Danger noodles and nope ropes

This morning I was on my way to work at the fire tower. Stepping out the front door. I quite like these sliding glass doors because I can see what is outside. This morning it was a tiger snake, just hanging out.

'It's such a magnificent creature!' I said to my sister, as the snake slid away into the thicket of cummock.. 'But fuck! Can they just fuck off from my doorstep?'

The last time a tiger hung out at my front door was a month ago. My front door is north facing and has brick paving... so tiger friendly territory. I squirted the snake with a tomato sauce bottle full of petrol and freaked the poor critter out. Then I went next door and asked the resident snake handler for help. He was into the respectful and kind relocation of reptiles. I just wanted him to kill this one. There was an impasse of communication between the two of us. 'Here's the shovel,' I said, handing him the shovel and then we both said prayers as he took a life.

So this morning, seeing another tiger snake on the path between my front door and the car, I was thinking of my dog and me, and the times when I stumble along that path at night to get something out of the car, headlamp on. 

Some people are fine with resident tigers. I'm absolutely not.

The Last American, or 'Dead Cities'

The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is supposedly in the genre of science fiction. It's one of those books that during most recent pandemic times and climate crises was touted by bookshops to move from "science fiction to the Australiana section". The narrator Ish is a young geographer who heads up into the mountains near his native San Francisco on a field trip to research his PhD. Earth Abides was published in 1949, so not long after a real, apocalyptic world event and like Camus' The Plague, is considered a great existential novel of its time.

Ish's name could derive from Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Perquod's encounter with the great white whale, or perhaps from an Indigenous American man called Ishi who walked into Western, urban society after his tribal society was vanquished by disease and colonisation.

I've been listening to the audio version of Earth Abides after reading Mike Davis' Dead Cities and Other Tales. Apocalyptic fiction is so good for long drives but my love for this genre has history. What would you do/be/become as one of the last humans on Earth? I mean really, I love this shit. Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Attwood, John Wyndham, Jim Crace and H.G. Wells combined philosophy, poetry, ecology and wholly sensible thoughts to create their dark visions of our humanitarian future.

In Earth Abides, Ish emerges from the wilderness after having suffered a rattlesnake bite. He's confused about whether the snake venom also caused a weird illness, with his rashes and lesions and a high temperature. The electricity and water are still on at the general store when he gets there but nobody's home. He leaves a note, promising to pay back the fuel bill. Gradually he realises the extent of the plague. There are moments of Ish moving from civilised to feral when he breaks the window of a newsagency to read the last papers published (seven days previous 'Situation Acute!!!') to when he requisitions a police officer's motorcycle.

There are no zombies in Earth Abides and I do thank Stewart for this. Instead there are some pretty mediocre survivors: a drunk with haunted eyes, a grifting white couple you'd normally place on the outskirts of a crack den and a mad hoarder who has stashed 24 copies of the same magazine edition, just in case. Ish wonders ... did any of the good, any of the useful people survive? In general, it seems that humanity has been cleanly, almost surgically excised from the world.

One of the most poignant parts of the novel for me were reading how nature took back the cities. Cities and indeed dwellings take constant maintenance to keep nature at bay. My own house looks like Halloween right now because I like to let the daddy long leg spiders take care of the bush flies. (Caveat, I do vacuum up the poor buggers twice a year). In Stewart's scenario, when the culverts aren't cleared and the weeds aren't sprayed, Highway 66 devolves, or evolves, into sand and then trees.

This is fascinating! "This grandly suspended, inorganic metropolis," wrote Earnest Bloch, "must defend itself daily, hourly, against the elements, as though against an enemy invasion."

In 1996, New Scientist writers called upon ecologists and other experts to try and qualify how quickly nature would take over cities, once humans were removed.

"Within five years, New Scientist found, weeds would indeed conquer the open spaces, pathways and cracks of the city ..." The buddleia, sweet lil butterly bush, was found to be the biggest bad ass of bad asses in this whole article. 

So Buddleias are able to grow through concrete to source nutrients and water (don't plant them near your septic tank folks) and are basically touted as the plant that will thrive and dismantle our infrastructure, destroying our tallest buildings and roads. THE BUDDLEIA WILL TAKE YOUR SOCIETY DOWN. When humans don't have enough energy or workforce to keep them at bay, those motherfucker buddleias will rule.

