Salt Story

by Drummond, Sarah

  This season the three commercial fishers took turns to net near the river mouth. It’s the most lucrative set in the inlet, catching the fish as they swim into the estuary from the river at night. Samwise had the river mouth that night. The next night was Grievous’ turn. Grievous only came out on the nights he had the river mouth.

  ‘He’ll be here at...’ Bullet looked at his watch, ‘five to five. That’s the earliest he’s allowed to set. Then he’ll drive the one-fifty back to Albany, boat and all. He’ll come back about two in the morning to pick up. Fuckin’ full-on bloke, Grievous. Thought he’d chucked the shits with us the first time he took the boat back to town after setting. But then Samwise said he was going out in the Sound at night to check his leatherie traps.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he said,’ Samwise nodded.

  Samwise woke me at four thirty the next morning. Through the window of the tent, he said, ‘You up, Sarah?’

  He was down at the water’s edge, bailing out his tinny by the time I got my act together. I dodged through the paperbarks. Branches dragged at my hair. The moon was gone and Scorpio flexed its tail over the western sky.

  ‘Bullet won’t be up for a while yet,’ Samwise said.

  He gestured for me to climb into the boat while it lay ashore, so my feet didn’t get wet. He and Bullet and Salt all do this. Then he pushed off and leapt in, poling with the oar out to deep enough water to let the propeller down.

  The river mouth worked all right. Samwise bent over the gunwale as each fat bream appeared, golden like a huge water sovereign, and grabbed them before they fell out of the mesh. He squeezed some fish through the mesh or worked the mono backwards over their gills, holding the fish against his body. Mullet thumped into the bins, thudding their tails against the side in protest. He had one bin for bream and another for mullet. The mullet were huge, nearly as big as Australian salmon. Their gills were often bloodied by the net. Their loose scales fell onto the deck. The eyes of the bream turned downwards.

  The little boat, emptied of all its nets overnight, began to fill again. The aluminium insides were stained with mullet oil, algae, seaweed and red gravel dust. ‘This ol’ girl,’ said Samwise. ‘I’ve been using this boat for twenty years now. Never had another boat, could do with another motor though. Always got oars in me boat.’ The questionable two-stroke was covered in splatterings of seaweed and slime from the nets. It rocked back and forth as it chugged along. I told him I feel the same way about oars, no matter the motor. When we got to the next net he turned off the motor and used the net to keep the boat in place.

  There were a few cobbler and some leatherjackets. And a tailor. Samwise cleaned them on the quiet beach below their camp, surrounded in sculptural red boulders. Pelicans came in for their daily feed, nosing through the paperbarks and waddling up the yellow sand. He threw them the heads and guts. They rolled the cobbler heads around in their beak sacs until they had the spines lying down. Then they swallowed them. I’ve seen old pelicans with so many holes in their beak sacs from being spiked that they look like colanders.

  The twins carried their boxes of fish up the hill to the camp where the ute was parked. The boxes were thirty kilograms, or forty if full of cobbler tails. They each laid out their fish neatly in a six-hundred-litre icebox, counting their catch. Bullet shovelled crushed, salted ice over the top, smoothed it out. He fitted the lid and taped it down with masking tape.

  All this time, their conversation was that of brothers working, or people who have spent many years working together. Their sentences were abbreviated, respectful but truncated, agreeably surmised. Quick words, said quietly. A question would answer itself. It was obvious that these words did not involve me but it was a pleasant sound as the twins readied the bins of fish for the Perth trucks, their words like a birdsong, waves breaking, a radio playing somewhere close by.

  Samwise got out of his waders, threw them over the washing line and disappeared into the gloom of the caravan. When he came out, he was wearing his good black jeans and a clean t-shirt. He shook my hand shyly. His hands were short and strong, his wrists thickened with old muscle. He got into the ute and left for town. It was about seven thirty in the morning and normally, I would be having my first cup of coffee.

  ‘He’ll fish at Wilson’s tonight,’ Bullet said. ‘Hey. You said you wanted to go into Bremer to buy some camera film. I was thinking of doing a drive through there and over to Dillon Bay. Bit of a look around. Wanna come?’

