Free Storm Boy by Colin Thiele

 
     
     
    S TORM BOY LIVED between the Coorong and the sea. His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other. They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles round the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible ruin of white water and spray. All day and all night they tumble and thunder. And when the wind rises it whips the sand up the beach and the white spray darts and writhes in the air like snakes of salt.
    Storm Boy lived with Hide-Away Tom, his father. Their home was a rough little humpy made of wood and brush and flattened sheets of iron from old tins. It had a dirt floor, two blurry bits of glass for windows, and a little crooked chimney made of stove pipes and wire. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, and it shivered when the great storms bent the sedges and shrieked through the bushes outside. But Storm Boy was happy there.
    Hide-Away was a quiet, lonely man. Years before, when Storm Boy’s mother had died, he had left Adelaide and gone to live like a hermit by the sea. People looked down their noses when they heard about it, and called him a beachcomber. They said it was a bad thing to take a four-year-old boy to such a wild, lonely place. But Storm Boy and his father didn’t mind. They were both happy.
    People seldom saw Hide-Away or Storm Boy. Now and then they sailed up the Coorong in their little boat, past the strange wild inlet of the Murray mouth, past the islands and the reedy fringes of the freshwater shore, past the pelicans and ibises and tall white cranes, to the little town with a name like a waterbird’s cry—Goolwa! There Storm Boy’s father bought boxes and tins of food, coils of rope and fishing lines, new shirts and sandals, kerosene for the lamp, and lots of other packages and parcels until the little boat was loaded like a junk.
    People in the street looked at them wonderingly and nudged each other. ‘There’s Tom,’ they’d say, ‘the beachcomber from down the coast. He’s come out of his hideaway for a change.’ And so, by and by, they just nicknamed him ‘Hide-Away’, and nobody even remembered his real name.
    Storm Boy got his name in a different way. One day some campers came through the scrub to the far side of the Coorong. They carried a boat down to the water and crossed over to the ocean beach. But a dark storm came towering in from the west during the day, heaving and boiling over Kangaroo Island and Cape Jervis, past Granite Island, the Bluff, and Port Elliot, until it swept down towards them with lightning and black rain. The campers ran back over the sandhills, through the flying cloud and the gloom. Suddenly one of them stopped and pointed through a break in the rain and mist.
    ‘Great Scott! Look! Look!’
    A boy was wandering down the beach all alone. He was as calm and happy as you please, stopping every now and then to pick up shells or talk to a molly-hawk standing forlornly on the wet sand with his wings folded and his head pointing into the rising wind.
    ‘He must be lost!’ cried the camper. ‘Quick, take my things down to the boat; I’ll run and rescue him.’ But when he turned round the boy had gone. They couldn’t find him anywhere. The campers rushed off through the storm and raised an alarm as soon as they could get back to town:
    ‘Quick, there’s a little boy lost way down the beach,’ they cried. ‘Hurry, or we’ll be too late to save him.’ But the postmaster at Goolwa smiled. ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘That’s Hide-Away’s little chap. He’s your boy in the storm.’
    And from then on everyone called him Storm Boy.
     
    The only other man who lived anywhere near them was Fingerbone Bill, the Aboriginal. He was a