Secrets

 

It’s no secret I’ve got a secret and I’m going to tell it to you.

You’re finally going to learn where the money is hidden.

I know. I know.

You’ve heard this all before because I’ve been dropping teasing hints for some time.

No more hints. No more games.

The moment has arrived.

I grew up in a leafy green Brisbane suburb known as Toowong.

One of the steepest hills of my old childhood stomping ground was the million-dollar views-once-you-were-on-top Miskin Street. Anyone looking to develop the bulging legs of an Olympic cyclist could do worse than make travelling up its God’s-gift-to-steepness bitumen a part of their regular training routine.

Near the top of this street, just before it connects to Sherwood Road, is a little tucked away laneway called Fewings Street. In the backyard of the 2nd house along, stood a wooden cubby house. Incredibly, it’s still there today, four decades aged, blanketed in green moss and barely visible amongst the overgrown thicket of vines and shrubbery.

Somewhere over that rickety hill-side fence is the loot.

Back in the late seventies, four pre-teen mates and I stored an air rifle inside a gap under the floor boards of that cubby house. It proved to be such a perfect, undisturbed hiding place for things that I returned some years later and placed a quantity of money enclosed in an old off-white hessian bankers coin bag in the same spot. And I can honestly say, to the best of my knowledge, that money is still there today.

How do I know that? ‘Cause I checked. Only a little over three months ago. It wouldn’t be enough to retire on but with inflation over 40 years factored in it might just be enough to buy a new fishing rod. Or cricket bat. Or cheap electric leaf mulcher.

Overseas readers have hopefully worked out by now unearthing this long hidden ‘treasure’ probably wouldn’t be worth the trip. I say this with the tragic yet fascinating case of Japanese office worker Takako Konishi in mind. Back in 2001 she was found frozen to death in a snow-covered field in Minnesota U.S. It was reported at the time she had died while trying to find the money buried by actor Steve Buscemi‘s character in the 1996 film FARGO. Though the truth of her death was somewhat less bizarre, this story grew legs and eventually grew to the status of urban legend.

I’m mentioning this now because having at last spilled the beans as to the location of the buried money, I wouldn’t want to be held in any way responsible for someone who, blinded by sheer greed and ruthless determination to get there first and claim the untold riches, ends up becoming entangled in a backyard jungle of thorny caterpillar vines and is never heard from again.

Nothing’s worth that fate. Especially not this nothing.