GULLY WINDS

Because I’d always associated Australia with the Outback and open spaces, I wanted to live in the countryside. But finding a house near Adelaide with some space around it was more difficult than I’d imagined. Everywhere was sprawl. I drove south until I reached the end of the commuter railway line and the land opened up again. There were rolling hillsides, vineyards, and pastures. Along the ocean were cliffs, headlands, and beaches stretching for miles. It looked like Canaan.

There wasn’t a lot to rent in Canaan, however, and the few places that were available had plenty of takers. Usually, the viewings were scheduled en masse so you could see what you were up against. The rental market was tight and everyone else seemed to have a better claim to a house than I did. Most were young emigrant families from New Zealand or England with small children. I was looking for a place where I could stare out the window. They were looking for a place to live.

After a week of searching, I finally had a line on a house. A family in Willunga had an old farmhouse they were renovating. They hadn’t decided what they were going to do with it yet. But since they had finished work on the back part, they thought they would rent that out to someone on an occasional tenancy basis while they worked on the main house. I qualified because I only came with two suitcases.

Even so, there was plenty of competition. Some wanted to rent the place as a studio where they could paint or write during the day. Others who normally wouldn’t have been able to afford a house of their own applied because it was only $100 a week. A viewing was scheduled so that Miriam Ward who lived next door and her daughter Sandra who had inherited the property could meet the prospective tenants. I arrived just as the last few people were leaving.

Sandra and Miriam explained that the family homestead dated back to the 1830s when Willunga was first settled. It had been in the family continually. Now that Miriam’s husband Henry had died, Sandra had inherited the house and planned to restore it. Perhaps she would turn it into a bed and breakfast.

The meeting went well. A few days later, I got a call from Julie at the realtor’s, “Was I still interested in renting the Ward place?” Yes. We made plans to meet at the property the following week.

On the appointed day, I parked my car in the driveway and waited for Julie. She got out of her car hesitantly and made her way to the breezeway between the main house and the building that had been renovated. She had a clipboard in her right hand and the two skeleton keys in her left.

“These are the keys,” she said. “Can you believe it?

“At least I’ll know which door they open.”

“Would you mind if we did the checkout here?” Julie asked. “I’ve already been in the house and I don’t want to go back in there again.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Where do I sign?”

“Don’t you want to check the place first?”

“I’m sure it’s fine. But I can have a look if you’d like.” I opened the door and went inside. I had been in the house the previous week, so I knew what to expect: a kitchen with a stone hearth and fifteen larder hooks on the ceiling; a pantry I planned to use as a bedroom; a bathroom with a toilet, bathtub, and a shower; and a laundry room. Everything was in order.

“Sorry,” Julie said, “but this place gives me the creeps.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m not supposed to say this because it’s bad for business,” she said. “But this place is haunted.”

I didn’t think much of what Julie’d said. I’d heard the same thing about the Maxfield Parrish Estate. Most of the things people find disturbing – the cracked masonry, the dead trees, the overgrown hedges, and the crumbling stone walls give it “The Fall of the House of Usher” look I’ve always prized. The Wards could leave the place exactly as it was – it was perfect. There were almond trees at the back and vineyards out front, a dozen sheep, twenty chickens, a red fox, and enough bird life to make you think these twenty-two acres were on the flight path of every bird in Christendom. I opened my suitcase on the wooden table of the kitchen thinking, “If I can’t write a book here, I can’t write a book anywhere.”

The first night gave me pause. I never sleep very well the first night anywhere. But that night I doubt I slept more than thirty minutes. It wasn’t what Julie had said – I’d lived in haunted places before – it was the gully winds.

I was just settling in to bed. I had unpacked my few belongings and the small appliances I had bought and was feeling quite satisfied with myself. This was going to work out fine. I closed my eyes to sleep. Just then a gust of wind came out of the east strong enough to take the roof off. I thought it was a storm of some kind but when I went outside to see what was going on, the sky was full of stars. The wind was coming down the hill behind the almond trees and sweeping across the valley floor. You couldn’t call it a gust because it never let up – the force was constant. It felt like being in a topographical wind tunnel.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. The branches of the big shade tree were brushing against the galvanized roof of the cottage and making an awful racket. It didn’t help that I knew the cause. It was a woeful sound.

“How did you sleep last night?” Miriam asked me.

“Not very well.” She was looking at me curiously. Was it about the house being haunted?

“No?” Miriam said coyly.

“The wind,” I said.

“Guess we should have told you about that,” Miriam said apologetically. “We call it ‘the gullies’ is in ‘gully winds’ and it can blow for days.” She explained it had something to do with the declension of the hills and the high and low weather patterns over the continent and the gulf. “I didn’t know about the gullies either until I married Henry,” Miriam said. “I grew up in Mclaren Vale not three kilometers away and there are no gullies there. Neither are there gullies on the other side of town.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Are you sure you don’t want your money back?” Miriam asked mischievously.

“Over a gale force wind that rises mysteriously in the night and can blow for days?” I replied. “This place just keeps getting better and better.”

She laughed. “I’ll ask Ian to cut the branches of the tree so that it doesn’t brush up against the roof. That’ll make it quieter.”

