Read Online Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds by Gregory Day - Free Book Online

Ron told her it made sense to sell the headland side beyond the line of the woodpile and so she agreed. Funnily enough, Min discovered then that she felt no deep attachment to the land other than to their half with the graves on it. It was all the same, she reasoned, whether it’s the McCoys who own it or some bigshot from Melbourne.
    Dom Khouri, of course, was more from Tripoli than he was from Melbourne, in so far as he’d been born in the ancient town on the Lebanese coast and had grown up on the streets there, raising himself as a street urchin without any family to speak of. Whenhis mother’s brother, Anthony Taweel, appeared unexpectedly when Dom was fifteen, to inform him that he had been living quite prosperously as a hawker, and now as a glazier, in faraway Australia, and that the young man should join him, Dom jumped at the chance.
    But when he arrived on the
Re Arethusa
at the Port Melbourne wharf in 1955, he had tears in his eyes and woe in his heart at the very prospect of the place. In his gusto he had wanted to get out of Tripoli, but halfway through the journey across the world – in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in fact – something had changed. Homesickness for the streets and citrus-scented bazaars and the people he knew hit him with a gnawing persistency that stayed long after he’d settled in his uncle’s house in Brunswick and begun his apprenticeship as a glazier. As the years passed and he finished his apprenticeship, married, had children, and developed his uncle’s business, Taweel Glass, from a small glazing concern into a major construction company, the dull ache had never entirely gone but he had replaced it with an iron-like determination to succeed. If he was going to have to live in what the Neapolitans on the
Re Arethusa
had called the
sfintere
, the arsehole of the earth, he was going to have to create his own version of dignity. And it was possible. Look at his uncle Tony. He had managed a remarkable life, and he’d arrived in Australia unannounced and completely alone. Already Dom Khouri could sense that, unlike Tripoli, where there was little work and a morbid consciousness of his own disadvantage always hanging in the air, Melbourne had a naivety, and opportunity for someone like him. And now at least he had some family, and no barrier to success other than a lazy type of racism. But he found that being a
dago
was no hindrance in his working life. Some of his Lebanese friends believed otherwise but Dominic Khouri, like his uncle Tony Taweel, had the common touch, and an innate understanding of the suffering behind most people’s daylit faces.
    In the early days, when he first took over Taweel Glass and he would give a customer an extra service for no charge, he made it seem as if the double glazing, or the retouching of the sills, the additional grouting or the free pane of glass, was an acknowledgment of their difficulties, not just a garrulous gift that was good for business. He did, in fact, have a heart for giving, and a resilient attitude from the hardship he’d endured in Tripoli and the unexpected wrench of his migration. As he always said, ‘money is like the glitter on the water, but the water is the thing’. In Dom Khouri’s life of successful exile, that water was a symbol of the blood that flowed between people and within everyone. It was the crimson fluid of his town on the old landlocked sea, the town whose bustle and catcries he missed on a daily basis.
    On the day he arrived to look at the McCoy place and talk things over, the weather was sleety. The ocean was the colour of lead and as far from some golden Mediterranean memory as possible. As was the case on squally days, not a bird could be found within half a mile of the house, excepting the bristlebirds, who huddled in the warren of the tea-tree and bearded heath underneath the gusts and who lived their existence so shyly that they were hardly ever seen even in