Aftermath of the waterstorm

Last weekend the inlet looked like this as the wind created a storm surge that smashed into the bush.

  

 

And this is the inlet today: See that little grove of melaluca trees? It's the same one!

 

For weeks the inlet swelled and I was thinking, one more winter storm will do it, and then after another storm, well the next one should break it. 

"Never seen her so punishing, so angry," an old resident said, when I sent him a video of the water's influx on Saturday. It was hard to go outside into the intense, oxygenated air. It just felt relentless and the waves were throwing white foam everywhere. Chesapeake road became impassable as the inlet crept through the karri forests and all the river systems backed up. Eventually there was just nowhere for the water to go.

Finally, after days of insane wind and rain, the sand bar to the sea broke open. I woke up on Monday morning, looked out the window and realised we had a beach again. It was an eery feeling after all the drama. A Xenotopia, an in-between space where even the ravens breathed out a more measured Faaark!

Today we headed east along the beach, looking for things, beach combing for plastic and treasure. Peacocky tea tree oil from the forest was still leaching across the freshly exposed undersea.

 

 

 

The trees seemed surprised, caught unawares and exposed after months of being under water. The inlet dropped about 6 feet in as many days. Some of the trees displayed the tattered rosettes of their neighbours' papery bark, wearing them like survivor prizes. 

  

In the photo below, you may see something that looks like a bird's nest. It's not. It's flotsam from the water storm. We looked up in wonder and I measured myself against it, I'm tall but not that tall. "It's like a king tide," said H.

 

Paper bark trees hammered by the water are the most obvious signs of how high the inlet went. They have the tide lines etched into their skin.

 

The Night Heron

 In the massive old grandmother marri trees who loom over my house, a night heron roosts and feeds. They are shy birds and will often explode from the tree above my head as I walk underneath. The sensation can be alarming - like disturbing a colony of fruit bats in the far north - there is a mad flapping of wings and calls that sound like a child's shriek. 

Some years, I don't see them. But it's always weird to see a large water bird roosting in a tree, something surreal in the arboreal. They have feathers a distinct shade of cappuccino froth and a water bird's delicate, long, curved beak and this year there are many night herons.

Today I was wandering about and noticed the white bird droppings in the marri litter near the chopping block. And a flash of bright blue, some masticated shellfish. I looked up (didn't get a shit in the eye) and saw the night heron. The blue was the detritus of her meal. The claws and skulls of yabbies lay on the ground like a grotto graveyard. The leftovers from a day's feed, after spending the night hunting in the waters of the inlet.

 

Winter Solstice Part 2

 

Jayden shivered. ‘We’ve got hours to wait.’ He switched on the TV. The opposition leader was saying something about nuclear power and renewables. His mouth seemed to move free of the rest of his face. ‘These arsehats wanna kill us all,’ said Jayden. He’d finally enrolled to vote after a summer saturated with Friendly Jordies videos.

  Matt shrugged. ‘Turn it up, then Mr Man can’t hear us,’ he said and so Jayden did.

  ‘Maybe we should get a room at the pub,’ he said, ‘and a counter meal by a raging fire.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe some old geezer will play an Irish fiddle and we’ll all sing and raise our beers.’ Matt chortled. He was starting to warm up. Whatever was bothering him during the drive seemed to fritter into this more recent drama. ‘More likely is the local chapter will get wind of us being here and run us out of town.’

   They sat for a few hours on the double bed, watching culture wars and other wars play out on the TV. Jayden had a bag of kangaroo biltong and Matt, two bags of Samboy chips and their makings were several tiny sandwiches which they gainfully imagined was a complete food combo.

  ‘This is bizarre,’ Matt said at one stage, ‘watching the news on telly. Like, you have no choice about what comes next. You can’t just click on it or click past it. It’s …’ here he held his palms, fingers outstretched, in front of his face ‘ … it’s just like right there you know? Right in your face. Kids getting blown up. Homeless. No choice.’ He leapt up and stalked around the room. ‘Let’s go outside for a smoke.’

