'Objects can appear closer than they are': a week in diary

 Feb 2. Tower. Time 1507 called in another inlet fire eastern end this time thanks to spotter S. No lightning for two weeks. Weird. Ground crews out and dozer tender. Listened to all radio channels. Crew found an unaccompanied vehicle on the track in to the fire. "Details please". Bombers reported someone sitting on granite at fire's tail. So ... an investigation then. Rangers shut Bib track and huts. Cops involved, found marron nets, chook pellets and a charred cooker with the man.

Feb 3.Tower. No visibility  4s and 5s all round. COLD. Max 18. No smoke in Fire 4. Crew out by 1300. Contained and under control. Fire 4 investigation on Monday.

Feb 4.Tower. No smokes in Fire 4. Met a nice German couple. They both had big teeth and amazing skin. We talked about sharks and bears

Feb 5. Tower. Smokes from Fire 4. Had phone chat with the nearest tower to me. Told him I tried to visit last season but no one was there and that was fine because his tower is freaking terrifying. He agreed which made me wonder why he climbs it everyday. Told him I even brought a thermos of tea and custard pies that day.

Feb 6. Day off. Food shop. Post office. Appt w Silver Chain nurse. Remote area nurse FIFO. Told him my eyeballs were fried from work. He is amazed firetowers still exist. Why not hotspots and AI? I can see smoke an hour or so before it turns up as a hotspot. Early detection. And AI still needs human interpreters ... so far. Bailed on lunch with A. Spider bite making me feel mumpsy and fried eyes. Tired body. Pharmacy on way home for eyedrops.

Feb 7. Tower. Called in fire at Greenrange 150 km away. Thought it was 50 km, then maybe 80. Wildest smoke I've ever seen. Talked to MP. He said that high pressure can even flatten out your retinas (!!!) which makes objects appear closer than they are. Like an eagle. Wild optical illusion. Met tower mouse so not a mardo or honey possum.

Feb 8. Tower. HOT 35 degrees 27% RH. Winds SE 30kph. Smoke coming over from Greenrange fire. Heading along the coast and then inland with sea breeze. Fried eyeballs again. Horizon glare and smoke. Spoke to Y on phone about a writers workshop we are doing. March flies after weeks of none. They still smell sweet like marri flowers on my palm when squashed.

Feb 9. Office. HOT. ML rang, just shooting the breeze. What son even does that? asked S. Read Fire 4 investigation. Sister J got into town for event, doing lightshow. We had ginger beers @ pub after work. Talked about Juliette, death, livers and the Moodjar tree where newly dead go to rest before leaving forever. That moment when they truly leave us like an elastic band snapping. Publican gave us party pies and tomato sauce. A man sitting nearby was wearing satin Christmas themed boxer shorts. Shire worker told me I'd made a friend of the grader driver after I gave him a pear from my lunchbox and a thank you card for grading my road to work.

Past tense

Years ago I wrote a story on A WineDark Sea called 'Can't kill him with an axe'. It was an account of the times I'd nearly killed Old Salt on his fishing boat. He'd previously had heart surgery ('they put a bit of pig in me!'), licked asbestos as a kid because he liked the tingling feeling on his tongue, had an affinity for battery acid and thought electrocution was a fine remedy for Ross River Virus.

Bill died on Monday. It's a weird feeling. When a close friend is dying, people ask if I want to visit them but I'm already there, somehow. Several hundreds of kilometres apart and I'm with them. I don't really know how to explain this. Despite this feeling, when Nga told me on Sunday that he was now on morphine, I'd said, 'Yeah, I'll ring him in the morning.' He sounded fine on Friday when he took of his oxygen mask to chat. Fine.

He was my mentor and teacher. He taught me everything about what it is to be on a boat, how to follow the channel markers home to port in the middle of the night. That was one of his first lessons as we motored home from Michaelmas Island. He taught me about family, about how fish think and how to tie knots (still terrible at that).

He seemed incombustible, unkillable. An incorrigible white man with a stout sense of right and wrong, a strong interest in his family's history of fishing the Great Southern inlets. He never gave up. So Bill, the star of Salt Story is gone. Bizarrely and so bloody banal for someone who always sailed too close to the wind, he copped covid at a funeral a few weeks ago. On Monday, we'll go to his.

