While I Can Still Remember: Norfolk Island

By Lyn Duclos and Zozie Brown

While I Can Still Remember is the story of Norfolk Island. This work of historical fiction begins with a prologue that introduces a monolithic Norfolk Island pine at its ‘birth’ as a seed over 650 years ago. The story then takes us to the present where the old tree – Lone Pine – has always stood on a limestone cl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piland Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780975780428

Lyn Duclos

'Shattered Reflections' is Lyn's first published book. This second edition has been published in response to many requests to make it available again. In the meantime, her recently-released historical fiction for children, 'While I Can Still Remember...Norfolk Island', is being enjoyed by children and adults alike. Lyn has also taught creative writing to adults and facilitated children's writing workshops for her local council. Mother of Andrés and Pilar, Lyn lives in a beachside suburb of Melbourne, writing full time and travelling. Readers can find more information about her other books at www.lynduclos.com.au & on Facebook.

Book preview

Prologue

Mid 1300s – Norfolk Island

It was the muffled creaking, cracking sounds that woke him. He was confused and frightened – because he had no memories – so he had nothing to compare them with. He couldn’t see, either, and he was bound so tightly that it was impossible to move even a bit.

He sensed movement surrounding him, a sort-of ‘letting go’, but had no understanding yet. He heard a pop, a crackle – closer now, louder now. What was happening?

There was a fearful murmuring on both sides of him, faintly piercing his bindings. A shuffling where the murmuring came from made him want to move, to murmur as well.

He felt a comforting presence that he sensed had been holding him, but that hold was less firm now.

As the crackling became louder, there was less pressure on top of him – a gradual release. He felt himself swelling as something light filled the new-found space around him. It flowed around him pleasurably, allowing him to unfurl his bindings, to discover the sensation of stretching, to begin to feel his substance.

Suddenly there was nothing above him.

Just like that, Number Eleven was airborne. His wings spread out to accept the support of the breeze that carried him away from the mother cone. Now he could see through the thin capsule that protected him, this ‘Number Eleven’ seed, as he began to store his first memories.

He was one of many being held skyward – quivering, fluttering, soaring – at the will of rising thermals. Other seeds fell straight from the mother cone, the breeze busy elsewhere, far far to the ground where they landed with a soft plop on the forest floor, settling amongst the debris.

Number Eleven caught sight of the mother cone as he tumbled on the thermal. Somehow he knew it was his mother cone amongst many others on branches of the enormous structure that throbbed and surged above the forest canopy. A feeling of regret might have crossed his mind but was lost as he slammed against another structure, thrashed amongst fingers of green, then ripped away to sail onwards, away from the mother cone.

Murmuring seeds fluttered by him, gathering their own memories, responding to this new-found world of theirs. It was not so much with a sense of wonder at this spectacle spread out amongst them, as they had nothing to compare it with, but, rather, absorbing it all.

The thermal carried Number Eleven with two others. They murmured their names to him: Number Forty-two and Number Forty-three; he responded with his own. But how did they know their numbers? An instinct carried in their genes and passed on by the mother cone.

And so they came to the heaving, blue-green ocean as they descended. If the wind had not whipped into the frenzy of a storm, had not hurled them back to the edges of the forest from where they had come, had not lost interest in them and let go, they would have floated for a while on the white-capped waves and become less than a memory as the ocean claimed them.

Number Eleven landed on the forest floor and waited for something that he sensed must take place. The alternate warmth of the bright disc in the sky and the cool quiet of the crescent light in the darkness accompanied changes in his body. There was a leisurely lengthening at the end of him. A pleasant sensation. A sense of purpose.

One day his spur broke through the capsule and pointed downward at the recently-moist forest floor. The warmth of the bright disc slanted onto Number Eleven each day, encouraging the spur to grow and anchor the seed into the earth. He felt a strength surge into him from the soil through the spur, and the capsule rose in dazzling fingers of light from the sky, drawn upwards until it stood proudly erect. And, so, he discarded the capsule as the first vibrant green shoots emerged from it, and now Number Eleven became a seedling.

He observed his four green leaves that pointed to each corner of the earth. Their faint ridges caught the dappled light on the forest floor. Now that he was erect, he took stock of his surroundings: a chaos of dried brown leaves fallen from the parent tree; unopened seed capsules doomed to silence; capsules split in two, their bellies drying; spurs straggling to grasp the earth as their capsules waited to rise; others like him, also upright, nodding slightly in the playful wind.

Not far from him, Number Forty-two and Number Forty-three murmured their delight at seeing him again. A feeling that he would later recognise as friendship seeped through him. His thread-like roots sprouted and pushed into the earth, gaining purchase as he reached towards the seedlings. His journey, like theirs, surged toward the sky as they gained new growth: a tiny central green bud, awl-shaped incurved leaves shooting, slender branches lengthening, separating,