Island Home

by Tim Winton

  There was an air of promise about those early days in Gwelup Street, an unspoken sense we were making something from nothing. Everything was raw and provisional. It was like camping. Things were rough but they were new, and back in the 1960s newness was prized above anything else. In time, as the neighbourhood became more established, when there were no more building sites and all the fences and lawns were finally in, the looseness and excitement evaporated and a kid had to go abroad for his fun.

  But in the beginning there was always the swamp at the end of the street. It was a great wild netherland that drew everything down to it eventually: water, birds, frogs, snakes – and kids of course. As we slunk off toward it, unable to resist its gravitational allure, we left the polite tinkle of sprinklers in our wake and the rowdy sounds of nature took over. We haunted the swamp and its environs barefoot. We hid in hollow logs, tried to knock parrots from trees with our gings, and in our aimless trekking we met tiger snakes, goannas, bees and strafing magpies. There were tracks through the bush everywhere and we followed them on our fat-wheeled bikes with banana seats and T-bar shifts. The swamp never ceased to enthral; it was an enigmatic place, a spot fraught with danger. The more intrepid kids in the street made rafts from the upturned roofs of old cars and paddled precariously through the reeds onto the lake. They dug deep bunkers and made humpies where they stripped stolen bikes and garnered vast collections of frogs and tadpoles and tobacco. There were stories of quicksand, of capsizes and skirmishes with strangers. Long-necked turtles scoped the surface by the shore. They dipped away like mini-subs, paddling silently out of reach of our hooked sticks. Now and then they crawled up out of the swamp and crossed the road on suicide missions, easy pickings for cars and owls and scuff-kneed kids. On the other side of the lake, market gardens pumped up the groundwater and shot it into the air as a constant halo.

  At home or in school I hankered for the swamp and its thrum of life. Our street was uniform and orderly, but where it ended the chaos of another, older life resumed. Through swathes of reeds and sedges the steely surface of the lake appeared like the suddenly opened eye of God. Waterbirds rose from it in clouds. At the peaty shore everything hissed and trembled. We searched for lost toddlers down there, went out in phalanxes to recover dogs or bikes. We lit fires and fought them, felt the land heat and cool underfoot. Even the meekest of us went a little wild down there and we only came home when darkness fell and mothers began to bellow from every back step on the street.

  Now that wildness is gone. The wetland endures but Lake Gwelup is a tidy suburban park with cycleways and gazebos. And the old neighbourhood has been smartened up. The houses we grew up in have begun to disappear. Modest bungalows are being replaced with Tuscan villas and walled compounds. My wife’s childhood home still stands but number 14 was bowled over. I drive by every few years feeling a little foolish. Now it’s just a place of remnants and memories, but it’s long been a landscape and dreamscape in retreat. Without us ever paying much attention, the bush shrank by increments. More tuarts and marris were felled, more birds and animals displaced, more earth was scraped bare as the suburb grew and the roads around us were bitumenized. There was always fresh building activity, more families moving in, immigrants from the English Midlands, from Serbia, the Netherlands. In time the street even acquired a public phone box. People paved their driveways. The last big gully, a maze of tracks and bowers behind our place, was bulldozed. The trees were burnt and the ash raked flat to make way for the football oval. Year after year secret places disappeared. At the time this process felt normal and necessary, like growing up. After all, the bush was a scruffy nothing and we were civilizing it.

  The biggest and most unavoidable change came when I was ten or so. Across the hill an enormous tract of bush was torn down. It seemed to happen quite suddenly. It was like a military action, with more men and machines than I’d ever seen assembled in one place. The air was black with diesel smoke as trees were battered down and rolled into windrows high as houses. For many days and nights those piles burnt like a sacked city. At sunset we rode our bikes around the perimeter to watch the sparks rise and rise into the sky. We didn’t know it then but most of this land was to be sealed with asphalt. Developers built a shopping centre there the size of an airport. With all the franchises sufficient to the era, it became an ersatz indoor city. In summer its vast car parks were like baking black plains. The hyper-mall took its name from the suburb. Within a few years it was synonymous with it and in the seventies when someone spoke of ‘going to Karrinyup’ they generally meant the shopping centre, not the neighbourhood. On Sundays, where once we’d pedalled through the bush, pimply teenagers learnt to drive their mums’ Corollas across hectares of empty, shimmering tarmac.

  The land-clearing going on around us in the 1960s was just a skirmish in a much wider assault that persists to this day. The population of Perth is growing at a hectic rate, and to accommodate the expectations of newcomers and young people wanting places of their own, the city spreads and sprawls. The bushland of the Swan coastal plain continues to be bulldozed for property developments and the urban footprint is now colossal. There’s an unbroken swathe of red roof tiles from Mandurah in the south to Two Rocks, a hundred and thirty kilometres to the north. Most planners, transport gurus and environmental scientists agree that the sprawl is socially and ecologically unsustainable. Every fresh subdivision comes at the cost of bushland. And every new suburb requires infrastructure. The habitat loss from the construction of roads and freeways alone is astounding. As a result of such frenetic land-clearing the prospects of several native species of mammals, reptiles and birds look dim.

