by Tim Winton
As we get under way, the dolphin shadows us, jumps, flashes ahead to ride the bow wave. But none of the old moves pay off and eventually it peels away to join the others rounding up herring in a pack along the bay. We skate across the lagoon with its mottled seagrass pastures and anchor in a sandy channel to fish for whiting.
‘How many are we allowed these days?’ asks the old man.
‘Thirty,’ I say.
‘Only thirty?’
‘Dad, thirty’s still a good feed.’
He shrugs. I guess things seemed better, freer in the old days. As kids in the thirties and forties, he and his siblings caught crays and herring and silver trevally from the shore. They collected their own maggots for bait and humped their catch home in hessian sacks. Sometimes, as the stories have it, they caught more than they could carry. Back when there was so much more coast than there were people living on it, the sea was mad with fish.
‘I spose thirty’ll do,’ he says.
I cut bait and look out over the water, the hulking white dunes, and the low roofs of the hamlet in the narrow margin between them. The good old days may be long gone, yet here we are, as ever, launching a boat from the beach in a quiet bay under cloudless skies, bobbing on clean water. In an hour we’ll have enough sweet-tasting fish to feed two households. Not so long ago we’d have fished until we ran out of room in the esky. Now, thank God, thirty whiting will do.
Since I was a teenager, when I first began to write stories for a living, I’ve mostly stayed close to the wilder shores of Western Australia. The places most precious to me are those where the desert meets the sea. The littoral – that peculiar zone of overlap and influx – continues to sustain my spirit and fuel my work.
In the early 1990s I wrote a little memoir called Land’s Edge to describe the beach culture I grew up in and the natural world that inspired me. Back then I was the father of young children. I loved introducing my kids to the lifestyle I knew as a boy and which my parents and grandparents had enjoyed before me. We lived in a fishing community of six hundred people. The school was over the road, the beach was only a block away and dunes loomed over everything, strange and changeable as the sea itself.
In many ways the conditions of our life together as a family were very modest. We certainly didn’t have much money, but to my mind we lived very well. After a couple of years in Europe I’d come to observe just how constrained a prosperous modern life could be. So I was conscious of how privileged our coastal existence was, and grateful for it. Every day as a matter of course we did what other folks did on their holidays, we pulled craypots before breakfast, snorkelled with sea lions on our lunchbreak, and bombed off the jetty at sunset. Some weeks we ate only what we’d grown in the garden or caught in the bay. Squid, abalone and crayfish were standard fare. Whenever the swell and wind were gentle enough I took a small boat out through the reef pass to deeper waters offshore to supplement our diet with dhufish, snapper and black-arsed cod.
Having inherited all this bounty we had to count ourselves as some of the luckiest people alive. We’d done nothing to earn it – the living ocean was simply passed down to us – and for that gift I will always be grateful.
This summer just gone I took my granddaughter into the sea for the first time. She wasn’t walking then, so she clung like a barnacle as I waded in with her. It was lovely to feel her shudder with the strangeness of all those competing stimuli – the surges of current and light and noise, the spill of waves across her delicate skin. What a thrill it is for a sun-damaged old beachcomber to initiate another generation, to feel that I’m passing on a kind of saltwater birthright – a healthy sea. Yet only a fool could suggest that little girl’s coastal inheritance is secure.
It’s hardly controversial to say the world’s oceans are in peril – that’s been the consensus view amongst marine scientists for years. Many great fisheries have collapsed. Ninety percent of the biggest pelagic fishes are gone. Coral reefs are in strife. Land clearing and rapid coastal development have put insupportable pressures on many marine ecosystems, and as terrestrial sources of mineral wealth are exhausted, the oceans become the new frontier. The world’s population has exploded and all the fishing, drilling, building and dumping is catching up with us. Even before we consider the prospect of acidification from global warming, we’re headed toward a situation where the oceans can no longer tolerate what humans dish out.
