Eventually, friends came to my rescue. The neighbour of one had a 10-foot fibreglass dinghy to give away. It was holed and the central third of the middle seat was missing, so a little restoration was required.
None of us had fibreglassed before, not even the blokes, and fibres of great length bristled from the fingertips of our washing-up gloves as we painted the sticky resin onto pieces of matting. The holes in the hull were quickly fixed and then the plan was to cut blocks of polystyrene foam to fit into the gap in the seat and glass the lot over. All good, except a chemical reaction took place and the resin melted the foam in seconds, eating it into shapes that were Gaudi-esque.
Next brainwave: raid the kitchen and cover the foam in aluminium foil.
It worked. When the fibreglass hardened, the blocks, like wrapped fruitcakes put aside to mature for Christmas, were visible trapped inside.
The boat was launched. It floated. I named it the Squid. It was ideal. Bashed and bomby, it could be left with impunity chained to a tree on the shore, waiting for me whenever I could return.
It turned out the Squid was a pig to row, and I soon got an outboard motor. But where to go? Well … Rileys, of course. I found a channel we hadn’t used in my childhood and worked it on the drift into the bay, picking up the odd good thing and a regular feed of whiting. The only limitation on me now was the tide: to launch, to fish, to get back in, I had to have the right water. There was no cow in the corner at Rileys anymore but the bellbirds still tinked. Sometimes a sea eagle came out of the tall timber to make regal circuits. And in the very early morning, when everything was extremely still, fish jumped in front of the mangroves. Along with the familiar there was always something new to see. The green water slid on by.
•
I’d had the Squid for about eighteen months before my brother and his grown-up son came for a visit from Melbourne and took their first spin. The three of us had a great day drifting around Rileys together and we even caught a squid, which was a first. You never saw such an exquisite creature. The way its mantle flushed with iridescent dots of pink and turquoise.
The next day my nephew left to fly off somewhere, so Rog and I went out together. Here, at last, is where I get to the heart of my story.
There were hardly any bites. It happens sometimes. I don’t know why. Days when even the entertaining babies aren’t about, as if a master switch has been flicked to Off. We tried different lines of drift, different bait, anchored and put out lines for crabs—nothing. By then there wasn’t much left of the rising tide anyway; the few fish that were about would only become more inactive as the water slackened. So we picked up the anchor and for old times’ sake set off on a tootle, steering through the same old oyster alley we used to travel. The trespass signs had gone from the leases over the years, though I can’t think why the imperative to shoot should have lessened. Did oyster robbery go out of fashion as a crime?
We motored past our old wharf, looking up to where the house used to be; in the mid-1990s it was sold and demolished. And then, for fun, we anchored in Purple Pumpernickel Bay. I still fished there occasionally if the wind was up in Rileys, but despite the always-keen look of the water I’d never done any good. And it was the same for us that day. It didn’t matter. We talked. I told Rog about the time I’d been there the summer before. I must be the only person in Australia, I said, who has had to move their boat to a new spot because it was surrounded by labradors. A pair of them had come charging down a private jetty and thrown themselves off the end at full pelt. Making a beeline for the Squid, they swam fast enough to create their own wakes, then settled in to circle insanely around the boat. Around and around they went, stupidly happy, and I worried they would tire or blunder into the lines I had out, wrapping them around their plunging paws. I don’t know what they wanted but they did not return to shore until I motored away.
Still no bites. Well, nothing of any worth; a couple of tiddlers. What should we do? Stay or go home? And then Rog said quietly, wonderingly, as if it was a bizarre idea that at any moment might evaporate of its own accord, ‘We could try … the Hole.’
Neither of us said anything. We sat there.
‘We could,’ I said finally.
But we didn’t move. A strange and awful blankness was upon me.
‘We’re grown-ups now. We’re allowed.’
‘Yeah.’
In fact, we were middle-aged. Our parents were long dead. Uncle Clive was in decline and would soon be in a nursing home.
‘It’s the right time. It’s just about the top of the tide.’
It was.
I said, ‘Do you think we really could?’
But there was another consideration.
‘Do you think you could find it?’ asked Rog.
I didn’t know. I had a marine chart on my bedroom wall at home and knew from it that the Hole was not a myth. It was 37 metres deep. But it was small, and I could only guess its position.
We started packing up. Got the motor going. We took it slowly, slipping between the boats moored around us and heading out towards the main channel and the Rip.
As we approached I felt a growing apprehension. I studied the landfall on different sides to roughly judge the distance out. Throttled back. Looked around again. The surface of the water was calm, almost slicked, except for the delicate inscriptions that indicated eddies.
I stopped the engine.
Rog put the anchor over.
When I first got the boat I bought two anchors and two ropes, thinking I might use one from the bow and one from the stern when crabbing. I never did, but for some reason I put the two ropes together; I suppose I must have thought one day I’d come here.
