Wave Dreams

Many people living on the east coast of Australia have dreamt of a massive wave striking the land. The east coast tribes have a wealth of tales regarding various catastrophic changes to the country; they all share the story of the great wave/s that shaped the landforms they know so well.

            Throughout the 1960s I had a recurring dream, always identical. Year by year I was always three years old, digging with my white and blue toy bucket and spade in the vast (to a three year old) strip of sand on Bondi Beach in Sydney.

            It’s morning and the bright sun shines down on hundreds of children and adults already filling the beach. Around me are brown legs, board shorts and bikinis, beach umbrellas and the irrepressible odour of tanning lotion, all cooking slowly in the heat. People are running and playing all around, above my compact toddler body. I dig down into the sand until it grows damp, then wet, and pooling water begins to collapse the sides of the small pit.

            In a sudden wash of cool air a shadow falls upon me. I look up. All the people on the beach have stopped whatever they’re doing and are looking out to sea, open-mouthed, stock-still and wide-eyed. I turn to see what they’re looking at, the thing blocking the morning sun. The sun is a rainbow shining through the ocean, a massive blue-green wave rising out of the east, its white cap foaming into the sky. The sun is about thirty degrees high in the sky, shining through a wave that is twice as high. I drop my bucket and spade.

            As the wave approaches no one is running, or screaming, or praying – or anything else. They’re all standing wide-eyed at the sight of a wall half as high as the sky rolling toward us. There’s no point running, nowhere to run to.

            The sun is a shimmering rainbow illuminating the wave from within. Its undulating, rolling majesty is awesome, beautiful, paralysing. And then The Wave begins to break and eye awake.

            A wave of this size strikes the eastern Pacific at least once every few hundred years; an average of one every 600 years over the last few millennia. The last giant wave to strike eastern Australia arrived on the 26^th January 1700. It hit Japan as well as the rest of the eastern Pacific. Carbon dating of shells attached to boulders thrown up on the Australian shore provide a matching date. (see http://www.geocities.com/r_ayana/AdrenalineRush.html ) But this is the knowledge of an adult. The vision of a child is so much more vivid. Many adults fail to remember their dreams...

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