A WineDark Sea

Oystermen

2012-02-07T12:03:00.003+08:00

Sometimes, late at night, the only other fishers around in the Sound are Grievous, and Gawain checking his leatherjacket pots. Catching leatheries is not his day job though. Gawain is also the director of a local seafood company. I see Gawain and Kilpatrick at the Sunday markets every week but the source of the creamy, salty oysters that they sell has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

The first time I saw the oyster farm I thought it was conglomerates of old wire fences that a farmer had built into the sea to stop cows from crossing paddocks along the beach. I had no idea it was an oyster farm. Then, one morning picking up nets on the east side of the harbour, I saw the barge out there and the figures of men in bright orange rain coats moving about the ‘fences’.

I asked Gawain if I could go out on the barge with them and he rang me at six o’clock one morning. “We’re leaving in twenty minutes, Sarah. Are you coming out?”

I drove down to the Emu Point ship yards where ancient wooden boats lined up with newer steel jobs, past the seafood restaurant, the chandler’s shop and the slipway manager’s sheds. Gawain had the tractor hooked up to the barge. Men donned wetsuits, getting ready for the trip.

“Sarah, have you met Diesel?” Gawain introduced me to the crew: Diesel, a bluff, hulking, fisherman sort, Turk, tattooed with sunnies and a long beard, Jason whippet lean in his sealskin, beanie and sunnies. The two German backpackers in bright orange sou-westers, Chris and John, nodded hello. Kilpatrick was staying to shuck in the shed.

“Where’s yer boots?” Diesel said to one of the Germans. “You got any gumboots mate?” He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Wellingtons? Galoshes? Ahh. Whatever. You right then, everyone? Ready. Let’s go.”

Once the boat was launched, Gawain jumped in and Diesel dropped the propeller and started her up. We backed into the shallow waters around the service jetty. “Tide’s still going down,” muttered Diesel. “Better get a move on.” Despite the early hour, a wind blew in from the east. Two men stood in the water on the sand bar with fishing rods. We motored towards Green Island.

Diesel and Turk lit up tailermades in shelter of the cabin and then put on their white cotton gloves. Diesel looked like he had always been a fisherman. He has been working the oysters for ten years now but before that he was a diesel mechanic. I looked at his boots. He wore diving boots with white gumboot tops elastic banded around them, like gaiters. “What are they all about?” I asked him.

“I invented them myself,” he said. “You see, all the stingray wounds I’ve ever heard of go in at the ankle or the top of the foot, or the sides. Never the bottom. So this is my protection. Don’t know if the theory’s right but I’ve never been barbed yet.”

“We get those little purple stingrays,” Gawain explained to me. “those buggers with the pink undersides. They’re the worst ones.”

“Cobbler?”

The men shuddered in unison. “We don’t talk about cobbler.”

The oyster racks are lined up in hundreds of rows in the still shallow waters of the eastern side. There is something very beautiful about their barnacled repetitions. Held together with sticks the size of tomato stakes, black rubber bands and rope, the racks reminded me of bamboo pathways through some kind of Asian water village. Their rickety regularity and the olive-hued beauty of tidal Oyster Harbour make the structures a kind of art.

The barge was loaded with seeper cages of oysters that had already been graded for size and were being returned to the racks. Diesel steered the barge into a channel just wide enough and killed the motor.

“Watch out for blue rings,” warned Gawain.

I’d forgotten all about the blue ringed octopus. When we were kids swimming at Emu Point, much mention was made not to fiddle with underwater containers or grottos where the deadly critters lived.

“Do you get many here?”

“Yeah, we get a few. Years ago, we were getting ten, twenty a day in the cages. Bloody awful. Then that hundred year flood came through. Remember that? All the fresh water coming out of the rivers got rid of them. But they’re coming back now.”

Diesel, Turk, Chris and Gawain jumped overboard into knee-deep water. Chris held the barge in position against the wind. Jason stayed on the deck with John and started throwing out the seeper cages to them. The three waders clipped the cages full of oysters onto the racks.

“Hey, Gawain, did I tell yer about my blue ring dream?”

I would not recognise Jason is his civvies. His wetsuit, beanie and sunglasses made him a deckie creature. “The night after I got that one on me leg, I dreamt there was one on me arm and I kept trying to shake it off, flaring up its bastard rings all blue at me. Shit. What a dream.”

“Sounds like a nightmare,” Gawain sighed over a broken seeper cage clip and said, “lacky band, please.”

“Oh, nah,” Jason said, handing him an elastic. “Nah, just a dream.”

“I’ve never seen one before, and I’ve lived here all my life,” I said.

Turk handed me a stake with a blue ringed octopus clinging to it. “Here’s one.” The tiny, slimy creature with electric blue marks jumped off the stick and slid into the sea around the legs of the men.

“Lacky band, please.”

The deckies threw the seeper cages and lacky bands to the waders until the deck was clear except for remnants of broken cages, barnacles and algae. Turk kept straightening up in the water and rubbing the small of his spine. I could see he suffered the same back as Salt. Once the seeper cages were done, the oystermen turned to harvesting. Diesel started up the motor again and moved the barge into another row further to the west, where the burnt out hill loomed brindle against silver water. He dropped into the water and counted the oysters in a random tray. “Forty five.”

Some swift mathematics flew around between the crew.

“Forty five per unit?”

“Four dozen.”

“Fifty dozen times four dozen is ...” Jason was onto it.

“Nah, fifty times forty five!”

It was all too fast for me. Within minutes the crew worked out how many units they needed to load for the Perth markets.

Black bream swum around Turk’s feet, feeding on the nutrients that his movements were stirring up, amongst the ferny brown weed and sea grass. “They’re a good size too. Should get that line out!”

“Turk, you gotta fisherwoman on board! Don’t tell her where the bream are.”

“Do you chuck a line in ever?” I asked, trying not to eye those fat bream any more than was respectable.

“Nah,” Turk said, grinning at his boss. “We’re here to work mate, not go fishing.”

After about forty minutes of throwing up racks of oysters to the men on board, who stacked them neatly against the cabin, the day’s quota was fulfilled. By then the wind and the sun had opened up the clouds. The men climbed into the boat and Diesel started up the motor again.

“What species are they, these oysters?”

“Sydney rock oysters. They don’t spawn in these cold waters, so they don’t get away. We’re not allowed to use Pacific oysters here because they might get away. But South Australia uses them, so I dunno. These ones we are bringing in now, they’re bistro oysters, a bit smaller. They’ll get graded and sent off today.”

“These are from Carnarvon aren’t they?” Diesel asked Gawain.

“Sydney rock oysters from Carnarvon?”

“Yeah, I think they got bred up there.”

“How many did you pick up today?”

“Two thousand dozen.”

Diesel found his shucking knife. “Grab one of those things.”

I picked out a nice fat oyster. He prised it open while Turk held the steering wheel for him, flicked the top shell overboard and turned the oyster flesh over in its base. Then he handed it to me.

There is nothing quite like a fresh oyster, with the liquor still liquoring and that salty sweet creaminess all going on ... wowwee

Back at the boat yards, Gawain backed the tractor down to the ramp and Diesel drove the boat straight on to the jinker. The others piled out and headed for the hose, past the neatly swept piles of barnacle shells below the sorting racks, to rinse off their gear before their nine o’clock coffee break.

Oystermen.

Oystering

2012-02-07T09:32:00.000+08:00

Diary of a Silly Young Thing

2012-02-04T21:51:00.004+08:00

They discussed it, late at night, over shortbread and pots of tea. What would it be like? To go out, dance, eat, no strings? "If sex happened, that would be good," he added, biting daintily, no crumbs.
Lil nodded seriously, not too eagerly she hoped.
"It would have to be monogamous."
"So that is a commitment."
"To a certain extent, yes. There's commitment. Mutual respect is a commitment."
"And what about work? The other girls?" She lowered her voice. "I know about Eileen ... "
He looked surprised, then slightly abashed. She saw the smile under the dip of his head. His Roman nose seemed to curve over his lips. "That just happened. I didn't realise anyone else knew."
"The girls ..."
"The gargoyles?"
"They look down on everyone," she sighed.
"Well. They would have had a fine time with that one. Eileen's lovely but she's not really my type, not like you. We were at a party, she gave me a lift home. She just pulled me in her front door. It was ... well, I hadn't had sex for six months. When she rang me the next day - Sunday I think, I brushed her off. I wasn't rude but I didn't want to take it any further. She said, 'What's the problem? Didn't you enjoy yourself?' But that wasn't true. I loved it! Just ..."
"She would have felt awful."
"She wanted the same thing as I did, at the time. She's still ringing me. She's pretty upset. The last call was quite abusive."
"May I ask you why you didn't go back?"
"You may," he smirked. "Okay," when she prodded him. "There was a middle aged desperation about her - "
" - Oooh, ouch!"
"Let me finish. She was divorced a year or so ago. She's at a bit of a loss. Perhaps her husband left her for someone else. She's angry. But with me, she covered it all up. She fell all over me, made herself instantly available, hid all her anger with flirting and flattery. She sabotaged herself so that I'd behave in a way that supported her dislike of men."
"Mmm, tidy. And you obliged?"
"Well, I been drinking that night."

She used to like pacing his beautiful house, studying a painting, his antique clocks or the philosophies of Marcus Aurelias, while he hummed in the kitchen making tea from the little jars he had labelled according to their variety.

Someone anonymous cleaned for him, another ironed his clothes. Everything in his kitchen was new. She liked the spare life he'd cultured. No photographs, only paintings. She liked his remove from the personal. He avoided intimate references with a card shark's sleight of hand.

They would have dinner and then see a movie or a festival show. He was traditionally attentive, paying for everything, opening doors for her. Later, they had sex, always in his room. Even the sex was a dance of prefigured steps. She knew he was displeased if she broke his code of behaviour. She floundered trying to second guess him. She tried to behave in the same dispassionate manner as he did to survive the experience.

In hindsight, she thought she could have challenged him, shaken his sense of self.

He didn't like her to sleep the night. He'd drive her home at four in the morning. On Tuesday mornings when she returned to work, he'd politely ask about her weekend. A look of pleasure crossed him at her hot panic. She had no idea whether, or what he thought of her. Once he told her that he liked the way she moved. She kept telling herself that this was something she wanted: someone who could take her out and satisfy her body, who wouldn't require a restraining order when she decided it was over. It was an experiment, she told herself. She wanted to see if she was emotionally capable of such an affair.

She went alone one night to the old pub at the top of the hill. It must have been the moon. Small town intrigues between men and women were sparking all around the bar. Matured minstrels played Stevie Ray Vaughn, Van Morrison, Dire Straits. Eileen was there with friends from work. Her ex husband was dancing with his new lover.

She shouldn't have been drinking at all. Her head was imploding with a threatening cold and she was bleeding heavily. She had to go and clean up in the toilets. She edged, shoulder first through the crowd of glittering, toothy divorcees and lurching bachelors who stood too close. In the disabled toilet, the one with a sink and a mirror, she wet a paper towel and smudged the blood from the inside of her thighs, changed, washed her hands.

The music roared as the door opened outside. Two women were shouting as they came in and lowered their voices as the door shut.
"I just don't want anything to do with him. He's supposed to have the kids tonight."
"Don't worry about him, love."
"Did you see the boss? He just walked in."
"On the prowl again?"
"Probably."
"You know he's been seeing Lil?"

The toilet flushed next to her. She stood at the sink in her cubicle, frozen. She felt Eileen outside, frozen too.
Then "Typical. She must be his daughter's age. Stupid slut."
The other woman exited and Eileen went in.
Lil flushed her toilet and turned the tap on, again. She stood with her hands in the sink, water running over her fingers and looked at herself in the mirror until she finally heard the music burst through the opening door. Then she turned the tap off.

"I Rode a Horse Up Stony Hill."

2012-02-03T19:22:00.001+08:00

She always wore a flowered frock, sensible shoes and a blue beanie, cowled almost to her eyes. Every time I saw Aunty she was in the same uniform. Tiny, stooped and ancient. Sometimes during the winter she may have added a cardigan and some socks.

I feel that the passing today of this beautiful and unique Noongar woman at 91 years of age should be marked somehow but of course just writing about it is troublesome to both Noongar sensitivities and also to the knowledge of how much has already been taken. In Otago, a Maori man said to me, "The difference between the Australians and us Maori is that all of our ancestors are on the page, on the wall. Every marae you walk into, the ancestors are up there, carved on the wall." It's different here.

I first met Aunty in the Centrelink office when she used to hold my babies while we all waited in line. She was an old lady even then. Sometimes I would drive her home from the supermarket when I found her at the bus stop laden with shopping bags. Later, I knew that she grew up working on the soldier settlements east of here. To this day, there is not a lot of credit given to the Aboriginal families who did so much work out there in twentieth century clearing, fencing, shearing and shepherding.

"Mum rose each day at daybreak and made breakfast for us, which was often porridge. She would soak the porridge oats over night so it would be soft in the morning and easy to cook. Sometimes we ate kangaroo meat, onions bacon and tomatoes and damper. We dipped our damper into the juices. Farmers often gave us mutton, tomatoes and vegetables. Mum used to snare rabbits and shoot kangaroos with a .22 rifle when dad was away." 1

Aunty was born and lived through the era of the West Australian 1905 Act, similar to Victoria's Aborigines Protection Act. She may not have noticed it as a kid but her family's life was quite controlled by this piece of legislature.

One day, out of the blue, Aunty turned her milky eyes to me and said, "I rode a horse up Stony Hill." She said it like she'd done it the day before and perhaps in her mind, she had. But later someone told a story about Aunty when she was a young woman. There was a wild black horse that nobody was game enough to ride. Aunty got on that horse. Her hair was long and black. She was wearing a black skirt and a yellow sash around her waist. She stayed on that horse and galloped it all the way up Stony Hill!
Aunty, sixty years or so later, was in the same room as that story was told and she cried and cried. Later, she told me it wasn't true. I have no idea. I don't think it matters.
Godspeed Aunty.

1. Winnie Larsen, Memories of a Noongar Childhood, R.M Howard, Albany, 2005, p. 27

Beautifully Out of Order

2012-01-29T19:52:00.002+08:00

There is always a strange kind of beauty in the obsolete.

The most gorgeous good ship Not For Sale,
The house with corrugated iron windows,
A circus graveyard in the shadow of Mt Wellington,
A recalcitrant swing
And the bar fridge that promises you everything of the best,
tomorrow ...

On Women and Dogs

2012-01-26T21:23:00.000+08:00

"It was a singular sight to see the women return from the bird rookery with their numerous dogs, most of them of a very large kind. Robinson counted up to forty and was told there was fifty on Gun Carriage. At Woody Island there were ten besides the herd of dogs the women have taken with them to Flinders. There cannot be less than two hundred dogs in these straits, all of a large description. Most of these islands are infested with wild dogs.

From the sealers, the natives have obtained a great many dogs. The natives have stolen them when the boats come ashore."

G.A. Robinson, 12/11/1830.

Archival Magic ...

2012-01-25T18:51:00.001+08:00

Colonial Times 21^st August 1829

The Black Natives

On Saturday last, a tribe of black natives visited Tea Tree Bush, a circumstance rather remarkable, insomuch as our readers are aware, it is a rather populous district. Their approach having been discovered by Mrs Smith, who fled, leaving only one infant chid. They plundered the house of such articles as they could consume and carried off the babe!! Upon Mrs Smith alarming her neighbours and returning to the house, she found the infant gone. The feeling of the parents, of course, are more easily imaged than described!! A pursuit was instantly commenced, when, within about one mile from the house, the little child was found lying on the grass, and what is very remarkable, a quantity of sugar placed near its mouth. We may easily conjecture how overjoyed the parents of the child were. This humanity on the part of the black natives, shews that they are not of so savage a nature, as they have hitherto been supposed to be; or that they now have sense enough to discriminate between the innocence of a child, and of the grown people, who they doubtless consider their invaders and enemies.

Launceston Wooden Boat Rally

2012-01-21T13:05:00.001+08:00

A Curious Body and Mine

2012-01-20T00:43:00.011+08:00

Tonight a friend looked at me from across the table.
"You're different. What is it? You've lost lots of weight."
"Dunno. What am I doing differently? I've stopped fishing."
My favourite jeans are falling off me. Whenever this happens I think that the denim is getting looser in its weave or stretch. I never suspect the opposite, that my body is shrinking away from them.
"You're leaner, curvier, more girly, or something."
"I've stopped fishing. That's all."
"That's it. You were always pumped. You're losing all that muscle. " He stopped and looked at me again. "What are you going to do now?"
"Oh, I don't know! Ride my bike more?"

My fingernails are growing. Years of wearing briny wet gloves have softened them to a constantly tearable state that included strange fungal incursions into the quicks. Three weeks after giving up the fishing I've realised I'm going to have to file them or cut them or something, because they're growing harder and stronger every day.

My hair and skin, oddly, is drier and less healthy, despite all the salt and windburn that they copped on the boat.

When I first started fishing, my body muscled up within weeks and then hardened into a well oiled net-hauling machine. She repossessed the memory from my adolescent years of swimming, canoeing and running.

I quite like these sudden life changes and watching how this body I'm living in adapts to them. Pregnancy, working a lawnmowing round, fishing, setting up garden centres, running, sitting on my arse studying, breastfeeding, courier driving ...
... They are the most curious, intuitive things, aren't they, our bodies?