After Ian cut the branches, it was quieter. I got used to the wind. I still didn’t have any idea when the gullies were coming, or – after they’d come – when they were leaving, but it didn’t matter. They came and they went. There were other sounds that rose in their absence.

Besides the wind, the other river of sound on the Ward place was the birds. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them of innumerable shapes, sizes, and colors all competing to be heard. I had never seen anything like it. They were everywhere. The only thing even remotely comparable to it was the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The birds would start chirping and calling an hour before sunrise and wouldn’t let up until well after dusk.

I hardly recognized a single one. Looking at the Australian birds in all of their variety was like looking up at the night sky: the stars were familiar to me as stars but that was where it ended. I went to the library to do some research and ended up buying two discarded books from the For Sale shelf. One was an illustrated compendium to Australian birds and the other was a more encyclopedic field guide with hundreds of pages. I’d spend the mornings with a cup of coffee in my hand and the bird books on the table trying to get acquainted with the neighbors. There were flocks of gulahs with their pinkish breasts, white and black cockatoos, magpies, corellas and lorikeets, robins, songlarks, and thrushes.

Often when Miriam came by to feed the chickens, she would stop for a cup of coffee and a chat. We’d talk about the birds. She’d made quite a study of them over the years as had Henry. He was intrigued by their behavior and could talk about them for hours, Miriam said. When he wasn’t preparing his sermon for Sunday, he was either reading books or traveling around the countryside visiting with other farmers. Henry had read a lot about animal behavior but was never satisfied with what science had to say about instinct. It didn’t make sense that the birds could get all of that coded information by DNA alone. There were migratory flight plans, knowledge about finding water, where to nest, what to eat and not to eat, predators to avoid, etc. How could all of that information be hardwired? No amount of “science” could explain such things. No – there had to be another explanation.

For Henry, the shortcomings of science were the gateway to the spirit and he worked this theme into his sermons. How much of what they were living each day on the farm could not be explained: the seasons, the weather, the wind, and the rain. Life itself. Science was only useful up to a certain point: you could be rational about something only when the rules applied. When they didn’t, it was time to look for something else.

I told Miriam about Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance: the idea there is a field of memory in the world that the various species of plant and animal life (including man) can tap into at any time. We are not born with all of the information we need. Nor does socialization account for all of the knowledge we possess. Rather, we are born with the receptors – an innate capacity – to receive the accumulated knowledge of time. This knowledge is not static – it is continually being updated to reflect the changing circumstances of our species and our world.

Sheldrake based his initial theory on birds. There was a species of bird in England that had figured out how to drink the cream from the top of milk bottles being delivered at various places around England. Since drinking milk from the tops of milk bottles was a relatively new phenomenon that could not have been anticipated in the great scheme of things, the birds had to have been getting this information from another source. Certainly, the information was coming from somewhere.

Sheldrake experimented further. Was this learned behavior? Were the birds of one part of England somehow communicating this information to other birds? But even birds that could not have had any contact with one another knew how to drink from the bottles. What did this suggest?

While I was explaining Sheldrake’s theory to Miriam, I had the sense that we were no longer alone. Someone or something was listening to our conversation.

“I wish that Henry could have been around to hear this,” Miriam said. “This might have explained it for him.”

“Maybe he is.”

Miriam laughed. “Maybe he is.”

One week later, I met Henry. I’d just finished reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Power of Dreaming. In this book, Don Juan tells Carlos that in order to be receptive to the spirit world, Carlos should sleep on his right side. This is an accepted signal to the spirits that you are open to being contacted by them. In order for this to be effective, however, it has to be volitional. In other words, if you normally sleep on your right side, such a position does not necessarily signal that you are open to communicating with the dead. You have to intend this by making a conscious effort to fall asleep on your right side in order to be contacted by spirits. Because this sleeping position is volitional, it is a sign of welcome.

I normally sleep on my left side, but that night I slept on my right. I opened my eyes in the early morning light and just opposite me across from the night table was an apparition of an older man lying on his left side, his head cradled in his left hand. He had a smile on his face as if to say, “You see, it really does work.”

I did not panic as I normally would have because of the sleeping position – I had willfully brought on this experience – there was nothing to get excited about. I sat up in bed, crossing my legs. Just as I did so, the apparition mirrored my movement by sitting cross-legged in the air at the same height as my mattress. He had a grin on his face as if to say, “Isn’t this fun?”

When I stood up, he did too. We looked at each other closely. The rest of what happened was a mental exchange – a kind of one-act play meant to tell me something about myself I didn’t yet fully understand or believe. “Now we are even,” he said with a thought. Then he faded into the air.

The next day I went over to Miriam’s house. She invited me in for a cup of tea. Apropos of nothing, I asked if I could see a recent photo of Henry. She went into the living room and came back with a framed portrait. “This is Henry,” she said.

I had met a dead man.

Charlie Canning published his first novel "The 89TH Temple" shortly after receiving a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide in 2012. A second novel "The Sign of Jonah" followed in 2015. Canning is currently working on a third novel entitled "Gideon's Trumpet" and the memoir "The Arnold Trail" about growing up in a family of cigarette and alcohol distributors in Maine. “Not Drinking in Australia” recently appeared in Studio: A Journal of Christians Writing 164 (2025): 47-51.