  The moon was rising above the karris when they went outside to the car. Matt had chopped up the weed during the drive so Jayden packed the first cone, filled the juice bottle with water and handed it to Matt. ‘Here you go, now chill the fuck out Matt.’ He couldn't work out why Matt had been so upset about the news.

  At around midnight, they drove away from the mill house, heading south towards the Ellis Creek Road. Jayden looked sideways at Matt. ‘Want some M?’

  ‘Fuck yeah.’ Matt was looking at his phone. ‘This guy Mr Man has just put us up on Facey.’

  ‘What? How did you find him?’ Jayden’s stomach stirred, turning.

  ‘Wasn’t that hard. Had a look around town. Who’s renting out. I’ll read it to you right? Think he knows my Dad.’

  ‘Well that makes sense.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Matt looked at his phone again. ‘Why would you even think he knows Dad?’

  ‘He just had this …vibe. Like your Dad. Sorry Bro. It’s something I thought when I saw him.’ Jayden hated this. Pale karri trunks flashed by in the headlights of his tinny car and he wished he could slow, pull over the car and make all this right.

  ‘Ok. Here’s what he said.’ Matt read from his phone.  ‘“Just got a couple of young punk pickers turn up at my house. Anyone in?” ‘

  ‘Jesus! What’s his user name?’

  ‘Shroom Daddy! Ha ha ha. What a fucking idiot.’ Matt started poking at his phone.

  ‘Can you call your Dad?’ Jayden asked. A four wheel drive overtook them, white dashes on the road glaring in the headlights. It slowed ahead of them on the bend.

  ‘I can’t call Dad,’ Matt said. He was really shaking now. Jayden tried to concentrate on the road. Dark shapes of micro bats flittered across his windscreen. They crossed the other bridge that demarcated the town, a thwomp as the little Toyota crossed the bridge.

  ‘I really fucking love poaching’, his mother had told Jayden, on a night when they were alone on a river, sitting in a tinny with several metres of hidden net beneath them. Drowned corks and lead weights trained on subterfuge to the bottom. Jayden was ten years old and his Mum was training him, even then. ‘Look. Look around you! Everything is honest here,’ she stage whispered, her black curls blowing around her head, ‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that. That’s the playwright, you know the guy?’ She began pulling up her illegal nets and piling them into the deck of the boat. Jayden could remember her sudden, angry brown hands moving as fish fell all over the checkerplate and her unmeshing fish into boxes. ‘There is no cure, son. We’re all fucked,’ she said. ‘Still, ain’t this moon alright?’

  ‘The moon’s coming up,’ Jayden said.

  ‘Dad … Dad,’

  ‘What happened Matt?’

  ‘Dad. Last night.’ Matt collapsed into his phone. Jayden checked him as he was driving.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Dad, he drove into this bloke last night. He fucking killed him. He was at the Balcatta BP. He saw this guy, he swerved and then he killed him. They say it was deliberate.’

  ‘Jesus fuck. Okay Matt. Let’s stop. We need to talk about this.’ Jayden was putting on his indicator.

  ‘No no,no! Keep going.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s your Dad.’

  ‘My Dad, yeah. My fucking Dad.’ Matt shook his head. He was still looking at his phone. .’Let’s go to Ellis Creek Road.’

 

Solstice

Hiya bloggers. My Auntie recently asked me what the hell is going on with A WineDark Sea, because I haven't posted anything since February fire tower days earlier this year. I'm very aware that this kind of 'sorry I haven't posted for a while' can be the death rattle for many blogs. Not the case here. I've been taking a break because I haven't had many funny or entertaining stories to tell in a season when West Australians have had the driest summer on written record. We've had mass tree deaths and water carting politics going on between towns. On one day, most of the schools in the south west were shut down due to fire risk. During this period, I haven't felt able to contribute in any kind of meaningful way to the blogosphere and it was my Auntie who finally bailed me up about it last week. (Thanks Auntie!)

So, yes I'm going to write about this period. Maybe it's important to document this time of the anthropocene. It's raining now. Sheets of rain have been hammering us all day. The swans have left the inlet ('They didn't even leave a note!' said my Mum).