Water Water

2012-01-19T08:45:00.000+08:00

'Fusty' is a Word that Springs to Mind

2012-01-18T20:21:00.014+08:00

It's a real shame to see bookshops major and minor collapsing all over the place. People say there's no money in books anymore. I disagree. I can go into a bookshop for a browse and come out a hundred bucks poorer, a hundred years richer.

What bugs me is trying to order a book in. I have said many times "I want to buy from you, not some internet depository. So can you get me this particular book?" Eight weeks later, I'm still dropping in and asking whether my book has arrived. It seems there is a deal with the publishers - orders have to be backed up with twelve others from the said publisher before they can afford to send a parcel from Perth or Sydney or wherever. It's the same scenario with music. Sometimes I even get a wry face with a "Sorry, I don't think it was ordered at all," after eight weeks.
Why don't they try to flog me Ebooks or a sexy Kindle? No wonder they are going broke.

The clunkiness of this system in the face of their online competitors just frustrates the hell out of me. I'd be happy if the bookshop folk went on the internet, ordered the book straight from the publisher and charged me the commission and the postage. I'd pay for the pleasure of walking into the shop and buying a book meant just for me. (In fact, recently I made a local bookseller do that and it only worked because I knew him and told him I wasn't credit carded enough to buy it online.)

No bookshop in the universe, other than those ones that include clicking, 'shopping trolleys' and credit cards, can stock every book we could ever lust for. So why is it so hard for small bookshops to get in on the act, instead of going out of business and blaming the internet or the lack of people who happenchance their shop?
Honestly, why is it so hard?
Sorry but I have no sympathy for the broken bookshops. On the other hand perhaps it is just a Westralian thing and elsewhere there are bookshops that are embracing this new movement of literature and thriving.

... discussion is welcome.

Oysters

2012-01-13T13:09:00.001+08:00

A WineDark Sea

2012-01-11T21:05:00.007+08:00

A WineDark Sea turned into, among other things, a story about the commercial fishers on the south coast of Western Australia and especially that intrepid septuagenarian Old Salt. Don't fret, this isn't an obituary. As I have written before, you can't kill Old Salt with an axe. It does bother me that this year he will be fishing alone, most of all because when he had his last 'mishap' his loyal deckie was around to put his nose back on and call an ambulance.

This year I'm devoting my time to dropping a completed book on the publisher's desk, looking after Storm Boy, my hulking swim-like-a-seal teenage son, building a fetching and comfortable abode at Kundip and finishing the thesis. Two years into my PhD candidature, I've got twelve months of stipend left to nail this work, create something beautiful, or else find full time work and spend the next decade trying to finish it. As MF has written, it is a major rites of passage in anyone's life and I want the finished product to be something I don't feel I could improve upon later.
So, for the moment the fishing has to go.

The Sunday market has been so much fun and helped renew a fresh seafood groundswell in our maritime town. But working Sundays meant I have been working seven days a week for the last three years. Didn't feel like work, most of the time and that's not my beef anyway. It's the commitment. Number 5 Aquarians can't handle that factor for too long. I've quit once or twice and Old Salt has sacked me too but we always end up back at sea and bringing our produce to the markets.

This isn't a rash decision. Rashes, even trumpeter spikes, don't come into it. I've been working up to this for a year now. Old Salt is cranky with me even though he's had twelve months notice. He came around and picked up the filleting table the other day, the table I have spent many a Saturday afternoon cleaning flathead and whiting and black bream on, listening to Johnny Cash and the Sundowners radio show on 100.9 fm. He wanted the knives back too but I busted one blade trying to scrape flesh off a boomer hide and the other knife is 300km away in Kundip. Reckon I've earned them anyway.

Commercial fishing is not an easy life but it's a beautiful life. The work has been my muse for five years. It's helped me shape ideas about sea people, how they are intrinsically different to land people. I've seen some things that I find impossible to attach words to and other things that have made my words bloom on the page. Witchery it is, when it happens.

The other job I am culling this year is tutoring at the uni. Again, wonderful work. Reining in my deckie's mouth, whilst taking a class through the last coupla centuries' founding sociologists, has been a challenge. I usually overcome this foible by getting out of my fishing boots and putting on a nice pair of shoes. The students seem to get through okay. I think they like my class. In fact another tutor and I were nominated for a few teaching awards last year and because it was the first time that it had ever happened in our rural, satellite campus, nobody knew quite what to do about it.
But again ... headspace cramming and 'commitment restructuring' means the tutoring has to go, for the moment.

Sam Neill, the actor, said once, "Always trust your talent, never your career." I wrote that quote in black texta on my toilet wall. It looks tacky because the print is fading and I sort of scribbled it down in my excitement but it has felt like my manifesto for a long time now. I'm good at teaching. I'm good at writing and I'm fucking good at catching fish.

Old Salt reckons I can go fishing with him whenever I want and I'm going to take him up on that offer. Mmm, fishing when I feel like it. Far out.
So there will still be a few fishing stories on A WineDark Sea. I'd like to buy a license from him too. If twenty five thousand of my loyal readers gave me a dollar each, I'd almost be there. In the meantime, stay tuned. Times they are a'changing. I'm just not sure how much or in what direction, yet but I'm already missing all the action. In the last week, I've become a boat ramp tragic.

Osprey and Nest, King River

2012-01-09T13:04:00.000+08:00

What Was in the Bottle?

2012-01-05T17:15:00.002+08:00

Aw ... okay then ...

I cracked away the blue wax and removed the cork from the bottle while sitting by the fireplace later on that evening. The Glad bag inside was easy to pull out because whoever had inserted it had done so with much care to leave a twist in the mouth of the bottle.
The message was tightly rolled. It looked like whoever had thrown it into the briny had bought a 'message in a bottle' kit and it was from a lad who lived in Perth. The date was 19th of December, 2010.

But then, rolled inside that letter were two business cards. One from a man who fixed garage doors and another from his wife ...

Kundip

2012-01-04T23:50:00.000+08:00

Message in a Bottle

2012-01-04T22:39:00.010+08:00

Whilst collecting firewood or stone at Kundip I am the happiest girl in the world. When I found a bottle with a message inside washed up on Masons Bay, something shifted in the definition of a happy Toa.
Imagine finding a true blue message in a bottle ...
I did, on New Year's Eve.

I picked it up. Potter, walking along the beach ahead of me, stopped when he saw my consternation and stillness.
"I've found a message in a bottle!"
He jumped around and whooped and waved and said, "I've walked for miles along beaches. I've found ambergris. The bane of whales. Ambergris! I've never found a message in a bottle. I've been looking my whole life for a message in a bottle."

I too have been searching the beaches my whole life for a message in a bottle. The strange thing was that when I found a Glad sandwich bag stuffed into a tiny bottle, lying in the kelp I felt no surprise, no amazement. I've walked countless shores and waited and hoped for this moment. And now ... here it is, just like I thought it would always happen. Fate. True love. The Leeuin Current. Whatever.

"Open it," he said.
The bottle was small and stoppered with a cork, sealed with blue wax.
"I think I'll wait." I put the bottle into my handbag.
It was New Years Eve after all.

Middleton Beach Today

2011-12-25T20:50:00.000+08:00

The Ship Song Project

2011-12-24T18:49:00.000+08:00

The Ship Song Project - Sydney Opera House reinterprets Nick Cave's iconic song. Performed by Neil Finn, Kev Carmody and The Australian Ballet, Sarah Blasko, John Bell, Angus and Julia Stone, Paul Kelly and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Opera Australia, Martha Wainwright, Katie Noonan and The Sydney Symphony, The Temper Trap, Daniel Johns and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Directed by Paul Goldman.
Arranged by Elliott Wheeler.
Photography by Prudence Upton.

Fairytale

2011-12-23T21:08:00.009+08:00

Nullabor Diaries

2011-12-17T21:59:00.024+08:00

Dundas Rocks, Norseman
Clay salt pan. I could feel the warmth through the floor of the tent. A thin crust of shining salt and then slimy clay underneath and the Bedford up to her axels in the middle of the dried up lake.
What was I thinking?
Three hours after I drove across the lake, a parallel track eight metres long was plowed black into the pristine ice rink surface. Three hours it took to claw back eight metres. The sun was going down. The kids were wailing. The clay was hot underneath the thin layer of brittle salt. Emu tracks in the white sand where I went hunting for branches and traction. Round boulders atop another, an indigenous feel to the place. Good hunting, roaming place. Eve and still hot. Evening crickets chanted, different to the ones in Albany, a continuous teacher's whistle. Salmon gums creaked, limb against limb. I would be prone to dendrophilia among these trees, if I wasn't so fucking bogged.

I got up at 4.30 and brewed some coffee, saw the sunrise over the salt lake and went out to collect some more brush to put under the car. 8 am. Still bogged. We flagged down an elderly Kalgoorlie man with a hangover. He was moving to Esperance because of a woman. He took us into Norseman where Barry, tougher and older than old boots, offered to tow us out. Barry had lived in Norseman for 51 years and hated the sea. He pulled the Bedford out of the clay pan, berated me proper, shook my hand and drove away.

Balladonia Roadhouse
The crows were still there. Last time, hitch hiking with a twitchy, ferrety truckie the flies went straight for my nose and mouth. The heat was horrific. Crows hopped about, dusty and opportunistic. A tiny car pulled up and four skinheads fell out, drunk as lords, black eyes, bleeding. Until I returned to this place those skinheads and the crows represented Balladonia to me. This time around, Balladonia was positively Camelot but the crows and the flies were still there.

Bits of Skylab and cameleers and settlers and the Old People. I was thinking about that. The black woman sat near the waterhole. Just sat. Normally she would have a bag of seeds and she'd grind them up on a stone while she chatted and laughed with the other women, grind the seeds into powder, mix it into a paste, light a fire, make some tucker with careful, long fingers. The seed mixture would clean out her system, nourish her, spread through her like life itself. Today, she got some chips and a coke and she doesn't need her dilly bag. So she just sat and looked at the water.

The wedgetails are like the lions of the Nullabor and the crows its hyenas.

Caiguna Roadhouse
Truckies sat outside in the lights and setting sun, smoking.
A blonde woman in a fur coat filled her F100 ex-ambulance with fuel. Same vintage as the Bedford. Her daughter hovered, a fairy in pink. Trucks thundered by making the ground shudder and splitting the night in half with their lights.
The road was bleeding with dead and desiccated kangaroos and bones bleached in the sun and strips of black rubber and wheels and wheel rims and rubbish and pallets and emu carcasses.

Cocklebiddy had wedgetails everywhere. A good humoured place with a bunch of fat, wild looking truckies sitting out the front. Then Eucla and that magnificent rise up over the sea and ultramarine blue of the ocean and white lime sand. A border town with a cheerful ocker officialdom. You are now in South Australia. Nullabor Plain. An expanse of blue smokebush meets the sky, red earth and the odd surprise of a good green.

Truck drivers eyed me off. Dark. Wild hair. Thongs. Stubbie shorts. Same uniform. Sometimes their legs were really dirty. One followed me around the shop at Yalata.
"So where ya goin'? Byron?
You know people there?
Was that you behind me?"
"You're my roo bar for the day," I said. I like sitting behind on trucks. Let them hit the kangaroos. Their slipstream also absorbed some of the impact of the passing roadtrains that shuddered my van.

The girl in the F100 looked tireder at every roadhouse. Her son, about twelve, filled the car with fuel, cranky. Her daughter the fairy played with one of their dogs on the concrete. Their other dog was approached cautiously by a dingo in the carpark. I saw the yellow sticker on the windscreen.

The truckie had puffy eyelids and slits for eyes. He was unusually clean and his eyebrows gave his face a mean look.
"Nice meeting you," I said as a goodbye.
"Don't expect me to change a tyre for you when you get a flat, darlin'."

A collective morbid they were, the crows, conferring in the middle of the road around mounds of kangaroo. The stretch from Balladonia to Cocklebiddy was carnage, blood all over the road. A dead roo every fifty metres. A big buck slouched on the road reserve, his legs broken, watching the traffic pass almost nonchalantly. Wedgetails posed on singular trees. They were magnificent. When standing, they were hip height to an adult. Their bodies were streamlined, ready for flight, long legs, cruel talons. They hung in the air in pairs. We stopped by a smashed caravan. The chassis was gone, just the windows and twisted aluminum, a toothpaste tube, cups, underwear, and sprawled across the smokebush, flowered curtains.

There was something apocalyptic about that highway that never bends. All that blood and eagles tearing at excoriated flesh ... the way the dead kangaroos lay with their paws clasped like hands across their chests, in prayer.

A sign at Cocklebiddy roadhouse says, "In God we trust. Everyone else must pay cash." The counter was manned by a gnarled character with a long, strawberry blonde beard and cracks in his face as deep as my thumb. I ran out of money there.

4.45 am

2011-12-16T08:26:00.000+08:00

The heft of rope. Wind blowing the boat off the nets and straining the corkline. I'm glad for gloves on windy mornings. Pelicans gather, diving their beaks into the sea to tear herring out of the net but shake their heads at the baby rays, tossed back pink and black. Silver gleam. Tailor? Mulloway? Mulloway. A tugging on the corkline and a tangle of stingray and mesh over the gunwale. The smell of flowers from across the harbour. Pull the net across the water against the wind. Salt spray. Start the outboard and go ahead to ease the strain and stop the net from furling. Long fronds of weed with butterflied cockles for anchors. Hair in my face. Seagrass parting under the tinny. A Shepherd's Warning sky. Slap of a black bream tail in the red box. Shake the catching net at the pelicans so they rise away from the herring in a panic and settle again, cruise back in. One barnacled blue manna crab. Gnarly bastard.
Breakfast.

Divine Wind

2011-12-13T13:24:00.001+08:00

Last night at the old whaling station, the mayor of Albany helped launch Sea Shepherd's 2011 Antarctic campaign Divine Wind (aka 'God Wind', or 'Kamikaze', interestingly).

On a Mission

2011-12-11T18:59:00.023+08:00

The panting of a brindle dog
disturbed my washing up.
I ran through the house to the veranda.
A yellow-eyed chicken killer,
part mastiff, pitty, kelpie
and born to partake in this county's gifts,
slurped water from the tub under the tap

"Come here. C'mon. Here boy."

He looked at me like I was a crazy
and loped away, up the street.

When Bob lived
here
I used to pitstop too.
A cup of Bob's grimy tea
and I was ready for the world.

The Seaways This Morn

2011-12-10T08:18:00.002+08:00

A Warm Welcome From the Albany Port Authority

2011-12-10T00:52:00.017+08:00

On the Salamanca docks in Hobart we wondered at the the Antarctic expeditioner named after a nineteenth century French sojourner. I love reading the journals of d'Urville and his officers in King George Sound. In Hobart we could nearly touch this maritime continuation of our past.

Not so in Albany. Tonight the SS Steve Irwin steamed in. Below is the only look you will get at this ship while they are in town, unless you have a boat. And then, no closer than eighty metres, please.

The security guard is a friendly from a firm contracted by the the Albany Port Authority to make sure no rabble get close to the port. "I work for/ for the APA," he told me, careful to distance himself with an extra 'for'. He might have been a cheerful employee but he is also an old Albany boy who used to fish off the wharf just like me, and he remembers all the graffiti that the seamen left, huge painted signs of national flags on the concrete back in the day when we had access.

He also remembers the whaling days because his uncles and his father worked the chasers.

He was good at his job and pleasantly refused to open the gates. He pointed the way for our best photo opportunity out by the tug boat harbour. I knew a way I could get to the port via my old fish factory haunt but tonight it involved a barbed wire fence that resembled something I used to build to keep foxes out of my chook pen. Dammit, no carpet, no key to the gates ...

"The eclipse is s'posed to be tonight but I didn't see it," he said. Well he should know. He'd been standing outside all night, protecting the port from terrorists, drug dealers and litigants, you know, the usual sorts that hang around Albany.
Yes. Anyway. Welcome to Albany, Sea Shepherd.

Waiting for Bardot

2011-12-09T21:18:00.008+08:00

This afternoon we set nets and crab pots at the western end of the harbour.
"You gone to visit Paul Watson yet?" Old Salt asked me.
"Why?" I was thinking of our local member of parliament. (Mental note, Peter not Paul.)
"Isn't he coming to town to save the whales?"
Ahh. The Sea Shepherd mob.

Apparently the Steve Irwin and the Brigitte Bardot are coming into port today and will be launching this season's campaign from the old whaling station on Monday. As I keep saying, the whaling dramas continue to play out in our town, the last land-based whaling station in the southern hemisphere.

"I think he's an arsehole," Old Salt was trying to get a rise out of me. "Putting people out of work. He should get a real job instead of sailing around the world, stopping good people from doing theirs."

The problem with working in a small boat is that you are stuck with whatever conversation is going on. Sometimes when Old Salt wants a barney, I'll ask him to drop me off on an island. This is a good lurk. This afternoon I was forced to stay aboard and, if you know me at all from A WineDark Sea, I'm quite partial to a rant if it suits me.

"Where was the Australian Navy when the whalers were cruising through the Australian Whale Sanctuary? Where? 'Crackpot' Watson was the only one out there. It's a territorial matter as much as anything but the government were behaving like total limpdicks." (I'm trying really hard to reign in my deckie mouth whenever I head off to uni but at sea, things are different.)
"I reckon the Australian government has some agreement with the Japanese we don't know about," Old Salt said. "But they've been eating whale meat for centuries. That should be their right. Imagine how many people you could feed with a single whale."
"Poor people?"
"Yeah."
"They can't afford to eat Japanese whale meat."
He muttered something about poor people breeding too much and I smiled away to the water. I know he hates that.
"But they should be able to kill whales if it is a part of their ancestral heritage."
"Yeah, with diesel-powered gunships, thousands of nautical miles from their own waters. Yeah."