  All these dwellings and suburbs are erected in a largely dry region with a shrinking rainfall pattern. But home owners still want lush lawns and European gardens, so groundwater hangs over these tracts in a perpetual reticulated mist and the waterways and aquifers absorb a steady trickle of phosphates and pesticides. From the Darling scarp to the sea the ancient, life-giving Swan River is slowly dying. Within three generations the river has gone from larder to drain. Toxic algal blooms occur summer and winter. Mass fish kills have become common in the upper reaches where black bream float belly up in their thousands and the mangroves and foreshores are spangled with their stinking carcasses. The prawns I used to catch and cook on the shore with my family every summer are gone. So too the cobbler we speared with gidgies in the shallows.

  In 2009 the unique cohort of Swan River dolphins began to display mysterious lesions on their bodies and soon they were showing up like all those bream, bobbing bloated amongst the reeds and paperbarks, their hides horribly disfigured. Within a few months twenty-five percent of the dolphin population was dead. For many years, Professor Jörg Imberger, the state’s most senior water researcher, has declared the river dead at depths greater than two metres. The waterway is choking on 251 tonnes of nitrogen every year, most of it coming from the fertilizers spread on farms and suburban lawns. First mooted in 2007, the Fertiliser Action Plan to reduce the flow of soluble phosphates into the river has yet to be implemented, and given politicians’ reluctance to upset their supporters in the fertilizer industry, there seems to be no real hope it ever will be. Under pressure from recreational fishing lobbyists the state government sponsors the seasonal release of prawns, as if the waterway were a pond on a dude ranch. Meantime the emasculated Swan River Trust deploys oxygen pumps in the upper reaches and with all those busy brown bubbles the river looks and smells like a careless boy’s aquarium. The Swan is desperately sick. And although a simple cure is ready to hand, the river is put on life support. Those pumps are emblematic of a city and a political culture for whom the glib fix and the photo-op will always be first choice.

  I imagine there are still kids living out at the edges in transitional places like the one I knew in Karrinyup, but given the accelerated pace of change, and the ubiquity of all those surveyors’ pegs, I wonder if these days they even have time enough to feel at home there.

  In hi
s memoir, False Economy, the nature writer William Lines describes his outdoor boyhood at Gosnells, at the other end of Perth. Brimming with bitterness and regret, he writes: ‘Ever busy, ever building, ever in motion, ever discarding the old for the new, few people paused to think about what they were so busy building and what they had destroyed and thrown away. But most of what they built was depressing, brutal and ugly.’1

  A casual excursion to the long inflamed colon of the Albany Highway between Perth and the hills will bear Lines out. The stands of jarrah he mourns, the soaks and paddocks he remembers, have been replaced by car lots, boxy housing estates and industrial gulags. No amount of bunting is going to make any of that pretty. You have to hope some of it is worth the loss.

  Like most kids I didn’t imagine places had pasts. Even when I saw landforms and habitats gradually scraped away I didn’t register the change for what it was. I didn’t understand how permanent the forfeits would be. Humans break in order to build. And of course loss is an inevitable part of making, creating and surviving. But in exchange for what we surrender we surely have a right to expect something worthwhile, something good – developments that are mindful of their footprint, buildings that are sensitive to landscape, planning that considers the underlying cost and values change that’s sustainable. Business leaders love to rhapsodize about ‘a culture of excellence’ but if our cities are any indication of the fruits of their labours, they seem content to bulldoze beauty and replace it with crap. The gospel of perpetual economic growth carries in its train the salvation promise of a life bigger and better for every-one. But this greater good is often mythical. The actual experiences of believers rarely bear out the claims of their faith. Even so, many adherents cleave stubbornly, fearfully to orthodoxy. I guess it’s what they know. Challenging this mindset has traditionally been the work of loons, heretics and Luddites. William Lines, who identifies unashamedly with the last, writes: ‘Other people must surely have found these surroundings as distressing as I did. Yet they were silent. Likely opponents lacked the vocabulary to understand the transformation of the world in which they lived. Few words existed to describe destruction. The dominance of the language of economics shrank alternative vocabularies. The leading men of Australia applauded the whole, endless clutter . . . as growth and development. With their eyes on the future, most people were too busy to notice the spreading ugliness, and they unwittingly but irrevocably bequeathed ugliness to the future.’2

  Lots of things have changed about Perth since those days. Everything, it seems, except the attitude of those who run it, and you could say the same thing about every major city in Australia. The land speaks to so many of us, and like any long-suffering parent it yearns for a little recognition. But not everyone is paying attention.

