Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  The Little Fox hits Melbourne

  Ever rebellious and unconventional, Vosje came to Melbourne, and we married in September 1963. We lived in a little two-storey bungalow that I had quickly built at the back of my mother’s house in Reservoir, had our two children, Ondine and Sebastian, and saved to buy a first house.

  I should never have expected Vosje to live like a caged bird in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and both of us being so stubborn did not help. We disagreed about how we should plan our lives. I was convinced that we should be patient, allow me a few years to buy a first house in the inner suburbs of Carlton or Fitzroy, then renovate, rent out and buy the next one. But Vosje was too impatient for that. She wanted us to rent in one of those suburbs now and get the hell out of Reservoir. Houses in those suburbs were about $10,000 then, or about five times the price of a new Volkswagen, for instance, but it was to be many years before I was to have a house there, for the marriage didn’t survive, and there was no Plan B.

  The parting, when it came, was quick, dramatic and painful. For a time, my mother looked after Sebastian, who was little more than a baby in 1967, until Vosje sorted out some accommodation. However, Vosje and I shared a lot of love and good times to the end of the marriage, and even after, which may have been to our discredit in the eyes of some, had they known.

  During those few sweet years of marriage we used to stay at my family’s cottage at Daylesford in Central Victoria, sometimes buying a bottle to take from Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar. Jules, behind the bar, once thought I was taking the mickey when I asked him if the bottle of Rutherglen red would travel to Daylesford, but I wasn’t; I was really earnest and naive. At Daylesford we had good times, occasionally eating trout that I would catch as a result of my new sport, my new passion—fly-fishing.

  There was a tradition at Daylesford: the fly-fishermen would meet at the Victoria Hotel on Saturday mornings to have a few beers and discuss the afternoon’s angling prospects while the wives did the shopping. These little meetings were held in the public bar, where no women were allowed, so everybody there was surprised when Vosje walked in, sat down beside me, and asked me to get her an Advocaat and cherry brandy. I obliged, and Vosje became the first female ever to have a drink in the public bar of the Victoria Hotel in Daylesford. She was like that!

  Before Sebastian was born we carted Ondine everywhere in a basket strapped into the back seat of our Fiat 500. On Saturdays we would go to the Victoria Market to buy the week’s fruit and vegetables, then we’d meet friends at a little restaurant, Gregory’s, in Carlton, for an Italian meal. In later years, with two children, we would go to Brian and Gill’s place in Parkville to cook some of the produce we’d purchased that morning. Gill was the Australian girl we’d befriended in Perugia; she met Brian when he visited me there. When they married later in Adelaide, Vosje and I drove to the wedding in the Fiat Cinquecento, arriving late.

  Anyway, they were great lunches and would go for hours—fried sardines, garfish, calamari and a few bottles of wine that Brian used to procure from his Italian friends. We talked about winemaking, and finally borrowed some equipment, bought some boxes of grapes from the market and started to make wine, fermenting it in a bathtub.

  All looked good until it finished fermenting, then it became quite oxidised, aldehydic and generally off. We knew nothing about sulphur additions, pH values or anything much, really, but an imaginative mate thought we could go to somebody’s uncle’s place in Fitzroy where there was an illegal still from which we could make grappa from our spoiled wine.

  So off we went into the night with our wine in all manner of containers and eighteen empty bottles for the grappa. But the first distillation produced more than two dozen bottles, and the uncle didn’t want us attracting attention by leaving and re-entering the property by the side lane. It was decided a second distillation was required to reduce the volume of grappa. This was done, leaving us with a little more than a dozen bottles of perfectly good rocket fuel—my first foray into the world of winemaking!

  One bottle, I remember, was put to good use when a boastful Australian girl was showing off her handsome Italian boyfriend. The other girls had had enough of her, so it was suggested that Italian men couldn’t handle their drink. She took the bait, and the handsome Italian, for whom I felt very sorry, dutifully downed about three shot glasses before he collapsed and was carried out to a car. The others were very happy for they never saw the girl (or her boyfriend) again. I don’t know what happened to the rest of it—I guess Brian added a shot of it to his coffee each morning until it was gone. I never drank the stuff, so lost interest in it. Lost interest in winemaking, too, for some years.

