Dealing with a dog who rolls in a fish kill

 About two weeks ago it was raining hard. We had about 60 ml in a week. The inlet swelled with river-brown water from the massive system fed by three rivers. I was running out of firewood. This time of year always presents me with a sense of lack: crouching over a fire that will not thrive, like an animal trying to stay warm. Not enough sun to power the internet and my single lamp for more than an hour per day. As a casual worker, I'm out of a job for most of June and July, so when the income runs out, gas bottle runs out, my gas fridge stops and so does the hot water.

It sounds grim but it's a reality of living off grid in a remote location. 'I should organise myself for this time of year,' I think every year. This year I lined up a few writing jobs which are tiding me over for the moment. Anyway, with the fresh water pouring into the inlet over the last few weeks, regular visitors have noticed an anomaly.

The sudden influx created a mass fish kill event. At least I'm better off than your average herring. Brownie and Co were filletting mullet on an ironing board down on the beach. They'd set nets the previous night and not caught a single herring. 'They're all dead,' Brownie said, pointing to the dead fish lining the beach.

I walked along the beach for a few hundred metres and found 30 or 40 more dead herring. Shit. Later, other boaters told me there were dead fish on every beach on the inlet, stinking up the reed beds and the sandbars. I could only find herring on the beach, large, almost bull herring. 

So I reported the fish kill to the authorities and warned Brownie to put his nets away. For the next 24 hours I stressed about Fisheries coming out to inspect our nets and hanging about the place. The main thing was that I thought it needed to be flagged. Water authorities got back to me to say it was a fresh water deoxygenation event.

So my issue now is my dog. 

On the first day, I washed her in warm soapy water after she'd rolled in rotting fish, rubbed her dry with an old towel. She immediately went down to the beach and had another roll. I washed her with warm soapy water again. 

Next time, she's getting the hose.

Weeding out the diesel

Just been reading Don Watson's Watsonia*, a collection of his essays and articles over a lifetime. Watson wrote, among other things, speeches for the former Prime Minister and Hawke-era treasurer Paul Keating. Not sure, you can fact check me on this, but I reckon he wrote the Redfern Speech, nearly approaching its 30th anniversary and a pivotal moment in our nation's history. Below is a shortened version.

Watson has an interesting take on writing political speeches, saying that his words belonged to the politician who spoke them, not to those who wrote them. I understand this sentiment as - speech writers are given talking points and then work those points into something beautiful and stirring. Those words no longer belong to the writer. It all sounds a bit meta but ask any writer if their words belong to them once their books go out into the world.

Anyway, folded into his book on topics so varied as the impotent decency of John Hewson, Australia's problematic relationship with Indonesia re East Timor, cricket and the politics of class envy, was a chapter on marijuana. So bear with me now as I head from international politics, the floating of the oz dollar and pathos of child jockeys, to the most illustrious vocation of growing weed.

'Seasonally Adjusted' begins with "So it is autumn. To put us beyond the claws (clause?) of winter, we should be storing up and making mulch." Yes, he's talking harvest time. "Turn the apples into cider. Stew those stone fruits." This story is a hymn to the gardener. "Gardening increases the level of personal debt,' he writes. "If you have a garden, you do not need any other worries.'

One may garden in Australia to their heart's content, he continues. We may grow wolfhounds or fairies. We may grow bank robbers or aphids or even the ladybirds to feast upon them. We may grow colonisation, 'We may throw clods, spit upon and barbecue animals. There is nothing to stop us indulging in idolatry ... we may sunbake, smoke and use a chainsaw.'

'No one will dob you in for dreaming here, but if you grow marijuana, they will.'

If you grow weed in your backyard, you'll get dobbed in, writes Watson. Coppers will leap over your camellias to get to the weed after the neighbour has done an 'Alert but not Alarmed' call. It's like the worst crime possible. Then the police will uproot all the offending plants and take them away in evidence bags to burn on a bonfire of righteousness ... 'well most of it anyway,' Watson writes, in a tongue in cheek reference to police unofficially taxing the revenue.

This "most of it anyway" reminded me of an incident in our great south coast about thirty years ago. After the raid of a massive bush crop, the local police took the plants to the local tip, poured diesel over it, lit a match and left. It didn't burn.

Word went out that there was heaps of dope at the rubbish dump. In those days, the dumps were not continually monitored by people so it was free weed for all. To this day there are stubby holders commemorating the event. All I can remember was the amount of hash I smoked during that time. It always smelled vaguely of diesel.

At around the same time, the Prime Minister was giving his Redfern speech. I dunno how this all connects up. It probably doesn't, except for Don Watson. Please forgive me for attaching the greatest speech in post colonial history to that time when weed was free thanks to the WA Police.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/02/looking-into-the-abyss-don-watson-on-facing-his-mortality

* love this re context. Watsonia is the worst weed ever!