 

 

 

 

Late to Mothers Day

In the wee hours last night, while entertaining the monkey mind with endless hypotheticals, separating wishfully rejigged reminiscences from the more authentic ones, searching out patterns, inventing story lines, and generally making a complete ass of my circadian rhythm again, I somehow brain-trekked back to Mothers Day. Yes, I know it was a week ago but just indulge me the title of this post. Thanks.

I had received a text message from Stormboy's Dad, wishing me a happy Mothers Day. The next day I rang him to tell him I appreciated it (plus something could he fix the tray-back on my ute something something). "Oh, yes, it occurred to me that Father's Day didn't happen last year," he said, because all good things must begin framed in the negative, right, "and it made me realise that it was you who always made sure it had happened in the past."

A survey recently detailed women's frustration with partners who do not honour them on Mothers Day nor support their children to do the same. When mothers mentioned their grievances to their husbands, they often answered, "But you are not my mother!" A friend of mine complained to me of the same answer in the same week, in an unrelated conversation.

Personally I think "But you are not my mother" is a valid response for both its genealogical logic and the generally unsexy places where Oedipal complications tend to end up ... but anyway, more about that later.

Maybe my own ambivalence is due to the fact I've been trained well by morbid circumstance not to expect too much on Mothers Day. Pearlie's father died when she was very young. (The painted pasta necklaces from kindergarten were gorgeous. The picture of 'My Family' with the father figure hastily scrubbed by the teacher out was not.)

Stormboy was eight months old when he, his father and I awoke in our bed, the night lightening into day, in the front room where the huge sash windows looked out to the rose garden. Stormboy's father lay still and quiet. It was not light enough to see his eyes but I knew he was awake. "Hey," I nudged him. I wanted a rise out of him, for him to laugh and hug me. He'd been so distant lately.
"Hey, it's Mothers Day."
"I know," he said, and of course he knew and that's why he was so still because he'd woken and remembered it was Mothers Day, because he'd woken and remembered that his mother had just died.
So receiving his text message last Sunday, after seventeen years of radio silence on Mothers Day, was kind of lovely.

007 drove his van out to Pallinup a few years ago, to visit our fishing camp. He used to do things like that: just take off for a few days and stay somewhere different, talk to different people, just for the experiences. He wanted to come out in the boat in the morning, to see what it was like picking up nets before dawn. That evening Old Salt, 007 and I sat around the fire drinking Stones green ginger wine. The cold was brutal. The cold rolled down the snow-capped Bluff Knoll (no kidding, I think it actually did snow up there that night), into the Pallinup system, where it crept along the river, around to the river mouth, over Miller's Point and straight into the back of our kidneys.

Everyone was getting pretty pasted by the wine and the fire and the frozen kidneys. 007 had this way about him, maybe it was just around women, I'm not sure, but he softened and often his conversations were fuelled by a more female sensibility, like someone had surreptitiously rubbed estrogen cream into his arm. Amazingly this night, it seemed to rub off on Old Salt too, notorious for his bluster, sharp tongue and tough guy bravado.
They began talking about mothers.
"You know," Old Salt said tentatively, like he was bracing for ridicule, like he had realised for the first time in his 70-odd years, like he was imparting a great secret, "when Mum died, I think I began to see my wife as my mother."
Both men stared at each other.
"I believe you are right," said 007. "You are absolutely right."

Not long after that, with a dearth of sweat lodges and bongo drums, we all took to our respective swags. I only had to get up once to throw rocks at 007's Maltese/Shitsu who was keeping me awake with his yapping. Okay, I didn't chuck rocks at him, but I did scoop him up, slide open 007's van, throw in the dog and slam the door shut again, hearing muffled grumbles as I stamped back to my tent in my socks.

The next morning was bitter cold and we were hungover as fuck. Even the fisheries officers turning up in the pre-dawn gloom with their headlights turned off didn't merit much interest as we donned beanies, gloves and fishing boots to wade through the shallows to the boat.

Unruly and Sandy

That's the measuring stick

That's the black bream with their eyes turned down

when we are packing them

into icy boxes for the city markets.

That's Unruly.

   

That's Sandy on his nets.

That's Sandy after the last buoy's gone into the water. He's smiling. He's set a good net and he's about to go home.