  Later, a medico friend told me that many Italian men in Melbourne were mysteriously becoming ill and occasionally dying. Researchers found that the illness was due to lead poisoning and, later again, that the lead was being leached from lead-based enamel in the bathtubs in which the wine was made. Sad irony, indeed, for it was suspected that many wealthy and influential early Romans died from lead poisoning due to the insertion of lead pellets in wine to give it a softer mouthfeel. The poor people couldn’t afford the lead and so didn’t die at the same rate as their ‘superiors’. A friend speculates that it caused the fall of the Roman Empire: good wine, bad wine—it was always there in the back of my mind.

  Retreat to Tasmania

  After Vosje and I split up, I found it too painful to be in Melbourne, knowing that my children were close by but that I could only occasionally see them, be with them and hold them and, feeling that they had adequate substitutes for me, I made other plans.

  Michael Buck and I sold off our small garage-door business, which had provided us with an income for the previous three years. The decision to sell up must have pleased him, as I’d become something of a loose cannon after my break-up with Vosje and both of us had more or less ruined our backs carrying heavy garage doors around building sites.

  So, in early 1968, I took a job at a construction site in north-western Tasmania, at Port Latta between Burnie and Smithton, in view of ‘The Nut’ at Stanley. After spending a couple of months in the single men’s quarters at Port Latta, I rented a little shack at Cowrie Point, a rocky outcrop above the beach with the whole of Bass Strait before me. The work was demanding enough, the hours very long, but there were girls at the township of Burnie. Saturday nights saw a procession of cars from Port Latta to Burnie, but a combination of fatigue, alcohol and challenging winding country roads usually meant that they didn’t all make it home, and there were unfortunately some funerals to attend on Wednesdays or Thursdays—after which, of course, everybody went to the pub and got drunk and drove home.

  The food in the dining room was not at all bad and every effort was made to keep the men content; plenty of steak and chips but very little greenery. Sunday nights saw a choice of salad, a huge coleslaw sort of thing, or curry and rice. The local doctor found that men were coming to him with problems which he assumed to be diet related, for the symptoms could be removed after a course of vitamin supplements. Talking to him one night, we established that generally his patients were the ones who had the curry and rice, and not the salad. Presumably they didn’t have fruit juice in the morning, either.

  After I moved into my rented shack, I was able to get organised and do some fishing. Angling had always been a passion of mine. As a child, when we went camping next to a small stream near Daylesford, I would not take my eye from the float for the entire day. Mum would bring my lunch of camp pie, tomato and lettuce and place it close to my elbow. I would thank her and eat without looking at the plate as I watched that float and waited for a bite. Anyway, a more sophisticated form of angling, fly-fishing for trout, had become the sport I loved, so I came to terrorise the trout of the Duck, Detention and Black rivers.

  I also discovered the mud oyster. These could be found on the sides or undersides of rocks in the estuaries, so if low tide coincided with some spare time from work it was well worthwhile turning over a f
ew rocks. The oysters could be huge, and one I found under a particularly large rock had a shell that was almost the size of the steering wheel of my car. I can still remember the extraordinary sensation of swallowing it, the size of a dozen normal oysters.

  There were other delights at the seaside, too. I was once talking to a girl with whom I was falling in love as we walked along the beach near my shack. I was telling her about John Steinbeck’s first published literary work, The Log of the Sea of Cortez, when I made the unfortunate Freudian slip of saying ‘marine orgasms’ instead of ‘marine organisms’, but it turned out all right in the end.

  I had brought with me a small dinghy I’d built in Melbourne, so I bought a craypot and was soon sitting on my balcony, with a glass of home brew to hand, looking at the buoy on my craypot bobbing in the waves and wondering if I had captured one yet. Scale fish could be caught with rod and line on the rocks beside the shack, silver grunter being the preferred species; and occasionally a school of black-back salmon would provide good sport on the fly, although they weren’t very good eating. They could be frozen in the ‘Silent Knight’ kerosene refrigerator that was not supposed to be a freezer but was, and the salmon provided excellent bait for the craypot. There were abalone on the rocks there, too, which could be relieved of their boredom with the aid of a large flat knife, goggles and snorkel so, given time, it was possible to assemble a meal of the very finest quality and freshness imaginable. If my girlfriend was visiting from university in Hobart, we would sometimes share this bounty and a bottle of wine while overlooking Bass Strait.