 

Threatened Species Day

Yesterday was Threatened Species Day in Australia. The date was chosen because it was on this day in 1936 that the last Thylacine died. (I do notice that goggle spellcheck tells me I'm writing about hyacinths here. Even the Tasmanian Tiger's name has become extinct in the etherwebs. Thanks blogger.)

The day is beset with a complicated stew of feelings about colonisation, the Anthropocene and resurrection. Apparently some Australian-born movie stars, among others, are helping fund an initiative to clone the tiger using numbat, tiger and dunnart genes. More practical ecologists are asking how this funding could be diverted to managing future extinctions. But no, the tiger clone/sighting bling always wins. 

The video of the last surviving tiger does me in. Yes it is a species made iconic for its extinction, but there are many other species that have suffered and become extinct over the last two centuries. Birds, marsupials and insects. Personally, I see the attempted resurrection of the tiger as the ultimate human arrogance. It's using Euro/settler 'science' to justify the elimination of a species ... and then bring it back from the dead. Wow. It's Frankenstein stuff for sure, with an added dose of Theseus' boat. But ultimately, 'building' another tiger is not absolving us of our past. 

Evening again

 

Like the gloaming and the evening, there is also apparently the fuckening! A friend sent this to me this morning and I was utterly up for it. It's been a pretty strange full moon period, for me anyway - and I've gone nocturnal since the dog and cat in the night time incident. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out to get me!

Missed calls from a dead ex, a pair of socks that aren't mine beside the fruit bowl, Random Man moving into the shack, the dead cat ...it's hard to refrain from making false connections between odd events at the best of times and I don't even smoke weed.

The inlet has risen really fast as well. Struth's boat would have been on the sand a week ago, if he'd parked it where it is in the photo below. At first I thought the bar had broken from the outside from the huge swells we've had but now I think it's the water pouring in from the other end, the rivers swollen with messages from upstream.

Here's some photos of my house too. People sometimes think I live in a shed but the cottage really is quite respectable. This is my desk and writing area, close to the fire of course. The huge windows face south to the inlet, and the weather.

 And this is I guess what you'd call the sitting room (It's all open plan). Today it's covered in prep work for next week's uni classes. This semester I'm tutoring for Environmental History, Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing.

Self medication: mushrooms, crabs, sunshine, poetry.

Happy Winter Solstice folks! We didn't have a family bonfire this year, instead there was major flooding, lightning bringing down power lines, wind at 9 or 10 on the Beaufort scale uprooting whole trees and other extenuating circumstances that involved women without nipples...*

 During this time I've had the worst head cold in years, spent a fair bit of time at the inlet cold, sick and lonely (in isolation basically; no one wants me any where near them), surrounded in butter menthol wrappers and dirty dishes. Yes, and whingy whiny too. So a day or so before the Solstice, when the morning was still and warm with pre-storm languour, I popped a mushroom in my mouth and dragged my sorry carcass down to the beach to sit on a rock, to feel the sun ripple through my chilled spine.

I sat on the same rock where I snapped the crocodile a month or so ago and sipped some hot apple cider vinegar and honey. Over at the boat ramp sat a white ute with fish tubs on the back. Couldn't see the man's boat and then I could - a white rooster tail over the other side of the inlet. As he got closer, I could see that it was Steeleye, his red checked shirt and khaki waders his standard dress code. Dog sat to attention at my feet and whined.

We chatted about the cobbler while he packed the fish. 'Caught three last night', he said as he hefted some stingray wings into the icebox. This is really unusual here and worrying for me as I love wading. 

 

Pelicans began to crowd his boat, growling at each other like kelpies waiting for the scraps. Steeleye gave me a couple of blue manna crabs, rare as well in these parts but the inlet was open for so long last year that all sorts of strange things have been going on - cobbler, stingrays, blue mannas. I even found a marron once, trying to find the fresh and stranded in salt water.

The shroom began to kick in, doing its work on my molars first and spreading to my jaws, behind my eyes. I thanked Steeleye for the crabs and gathered them up by their claws. Walking up to the house, a lightening of my spine and the clicking of crabs at my side, I heard Steeleye's ute rattle along the track, boat trailer thumping behind. Wouldn't be back for a while, he'd said, too many yellow eye mullet and they're only 40 cents a kilo at the moment.

Back in the kitchen I boiled up the crabs to crimson and spread newspaper over the bench. Wasabi and some vinegar in a little bowl. I jointed the crabs' limbs and sucked out my first feast of the season, lifted the carapaces and vinegared away the yellow guts.

I was supposed to drive down south and stay with family that night before the Solstice but I couldn't handle the thought of swagging it on the floor, sick. So instead I fed on fresh crabs, feeling the heady rush of the shroom trip swimming into the fuggy ache of the head cold, listening to Marianne Faithful recite The Lady of Shalott.#

* Not really.