The rope fed itself out over the side. We watched it dance across the gunwale in the automated fashion of a main thread on a knitting machine. Each of the ropes I had bought was 30 metres long. Down, down went the first. Down and down. And then it seemed to slow. But then the rope suddenly snaked and sped up and the stainless-steel clip that fastened the two ropes jerked into view, travelling up and over the bow: the second rope was away. We had found the Hole.
We were there.
Gradually we got used to it. Our lines took forever to get to the bottom and felt strange. But we started to relax.
It was true. We were not kids. We were allowed.
We didn’t get any bites, but we began to enjoy our surroundings—that is, until about six other boats turned up and dropped their anchors right near us. Most of them were fancy plastic lumps with every sort of electronic gizmo hanging off—fish finders, GPS and so on. I was outraged. Here I was in a boat and still my fishing was spoilt by people coming too close.
I put on a last bait. It was nearly time to go. But we told ourselves our day had been successful anyway just by coming here. I left my rod unattended for a bit while I did some preliminary tidying, but when I picked it up again, oh my God, I had something heavy. Something big.
‘Rog …’
Really big.
The rod bent. I pulled the big slow thing up and Rog got the net. It seesawed, it yawed, it took forever, but finally a dark shape materialised. Rog leant out and the shape nosed serenely into the net, though only its head seemed to fit; simultaneously Rog lifted and in a heavy, dripping arc in it came, landing thickly in the bottom of the boat. A huge flathead. Biggest one we’d ever seen—by a mile. Adrenaline pumping, we whooped and screamed.
‘Suck eggs, you plastic heaps! Go the mighty Squid,’ I hollered.
We were grown-ups.
•
I have fished the Hole many times since. My sister—bless her—bought a wonderful holiday shack in the area, and being the most feckless sibling and the only one resident in New South Wales, I get to use it often. Finding the Hole straight off is not a given, so when that second rope goes over I always feel a thrill. And partially alarmed. Lots of times I come back with nothing. But every now and then I scare the bejesus out of myself with what I bring in: an octopus, small sharks and ray
s, a yellow moray eel. Even a big flattie at the 80-centimetre mark can be a heart-thumper to handle on your own. The thing is, you just never know what will come up, because an infinite variety of marine life swims in those waters. Sometimes, I must admit, I’m not entirely sorry when a big thing gets away. It’s never the things I haven’t caught that I regret; it’s the things I didn’t get to see.
•
I have been privileged to share in the raising of a child, a boy who is now a man of 25. In the wharf years, he got turned off fishing—and who can blame him?—but more recently his interest has rekindled. Alas, we only get to go out rarely. I put him in charge of the boat, I try not to over-instruct, keep a lid on my desire to impart the lore and love of the place as well as the practical information he needs to be safe on the water.
Last Christmas Eve we fished the Hole together, and I caught a fish I thought I’d never catch: a jewfish. We yelled and hooted that day too. At three-quarters of a metre long, it was magnificent. An eyeful of silver. The mythic made material. I wished I could ring up Uncle Clive and tell him all about it, but he had died twelve months before.
I badly want to give my shared boy my own deep love of this place, because I know what comfort it can bring. To be steadied by that enduring core is to always be protected, but I know it can’t just be bestowed. It must be lived.
I am a writer for whom words are usually scarce. I find them mesmerising: beautiful, strange, powerful things that take trouble to marshal. They tantalise, sometimes presenting themselves, sometimes retreating. Up they come in their own good time from the channels by the sandbanks, from the leases, from the Hole.
In my life I haven’t been all that good at being around people. So when I’m dying it won’t be the thought of leaving the world of people that will make me sad. It will be the thought of leaving my place. But I won’t be frightened while I wait to go, I hope, because I will call up the watery paths of my childhood, of my life, and see everything in clearest detail. In my mind I’ll walk the track past Shackleton’s house down to Rileys, stopping at the ants’ nest and pausing at the web of a St Andrew’s Cross spider. I’ll feel again the stippled texture of a pop-weed bead between my fingers; put my eye to a knothole in the floor of the old house. I’ll sit in the Squid watching the slowing drag of the tide. That great volume of water, I always think, is like a cumbersome but magic wardrobe that must be dragged in and out of the same room several times a day according to a silent schedule.
Away it will slip, under me.
Dear shared boy, always remember that flash of silver in the deep. To live, even in the midst of love, is a lonesome business; but that quickening—the surprise of the marvellous glimpsed—keeps us going.
Things Seen
When Uncle Ev came back from the First World War there was something wrong with him. I don’t think we kids were ever told quite what it was, but somehow we understood. It was shell shock, bad dreams, drink. But there was urgency to it. The kind of unspecified wrongness which Ev had brought back was terrible and dangerous, came close to taking his life.
Uncle Ev wasn’t my uncle, he was Uncle Clive’s uncle, so no family relation of mine, but Uncle Ev and I were connected by place. That’s why, though the story of Uncle Ev was set two generations back in time, and about people I didn’t know and would never meet, I paid attention.
