Salt Story Read online

  First published 2013 by

  FREMANTLE PRESS

  25 Quarry Street, Fremantle 6160

  (PO Box 158, North Fremantle 6159)

  Western Australia

  www.fremantlepress.com.au

  Also available in a print edition.

  Copyright © Sarah Drummond, 2013

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Consultant editor Georgia Richter

  Cover design Ally Crimp

  Cover photograph istockphoto, franckreporter

  Maps Chris Crook, Country Cartographics

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Drummond, Sarah, author.

  Salt Story: of sea-dogs and fisherwomen/Sarah Drummond.

  ISBN: 9781922089076 (ebook)

  Small-scale fisheries—Western Australia—Great Southern Region—Anecdotes.

  Fishers—Western Australia—Great Southern Region.

  Women in fisheries—Western Australia—Great Southern Region.

  Great Southern Region (W.A.)—Social life and customs.

  305.96392099412

  Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts. Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A NOTE REGARDING MAPS

  SAME TRIBE AS ME (AN INTRODUCTION)

  SALT

  MAST ER’S APPRENTICE

  THE NET THAT DOESN’T CATCH ANYTHING

  SELECTIVE HEARING

  BREATH OF THE WORLD...

  IT’S NOT ALL HALCYON NIGHTS AT SEA

  THE EASTERLY OF MY DISCONTENT

  WASHERWOMAN, FISHERWOMAN

  THE ART OF SEA-DOGGERY

  WHILE WE WAITED

  NIGHT OFF

  OH, ’TIS MY DELIGHT, ON A SHINY NIGHT...

  NO JOB FOR A SOBER MAN

  BAIE DE DEUX PEUPLES

  BEACH SEINING FOR GARDIES AT PEACEFUL BAY

  SHIT SHOT

  DOGS OF THE SEA AND OTHER ANIMALS

  FINGER FOOD

  MAN BITES SHARK BITES DOG

  SEAL MEDLEY

  WAITING FOR BARDOT

  ARCHIVAL SONGSTERS OF PELAGIA

  MOUNTAIN MAN, THE FUGITIVE AND THE WHALES

  BREATHING AWAY THE MACHINE

  WAY, WAY WAYCHINICUP

  WHALE TRACKS

  HOW TO EAT FISH

  SMOKED PALLINUP MULLET

  DEVOURING THE DODO

  ANOTHER FISH AND BICYCLE YARN

  THE SALMON ARE HERE

  ARRIPIS TRUTTA

  MIRRONG, MUGIL, MULLET

  AND THEN THERE WAS AN OCTOPUS

  STINGRAY STEAK

  HOW TO FEED A FISHERMAN

  OF HARBOUR AND INLET

  GONDWANA MER

  PALLINUP

  GRIEVOUS AND THE BLUNTY BOYS

  SHACKLANDS

  MY LIFE IN MAY

  NAILS’ NETS

  MONSTERS AND FIRE FAERIES

  DAMN THE BANKS

  AND THEN THEY TALKED ABOUT THE CRABS

  FISH HEAD

  TONIGHT

  LEGENDS

  JOLLY AND HIS BOY

  A GUY THING

  HIS DAD

  THE FLATHEAD PATCH

  PRINCESS ROYAL PRICK

  SUPER FISHERIES OFFICER GUY

  GOOD FRIDAY

  PETTY SESSIONS

  YOUR FLARES ARE OUT OF DATE, SIR.

  INTERVIEW WITH THE FISHERWOMAN, MS MER

  TOUGH GUY

  CAN’T KILL HIM WITH AN AXE

  OYSTERMEN

  PORTRAIT

  INTERVIEW WITH A FISHERWOMAN 2

  BEGINNING THE CONCLUSION

  GAFFER-TAPED WADERS

  SARAH AND THE POET

  AVALON

  REFERENCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Great Southern

  Kinjarling (King George Sound and surrounds)

  A NOTE REGARDING MAPS

  Older or local names of places that do not appear on these maps, or appear under another name include: Brook’s Inlet (Broke Inlet); Casey’s Beach (adjacent to Nanarup); Cathedral Rock (at Windy Harbour); Irwin’s (Irwin Inlet), Floodgates (adjacent to Torbay Inlet and Muttonbird Beach); the Gordon (Gordon Inlet); Kinjarling (King George Sound and surrounds); Pallinup (the Beaufort, Beaufort Inlet, Pallinup Estuary); Possum Point (in Irwin Inlet); Seal Rock (adjacent to Point King); Skippy Reef (off Possession Point); Wilson’s, the Wilson (Wilson Inlet); Whalebone Beach (Doubtful Island Bay).