Hunting and gathering are in my blood. Fishing is an integral part of my family culture. I have lived most of my life in communities where people either fish for a living or fish to simply feel alive. But I’ve also lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw – or assumed – an endless bounty. I was slow to comprehend all this; the image of the slowly boiling frog fits me perfectly.
In the nineties I got used to diving longer and deeper to find abalone where not long before getting my quota had been easy work. Prize species like dhufish and snapper became locally scarce, and all around me boats got bigger as recreational fishers had to venture further and further out to catch a feed. You didn’t need to be any sort of boffin to know something was wrong; fishing, even for hobbyists, had become hard work. Eventually I understood that I wasn’t merely a witness, I was a part of the equation. As was every person I knew.
Of course the worst of what was happening at sea was not taking place in my backyard. By world standards what I was seeing was relatively mild. Europe and Asia had dead zones already. Closer to home in the Pacific, plastic gyres the size of cities were beginning to appear. Catastrophic oil spills like the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989 seemed safely distant. But twenty years later, the illusion of immunity was shattered when, for seventy-four days, the Montara platform spilled oil into the Timor Sea off Western Australia. Suddenly problems facing our marine environment were no longer over the horizon. I began to read some of the emerging science and got a clearer picture of what my senses were already telling me, and it was this slow realization of a global threat and trouble at home that stirred me to become an activist. It was obvious that all of us, even Australians, needed to change our behaviour. The science suggested we should reduce our consumption and set aside areas of marine habitat as sanctuaries for regeneration.
In 1997, a few years after I became the honorary vice-president of the local branch of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, I published a little book called Blueback in which a woman and her son fight off a development juggernaut that threatens to destroy the lonely, pristine bay they live on. It was only a fable but in it I was wondering what it took to save a precious place. Some years later I’d have cause to wonder if perhaps I hadn’t unconsciously been rehearsing for a new phase of my life, because it was shortly after publication that I found myself in a battle for just such a place. During the years of the Save Ningaloo campaign it often felt as if I’d gotten myself snagged in a far less wishful version of my own novel. And it felt as if the story was not only uncontrollable but inescapable.
Once Ningaloo Reef was properly protected in 2003 it was evident that the stewardship of our oceans had become a mainstream concern in Australia. People expected their national heritage to be defended, and nothing seemed more precious than the sea around them.
After Ningaloo I tried to return to the reclusive life I’d enjoyed before, but one contest quickly segued into another and now I find myself more or less permanently enmeshed, as if I never will climb out of that little book after all.
All these years later I continue to go to the water every day to surf, wet a line, set my craypots. I’m not the gung-ho fisher I once was, yet whether it’s a few squid, a quick snorkel or a sunstruck idea at the jetty, I’m still feeding off the ocean in every possible sense and I owe it a debt. So the rabble-rousing goes on.
It’s exhausting, but I’m glad to have played a small part in this cultural sea change. In a few weeks the Australian government is expected to declare a chain of marine parks running from the Southern Ocean to
the Coral Sea. Just as our forebears set aside terrestrial reserves for respite and study, for non-extractive recreation and as a form of prudent planning for future generations, marine parks are a means of preserving representative and vulnerable habitats. Work on this process began in 1999 when Liberal prime minister John Howard established the National Oceans Office. Until Tony Abbott rose to the Liberal leadership the initiative was bipartisan. It’s also broadly popular. Polling suggests an overwhelming majority of Australians support the establishment of these parks, so the plan should not polarize citizens. Again, the scientific consensus is substantial. It’s not a matter of fisheries management, it’s about the preservation of ecosystems. The Gillard government has a massive opportunity to create an enduring legacy. It also has a chance to distinguish itself politically, to define itself in a polity obsessed with reactive, short-term twitches and fixes. This is a moment for the future, so you can expect to hear the voices of the past rail awhile. You’ll still meet the odd geezer whining that he can’t shoot roos in a national park. Sixty years ago blokes like that had plenty of company but now they’re a fringe element, maddies. And sixty years hence you’ll doubtless find anglers who cannot accept that some bits of the ocean are for fish and not fishing, but again there probably won’t be many. Most rec-fishers are philosophical about marine parks, they have a sense of justice and proportion. When they get past the backward bluster and realize that most coastal waters will remain open to fishing, they can’t see what the fuss is about.