# 'She Walks in Beauty' by Marianne Faithful and Warren Ellis is a wonderful album if you are into either of these two AND the Romantic poets all in one place.

 

Another sterling delivery

Today after work, I arced up my old laptop in the resource centre to find that the faithful machine I've been working with for the last five years had completely broken down and was sending me dire hard drive and error messages in bright blue. She had the digital version of the flu. I only have a two day writers workshop beginning tomorrow, that I've been working on for weeks. It was a horror moment, that electric blue notice, and the old puter kept sniffling and shutting down every time I tried something new.

Once the stomach churning settled and I'd got my wits about me again, I rang HP support and a kind woman called Rasha talked me through rebooting the whole shebang. Now this is not a sponsored post, far from it, but as a freaked out pleb with a failing five year old laptop, HP's customer support today was amazing. So ... winning on that front.

Then I ambled down to the post office for a mail check. There are no letterboxes where I live and consequently no street numbers either. People describe their house when I am trying to find them as 'it's three houses past the yellow house on Park Avenue, about four houses before the turn off to Swan Street.'

I digress. I went to the post office to pick up my mail and the post mistress (yes we still have them here) handed me over a bubble-wrapped parcel. I fingered the plastic lining of this parcel. Whenever a book that I've written or that I have a piece in comes out, my publisher tends to send it with no return address, like a mystery gift, like they know us authors will unwrap it and find their new baby swaddled inside.

The book: Women of a Certain Rage, edited by Liz Byrski, will be out on Monday and I received my copy today.

 So yes. Love affairs! The bikie wars and then a strange reconciliation! My story The Club goes into what happens when we are forced to understand that people who may not think like us ... no bugger it. The story is about a culture that I seriously disliked and how I realised that the men within that culture loved the same man as I did.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever written, for several reasons. I'm so glad that it is on the public record now, within this anthology. My editor, in her note wrote 'Another sterling delivery from Drummond!'

That's a pretty nice sentiment to drive home with. Computer fixed. Anthology out in the world. Sterling delivery.

A good day.

#offgrid compared to #vanlife

After a ten day stint on fire tower and radio support in the office, I've just had a joyous few days off. I did my washing:

I did the dishes and just hung out at my place. Kyabla sent me a box of honey from our last hive rob at Kundip. My colleague on the tower recorded his lowest relative humidity and highest temp ever today.He's been doing this for decades so it's a precedent. No more bits of kangaroo turning up via Selkie from the beach, although there were two tusks and a hind leg on my doorstep this morning. I've been busy prepping my lunches for the next swing ... safely stashed in a gas fridge that is on the blink. 

#offgridliving is the very opposite of #vanlife. Perhaps I should link up my life to their Insta account.

The Robodebt Zombie Apocalypse

 So it's just been announced that the federal government settled a class action lawsuit against them to the tune of $AU1.2 billion. The class action was brought against them by the people of Australia who had been financially wronged by what has been called the Robodebt scheme.

I was directly involved in the Robodebt scheme, not the class action but because I was a casual worker who applied for unemployment benefits between 2015 and 2016. Look, this is a terrific country when it comes to policy around healthcare, social security and social housing but over the last seven or eight years the conservatives have strove to obliterate all that. To portray people who need those services as 'leaners not lifters' bastardised an entire egalitarian system and won them an election. Yes, I'm going all unrepentant leftie here.

I applied for unemployment benefits when I first moved to Broke, mainly to tide me over while I found a job and find a job I did - at the service station. (Any aspiring writers who think that once their first book is published, will never need to work a day in their life again, think twice please.) I was stoked to work there and met a lot of locals. The work was nourishing and I reported my wage to Centrelink every fortnight. I was unsure of ongoing work due to the casualised nature of the job, so I stayed in the system.

Last year I received a letter via registered mail from Centrelink saying I owed them a shit ton of money from that particular financial year. They were setting the debt collectors onto me. Here is where it gets messy. I rang someone ... someone? at the office and said, 'I'm just going to suck it up. Send me the bill. I'm sure it's not much, prolly just a few dollars. I've made a mistake somewhere in 2015.' It was then that she explained how the Robodebt was calculated.

It's the income averaging estimate. Say if you were on the dole for a month in 2015 and then got a plum job at $100K a year, Centrelink averaged your income over the whole year and decided that you owed them *a shit ton of money*. It's called Robodebt purely because there is no human interaction in this decision. At the time the government were campaigning hard for a surplus budget to get them re-elected. The current Prime Minister was Social Services minister and these numbers (billions of bucks from welfare recipients) gave all the pollies hard-ons and shored up their budget. Scott Morrison then moved onto Treasury and kept up the pressure on so-called dole bludgers, handing the portfolio to new social services minister Alan Tudge*. By the time Morrison was Prime Minister, the job was done and people in casualised labour like me were being told we were bludgers and welfare cheats. Many people had their tax returns raided - by the government - to repay a debt that has now been deemed illegal.