  SALT

  He was burly and sad and smelled vaguely of mutton. He handed me an apple and talked about fish. ‘They’re not real salmon, y’know. That was Captain Cook’s fault. He thought they looked a bit like a salmon and the name stuck. They’re really a kind of overgrown herring.’

  The old fisherman looked to me for a response. Folds of skin nearly obscured his eyes and scabby cancers colonised his nose. ‘You eat an apple just like I do.’

  ‘Core and all?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t those seeds taste good?’

  Salt Story was born in the Great Southern inlets and bays of Western Australia. Initially, these tales of fisher men and women may appear to read as fragments of a day, a life–ripping yarns, beautiful lies and a few home truths. But these sixty-two pieces contribute to a living history of the estuarine and inshore fishers. Salt Story is my tribute to the beauty and fragility of the industry.

  Small-scale, inshore fishing on the wild south coast hasn’t changed much in the last century. Aluminium boats with outboard engines have replaced a lot of the wooden carvels and clinkers, and fish find their fate meshed in nylon monofilament rather than heavy cotton nets tarred with grasstree resin. Trailered boats allow fishers to work estuaries further away, for shorter hours. Once a fisherman’s whole family may have camped on the shores of Wilson Inlet for the six weeks that the mullet were running. Now he can drive out, set nets and make it home in time for dinner.

  I first met Salt when I camped by the beach and helped his salmon team seine tons of the fish into shore. A pink and whiskery bloke, wearing a beanie, a pair of jocks and a jumper that stretched over an impressive beer gut, he sat aboard an ancient tractor and towed one end of the net up the beach. The net strained against the suck of the swell, full with thrashing salmon. Men, women and children held the net upright, heading off any fish that threatened to leap out. The six or seven dogs present managed to look concerned, excited and bored, all at once. When the fish were dragged up on the beach, Salt climbed off the tractor and stepped with thorny feet through the small sharks and salmon, grabbing stingrays by their mouths and throwing them back into the surf.

  As a wayward teen, I found myself hanging around a lot of jetties and beaches. Beaches, piers and wharves reminded me of another point of arrival and departure – the roadhouses – where at night the neat red lights of the big rigs signified to me the will of a people removing themselves from housebound communities. The lot of fishermen, yachties and truckies seemed to be a purposeful shiftlessness, a nomadism that raised a middle finger to the myth of the Great Australian Suburban Dream.

  ‘You never stray far from the sea, do yer,’ said Salt, when I hatched my next project out loud. What was it again? Getting a berth on the anti-whaling crusader Sea Shepherd? Writing a biography of a Norwegian whale chaser? May
be it was my plan to head down to Antarctica with the Patagonian toothfishermen for a season.

  I have always wanted to hang out with these kinds of people. I want to understand them, to rub through the veneer of people who spend their lives on the water. I say ‘veneer’ because being away from land and then returning can produce a kind of aloofness. Land people will never understand what sea people are talking about. They are creatures from different universes.

  Back in the days when Salt was still being nice to me, he said, ‘Dunno girl. I just don’t swear around women. Never have.’

  How touching and old-fashioned, I thought.

  It’s funny how things slide. Aboard, Salt has the tongue of jellyfish tentacles. It is not a hasty generalisation to say that fishermen can swear a bit. So be warned, there is some ‘language’ in these stories.

  The places we fish are the inlets and bays of the Great Southern: Broke Inlet, Irwin’s, Pallinup Estuary or the Beaufort as it is also called, Oyster Harbour and Princess Royal Harbour, Waychinicup, Stokes, The Gordon, Wilson’s, King George Sound and Two Peoples Bay. Some of the inlets are stone bound and permanently open to the sea. Others are closed by a sandbar until it rains enough. Then the rivers rush down from high country and the sea pushes in. Sometimes people bulldoze a channel, to save their cow paddocks, their road, their fishing shack or their sea-changer from the seasonal, watery annihilation as the inlet swells into the country. The inlets tend to sit behind a mound of sand-dune country. These are fertile, furtive places, protected from the open ‘yang’ roar of the ocean and onshore winds. They often seem to have their own climate, their own little raincloud hanging in the stillness, a cooling breeze ruffling the water, the reeds dripping with moisture and threaded with tiger snakes.