  Later on I bought a lovely little yacht, a Rainbow, which consisted of a planing hull, a mast and a lot of sail for its size. Myrtle went like the wind and almost as fast. On a sunny day, when I was not on shift, I used to surf it on the waves in front of the ‘pellet plant’ where we worked to torment my workmates, who could watch me from the windows of that dark satanic mill.

  I can’t recall if there was any Tasmanian wine then. Graeme Wiltshire hadn’t got Heemskerk going, nor had the Alcorsos started at Moorilla, and it was long before Andrew Pirie came over from Riverina College, and later Andrew Hood, who also lectured there. And, of course, it would have been a very long time since the infamous failed experiment on Maria Island, when bunches of grapes were tied to unproductive vines to fool investors. It was an old-fashioned scam. The grower had realised that the climate was too cold to ripen grapes but needed the investors’ money. So he imported grapes from the mainland and attached them to some vines in a small area where he led them to inspect the ‘crop’.

  And so I used to drink some Tahbilk Marsanne and occasional mainland rieslings. Vosje would come over with the children sometimes, or friends from Melbourne would visit, and the challenge was always to assemble as many of those fishy ingredients as I could before their arrival.

  At that time I met Estelle, who worked in the office at Port Latta. She was a bit of a tomboy whose family lived in Stanley and sometimes had roast wallaby for Sunday lunch. So we caught a wallaby and I was introduced to that delight—it was cooked as you would a leg of lamb and some of the meat was saved for wallaby patties.

  Over a couple of years I was given several families’ secret recipes for wallaby patties. I gradually came to realise that they were all the same—wallaby, bacon, breadcrumbs, flour, onion and egg. It was Estelle who also introduced me to whitebait patties. We would net the whitebait from the estuary with dip nets, and occasionally a trout could be seen slashing at their shoals as they plucked up their courage and charged, seeking safety in numbers as they ran the trout gauntlet to get upstream to their breeding grounds. This meant that the fly rod usually accompanied us on the whitebait run. When the season was right, Estelle also showed me where and how to catch the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish. I’ll never forget her excitement when I landed my first primeval monster from the deep.

  Unfortunately, I then made the mistake of putting it in the front luggage compartment of the new Volkswagen. It escaped from the hessian bag in which I had (inadequately) secured it and backed down a crevice between the petrol tank and the mudguard, necessitating removal of the bonnet with a spanner and an interesting tug-of-war with an enormously strong opponent.

  Estelle had a beautiful Arabian mare and would sometimes borrow another horse for me, and we’d gallop them along the hard sand beaches at low tide, a wonderful experience. Estelle appeared at the vineyard tasting room last year and we had a good reminisce about these old times from forty-five years ago.

  As a fly-fisher, I was inevitably drawn to the Highland Lakes—only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the beach at Cowrie Point to the Tasmanian equivalent of the Scottish Highlands, above the snowline in tundra country. Among those windswept tarns I succumbed to the lure of ‘the uncertain trout’ and would bolt from whatever shift I was on to camp and hike and fish for a couple of days—a habit I’ve never broken. It is country that gets into you, perhaps particularly if you have Scottish blood in your veins. But almost everybody who came up there with me has returned, and most of us still do. The trout there are some of the best in the world, often hugely challenging to catch and always spectacular to eat. Their flesh varies in colour according to the lake they come from, reflecting variations in diet, becoming more orange as the amount of crustaceans and mayflies in their diet increases.

  The most striking colour I’ve ever seen was in a fish from Lake Baily, where their diet consists almost solely of water snails, mayfly and anthropods. I approached the lake on foot one day to see an angler about a kilometre away cleaning a fish. As he, John Philbrick, opened up the fish there was an explosion of Day-glo orange against the dull grey of the tundra as the sunlight caught the flesh.