To collect the debts owed by unicorns and other dole bludgers, the federal government used a particularly nasty debt collection agency called Probe - an uncomfortable name that calls to mind what aliens do to their human abductees - to collect their dirty work's cash. I've had a fair bit to do with Probe, given my Robodebt, and I'm really sorry/not sorry about the visuals I've given you here.  

To satisfy Probe's demands I went to my bank and had them print out the entire year's record from 2015/2016, and then highlighted all incomings. Handed that in ... and that's when the phone calls started. While I accepted the debt, Probe workers were trained to ask for more per month. They go hard. When I lost my job and rang them to say my fortnightly payment would be delayed, they asked me to lend some money from my Mum to pay them. No really. It was twenty bucks.

Thugs.

So I'm pretty pleased to see the news that this class action has been settled. I'm a bit pissed though that the federal government hasn't been held to account. It's odd that that it settled before the PM was called up. Their policy has allegedly caused the suicides of many folk who weren't as robust or as settled in community as I am. Can you imagine being homeless and having to go through this shit? I've got a PhD, very few mental health issues and a stable home, and yet I still found the Robodebt thing hard going and really stressful.

 

  * As social services minister, Alan Tudge illegally leaked Centrelink private data on sole parent journalist Andy Fox who just happened to be taking a swing at the Robodebt scheme.

& Thanks to Andy Fox, Peter Van Onselen and Asher Wolf who covered this story over the last five years.

Canteloupe

I saw him on the town road driving towards me and rather than our grinning windscreen greetings, it was a terse raised hand from me and a concerned look from him. How I would love to smash that windscreen, must have flashed my eyes, seeing his knowledge that I was beyond cajoling now, or lies.

You know it is over when he stops enticing you on midnight adventures and day time rain time trysts; when he begins to wife you and you oblige. You know it is over when you make him toast in the morning instead of cooking him kangaroo meat in a cave at midnight. You know it is over when he provides just enough goodness for his pass card to embark on his next adventure without you.

My phone rang as I pulled into Crypt’s house. No Caller ID. I switched it off and then Crypt opened his front door and said, how you going Sarah?. Aussie’s birthday ey? Party, party! Do you want a beer? It’s cheap beer. Just shit beer really but something to get started on.

I’ve dug her up an orchid for her birthday, I said. I think it will take. They’re amazing.

I showed him the orchid, sprouting long, crimson stalks in an old tin stock pot I’d found in the Creepy House. I’d cut some flowers too and wrapped them in wet tissue, alfoil and wreathed them in a copy of the Weekly.

That’s impressive, better than my effort, he said. I just bought her a pile of sausages. Crypt's night shifts usually involve cleaning the blood and bits of bone off the floors, the walls and sometimes even the ceilings, when the arterial sprays hit the light fittings of the surgery room at the hospital.

You know it’s over when you can’t stop thinking about the night your lover's last lover was the usher and his wife took the stage alone and her father had just died. The white orchid in the usher’s dark hair. His wife's red lips stretched into what was supposed to be a stagey hilarity. Project that voice, actor. Put on that mask, usher, and usher us through the night. Go on. Both of you.  Break a leg.

Both women looked terrified.

Crypt’s house is immaculate; shabby fibro chic. Now that he has a Kindle he reads three novels a week. He has printed out the periodic table and pinned it up in the kitchen. Most days on my commute, as I shoulder through the door with my back pack full of work clothes, a lap top and a dog, Crypt is asleep, or trying to sleep, or recovering from lack of sleep. But this day he was a bit spiky after a week of night shifts. Someone knocked at the door.

Who the fuck is that? shouted Crypt, throwing open the door. Who the fuck is knocking on my door?

I already knew who it was. I saw his car through the torn lace curtains, parked across Crypt’s driveway, and then I heard his voice, asking for me.

Well I dunno, said Crypt. Who are you anyway? And Sarah? How did you know she is here? Sarah! He turned to me. Do you wish me to let this gentleman onto the premises?

Of course, I said. Come in.

He looked sunburned and intense. He didn’t really smile and that thing he normally does with his eyes when he sees me wasn’t there. I assumed he was reflecting the same lack in mine.

Sit down, sit down, said Crypt. Do you want a beer? It’s not that great but it’s a beer. Crypt slammed down a can in front of him.

He nodded and sat down. He said,

I tried to ring you, just then, from a pay phone. My phone has died a terrible death …

You know it’s over when you block his calls, messages and face time on your phone. You know it’s over when you resign from your secret internetty game with your secret internetty name - he changes his name according to whomever he plays with - and then you delete the app. You know it’s over when he is still too wary, secretive and careful, even in the face of losing you forever, to acknowledge this fact, to ask in Crypt’s presence: why did you block my calls and cut contact with me a week ago? What happened?

