Stone Stories #1

The serpents were fighting again, this time over eggs, their own eggs or maybe it was the muttonbird’s eggs, laid in burrows on the island. They writhed and rolled through the sound, smashing boulders and letting the water in to the place where once there was a wooded valley with a creek running through. Jarrah maybe. I don’t know. It’s been flooded for a while now and that was all the work of the snakes.

One of the water snakes shone like paua shell, glossy with the rushing water, given the incoming tide. The other snake could see her reflection in her partner and tormentor. Her skin was reddish brown like the bloodwood kina and soon, after he bit her and slid back to examine the wound, in a rare moment of comradery given what had been happening for the last seven days, nodded to her as she watched her wound sprout blood in the mirror sheen of his hide.

She wanted to kill him then, kill his glee in her damage and, knowing she could never kill him, that killing her fellow progenitor would cause their mutual extinction, she burrowed into the earth to escape. Her skin became ruddier as she nosed through deep black sand and deeper into the white sand of sea dunes. She swam under the mountain, beneath granite tors and found the underground stream, followed the stream gulping at the sweet water rich with minerals to keep her going. Behind her, there was a rumbling sound. 

He followed the path she made under the mountain and then swam along the underground stream, now red with her blood. He knew from the dank scent that she was failing.

She burst out the north flank of crow mountain. She asked the people to help her. They wore cloaks and stood in a small circle, looking shocked, their sticks shipped to their sides. We don’t dare, one of them said. What if he comes after us next?

Distract him then, she said as the rumbling under the mountain grew louder. She slid away, through the reeds of the wetlands, past the Big Tree and into the creek. She knew this creek flowed into a lake filled with yakka tortoises. She knew this because she had made it herself. Dug it out to let the water flow when the water rose up that time. Here and now, she rested a bit, hoping the people would make good on their promise. The little fish gathered, nibbling at her body, and it felt like a sweet massage.

When he came out of the mountain, he wasn’t gasping like her. He emerged straight into the sky, his colours pulsing in the sun. Where is she? He asked the people and they just looked at him. They didn’t seem to know what to say. A kid with windblown hair raised her arm, like she was about to point out the lady serpent but she was cuffed and she dropped her hand and looked at her feet. He looked down and saw the track of brushed aside rushes in the wetlands. He was fully emerged from the mountain now and towering above them. Where is she?

One man picked up his dog, cradled the dog, whispered into its ear. As the serpent took off through the rushes, the man threw his dog into the air. The dog howled and flailed as it landed in the serpent’s path. He had to either go around the dog or stop to inspect a likely feed. He bit the dog in half, swallowing the torso and flung the tail and the head back at the people in reproach.

*

The rock in the shape of a dog’s head stands in the place where all that business with the serpents happened. The main road runs so close to Dog Rock that the town council painted a luminous white collar around its base, ostensibly so drivers don’t run into it. The rock sells postcards, advertisements for car yards and tourist moments. Whenever there is talk about removing the collar citing cultural concerns, the council overrides, citing safety concerns. Yarn bombers knitted the dog a new collar and that was removed, citing safety concerns. 

Two hundred metres south is the church, attended on Sundays by processions of families and led by men in robes, carrying sticks. Outside the church is the dog’s tail. It’s a tall, upright monolyth of granite. A rectangular cavity was carved into the dog’s tail and inside that grotto stands the Virgin Mary. 

Recently, but not so recent as the epic battle between the snakes, someone stole the Virgin Mary. The thieves carved away the concrete that bound her feet to the granite, and took her away. It was considered by many as an act of desecration.

There are rumours of tunnels under the crow mountain, dug out during the war to help soldiers move around unseen.

The Sound of a Podcast

I'd almost forgotten what a ripping yarn this is. Rosemary Puddy who runs thebookpodcast has rerecorded my interview with her from a few years ago. Have a listen. It's great.
Here is the link: https://bit.ly/TBP019

Christopher Pease 'Hunting Party'

Big Sky Town

Black cat crossed my track

Black cat crossed my track as I drove through the gloaming. It crossed at the Inlet River bridge; a thin, desperate feral and black as night. Prone to superstition I am, though in a contrary sense, in that I usually take the meaning opposite to popular tales to preserve an old omen's usefulness. Born on a Friday the thirteenth and all.
Keep your eyes peeled, I thought, be ready. There's that black cat to ward off bad luck or bad judgement.
... And on the next blind corner, emerging from the columns of karri trees came two houses on trucks, the houses' verandas slewing into my path. No lights, escort car or signs. The second driver reefed his truck into the gravel and I did the same on my side, saw the corner of the moving building just miss my mirror.
Lucky cat, that one.