Aghh!

 

For those (two) of you who are interested in the outcomes of my investigation into the Youngs Siding white ant signs, here is an update.

No it wasn't sign posts to a bush doof. Apparently it's about a long standing feud between tow boat operators on the inlet and this is the latest iteration in a thirty year war. It's odd that this battle erupted at such a quiet inlet but there you go. 

The Broke Inlet Towing Company has long held the rights to towing all broken boats to shore. That's Yowie CEO. He's the guy. He'll save you and salvage your boat. Unfortunately, Yowie was not present recently when a boatsman in distress asked another party to tow him into shore. Yowie reflected that he felt undercut and white-anted by this rogue towing company called the Youngs Siding White Ant Recovery and Salvage..

This problem all started with the Black Pig Racing Club in the 1990s and an annual race that should've been on January 1st but usually ended up being contested somewhere in September, as no one could get their shit together before then. Are you still with me? Good. 

In 1998, the Blacker family bought a 50 horsepower jet boat (Holden red motor, go the Blackers! Fuck I love that sound) but everyone else thought this was rather bad form because they were racing against the Blackers in dinghies with 25 or 15HP two strokes that sounded suspiciously like lawn mowers. That's the moment when the bad blood came in.

So ... the Blackers towing a boat out of the inlet and Yowie from the Broke Inlet Towing Company's feelings about that particular incident have rejuvenated the old war over the last few weeks. Those white ant signs are a bold move from the Blackers, and a raised middle finger to the status towing quo.

How are we going here? When I tried to explain the saga to my son, Stormboy replied, 'I'm not sure how to respond to that one but someone has dedicated a lot of time to those signs.'

Yes, there has been some effort and thought put in. I find the whole episode quite beautiful.

 

'Knows a cool vet'

Today I was driving home and all along the Inlet gravel track were these signs.

 

Some were sticky-taped to trees and others were attached to signs and flapping in the late afternoon wind. They all were made on A4 paper and somebody had obviously made quite a lovely stencil of a white ant and then sprayed the white paper with blue spray paint. Road directions to a bush doof perchance?

Bush doofs happen out this way occasionally and the spotter pilot mentioned today that there were a lot of cars around the area. But then I was nearly home and saw this sign outside Yowie's hut.

I sent a message to my son Stormboy, who used to live at Youngs Siding (apologies to the apostrophe police), about two hundred kilometres away. 'Do you know anything about this?'

'He's wearing his heart on his sleeve. I like him. Knows a cool vet ha ha.'

So many questions like ... how do tissues solve white ant issues?
 

Oil Light and the Bay of Pigs

I was on the phone to my sister when Brownie and Doogs arrived from the bush camp, their dingo-looking hound Flex in tow. 'So yes, I've found a $1500 shitbox with no windscreen wipers or muffler.' I said to my sister, waving for the men to take a seat, 'It drives great and looks like sin apparently ... and Queen Ben is probably bound for the wreckers. What a fucking day.'

'It's about to get even better,' said Brownie after I'd ended the call. 'Have you heard about the Bay of Pigs?' 

'Drives great, look like sin.' Doogs nodded. 'Sounds like me.'

The oil light in Queen Ben came on yesterday on my way home to the inlet and then flickered out. This morning, with my dog Selkie still not home from her pre-dawn date with Flex, I headed out for another tower day, and the oil light came on again. In the mistaken belief that the oil light works like a fuel light, giving me a few more kilometres, I continued for another two or three hundred metres. (Yes I know, shut up. I've been self flagellating all day okay?) A terrible knocking sound. I stopped. Under the bonnet and off with the oil cap. Smoke curled out of the sump.I poured in some oil and heard it sizzling against the heat.

Queen Ben turned twenty last year. The five years that I've had her have been about replacement and good husbandry. A new head, replacing the turbo, ironing out dented panels, gearbox issues, idler arms and wheel alignments. My philosophy is that a diesel four wheel drive can last forever if you treat her right. 

Yes, I'm a terrible husband.