  SHACKLANDS

  Bullet stopped in at the Bremer Bay servo and bought some bread rolls. We crossed the bar at the river mouth and he drove a fisherman’s dodgem through the peppermints. His four-wheel drive sounded like a Sherman tank as it chugged through the gears. On the back tray, the dogs grabbed at branches flying by.

  We passed a few other four-wheel drives towing camper trailers. Then the ute slewed through the sandhills until Bullet pulled up on the hard, windswept sand of the next inlet’s bar. A flock of plovers rose away from the water in unison as the dogs galumphed about. They settled just as fast, as soon as the dogs swaggered away.

  ‘This is the Gordon,’ Bullet said. ‘We go fishing here sometimes. Mullet, mostly.’ A rough tin shack sat beside the track, ‘Whale Villa’ spray-painted across the corrugated walls. Inside, the floor was black sand and there was a wire bed with no mattress perched in one corner. Someone had scratched into the windowpane, ‘Save a whale, harpoon a fat chick.’

  ‘I’ll show you some more shacks, yeah?’

  We spent the next five hours driving the beaches, the white sand so fine it squealed beneath the tyres, and cutting across rocky headlands into banksia scrub and black sand. On each remote beach, at the end of another perilous track, there was a shack. Working with a necessity-being-the-mother-of-invention ethos and a rough but perversely finetuned sense of aesthetics, commercial fishers have been building shacks along this coast for generations. They built them with corrugated iron and timber, perched on the edge of beaches, the windows viewing to where the whales loll around and salmon flock into the turquoise bays. Inside every shack there is a kerosene fridge. A rusted half-tonne monster carted out there in the 1940s or ’50s, it is likely that the fridges will be there long after the shacks have disintegrated. Some of the fireplace chimneys have been fashioned from corrugated iron and house ancient Metters stoves or potbellies made from welded brake drums. Behind all the fishing shacks are verdant patches and great fig trees vivid against the grey-green hues of the coastal scrub. Ahh. The septic tank.

  Some of the fishing shacks were built by farmers or anglers but most are commercial salmon fishing shacks on government leases. These shacks are tangible family trees of south coast fishing families. The list of names tenanting these rusted spider homes makes up that briny heritage. As is every commercial fisher’s wont, Bullet was disdainful of the shack dwellers who weren’t fisher blue bloods. ‘They don’t pay any lease fees and then they lock them up so no other bugger can use them. They’ll all get knocked down one day when the council chucks the shits and then all the commercials’ shacks will get knocked down too.’

  We stopped for lunch at Whalebone Beach, just past the stone well that Matthew Flinders’ men dug in 1802. Bullet showed me the memorial site of an Aboriginal child and another little cairn created in honour of a fisherman’s uncle. A track lined with the skulls and vertebrae of whales led from the beach to a large shed nestled into the sand dunes.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road.’ Bullet led me up a little path made of yellow pavers and coral to a whalebone throne on top of the sand dune. He sat down on the sun-bleached bone and then stood up and shuffled his thongs. ‘Sit. Try it out.’

  I sat. I could see the roof of the shack and the huge rainwater tanks, then out to the East and West Barrens, a dark necklace of mountains that looked like they forced their way out of the earth just yesterday. A chalk-white beach, the clearest of turquoise water and the deeper ultramarine blue of the seagrass beds – all this in a perfect curve that
went on for miles and miles.

  We walked back down the track. Bullet pointed out the succulent gardens and stopped by a profusion of smoky green cotyledons by the rainwater tank. ‘They had amazing flowers this year. Bright yellowy orange.’

  I realised he must have spent a fair bit of time at this place. ‘Oh, yeah. I stay here when I’m squidding for days or weeks if the squid are any good. Old Heberle is fine with me looking after the place. I was here a few weeks ago when those flowers were out. Musta been thirty whales outside my door every day. There was an old bloke here too, staying in the shed. He was a bit weird with me being here at first. He had depression or something. Doctor wouldn’t give him any drugs. Told him to come out here for three weeks. Wasn’t too happy when I rocked up but he got used to me.’

  It was about thirty degrees. The horizon began to haze up with faraway wildfire smoke. The dogs were thirsty. Bullet poured some water into a honey pail for them and Digger bullied the other dog away until he slaked his thirst.