Old Salt said, "When I was whaling, oh it was a good life. We were a bunch of rascals, out at sea, coming in with shitloads of money, tearing up the town ... yeah, it was good. But I wouldn't do it now. I never liked seeing those creatures die. It was a terrible thing, to see them die."

When we got back to the boat ramp, he said "I want you down here at four-thirty tomorrow mornin'."
Four thirty. Three thirty out of bed, with forty five minutes to get my shit together. We go through this routine of bargaining waking hours every Saturday.
"Five."
"It's dawn at five."
Summer is bastard for layabout fisherwomen like me. "Yep. That gives us two hours to pick up."
"With the pots and all," He chucks me his worried look. " ... and all those crabs in the nets ... "
He gave in a bit too fast though. Made me think he hated too-early mornings too. "Okay, don't be late. No socialising tonight."

I went for a drive around the headland after he drove off because I saw the whale watching cat set off and I thought they may be ushering in the Sea Shepherd fleet. There was a bit of a buzz in the air. But I had no joy when I went down to the pea factory on the channel to scout them out. I'll post some photos if I see them in my sleepy, dazed state in the morn.

In the mean time, here's some that I took of the Taurus heading out to the islands.

Ivor Cutler and the Herring

2011-12-09T09:10:00.000+08:00

Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, #2, Episode 11.

On Burying Brindle Dogs

2011-12-03T23:39:00.020+08:00

Last night I drove out Chester Pass and saw my year's first of those strange household Christmas installations adorning some horrible brick veneer, um, home. I understand that this is the only time of the year this house will be anywhere near striking. I even get, when I'm feeling generous, the impetus behind the flashing lights, fake Santas, snow and reindeers, despite it being midsummer fire season in Australia.

About five years ago the West Australian ran a competition for the best domestic Christmas lights fiasco. The same year I got lost in suburban Perth in the middle of the night, a refugee from the south coast trying to find a wedding in the city of Fremantle. I kept doubling back in the Bedford van and blundering into the same brick and tile Rockingham wasteland sporting sparkling rooftop sleighs driven by fat men in Coca Cola suits. Even Indiana Jones would have felt disenchanted. I've hated that newspaper ever since.

Stop fussing, please. I'm getting around to burying brindle dogs. Stay with me here.

At about the same time, a suburb in Albany began specialising in the domestic Christmas thing. Whole streets of houses were strung up with Christmas bling and there were even oldies coming out to give kids lollies. It sounded great and I decided that I'd take my children on a tour of the Christmas lights. Unfortunately, I'd run out of petrol that morning - the usual starving student, single mum scenario - so I asked my Mum if I could borrow her car.

My mum had this dog who she'd saved from a certain death several years previously. Mum saves dogs a lot because, like me, she's an old witch who knows that dogs are her familiars. Gypsy was a great dane crossed with bull mastiff; a friendly, brindle killing machine. Her genes were completely dodgey. This living example of humankind tampering with nature always shits me. Some people just think they can build dogs to extend some ridiculous idea of themselves.

By the time she was eight years old, Gypsy's back could no longer hold up her body and she was in constant pain.Then she started trying to kill other dogs. I took her for a walk one day and met a man and his child on the bridge. His beautiful two year old daughter tried to ride her like a horse and Gypsy bit her when the toddler began to throw a leg over. Not only Gypsy's physical pain but the look in her eye began to bother me.
My mum and I had stern words.
"It's only a matter of time," I said. "She'll tear some kid's head off. You can't trust her. It's gotta be done."

On one of those pre-Christmas days, Mum put Gypsy in the back of her little sedan to get her put down. It was a hot, busy, chaotic day.

That night, we drove around the Christmas bling suburb. The eve was steamy with new summer smells. We drove up and down suburban streets lit up with festivities and we stopped often to walk around and wonder at the massive efforts of the householders and eat their offered sweets. Whenever we got back into the car, I started sniffing at my freshly adolescent daughter. "Darling, it's okay not to have a shower every night. But you must change your clothes. That's what it is. It's hot. You are sweating more now you are a teenager. "

They will never know. Right?
That their mum took them on a tour of Christmas delights with their beloved Gypsy going off in the boot. The next morning my mum told me that because I'd been working all day and wasn't around, she wasn't able to lift the great dane's body out on her own. She sold the car eventually. She was never able to get the smell out.

Gypsy wasn't the first big brindle dog to grace my life.
I used to live in the centre of town with several babies, chickens and a brindle kangaroo dog. In Europe they are called lurchers, the original poaching dogs. Silent, (they don't bark when hunting) incredibly fast, brindle and shaggy, they are the bedraggled kings and queens after my own heart. Lurchers in Australia tend to be dearly loved by Aborigines and old-school farmers. A strange connection, I know.

Daisy was a feral mix of wolfhound, staghound and Rhodesian ridgeback. Her kin appeared lounging around King Lear's hearths. She died when she sniffed out a plastic bag of rat poison on the back of a ute. I'd taken her out to the farm when she went on heat to avoid Black Dog who turned up every six months on the dot. When the farmer alerted me to the empty bag of rat poison blowing in his yard, I took her to the vet who pumped her with vitamin K. She lived for another week. Finally her big body lay on the vinyl floor, showered with flowers from the vet's garden.

Black Dog stayed at my house, waiting. Sometimes I fed him.

I dropped the kids off at school and then the nurse helped me carry Daisy's body out to my car. I got home, dragged her out of the car and wrapped her in a tarpaulin. For the rest of the day, I dug.

It's an old part of town. I had a conversation yesterday with the current owner of the house I lived in then and he agrees on the strata. There is basalt rocks and seashells and bones and the remains of a lumber yard. I dug all day, turfing out rocks, other families' beloved dead dogs, olive oil tins and sea shells. Then I went to pick up the kids from school.

We three stood around the massive hole. Pearlie and Stormboy couldn't believe Daisy had actually died.
All of us were sobbing. Believe me, perhaps the death of a long-removed family member is an assault on our knowledge of grief. Try dogs. I lowered the tarp-clad body of Daisy into the hole. She didn't fit. Fuck. I'd spent all day digging that hole but the dog's legs were stretched out in rigor mortis and she was the size of a calf. Pearlie and Stormboy started crying even more. I desperately tried to widen the hole with my shovel.

Across the road lived the local ABC radio announcer who (I'm pretty sure) saw all my weekly dramas and domestics play out. I'd always liked him and his wife but was too inundated and shamed and baby-tired to acknowledge them.

I saw him cross the road. He must have been watching me dig that dog's grave from his front room. He walked up to me and took the shovel from my hands. He patted my shoulder and said, "No-one should have to do this on their own, Sarah."
And he started digging.
I loved him then.
I always will.

Whale, Daughter, Overland

2011-12-02T21:28:00.005+08:00

The latest copy of Overland is due to hit my letterbox next week and it's very exciting for me because one of my stories is in it!

I call Whale, Daughter my 'hysterical story' because I spent most of its creation in tears.

But don't let a few damp blotches on the pages put you off. It's the story of a dying whale and other aspects of my life at that time but I still feel this is a sound piece of work. There's lots of other good stuff in there too, of course. I notice (she said a bit grumpily) that Overland hasn't made it to West Australian or Northern Territory bookshops but you can subscribe online here.

Three Interesting Things

2011-12-02T10:52:00.002+08:00

Remnants of the past ... these net racks used to be in every commercial fisherman's backyard and salmon beach. They were for drying the heavy hemp or cotton nets after being tanned in big drums of boiling grass tree resin and water, and also to clean out sea weed after a beach seine shot. The net racks tended to disappear when the fishers began to use monfilament but this one is still standing at Windy Harbour.

Quongdongs, bush tucker extraordinaire! I was driving out to Kundip with one of the local elders on Tuesday. She kept slowing as we got near the Phillips River. "No, not there." She'd speed up again and then slow on the next corner. "Here, here." And 'Here' we wandered through a little forest of Quongdongs. I'd like to plant some at my place.

Redback spider. Danger danger, that jagged red stripe screams. I haven't seen one that big and red for a long time. Kundip seems to harbour a few invertebrate nasties like redbacks and scorpians.

And that is my show and tell for today!

Sailing the Good Ship Vesperosa

2011-11-29T08:13:00.004+08:00

Text from a Toa Sister

2011-11-29T01:13:00.002+08:00

"Nothing but cool alloy sculptures left.

Me house exploded.

i reckon i can say

i take the

biggest explosion by a Drummond girl prize."

Punch and Judy (With All the Scary Bits!)

2011-11-25T10:59:00.002+08:00

While Ken handed out pamphlets at the markets for his travelling Punch and Judy show, I asked his partner Kirsty, "what is it about Punch and Judy? What are your theories?"
She replied that kids are always being told what to do and how to behave, Constable Care style. When they are exposed to Punch's reprehensible, ridiculous buffoonery that involves him making the same mistake over and over again, children are happy to claim the moral power to let him know where he is going wrong. So they teach themselves ... Nice hey.

Here are the details for Punch and Judy in Albany and Denmark:

ALBANY, this Saturday, Nov. 26. 11 am & 2pm St Johns church hall York Street.
DENMARK This Sunday, 27th CWA Hall Mitchell street

Kids $10.00

Adults $12.00

Family (4) $40.00

Enough of Flames

2011-11-25T10:38:00.001+08:00

Enough of flames for a little while and back on the WineDark Sea... except to let you know that the Toa sisters are all okay. The weather in Margaret River has cooled down which will make it easier to bring the fire under control, today. The Denmark fires sound like they have settled down a bit too. I woke this morning with smoke from 50 kilometres away filtering through my curtains.

Last night we fished for flathead and then motored home at night, past the container ships.

Wildfire #2

2011-11-24T17:44:00.028+08:00

One sister is leaving town. "My kids are getting more and more upset. They're getting all the old folk out of the hospital. The school's shut down. It's so smoky here. We're leaving."

Annie's house was obliterated yesterday. She's lost everything* and is running on a strange kind of adrenalin when I talk to her. I'm still waiting for her to crash.
"That house would have exploded ... the fuel tins I stored under the veranda, and my best motorbike too ...but my Nissan Urvan - the fire burnt in a neat circle right around it! That is my best car. I'm so stoked. Also, you'd never credit it, someone gave me a fire fighting unit the day before yesterday!"
"Well, that's not really useful when you've gotta race in, grab your paperwork and leave," I said.
"Yeah ... especially because there wasn't even a hose attached!"

My other sister (I have lots of sisters in Margs) is contemplating the fire front heading for her house as I write this post. She's in town and has been convoying cars, dogs, boats and furniture from her forest block all day. "You wouldn't believe the gusts. Fifty, sixty kilometres an hour. Then it just stops and we think everything's okay. The fire is making its own weather system. But now the wind has changed and its blowing the fire front towards the town. Everyone is freaked out."
She's worried about her landlord/neighbour who is refusing to leave. "He's like the captain of the Titanic, the stupid bastard. He's out there getting pissed."

On my last phone call, the sisters were okay but seriously rattled and tired after twenty-four hours of drama, sleeping with mates, community briefings and stressing out over horses etc. One sister wants to break a few DEC kneecaps but as I reminded her, "You'd hesitate at the crucial moment, darl. I know you too well."

Tonight ... the FESA incident controller Roger Armstrong told the community meeting that conditions were unlikely to get better. "It'll be traveling fast, the sky will go dark, it'll be very scary, and there'll be a lot of noise," he said.

*except her Urvan!

Wildfire

2011-11-23T19:33:00.004+08:00

I was driving into town this morning and listening to the fire warnings on the radio. 'Catastrophic' was the potential scenario handed out to country north east of here. This is a new warning that morphed from the Ash Saturday disaster. Before then, Australians only had to deal with 'high' or 'extreme' fire danger.

Driving again in the afternoon, I heard that a fire was burning out of control near Margaret River. The announcer gave warnings about Caves Road. Shit. I rang my sister who lives in a little wooden hippy shack in the forest there. Her phone was dead. I rang two other sisters. "She's okay. She evacuated." Finally Annie rang me. "I got my tools and some clothes. (She is an extremely well dressed mechanic) But I think my house has just burnt down."

The directions on what to do for people living on Caves Road brings home how truly terrifying this fire is:

"WHAT TO DO:

It is too late to leave. You need to take shelter in your home and actively defend it.
Take shelter inside furthest away from the fire front and make sure you can easily escape.
It is best to shelter in a room with two exits and a water supply such as a kitchen or laundry.
You must seek shelter before the fire arrives as the very hot radiant heat will kill you well before the flames reach you. Protect yourself with long sleeves, long trousers and strong leather boots.
If your home catches on fire and the conditions inside become unbearable, you need to get out and go to an area that has already been burnt.
Do not leave in a vehicle or on foot as this is deadly."*

* http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/11/23/3374565.htm
Images: Perth Now.

Vardo II

2011-11-21T11:54:00.000+08:00

Image by S. Wilson

A Day in the Sound

2011-11-19T19:34:00.003+08:00

A day in King George Sound fishing for King George whiting is a kind of healing after a winter in the estuaries. Any grumpiness produced by murky inlet waters, muddy seagrass, angry crabs and obscenely early mornings are forgotten as the Westerberg skims the offshore briny and settles into the turquoise dream of the whiting grounds.

Triangles of white sails lie against the islands. Fish shaped like silver sickles, like big bluegum leaves, come up in pods of three. The water in the red bin glistens with whiting mica and far away, I can see the flashes of swell crashing into Breaksea Island. My skin tightens with sun and salt but I just cannot turn my face away from it.

Interview With a Fisherwoman #3

2011-11-16T22:04:00.010+08:00

When she was two years old and living on the island, her father would put her in a wicker basket and lower her on a rope down the long walls of granite to the groper hole.

He was a strong man and a lighthouse keeper.

He would climb down after her and together they berleyed up crabs and abalone roe.

Some of the groper were as big as he. He’d climb back up the rock with the tracer over his shoulder, hauling the creature out of the sea.
“We used to eat fish every day, and rabbits. Loads of rabbits on Eclipse Island. The Kestrel only came out every few weeks with supplies, firewood, kero, flour, all that stuff, so we ate whatever was around.”

As a family they worked sharking at Hammelin Bay and rarely went past the little island for prey. It has always been a popular holiday spot and I think netting is now banned there. “So many sharks! Right where everyone swam and mucked about.” She showed me a photograph of her as a kid, surrounded in shark carcasses slung from racks and lying in the sand at her feet.

Black and white photographs of huge sharks, the images peeled at the edges, sometimes a date, names and other details neatly typed on a separate piece of paper and glued carefully beneath the fish – I see these pictures often when talking to older fishers.

Far from macho posings, the commercial fishers tended to take pictures of women wearing shady hats and aprons, or children with bleached, wild hair sitting astride a monster that they hooked off the beach or dragged out of the salmon net. Women and their daughters have always been part of the action.

“I was snigging salmon up the beach when I was two years old,” Ms Mer tells me proudly.

Image: Mulloway. Robert Neill. 1841.

Interview With a Fisherwoman #2

2011-11-10T13:23:00.000+08:00

Interview With a Fisherwoman

2011-11-09T20:09:00.009+08:00

I drove out to meet a fisherwoman on a day when gales and hailstones battered the whole south west of the continent.

"Tray back Landcruiser. White." She said she would meet me by the caretakers shed. I drove along puddled gravel roads, past the colourful weatherboard fishing shacks that squatted side by side like uncertain teenagers, until I found her.

"It's the wild woman of Borneo!" she said, leaning out of the ute and taking off her black wraparound sunnies. I could have returned the compliment. Ms Mer was older than she sounded on the phone. Her hair shone snow white from beneath her beannie but her eyes were clear, pure blue like a sun-glad sea. She'd spent so many years at sea that her irises could have been made of the stuff but there was also a bit of steel in there and something else; a humanity, a steady reckoning, kindness.

We rumbled past more shacks. "They keep all us professionals out the back here, out of sight," she told me later. "Right at the end of the track. We have to keep all our gear out of sight too, in case it offends the reccies." She means the anglers, inland farmers or city dwellers, who lease shacks for their holidays. Solar panels perch on reccie roofs like raptors and hot water systems are wrapped in tarps to keep out the salt spray. They nail signs by their front door: Gone Fishin', To the Manor Prawn, Hideaway or Merv n Averil's Castle.

I was impressed by the lack of signage to Ms Mer's shack. That and the monster of a diesel Lister chugging away in the shed. "Gotta have it. There's no mains power out here. I need it to make ice." She makes block ice to keep the fish cool when she is out at sea for a few days. "Been through a few of those motors since 1971, three ... maybe four."

Her garden was smooth beach stones and succulents. Long white socks hung in the garage next to her 'changing room', where all the fishers got out of their smelly gear. Up a carpeted ramp was the door to the house. She showed me into a large room with huge windows looking over the sand dunes and then the island out in blustering, choppy sea. Inside, armchairs were cowled in crocheted rugs. Shelves and shelves of books: hymn books, Lynda la Plant, more crime fiction, Australiana, Readers Digests, Hammond Innes. On the bookshelf was a yellowed photograph of her and a fellow nurse from the Vietnam War, grinning into the camera with urchin innocence, the Vietnamese child on the stretcher smiling too, swathed in bandages and sheets.

The Everhot was firing and beneath it two lizards lolled on the warm tiles. A polished kettle hummed on the hot plate. She turned off the radio. "No good news anyway." Ticking clock. The roar and roar of that wild sea.