Because if he had asked me that, Crypt may have well put up his palms, backed away and left us at the little laminex kitchen table to let us talk some truths. Crypt may have gone outside to gaze over the verge action of the debacle’d meth house next door, or at my orchid in a tin pot, or decide that it was bin day even though it was a Saturday. 

But my visitor didn’t ask me that. He is just a man who has affairs. 

Truth is no option for the romantic strayer, and so the three of us sat around the table, drank beer and talked about toe tags, the day’s sailing, fish paintings and science fiction. I was aware of his discomfort and thought, his discomfort is not a single fucking stitch on the tumult I’ve worn the last four years. Pain expressed repeatedly by me and ticked off on his mental clipboard.

Tick.

No Action Required.

You know it’s over when you realise the futility of explaining why this unequal relationship succours your damaged self and dismantles your true one. He hasn’t listened to you, he never will. Explain yourself woman. Again. Enough. You know it’s over when you recall his complaints about his previous mistress’s bleak, black heart. You always thought you were better than her and now you’ve become that same bleak, sad heart. A once-wild soul, black-mantled by secrecy. And that there will be another soul after you. There probably already is. You’re just not that special, Miss Sarah.

I was feeling restless. Finally I stood, exhausted with the hopping between chit chat pleasantries around Crypt’s kitchen table and the cool narrative going on in my head.

I’m off to Aussie’s place, I said, putting on my coat. I want to help her set up.

Yes, said my visitor, standing. I should get going too.

I’ll see you over there later, said Crypt to me. Are you taking her the orchids?

Of course.

I turned. Goodbye, I said to him.

I felt a small twinge of … something, when I saw his beer can ringed neatly with indents from his thumb nail. I hadn’t noticed he was doing that.

See you, he said.

I was out the door, collecting up the tin pot and the Weekly-wrapped corsage, and I was down the street, stalking along with the pot on my hip, holding it like a baby or maybe a washing basket. I was angry but I didn’t use the pot to break his windscreen. I didn’t feel so wronged after all. I just felt a million different furies spawning from an ancient hurt. I heard his car start and rumble along the road behind me, slowing as he reached me. This was where he would stop and say, can we talk now? But Aussie’s house was right there and I crossed the neighbour’s lawn to get to her driveway. I didn’t look to the road as I waved the spray of orchids at him, waving him away, and so he drove away.

What was all that about? Crypt asked me later and so I told him.

I call him Crypt here, not because he cleans blood and bone fragments off walls for a job but because he is really, really good at cryptic crosswords. He just has that kind of brain. Later he sent me this message:

I couldn't remember your friend’s name so I called him Rockmelon to place him in my mental catalogue. I got it later: Cantaloupe. 

Can’t elope. Can't. Elope.

 

 

On piggers taking control of a zoom meeting

It was a while ago now but I keep on promising this story so I guess I'm going to have to put out at some stage. I've been off grid for five years and adapted my life to work and home. Some people would see me as a comrade living in North Korea: sitting in the dark with a wind up radio. That is pretty close. Candles are nice. I've had a single solar panel powering what a solar tech guy recently called a motorcycle battery, in not wholly admiring linguistics.

So, given that the campuses had shut down and we ran all our tutorials and meetings via zoom, it was a time for maximum exploitation of tech and time. I got onto it pretty much a week before anyone else (except the insurers) because I'd been working remotely for years anyway.

Apart from the laundromat and my friend's back veranda, both with power point and internet access, this was my most common teaching room. I've run it from my car.

It's my in-range spot and a great place to make calls, five kilometres from my home. This is also not a great place to call anyone during a storm. Ten days ago ... see below.

photo courtesy of OzStory

 I've spent several hours at a time on the phone at this in-range spot, while the original pandemic stuff played out and work meetings went online, full of peering administrators trying to work out who was there. Some meetings were funny and joyous, particularly with students, and others were like aghh.

During this particular meeting, I was still feeling smug about having a work meeting in a karri forest rather than the bedroom or cramped office that I could see everyone else zooming in from, when a 4WD full of people and dogs stopped beside me. 
'Are you okay?' one of the blokes asked. 'Not broken down or anything?'

It's the nicest thing to do and something I've noticed a lot when I'm in my in range spot in the forest recently. I'm having a work meeting and people stop to ask if I'm okay. The problem with this occasion was that they were pig hunters, I had my dog on the back and I was intently listening to how someone had just run a 'virtual field trip' while the campus was shut to students.