  ‘I like to work in different places. Come out here for a while squidding, then I head out to Wilson’s or Pallinup. Get some bream, go sharking out at Doubtful Island. Crabbin’ ... Samwise, he just goes to Wilson’s every night. He’s a bit different to me.’

  ‘Where else do you catch shark?’

  ‘Oh, Muttonbird, Haul Off Rock, Torbay, Groper Bluff, off Waychinicup, Cheynes, Bremer ... everywhere, everywhere.’

  He opened the door to the shack. Inside, the concrete floors had been recently swept and someone had left a ‘thanks for letting us stay’ note and some candles on the wood stove. Bullet nodded. Two kerosene fridges stood side by side. I imagined the split windscreen blitz trucks from the war grinding through the Australian bush, carrying whole families, building materials, nets, tractors, boats and those fridges, out to the salmon camp.

  Bullet felt protective over this shack. Someone had forced the lock to the ‘master bedroom’ and, even though no damage was done, ‘It just annoys the crap outta me,’ he said. ‘People should respect this place.’

  Bullet took the makings out of his esky and laid it out on the laminate table. Sliced cheese, a whole cooked chook, tomatoes, the fresh bread rolls, lettuce, butter, salt and pepper. A bottle of chilled lime cordial. The dogs lay on the concrete and panted, tongues lolling.

  Six shacks and three swims later, we rolled back into the camp at Pallinup. The dogs were too exhausted by then to rouse each other up. They flopped down under a tree and swept the flies off their bodies with their tails. The hazy horizon that Bullet had commented on earlier turned foggy with smoke. The wind turned suddenly around to the sou’-east. The sky was orange and a fierce, gusting gale whipped up the waters of the inlet.

  At five to five it was time to set nets. Grievous and another man drove into the camp with the boat clanking on the trailer behind them, the car stereo blaring out Bryan Adams. Grievous waved out his open window to me. ‘Gidday, Sarah!’

  He backed down to the water, jumped out of the ute and pushed the boat off the rollers. Then he and Bullet worked out where they were setting while Grievous’ quiet mate looked on. The wind blew up even madder and the sky was full of smoke. The river mouth was the hardest set because of the wind direction but it would also be the most productive and there was no way Grievous was going to miss out on that. He’d just had to detour an extra fifty kilometres around the fires at Bluff Creek.

  His mate said, ‘I think I’ll stay on shore.’ Everyone laughed.

  I said, ‘I think I will too.’

  ‘Carn Sarah,’ said Grievous. ‘I’ve seen you out in worse.’

  ‘I’m a mere tourist today, Grievous.’

  Bullet took off for the lee side of the estuary, churning an olive wake behind him. Grievous got into his wet-weather gear. His mate and I watched him head into the river mouth. Water and wind can chuck up some nasty surprises on an inlet but Grievous is beautiful to watch in a boat, lithe and graceful. He shouldered the dinghy into the waves and started throwing the nets into the murky chop, only stopping to steer the boat against the wind.

  As I fell asleep that night I heard a flock of swans fly over, singing to each other. I heard Grievous return in the greasy night, about two o’clock, talking to his deckie as they passed my tent. I heard them launch the dinghy and start the motor. The wake chattered against Bullet’s aluminium dinghy on the shore.

  When I woke again, it was Bullet. ‘You up, Sarah?’

  The morning was red all over from the smoke hanging in the sky. A molten sun climbed over the sandbar. Bullet hauled in nets in the shelter of the paperbark trees. Their ghostly figures danced against the ochre cliffs and grey green forests. A sea eagle watched us from her paperbark eyrie.

  ‘You’ve got a pelican in the net,’ I said.

  ‘Nah,’ said Bullet. ‘Never happens.’

  He screwed up his sleepy face. ‘Hang on. It does. I know who that is.’

  It looked like a stump or a stake in the water and there are plenty of those in the inlet. Plenty of pelicans too.

  ‘But this guy is sick. He’s got a hole in his neck and he’s a bit desperate. If the poor bugger tries to swallow a fish in the net and gets the net too, he won’t be able to throw it up again. That’s what’s happened.’

