The Tree and the Serpent

He stepped out into the washed-out light of a winter afternoon, boots sinking into black, rain-softened earth. The kind that clung to your soles and didn’t let go. Behind him, the bush whispered, not with wind, but with memory. Damp eucalypt, distant crows, the smell of wood rot and something older beneath it.

The others were gone. Lost, maybe. Or had he left them?

Three days, I muttered. Three bloody days, and not a soul in sight.

He had come inland with maps and a rifle, a man tasked with “opening up” country for a settler’s road.. though no one ever asked who it belonged to in the first place. His orders were to chart the land and mark anything “significant,” which usually meant trees too wide to cut, or creeks that hadn’t dried up yet.

He’d never given much thought to the indigenous that still moved through these parts. Not until he’d found one watching him from a ridgeline weeks ago, silent and unmoving, like carved stone. He remembered scoffing.

Always skulking, I thought. Like shadows that forgot how to speak.

Truth be told, he didn’t think of them as much more than ghosts.

Clinging to land they refused to use properly. Wild things in a wild place.

But now, alone in the soaked silence, the land felt less like something he could chart and more like something that was charting him.

He paused to wipe the rain from his face, but it made no difference. Everything was damp. The weight of his coat. The pages of his notebook. Even the bullets in his pouch felt swollen. The cold here didn’t bite, it soaked. In the bones, in the breath.

Somewhere ahead, through a veil of drizzle and thin trees, he saw a trail of smoke curling skyward. It rose too clean, too still, as if it had always been there and he was only now allowed to see it.

He turned toward it. Rifle slung. Fingers tense.

I didn’t know it then, but the bush was already leading me somewhere I couldn’t map. Somewhere no whitefella compass could follow.

And the worst part?

Part of me wanted to go.

He pushed through a curtain of soaked scrub, branches slapping wet against his coat, until the smoke revealed its source. A low fire, crackling in defiance of the drizzle, circled by three figures.

Blackfellas.

Two stood, spears upright, still as fenceposts. The third sat cross-legged by the fire, unmoving, eyes closed. They hadn’t built a hut. No horses. No food or baggage. Just the fire, the rain, and the smell of burning greenwood.

He froze. His instincts flared, caution first, then suspicion, then the old, sharpened thing they’d taught him in Albany:

They don’t like us here. They don’t think the land is ours.

The tallest of them opened his eyes. He didn’t flinch, didn’t reach for a weapon. Just looked at him. Not with fear. Not with anger. Just… recognition. Like he’d been waiting.

The other two shifted slightly, their bare feet silent in the wet earth.

What are you doing here?

He barked.

This isn’t your camp. This land’s been claimed. Chartered.

The man said nothing. Just tilted his head, like a wedge-tailed eagle studying something broken on the ground.

I said-

One of the younger ones stepped forward, spear half-lowered. Too fast. Edward raised the rifle.

Back off!

The fire popped, as if startled. Smoke thickened. The spear stilled in the man’s hand.

“You don’t want to do this,” said the one by the fire. His voice was low. Calm. Strange accent, but clear.

“You’re already on the other side.”

His finger tightened on the trigger. Rain slid down the rifle barrel. His breath steamed.

And then-nothing happened.

No charge. No attack.

No shot fired.

What’s happening I thought…

The young warrior stepped back. The seated man simply closed his eyes again, as if he’d never spoken. The moment passed like thunder without rain.

The colonist stood there shaking, anger leaking out of him like steam from wet kindling. He lowered the rifle. His hands ached.

He turned away.

But the bush had changed.

The ground underfoot felt warm. Not muddy anymore, but dry and firm, like sun-baked clay. The air smelled of fire but not smoke. Light filtered through the canopy in golden shafts, though the sky above was still heavy with cloud. Rain fell, but it never reached the ground.

Somewhere nearby, he heard the cry of a bird he didn’t recognize, long and deep, like it was calling him by name.

I should’ve run. Should’ve gone back. But my legs kept moving.

And the more I walked, the less I knew where I’d come from. The trees had shifted, but it was still somehow the same. But also completely different.

Where before they were grey gums and paperbarks, now their trunks twisted like ropes, bark dark with age, branches arched like ribs over a path that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t remember walking. The ground was firm now, no mud, no rain, just dry red dirt and leaf litter that crunched beneath his boots without sound.

Birdsong echoed, slow and deliberate. One long note, followed by silence. Then again.

Up ahead, a figure moved.