I walked for a while until I came into range and texted my boss that I couldn't make it to the firetower today, with some brief details of my poor car's demise. Cicadas chanted in the forest and parrots flitted around me, colours of karri leaves and bottle-brush flowers. Then I turned and walked home, patting Queen Ben's bonnet as I passed. It was surreal, walking through the forest that I drive through every day. Walking is when you notice things.

Smoky red dust rose up on the gravel as a car approached and I found a welcome ride home. Selkie was back, soaking wet, smelling of the inlet and limping badly. 'So that was quite the excursion,' I said to her. She looked at me in that way dogs look when they've done some bad things. I turned on the wifi. 'Oh no! Are you okay, do you need a lift?' My boss had replied. I told him I was okay and then I rang my sister.

I managed to borrow a car for the day and make it to the firetower eventually. I'll leave out the bits about the missing firetower key, the long drive to retrieve it, the firetower nerd I met up there today who was really cool, and that snake. But I have to have a car and the Queen Ben is dead. So I got busy on my phone, bought a car ('drives fine, looks like sin'). I live 35 kilometres from the nearest town and the firetower is an 78 kilometre round trip. There's no public transport and getting on a bicycle is a bullshit option, dammit.

I made it home close to dark and asked a mate to help me tow Queen Ben home from her unhappy perch on the gravel shoulder.. My reasoning was that the RAC will be badly stretched over the next few days of New Year's Eve chaos in our little seaside holiday town. 

I was just having a self-congratulatory glass of wine on the back veranda and updating my sister on the phone about the new car I was buying, when Brownie and Doogs turned up. They growled at Flex as he dawdled innocently towards Selkie's food bowl. Selkie looked up and didn't even complain or harry Flex. She was still limping. She looked very, very sore. 'So, the Bay of Pigs,' said Brownie.

Flex and Selkie took off before dawn this morning. They often do this when Brownie and Flex are staying in the bush camp. Selkie and Flex go off for hours and I never know where they go. Sometimes they'll come back streaked with charcoal and I'll know they've been into the firegrounds. Sometimes, while looking for them, I've followed their tracks along the beach for miles. Selkie always comes home exhausted and she's sore for days. There are few roads and no fences around here. It's dog heaven but I always worry about them taking baits.

This morning, Doogs went down to the boat ramp and heard the two dogs barking. It was an early easterly and so he could hear them, their voices calling along the inlet shore. I was mourning the knocking piston death of Queen Ben and beginning my dejected walk home, by the time Brownie and Doogs walked east along the beaches and rocky outcrops to find Selkie and Flex bailing up a huge black boar. Apparently, the pig was standing in the water facing off the two dogs. He was in the inlet, water around his shoulders and nose to nose with Selkie and Flex. 

'This pig was huge, Sarah!' Doogs said. I put my head into my arms. Oh. My God.  'Much bigger than these two,' he motioned to Flex and Selkie. 'They were crying and barking like babies though.'

'What a fucking day.'

'We're calling that place Pig Bay,' Brownie nodded over his beer. 'It's something that's happened here and that place needs a name. Never seen that before. Never. A pig facing down some dogs in the water. Never seen it.'

So Pig Bay it is.

This stuff all happened here on New Year's Eve 2023. It's been another mad year yes? Happy New Year Bloggers xxx

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Psychogeography of the inlet

 Psychogeography is a term that emerged in the 1950s and its practice is great for landscape writers and artists:  "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals." Until a few years ago, I was completely unaware of the word but had been thinking about the concept for decades. Writing about people of the sea and islands will do that.

"Unfold a map of London, place a glass rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go ... footage as footage." Robert MacFarlane, A Road of One's Own.

In an urban context, this exercise forces a re estimation of our surroundings - what is accessible and what is off limits: fences, the concept of private property, the absoluteness of a stoic brick wall, drains and public thoroughfares. Really, it's a form of re-mapping or even anti-mapping. It breaks us out of the unaware carpark and footpath thinking that we have when heading down to the shops.

The reason why this is coming up for me right now is that the inlet broke its sand bar out to the sea last night. Here is a photo from today and you can check out photos from yesterday in my previous posts.