Once again - I just love this shit. In the end (?) Ish creates a society of survivors and it's always fraught with its own existential questions. Given the era of writing (1940s) he sprays himself with DDT to get rid of fleas, speaks of his marriage partner as 'fulsome' or 'fertile looking' and engages in all the racial dynamics of the time, which is odd but ... okay George..

I fell asleep several times listening to the audio book, waking to hear that ants had died out because they didn't have as many cadavers to feed on, fell asleep, woke up to when the big cats predated upon the small house dogs, fell asleep, woke up at dawn thinking, 'This is an okay day, today.' Had some strange, lucid dreams in the interim.

In the morning, my dog licked my spare hand as I pushed the fruit bread decidedly into the toaster and the electric kettle bubbled to a shut behind me.

 

GR Stewart, Earth Abides, Random House, 1949

Mike Davis, Dead Cities and other tales, New York, 2002.

Bullant

 Today I was spared from the tower due to rain covering huge areas of the south west. (Awesome!) Awesome because I've just injured my back in a freak bull ant incident.

I came down with a head cold a few days ago and I'm sure the office staff were wondering what was going on with my new dulcet, throaty tones on the UHF radios, calling in smokes with the gravelly firetower version of a certain community radio announcer. I did myself a few rapid tests just in case, all clear (how does anyone even catch a head cold right now?) but I felt like shit and it was a hard climb up the mountain on Friday.

Yesterday was my first day off in ages. As every year, and now ramping up due to climate change, the fire season is extending - and my other job at the uni is seriously overlapping the fire season work, where it was once a comfortable transition. I've been working an insane amount of day/weeks straight this year and last.

So ... had a day off.Some neighbours came by to drop off their boat and we stood chatting as they unshackled the trailer. We talked about the Donnelly fires that are reddening my every sunset and then I felt the bull ant bite just above my belly button.

'Hang on,' I said, trying to brush the critter away. I felt another bite on my upper arm. This fucker must have jumped up onto me! Another one on my forearm ... I looked around desperately for baby bracken furls to cure the pain radiating from my skin ... nothing. Fuck.

'Okay guys, sorry the clothes are coming off,' I said to my appalled visitors. They stood by the boat, not knowing what to do as I ripped off all my clothes in the driveway, trying to find the bull ant.

In my hectic Maenad dance to rid myself of my clothes, I felt the lower left lumbar area of my spine ping. Like, a muscle in my lower back just literally went PING!

My neighbours drove away, probably shaking their heads, and I've spent the weekend on voltaren, Netflix and other anti imflammatories, trying to fix my back and the numerous bull ant bites that are spreading over my flesh like lava.

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.

 

"Look at Insta"

 

Cockle bottle

 A baby cockle walks into a bottle:

Just found this in an old bottle collection that we are collating. The very image stinks of poetics and story telling, yes? 'Double shell', said a friend who understands filter feeders. 'No octopus would ever get to this cockle.' She paused. 'It would have been safe from predators for  its whole life.' We were cooking dinner together. We looked at the bottle again. 'It's just so sad,' she said. 'Its whole life ...'

Rockhopper

 This morning we had word that a stray penguin had been found on the beach opposite the inlet where I live. I was thinking, okay a penguin ... when I was commercial fishing we'd hear the fairy penguins as they came home to roost on the islands. It would always be dusk and they sounded like crying babies.

The flurry of activity from the rangers and ecologists in the office about a stray penguin struck me as odd. It turned out that this one was a northern rockhopper, not a fairy. Northern rockhoppers are endangered and if they turn up on our coast, they are often exhausted and malnourished after a long diversion from sub-antarctic islands. Check these guys out: They are pure penguin bling.

 Normally they live on islands such as Amsterdam or St Paul, outpost islands between Australia and South Africa. They are severely weakened by their yearly moult, when they lose about a third of their body weight. The recent south easterly blow may have caused this young lady rock hopper to wash up at the inlet and, as she was so weakened by the journey and her moult all at once, she was taken to a wild life carer to save her from feral foxes and cats.

I was able to have a good look at this interloper. Her feet are solid, fleshy rockhopping feet. They are not the firm, skinny feet of most avian species. The rangers said she was quite friendly and that she literally hopped about over the rocks. We piled towels and rain jackets around her. She was itchy and trying to scratch away her superfluous feathers because of her moult. It was quite a special moment seeing a bird-child who should have been thousands of kilometres away.

For some reason, her story reminds me of Laika, the first dog in space. An exiled critter subject to the whims of climate and humanity. I wish her well for the return journey.

