The Outback Night Sky

Ruby pressed her nose against the car window and watched the last little town disappear behind them. The houses got smaller and smaller until they were just tiny dots, and then they were gone altogether, and there was nothing but red dirt and scrubby bushes stretching out forever in every direction.

"How much longer, Dad?" she asked.

"Almost there, Rubes," her father said — the same thing he'd been saying for the last hour.

But this time he actually meant it, because he turned the truck off the road and bumped along a dirt track until they reached a flat, open spot next to a big old ghost gum tree. Its white bark glowed in the last light of the day like it was showing off.

"This is it," Dad said, turning off the engine. "This is where your great-grandmother used to camp."

Ruby climbed out and looked around. There was nothing here. No buildings, no fences, no phone towers, no nothing. Just flat, rust-colored earth and the enormous sky above, turning the most incredible shades of orange and pink, like someone had knocked over a whole paintbox.

"There's nothing here," Ruby said.

Dad smiled. "Just wait."

They set up their swags side by side on the ground. Dad showed her how to roll out the canvas and fluff up the sleeping bag inside. Ruby's swag smelled like dust and old adventures.

They ate baked beans out of the tin, sitting on camp chairs, and Dad told her about how Great-Grandmother Nellie used to walk this country when she was young — really walk it, for days and days, with no shoes and no car and no baked beans in a tin.

"Wasn't she scared?" Ruby asked.

"Of what?"

Ruby looked out at the emptiness. The orange was draining from the sky now, and everything was turning deep purple. "Of… everything. There's nothing out here to help you."

"Ah," Dad said. He scraped the last of his beans. "That's what I used to think too, when I was your age. Nellie had a different idea about that. She reckoned the land wasn't empty at all. She reckoned it was full — absolutely packed — with things to help you. You just had to know how to look."

Ruby squinted out at the flat horizon. She couldn't see anything helpful. Not even a gas station.

Then the stars came out.

Not the way they came out at home in Adelaide, where you could see maybe twenty or thirty if you were lucky and the streetlights weren't too bright. Out here, they didn't just come out. They poured. First a handful, then dozens, then hundreds, and then so many that Ruby actually stood up from her camp chair because she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

The sky was absolutely stuffed with stars.

There were big bright ones and tiny shy ones and clusters that looked like someone had spilled sugar across a black tablecloth. There were so many that the darkness between them almost disappeared. The whole sky was glowing.

"Dad," Ruby whispered. "Look."

"I see it," he said softly, standing beside her. "This is what Nellie wanted me to see, the first time she brought me out here. I was about your age."

Ruby's mouth was hanging open. She closed it. Then it fell open again.

"Now," Dad said, pointing up. "See those four bright stars there, making a sort of cross shape? And that really bright one just next to them?"

Ruby followed his finger. "The crooked-looking cross?"

"That's the one. Most people call that the Southern Cross. Sailors used it to find their way for hundreds of years. If you can find that cross, you can always figure out which way is south."

"How?"

Dad crouched down next to her and pointed carefully, showing her how to draw an imaginary line down the long part of the cross and extend it, and how it led your eye all the way down to a point above the horizon.

"That's south, right there," he said.

"So if I know where south is…"

"Then you know where north is, and east and west too. You can't get lost. Not ever. Not as long as you've got the stars."

Ruby stared at the Southern Cross with new eyes. Those four little points of light were like a compass stuck right up there in the sky, just waiting for anyone who thought to look up.

"Now," Dad said, and his voice got quieter, the way it did when he was about to say something important. "Nellie didn't call it the Southern Cross. Her people had been watching those stars for a very, very long time — thousands and thousands of years. Long before any sailors came."

Ruby looked at her father. The starlight was bright enough that she could see his face clearly.

"She called those stars part of a stingray. See — the cross is the body, and those two bright pointer stars are the tail, sweeping along behind."

Ruby looked up again, and she gasped. Because suddenly she could see it — a great diamond-shaped stingray gliding silently across the sky, its tail trailing behind.

"A stingray! I can see it!"

"Nellie said the stingray was being chased," Dad went on. "See that smudgy cloudy bit over there? That dark patch?"

"That dark blob?"

"That's the head of a shark. It's chasing the stingray across the sky, every single night. Round and round they go. Nellie used to say that if you watched long enough, you could almost see them moving."

Ruby stared at the dark patch, and a shiver went through her — the good kind, the kind you get when a story is so perfect it makes your skin tingle. She could see the shark, and the stingray fleeing, and suddenly the sky wasn't just a bunch of random dots anymore. It was a story. The biggest story she'd ever seen, stretched right across the heavens.

"What else?" she demanded. "What else did Nellie see up there?"

Dad laughed. "Well, see those two cloudy patches over there? The bright fuzzy ones?"

"The ones that look like two little clouds that got left behind?"

"That's them. Most people call them the Magellanic Clouds. But Nellie called them the campfires of an old couple who traveled the sky. She said they were always together, those two. Never apart. She reckoned they'd been sitting at those campfires so long that nobody could remember when they'd first lit them."

Ruby felt something warm bloom in her chest, looking at those two little smudges of light. Two campfires. An old couple. Together forever.

She lay down in her swag and stared straight up. The stars were so close and so bright that she felt like she might fall up into them, like the sky was a great glittering ocean and she was floating on her back in it.

"Dad? Did Nellie really know all these stories?"

"She knew more than I could ever remember," Dad said, settling into his own swag. "She learned them from her grandmother, who learned them from her grandmother before that. On and on, going back and back."

Ruby was quiet for a moment. "That's a really long time."

"Longest stories in the world."

Ruby traced the stingray again with her eyes. The body, the tail, the shark chasing behind. Then she found the two campfires, the old couple sitting together in the sky.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Rubes?"

"Next time, can we bring my friend Mika? She thinks there are only about fifty stars."

Dad laughed so hard his swag shook. "We'll bring her. Nellie would have liked that — more people looking up."

Ruby smiled and pulled her sleeping bag up under her chin. The red dirt was warm beneath her, and the sky above was the most enormous, most beautiful, most full thing she had ever seen.

She found the stingray one more time. It was still there, still gliding, still being chased, still telling its story — the same story it had told her great-grandmother, and her great-grandmother's grandmother, and grandmothers before that, on and on and on, all the way back to the very first person who had ever thought to lie down on the warm earth and look up.

"Goodnight, stingray," Ruby whispered.

And she closed her eyes, and dreamed of campfires in the sky.