"Cuppa tea, coffee?"

"I'd love a coffee. Missed out this morning. I had no milk."

She sniffed when I said I wanted sugar. "Sugar!" She hunted around for some. "I don't have sugar in anything. Never have liked the stuff."

Ms Mer had made a barley mushroom soup, some coleslaw, pickled beetroot and plateful of crumbed herring morsels and she placed it all on the table along with bread and butter. Faded brown flowers spread over the table cloth. She sat down opposite me, the teabag still dangling from her cup, and fixed me with her blue eyes. She'd taken off her beannie and her white hair framed her like a pixie cap. "I hope you like the soup. You're not vegan or anything?"

"I'll eat anything. But especially herring."

"I'm not such a great cook," she shrugged and smiled.

"But this is lovely! It's a feast."

"You know, I never married. Got out of that one nicely, hey? Never a man who would cook and clean for me while I went fishing. I don't even really care about houses. Houses are just places where us guys sleep when we're not aboard a boat."

She showed me a photograph of a classic West Australian fishing boat, slung up on a lift, about to enter the water, surrounded by men in flannelette shirts. "That's my old boat. I sold her and bought the one I got now. That's just after I built her. Bond wood. Not a plank boat. Plank boats are a lot of work. When you get them out of the water every year, you gotta paint them, caulk them ..."

I started to tell her about the Pearl and then decided not to.

Lorna Fencer Napurrurla

2011-11-08T20:47:00.004+08:00

Please, please have a look at this post by the Northern Territory's Bob Gosford on the art and life of Lorna Fencer Napurrurla.

Kangaroo Tucker. Lorna Fencer Napurrurla. 2004

Sunday Markets

2011-11-04T21:50:00.011+08:00

"I bet you're gonna miss the markets," Old Salt said to me as we set the nets in the evening.
"Yeah, I will. But I'll miss being out in the boat more."
Old Salt and I have been fishing for the Sunday seafood markets for three years now. We start on Thursdays, baiting crab pots with trumpeters or the filleted carcasses from the previous week, setting nets for herring and bream and whiting. Saturdays I clean fish on the stainless steel table in my backyard to the strains of Johnny Cash or the Sundowners radio show (Not! According to health regulations we have to clean fish on the boat. But no soul would buy it if they saw the state of that boat, so it is a bureaucratic nod to the healthies that we theoretically fillet onboard and realistically fillet somewhere cleaner.)

Before the seafood markets we sold fish to the Perth markets for two years. But the Sunday markets are now my favourite financial staple, my one social networking event and the source of such joy juice as great musicians, clean, locally produced food and really, really good coffee. It's all in one place! Right on the sea shore, where the fishing boats are moored next to million dollar yachts. On Sundays we eat like gourmets - fresh Albany oysters (the Oyster Boys love crabs), asparagus (she loves black bream), local beef, strawberries (they love black bream too), obscenely yummy marinated fetta (he loves fishmeal for his biodynamic compost operation) and fresh pink lady apples (I think they like cash more than fish, though they do dissolve at the prospect of King George whiting).

Stormboy has learned his addition and subtraction as the cashier. I weigh and wrap up the fish and crabs. Old Salt leans against the table and, by the pure power of his charisma, attracts conversation with other old salts or lovely ladies in the queue.

We rarely have left overs. People complain because they come in an hour after we open and Old Salt and I have sold out. This happens most Sundays and I have to explain to cranky punters that we don't buy fish in from other fishers. We catch it all ourselves and we don't freeze anything either. Get in early and you'll know that your produce was still wriggling twenty four hours ago, so fresh you'd slap its face.

As you may gather, I'm quite proud of our seafood stall. It's unique in our corner of the world, where fish can end up in supermarkets a week (weeks?) after it is caught and still labelled as fresh. (Believe me, I know how that system works and it is not nice.) That's before the imported seafood comes in from from dodgey international fisheries. Our fish shop is a good argument for sustainable fishing practices as well, servicing a small market, heavily regulated by such handsome characters as our fisheries officers and concentrating on 'run' fish, rather than the sedentary fish which tend to get hammered by anyone with a boat.

I'll get on to why I am going to miss fishing so much. This post began as a story about a squabble between Old Salt and I, and morphed. Sorry about that. As the drunken gravedigger said to the coffin, "I'll fill yer in later, mate."

Boundary Stones

2011-11-02T20:46:00.001+08:00

Fishing Shacks #5

2011-11-01T16:27:00.003+08:00

Pelicans

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000+08:00

Snapshot

2011-10-30T20:12:00.002+08:00

'"Get in the car."
I was on the verandah, fuelling my hair with henna mud, when I heard that.
"Just get in the fucking car."
It's a nasty road, no room for a mistakes or for domestics to play out. The voice came from behind the peppermint trees and roses that screen traffic from my life but it was so close it could have been in my own head. I looked through the screen of green to see a blue-hoody-boy sticking resolutely to his path.
"Get in the car, fer fuck's sake!" I could hear the father's frustration ... and fear.
The car revved and stopped again.
"What's wrong with you, boy!"

A door slammed. The car rumbled down to the stop sign. I headed for the driveway to check if the teenager was okay, knowing I looked like some kind of Dogon dogstar-worshipping mud man. He was in the car. He wasn't okay, his Dad wasn't okay. Their Sunday was turning out a whole hatful of shite.

A Deckie's Street Cred Death

2011-10-26T22:40:00.009+08:00

I've just started on the next draft with the publisher's words in mind: "You must make sure the characters in this book are okay with you writing about them. You are going to have to run it by them."

"But they all have pseudonyms!" I protested. "They don't even know who they are and some of them have two or three characters meshed into one."

Fishermen always know who they are. But creative non fiction, it seems, is a green, sunlit field full of grasses waving in the wind ... and fraught with unexploded ordinances. "This stuff holds a lot of power, later, much later," the publisher explained.

I talked to Grievous. "I've written this book ..."

And Blunty and Nails and Old Salt and Kermit and Perry.
They all like the stories because they have been hanging out for years for someone to do this.

I rang Fisheries. "I've written this book ..."

I had a meeting with them yesterday and we ambled around the legalities of buying wetline or estuarine licenses, the proposed marine parks, the flathead wars and how they are going to deal with those dastardly recreationals who rat our crab pots.

Finally we got to the subject of my book.

"It's very tongue in cheek," I said. The chapters involving Fisheries Officers were printed out and folded neatly in my handbag.

Here is an excerpt, just so you understand exactly what I'm going through today:

Super Fisheries Officer Guy

I was quite excited about getting the fisheries involved to catch the crab thief, seeing as yours truly harbours a guilty lust for fisheries officers. Guilty, because the Department of Fisheries and commercial fishers are the Montague and Capulet families of the ocean. Lust, because fisheries officers are such a damn sexy bunch that every time they are in uniform at the boat ramp, something strange happens to me. I get flustered, forget things, like how to speak, and I deeply regret my choice of attire. The fact that the workplace tinny requires a raincoat and plastic pants has no bearing on my desire to be wearing something more attractive when these strapping lads come calling.

And then this:

We were launching one day, when a whole boat load of Brads came in. These guys were not the inspectors of the fisheries world but its special investigators. It was getting close to dusk. They were knocking off and we were just going out.

“You after whiting tonight?”

Salt reversed the boat trailer down the ramp. I stood at the winch, a happy girl.

“No, flathead. What have you guys been up to today?”

He leaned out of his immaculate boat and gave me a blue-eyed smile. “Gonad counts on herring.”

Phwoar ... “Really? Gonad counts? Amazing! (Giggle.)”

“Have you seen any around lately?’

“No, I haven’t seen many herring.” Probably because they weren’t running at the time, but I didn’t say that.

I wasn’t really focussing on my job. I let the ratchet off the winch, forgetting that Salt had greased the rollers the previous day. So the boat rolled straight off the trailer and into the sea, the cable still hooked onto the bow and the winch handle spinning wildly. Something you must never do – and usually do anyway in the heat of the moment – is attempt to stop a spinning winch handle with your own flesh and bone. The handle has the weight of a whole boat behind it. Don’t do it.

I’m pretty sure I knocked a chip out of my thumb bone that day. My hand immediately swelled into a rather useless appendage and I was left in a world of pain which intensified my confused feelings of embarrassment and grumpiness.

“I’ve never done that before,” I explained to Gonad Man. My dog jumped into his boat.

“No, really, I haven’t!” This kind of double protestation always makes things worse. To compound it all, the dog would not get out of the Department vessel, totally ignoring my threats and entreaties.

Our meeting wound up and the two fisheries officers were still waiting for me to hand over the manuscript.

Yes, folk. I bailed. I asked them for their email addresses and said I'd 'flick it to them.'

They will never see me at the boat ramp with a straight face again.

Damn. Damn damn darnit.

The Tanks

2011-10-25T21:08:00.007+08:00

In 1940s northern Australia, the World War was probably seen as a distant disaster that became decidedly neighbourly once the Japanese started bombing. I think Singapore and then Timor were the stepping stones. The settlements of Darwin and then Broome were next. As a teenager, I walked out across the tidal mudflats at Broome to toe the barnacled carcasses of the Dutch seaplanes that tried to escape and failed, during the bombing in 1942.

A young Aboriginal man stood on the engine block with nylon fishing line threaded between his toes, waiting for the returning tide and the mulloway. I thought he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. (I was 12, maybe 13 ... and perhaps it was also the setting ... but my visual memory still agrees). When the tide turned, I had to jog across the flats to Roebuck Bay to beat the rushing, incoming king tide that threatened to drown me.

Anyway ... the deep south was not considered immune from Japanese attack and this fear is historically backed up with stories about Southern Ocean submarines off the Nullabor and midget subs in Sydney Harbour etc etc. In Albany, the forts were fortified for a second time and gun placements cemented in. But some of the best WWII artifacts in Albany are several kilomtres from the heads: the fuel tanks. They are straight down the hill from where I live, huge concrete tanks that were once used to store fuel (well away from foreshore war targets), with iron pipes that travelled to refuel the allied ships. The pipes are now rusting under railway lines, the new entertainment centre and the woodchip berths.

Some of the tanks have their own eco-systems going on now. Gum trees sprout and lurch for the light. Bullrushes ask the frogs to join them in chorus with tiger snakes, gotu kola and bangaras. In the winters, some of the tanks fill with water and turn into swamps.

A some stage a scrap metal merchant tried to strip the concrete walls of their iron cladding.

The tanks have been ignored by the general population over decades but are these days closely guarded by agents of the fertiliser company owner, whose harbourside toiletries were responsible for a Princess Royal F*ck Up of environmental disasters in the 1980s.

The tanks are still revered by a small minority. This minority are the street artists of Albany. The circular walls ('whispering walls', as a friend noted, when he realised he could stand half way around these massive circles and whisper naughty things to anyone fifty metres away on the arc) host the psychedelic illustrations of those folk. If you are a regular WineDark Sea visitor, you will recognise these pics:

So, a product of World War II engineering turns into a subversive, ever evolving art gallery and - like the shattered sea plane beds of Roebuck Bay with the dreamy man who knew well enough to fish there - a place of beauty, space and peace.

Parikia Reef, by Catherine Gordon

2011-10-25T11:06:00.000+08:00

The Hand That Mocked Them and the Heart That Fed

2011-10-22T21:19:00.002+08:00

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away'.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Just a Quick Reminder ...

2011-10-20T23:26:00.010+08:00

Back in the bad old days, when the pea 'n' beans processor let their by-product flow straight into the channel, we'd string up a piece of bamboo with some nylon and a hook and go looking for herring.

We stood on wet black rocks with the conveyor belt ladies (the ones who picked out the rotten peas) and men whom we thought then were old - wrinkled knees and Stubbie shorts, fingers flattened and strong with manual work. No bait required, thanks to those rotten peas and bean shells. The herring were nuts. We'd get a bucketful in half an hour.

Around the corner from the creaking, rusting factory, there lies a pristine little cove, secreted away from roads or tracks. It's a funny little spot on the south shore of the channel into Princess Royal Harbour, damp, often hidden from the sun, clad in paper bark trees that grow right down to the briny. Things arrive here, flotsam from the Sound and beyond.

It's a good place to play, catch whiting, and watch the schools of salmon trout meander by.

To get the massive Cape iron ore ships into Princess Royal Harbour, the Albany Port Authority and Grange Resources will dredge a channel from the harbour, straight through the middle of King George Sound.

The seagrass beds in the channel and the Sound are able to look after themselves, apparently. They still haven't recovered from the best efforts of the fertiliser plant to destroy them on the western shores in the 1970s, but the EPA and the Port Authority are confidant that seagrass beds can adapt to any mining boom.

As for The Cove, the spoils from some of the dredging will be used to fill it in, to create a berth for the iron ore ships. The Cove, the last piece of natural coastline (apart from Pelican Point) on the north side of the harbour, will be gone. I was asked recently what will happen to The Cove after the Albany Port Authority and Grange Resources have taken residency.

It's a no-brainer really. It just won't exist any more.

The Cove will be replaced with this:

These last three photographs were taken right next to The Cove. Already the old fishing goat tracks have been covered over to prevent public access. The dredging is due to start next year. Sorry to let such a bucolic tale turn so nasty ... but it is the tale for this little corner of the world.

Wild Man

2011-10-20T10:24:00.002+08:00

Cobbler and Bream, Irwin's Inlet

2011-10-19T11:01:00.000+08:00

Black Irish Hair

2011-10-18T22:14:00.022+08:00

Our Auntie reckons we've got Black Irish in us. She's white, white skinned and blue-eyed, and then some wayback gene bestowed her with ebony hair- a whole helmet of fuzzy - kinked like a Papuan's heirloom, busting our Auntie right out of the O' Sullivan clique . She's often wondered about her origins. One of my sisters is the same. She has skin that peels and dies in the sun before it will tan, and hair of any South Pacific Indigene. The rest of us have ringlets at the pre-kink stage; mad, woolly, reddening curls and freckly, Australian skin that borders on the swarthy.

At fourteen, Stormboy is struggling with his curls. "But curls get the girls!" I've been trying this line for a while. I tried to explain the link between curls and testosterone, about genetics and how lucky he is. I conveniently forgot that at his age, I was curvy, curly and near on six foot and I desperately wanted to be everything else but. He has taken to hair wax and the straightening iron. He's got a kind of Bieber thing going on. Fruit of my loins, child!

Pearlie denied the Curl too, at fourteen. I think she owns a straightening iron for every year she's existed in her present human form. The anti-frizz, 'gliss' and smoothing muck spouting the sexy-straight-hair-jargon has been clogging our bathroom ever since 2006.

Some sociologists reckon that by the time kids reach their late teens, they return to the core beliefs they were raised with. I'm just hoping that my kids' curls will find their rightful crown.

That said, I've got a pharmacy of the stuff now, thanks to the said teens. Taming days are my weakness, especially when this frizzy old wild witch o' the west is about to be subjected to a job interview with Someone Important. I still fall for that. I'll spray or wipe the stuff into my hair in an attempt to look respectable. It usually turns the whole bird's nest into a dirty mess. Then I tie it into a bun. On my way to the job interview, folk will stop me in the street and ask if I can score some drugs for them.

Whole-egg mayonnaise, honey, olive oil, not letting a (straight) hairdresser near me and no brushing after washing are the tried and true formula for dealing with Black Irish hair. As I age, I'm getting to better understand my locks.

I walked into a hairdressers in my late teens and asked the man to cut my hair. He looked at me and started cursing in Italian. Then he produced a fine toothed comb and dragged it through my hair like I was some kind of heretic Lilith visitation. He was ripping my hair out by the roots and still cursing. By then I was getting cranky because it was really hurting me. The whole experience was quite unpleasant for both of us.

His apricot tree fruits every year out the back of his shop and they are so fucking yummy when he is away on holidays. I always remember that comb and laugh as my witchy hair snags on one of his branches.

By the Seashore

2011-10-16T20:17:00.000+08:00

Here is a moment from one of my favourite poems ...

I was friendly with the fishermen,
Under an upturned boat often
When the rain pelted sat with them,
Heard about the sea, and stored it up
In secret, believing every word.
They became used to me.
If I wasn't on the quay
The old fisherman sent a girl
To shout to me: 'Our men are back!
We're frying the flatfish.'

'By the Seashore', Anna Akhmatova, in Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 32.

Catherine Gordon on Paros

2011-10-16T19:15:00.001+08:00

My friend Cathy is on the Greek island of Paros doing an artist's residential.

Here is some of her latest work!

I Want to Get Off: Advice is Welcome

2011-10-14T21:20:00.007+08:00

How do I delete myself from FaceBook? Permanently?

I thought I'd dived under the radar two years ago, only to discover tonight that my homepage is still up and running and 30,000 people (well, okay, not quite) have since tried to 'friend' me.I don't like FaceBook and the magic delete button is mysteriously missing on the settings page. Another thing I don't like is that this 'private company' is collecting information about me and selling it to other companies/prospective employers/ex boyfriends. If that kind of behaviour came from the Australian government, you'd think Big Brother, riots in the street, or maybe even a tax file number.

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me. I disabled the gps on the my phone the same day I bought it. I found out recently that my mere fumblings will not waylay the reptilian instincts of NASA or Google Maps. Those guys will always know where I am so long as I own a mobile phone (even if it is switched off). I discovered a website where you can stalk your ex for less than ten dollars a month by entering both your mobile phone numbers. Aghhh! Give me country gossip, a strange man following me home from the pub at midnight and the acknowledged inconfidentiality of social services in a small town any day. I'd prefer that. At least I can counter that with letters, fisticuffs and a chance meeting in the meat section of my local supermarket.