It was Uncle Ev’s father who came to the rescue. He quit his job and took his grown-up son away to camp in the bush at Rileys Bay on the Brisbane Water for however long it would take for him to get better. I don’t know how he convinced him to go. Was subterfuge involved? Was it almost a kidnapping? Did Uncle Ev not care enough to refuse? The father left behind his wife and a comfortable home and the network of duties and ties that was his daily life: from all those roles and tasks he unhooked himself, in order to concentrate on one.
Why did the father bring him here, to this locale, particularly? Did someone suggest it, had the father been here before? I have no idea.
They probably travelled up by train to Woy Woy. But once arrived, they had to cross the estuary. The ferry service was regular in those days, calling in to isolated wharves on the bush side, as well as looping between patches of settlement on the populated western shore of the waterway. So while the father might have made do without a boat, to have one would have been better, a rowboat they could fish from and which they could pull up to the little beach at Rileys.
The hillside where they camped was steep—is steep—and thickly wooded, though dotted through with outcrops of rock. It folds around the bay, on windless winter afternoons throwing the shadow of itself far forward to turn the water glossy black, the jet of Edwardian mourning jewellery, liquid reflections precisely cut.
The wail of the distant train would have come over to them, piercing the quiet at timetabled intervals, but otherwise they lived with nature’s sounds: abundant birds, the occasional splash of a fish.
I have no details of how it went, what form Ev’s behaviour took, what the father did to assist his son when days or nights were bad. I imagine Ev filling his hands once more with tools that made sense: the handle of an axe; a pair of oars. Doing what hands are better off doing, as opposed to holding guns. That, I imagine, would help—the practice of simple chores. But that’s the thing. I imagine. I do not know. How long did they stay? Six months, a year?
The story has only a few known truths. In that quiet and beautiful place, removed but still within sight of society across the water, Ev got better—or better enough to return to the city. A father’s love and patience had saved his son.
The brevity and unadorned simplicity of the Uncle Ev story are its strengths. But because it’s so short it’s almost not a story. It’s hard to situate. What reason is there to tell it outside a family gathering, or as a fleeting aside to a historical description of place? If the Ev story was a piece of music there would be silence at the beginning and end, giving it the extra space it needs to breathe to be its fullest self, time for the listener to sit with it a moment, and bring something of theirs to it.
Once, as a way of sharing the story, I might have tried to fictionalise it, plumping it up with drama, in the process destroying the spareness I admire.
•
Hidden at the back of the bookcase in the lounge room of our holiday house, behind volumes I judge to be of least interest to the strangers who sometimes rent the cottage, is a small notebook. To put it there is a risk. I put it there, in that semi-public place, not to invite the entries of others (as some casual finder might mistakenly think) but so it is handy, so I will remember to use it—I hope for many years. I wish I had started it earlier.
On the first page is the heading: Things Seen.
The notebook as first conceived was to be a list of living things seen in the area. It seemed likely that over time the diversity of the nature of this small place would prove to be quite remarkable. There would be pleasure when reviewing the evidence in the future.
I started off putting dates to entries because knowing the time of year a thing was once noticed might alert one to seeing it again. But I am mindful of a downside and the protocol may have to be modified. What if I am reading the notebook one day and realise that something delightful, once encountered periodically, has not been spotted for years? Already I think of the hordes of soldier crabs that once occupied the mudflats near the church. It’s more than likely I’ll be an old lady holding the book with shaking, sun-cancered hands, turning page after page, crying.
Perhaps better not to put down years.
Only months.
I am careful when I add an entry not to be noticed by family members either, because I don’t want to be self-conscious about what I write and I don’t want to have to rebuff anyone’s suggestions for inclusions, especially as any such suggestions would undoubtedly be made with much kindness and enthusiasm. Diversity is interesting, but it’s not the whole point of the notebook. If it was the whole point, why would I mind the contribution of others? No. T
his is a list of things I have seen.
The importance of the book is as an aide-memoire. For each creature listed—on the page only a couple of words, little more than a noun or two—there’s a detailed picture in my head. And not only that—attached to each mental image is the feeling of the experience I had of seeing.
So the list itself is bald:
The fairy penguin.
The dead sea snake at the beach.
The turtle swimming at the corner of the oyster lease.
But the notebook is a path to their re-creation. To renewed pleasure. To revisited wonder. To the intake of breath in that moment when my brain understood what my eyes were seeing.
For example: The leatherjacket.
Down at the extension wharf on a day when the water was preternaturally green and clear, I was watching the current and the graceful drag and sway of a long strand of sargassum weed attached to a piling when, by a small movement, the shape of a fish, a large leatherjacket, became discernible. It had been there all the time, feeding at the base of the weed, perfectly camouflaged in its patterned skin of antique lace, delicate fawns and browns.
As the water pushed the weed in dreamy pulses, the fins of the fish fluttered and trilled.
The leatherjacket.
•
If anyone understood the inerasable power of personal witness, it was Goya. He even put it into words. Yo lo vi, he wrote as the caption under the aquatint numbered Plate 44 in his 82-plate series, The Disasters of War, created during the Peninsular War, when the French invaded and occupied Spain between 1808 and 1814. ‘I saw it.’
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