Yes, all hell broke loose. Their dogs spilled off the back of the ute (pig hunters leave one side of the cage open so their dogs can smell wild pigs and get started) and started trying to attack Selkie through the open window. My dog went ballistic and the worst thing was that I'd forgotten to turn the mute off my mic during the meeting. I'm shouting, they are shouting, all the dogs are shouting, everyone is shouting. A bit of fruity cursing.

The only people not shouting were my boss and colleagues, staring from their living room desk tops. I'd pretty much shot down the whole meeting. Lesson for the day? Turn on your mute button before the pig dogs take over your zoom meeting and assume total control.

A most gentlewomanly adventure

I've been busy the last few days helping clean up an old estate for a new one. Yesterday I began burning, stacking cardboard and twigs into a fire drum. I thought, yes I hate burning plastic, I won't do that, but by mid afternoon I was chucking anything into the flames that I wouldn't have to reef out for the tip later. It was cheaper, I reasoned, to burn the plastic milk bottles and cool drink cartons, than to pay the rubbish tip fees. It's a compromise borne of desperation. It was unseasonably hot and I found myself seeking shade with a lemonade a few times during the exercise.

I've cleaned out a few deceased estates for friends but this one is the mother of them all. By day's end my hair was cloaked with acrid smoke and there was still rubbish lying around. Cleaning out the detritus and treasures of generations on the one property is humbling, confusing and really bloody infuriating.

We loaded the non-burnables onto the back of my ute. Today at the tip, I'd forgotten my gloves. I was on my own and had a wool sack, a wheelie bin and a metal crate full of rubbish that needed to be offloaded manually. I found all sorts of things in those bins. I asked the worker if I could chuck the beer cans. Normally I'm a recycle freak but the whole operation had become so overwhelming (see above) that I just wanted to bin everything and the tip hand agreed.
I was throwing everything into the skip bin. I came across birthday cards, beer cans, boxes, stickers, prescription packets, bottles, dead animals (yes), more beer cans and plastic straw bale wrappers that caught around my arms and legs. A pale frog leapt from the bottom of a bin and into the day. I threw an unidentified small animal carcass onto the tip at the same time as I realised I'd cut my fingers on some wire.

After I'd paid my dues to the tip, all I wanted to do was wash my hands with soap and water. My fingers were bleeding but this is a good thing, right? A bleeding wound will surely purge the germs. I drove to a servo and filled up with diesel. The toilet was occupied. I paid for the fuel and hung around for a while, hoping that whoever was in the toilet would come out, so I could wash my hands.

They didn't. I began wondering if whomever was in the toilet was okay. I mean, what if they've died in there or something? My wounds potentially infected with a dead cat or fox were kinda inconsequential in this particular situation. Still no one came out.

I had to meet Aussie and a writer at a swanky cafe ten minutes later for an edit and review meeting for the writer's latest book. I gave up on the servo's toilet and headed for the cafe. Hair coated in plastic-smelling smoke, with bleeding fingers and a strong scent of old beer, random rotten carcasses and defeat wafting from me, I scrubbed my hands clean in the very pretty ladies bathroom of the said cafe.

If anybody noticed, they didn't say anything, so maybe I pulled that meeting off. However, it is also possible that I'll never work in this town again.

Three Valkeries

‘Had the records of the Colony not been preserved with fidelity and care ... it is not improbable that some future writer might have extolled Walloa, the female native, into a heroine, as the defender of her native woods against the aggressions of the British and placed her on a level with the British Red Queen who, it is said, resisted the Roman Arms for nine years. Speculation as now regards VDL is quite out of the question – and forever so.’  Jorgen Jorgenson.

And so the last king of Iceland got in early and declared with all the authority of memoirist and Roving Party officialdom that the Pallawah warrior woman Walyer (aka Tarenorrerer) never be compared with Boudiccea again. Standby Jorgie, I'm about to do just that.

This morning I was reading some great stuff from the fabulous The Raven Report about Lilith and Boudiccea, and so on International Women's Day, I'm heading over to the dark side to where, when a woman is seriously wounded by being presumed born unequal to man, some really nasty shit can go down. *Says brightly* Happy International Women's Day folks!

Walyer was born around 1800 to the Tommeginne people in the northwest of Ven Diemen's Land. She was initially abducted as a teenager by the Punnilerpanner people of the Port Sorrell region on the north coast of Van Diemen’s Land and sold to Bass Strait sealers.1

Aside from the sealers’ kidnapping of women for labour and sexual purposes, warring tribes whose territories were being squeezed by the white settlers, also kidnapped Pallawah women from other tribes. The kidnapping of women by rival tribes and sealers in Van Diemen’s Land could be viewed as an act of reproductive warfare; wherein women’s fertile bodies become the site of conquest.To paraphrase Lyndall Ryan, to take ten women of child-bearing age from a Pallawah band, takes away the future of the band. This act of war was practiced by both white settlers and internecine tribes.

