Tube Shell Heirogplyphs and the Gnamma Holes

 The birds, bream and mullet here feed on the tube worms that grow their nacre like coral upon the trees that are swept down the river, from the storms that batter the Stirlings and beyond, which in turn are fed by systems from the Indian and Southern Oceans hitting Gondwanaland ...

In the night I hear the black swans call each other on their flight path. They are a talkative folk. Dab chicks, looking like rafts of tiny ducks, scuttle under the skin of the water as the boat approaches through the dawn glass off. We pick up nets before dawn, shaking out the coral. Old Salt stamps on the remnants left in the nets, crunching them into a smelly, corally carpet, so that when we set nets in the afternoon, they will not tangle and hamper our efforts.

 "I reckon," he says, "if all those settlers used cow shit and sawdust as floors ... this coral would be okay, ground up, as a floor for a hut ... once you got over the smell of the worms going off."

He's right. It would make a grand floor. No sweeping or vaccuming, and the gathering dirt would become part of it all. Another friend recommended gravel, for the same reason. But harvesting the coral for building would mean (for me anyway) removing part of an eco system. Old Salt is used to that scenario. He grew up with his family using and working with nature. There is no way I would take enough coral away to make a floor for my shack.
Still, there is a box of the net's debris for the next chicken owner that puts up their hand.

Also seen on my travels ... a beautiful gnamma stone, surrounded in nacre text, covering fresh sweet water from the mossy forest above.

San Patricios

The album 'San Patricio' by Ry Cooder and the Chieftains has been (ahem) instrumental in my understanding of colonialism and standover tactics all over the world. But this particular song is 'sideways' and also a more direct explanation of what happened in America's invasion of 1840's Mexico ...
Goes to show what goes down when you chuck a few Irishmen into the international diaspora. In West Australia it was the Fenians and the Catalpa incident. In America, it was the San Patricios.

Buddhafull Moon and the Thesis Blues

About a year ago I met a woman who was at the same stage in her PhD as I am right now. She burst into tears in front of me and said, "I can't do it. Everything about the Jungian archetypes and brain plasticity that I'm working on has already been done. What's the point? Why am I doing this?"

At the time I was aghast and quite appalled because there were three or four of us postgrads sitting around a table watching her falling apart and I didn't really understand what was happening.
I do now. She has the same supervisor as me, who said, "You are at the two year stage. Yours is a perfectly normal experience. Stay with it."

I've spent all day trying to write and failed. The back of my calves are tight because I haven't walked more than twenty metres since bedrise. I've been stuck on the internet, consuming and not creating. I have two serious essays due in within the next month and their deadlines - instead of motivating me (normally I love deadlines) - are just stressing me out to a point of complete impotence. My hands shake with caffeine. I should have finished with my thesis research but I'm hanging onto it because it is a comfort zone and soon, I'm gonna have to write. I've got nothing to write. Finally, after all the research, I have nothing to say.

Tonight I drove home, the headlights sifting through the lowland's the first autumn mists of the year. Apparently tonight is the Buddha Moon, one of the biggest moons in twenty years but the sky is cloudy and I couldn't see it rise. I'm thinking, given my rampant dreams over the last week, that even though I can't see the Buddha Moon tonight, something is shifting in my universe.

Tomorrow, I will get up and make breakfast for Stormboy and me. I'll send him off on the school bus and then I will settle down to write. Anyone who knows me will know it is a split life ... because by mid afternoon, I'll be heading back out to Pallinup with the San Patricios blaring on my car stereo and mullet on my mind.
What to do.
Just write, my supervisor says.
She's right, of course. She's always right.

Dawn of the Season

It must have been an overtired state of silliness - umeshing bream late into the night and laying them neat in bins, icing them down and then stacking the bins onto the back of the ute. Maybe it was the wine later. Maybe it was all the black bream's spines broken off in the flesh of my palms like shards of glass.