A Transit of Venus Year and My Handbag

It was a pretty interesting year for Australian women; what with the Prime Minister's slap down of the opposition leader after two years of personal abuse, Anne Summers' essay Her Rights at Work and an online guerilla response to Alan Jones' usual tirade that educated, powerful women will destroy the joint.
The turning point in all three happenings was the that online community rode rowdy roughshod over the old media guard, yahooing and swinging their bras and Yfronts above their heads. What happened next was what Benard Keane summed up as the rage of the prostatetariat. (prostatetariat being possibly the most magnificent word coined in 2012)

The media has been told for a long time that the internet will bugger their advertising revenue. But no one told them it would happen courtesy of social media campaigns as well.
This had a particularly amusing outcome of upsetting powerful old white men, the sort of people not merely used to running things, but doing so in an unchallenged, and definitely unmocked, fashion. No matter where you looked this year, there was some privileged old white guy angrily denouncing things. Gerry Harvey or Solomon Lew or Ray Hadley or Alan Jones (Old White Guy primus inter pares), or the entire Republican Party (brilliantly condensed into Clint Eastwood railing at an invisible person, an act so laden with symbolism it deconstructed itself in real time), or the old men of The Australian, from Chris Mitchell down, powerful elderly males infuriated that the world no longer gives them automatic deference, let alone allows them to run things unchallenged. 
The result: the rage of the prostatetariat.
(Here - and this is a great article)


The coup happened because even as Gillard's speech and Summers' essay went viral, and Jones was forced to apologise for some truly 'vile' comments (his advertisers were deserting him like nightclub punters after the 3 am spotlights are turned on), the old white men of The Australian completely misjudged the seismic shift that was occurring and tried to maintain their status quo of keeping a witch at the stake whilst wielding pitch forks and a box of matches.
Meanwhile the bloggers, twitterers and FB activists just got on with it and burnt down the prostatetariat tower within the week. No newspapers or matches required, thank you very much.

What happens when guys
like Paul Kelly, Chris Mitchell,
 Christopher Pearson and
Alan Jones misread their own readership.
Oops.

Anyway, whilst on this feminist slant, I think I'll talk about my hair and I may at some stage move on to my handbag. There's also the slightly fraught question of whether, with my new status of grandma, I'll ever get laid again and if I do, will it be weird, uncomfortable and with all lights turned off. As MF keeps reminding me, I'm quite young for a 21st century grannie, which makes the whole nanna dating scene sort of strange. What to do. I've been angsting about a lack of boyfriend sauce for a while. A factor in this dearth may be living in a country town where the gender demographic is female heavy. Perhaps it is also being a nearly six-foot tall wild woman who gallops off at the hint of a gold ring and has a reputation of being a bit lippy, wins at arm wrestles. Grandma. All those states require someone quite um ... quixotic and special.

This paragraph has no bearing whatsoever on the above paragraph's subject. Of course someone will love me despite the twigs in my hair, I mutter defensively. Having run out of shampoo, I want roll with it and see how long I can go without washing it. Yes, there is a light aroma of woodsmoke and sweat. There's a few twigs and bottle brush flowers going on too. Like one of the Toa sisters, my hair thrives on the briny and I've always loved leaving salt in my hair for days after a swim. It gets glossier and shorter as the curls tighten and begin to dread.
Said sister was told once that her hair smelt and she should probably wash it. "But it's not itchy yet!" she answered. Mine's not itchy yet either. It's actually starting to feel really good. So there.

Personally it's been an odd rollercoaster 2012 of highs and lows. Some of them I've blogged about and others have been a bit raw to document online. Fishing out at Pallinup was definitely a highlight, along with getting my book signed by Fremantle Press (coming out this year, yay!) and Matilda Grace, ohh, that baby ... My handbag is honest testimony to my year: phone charger, diary, tampons, pocket knife, screwdriver, so-called smart phone, headlamp, ear phones, rollie papers, sandalwood oil, blue wren feathers, pliers, tissues, cable ties, a water bottle, puncture repair kit, asprin and crushed seashells. An apple and a book.
These items service my midnight visits to the whale graveyard, my own personal road side assistance needs, fish filletting habits, a night on the town, working out of town three days a week, living in a tent, roams around the red cliffs or to the sand bar at Pallinup, a funeral for a tiny blue bird, some minor emergencies, some major joys. One major joy involved the little plastic jar that my daughter made me cart around in my handbag for the last month, in order to salvage a portion of her placenta on the big day.
And all this ephemera lives in a canvas miner's tool bag that I cannot seem to give up for anything more feminine or elegant because it is just so bloody useful.