You can see the footprints from where Selkie was wading out to catch a stick that I'd thrown for her last night, those trees then a pretty reflection on the glassed-off water. We have a beach again!

For the last month, we haven't had a beach. As the inlet filled with river water threading through a system of thousands of square kilometres, places to walk became scarce. We are in the bush here: there are few tracks or roads. The inundation began to feel oppressive. On land, ancient marri trees leaned over us, blocking out the sun and keeping us cold and the solar panels failed us. The bush became more dark and damp. I grew up in sand dune, coastal heath country. We always had an horizon, a big sky. Living in the forest takes some getting used to.

From a person unwittingly writing about the psychogeography of islands, I became a person writing about the psychogeography of inlets and how they are kinda negative images of each other. An inlet is a body of water surrounded by land after all. My feelings come back to the original definition of psychogeography: "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals."

Now this is cool. Last night, I strapped the camera trap to a tree at water level to capture the water as it receded. There were only three night time infra red photos. It was glassed off so the waves didn't trigger the motion sensor. What triggered it was the water rat, a marsupial better known as a Rakali, or in the Noongar language a Ngurju.

She will break

 

The inlet is about to open after all these rains. Here are some 'before' photos that I took today. I'll post the 'after' photos once the sand bar is broken and we have a beach again.

 

Raven Report

I set up the trail camera at pretty much waterline, facing out into the inlet. She's swelling fast now and I was hoping for shots of waterbirds. When I picked out the SD card after 48 hours and plugged it into my computer, it came up with over 1600 images.

Of course. The waves. That meleluca tree swaying in the wind, constantly setting off the motion sensor. I wondered whether or not to download the whole lot. Surely a waste - of what? - time? of digital space? Anyway, I did download the lot and what I have now is a stop motion film of the inlet over 48 hours, with the water photographed every moment it moved, each surge and return, every flicker of that tree in the wind. The resolution and clarity of the photos is ... pretty good.

It's the most amazing, utterly beautiful sequence of images I've ever seen and they were taken entirely by accident. I mean, I'd set up the camera looking for critters to move into the frame and here is the whole inlet, speaking to me.

 

Speaking of critters, the first image of an animal I found was of this raven. Within a few hours of setting up the camera, she'd come in to have a look.

Yesterday I noticed a lot of raven activity around that spot, as I watched from my writing desk. They were flying down to the beach and then taking off with lots of calls to each other. I'd forgotten all about the camera. I was getting ready for teaching semester two at uni and thinking about writing and history. So I kinda nodded away my raven observation and went back to my computer. The hound looked interested. As it turns out, when I retrieved the SD card today, one raven had found the camera and was calling others in to investigate. This camera was an event for the ravens. How bloody cool is that?

More camera trap pics

 

So this is a terrible photo but here is your little ginger pig! Her ginger stripe is on the right side of the frame. It's the only image I've been able to get of her so far. Scattered all around are the remains of her foragings: the crimson shells of bloodroot bulbs and kangaroo bones from the roadside. A few months ago, in the summer, someone hit a roo on the track. In the weeks after, the carcass was dismantled piece by piece and, by the looks of this little pig's grotto, this is where it ended up.

When I first moved to the inlet in the midst of winter, I met some pig hunters on the track. Two car loads of young men with cages on the back of their utes, filled with enormous dogs - whiskery lurchers and brindle mastiffs. 'Gidday love,' the first driver said. 

This is wild and woolly country. Marshes, peat bogs, soaring karris and ancient marri trees. 'Seen any pigs around here?' My dog leaned over my shoulder and growled at the caged dogs. All hell broke loose. I hadn't seen any pigs but thought I could send two carloads of slightly pinned men and their dogs somewhere that was not near my place. 'Yeah, saw one yesterday. About 30 Ks up Chesapeake road!'

On a happier note, here are some camera trap photos of some real live kangaroos. I love the infra red ones for their glowing night eyes and larking about. The last one is taken back at the ginger pig grotto. Composition, yes?