  A group of four or five of us, varying every year except for me, the common denominator, used to fly to Launceston after Christmas then take a taxi direct to those lonely lakes and tarns of the Tasmanian Central Highlands plateau. The first driver we engaged for this unusual fare was not comfortable as he drove his Fairlane on the unmade road that sneaks alongside the Liaweenee Canal leading up to Lake Augusta. As we unloaded our gear below the majestic but forbidding Wild Dog Tier, he commented that it looked like a moonscape and that he couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was only after the payment of a hefty deposit that he agreed to return in ten days’ time to collect us. And off we went with our Volkorn bread and smoked bacon, rolled oats, dried peas and instant mashed potato in our hiking packs. Ten days later the taxi driver was amazed to see us emerge from the swirling mist and set ravenously upon the chocolate bars we had asked him to buy for us.

  Bass Strait deckhand

  I had long nurtured a desire to work on a fishing boat, having seen them moored to the wharf at Stanley, and having talked to the deckhands and skippers in the pub there. Towards the end of my last employment in Tasmania, I found I could do just that, for the skipper of a cray boat had come to Stanley searching for a deckhand. So I was soon sailing out on the Amelia, a lovely old double-ended carvel-built thirty-footer which had been registered at St Helens on the east coast of Tasmania.

  The skipper was a taciturn and well-educated Dutchman by the name of Jack Meyer. As we motored out to the fishing grounds, he explained the drill and showed me how to bait the craypots, a procedure with which I was familiar. Using his echo sounder he was able to read the sea floor below and when he found a suitable rock formation, he would call for me to drop a pot, and overboard it would go with its attached marker buoy. And so we would continue until all the twenty or so pots had been released. After that we would clean and wash the deck then have lunch—for him a frozen steak put straight onto the frying pan which, amazingly, cooked properly, and for me a couple of small cray tails done quickly in the pressure cooker, some bread, salad and a half bottle of Australian chablis. It was fun for me to practise my rusty Dutch with him, he being surprised to have an Australian-born Dutch-speaking deckhand. After lunch and a lie-down we would then return to collect the pots.

  On my
first trip the wind came up and it became quite rough out there, making it difficult to winch the pots onboard. After we had recovered about fifteen pots and dropped the crays they contained into the seawater hold of the boat, I pulled up one pot containing not crays but a Bass Strait crab, a giant of a crustacean with one small claw and the other a monstrous threatening thing about as thick as my arm. Jack had not told me about them, so I looked to him in the wheelhouse for guidance. The boat was pitching and rolling, I was drenched with spray every time we hit a wave and the wind was blowing hard so communication was difficult. He was indicating that I should put my bare hand into the pot and pull the creature out. I must have appeared reluctant to do so for, keeping one hand on the wheel, he leaned out of the wheelhouse and yelled: ‘Put your hand into the big claw and pull it out! It’s just like a suitcase handle. It can’t hurt you, it can’t close that claw!’ Then followed perhaps the most challenging few seconds of my life until that time. But he was right; they can’t close that big claw enough to slice your hand in two.

  The other drop-offs were comparatively uneventful after that and we returned to the Stanley co-op with a good load of lobster in the seawater hold. But it was a Saturday and the co-op was closed. Jack wanted to return to St Helens before the weather got worse and sell the catch there instead. He would pay me cash for my share of the estimated value and if more was owing he would send me a cheque for the balance. We parted on those terms; he sailed off to St Helens while I got into my car and went back to my shack, hoping to find a girl waiting there. Some days later I received a hefty cheque in the mail, for he had underestimated the weight of the catch.

  A few days later I went to the pub to see if I could get a job on a shark boat, for I wanted to continue my experiences at sea. There was a job available, on the Tingarra, a fifty-foot steel-hulled shark boat, which was leaving as soon as the weather cleared—and they could use another deckhand! The skipper had already hired an inexperienced hand, but was soon satisfied that I could do the job, given my experience at crayfishing. I neglected to tell him that I’d only done one trip.