Oh - hey - Happy New Year everyone!
May it be happy and honest and fruitful.
XXX
Sarah

The Honey Tree

Yilgar and her crony Gimbuck, had come up for a talk one afternoon, and I strongly suspected a cadge, for the camp was in disgrace.
The women the day before had all been sent to collect and drive some sheep across the river and on their way had found a honey tree, that is a big tree in which the wild bees had made a hive. What were sheep in comparison to a find like this? So they were left to their fate while all the women set to work to burn the tree down and smoke the bees out.

Now that takes time, so the sheep wandered off where their own sweet wills dictated while the women and children camped by the honey tree and made fires round it smoking the bees with green bushes, and burning so the tree should fall in the right direction.

Meanwhile at the homestead my husband was getting more impatient and worried at the non arrival of the sheep. At last, after some hours had passed from the time they ought to have appeared, a native on horseback was despatched to see what could be the matter.

He arrived just as the tree was about to fall, of course he had to assist them when it was down, examine it, see the size of the hive and taste the honey. Then bark had to be found and stripped from the trees, bent into shape to put the honey comb on to carry back to the camp. What were sheep compared to such an interesting and unexpected find? And all this sort of thing takes time, besides a native never hurries himself.

Meanwhile the homestead was getting more and more agitated over the non-arrival of the women, sheep and messenger. Something serious must have happened. It was getting near sunset and nothing had turned up, the women had been sent before midday, and the sheep were only three miles away.

At last my brother mounted his horse and rode off. About a mile from the homestead he met some of the wanderers laden with honey in bark baskets. But where were the sheep?
"The sheep? Oh we lose 'em," was the chorus "but look master, what lovely honey. Taste some. It is very good."

Ethel Hassell, My Dusky Friends, C.W. Hassell, Fremantle, 1975, p. 83.

You Need Never Leave Your Home

Recently on Radio National's Download This Show, they were talking about that internet giant who began selling books and has now branched out into home shopping. So, folk can buy their fortnight's essentials and have it delivered to their door. They don't need to go mix with the rabble for anything. Food? Water? Toilet paper? Hell, just work all day, go home and relax in the home theatre. (Now ... that is weird. Is it just me, or is the 'home theatre' incorporated into every Australian McMansion just really, really strange?) I quite like leaving my home to buy food and entertainment. It's part of my hunter gatherer impulse. Apparently having a house in Gemini means that I just love arguing with my family about politics and philosophy but sooner or later, I may find they've relegated me to another home. (Cue the hunter gatherer thing.)

I suppose the irony is that while I was listening to RN's 'you will never have to leave your home again', I was driving the 150 kilometres out to Pallinup to catch fish that I would drive back to Albany and put on a truck to Perth, to be auctioned at the markets and sent back to the supermarkets in my home town.

While out at Pallinup I decided to take a drive east to my Kundip shack. I needed to drop off a load of wood and planned on having some lunch, a read and a little sleep in the lovely bed I'd built, to get back in time to set nets with Old Salt.

Turning off at the Jerry roadhouse is always like stepping off a jetty for me. At that point, I'm leaving and civilisation drops away. Radio reception dies and the road stretches into a few hundred kilometres of paddocks and bitumen.

I passed a red scooter, loaded up with fishing buoys, sleeping bags, backpacks and tents on the roadtrain highway, the rider looking grimly ahead. As I flew by the scooter, I was thinking, man, that is brave. Crazy brave. I began thinking about the two people I know who have ridden bicycles across the country, how unexpectedly urbane they are in their present lives considering their adventures. I thought this scooter rider must have been one of those Japanese blokes; sunburnt, strident, tenacious.

When I arrived at my shack, I walked around the place as I always do. Someone had lit a fire there.

Other folk had decided to move in.

That last photograph is not that great. It's a 'snap and run' shot. Black bees have moved into my shack. They've built four or five hives in the place. Honey and pollen were running down the windows. I was truly outraged! But the honey comb, oh boy, that stuff smells so yummy.
So, how to tell the bees to leave? Politely?