Not the men from before, no. This one walked differently. Unhurried. Barefoot. Draped in a possum-skin cloak, one hand dragging a long stick behind him, leaving a groove in the dirt. Kangaroo Paws sprouting almost instantly in the trail left behind. He didn’t look back.

“Wait!” I called. “Where am I?”

I had no idea how those flowers sprouted so quickly..

The man in possum skins said nothing. Just walked on, cloak rippling as if moved by wind that the foreigner couldn’t feel.

So he followed. Of course he did. Not that he wanted to, but because there was no longer a choice. The bush had closed behind him, folding its arms.

They came to a clearing.

At its centre stood a scar tree. A towering marri with a wide vertical wound. The bark had been carved away generations ago, clean and purposeful, now blackened with age. At its base, a fire burned in a perfect circle of white ash. No smoke. No heat. The figure stood beside it.

“This place,” the man said, finally. His voice was soft, but deep, like it had been echoing for a thousand years. “You call it nothing. We call it everything.”

The trespasser swallowed. The rifle on his back felt heavier than ever.

You… live here? I asked.

“We remember here,” the man replied, placing a hand against the tree. “We don’t live in just one place. One time. You walk forward. We walk through.”

A wind moved through the clearing, hot, sudden, and the fire flared. Flames jumped, twisted, then flickered images into the air.

I saw things. Beautiful. Horrifying

The rivers flowing, father and child catching fish.

Songs around a campfire. A mothers smile.

Walkabouts. Coming of age.

People being moved. Marched. Beaten.

A girl hiding in the long grass with a baby.

Men in red coats laughing around a smoking barrel.

One of them… Him?… holding a map, pointing. Ordering.

No.

He whispered.

That wasn’t me.

The wiseman looked at him now. Not angry. Just tired.

“Then why do you carry it with you?”

The surveyor turned, reached for his rifle slung over his shoulders. Watched as it turned to ash in his hands. A puff of white dust trailed into the wind.

He dropped to his knees, the firelight dancing in his eyes. Around him, the bush shimmered. Every tree had eyes. Every bird called his name. Or maybe someone else’s?

A breath passed through the land. The kind you feel more than hear.

Am I dreaming? I asked

The man gave the slightest smile. “No.”

Then everything folded. Not collapsed, folded. Like paper in a breeze.

Darkness fell. And when he opened his eyes, the fire was out. The man was gone.

But the scar tree remained.

The scar tree trembled.

Not from wind, there was none, but from something deeper, like the land itself had taken a breath and was holding it, waiting.

A sound rose beneath his feet. Low at first, then rising, a rumble like distant thunder, or a flood roaring through a gully. The ground pulsed. The fire’s ashes began to shift, spiralling outward in perfect circles. In their centre, something stirred.

The dirt cracked open, not violently, but as if it had always held this thing, and now simply stepped aside to let it rise.

From the earth, a shape emerged.

Long. Coiled. Iridescent even in the gloom.

Scales of ochre and deep green shimmered beneath translucent skin. Eyes like dark opals opened slowly, fixed not on the tree, or the fire, or the sky.. but on him.

The Waagal.

He didn’t know the name, but he knew the being. It was the riverbed and the flood. The arc of the hills and the curl of smoke. It had no mouth, but it spoke.

You’ve seen enough.

He fell to his knees. Not out of fear, though he was afraid, but from the sheer weight of knowing.

You will go back. But you won’t return.

And then the world shifted again, this time like waking from deep sleep. A blink. A gasp.

He opened his eyes beneath a grey sky.

The fire was gone. The scar tree stood the same, but smaller now, less ancient, more ordinary. Damp again. The smell of rain hung in the air.

He touched his coat. Wet. Heavy.

The rifle lay beside him, rusted along the barrel. His notebook, tucked into his coat, was soaked, but one page, miraculously dry, held a crude drawing in ash.

A scarred tree at its centre.

A great serpent coiled around it, spiraling downward. And beneath, a lone figure, small, engulfed, out of place. A figure that didn’t belong.

I couldn’t stop staring at the drawing..

He stood. The bush around him was silent, indifferent. No footprints. No smoke.

He didn’t know how much time had passed. A day? A week?

The compass in his pocket spun slowly, refusing to settle.

He never found the others. Never finished the road. The land swallowed his maps.

So I walked. I don’t know where I was going. But I walked.

And when they found his journal years later, tucked in the hollow of a tree near a dried-up creekbed, it ended with one line:

I think I woke up. But I don’t think I ever came back.