We were tired and crusty in the dawn gloaming, hauling nets out of the inlet with mullet still meshing and others leaping over the corkline or their tails waving against the ropes in the olivey waters. Like the ones Unruly caught after his net was down twenty minutes, these fish were huge, gleaming and beautiful. I lost my balance, nearly fell over the side and I blamed the last mullet thrashing in the mesh. "That bloody mullet nearly pulled me in!" I yelled at Old Salt. "This job's got nobs. I want compensation; for trauma, bad jokes and carpal tunnel."

"Woman overboard ..." mused Old Salt, looking as though the idea appealed to him but not while I was doing all the hauling, maybe later. "Got a notice in the mail from the marine safety mob telling me what to do in the event of a man overboard. Just as well I got that notice. I'd have no bloody idea what to do. (He's been a fisherman for sixty five years now.) Apparently, I should chuck a buoy over and then go back and pick 'im up."
He shrugged. "They're prob'ly right. Guess it depends on who it is in the water."

Shacklands

Evening of the Season

The rivermouth set on the first day of the commercial season is the prize. When I arrived at the inlet, the three fishermen were standing around their boats ready to draw straws for it. Nails had the twigs of a paperbark tree in his hand and they were arguing about who should draw and who should deal.

"I'll deal," I said. "Seeing as I'm the vaguely impartial one here."
Old Salt's heathen female deckie. Right.
Still, Nails gave me the sticks and I turned around into the wind, breaking them again in my palm because one was so long it travelled to my wrist and they would have seen it.
Unruly got the first one. Long.
Old Salt drew the shortest.
"So that's it then. Old Salt and me get the rivermouth."
Unruly reeled away in disgust. Nails looked at me. "What about the longest one?"
"I made it the same length as the other long one. There was only one short straw. You and Unruly can work out between yourselves who sets the rivermouth for the rest of the week."
They were shaking their heads but I gave them the sticks as proof and they refrained from starting a fight. The draw was fair - it was just dealt by a withershins woman.

An old man sat with his dog on the shore fishing for bream, opposite the island. He said he'd had no luck and soon they'd be taking their caravan back home to Mandurah but "seeing as the track is washed out, I told the wife that I dunno if we're going to get out. May have to stay a few days more." He laughed then. "I love it. Haven't caught a single fish, but what a place."
While I was waiting for Old Salt, I picked swivels and beanies out of the coral and dropped them in the man's bucket. 

We set the rivermouth just past the angler, and then ventured out past where Unruly and Nails were setting their nets to put out some four and a half inch mesh. I chugged through the waters, the motor cavitating over wind waves and getting stuck in sandbars, past the trees swept down in floods past and covered in domes of coral, looking like lines of stromatolite school kids on a glass-off footpath. The tide is low in the inlet, lower than sea level. I could have stood in the water and held up the cork line. Old Salt stood at the bow looking for floats or nets or buoys.

We set out by the red sandstone cliffs. On the eastern end of the inlet there is a sand bar and beyond it the open sea roars and roars. I saw Unruly's boat heading back from the bar and stop beside Nails'. They had some kind of mid inlet discussion. Then he motored over to us, fast. He headed straight for the dinghy and swerved at the last moment, sidling into our gunwale with barely a wake.

I wish I'd had a camera to photograph this image: Unruly in his orange wet weather gear, a bluff, tall, strawberry blonde man with a craggy, cracked face, standing in his aluminium flattie and holding up two of the biggest sea mullet I've ever seen. These fish were as big as salmon, silver and gleaming in his hands and his grin was ecstatic. "Got them twenny minutes after I set net, Old Salt," Unruly always talks slow. "Looks good for the mornin'."

We are back at Pallinup, I thought, fishing for Pallinup mullet. This is gold.

Long Memory

“At Busselton the melok – salmon trout – was represented by one old man, who sang for me the melok songs of the spawning season while he imitated the movements of the great spate, 

and told me the legend of huge cannibal dogs that daily hunted human flesh, carrying men in their mouths to their lair. This legend attained a curious significance when fossil bones of a flesh eating sthenurus were discovered in the Margaret River caves in the vicinity."

Daisy Bates, My Natives and I, Hesperian Press, Western Australia, 2004, p. 69.