I drove back to Pallinup and talked to the other fishermen. They've had shacks around this coast for generations. Unruly said, "Talk to Grievous' Bro. He loves bees."
Grievous' Bro walked into the camp. It turns out he's a bit ambivalent about bees.
"Get some flea bombs. Pour diesel over the hives," was his advice. "We got back to our herring shack one year and there were twelve beehives in there. Diesel is the only way to deal with them. You've just gotta kill them."

I'm quite devastated that my shack has been commandeered by bees. On the road back to Pallinup that day I was feeling cranky and needing the close comfort of a pest control confidant. It turned out there was an entirely different epiphany lurking. I pulled into the Jerry roadhouse and the red scooter I'd seen before my aparian odyssey was parked out the front. This bike was a crazy mix of visionary/fisher/traveller. Then I saw the South Australian plates.

I walked in and bought a coffee credit. Apart from the smiling Irish attendant, there was only one other person in the place. She was little, tousled, young. She looked tired. She had her ears hooked to her lap top. She sat at a table at the far side of the room. I waved at her and she took out her earbuds.

"Did you just ride that scooter across the Nullabor?"
She nodded. "Yes. Yes, I did."
She looked like she was about fifteen. I stared at her. She stared back. Both of us were quiet.
Finally I blurted, "I am so fucking impressed."
Shy, awed, I pressed the 'flat white' button on the machine, made a coffee and then I left for Pallinup.

Last Days on the Inlet #4

Setting out early evening to set the nets

 

with four inch mesh and a fisherman,

into the crazydancing trees.

The first buoy

In the morning, we pick up the nets. That big fish on the right is a sea mullet. Mmmm.

Unruly measures his fish.

And ices them down for the city markets.

Last Days on the Inlet #3

Last Days on the Inlet #2

Last Days on the Inlet

All Saints Day heralds the closure of Pallinup to the three commercial fishers there this year.
"Shame really, just when the fish are coming down the river," said Grievous' Bro.
"But it would be more a shame if the fish weren't coming down, wouldn't it?" I asked him.
We are starting to feel a bit sad about leaving the inlet after six months. Soon we will pack up the camps into a south coast 'travelling circus' convoy: boats, nets, caravans, buoys, ice boxes and pot belly stoves, red plastic fish bins pierced with black bream spikes packed into muddy utes with salt stained windows ... and head back into town to a more civilised life.

Swan Song

Getting Bailey Down in the Lookout

Old Salt was in his caravan, reading the paper and eating lollies, waiting out the day until we could set nets again. I asked him if I can take the dinghy out to the sand bar. I wanted to go exploring past Cag's Camp, around the corner to Groper Bluff. And could I take the dog too? He nodded, twice.

The real reason for my coastal hankering that day was not to explore but get a handle on how to write Samuel Bailey kidnapping a seven year old girl off the beach on this same stretch of coast. I'd been intending to do it for weeks and kept putting it off. A day in Bailey's company is no fun. Writing in the quiet blue room can be an insular experience and invoking Bailey just makes me squirm; the twisted shit he'd done. (In case you have not been following this tale, Bailey and the little girl are real people from the 1820s.) When writing Bailey, I'll sometimes go across the road to the pub and buy myself a bottle of wine just to get through it.

After anchoring the boat in the soft sand of the bar, taking care to shelter where she wouldn't blow onto the sand and get stuck (a real bastard when I'm the only one to push off - the dog is never any help), I headed for the gathering of salmon shacks perched above the sand dunes. Wandering along the track to Groper Bluff, I was thinking about snakes and my bare feet and the flowers and saw those amazing mushrooms that bounced out of the barren soil like optimistic aliens.
And then, I came across the whalers lookout ...

Oh boy. Was this one of Cairn Man's depredations? The structure looked 'worked on' ...too tidy for a 19th century job. I really hoped it wasn't Cairn Man. In the end, I deduced that it was an original that had been fixed up a bit. There is a whalers lookout on Cheyne Island, adjacent to Cape Riche, which is very similar in structure, although a little bit more ragged. Stormboy found it when I dropped him off there a few years ago.
"Mum, I'm feeling really sick ..."
"We've still gotta pick these nets up."
"Get me off this boat! I wanna go home."
"How about I drop you on a deserted island for an hour?"
He nods vigorously, "Please Mum, please."

