The Forgotten Islands
Page 23
Then a change came over me. I decided, somewhere near the top, my lungs wheezing, that I would not rush back along the path. It came to me like a minor revelation: come what may, I would accept my fate. I had waited most of my life to visit this place, and rushing would dishonour it. Time, I felt sure, moved at its own pace here, and it was not within my, nor anyone’s, power to bend it to my will. If I was destined to be left behind, to remain here, even as an uninvited guest of the island’s kindly caretakers, so be it.
From that moment, the journey became surprisingly easy. I reached the ridge and wound my way back through the trees. Some unexplainable test I felt had been presented to me, and I had somehow passed. Now, as my reward, the time was mine to savour this wonderful place as I chose.
I arrived back at the caretaker’s cottage as nonchalantly as possible. And as though time had indeed found a way to hold off during my adventure to the cove, there stood Penny outside the cottage, watching the antics of a gaggle of large grey Cape Barren geese. Her greeting told me in an instant that my absence had not even been noted. ‘Good walk?’ she said, smiling.
‘Excellent, excellent,’ I replied as if I’d just strolled to the other end of the paddock and back. No one else seemed be around. The lighthouse boys had headed off in a group to inspect the remains of the horse-drawn whim, once used to haul loads up from the jetty below, and were due back soon.
I could relax. Inside the house, I even had time to savour the last of the tea from a battered metal pot in the kitchen. I turned towards the window so Penny could not see how urgently I savoured every drop, then filled and refilled a tumbler of exquisite water, cool and sweet, from the rainwater tank.
Between gulps, I made aimless conversation with Penny, but was vague and still heady with the drama of the afternoon. Despite my adventure, I knew I was, in reality, no closer to discovering the truth of Ron’s old story about the missing boy he had told me all those years ago and now, here on Deal Island where it had all supposedly taken place, I sensed I never would be. Perhaps, though, I had been missing the point.
I had pursued a myth to its source, and felt now that its restless voice was finally being stilled, or rather released from within, having served its purpose: propelling me through an odyssey, tantalising me with a treasure – the question of its truth. The real treasure, however, I now realised, had been the journey itself, and the discovery of the small but wonderful world of Bass Strait and its enigmatic islands.
Outside some exquisite finches, Beautiful Firetails, darted in and out of the bushes which had grown to absorb an old wire fence. Across the way, the lighthouse folk were returning from their expedition still in their tight-knit bunch, their chatter travelling faintly across the ridge overlooking the cove. I walked out into the late afternoon air and, peering over the edge, I could see James preparing his Strait Lady for our homeward voyage. In the lowering sun, it still appeared to be floating on air.
Erith and Dover islands lay in front of me, the low spit of the swashway between them soon to be drowned on the incoming tide. If I moved a little to the left, Judgement Rocks – famous for its large seal colony – could be seen just off Deal’s northern edge; behind it, the Curtis Group of islands formed a line receding into the late afternoon light. Other rocks and islands arced away to the north, tracing the top of the ancient mountain range that stretches back to the Victorian coast, just visible as a pale and distant water-colour backdrop.
An impressive sight it certainly was, but tinged with a note of frustration: these were just some of the many islands whose rocky flanks beckoned but which, for now at least, remained beyond my reach.
Yet, I felt at that moment, looking out across the water from Deal Island, a subtle shift take place within, a small but definite realisation that for the first time, I had a sense of these islands, of this place, as if sufficient patches of a darkened tapestry had at last been illuminated for me to finally see what it was I was looking at.
Behind me I knew to be the mighty peaks of Flinders Island; ahead the stony edifices of Rodondo and Skull Rock; and somewhere over to my left, way beyond sight, the jagged shores of King, and the beautiful beaches of Three Hummock Island, where I had climbed the magical sand dune and seen the ancient middens with Robert and Chris and Kate.
I could not say I knew them. Wild places such as these, I suspect, would always be unknowable. But at least I now had a sense that they were there. This trip through Bass Strait and its islands had felt like one day discovering a door to a room in your house you never knew existed. Come back the next day, though, and that door might not be there at all, tantalising you with the dream-like memories of magical islands in the sea.
The steep track up to The Nut at Stanley. Getting up was hard. Going down was harder.
A typical morning in Stanley as the town comes to life.
Eleanor’s Beach on Three Hummock Island: a magical spot named after the mother of my guide Robert. (ROBERT ALLISTON)
Chris taught me more about granite than I ever thought I would learn. Part of Three Hummock’s naturally sculpted coast.
‘I looked back, knowing that not a soul was to be found anywhere among it.’ The enigmatic landscape of Three Hummock Island. (ROBERT ALLISTON)
About to embark on Sea Snake II. Don’t let the wet-weather gear fool you. It was all downhill from here.
The sun went down and the storm and seasickness rolled in.
The storm lifted to reveal the rock stack of Devil’s Tower, with the mystical Rodondo behind.
The Sea Snake’s broken mast: a forlorn sight as we limped back across the strait.
The Strzelecki Range on Flinders Island – a landscape that brought to mind the Scottish Highlands.
From Leedham Walker’s plane during an impromptu flight. One of Flinders Island’s quiet little bays.
The desolate cemetery at Wybalenna, Flinders Island.
The deadly reef at King Island which, barely a hundred metres from the shore, took the lives of 400 people in Australia’s worst shipwreck, the Cataraqui, in 1845.
A sequence taken over just seconds as a storm thundered in across Flinders’ rugged south-west.
The lighthouse at Cape Wickham, King Island – Australia’s tallest.
All that remains of the Cataraqui – her anchor, preserved in a forgotten corner of King Island.
Swan Island, sandwiched between Flinders and Tasmania’s north-east coast.
The strange, almost alien landscape of remote Steep Island in Bass Strait’s west.