Apparently if I'm not breaking the law then all observation is benign and kinda friendly. My, how we have evolved since Bentham's panopticon.

I dislike my car's number plate being broadcast on the internet in the front yard of my home c. 2010, when the grass needed slashing and the geraniums could have done with some water. If I want to tell you about my lacklustre gardening, what time I turn on the kitchen lights or where exactly I am in the continent, I'll let you know on A WineDark Sea.

And there is the rub.

But I still want to remove myself from Facebook. Any suggestions?

'My Dog Gave Me the Clap' (No not me, it's ... oh don't worry about it)

2011-10-13T12:27:00.008+08:00

Personally I feel sorry for the dog. Maybe dogs don’t care about these things but if someone gave me the clap, I reckon they’d be mortified if I wrote a book about it. Thankfully, Adam Morris deals with Feathers the dog and his main character Saul’s ‘green wang’ problem early on in this hilarious book. Feathers exits stage left at the end of Chapter One and the reader can breathe, smile with relief and move on to Saul’s philosophising about how easy it would be to get laid if he were gay, his negative thoughts about his negative thoughts diary and a series of rather nasty ‘incidents’ involving Akubra hats, shotguns, Russian dancing and a chookhouse.

Saul’s list of desirables is a job, a girlfriend, a car and somewhere to live other than his mate Ralph’s chookhouse. He had a good job relief teaching once, until a regrettable Hunter S Thompson moment. Thank goodness the students had left or he might have been arrested and sacked. For his next job interview he wrote eight pages of performance criteria on “... learning grids, appropriateness, guidelines, equivalent experiences, team leaders.

Where had all the men gone?”

His last girlfriend was three years ago. Now Saul has difficulties hiding his erection in the welfare office queue. He's getting flashbacks of the porn he watched the night before and pondering on the sex lives of the oddly unattractive couple ahead of him. “Maybe one of them had persuaded the other to do something regrettable in the bedroom last night, maybe there was an embarrassment in the air neither could stomach bringing up ...”

If Saul sounds like a sad, loser, anti-hero, then that's because he is. This is the Australian version of the White Male F*ck-up Novel after all. Underlying most of Saul’s problems and nasty incidents/accidents is alcoholism and the accompanying depression but Adam Morris is deft and subtle enough in his writing to avoid mentioning these clangers. He just concentrates on the disaster area.

I can recognise some of Saul’s ‘incidents’ (but not the dog one) - his fumbling interior monologues on trains, his disconnect with community - and it makes me wince, just a little bit. My Dog Gave Me the Clap is a very funny book – a giggle-helplessly-in-the-dentist’s-waiting-room kind of funny. The problem with laughing at Saul’s f*ck ups is that any schadenfreude is followed by an uncomfortable niggling feeling that we are a mere shandy away from Saul’s hopelessness. Halfway through a moment of cracking up over another of Saul’s mid-trip, delusional balls-ups, I am suddenly sobered by a vague memory of the day we took those strange pills, went to the buskers festival and offered up our bodies as props ...

After a counselling session with the local priest, Saul's spirit begins to rally. “Saul felt lighter than when the day had started. He felt similar after vomiting from too much drink. That fresh empty feeling, that good empty feeling.”

Sometimes I just wanted to look away. I couldn’t. But I wanted to.

Saul’s observations of people can be acute and beautiful: the kindness of the lonely farmer who fed him breakfast and told him he was okay after a drinking session/photoshoot/shotgun incident gone horribly awry the previous night: the woman upstairs whose 2 am lover doesn’t argue or put out the rubbish. There is also a strange beauty to Saul’s self immolation. Call it a Flaming Lamborghini kinda beauty, except I don’t reckon he could afford to destroy himself with one of them because he doesn’t have a job right now.

Saul’s creator Adam Morris swears that despite being a musician and lad like Saul, this is not one of those autobiographical first novels. Righteo. Adam Morris’ dog says he resents the implication. Fair enough. Despite these conflicts I found My Dog Gave Me the Clap to be a funny, strange and compelling read.

Adam Morris

My Dog Gave Me the Clap

Fremantle Press

188pp

$22.95

Wooden Boat Tragics

2011-10-12T20:53:00.006+08:00

Some weeks ago Aussie rang me from the local arts centre.
"Your boat is here."
"The Pearl? No! I've just taken her to the tip."
"She's here. She's out on the lawn."

A few years ago, I wrote on A WineDark Sea to "stay tuned for the voyage of the Pearl." It seems her voyage these days is less traversing wavy seas than waving clover and now she's bogged in the grass less than half a kilometre from my home as an art installation.
Classic. Pearl's true north always spins south to Toa. She's been following me around town for quite a while now.

At the opening of the Boat Show exhibition, us three past owner/lovers of the the Pearl - the New Romantic, the Mad Frenchman and me - gathered on the grass with glasses of the artists' red wine to toast the Goddess of the Wooden Boat.

We are all still in love with her ... but we three also know that affairs with the Princess are high maintenance and best avoided in the interests of sanity. So it was yet another happy goodbye.

Notes That Survived the Fire

2011-10-11T22:33:00.018+08:00

In December, Overland will publish my story about a humpback whale who stranded in the town harbour. He was a year old when he swam into the quiet waters, wriggled onto a sand bank and prepared to die. The sun tore open his exposed, eggplant skin. It was a distressing time for us harbor-dwellers.

My best mate Aussie laughs at me whenever my ears prick up, over gin and tonics in her banana tree garden. "Can you have that line/story/anecdote?" She says. "Of course, Sarah! It's yours! Take it."

This month I've been writing the first chapter of my exegesis about the Tasmanian women who were stolen from their country by sealers - the women who ended up in my part of the world in 1826. I've been trying to argue that they had some kind of agency, of autonomy, some kind of power over their lives. As words go by, I'm beginning to realise they had none, that what happened in Van Diemen's Land and all over this south coast in the 1820s was just fucked.

But the stories still drive me so I write them down. Sometimes they are so dark and nasty (today I did Lyndall Ryan's 'Mass Killings in Tasmania') that I am exhausted by the day's end. I walk and walk and by the the time I am home, I am almost okay. I light the fire, drive the kid's swim club errands, cook something, behave like a parent (guiltily) and fall into bed with a fluffy novel or the weekend's book reviews.

I wanted to be a writer since I was ten. Back then I had a Temple of Doom style story all mapped out but I needed a getaway car. "What kind of car would baddies drive?" I asked my Mum. "A really expensive car?"
"Mmmm. A Sigma?"
So, in my first novel, the baddies drove a Black Sigma.

By my teens, all the Sigmas about town were rusting and driven by unemployed tuna fishermen. I decided that to produce anything substantial, I needed some life experience. So I set about the research. This involved lots of hitch hiking, random sailing events, cross continental bus trips and drinking in strange places with strange people. I bought journals and diaried who I'd slept with, recipes, taxi rides, landscape descriptions, agonised meanderings, concert tickets, locks of hair, photographs and newspaper clippings. Over fifteen years I had several keeping places for these books and they were broken into regularly by jealous lovers.

The man I was supposed to marry rang me one day at work and asked me to come home. He'd found the suitcase under my bed. He sounded kind of short of breath. He was probably a bit worried about his future. He'd spent the whole day pouring over my journals and when I returned, I had to explain myself. I spent hours backpedalling over my written-down misdeeds. My thoughts later was that he was quite the sociopath. At the time, his suggestion that I burn the lot made sense. So I did, shackles of the past and all.

That afternoon I burnt fifteen years worth of diaries in the back yard. Anyone who has burnt books knows the practicalities. They don't burn like logs of pine. You have to keep stoking them. It was a long night, seeing those locks of hair and recipes and photographs surfacing in the flames and stoking, stoking.

"I was so pissed off with you when you burnt those books," said Aussie.
"So was I," I said to her.

After that event, I stopped writing for a few years. I felt so betrayed that I never wanted anyone to read anything I'd written again. The funny thing is that event shaped me as a writer. Since that day of the fire, I have only written stories for other people to read. I will never write purely for my own navel-gazing intentions ever again, for fear of it being violated. Everything I write now is for the public. Even my journals consist of the workings of new stories.

I still have two of the diaries that I hid where he could not find them. They are wrapped in a silk scarf and I haven't opened them for some time. I transcribed them once. They are on a defunct computer file titled "Notes That Survived the Fire."

I was thinking about all this writing stuff today and doing a kind of fully loaded cost accounting (whatever that means). Here it is: I spend most days on a scholarship writing a thesis on the Tasmanian women. I have a book of creative non fiction accepted by a pretty good publisher. I get stories printed in lit journals a few times a year. I've got three book reviews to write this week and on the weekend I'm talking on a nature writing panel.

I guess that makes me a writer.

Faark.

We Are Apex Critters, Goddammit

2011-10-11T19:44:00.010+08:00

Yesterday a prominent Perth businessman went missing whilst swimming near the Indiana Tea Rooms at Cottesloe Beach. Seven hours later police divers found his shredded bathers on the ocean floor. Another hungry Great White is blamed and today talkback radio is buzzing with locals' anecdotes, arguments and philosophies regarding whether Great Whites have any right to exist in our suburban waters.

The commentary today included that of a champion body boarder who said (and summarising here) that the Great Whites are obliged to share the waters with us and not eat us: therefore if they are eating us they should be culled. This considered hysteria reminded me of Val Plumwood's amazing essay. She wrote it ten years after she was mauled by a crocodile in the Northern Territory. Val Plumwood was an environmental philosopher and her essay Being Prey is a rendition of her experience but also a razor sharp examination of how us humans dislike the idea of being eaten.

This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices - the strong coffin, conveniently buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood and alien monsters eating humans.

Here is her essay and here is my original post on Val Plumwood.
Image: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-11/jet-skisjpg/3497442

Alice at Middleton Beach

2011-10-11T10:39:00.001+08:00

Summer after summer

Alice lived

in the jarrah house

in the sand dunes

when the equinox blew

beached whales

pushed & prodded

returned with the tide

intent on dying

their bodies lay

along the shoreline

till the dark breath

went out of them

& and they stank for days

the beach was ringed

with mountains

shaped liked resting emus

low scrub grew up

to the edge of the bay

great ships

garlanded with lights

anchored & paused

on their way to the world

a fishing boat

pushed off

& bobbed like a toy

the light on Breaksea

wavered went out

& blinked again

Dorothy Hewett, Alice in Wormland, Papaerbark Press, NWS, 1987, p. 30.

Night Fishing

2011-10-08T21:15:00.000+08:00

Crusher Balls

2011-10-08T18:30:00.001+08:00

A few months ago I technologically challenged myself quite drastically by spilling coffee all over my laptop. You may have noticed a slowing in WineDark posts and a complete lack of new pictures ... sorry 'bout that. Here's the first installment in all the lovely pics I've just loaded onto my shiny new toy.

Man Bites Shark Bites Dog

2011-09-25T19:26:00.016+08:00

A wander through the seaways this week ...

I saw a humpback whale yesterday, leaping about by the first portside marker in the Sound. We were setting the flathead nets at dusk and I saw the whale, his body pouring out of the sea like black ink and plumes of white spray on his crashing return. Then his tail made a perfect cetacean crescent against a reddening sky. We motored out into the Sound later to look for him later but he was long gone. Not even a footprint.

I saw a stingray in the shallows too, that eve. As big as the Turkish rug in my living room, ranging along the nets, its body speckled with white paisley. I'd know that pattern, if ever I saw it again.

In the morning, we pulled up the Harbour nets to find a littler ray with its stinger bitten clean off. Its body was sliced open with little bleeding arcs. Sharper than any filleting knife, that mystery shark's teeth. Salmon trout lined up in the mesh with only their heads left.

"Bronzy," said Old Salt.

Sometimes the crab pots are full of carapaces and chewed-up claws. It usually means an octopus has got in, or maybe a leather jacket; they eat crabs too. The crabs get caught up in the nets when they go in after the herring. Sometimes the flathead nets come up with row upon row of heads and no bodies. That's the seal.

Mr Yin told me a story about watching a great white shark circling Seal Rock. You can see Seal Rock from the lookout on Marine Drive. It is a rounded piece of granite close to the coast where an old bull hangs out, his doe harem lolling around him in the surging swell. Mr Yin said this shark circled the rock for an age, hungry-like, round and round that big round rock, waiting for that old man seal to make just one mistake.

There is a five metre great white in the Sound that has been making people uncomfortable this week. He's had a go at a few boat propellers and gone along Grievous' squid lines, stealing the bait, jigs and all. Five metres. My friends who sea kayak on Sundays are sticking to the Harbour. "Are there any mussels on the shipwreck at the moment?" I ask them. One is a piscatarian, the other a confirmed meat eater. I don't think they even noticed the mussels.

To have a crack at the title of this meandering post ... my Dad came home from the fish factory one day, chucked me into the Kingswood and said, "Come and have a look at this." We drove back to the factory and he walked me into the freezer room.

It was the size of a gymnasium, with racks against the walls full of salmon or sardines or whatever was going on at the time. My wet shoes stuck to the icy floor. I can't remember the other fish. All I remember was seeing the shark, frozen solid and lying upon carpenters tressels like an exhibit right in the centre of the room. Its skin was black (and I still don't know whether this was because it was frozen) and it was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen.

Dad said, "See if you can touch both its eyes."
I couldn't. When I stretched out my ten-year-old arms across the head of the creature, I couldn't reach both of its eyes at once. Then he said that when the fisherman cut it open, he'd found a kid's tricycle and half of a dog inside its stomach.

Catherine Gordon and Waychinicup #2

2011-09-21T16:51:00.000+08:00

Waychinicup

Rame Head

Catherine Gordon and Waychinicup

2011-09-16T23:08:00.000+08:00

Tonight

2011-09-16T22:55:00.002+08:00

Tonight we worked under the lamp in our special, special flathead spot. I've been fishing for five years now and the moment when the flathead swarm into the harbour still blows me away.

A month ago we picked up a few specimens in Oyster Habour. Old Salt said, "They got roe in 'em?"
"Yep."
"It's early. Everyfings early this year. Let's get out there before the seal."

There is a seal who, once he understands where we are setting, will treat the place like the seafood section of a supermarket. Fish hanging from mesh. All he wants is the livers but he destroys all flesh in his mission. We can't set there again for months.

The flathead were early like the plum flowers and black lizards emerging from their winter opium dens. I could smell pink jasmine, travelling to me like sure mail across the water ...

In a rough, windy sea, we garnered a lovely box of flathead and travelled home
through the channel where the outgoing tide hit the westerly wind wave of the inlet,
past the steaming heaps of woodchips, composting under orange lights,
the chugging train, the gantry, the Chinese freighter,
the crew standing smoking cigarettes in the lit deck
under the seven foot sign:
SAFETY + FIRST.

The wind dropped. We had a box of flathead and the seal hadn't found us. I could smell the clear cedar of the woodchips. The sea glassed and all over the harbour, lights raced in bright streaks towards us, drowning out the sound of the two stroke.

Sarah Toa Stingray

2011-09-16T22:08:00.004+08:00

Standing waist high in turquoise waters at Whalers Cove,

I see the stingrays come ahunting,

their shadowy pirate sails varnished tabletop black.

It is a nervous moment

but they sweep around me in wide arcs,

looking for whitebait and herring along the shoreline.

I've loved stingrays since that day. I feed them mullet frames from the beach and worry about the Disaster Puppy chasing them off and encountering those knife-like barbs. But I've pulled up quite a few stingray in the nets too. Most of the time I let them go. When they have munched on every other fish in the net, I take them home and eat them.

At the fish markets, I have an Englishwoman who relishes a stingray wing. She poaches it and serves it up with butter and capers. The flesh is a strange, grainy texture with cartilage holding the whole thing together. I haven't tried that recipe BUT here is a true blue Albany stingray recipe I made up myself.

Hopefully you've got an Old Salt or fisherwoman in your neighbourhood to deal with the killing and cutting because catching stingray involves lots of blood and wriggling and squabbles on board a small aluminium tinny. (Just keepin' it real, folks!)

Cut the wings straight down into one inch steaks.
A sharp, flexible knife will cope with the skin and the cartilage.
Make up mix of soy sauce, olive oil and fresh grated ginger.
Marinate said stingray.
Barbeque it.

Try it.

Worlds Colliding #1

2011-09-07T23:20:00.002+08:00

In 2007 I arranged to meet a woman from America in the town library. I knew who she was as soon as I walked into the foyer. There was something about the seventy years in her face, a flash in her eye, the robust juiciness of a woman well-lived and strong. Pat Farrington had flown the red-eye for a rather special reunion; thirty years after the day the Whale and Dolphin Coalition clashed with gunners and flensers at the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station.

http://thelastwhale.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/the-protest-at-the-gates/

Above: This is a photograph from that day. Federal police, bikies, flensers, protestors, singers, rainbow folk, locals (the ones wearing thongs), an ex-deputy Prime Minister ... Breaksea Island on the horizon, blubber tanks in the background and right in the middle of the mob - that's Pat Farrington.

2007 ... on their way from the airport and driving through the town of Albany, her guide pointed out an old gunner standing on the street corner. Pat leapt from the car, ran over to him and ambushed him with a big, lusty hug. "Still has a twinkle in his eye," she told me later. "He's a handsome man, that gunner."

1977 ... the protests focussed the world's attention on the last onshore whaling operation in the southern hemisphere. Back then my hokey little home town was polarised by whether or not killing whales was ethical or even viable, frightened with the real threat of huge job losses and dragged out of a past where whalers were the epitome of manhood, into the glare of more modern sensibilities. I was seven and can remember the tensions and gossip, amid sage noddings at the dinner table.