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.

 

 

Heading for the coast

Working (vulnerably) From Home

So I have the inverter, humming like a tuned-up tractor, beside me. Actually it sounds like a suburban neighbour's leaf blower on a Sunday morning, but who am I to complain about having internet at home?

Today I'd like to talk about iso injuries, that is, the injuries sustained by a planet of humanoids isolating in their homes for a sustained period. No, not really, just little ol' me confined to work from home, or the local laundromat, or Flame's back veranda. Wherever there is internet anyway. I'll list this litany of personal injuries not in chronological order but based on the fact that they are all related to my own state of mind due to lockdown.

Nora Ephram once wrote that she was raised to understand that "all painful things eventually turn into funny stories." I can't agree more with the woman who was once married to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein and who also said "everything is copy." She went on to write a savage take-down of the end of their marriage in novel form. Like she said, everything is copy and pain, on later reflection, can be pretty bloody funny.

I was watching my dog limp. Selkie is one of those unber-healthy dogs with a glossy coat and bounces around like Tigger. Seeing her in pain was awful and it looked like she'd broken a bone in her foot. She has a round, every morning in the place that is dog heaven. Just before dawn she takes herself off for a run along the beach, heads into the bush and returns forty minutes later, panting and chuffed, often with a kangaroo bone. She is a dog without fences or roads. Imagine that life for a dog. This particular morning she returned a bit subdued and limping badly. It was in the first week or so of our Australian lockdown. I had the sniffles and decided not to travel 200km to video conference a Noongar elder for my teaching job.

Instead, after 24 hours of spinning out about my injured dog and how far we were from the nearest vet (100km), I went all Dr Quinn Medicine woman on her and administered comfrey to her foot and bound it up. By the time I got her to a vet, he took one look at her, rotated her back knee and said, 'Well I won't do that again. It's obviously causing her pain. It's her cruciate ligament. Here's some anti inflammatories. If she's not better in a week, it's surgery.' He threw my bandages and unguents aside. My brain bled, with dollar signs leaking out my ears, as I lifted the 40 kg rottweiler cross back into the car.

This is obviously not an iso injury but it made me feel really vulnerable. I sent messages to my son who by then lived across a closed border from me. 'Let me look after her, I'm closer to the vet' he replied. 'There must be a way to get a dog across the Frankland river. I'm about to kill a sheep, so I can get some chops and potatoes to you at the same time.' Blessed Stormboy.

At around the same time, some friends went picking field mushrooms and gave me a mass of them chopped and wrapped up in a happy christmas tea towel. Any of you who know me well know that I love eating mushrooms and I do know a bit about which ones to eat. So I set about making a cream of mushroom soup and that night I ate the lot. So yummy!

The next morning I woke up with a fever, I was shaky and then I started vomiting. I felt like I'd been poisoned and poisoned I was. Once again I felt terribly vulnerable. I was 100km from the nearest hospital. Could I drive there? Would I have to park my car on the highway ten km off the dirt track, put on my hazard lights and hope for a passerby to help me out? The roads were so quiet. Normally I'm quite the mountain woman but times like these make me feel inconsequential. My nearest neighbour is 25 km away.

I cured myself with red gum resin made into a tea. Worked a treat. Then I swallowed half a cup of petrol due to an unfortunate and aborted internet installation. Then I rolled an ankle wading through the water to pick up a net full of mullet. Then I sprained a thumb on the next week's mullet set. "What the fuck is that Brown Thing in the net Boo?" "It's your Croc Sarah. It seems to have come loose from your foot." "Oh ... good. Whoops!"

Sprained thumb.

You'll be happy to know that my lungs (from breathing in petrol), my stomache (from ingesting petrol and poisonous mushrooms) and my dog are much better now. My rolled ankle and my thumb still hurt a little bit. However I think that, while I'm normally pretty good at looking after myself, especially in the isolated areas where I often live and work alone, I've been a bit slap dash on the personal safety front lately. My next post will be about the pig hunters and their dogs who upended my zoom meeting with my boss.

Hope you are all well bloggers. Stay sexy x

Burnover

Recently we had a fire training day and one of our lessons was how to survive a burnover. To do the lingo, a burnover happens when you are in a truck, a bulldozer, a car, or on foot as a wild fire front goes over you and through. The boss showed us this video of where a fire fighting scenario had gone wrong. Triggers, folks - anyone with fire trauma need not watch this. However no one was seriously injured here.

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.