There will, however, be commercial casualties in this process and it’s vital that affected fishing operators are bought out on just terms with dignity. Government must ensure it finds the will and funds to achieve this. And it has to show a bit of courage in taking on some of the bigger vested interests at sea, not just industrial fishing, but the big players of oil, gas and coal whose activities have a serious impact on the marine environment. Few Australians have any idea how much territory is locked up in oil and gas tenements. In Western Australia alone they encircle every important coral reef from Ningaloo to the Montebello Islands, from the Pilbara to the precious Rowley Shoals. The public is only just beginning to see the threat the Queensland coal industry poses to the future of the Great Barrier Reef as more and more coal ports are mooted.
Federal environment minister Tony Burke has hard decisions to make about how much habitat he reserves inshore on the continental shelf – where fishing pressures are most extreme and where most Australians interact with their marine environment – and how much territory he’s brave enough to deny industrial interests. There’s already an emerging emphasis on reserving abyssal waters at the expense of the contested grounds closer to shore, as if the low-hanging fruit of large offshore zones might make up for how little protection our inshore waters will be afforded – a case of never mind the quality, feel the width. My instinct is that Tony Burke genuinely cares about the outcome. My hope is that he’ll resist the urge to fudge. At such a prosperous moment in our history, with so much more at stake for the Australian people than the next political cycle, the boundaries Burke sets may speak not simply to his character and that of the Gillard government, but to the kind of legacy my granddaughter and her kids will have after he and the government and I are gone.
Now and then, when things get bleak and it feels as if nothing really changes, I think of a hole I once swam in at the Montebello Islands, north of Ningaloo. It’s a crater a kilometre across, left by a British nuclear bomb in 1952. A strange place to go for a snorkel, I know. There wasn’t much to see down there besides glassy sand and weird, white worms. Only a few years before I was born this wanton destruction – the blowing of islands from the sea and the irradiation of entire ecosystems – seemed necessary to secure world peace. Today the Montebellos are nature reserves, their coral reefs teeming with dugongs, whales and spangled emperors, and parcels of the islands are sanctuary zones that should be extended. The shift of mindset, the cultural sea change required to get from bombing them to preserving them – all in the span of a single lifetime – is immense.
People develop. They change. As individuals, yes, but also as families, communities and nations, and the nuclear crater at the Montebellos is a handy reminder of just how much and how quickly. It seems odd to say that a swim in a radioactive hole can be restorative, that it can engender hope, but that’s how it felt afterwards as I stood on the boat and thought about how far we’ve come. In the years since, that hope hasn’t faded.
* In 2012 Tony Burke declared the world’s largest system of marine parks. When he came to power in September 2013, the new prime minister Tony Abbott announced a moratorium on all new marine parks and a review of those recently declared. He was removed from office less than two years into his term, but both the freeze and the review have continued under Malcolm Turnbull and his various environment ministers. All indications suggest the government is likely to reduce protection.
Barefoot in the Temple of Art
As you approach the National Gallery of Victoria, along a boulevard jangling with trams in downtown Melbourne, it’s easy to see why former director Patrick McCaughey called it ‘the Kremlin of St Kilda Road’. It’s a massive rectangular block whose blue stone walls have something of the penitentiary about them, and in a quarter teeming with tourists and commuters it manages to retain a perpetual and sinister remoteness. There are no windows. The only break in the mass is a portal arch so tiny it could be a mouse-hole from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Only when you step through that arch do you see the building’s inner skin. There’s no portcullis here. All that stands between you and Australia’s greatest art collection is a falling sheet of water.