What a strange reunion of souls it was in 2007. WaD Coalition and Greenpeace stalwarts stood around on Middleton Beach and chatted with the old whalers. The Japanese were heading off to Antarctica for another season. The fight to stop whaling continued but this time, some of the gunners and first mates from Albany were on board as well.

1977 ... the local bikies were drinking at the White Star the day they heard protesters were gathering at the whaling station. They put down their beers and headed out there. Pat Farrington told me that the roar of their bikes approaching sounded like helicopters. The Feds made them park the bikes up the hill and approach on foot. The American protesters cheered at the sight of these bearish, leatherclad men walking down the road between the lines of police cars. They came from a '60s Californian culture where the Hells Angels were aligned with protest movements and general social unrest.

In Albany it was quite a different story. Gods Garbage members worked on the chasers harpooning the leviathans, or at the whaling station dismantling them into a marketable commodity. Some of them had just surfaced from the Vietnam war. Uppity protesters were not their favourite people in the world.

The scene ended with a thankful lack of claret, despite the stakes. From what I remember of my interview with Pat (the file is in a dead computer somewhere), the bikies were softened up by Pat's daughter asking them if they could turn around so she could take a photograph of their patches for her Hells Angels mates in California. They laughed, turned their backs and began emptying their clobber of chains, knives and other weapons. The protest fell apart as the rainbows and dolphins graced the waters; the objective was achieved. Then the Americans asked if the bikies wanted a ride back up the hill. Everyone piled on the back of a flat bed truck. Pat showed them the contents of her bag - a collection of tiny carved whales. Bikies and Greenies swung their legs over the side of the tray and communed over those little carved critters.

They travelled up the hill towards the motorbikes. Federal police cars lined the road like a guard of honour. As each policeman saw the scene on the back of that flatbed truck, they laughed out loud and so the ripple of dawning laughter followed that strange union the whole way up the long hill.

Tonight at the shops I met up with a Gods Garbage bloke in the dairy aisle. I asked him if he remembered that day at the whaling station in 1977 and if he remembered Pat. It's strange how the old bikies get misty-eyed when I mention her name.
More about her tomorrow.

Have a look at Chris Pash's blog The Last Whale for more stories about the 2007 reunion!

When William Hook Escaped to Waychinicup

2011-09-01T12:08:00.003+08:00

The little boat that we used for netting fidgeted against barnacles. I held the rope and waited. Weed coaxed Moennan away as the rest of the camp slept. She limped over the rocks and clicked to her dog.

We sailed to the east over an oily, heaving sea. The flames of burning Michaelmas Island grew smaller until we rounded Rock Dundar and then there was only the glow in the sky. Weed clung to the gunwale, terrified by the dark sea. I could not make her sit trim. She clutched that stone of grey pumice. It was the shape of her heel, something else I have seen her hold when she is too scared to run.

Moennan watched ahead. She held Weed’s hand sometimes, or I saw her run her hands through the coarse hackles of her dog, run her hand against his grain, ruffle up his spine and hug him to her.

I found the inlet. Bound by stone, the rush of tide in the channel bore us through into quiet, breathing waters, ringed with granite, flowering with orange lichen. We spread skins in the belly of a huge cave that curved into the mountain, and slept.

In the gloom of the next morning, I woke, wretched and sore, the long night of half dreams still soaking my body. Being in the lee of the mountain meant no warning of the squall that ripped across the sky, rubbing out the cross of stars. Taraba, that brave yellow cur, whimpered and crept closer to the side of the cave with every thump. The stone on which we lay ran with water. Muttonbirds kept up their crying. The penguins sounded like babies that would not thrive.

I knew Bailey come from the island to find us. I rolled over and found the warmth of Moennan, peered past her oiled hair to the dark sea, looking for the quicksilver splash of oars. I listened for the grind of keel against granite. We shall live like oystercatchers, I thought, red-eyed bastards watching the water surge, gambling our lives on every wave.

There was a big moon, and then another returning, her belly swelling. All the time we lived on the quiet water I did not question the Maori’s lack of kindness in keeping me from my people. I was glad for the peace.

At night, we fished.

I was the tallest girl, the tallest thing on the whole inlet and above me the stars blazed and the quarter moon glowed the water. I forgot my sadness, my loss and the angry tinglings of my diseased sex when the little boat grunted on crunchy coral and I spread my toes over the thwart of nets and punted out into clear water again.

Heke forced a stick into the soft sand of the shallows, moving it in a figure of eight to ease it in, looped the cork line around the wood. The boat lurched with his weight and I spooled out ragged net, while he rowed.

Later, we went back to the stick.

"Feel this," he handed me the cork line.

I took the wet, muddy rope in my hand. I felt fish hitting the net, a sharp tug, then a flutter, a lighter hit, as they struggled. So I knew there would be a few.

"Hauture," said he.

"Madawick," said I.

Skipjack.

I woke when the air was still and cold. The wind stopped. It was time to pull up the nets.

I left my skins to squat a little way from camp, drove a neat hole into the gritty sand with my stream. I watched the dark loom of the Maori.

"Get up, Tama hine." He shook the little girl. "See this ... something in the water,"

He stood just on the lacy edge of the water and strange blue lights shot out of his toes. Hot blue bullets fired away from his legs.

I heard the girl breathe in, quick.

"Fire in the water, Hine."

Each step into the sea, as we pushed out the boat, made the fire flare. Every stroke of the oars made a sparkling rush of sun diamond water in the inky brine, and then the dripping airborne oars traced arcs of wild colour beside the boat. Shrimp became brilliant drawings, stars falling through the sea.

Still dark and starlit, with the moon gone, no light yet but the glow of a new day. Fish flew away from us leaving a comet tail of blue fire in their wake. The Maori rowed and rowed, straight past the stick that held fast the net and none of us dreaming folk even noticed, until we were well out into the centre of the inlet.

"There be no fish," he told me. "Net is lit up like a Chinaman's birthday."

I could see every single mesh illuminated, soaring up towards Heke's grappling fingers and swooping down into the water, gilt with glittery magic.

We caught a few, yes, some gleaming skip jack and fat mullet. By then the sky was lightening and all the fire creatures melted back into the secrets of the inlet.

After we ate, Weed and me walked over the mountain to the woman’s place, to show her for when she is older but there was a fire burning inside the stones so we didn’t go in. On our way back we broke some touchwood from a rotten tree and found some grubs. I showed Weed how to peel a stick from the tree and push it into the ground so the people whose tree it was did not get angry.

We came back to the cave. Heke, his rough face gentled by the sliding down sun, saw the grubs and the blue flowers in my hair and laughed and laughed. He picked a grub from my hair and ate it. Then he picked out a blue flower and ate that too.

Daughter

2011-08-26T21:46:00.000+08:00

Fishing for Bream at Pallinup

2011-08-26T11:16:00.001+08:00

This Morn

2011-08-20T22:18:00.014+08:00

This morning I was six minutes late to launch the boat and pick up the black bream nets. The phone rang on the last stretch to the boat ramp and I ignored it because I knew it was Old Salt hurrying me up. I backed the boat trailer down the ramp and watched in the lights of the rear view as he messed around with the ropes and winch. Then, after dumping the boat into the black pre-dawn water, I drove up into the carpark.

I was just zipping up my wet weather gear when I was surrounded with police cars.

At six in the morning and boat ramping, I did a stumbling mental inventory: trailer lights? Check. Current car and driver's licence? Check. Have I done anything BAD lately? Um .... No. Check.

They leapt out of their cars. "We've got a situation," said one policeman. "There's a bloke out there." He pointed out to the sea grass banks where a solitary figure stood like a stump in the middle of the harbour, his shouting and screaming spreading across the water. "He's going off. Can you see him?"
"Yep."
"We need you to take us out there and get him in."

Suddenly my projection of a morning of pulling in nets, watching the sun rise and whingeing about a dearth of black bream began to look pretty ordinary.
"Does he actually want to come in?"
They looked at me.
"Okay. You'll have to ask Old Salt. He's the skipper. He's the man to decide whether or not you drag a crazy guy into his boat."
The policemen walked out to the boat to talk to Old Salt.
They came back to me. "This man may not want to come in. He could have a gun. There may be a bit of a struggle. You might get wet."

Old Salt and I both looked at the coppers.
"We try very, very hard not to get wet," said Old Salt.
"Not getting wet is the most important part of our whole operation," I said.

Everyone began to look uncertain. Then Old Salt asked the question that changed the course of the morning. "What's his name?"
"Peter Jackson."
"Peter Jackson? Aunty Jack?" I said.
"Do you know him? How do you know him"? The coppers turned their alpha-male-on-the-job glare on me.
"I went to school with him. He's nice."

I walked around in circles for a while. Aunty Jack has always been a gentle soul, even when off his meds. I walked back up the jetty to the boat and the tight cluster of uniforms. "How about I go out and pick him up?"
"Without us?"
"Yeah, we'll go out there and ask him if he wants a ride back. If he says no, or we have trouble, we'll come back and get you."

The police were all wired up to requisition the boat, which would have been funny because that two stroke is a passive-aggressive fucker and that is before Old Salt gets hold of the tiller. Plus, uniforms in a commercial fishing boat give it a whole new look. Plus I knew their shift finished in an hour and their boots were still dry. I could see all this stuff ticking over in their collective minds too and then they looked to me and gave me the nod.

"He's not in any trouble. We just want to get him to hospital," said the policeman Bird. "Let him know that."

Old Salt fired up the two stroke and we roared out to the bank. As we got closer, he had to lift the motor so we could get onto the shallow grounds of harbour. The man who stood waist height in the water was a stranger. Far out, I thought, We are picking up someone I don't recognise after all. I don't know what I am getting into here. Ooo -wee.
Finally, I realised it was him.

"Aunty Jack! Aunty Jack!" I called. "Do you want a ride?"
His face was a skull with huge black holes for eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept for a fortnight. His long hair dangled in wet brown strands. I reckoned he'd been in the water for a while and was probably hypothermic.
When he recognised me he seemed to get higher out of the water and his eyes got even darker.
"Sarah Toa."
I didn't know whether my name was welcome or curse.
"Just get in."
"I saw you on the school bus."
"Get in."
"They shot my mother."
"Jump in the boat, Aunty Jack. C'mon."
He climbed into the boat in a quick move, straight over the gunwale. Son of a fisherman, he sat on the thwart and I wrapped smelly shade cloth around his shoulders.
"Can you take me over to Emu Point?"
"We're going in just over there," I pointed at the boat ramp.
"The cops'll shoot me, Sarah. Take me to Emu Point. They've bin taking pot shots at me all night."
"We'll look after you, mate," Old Salt said. "Just hang tight. If they make any trouble, we'll take you out and make you pick up our nets."
"They'll kill me."
"Nah."
"They killed me Mum."
"Yer Mum's alright, mate. I heard. She's okay."

The conversation went on like this until we pulled into the jetty. The police had drawn their cars behind my ute, so their lights were just showing over the bonnet. Being used to Fisheries ambushes, my antenna was truly buzzing when the paddy wagon wasped into the car park. I didn't know what Aunty Jack was going to do but when I looked at him, he sat huddled into the shade cloth and seemed cold and blue and tired.
"We'll stay here and keep an eye out for yer, mate," said Old Salt. "We'll make sure you are alright."
"I'm really scared," he said.

Aunty Jack climbed onto the jetty. He was missing a shoe and his clothes were torn up and wet. He shambled along to where the policeman Bird stood waiting on the red gravel. Bird put his hand on Aunty Jack's shoulder, quite gently, and the other constable sauntered, alert. At the paddy wagon, policemen and women patted him down. Then they stuffed him into the white plastic capsule, slammed shut the hatch and drove him away as the sun rose over the hills.

1940s and '50s Salmon Camps

2011-08-14T20:13:00.004+08:00

Images from the Westerberg collection at the Local Studies Collection, Albany and the Battye Library, Western Australia.

The Post That Got Away: Shit Shot #2

2011-08-11T21:50:00.015+08:00

Okay, now where was I? Oh yes.

It was dusk. Old Salt and I were loading net onto a little boat in anticipation of the seine shot for gardies and herring that would make us rich. A bunch of blokes got bogged on the beach below. They left their ute and wandered into the salmon camp, to see what we were up to.

They were supposed to be shipping out on the sharker anchored by the island but had forgotten to buy ice. All the factories were shut for the day. They settled down to drinking instead.

I know their skipper Philthy. He's got a PhD in bugs or something. He quotes Jorge Louis Borges' The Library of Babylon at me when he's drunk. He is a fidgety little bantam with a brain like a computer. One day Philthy saw the light and realised he didn't want to be a scientist. He wanted to be a fisherman.

One of his deckies looked like he'd come straight from the back alleys of Sydney or maybe the darkened rooms of Darwin's Vic Hotel. Tattooed legs, stubby shorts, a flannel shirt and a fragile nature, he was a man spat out by polite society and therefore was welcomed by Philthy's operation. No social worker but one with a philanthropic heart, Philthy has been known to throw these hankering souls overboard - but only when the boat gets within swimming distance of the island.

I went to school with the second deckie. He smacked me on the school bus once, after I'd let the down the tyres of his sister's bike. He was a blond, long-haired roughie back then. His father and his grand father were fishermen. He hadn't changed a bit.

The third deckie was a dogger from Canarvon. His diamond-shaped head prickled with a buzzcut the whole way around. He must have been in his twenties but he had the hard face of a man who'd spent a lot of time in the desert. Yes, he shot dingoes for a living but at this was when the floods had covered the north and he was on sabbatical until the earth dried up.

When it was dark enough, Old Salt drove the boat down to the beach. I walked down and the deckies followed in a rag tag, shambling mob. Old Salt was pissed off. He hates other fishermen watching him work.

I pushed out the boat with Old Salt at the oars. There is a rock about fifty metres from the shore. I always have to walk the net over this rock so we don't get snagged up. This night a weird swell washed in. Old Salt rowed out into the night with me holding one end of the net and the waves kept on pulling the net onto the rock.

Tattooed Legs started up a strange dance on the foaming edges of the water. He capered through the swell, holding up his checkered shirt and dancing through the waves.
"He's lookin' for pippis," the dogger told me. "With his toes. He's bin goin' on about these fuckin' cockles for days now. It's all he wanted to do when he got down south."

Philthy's tales of the infinity of the hexagonal library, the librarians who threw themselves from a never ending reading room into a vortex of nothingness, disappearing into dust, failed to impress Tattooed Legs. In fact, I think it made him dance even harder.

The wind came up and the strange swell competed with Philthy's shouting. I felt the net grab against the rock. I unhooked it, briefly. Then Old Salt was shouting at me from up the beach. He'd already anchored the boat in the sand and was working his end of the net.
"I'm snagged." I yelled back.
He stumped along the beach, grabbed the rope off me, tugged it. He started into the water. He swam out to the rock in his clothes and ripped the net away. Them he stamped back to the boat and his end of the net.

Three herring.
We all looked at those three fish flapping on the sand. Nobody spoke.
Then Philthy and his deckies rocked their four wheel drive off the offending stone with a nasty crunching sound and took off down the beach looking for salmon, spraying bright plumes of burning cigarette butts and beer cans behind them.

Old Salt and I looked at each other. We were both soaked and covered in white beach sand.
"Just as well they didn't see us catch real fish," Old Salt muttered at me. "They'd tell everyone."

Shit Shot

2011-08-10T22:10:00.004+08:00

A shit shot is the nasty antithesis to those great moments on the beach at night (or dawn). A shit shot always happens to fisherfolk when they are down to their last fifty cents.

Blunty was at the Irwins camp the week all his fishing license and registration bills and land rates came in. Plus a Fisheries fine for an undersized salmon trout. While Salt and I hauled King George and yellowfin whiting in record amounts, he set the same size nets across the same cockle banks and got bugger all. It's just the way it works. Fish are fickle like that. They don't think about our overheads while they swim around at night.

A shit shot is when it all goes wrong. I went off track a bit in the previous paragraph because a shot is not setting nets in the dusk, to pick up at dawn. That was just making a point about luck and fishing. A shot is seining off the beach and it all happens pretty quickly. Good or bad luck amplified, if you like.

We see the fish swim into the bay, whether it be a dark stain of tons of salmon - or the fins of sea mullet splashing and writhing on the water's skin - or the smelly glitter of gardies in torchlight and there is a sudden rush of gnarly men down to the boat. You'd never believe men like that could run so fast. It's always a dash because the fish don't stick around. They push the little dinghy into the sea, the rower spools the net behind them and rows in a perfect arc back to the beach. Then they pull both ends of the net in.

Here is an extreme example of a shit shot, one that I wrote about a few years ago:

* Her Dad

“Dad always said ‘Never shoot here when it’s onshore or too rough. Don’t waste your life or your gear. Most of all - don’t be greedy.’ The bastards got it all wrong – look.”
She gave me the binoculars with shaking hands. “Net broke. Too bloody greedy.”
Black marks on the white sand below looked like itinerant seaweed but then I focussed in on dead fish – tons and tons of dead fish.
“Look along to the main break, where the inlet comes out.”

Surfers sat upright in the water, the tips of their boards just visible. But there were other tips too, gathering around them like black leaves. Fins, the fins of dead salmon. The surfers sat on their boards in a sea of dead salmon, patiently awaiting the next set.
“This used to be our patch. This would never have happened if Dad was still alive,” she said.