Walyer spent the next decade on Bass Strait islands. She was probably subjected to a harsh regime of violence for minor misdemeanours such as stealing food, and she may have been traded between sealers for sex and labour. Despite the hardship of her existence, Walyer exploited the relationship between Tyreelore (island wives) and sealers to her advantage. She learned to speak English, to handle small boats, and most importantly, Walyer learned how to use and maintain firearms.

Walyer escaped the sealers in 1828. She returned to Van Diemen’s Land in the middle of the Black War,* where she gathered together a band of guerrilla fighters, mostly Tommeginne people including two of her brothers, Linnetower and Linnlikaver.2 She taught other Pallawah people the use of firearms, knowledge she’d gleaned from the sealers. Her organised attacks are said to be one of the first occasions of Aboriginal Tasmanians using muskets against the colonisers.3 During these attacks, Walyer was described as carrying a fowling piece and standing away, often on a high hill or rock. She would call out to her victims in abusive language, a woman goading them out of their huts to face her spears and if they did so, her warriors shot them. 

Walyer by Julie Dowling

Like Boudiccea, like Lilith, Walyer was not to be fucked with. All three had been supplanted, cast out, abused and underestimated. Lilith, in the Judeo Christian tradition was created equally from the earth with Adam but turfed out when she tried to assert this status. Boudiccea was seen as a soft target by the Romans once her husband Prasutagus died, leaving her in charge.

In December 1830, G.A. Robinson wrote about Walyer:

"By these men [the sealers] she has been tutored in all sorts of mischief. She became so desperate – and possessing a great deal of cunning – she was not only dreaded by the whites, numbers of whom have been massacred by her, but she was a terror to all the natives she came in contact with, a great many of whom this Amazon caused to be killed."4

Robinson was also the subject of one of Walyer’s attacks:

“On another occasion he was tracked by an escaped lubra Tererenan or Walyer, “the Amazon”, who, at the head of some desperate Aborigines, declared a war of extinction against all Whites and any Natives who were friendly with them.”5

When the situation in northern Tasmania became too dangerous for Walyer due to her attacks on neighbouring tribes (including the one who'd sold her to the sealers) and the Black War intensified in its ferocity, Walyer returned to the islands – and the sealers. Her two brothers and two sisters also went with her. 

“It would appear that Walyer ran away from the natives and made her way to the sealers in consequence of one of the black men trying to kill her. One of the women informed me that the black man beat her and broke her back with a waddy (Walyer states that her back was broke by a fall from a tree but this I don’t believe), and intended to have her killed but she got away and made her way to the sealers, with whom she had formally cohabited and where she considered she would be safe.” 6

For two years Walyer lived with a sealer John Williams on Penguin Island, working, sealing and muttonbirding between Penguin, Bird and Forsyth Islands with several other Tyreelore. In December 1830, John Williams and seven other sealers were wrecked off the Low Isles between Clarke and Penguin Island. They were marooned for eight days and survived by drinking a seal’s blood and eating the flesh raw. Williams and John Brown made a little boat out of seal skin and tried to cross the ten mile passage to Clarke Island to get help. They were never seen again.

Whilst the men were marooned, G.A. Robinson sent his agent James Parish to Penguin Island. He wanted the Tyreelore to be taken from their sealer husbands and sent to Swan Island, the first of Robinson’s ‘exile islands’, as he had promised the island wives to their Pallawah countrymen to pacify the men into submission. Walyer was one of the women captured that day. “The straitsmen who had survived their ordeal returned to the comfort of their island homes after being rescued by James Parish. However Parish took away all of their wives to Swan Island,” writes Tyreelore descendant Patsy Cameron.7 Apparently, the sealers were very pleased to give up Walyer, indicating further her fearsome nature and that she was no passive kidnap victim.8 

Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman. Boudica. 21 century.

On Swan Island, Walyer’s identity was quickly discovered despite her changing her name to Mary Ann. The Pallawah man Peevay saw her recognise and call to her old dog Whiskey. Three survivors from one of her attacks were also on the island. Walyer dealt with this situation by attempting to create Anglophobic panic among the inmates of Swan Island, claiming that soldiers were coming from Launceston to shoot them; that they would be chained or gaoled. This wasn’t an unrealistic claim, given that martial law had just been called in Van Diemen’s Land, meaning it was now legal to shoot or capture Aborigines who entered the ‘settled districts’ of the north.9 But the resulting anxieties were enough to justify Robinson exiling Walyer further and isolating her from the other Tyreelore. In March 1831 he evicted the sealers on Gun Carriage Island and moved the captured Aborigines, including Walyer, into the empty sealers’ huts. 

Walyer died on Gun Carriage Island in June 1831, from complications of a common cold.