Bass Strait’s changeable weather rolls over Deal Island. (DAVID REYNOLDS)
The Deal Island light, built in 1848. (DAVID REYNOLDS)
The spectacular bluff of Deal from the air. (JOHN IBBOTSON)
Virtually all that remains of the Karitane, her winch. Squally Cove, Deal Island. (DAVID REYNOLDS)
The two Cheetah engines from the Oxford trainer aircraft that crashed on Deal in 1943, killing its four student airmen.
Erith Island and the swashway, seen from Deal Island. (DAVID REYNOLDS)
Deal’s resilient Cape Barren geese. ‘They’re just like people,’ the caretaker told me. (DAVID REYNOLDS)
Part of Deal’s rocky escarpment. (TRAUTI REYNOLDS)
The end of my quest: the little cove on Deal where the story may or may not have happened.
EPILOGUE
THE SQUID LADY
Liz knew more about the giant squid than practically anyone alive and, at times, even resembled one. Not in a direct physical way, of course: the Senior Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the prestigious Museum of Tasmania was a perfectly presentable-looking woman and her manners were never less than patient, accommodating, even charming. Certainly more than mine would have been if roles had been reversed, and she had been the stranger turning up out of the blue, taking up space in my crowded office seeking confirmation of a story about a boy being taken by cephalopod, or giant squid, on a Bass Strait island a century ago. But there was something about her, something abo
ut her eyes, some glint that occasionally seemed to catch the darkness of a place that was very deep and very cold, like the depths of a bottomless ocean. I saw it only once or twice during our talk, but it was enough to send a quiet chill running through me, despite the heat of the afternoon. The first things that caught my attention, however, were not the squids, but the spiders. She knew a lot about them too, and adorning a pile of important-looking research papers next to her printer was a large hairy eight-legged thing.
‘It’s not a real one, of course’, she assured me. ‘Those are at home.’ (A collection of freeze-dried tarantulas – genuine ones – apparently adorn a corner of her living room.) ‘I keep one on the back of the bathroom door. Just to amuse people.’ I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
Liz has had many encounters with the giant squid over the years, being involved in the recovery of and research into the few examples of this elusive creature found washed up on beaches or caught in trawlers’ nets. For centuries, they were the stuff of legend, the kraken, the giant octopus, the attacker of ships, said to be the size of a small island with the power to drag a warship to the bottom of the ocean, but no live example had ever been seen. Then in 2005 the first photographs of giant squids, taken at the depths where they live, were released to an astonished world.
‘They’re amazing creatures,’ said Liz, in a low, slightly gravelly voice, and a little of that unsettling glint. ‘So huge. Eighteen metres long and 250 kilograms.’ She leant forward in her chair. ‘Their suckers are jagged … like sharks’ teeth … each one rotates on a kind of ball, so then when they come to grab something … krumpf!’ and she made a sudden sucking noise, clamping her hands together like a vice, then made that smile again and leant back. ‘Amazing creatures …’
‘So …’ I asked, trying to bring things back to the basics, ‘they’re not just little squids that have, you know … gotten bigger?’ She blinked.
‘The family Architeuthidae. They are a definite species on their own.’ She paused and then said slowly, ‘They have the biggest eye of any creature in the world.’
Given that Liz seemed so enamoured of these animals, I decided, for one final time, to tell the story about the boy on Deal Island and his grizzly demise. Having told it dozens of times in places far and wide, on boats, in pubs and cafes, around open fires and at airport terminals, I suspected this really would be the last time I rolled out Ron’s dark old tale. I set the scene brilliantly, adding colourful details of people and places, even taking on the roles of the boy and lighthouse-keeper, complete with accents, and ending with a flourish, followed by a dramatic hush.
Liz said nothing at first, then cleared her throat. ‘That’s … a very interesting story.’
‘So,’ I went on, my turn this time to lean forward in the chair. ‘Do you, in your professional opinion, think it is possible that this boy was taken by one of the er, Architeuthidae family – a giant squid, from the rocks on Deal Island that day?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘No,’ she continued. ‘For the simple reason that they simply do not, indeed cannot, live anywhere near the surface. The species Architeuthidae sp., as we call the giant squid, is found at depths of great pressure, from around 750 metres to a kilometre down. Examples that have been brought up in nets have simply blown up as the pressure decreases. One Japanese boat recorded that a squid they caught was still moving slightly when they brought it to the surface, but was dead within minutes. Bass Strait is, what, 60 metres or so deep? They just couldn’t survive there. The pressure would kill them. It’s the reverse of what happens when we go to great depths – their muscles and organs are crushed by the lower pressure as they approach the surface.’
I took all this in for a moment.
‘So, no chance at all then?’
‘None at all.’
‘Have any giant squid ever been found in Bass Strait?’
‘Off New Zealand in very deep ocean trenches, certainly, but in Bass Strait, to my knowledge, no.’
‘Not even one?’
‘Not even one.’
I tried a different tack. ‘Has any person, anywhere in the world, at any time, ever been known to have been taken by a giant squid?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘What about all those scary nineteenth-century lithographs of giant squids attacking ships?’
‘They are nonsense.’
‘What about giant octopuses?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Giant octopuses. Could it have been a giant octopus?’
‘There is no such thing as giant octopuses.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. They are a fallacy,’ she said. And then quite slowly and deliberately, ‘I fear that your story is not founded on scientific fact.’
I left and thanked her for her time, thinking that I should probably be feeling a little crestfallen having had the premise of my saga shot down completely in flames. But in fact, I didn’t really mind. Ron, after all, was never one for telling the truth. But he could tell a fine story.
VIKING
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011
Text copyright © Michael Veitch 2011
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ISBN: 978-1-74-253395-7