  From fish traps and spears and cooking beneath the ground wrapped in paperbark, to netting the Pallinup estuary for mullet and bream and sending the fish in trucks to the Perth markets, the south coast inlets and bays hold stories about men and women within them: the fugitives, shell-shocked hermits, bird lovers and salmon-fishing families. The fishers told me stories about their ancestors, some of whom have fished this coast for five generations. They mostly work at night or in the dawn hours and tend to keep to themselves.

  Theirs is an existence which is challenged today by constant wrangles with government departments over licensing, industry reviews, and the uncertainties presented by proposed marine parks. Some south coast fishermen think of themselves as an ‘endangered species’ and, considering the social and political pressures, popular anxieties about overfishing and friction between commercial and amateur groups, it’s not an unreasonable status. In some countries the commercial fishers are a valued part of their nation’s cultural heritage but this is not always so in Australia.

  Salt Story tells of netting with Salt in a little tinny in the southern waters of Western Australia, and of some of the other fishers who work the same grounds: sea-dogs, fisherwomen, tough guys, oystermen and storytellers.

  THE NET THAT DOESN’T CATCH ANYTHING

  ‘What have we got? A brick fish!’ We haul up the house brick that holds the net to the ocean floor.

  ‘Nuffing!’ Salt shakes his head in disgust. He says it every time we pick up that brick. ‘Fuckin’ nuffing.’

  There is a legendary flathead lurking somewhere in King George Sound. I hear about it quite a lot. ‘It just ate that KG,’ Salt growls, tearing a mangled King George whiting from the mesh.

  ‘Not a stingray?’

  ‘Nah, it’s that big fuckin’ flathead. Too big to fit in the box, it is. About the size of a small crocodile but nastier.’

  If you told me the word gullible wasn’t in the dictionary, I’d have to check, secretly, later. ‘Really?’ I ask, agape. ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Seen it? It tried to chew me leg off,’ he pulls up his wet-weather pants to show me the scar. It is a terrible scar, two sets of teeth marks, scoring across to meet in the middle of his calf.

  ‘But wasn’t that a shark?’ Last time he showed me that scar, he said a dog shark had latched onto his leg and he’d had to cut off its head because, in all the excitement, the shark’s jaws locked.

  ‘Nah, that’s the other leg, girl,’ he smirked. ‘Great night at the Bremer Bay pub that night. The barmaid had to fetch the pliers onto me.’

  In the early evening, the western wind turbines slowed and then stopped.

  ‘Not far now. We’re nearly onto The Net That Doesn’t Catch Anything,’ Salt says.

  ‘It’s not so bad, that net.’

  ‘Nope. I’m cutting it off tomorrow. Forgot to do it today. Doesn’t catch anything,’ Salt says. The silver gleam of King George whiting flash into the plastic bins. ‘And it’s too shallow. Pike swim straight over the top.’ Just like that, there is a pike, then two, three, wrapped up in mesh like a rolled roast and still baring their teeth. ‘I’m gonna cut the whole lot off. It’s useless. It’s The Net That Doesn’t Catch Anything.’

  Salt has diamonds on the soles of his feet tonight, electric blue, phosphorescent diamonds.

  ‘Take me home.’ He sits amidships on the pile of nets and looks ahead as I take the tiller. Just like a working horse, it is my favourite time of day but not because I am going home. It’s nearing ten at night and the wind has dropped. We have the loveliest tub of fish for tomorrow’s market. Navigation lights – green, red, yellow, blue – blink around me. I head into the channel and feel the chill of the land. The woodchip mountain is composting, woody scented. Steam clouds the orange lights. Our crocodilian wake flickers with fire in the water.

  We never say anything during this part of the trip, not just because of the noisy two-stroke. It is that short period of absolute satisfaction that everything is right with the world.