Walyer, who had witnessed first contact with Europeans and the Black War in her lifetime, came from a culture where women were not traditional leaders of war parties. “The emergence of such a female leader, at the time an unprecedented event, says much about the way Tasmanian Aboriginal society was breaking down. Throughout the island, the traditional power structure was collapsing.”10 Women fought beside Walyer, including her own sisters. G.A. Robinson claimed that other Tyreelore women were apparently present with Walyer at the Thomas/Parker killings.11

Walyer’s attacks on fellow countrymen and women make her a problematic character in a narrative of internecine battles during a third party invasion. McFarlane writes that she returned from the islands with guns and therefore wielded “an inordinate power over the relatively defenceless Aborigines who still inhabited the coastal region.”12 That she possessed firearms and readily taught others how to use them quickly inverted the power structure of Pallawah society. Walyer has been criticised in historical narratives for attacking rival tribes already on their knees due to disease, the sealers’ predations upon fertile women, attacks by the agents of the Van Diemen’s Land Company and the toll of the Black War.

Walyer was also criticised by writers during her own lifetime as a pugilistic but inconsequential pain in the neck who shouldn’t be taken seriously. Black Line veteran and ‘Last King of Iceland’ Jorgen Jorgenson attempted to shut down all future narratives of Walyer being portrayed as a female hero of freedom and resistance in Van Diemen’s Land. She was no Antipodeans’ Boadicea, was Jorgenson’s argument, fighting for her “native woods”, “resisting the Roman arms for nine years,” though it would be tempting for future historians and storytellers to portray her that way. Thank goodness, he wrote, for the “fidelity” of colonial records, which made it clear that the warrior woman of the 1820s was no more than a bloodthirsty troublemaker who showed little discrimination between her attacks on coloniser and colonised.

A black woman with guns, a black woman who cohabited (and eventually sought refuge) with the ‘banditti sea-wolves’ of Bass Strait and rallied a guerrilla band to fight for her country is not conducive to Van Diemen’s Land’s settlement narrative or stuff of national myth.This is probably why you may never have heard of her.

“She fought on behalf of her people with bravery and tenacity in a war for which there are not memorials.”13 Jebb and Haebich write that Walyer’s “individual resistance campaign in north-west Tasmania shows that she deserves epic status.”14 Such is the contention between the two contemporary portrayals of Walyer that The Companion to Tasmanian History has not one but two, contrasting, biographies of her.

Australian women rarely feature in nationalistic narratives of warfare. The story of Walyer’s violent revenge attacks upon Van Diemonian and Pallawah people who wronged her terribly has been downplayed ever since, whereas the narratives of wronged-white-man-turned-outlaw/hero, such as Ned Kelly or Ben Hall, have inspired books, songs and film and formed part of our national identity.

As a Tyreelore, Walyer’s response to crimes against her body, her family and her country was extreme and unprecedented. However she was not the only Tyreelore to practise a violent form of resistance. “Some, who had been either coercively taken by sealers or had been sold or bartered by husbands and fathers, occasionally escaped to rejoin their tribes after which, Calder claimed, they could not be restrained from joining in, ‘sometimes leading the attack.’ Walyer was one such leader, who crossed all social borders ...” Those Pallawah women, especially the island women, were fearsome to behold.

  
* The Black War occurred in Van Diemen’s Land between 1824 and 1831. For more information please see Clements, N., The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, University of Queensland Press, 2014.

1. Ryan, L., ‘The Struggle for Recognition: Part-Aborigines in Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century’, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 1-2, 1977, pp. 27-51.

 2.  Plomley, Ed. 2006, p. 334.

 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_Aborigines#Contact_with_Sealers_on_the_North_and_East_Coasts.

 4. Plomley, Ed. 2006, p. 330.

5. Plomley, N.J.B. Ed., Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p. 80.

 6.Plomley, Ed. 2006, p. 334.

 7. Cameron, P., Grease and Ochre: The blending of two cultures at the colonial sea frontier, 2011, p. 130. As well as the women, Parish took sixty pounds of muttonbird feathers and sixty kangaroo skins which he claimed as his own, despite the produce resulting from the labour of the women. Plomley, Ed. 2006, p. 331.

 8. Ryan, L., 1996, p. 150.

 9. Clements, N., 2014, p. 54.

10.  Lowe, D., Forgotten Rebels, Unpublished edition, 1994, Available from

http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/127.pdf (accessed 12/09/2012)

 11. Plomley, Ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, 1987, pp. 860-867.

 12. McFarlane, I., ‘Walyer’ http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/W/Walyer.htm 

 13. Matson-Green, V.M., ‘Tarenorerer (1800–1831)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10455b.htm

 14. Jebb, M.A., and Haebich, A., ‘Across the Great Divide: Gender Relations on Australian Frontiers,’ in Sanders, K., and Evans, R. Eds., Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace, Sydney, 1994, p. 40.