The story of three Dots
Two of the three Dots are regularly pulled over by the local sergeant and warned about hooning about on their gophers. The third Dot lives next door and spends an age in the roadhouse, asking people what day it is, so she wouldn't get gypped buying yesterday's paper. After asking a dozen people, she still eyed the date suspiciously. Never forgets her PIN though. Her and the second Dot hunched over the ATM machine like a pair of witches over a cauldron, stabbing at buttons and sighing.
The third Dot was taken, just the other day.
"They're cleaning out Dot's house," said the second Dot, nodding to the house next door to the roadhouse. I was making her a coffee: regular cappuccino with half a sugar, hot hot. "They got contractors to do it."
"Where's she gone?"
"They've taken her." It sounded so ominous; the dementia unit in the city. "Doctor's orders, apparently."
"You must be devastated, Dot."
She nodded. "Dot'll be having a bad week." She looked frightened.

Circular Ruins
I was reminded of Borges' story The Circular Ruins by another blogger. It is the story of a man who dreams a man into existence, only to realise he has been dreamed himself.

We lay on smoothed stone, on the edge of the rapids. Roaring water, water rushing down to Circular Pool, foam curling frothy balls into laterite knuckles and granite palms. The day was warm. The roaring was relentless, not the metronome rhythm of the sea that I am used to, but constant rushing of blood in the ears, water the engine of the river. Our legs were hooked together, our bodies almost braided. We lay motionless, lulled by the sound of the river and lizarded by warm rocks.
I dreamed, awake. I didn't sleep. Dreamed for a thousand years, until we both were a mummified strand of people left as a long forgotten dream upon a lichened rock. Storms and droughts came and went. Above the crickets chanted and birds called, and below, the river ran but I dreamed on.
A twig cracked, or one of us shifted. Maybe the step of a tourist on the boardwalk above or the cry of a child. I can't remember what happened to make everything fall through the skin of that dreaming. But, when he opened his eyes wide and stared at me, I knew he'd also been dreaming for a thousand years.


Life's two percent surcharge
That experience was pretty difficult to explain to myself, let alone write down for someone else to comprehend. I haven't been writing for a while and even the qwerty layout feels a bit alien to me. I feel like there's not much I need to say/write. I just want to exist. It's funny because, although I don't feel a creative or analytical bone in my body right now, there are still narrative arcs barging about in my head. It was supposed to be my 'putting things in place' year; where I write some academic papers in order to have choices next year when I return from the inlet. Tenure. Travel. Publishing. Adventures. That sort of stuff. Stuff that compliments this stuff:

http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/30818/

That's my PhD thesis and a link to its more ethereal version, containing biographies and history of 1826 when the sealing communities of the Hunter and the Governor Brisbane lived on Breaksea Island in King George Sound. If you are super interested (like I am), you don't have to spend six or seven years researching the story (like I did), you can just download the whole thesis from that link and read it.

Maybe this creative inertia and feelings of qwerty inadequacy stems from finishing a couple of big jobs. I just want to get under a doona for a few months, or lie on a rock and dream. I do like what novelist Elena Ferrente says about this state: "When you've finished a book, it's as though your innermost self has been ransacked, and all you want to do is regain distance, return to a whole."

Anyway, instead of being creatively productive, I've made an awful lot of coffee. I've said, "Which account are you using?" about twenty thousand times, followed by, "There's a two percent surcharge on credit but not savings or cheque accounts." Lots of customer sighing. Some remonstrations. They don't see me. Only their credit card and the EFTPOS machine.
Me: "Credit? Okay."
Click click click. That's Doctor Two. Per. Cent. Thank you very much.

Nic Duncan, award-winning portrait photographer, now she got the real me the other day.

Impossible trees and PhDs

 The bar broke, the sea came in and the inlet was scoured out through a channel 100 metres wide. Overnight the water level dropped by a metre and a half. We now have a tide ... I now have a beach. The flooded paperbark forests are now beaches. Amazing.

I've been a bit quiet on A WineDark Sea because I've just finished and submitted my goddam PhD! It was printed yesterday. The last week has been a hectic round of trying to find power to charge my laptop, or searching out free wifi, somewhere, anywhere, often trying to find a bed to sleep in while in town, all the while making myself sea sick scrolling through reference lists, grammar, formatting, etc, etc.

It's done. Well for the moment anyway.
Now ... what's next?

Some thoughts about men who row boats and ride bikes

Here is something I wrote recently about the sealers of the 1820s and contemporary commercial fishers and 'outlaw' motorcycle clubs.

I worked as a deckhand with men who net the estuaries and inshore waters for fish and crabs. The irony that I was writing about men who also worked these same shores in small boats, albeit more than a century ago, did not escape me. One of the fishermen I worked for was proud to relate that he was a fourth generation fisherman and that one of his ancestors, a sealer, was accidentally shot through the neck and killed while working beaches east of Albany. This fisherman had a keen sense of his ancestry and natural history, and working for him was an ‘embedded’ process of research for me. I spent long hours on the coast learning how to handle boats, nets, stingrays, small sharks, and some interesting weather.

