This is just one story. The telling of which has helped me understand things I consider important. I have made it up, but it is full of truth. - Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Chapter 1: South of Ulladulla

South of Ulladulla, aboard a yacht named Illusion, Gabriel Aden Thorne came into the world laden with great expectations. His parents wished him a life as a sailor or a skipper, since that’s what they knew and the sea had treated them well. Gabe instead followed his grandfather, who edited the Blue Mountains Gazette, accepting an offer to start as the Gazette’s cadet reporter when he turned 16. He was initially responsible for births and deaths then graduated to police rounds, which he enjoyed much more because there isn’t a whole lot you can say about a birth or a death, other than it happened, whereas police reports are like dirty windows: give them some spit and polish, check for smudges and fingerprints, and once you’ve dealt with those things you see people much more clearly. 

Gabe left the Gazette when his grandfather sold the business and retired. He launched his own publication, Blue Heeler, poaching Gillian Moorcroft and Rory Chau on his way out and recruiting a student from St Agnes Mount Victoria High School, Michael Keller, to be the site’s youth reporter. The four of them worked hard to produce local content that was smart, honest and energetic. Soon enough, people stopped asking ‘why call it Blue Heeler’, which made Gabe feel immensely proud.

Anyone who has identified their zodiac sign in the night sky knows the thrill of discovering a pattern in otherwise random clusters of stars. It comes with a sense of satisfaction, or perhaps it’s a sense of relief: the possibility that our true nature, or more precisely, its astronomical representation, can be outlined by celestial bodies far beyond our reach. Gabe Thorne was born under a water sign, of course. He was Cancer: meticulous, creative, mysterious. These qualities worked in his favour, most noticeably when unbelievable events coalesced in mid-2022. A different editor might have dismissed the matter, thinking no-one would be interested in a story about unruly kids demanding attention, but Gabe chose a different path: he listened to his youth reporter and then asked Michael to write it up for Blue Heeler as if he was compiling a police report. No need to embellish, he said, just tell me who, what, where, when and why.

Blue Heeler published Michael’s story on 15 July 2022. No-one knew then the full significance of ‘Suspended for seeing the funny side’, although in three sentences the story delivered most of what Gabe asked for, apart from one missing piece.