  III

  Trigg Island, 1966

  It’s not really an island. Though it must have been one once, as the beach waxed and waned over time. For the moment it’s just a huge hunk of grey-white limestone jutting into the surf. Sometimes it looks like a chunk of space rock that’s come to rest on the shore. You can walk out to it along the sandspit that connects it to the beach. In its lee men launch dinghies and youths tool up with snorkelling gear to explore the reef. On the windy side, near the treacherous Blue Hole into which some luckless swimmer seems to be sucked and drowned every summer, anglers sit high above the surf on tripods casting for tailor. As waves belt in across the platform reef the fishermen are high and dry, baiting their ganged hooks with mulies and bagging fish in sacks slung from their shoulders.

  The rock itself is sharp and gnarly, like the surface of an enormous, hard and pitiless meringue. It’s tough to navigate but at six I know every pit and pipe, every solution hole and wind-carved cutaway, and I climb across barefoot until I find the guano-spattered shelf that obscures the gap I lower myself into.

  Inside the rock it’s another world. The beach noise, that white roar, is muted. There’s no wind, no voices, no gulls. It’s so quiet the intermittent subsea gurgles and burps sound impossibly loud and close. The tide is going out but the swell is up. I clamber down the vertical cleft to the bottom where chutes radiate landward. Here the sand underfoot is hard and wet and further in, away from the light, the jagged ceiling of the cave is damp and tawny. It smells slightly shitty in here, as if no fresh air gets in. Or maybe some kid has dropped a turd in a dark recess.

  I crawl in deeper, away from the sea. Every time I come here I have the same excited, panicky sensation, and given the smell of poop, perhaps I’m not the only one. There’s something fearful about being in the guts of the rock with the ocean battering outside, sluicing in through obscure vents and ducts. The atmosphere is wet and heavy. You can feel the weight of the rock hanging over you, pressing without quite touching.

  Eventually I reach dry sand. The chute is low. I have to belly in with the serrated rock at my back. The light is thin and blue-grey. It’s even dimmer back here where I fold up in a crescent-shaped niche, cocooned by cold stone. When I press my ear to the sand the ground hisses. It scares me. But I love the secrecy of it. At the faint sound of voices, I scoot up a narrow shaft to watch teenagers kiss in the wind and sunlight, thinking they’re invisible. They have no idea I’m there.

  Across the surf-wracked shelf of reef behind the couple, there are other chutes and clefts and caves – the underwater sort. I’ve only seen them at the lowest spring tides. If you kneel in the water you can make out the fingerlike galleries threaded with distant spots of light. In a few years, at high tide, I’ll swim into them and creep my way through, angling around blind corners, watching for flutes of light up into which I spear my snorkel for a breath of air. Even then the fear isn’t paramount; it’s the secret place, the private space I’m seeking.

  I leave the smoochers and drop back into the heart of the island. But just as I reach the sandy floor a wave thunders against the ramparts, bigger than anything all day, and in moments it rifles through the chambers, spitting, gurgling. The wind of it ruffles my hair like the approach of a train in a tunnel and instantly I’m scrambling for escape. By the time I make it to the vertical shaft the cave is awash. As whitewater wrenches at my shorts I get a handhold and scuttle up into the sun like a startled crab. The lovers barely notice me passing by.

  Barefoot and unhurried

  When it comes to apprehending nature kids have a significant advantage. I didn’t appreciate that until I could observe my own. Now I have grandkids to reinforce the lesson as they potter about, barefoot and unhurried. You can see them taking the world in through their skin. What a blessing it is to be too young to drive, to be without a watch, to never really submit to the power of the timetable. How can you view a child’s mulish refusal to wear shoes or clothes as anything but wisdom?

  Being short and powerless, kids see the world low down and close up. On hands and knees, on their naked bellies, they feel it with an immediacy we can scarcely recall as adults. Remember all that wandering and dithering as you crossed the same ground again and again? It wouldn’t have seemed so at the time but with all that apparently aimless mooching you were weaving a tapestry of arcane lore – where the chewy gum bulges best from the tree, where the yellow sand makes a warm pad to lie on beneath the rattling banksias – that didn’t just make the world more comprehensible, but rendered it intimate, even sacred. As a kid I certainly didn’t know what I was up to. But I had a feel for the blossom time of the wattle, the up-close leafiness of lichen. I knew the pong of kelp and seagrass signified the arrival of the afternoon breeze. When the southerly really got going it rattled the pods of the wild lupins and corrugated the surface of the swamp. So much is absorbed unconsciously. And now when I think of the sense memory of bindies and doublegees underfoot, and all those stubbed toes and sand-scorched soles, the splinters in the meat of the thumb, the ticks in the back of the neck and the shrivelling sting of sunburn, I grant these sensations the status of knowledge. I owe that insight to Aboriginal philosophers like David Mowaljarlai and Bill Neidjie. Whi
tefellas are too keen to disown the wisdom of the body, mistaking our loss of receptivity for maturity. For a while in childhood we are, as Les Murray puts it, ‘all innocent authority’. Which is not to suggest we’re gentle innocents. I pulled the legs off frogs to see how they worked. I robbed birds’ nests and roasted ants under a magnifying glass. I harassed long-necked turtles and left tadpoles floating so long in Vegemite jars they turned into snot-monsters. I did some of it in gangs and posses. But I was happiest poking about alone.