  Bullet pulled fish out of the net and dropped them into the box. We drew closer to the pelican.

  ‘Samwise’s got an injured pelican at Wilson’s that he looks after,’ Bullet said. ‘He calls him Wobbles cos he’s got a busted wing. He feeds him every day, makes sure he gets some fish ahead of the others.’

  The pelican looked weak and didn’t struggle as the boat got closer. It was so still I wondered if it had died. Its beak and wings were wound up in the net, so it looked like an ungainly giraffe trying to drink.

  We pulled up alongside. ‘You’ll have to grab ’im. I’ll get the fish out.’

  The bird had a large gash on one side of its neck and the wound must have gone right through to its throat because a small black bream clad in nylon fishing net poked through the bloody hole.

  I held the bird’s wings and beak and felt its heart bleating as Bullet quickly yanked out the fish. I thought he was quite brutal until I realised how much pain and distress I would have caused faffing about, trying to be gentle.

  He untangled the fish from the mesh and chucked it in the water. ‘Don’t wanna keep that one.’

  ‘But it’s already cooked!’

  He pulled away the nets from the pelican’s legs and sat it on the water, gently as if it were a baby. We watched it paddle slowly away.

  ‘Poor bugger needs a bullet,’ said Bullet.

  The sea eagle hadn’t moved, had watched the whole rescue.

  MY LIFE IN MAY

  Slow windless, misty rain.

  Wintergrass. The mice move in and the snakes go underground.

  Ocean flattens into frosted glass.

  Grevillea flowers unfurl and leaves begin to fall from deciduous trees.

  Sunglasses and beanie all day.

  School busses return from ferrying the farm kids home, headlights on.

  There is a swirling web of change around me, this May. Moving house ... an angler begins a popular campaign to stop us fishing Oyster Harbour ... a friend is dying (fast), crucified with pain ... another diagnoses his own cancer and contemplates the various ways he can suicide and arranges for me to look after his dog, then gets the All Clear and goes fishing instead.

  I wake at fiveish on the floor of the fishing shack, to the roar of a dark ocean.

  It is cold. I’m about to get wet. It is always a hard moment placing my bare feet on gravel, in the water, on the metal chequer plate deck of the boat.

  At Irwin Inlet, the hills blackened and steaming with the burning-off fires, we push the boat over the shallows of weed that remind me of waving sheoak needles. Aboard, we punt with the oars for a hundred metres before I can lower the prop and fire up.

  As soon as I get the outboard going, I wouldn’t be anywhere
else in the world. We motor through the channel, marked out by grey sticks with ice-cream container plastic nailed to them. Sun creeps over the hills and spreads across the water.

  Salt deals with the cobbler.

  The inlet has a skin of quicksilver.

  Mullet.

  NAILS’ NETS

  In the hour before dawn at Irwin’s Inlet, the black swans lead their young across the water. There are not enough words to name the shades of silver here. The swan voices drift across the silky inlet. If I were here long enough, I would learn the language of the inlet: the birds mapping the fishing grounds with their calls; the reeds and the tiger snakes and the silt and the mullet all speaking to each other.

  Jordie, Nails and Unruly had been setting there for weeks, while Salt and I fished Oyster Harbour, so we were the newbies. This evening they had started early by just a few minutes. There were nets everywhere. Salt looked longingly towards the northern end but decided not to risk it.

  Jordie motored over to our boat. ‘Gidday Salt. Just thought I’d let you know where my gear is.’ He made various complicated squiggly gestures with his hands to explain the fine cartography of his nets over the huge body of water. His motor was still running. Salt is so deaf by now that he just looked at Jordie’s talking face and nodded regularly to show he understood.

  ‘Where did he say his gear was?’ Salt asked me, once Jordie had roared off, headed west and then folded into the forest, up the river to hide his boat overnight.

  We set the nets with the easterly blowing the boat across the water and drifted near some tea-tree markers.

  ‘There’s a channel coming up.’

  ‘Yeah. Just stay off the bank. That’ll be where the Kent River comes out.’

  I began to stress about setting the nets across the river mouth but Salt didn’t care. ‘Some bastard always runs into this net. That’s why it’s the Irwin’s net. Always in fuckin’ bits.’