders. Getting the hooks out … well that was more than awkward. And he never did give me back my hooks, or thank me.

GMT claimed it was a lucky cast, not a genuine Time Travel event. Every Time Traveller fisherman I know would want to be on Fraser Island fishing if he could also save a life. Unreasonable attitude and I said so. GMT limited my ‘go-back’ time travel to 200 years after that.

When Time Travel business is quiet, GMT gives us better performing Time Travellers an opportunity to free-lance. Do our own thing.

It wasn’t a major event, cyclone season in Cooktown. Only 8 lives involved, and boats again, and I don’t like boats, but it was my grandfather Pehr Österlund this time. My mother’s father, Harbour Master and Pilot in Cooktown. I only had to go back to 1907. Should take me about 4 minutes.

Pehr Österlund immigrated to Australia from Sweden in 1885 and worked for Harbours and Marine as a marine pilot. He met and married Irish immigrant Ellen Lowther in Maryborough. Together they had 10 children. My mother was number 5, and 11 years old in 1907. Mum didn’t know in her lifetime that I was a Time Traveller and that’s sad. She’d grieved for her father her whole life and named me Peter after him. Obviously I was her favourite son.

Four minutes is up, so back to the story.

I set my Twatch for 29th January 1907, said the magic words (which I can’t put in print) pushed the play button and zippo there I was, on Cooktown’s hot dusty main street, trodden before me by countless gold miners trudging 200 km, wharf to the Palmer River diggings.

It was early morning, hot, humid and still. The painted band of clouds stretching across the sky heralded a blow. I knew where I was going. Dodging a plodding horse and cart I headed for the wharves. Government sailing ketch ‘Pilot’ laying alongside. Captain Pehr Österlund standing there, calm as a duck on a pond, puffing on his pipe, occasionally looking towards the heavens then tapping a new barometer affixed to the cabin bulkhead.

‘G’day. Looks like a blow coming,’ startled, he turns, looks down his long nose, assessing me.

He doesn’t remove his pipe, ‘Umm. Glass be dropping.’ Soft, melodic voice.

‘Ya not going out, are ya?’ Nasal Aussie accent.

A school of bait fish erupt from the fast making tide. A swallowed grunt from swirling water told me a barramundi has just had breakfast. We both saw it and Pehr turns to face me.

‘Who might you be? Clothes say not local.’

‘Just a traveller from out of town related to a crew member.’

‘That so? Well, I don’t want to go, but employer say yes.’

‘Don’t go. Listen to your own better counsel.’

‘That so now?’ pointing his pipe stem over my shoulder, ‘Well you tell that to MLA Hargraves Esquire, Minister for Harbours and Marine, and Mining. He be leaving his office now.’

A fussy little man steps from the hardware store doorway and scurries along the street, kicking up dust with every step. I won’t bore you with the details, but needless to say Hargraves was in no mood for me, ordering me off his Government property wharf. His wharf? That’s what he said. I looked at a heavily trimmed tree to which ‘Pilot’s’ fore line was attached.

‘I believe Cook tied his ship Endeavour to that tree in 1770. He was a sailor and I’ll bet if he was here now he’d agree with me.’

An electric shock could not have had more effect on Hargraves. He turned on me with venom. I heard him out. Pehr said nothing.

‘A cyclone that you call a circular storm is building and it will hit tonight. The good Captain says his barometer is dropping. Sir, you own the hardware store and sales are down since gold petered out a few years ago. The silica sand deposits you want to lay claim to and capitalise upon, won’t help you – not when you’re dead. Please don’t go out tonight.’

A redder face I’ve never seen. Hargraves was furious and screamed such vitriol my grandmother whom I’d never seen, strode down from the Harbour Master’s home on the side of Grassy Hill to see what the ruction was about.

Hands thrust deep in pockets and puffing on his pipe, Pehr regarded me with a mixture of interest and wonder. His benign smile under bushy moustache said more than words.

Of course I couldn’t tell them to which crew member I was related, or that tonight would be the worst night in the lives of Cooktown residents. They all looked up at the threatening sky and it was at that precise second my time expired. I was gone. Gone before I had achieved more than heap more worry upon my troubled grandparents.

Pehr did sail with 6 crew and Hargraves. The un-named cyclone did arrive as history shows. It blew for 36 hours, devastating the town and wrecking the sailing vessel ‘Pilot’. Eight lives lost that night. The smashed wreck, submerged at Twin Islands was stripped bare of bodies and gear and not found for over a month. Not so much as a talisman found.

That cyclone is one of only two cyclones to end in South Australia in recorded history. The second one came from Karratha in W.A. in early 2000.

I’m still a Time Traveller. Love going to places in the past, but our wages of two ‘intergalactic ticky-tocks’ per hour is pathetic and Aldi refuses to take them.

Oops! Message on my Twatch from GMT. ‘Go to …’