That is the story of a salmon shot gone seriously wrong. The fishers misjudged the amount of fish, the net broke from the strain, the fish drowned. They took a while to wash in. Bulldozers had to clean up the mess and the beach stank for weeks. The sense of death and utter waste was ... rotten.

It happens on the south coast every twenty years or so but I've never had a shit shot like that one. Ours just involve not catching anything. The last shit shot was at the salmon camp and we were after gardies and herring. The sun was setting and the windmills made asterisks over the cliffs across the bay.

A ute full of blokes got bogged on the beach below the camp. Actually, the car was suspended by its engine block on a large, pointed outcrop of granite. They were all shitfaced and hadn't even seen the rock coming.

For some reason Old Salt and I were cranky with each other, or just plain cranky, so we weren't talking much while we loaded the gardie net onto the dinghy. Loading a seine net is an art. It's got to play out nice and smooth without any hands, at night, straight off the stern of the boat. The pocket has to be in the right spot and folded so it opens out on its own.

State of Grace

2011-08-06T22:23:00.007+08:00

Between Pine Creek in the Northern Territory and Adelaide lies The Best Op Shop in the World. Before I hitched into central Australia I didn't really understand the night cold. The cold cruelled away from the coast and into my landbound body like a nasty rumour by the time I hit Tennant Creek. A dearth of inland water at the roadhouse showers meant a new kind of torture - pinholes shot at my body mercilessly until the timer stopped after four minutes. Then I was stuck with no clothes on, in the freezing cold again.

In the morning I walked into town to find an op shop that sold a woolly jumper. Friendly truckies pointed me to the place. Inside, a weathered man who looked like he'd been driving trucks or droving for a lifetime handed me a stick of incense with the friendly gesture of a sister. He sold horse harness, clothes, urns, camera film, spare tyres, artifacts and woolly jumpers. When a man like that hands you a stick of incense anywhere, let alone the hard highway town of Tennant Creek, you will remember him.

He had long diamante earrings reaching to his throat. He wore a camo army surplus jacket and a mini skirt. His legs were lanky, brown and sinewy and his hair blonde. He told me that he'd lived in Tennant Creek for twenty years. He looked tough. I certainly wouldn't have brawled with him. He approved of my woolly jumper choice and kissed my cheek with leathery lips. I've still got no idea whether he was trans this or that. No one else in the town seemed to know or care. He knew who he was and that is all that matters.

I left Tennant Creek and hitched south. I spent the next six months in a comfortable parkland conversation with Adelaide academics and a sideways sleazy knowledge of the Mile End Cock and Bull. My only memory of Tennant Creek now, the highway town smacked into the middle of our country, is that awesome op shop and the one man who knew who he was.

Carval Knowledge

2011-08-04T23:08:00.006+08:00

I've had a few great ideas for the Pearl. The first one was to patch her up, install a diesel Lister and go fishing. My last great idea was to upend her above a mud brick plinth so she could crown a shop full of great books in the middle of nowhere.

This was long after I had given her away. So I reclaimed her in another fit of wooden boat self-flagellation. All the people who had fallen for her siren song shook their heads but they understood. My new plan was that the Boatshed Bookshop could be a go-to destination. Like a drive from Port Hedland to Broome, it is the journey through the desert that makes the oasis so gorgeous. Imagine driving for days and then finding Another Roadside Attraction (thanks Tom Robbins) in the form of the best boat shed bookshop ever, out the back of beyond. Poetry.

However nice the idea was, the reality of getting the Pearl out there started to do my head in. (Yes, I really was quite serious about the book shop in the desert thing, This is not another WineDark yarn.) The trailer chassis was rusting through. The wheel bearings were, well, not bearing up. I needed a truck with a tip trailer and a winch. Once I got her curvy half-ton self out there, white ants had to be kept at bay with rock salt or something harder.
Then I had to replace all the ribs, because they were rotting into the stringers and terrible things would happen to inhabitants of any bookshop she roofed. I don't know how to steam and bend 98 kauri pine ribs of a 20 foot 1920s carval. If I did, and I had the time, I'd steam the bastards, put the Pearl in the water and go fishing.

I guess the moral of this tale is that if you fall in love with the Siren of Wooden Boats, you should be a rich, retired carpenter. Do I sound jaded or just a bit tired? Yes. She has nice lines this girl but her witchery is cruel. I'm worn of old wooden boats. Give me an ally hull and an outboard any day.

Tonight, under the cover of darkness and some ~~illegal~~ ~~borrowed~~ hastily-attached number plates and lights, I took her to the tip. The plan was to miss peak hour traffic while I negotiated the major roundabout with her hull creaking and rocking behind me. I completely forgot about Thursday night shopping. Crazy. Anyway, Greedy, who works at the dump, wants to turn her into an installation, surround her with sunflowers and cover her in poetry. He is the right kind of siren lover - one who does not go to sea.

So, the Pearl has returned to where I found her three years ago.

Unpacking the Witch Thing

2011-08-03T10:57:00.012+08:00

Whilst halfway through my slide in the car, I heard on the radio yet another rally of rabble rousers protesting against the carbon tax and chanting "Ditch the Witch, ditch the Witch."

Admittedly, I was rather busy at the time, thinking about such things as kerbs, tyres, life, death ... you know. But I keep getting flashbacks and the chanting is the soundtrack. Like a bad 'Tour of Duty' companion CD to the war.

Why Witch? Is it because our female Prime Minister has red hair and a long nose? Or because she is female? While on the female thing - how do interviewers and slangers such as this lovely character below get away with calling her by her first name and then stretching it out to a school bully taunt?

Sometimes the supposed Aussie egalitarian ethos gives me the shits. This egalitarian sentiment only activates when peering up to the roost above, not down to the socio-economic equivalent of the chicken hutch floor: that's for the Bleeding Hearts and Do-Gooders.

When Kevin Rudd lambasted an RAAF air hostess, provoking princess tears all around, for providing him with yesterday's newspaper and feeding him meat, Australians jumped up and down at his arrogance and cruelty. Like who does this prat think he is - The Prime Minister or something?
Perhaps Rudd could have been more dignified in his response. Perhaps the RAAF could have noted that Australian Prime Minister was vegetarian and would like to read that day's paper.He is their boss, after all. Duh.

Anyway, to pull my Australian egalitarianism whinge back to the Witch discussion, I'll put myself out on a limb here and suggest that the Witch thing goes beyond sexism or just plain bad manners. It is engaging in popularising misogyny ... an exercise in keeping the woman in 'her place'. A crowd of people chanting ditch the witch reminds me of a bunch of flat earthers holding rakes and pitchforks - those delightful folk who, if they could actually find enough firewood after burning witches for the last thousand years, would happily harry another red headed, unwed woman (and thank goodness she is not a midwife) to the stake.

I'm quite politically ambivalent. Yet I find this recent climate disturbing: that the opposition leader is okay with standing in front of the blatantly homophobic and misogynistic placards in order to whip up some popularity for himself - and that our women leaders are so publicly disrespected on a personal, rather than a political platform. Maybe it is just me.
Dunno.
Is it just me?

Seal Colony, Breaksea Island

2011-08-02T19:42:00.001+08:00

Planing

2011-07-31T15:46:00.032+08:00

"Here! Mum! Turn off here."
It was hailing. I couldn't see the street signs.
I braked to turn right. I was dawdling anyway but the car kept going sideways, sliding across the hail stones, heading for the kerb and someone's picket fence. It just kept going. I thought, she's gonna go over. There is nothing I can do.

I saw a similar thing in Dunedin one icy morn; cars full of commuters coming off the snowy mountains, heading for work in the city. I stood safely away and watched them slide into bonnets, bumpers, kerbs, windows and street signs. An ungainly brake-free balls-up: ice and gravity and some killer skates that looked suspiciously like vehicles with people inside them.

It seemed to take an age to slide across the tar today. I was thinking, I've gotta get some tyres with better tread - I've gotta keep her off the kerb or she'll go over - I no longer have any say in this scenario - someone on Radio National is talking about the carbon tax - hold on but not too hard coz it hurts more if you are tensed up - I've gotta get this car out in a slimy paddock some time and learn how to deal with this kind of shit - please don't go over - please don't, car.

We stayed upright and squealed into a stilled, sweaty mess.
My heart was just ... bleating.
Pearlie said, "You alright Mum?" Bless her for the first sentiment she expressed. Too often I underestimate her.
"A glass of wine and a few moments in a quiet room, and I'll be fine, Pearlie," I said, when I'd settled down a bit.

The End of the Affair

2011-07-27T18:47:00.057+08:00

It began and ended in a kindly soup of needs and wants. He turned up on my doorstep as a boatbuilder and I made him a pot of tea, thinking he was about to relieve me of my 20 foot hulk of financial carnage. We sat beside the green wall of periwinkles and talked about boats for an hour. Then he asked if I had any sea mullet left.
I must have looked rather devastated.
"Aren't you here to buy my beautiful carval?"
"Erm, I'd like to buy some sea mullet ..."
So the man, who liked wooden carvals and but sea mullet more, left for the City with fillets wrapped in newspaper and the taste of tannin upon his tongue.

When he returned a month later with a bottle of red and a bit of hope in his heart, a Strange Man on a Motorcycle sat revving his iron beast in my driveway. His hopes of romance didn't include any knowledge of me or my life, it seems. The boat was gone. He stashed the wine behind his back, crabbed back to his car and drove away.

Six months passed. I'd forgotten him ... except for ... something. What is that 'something'? Is it the fusion that feels greater than the sum of two bodyminds? That velvety collision when a cog finds its perfect niche against another? Or is it just plain old biology? That 'something' conspires with the loins and the brain, gatecrashes the middle ground called my heart. I've known that 'something' to be a right bastard and I'm gun shy, these days, of gatecrashers.

'Our way' was to fly just outside of each other's trajectory in a careful dance of the jaded. The earth left the sun and returned again before I saw him. He gave me some books, then. I was leaving town for weeks on his next visit down south. My book was accepted by the publisher. Then I was away fishing. He sent me hedonist texts. It was all ramping up. The butterflies began to swarm in my belly. (Oh, you know that feeling? Of course you do.)

We met again, after my fortnight of planes, trains and automobiles. We sat on the lichen at Pelican Point and watched the dog swim in the winter glass-off. A houseboat floated out in the bay. I knew someone was camped in the redgums behind us, I'd seen their swag and crushed watsonia footways. I wondered if they watched us. Gannets yelled at the dog when he got too close to their nests.

He said, "Can I touch your hair?"

He was a Leo. Bah! The opposite to me in the circle of stars, a crashing battle of bodily spars. He opened me up as the sun does a bloom; as a lion does a carcass ... and then he stooped just enough to gnaw on my bones.

"I feel like an insect in your web," he said, spreadeagled upon my bed.
"It is witchery and nothing more," I said. "Be calm. I'll fix that cruciate and that cold and you will never know that you feel old."

Days later, I felt his softening as his mind hardened into tomorrow's chores.
He is a lot older than me.
I suspected there was a wife.
"Did you find me insincere?" he worried at me.

One night we wandered into a 'private party' at my favourite bar in town. Why did he he choose the chesterfields at the only fireplace with two beautiful young women lounging upon them? Or speculate on their sex lives? Why did he show me the lusty text messages from his boss's daughter? I felt the investment he'd purchased from that princess's predicament. That moment on the chesterfields, our bodies together felt suddenly lumpen and compromised. Why doesn't he just buy a red sports car, I thought grumpily. Why am I here again? I felt my fat thighs and the lines on my face. I felt my (horse) hair. But the taste of his tongue was still upon me.

We walked through the churches and granite gutters laid by convicts. We passed the three cheers from the birthday house and then drove up the hill to my home by the sea.

I woke up in the morning to a revelation. I don't want to wait for a man to text me with hedonistic sonatas - or wait for him to come down from the City to fuck me - or for his midlife crisis to subside - or for him to pick off yet another Albany Girl.

I am no fucking plaything and I don't like butterflies. What I want is someone to love me. I want a partner, not an intruigue. I want someone to love me.

This was a beautiful moment on the verandah, surrounded by that emerald wall of periwinkles and wandering Jew. A moment of realisation, finally, of what I required from this world. I rang him and said all of these things.

He never invited me into his other life. But a few hours later, bless him, he came down to where I was working and gave me hugs, said goodbye, said he would always think to me when he saw a windmill or lichen on stone or a crappy old wooden boat ...

And that was the end of the affair.

Penguins and Post Offices

2011-07-26T09:31:00.006+08:00

The release of the latest ten dollar Penguins is always a beautiful thing. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, A Spy in the House of Love by Anaiis Nin and more great books sit in their orange and white glory on my shelves. Books are quite expensive in Australia, so wandering into the post office and seeing some well remembered classics lined up for ten bucks is just an absolute joy. Coffee and cake ... or The Chrysalids? An eighth of a tank of fuel ... or A Passage to India?

Last year, or maybe it was the year before, Australia Post sent a memo out to all of their staff saying that three of the books must be removed from the Penguin classics display: Nabokov's Lolita, Foucault's The History of Sexuality and and Anaiis Nin's Little Birds. You can see where this is going. Australia Post is a family store. Now I have been known to walk out of a lecture theatre where an earnest academic was extolling the erotic virtues of creepy Humbert Humbert's relationship with a twelve year old girl ... but Foucault? Has anyone in the room read The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 and actually got their rocks off? It is post structuralist theory and as dry as a dead dingo's donga.

It was an interesting excercise in market censorship of the classics. Lady Chatterly's Lover was allowed to stay. This is ironic, because Penguin were the first to publish the unexpurgated version in the 1960's. Possibly, and I am taking a punt here, Australia Post thought that removing that book from their shelves may attract some unwanted ~~ridicule~~ attention.

Anyway, one day I collected up the three offending books and took them to the counter at my local post office because I was in a mood. "Haven't these books been censored off the Australia Post shelves?" I asked the woman. She is a good character. She once told a robber that, no, she wasn't going to give him any money and was so frightening that he walked out the door hanging his head.

She took the books and examined them. "Yes, that's right. There was a memo out the back somewhere about that. Can you put them back on the shelf for me, love?"

Never Lie When You Can Sleep: Dreaming Up The Waterboys

2011-07-25T15:12:00.004+08:00

In a radical reimagining of Western Australian history, Peter Docker presents a land 300 years after colonisation, where the West’s most sought-after resource is not iron ore but water. The Aboriginal people are waging a guerrilla war against the eastern states Water Board, who have been controlling the West and its water for one hundred years in a secondary colonisation. Central to The Waterboys are Conway and his friend and fellow soldier Mularabone and the tale begins with the two young men stealing a Water Board truck to smuggle water. Mularabone’s people live underground in a warren of caves reminiscent of the North West’s Windjana Gorge, where the Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra held his last stand. Their methods of resistance are digital meets herbal; cloaking devices and holograms and then body pastes made from plants and ochre to combat the deadly ultraviolet light.

If you are already thinking that Western Australian secessionist ideas are being excavated in The Waterboys, you would be correct ... kind of. For this story also takes the reader back to the moment of British colonisation, when Captain Fremantle steps off the edge of Empire and dares Captains Stirling and Irwin to embrace the Country and start behaving like more respectful guests. In this novel, frontier violence on the Swan River takes place between His Majesty’s frigates.

The Ghost of History chapters tell how Captain Fremantle meets the Nyoongar people the day he fell into the Swan River and his previous life as an agent of imperial expansion dissolved into one of song, dance and understanding the land. The character of Fremantle is one of the most splendid I have encountered in literature in a long time. Who in the world would I most want to have dinner with? Captain Fremantle aka Wobbegong from The Waterboys. (Wobbegong? Yes, you gotta read the book). In this passage he is about to take on the Royal Navy to defend the Countrymen and Nyoongar Boodjar:

The two Djenga sailors in the wooden boat apply themselves to the oars, and the little rowboat pulls away towards the Challenger. Wobbegong sits upright in the little rowboat. That Royal Navy is still stamped all over his posture – I doubt if he could slump, even if he tried. He is still shirtless, but he has donned his Royal Navy captain’s hat. He stands up to buckle his cutlass.

On his ship, I can see that Wobbegong has had the HMS scratched off, and now there are three large concentric circles painted in red before the name Challenger. p. 327.

Navigating these jumps in timeline, as well as entering the water diviner Conway’s sporadic dreaming, was a bit like reading Trainspotting for me: once I got the hang of the lingo I was away, riding on Docker’s audacious speculation of a whole new history. The Dreaming 44 chapters reflect some nasty moments of our own present – the organised chase of a prisoner through corn fields that echoes a 1930’s Klan hunt, or the mindset of a man chained up in the back of a paddy wagon, or sitting in the tray of a crowded ute, child on lap and a drunk driver up front. Jack’s pissed. Eyes shining, lips red as sex, cheeks glowing with malice and laughter and alcohol.

Infiltrating the book is another, darker dreaming. Peter Docker cracks open our country’s drinking culture with his grog dreaming theme:

We’re watching telly. Me and the other Water Board troopers. I look around to see us all lounging around in uniform. My mates and me. We’re drinkin beer. I’m drinkin beer. On the piss with me mates. Maybe my brain has forgotten that soon my body will get sick ... I hear myself laughing and I don’t know why. Even here, in my drug-dulled state, wearing the Water Board uniform, there is something else. I know this is a lie. That the heart of the grog dreaming is about lies. p. 77.