Contemporary commercial fishers can be clannish, with slightly anarchic tendencies towards the government arms of law and order, only complying for utilitarian reasons. They are comfortable living in bush camps and shacks for weeks or months at a time. They understand the cycles of nature – the winds, the swell, the natural predators and the seasons - their work is intimately joined with nature. Their income derives from a maritime-based primary industry plied from small boats. In these ways contemporary commercial fishermen are similar to yesteryear sealers.

In other ways, modern day commercial fishers are no duplication in sentiment or actions of the 19^th century sealers: they are usually happily married, own land and pay large annual fees to maintain their fishing licenses. They do not kidnap women and imprison them on islands or shoot Aboriginal men and each other (though there are a few historic yarns of weapons being brandished over access to fishing spots).

However I do wonder what kind of men the fishermen would have been if they were placed in the same situation as the Hunter and Governor Brisbane crews in 1826: abandoned thousands of nautical miles from the nearest point of white population and legal censure for months or years on end. Phrases like ‘the thin veneer of civilisation’ and ‘men of their time’ go through my mind. These phrases are also common responses given to my wonderings out loud. There is really no way to answer this question, other than to judge each individual by evidence of their actions, either today or 160 years ago.

The ‘men of their time’ argument can be a simplistic way out of explaining a history of ill deeds, and of opportunities taken by people powerful enough to exploit those less powerful. But then communities do respond to learned morals, new legislation and social mores. Societies and laws change to censure behaviour that may once have been deemed inoffensive. Some examples within the last twenty or thirty years would be giving a child a ‘belting’, smoking cigarettes while pregnant, driving under the influence of alcohol, refusing to employ a married woman or forcing her into unpaid servitude, or leaving a child in the car outside a pub. Skinning a rabbit before it is dead.

The actions of twentieth century folk compared to the nineteenth century sealers is complicated by cultural and societal mores of the era. I have yet to find more than one example of an attempted prosecution of a sealer for kidnapping and enslaving an Aboriginal woman, and this reflects the unwillingness of the Van Diemen’s Land colony to legally censure such actions.(That prosecution was aborted not for a lack of evidence but a kind of sanguine ineptitude, by the way.) [1]

Arthur Veno, in his book on Australian outlaw motorcycle clubs The Brotherhoods, explains how young men with a background of familial violence and a self-perceived or overt exile from ‘normal society’ can form groups that are insular, violent, and reliant upon an internalised structure of regulation and law. In many ways the sealers of 1826 remind me of modern day bikies and the reception with which their exile and consequent self-government is still met by the legislators and media.

These clubs are characterised as having a constitution, a rigid organisational structure, and heavy levels of commitment to ensure their survival. They exist in their own world, cut off from mainstream society through a rigid system of rules and an inherent belief system.[2]

I grew up in a town in an era when many men were forced out of maritime occupations by the closure of the whaling industry, the imposition of tuna quotas and environmental disasters such as mass death of pilchards in the Southern Ocean with its flow-on effects to the other fishing industries. They left or they adapted. Some of the more disaffected folk joined up with war veterans to create a local outlaw club who were overtly misogynistic and racist  towards people who were not of their ilk. People spoke in whispers about the drugs, gang rapes of women, and fights or attacks between the motorcycle club and local Noongar people.

In observing interactions between contemporary groups of men such as bikies or commercial fishers and the law, (and I'm sorry to conflate them both here but it is pertinent) I noticed that power relationships were often the same as the ones between the law-makers and the sealers in the 1820s. It seemed to be a point of masculine pride: both parties distinguished themselves by their positions, that they never ‘cross over’ to the other side. Commercial fishers historically do not defer to fisheries officers unless forced to by law and bikies historically will never defer to the police or the media. In both cases, when they do cross over, it is self-serving for the purposes of the group, or the individual. When it is the individual, that man risks of permanent, and perhaps deadly, exile.

Another analogy of power and 'men of their time' is the language used by journalists and police regarding outlaw motorcycle clubs. It's remarkably similar to the language used by men such as Lockyer (Amity) or d’Urville (Astrolabe). The word ‘gang’ is used as a collective noun in both instances, described in the Australian Modern Oxford Dictionary as: “1. A band of people going about or working together, esp. for some antisocial or criminal purpose.”[3] 

Veno writes that the term ‘bikie gangs’ is a huge issue with motorcycle clubs, in quoting a Hell’s Angel: 

“It’s a law enforcement term. It’s used to try to make us worse than what we are. Once a club becomes a gang, then the police can get all the support from the citizens they need.”[4]

---

[1] John Baker was arrested for the kidnap of Trugernina’s sister Makerleedie in 1826. Plomley, Ed., 2006, p. 1051

[2] Veno, A., The Brotherhoods: Inside the outlaw motorcycle clubs, Third Edition, Allen and Unwin, NSW, 2009, p. 33.

[3]Ludowyk, F., and Moore, B., Ed., The Australian Modern Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Victoria, 2003, p. 332.

[4] Veno, A., 2009, p. 56.