(Call me a bad mother if you want but I still find it hilarious that my son preferred being dropped off on an island, all alone, as a ten year old, rather than hang out with me, providing berley for whiting.)

Shore based whaling east of Albany predated the colonial era and many of the whalers were Americans or from the Eastern states. They chose beaches like this one to flense the whales, setting up their trypots and reducing the leviathans down to mere barrels of oil and bones.

I sat inside the shelter on a flat stone that some kind soul had prepared earlier. Suddenly, I was warm, the sou-westerly at my back. Of course it was a whalers lookout. Sou westers are the season for whales. The utilitarian nature of the structure all made sense. I looked out to sea and thought a bit about what it would have been like.
Samuel Bailey and the little girl just swam straight into my head. I wrote down the whole scene as fast as I could, before the march flies found me.

(Here is a link to Martin Gibbs' wonderful book on 19th century shore-based whaling in the south west.)

Sea Shroom

I saw some mushrooms yesterday that I have never seen before. They'd burst out of a sand track above the beach. Freak fungi? Maybe they've been doing it for millennia. I always thought that fungi thrived on organic matter but the sand these optimistic folk sprung from is burned in a crucible of salty onshore winds, seasonal bush fires and little rain.

On the Tiller

I know how to do this. It is late afternoon and the wind is up. I turn the dinghy in a long arc into windward slop and watch for Old Salt to gather himself. I point the boat for the paperbarks. He doesn't need to flick directions at me as he stands amidships but still he flicks the back of his hand towards the shore. A digital Rosetta stone for lesser folk. It's me at the tiller. I know how to do this Old Salt, I think as I roar up to the paperbarks, lift the motor when we hit the shallow coral grounds, ease the throttle. I can see another little boat moored in the flooded trees, its rope threaded through branches, the outboard out of the water and tilted to the right. The dark flash of a solar panel through the forest and a smudge of campfire smoke above. I work the tinny along a bit. There's a boat in there, I say to Old Salt. They'll run into our nets tonight if we set there. Get closer to where the afternoon sun bleaches the trees to ghostly white, full lock to the nor west, pull the gear astern, full lock to the south east, straighten up, back in the boat to where the big old bream lurk. The mountains are a blue grey bruise on the sky. Old Salt fiddles with the tangled buoys. Our wake arrives, shwishing against submerged trees and onto the sandy shore. Then it is only the cawing of jaded crows, the thump and crack of the swell outside the bar, the soft throb of the motor as we play out nets. The mushroomy scent of nets and sweet flowers over the water. A sentinel sea eagle lies above me, watching.

Stretching the truth

Last night out at the inlet I recorded some more of Old Salt's stories. It led me to thinking that I should do this with some of the other old fisher men and women but the 'taking' of oral histories is a strange process. Old Salt knows well enough to trust me but some of the others don't and probably view my endeavours with some suspicion. They'd have to read the manuscript to know that I am on their side and some of them read nothing but the weather and the seasons (yes, and that is why these folk are a source of my constant fascination.)

From my own experience and learnings of recording oral histories, there is a relationship of trust that has to be developed and maintained before, during and after the recording. Then there is the technical stuff: don't wear bangles or noisy clothing; make sure the subject is comfortable and willing to stay the duration; ask leading questions, not ones that end in a 'yes' or 'no'; do your research. One of the most interesting instructions and something I've stuck to ever since is that you should never ask an interviewee to tell their story before you start taping. If you do, they will tell it to you in vivid, gorgeous detail. When you begin recording, your interviewee will be rehashing, editing and reciting and all that rawness is gone forever.

Anyway, most of the rules get thrown out the window at Pallinup.
I love the yarn below, because it is just so bloody funny ... a story of Old Salt's Dad, one armed poacher of legend, getting busted for undersized black bream in the 1950's.

On a cracking swell, I

escaped the damp and broody confines of the inlet, motored past the paperbarks and the red cliffs ... to the sand bar and the southern ocean.

 anchored the dinghy into shifting sands and walked east

 communed with a whale

a plummeting gannet, a Pacific gull, the hot burst of a mandarin crescent in my mouth.

found treasure

black dog and me, we stopped to gaze into rockpools 

and then we walked on, over the limestone stumps of ancient forests,

following the fox's early morning prints
to Reef Beach.