Docker triumphs in The Waterboys with his audacious reordering of history. I did worry that the centre of the book would not hold, so wild is the narrative and the dreaming. However Docker reins in the chaos to produce a great novel and, as is the way with good speculative fiction, tells a few home truths about brothers, Countrymen and women and the state of Western Australia. Historical Nyoongar people such as Midgegooroo, Munderan and Yagan are all here, not named but beautifully recognisable through their demeanours and descriptions. After reading The Waterboys, my only disappointment is that Wobbegong will never swim out of the Swan River and ask me out to dinner.

Ultimately, I feel that this book is about brothers, or the light and shadow of a man. Conway and his brother Jack (a nod here to George Johnston’s classic Australian novel), Greer and Sarge, brothers-in-arms Conway and Mularabone, Wobbegong and Holy Water. Peter Docker pulls off this examination of manhood without resorting to simplistic good/evil binaries or men’s group clichés. The stunning front cover illustration reveals that light and dark – if you look closely, you can see the ‘fidgety little bastard’ in the child’s eyes.

The Waterboys

Peter Docker

Fremantle Press

363 pp

$27.95 paperback

This review is also posted at Overland Blog.

More on Being a ScaredyCat

2011-07-25T11:17:00.003+08:00

"Sarah!" The only other historian from Albany at the Tasmanian conference came along to see me present my paper and said afterwards: "I've always seen you as such a brave and confidant woman. What happened?"

I was at the conference for four days before my own presentation and watched the academic rigour of each question time with great apprehension. Thursday loomed closer and closer. "They are very gentle to us babies," another postgrad said to me, of the Elder's treatment but I was still scared out of my brain.

The night before my presentation, I went over the paper and decided that it had about nine things seriously wrong with it. The next morning, I rang my supervisor and got her out of bed, forgetting all about the time difference. "Just drop the Gimble paragraph if you feel you are running out of time," she said. "You'll be fine. Good luck."

Most of the conference sessions took place in small meeting rooms or lecture theatres. Mine was in the absolutely enormous performing arts complex. Huge. Like for an opera or something.

One of my idols whom I'd not met, Lyndal Ryan, sat in the front row. Others started filtering in and took up seats all over the auditorium. I was introduced as 'Jane'.

There was nothing for it but to smile and say to the audience, "Look. I'm just a pup at this, so bear with me." I explained that the sealers and the Tyreelore (Pallawah islander women) fascinated me for a few reasons, not least because I worked with men in small boats in my other life and "they are the same kind of men." That the women were not of my own ancestry or story but indicated an innate woman's wariness of appropriation, of personal and spiritual annihilation.

Everything seemed to work okay, except for the first slide which was a map. I was trying to explain the location of the islands and where they lay on the coast around Albany - to Tasmanians. For some reason, that particular slide was almost invisible on the big screen. I fumbled through that. As I began to read, I realised that I could break out of the text and just talk. It got easier and easier, until Malcom, the chair, gave me the five minute call and then I had finished the paper.

Lots of questions, about men and islands and women. I was challenged on my use of the word 'wives' by a young man doing Black Line studies. He thought it was a demeaning term, considering that the abductions of women were often violent and they were treated as slaves and chattels. I explained that Tyreelore meant Island Wife, that the Pallawah women had called themselves wives. "Robinson only mentioned the word wives once in Friendly Mission," he replied, somewhat defensively. I looked over to Ryan for help and she looked back with a 'you're on your own, darling'.

Interestingly, this challenge to my terminology has since helped solidify my thoughts about the Tyreelore. It was the most useful question or comment in the whole presentation. But at the time, it was a difficult moment. Later, Lyndal Ryan sat next to me and said, "What you are doing is really important. Don't worry about him. Keep doing what you are doing. Read between the lines. We want to see more of you."

At lunch, another Elder with a reputation as history's 'troublemaker' took me aside. "Lyndal and I were talking about your paper," he said. "It is such a rich and exciting story you are working on. We also talked about your doubt. It is a good thing in historiography to entertain doubt. Doubt is crucial to your discipline, to pull a story apart and look at it anew. But do away with your self doubt. You don't need to doubt yourself and your capability to write this history. You are right on track."
What a cool thing to say.

After lunch, I had to chair another presentation for three postgrads who were all in much the same state as I was. When we were done, Luke said, "Let's go and get a drink."
"Oh, yes please." We all heaved a very relieved sigh and went across the road. At a classic Tasmanian brick and tile with a Boags banner and clinking keno machines, the tattooed barmaid poured us all a 'house red' straight from the cask and charged us a dollar fifty each.

Fishtraps ScaredyCat

2011-07-24T22:43:00.004+08:00

I was hyper aware of you

and I didn't know what to do, so I did nothing.

I just mooned about

that day

when the water glassed off

and you gave me

some chai tea sachets,

lunch,

a potted chili grown from seeds

carried on the whaling ships from South America in the 1830s,

river stone fishtraps

a picture book of birds

some biscuits in plastic wrappers,

your ear.

Burned Hot and Bright: Amy Winehouse

2011-07-24T20:44:00.007+08:00

For those who have no knowledge of Amy Winehouse other than the Woman's Day or New Idea images of her falling out of nightclubs and into police cars, her beehive and Cleopatra makeup skewed, her rehab vision screwed ...

... find a copy of Black to Black. Light the fire, pour yourself a glass of good red and listen to the girl. It will be a revelation, I promise you.

Amy Winehouse may be cavorting and jamming with a tribe of self-combusting genius women the ilk of Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin tonight. Imagine it.

I feel terribly sad about her death. I once watched a video of Janis Joplin stamping her spangled heels on the stage ... Why oh why oh why ... and the woman next to me, who was at least twenty years my senior, expressed outrage and anger and sadness that such a freakishly talented woman could just be removed from our world by something so banal as drugs. Her words, about Janis dying like that, have stayed at the back of my mind and revisited today.

Muslim Stories from the Dark Days of White Australia

2011-07-20T20:03:00.002+08:00

My review of Hanifa Deen's great new book is here.

Winter Glass-off With Dog

2011-07-20T11:22:00.000+08:00

Two million words on why I live here ...

This Will Make You Stronger, Son

2011-07-17T19:28:00.006+08:00

Stormboy and I arrived in Launceston, Tasmania, after a true red-eye from Perth. We hadn't slept at all on Sunday night; well I think he may have slept between three and five before Melbourne - but I know I didn't. At Tullamarine airport I gathered our luggage in a circle around us, set up the laptop on a stainless steel bench, read my paper out loud to my son, accepted his critique and revised my powerpoints. He checked his face book. All around us people were looking at their screens. I pointed out the orthodox Jews lining up for Los Angeles, the Somalian families heading for Adelaide, the Maori man in his sharp suit and white shoes in the London queue. A whitebread Albany boy is Stormboy and his eyes were widened that night.

We staggered into the backpackers in Launceston and learned that we couldn't check in before two in the afternoon. This was the point where I pulled the overtired parent role - pointing out that my child hadn't slept for days and all we needed was two beds and some doonas. Like. Now. The Arthouse Backpacker staff are super cool and make up their own rules and we got a bed within minutes.

We found the supermarket after a beannied adventure and trudged to the backpackers through howling rain and other rhetoric, carrying bags full of food and shampoo. "This reminds me of Dunedin," Stormboy grumbled. He was close to fainting from lack of sleep. Only the thought of climbing through the abandoned gasworks building kept him awake. "Walking through a strange, cold town, carrying food and having no home because my Mum's got a university agenda. Dunedin.Tasmania. Yay. Go Mum."

Historians Conference

2011-07-13T18:09:00.009+08:00

I've been away, as you dear reader, may have guessed. Away from my little shack overlooking the harbour and away from A WineDark Sea. But I return with stories to tell! The photographs from the last few posts were from Launceston, where the historians of the world (okay, Australia and a few random adventurers) gathered for the annual conference.

Apart from the constant guilt about the ratio of written work to scholarship cash, the falling away of my social circle, the feeling that I am talking into air when someone says "So what is your thesis about?" and the long hours spent inside my head's interior cities (the pleasant bit), another job of mine as a PhD candidate is to attend conferences and present my latest research. I'm beginning to understand that the reasons for this is so that everyone else in the same discipline knows what you are up to: overlaps get sorted pretty quickly, connections are made and resources shared - or deliberately not shared. Is this a scary concept to a young blood? Fuck yes.

Two posts down, I commented that I was surrounded by rock stars. In the conference rooms at one morning tea time (the only sessions that Stormboy always made sure he was present for) I saw an old man walking towards me. He was really heading for the chocolate crackles. John Mulvaney. The man who excavated a Tasmanian tiger on the Nullabor during the seventies or eighties. He'd found the earliest trace of dingoes too and come up with the theory that the arrival of dingoes saw out the end of mainland tygers. I wrote some fiction about him once, it is here.

Mulvaney edited a beautiful book of Captain Barker's journals called Commandant of Solitude, the story of European beginnings in my home town (He complained to me that MUP had remaindered them). He also wrote Prehistory of Australia. I turned around to see Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan getting stuck into coffee and carrot cake. Far out. More of them. I've been reading their stuff for ten years and here they all are.

It was quite a surreal experience. Like the rest of us amateurs, the rock stars were presenting papers on their own latest findings. Ryan's paper was on the success of the Black Line. For anyone who doesn't know about Tasmania's Black Line, it was a systematic attempt to round up the Pallawah people, using a 'net' of soldiers and civilians spanning the island of Tasmania. It was paid for by the British Government and is considered one of Australia's most expensive military exercises before the Japanese invasion of World War 2. It was also seen as a colonial-style economic stimulus package, where cash was injected into a struggling community to buy meat, boots and guns. The official result of the Black Line was the capture of one old man and a boy. But Lyndall Ryan argued the Line's success in that, within twelve months, many of the northern and eastern tribes had disappeared from Tasmania.

That the conference was situated in Tassie this year (they take place in a different city each year) meant a lot of the academics were locals, including Reynolds and Ryan. As I've written before, Tasmania's history is bloody and close. Many of the younger academics were focused on Black Line history.

What I found striking was that despite the research, the talk and the ideas flying around the campus during this conference, Tasmania as a state seems content to smother its other history with a kind of Disneyfied colonial aesthetic. Contemporary Tasmania is a palimpsest: pretty paddocks and buildings pasted over a rather nasty past. The academic world whirls with stories and theories of What Happened, while a hotel in Launceston is named after the two leaders of the Black Line - those men regaled with songs, flowers and food as they rode out on their mission.

Cooking With Gas and the Cataract

2011-07-06T13:19:00.000+08:00

Some Things I Saw Today

2011-07-04T19:18:00.000+08:00

I'm Going Out of Chooks

2011-07-02T21:06:00.003+08:00

I've had chickens and the associated dramas for twenty years. It all began with inheriting some chickens with a house I moved into. I've undergone every chicken owners' class in the theology/theory/philosophy of chook pens. (Ask a chook person. Go on. If you think I'm being kooky then you are not a chook person and need to know these things. Invite them home, get them on the couch, make them a cup of tea and then ask them. They are not scary people or weird or from a cult.They just get chooks.)

At present I live with a cat and four chickens all inherited from Mum/Bob/Stormboy/Sal. None of them are mine, in fact few fur or fowl I've lived with are critters I've specifically gone out to acquire. They just end up at my place. The rooster from that initiation into chookery was a surly bastard who thought he held some sort of title, seeing as he'd inherited me. My daughter did not feed him wheat fast enough, it seemed. She was feisty even at two and would not succumb to his bullying in the chookpen. But two year old children are close to the ground. I saw him jump straight into the air (I thought; 'I've seen that rooster move somewhere'.) before he slashed her face with his chookpen spur. Fucker. She's still got the scar under her eye and he was tough as a boot in the pot.

I've seen and participated in nights of murder.

'Cause there's nothing strange

about an axe with bloodstains in the barn.

There's always a bit bit of killing

you've got to do around the farm.'

Tom Waites

Dark, dark stuff of chicken theology aside, chickens are also the key to true happiness. Feeding happy chickens is akin to watching goldfish, except that chickens are always happier than goldfish. Momemts of feeding chickens are the existentialist's dream (eggsistentialist, perhaps?). When buying wheat recently, I mentioned my chicken happy theory to the girl at the counter of the stock feeds shop. She said, "Well that is all very well for you! My last customer said the two things that make him very unhappy are - 1. Combing his hair and 2. Going into the chookpen with his socks on.

Anyway, the whole point of tonight's post is to say that I am finally going out of chickens. Recently a pair of dogs culled half the flock and that was a traumatic event. I'm moving to a place out in the bush that is not conducive to scratching about and planning to become a lot more nomadic (not conducive to scratching about - or building chookpens). So the chickens have to go.

Here is some photos I took tonight of the girls with the resident bandicoot. (For those not in the know a bandicoot is a marsupial who carry their young in a pouch, like a kangaroo.)

Stormboy and I took the torch and four cardboard boxes up to the chookpen after dark. We shut the gate behind us. "Got the masking tape ready?" I asked him.
"No!" He ran back down the stairs.
Then I plucked the girls, one by one, of their perch and stuffed them into the boxes. Stormboy taped them over. The squawking was tremendous.
I was a bit proud of Stormboy tonight because the last time we did this, he fell to bits over their protesting. "Just grab them!" I'd say. But he couldn't do it and got all upset.
Anyway, tonight, he was great and we packed the girls into boxes. Then Dad turned up in the ute and took them back to his and Sal's house, where they will see out their retirement ...

Hail, the crone chickens going are home.

Fecking Outboard!

2011-06-30T22:27:00.003+08:00

"Nails'll be there. Now. Don't say anything to him about fishing for gardies later."
We pulled into the little carpark beside the inlet. "He'll be down there for the next week with bloody Grievous, trying to catch them all before we get back." Old Salt spied Nails' truck at the same time as me, laden with one huge ice box and several smaller ones; his lacky siders stored neatly under the tray, out of the rain. Tough Guy, by the by.

(This is becoming difficult to write because it is quite late, my back is sore, we've seined the gardies and all I want to do is settle down in my swag to write something romantic and exciting about fishing. However Old Salt must think that there is dancing girls on next at the Irwins Inlet Hacienda and he is hovering rather than going to sleep in his caravan. Hovering includes:
- jingling keys
- eating spam and tomato sauce on toast with his mouth open
- slurping tea
- talking to the dog like the dog actually understands English
- and after lots of big sighs, saying "You do this computer writing thing a lot?")

Nails was already on the inlet. I could see the sun whitening his wake and the fluorescent green of his sou'wester, out past the island. We launched the boat and I started it. Then I had to start it again.
"Did you turn that thing off?"
"No, it just stopped."
It sputtered out again, like the fuel wasn't getting through. I started it again and she ran for one hundred metres before dying for the last time.
"Give me a go." Old Salt stumbled over the nets. He yanked and cursed for five minutes and then looked up straight into the squall. Of course, squalls only hit fishing boats when the motor has failed. I've never known it any other way. We started blowing towards the island. Old Salt threw me an oar and we both punted for the car park.
His words, shouted into a mad wind, ran sort of like this:
"Push away from starboard, push the bow around. Keep 'er straight. Don't touch the gunwales with the oar, you're pushing the bow around too much. C'mon you can do it, you've done it before. Stop pushing the bow around. You know what you are doing. Push the fucking bow around! Push it harder. Don't lose that oar. It'll get stuck in the mud and you'll lose the bastard. Stop pushing the bow around ...."

By this time we were side on to the wind and hurtling to the island with the oars making no difference. "Why don't we just blow over to the island and then row back when the squall is over?"
"Because we could be there all night! Oh, just let me do it." He punted harder against the wind and I threw down my oar because it was useless and being harangued like that is enough to make me feel useless - and flaky too. So we blew over to the island.

"There's rocks ahead. Do you wanna pick up the motor?"
"I don't give a flying fuck about that fucking piece of shit."
I was thinking, I have always wanted to visit this island and we are always too busy and now here I am.

In the lee of the storm, I stepped into the reedy skirts of the island. Old Salt didn't see me because he was hunched over the innards of the outboard.
I found myself in a flat clearing of stone, thick with lichen, surrounded in soft, white paperbacks and tea trees. By the stone lay swathes of moss, the most glorious green I have ever seen, glistening with rain and studded with tiny red flowers. I climbed through the trees and happened upon another little gathering circle of stone. The place felt magical and wild and sort of ... welcoming.

The moment was broken not by the roar of the outboard but the sudden brightening of the horizon, as the wind and rain stopped. I went back to the boat, where Old Salt was replacing the lid, still cursing.
"I'll row back." I fitted the oars into the rowlocks.
Nails rounded the island in his big punt.
"I'll row," said Old Salt and got to the thwart before I could sit down. "Haven't rowed for ages. Like rowing."

So he rowed. I stood at the stern feeling useless again. Nails motored closer and I waved him over, hoping for a tow.
"What the hell are yer doing? Never call another fisherman over! Fuck!" Old Salt rowed harder.

Nails was beside the boat. I smiled, but he didn't. He just asked Old Salt what was wrong with the motor. I scrambled up to the bow and got the rope ready to throw. Then I remembered the big U bolt on the end. "Watch out! There's a weight on it," and threw it to Nails. To his credit, he ducked.

Back on shore, the two fishermen spent half an hour talking about busted outboards and cobbler and yellow eyed mullet. Eventually Nails looked at me. "Probly should let you fellas go and get dry."

I drove. Old Salt got out his mobile phone. "Dusty! I wanna talk to you about that outboard you sold me for a pup."
" .... ?"
"The propeller's not going around enough to get us underway. You know what I mean? I tried turning it by hand but it just won't go round fast enough. Gotta crank handle you can sell me?"