  ‘I’m gonna get on the piss soon,’ Salt tells me at the jetty. ‘Been too good for too bloody long. I’m gonna go out and shake this town up, shake things up a bit. It’s about bloody time.’

  He’s pretty happy. He’s outfoxed that fisherman’s jinx yet again. It’s been a good night’s fishing, despite that net.

  SELECTIVE HEARING

  One of the Aunties told me that she and the grandies swam a net out at Pallinup, and caught all this sea mullet. I mentioned it to Salt and the next time he saw her, he had to ask. ‘Where’d you catch that mullet?’

  ‘Oh, over by the bar. Then we set another net, caught some more, cooked it up on the beach wrapped in paperbark.’

  ‘Which beach? What side of the bar?’ He listened intently to her directions.

  Salt has been itchy about sea mullet, seeing as the latest theory is they’ve swum up the Pallinup River where we commercial fishers are not allowed to work. So we were out on the inlet this week trying to find where this woman had caught her fish. The evening was so still and clear that as we planed across the inlet, it felt the boat wasn’t even moving, just the sky and the red cliffs moving towards us. We set two overnight nets by the paperbarks near the bar, where furtive camp fire smoke smudged the trees.

  The next morning it was raining sideways. That was the first bad thing. I kept shouting to slow down as we roared out to the nets because the rain was drilling me and I hadn’t found my sunglasses in the half-dark tent. As we hauled in the net, I began to realise we’d started at the wrong end. Salt had to start the motor again and reverse along it because the wind was blowing the boat across the net and getting everything tangled.

  I also understood that my wet-weather gear was no longer waterproof. The plastic had worn away from the lining when I’d left my pants and jacket pegged on the camp washing line during the storms. This may seem like a minor technicality but I was living in a tent at the time. Dodgy wet-weather gear in sideways rain when the nearest hot shower or clothes dryer is fifty kilometres away, is a real bastard.

  Then Salt backed into the net and bound up the prop in monofilament. You know the Conchords song ‘Business Time’? Yeah, well. It’s Whingeing Time. Six in the morning, the sun not yet wak
ened and my expletives were already spraying the deck. Salt always thinks my tantrums are very funny, so to up the entertainment, he backed into the net a second time after I’d untangled the first one from the propeller.

  It wasn’t easy in that wind to climb over the stern of the dinghy with a filleting knife between my teeth, lean into the outboard and start fiddling with strands of nylon wound tight around the prop. Plus I was no longer waterproof. (Have I mentioned I wasn’t waterproof?) Salt couldn’t do the untangling because his waterproof waders severely constricted his movements.

  ‘I know what’s going on,’ I shouted over the sleet, surf spray and other flying rhetoric. ‘You’ve got a deckie! No one else has a deckie. If you didn’t have a deckie, you’d be thinking about how to make your job easier. But no. No. You’ve got a fucking deckie.’

  He looked a bit bemused, like when he can’t hear me speaking, like when he just sees my mouth opening and shutting in the middle of a meaningless torrent of strange and vaguely humorous facial expressions. He looks like that a lot, when I start yelling.

  BREATH OF THE WORLD...

  Massive schools of flathead swarm into the harbour in November, some laden with spring roe and feasting on anything in their way. After setting some raggedy net in our special spot, I jumped ship and explored the cairn-encrusted Possession Point. Towards her rocky peak were little gardens of perfect crimson orchids in emerald moss and verticordia, that flowered pink against the granite.

  The sun began to slip away behind the wind turbine. I returned to the boat, where Salt leaned over the stern and stared into hypnotic depths. We drank coffee, peeled an orange each and waited for the night.

  Beneath the boat, I could only imagine all the things going on, connected to these happenings by the net and what it would reveal. There was the skin of the water and Salt’s boat, floating above this universe. Down there, flathead swam in toothy, carnivorous swathes and the eccentric little spider crab preened her new crown – a single length of seagrass. Turquoise grass whiting fled from the greedy spotted sharks and vampire bat rays. Strange currents ran beneath the calm surface, rolling the net into tight bundles of monofilament and weed. Seagrass undulated in rippling meadows and above all the drama, the dinghy fidgeted against her anchor like a naughty pony.