The water wall has been disarming pedestrians and delighting children since the museum’s unveiling in 1968. Today, on a hot morning in the summer holidays, kids linger to feel the current sluice through their fingers. It’s a treat to watch them. It takes me back.
You could say the NGV and I got off to an awkward start. When I first visited, nearly half a century ago, the new building on St Kilda Road had been open less than a year; it was Melbourne’s fresh civic triumph, a trophy the city’s burghers and bohemians could share and dispute over. But I was of neither tribe. I arrived at her door sweaty and barefoot, a scruffy nine-year-old interloper from the western frontier.
I grew up in a hardy, utilitarian environment, where nobody you knew had ever finished school, where practical skills were valued and beauty, art and language were mere frippery. It seemed there was a cultural moat between me and the speculative dreamworld I later learnt to call art. But there were larger barriers to contend with – distance chief among them. Perth was popularly considered the most isolated city in the world. The ‘real’ Australia, the one we saw on TV and in magazines, lay elsewhere, somewhere beyond the heat haze of the treeless plain. It was hard not to feel that everything you knew was inconsequential.
Feeling overlooked, even spurned by the eastern states, which make up two-thirds of the landmass, westerners like us suffered the prickly anxiety felt by provincials the world over. We dreamt of making the great crossing to the Other Side, if only to confirm it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The trip across the Nullarbor was a rite of passage. When my family made the trek in the summer of 1969, a drive longer than that from London to Moscow, there wasn’t even a sealed road linking Us to Them.
The privations of that journey, the juddering corrugations and choking dust, were a test of character, but we were sure our ordeals would not be in vain. Keen for us to experience the great world beyond, my parents had taken us out of school early. There was, they said, so much to see and do and learn, and Melbourne was a town where things happened. We’d visit the hallowed stands of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, walk the streets where cop shows like Homicide and Division 4 were recorded in glorious black-and-white, and finally, most importantly, we’d tarry in the shadow of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, where only a year or two earlier the legendary Seekers had played a homecoming concert to two
hundred thousand fans, the largest audience in Australia’s history.
It took more than a week to reach Melbourne. We knocked the dust from our clothes and worked our way through the sites of pilgrimage and, though no one would admit it, our hearts were sinking. The place looked ordinary. The trams were jaunty in their anachronistic way, but nothing about Melbourne appeared any more potent or Australian than the places we knew. The MCG was just an empty hulk. The scene of The Seekers’ triumph, without our white-bread troubadours to enliven it, didn’t have much to excite a nine-year-old either. Even Mum and Dad seemed a tad underwhelmed, but they lingered dutifully at the foot of the stage as we kids chased up the freshly mown amphitheatre toward the final stop on the itinerary.
Mum had shown me pictures of the brand-new museum whose massive stained-glass ceiling and groovy water wall had featured in magazines and newspapers. By all accounts the place was terribly modern. But that hot day, footsore as we were, its chief promise was water. We bolted through the parkland from the Music Bowl to the fortress on St Kilda Road, and there, for a moment, we stood awed before the gallery’s moat-like fountain pools. Then, like the heathens we were, we dunked our feet and splashed about and were happier than we’d been all day. To me the water was special relief. I’d stubbed both big toes and the flapping scabs were a nuisance. Even before our parents arrived, adults were sooling us out of the water. Dunking, they said, was disrespectful. Didn’t we know this was art?
Once we’d dried off on the hot pavement, we knew better than to touch the tantalizing sheets of the water wall that lay like a shimmering curtain between the portal arch and the mysteries within. We fell into line and followed our parents through the arch. We were on our best behaviour. Mum gobbed on her thumb and cleaned our faces, but when we presented ourselves at the ticket office, we learned that we would not be admitted. Barefoot supplicants were not welcome in the temple of art.