What followed for weeks on end was not so much a feeding frenzy as a nonchalant and amiable slaughter before an ever-growing audience. Marine biologists, tourists, fishermen, news crews gathered on the cliffs to watch whales, sharks and pelagics casually taking turns at gliding into the black cloud of anchovies that made space for them the way the weak always will for the powerful. The predators moved open-mouthed through the captive school, cutting a swathe without gnashing or excitement, leaving only a green trail of clear water behind them that closed up again as the terrified fish bunched for security’s sake. Those not feeding cruised the perimeter, herding, shaping, intimidating the millions of little fish. Spanish mackerel, tuna and yellowtail kings worked alongside bronze whalers and tiger sharks.
No feeding event on this scale has ever been recorded before in our waters. Every day the theories grew and multiplied, until the wind changed and the school broke up and headed to sea. It was a heavy-handed lesson in the web of life, a display of force and vulnerability, a travelling show that played a month or so and moved on to leave us wondering.
The frenzy at Cape Cuvier, the presence of the whale sharks at Exmouth and (to a lesser extent, thanks to long term studies) the dolphins at Monkey Mia are barely understood phenomena, but ones which must be regarded as privileges to behold. I find them stirring, inspiring, strangely unifying and even religious in their nature. I don’t believe there’s anything cosmic or divine or morally superior about whales and dolphins or sharks or trees, but I do think that everything that lives is holy and somehow integrated; and on cloudy days I suspect that these extraordinary phenomena and the hundreds of tiny, modest versions no one hears about, are an ocean, an earth, a Creator, something shaking us by the collar, demanding our attention, our fear, our vigilance, our respect, our help.
After many dives in the Aegean Sea, where most of these things are long-lost, the beaches gummed with oil and the sea foul with plastic bags and sewage, where the dynamited deserts beneath the surface are quieter than any inland sea of the Antipodes, I still remain hopeful about the message getting through in the West, even if nature has to become its own propagandist. Because after the last open coast of Australia is tamed, polluted and overfished, what’s left except nostalgia and the desert at our backs?
Living in exile on the island of Guernsey, one hundred and thirty years ago, Victor Hugo prophetically wrote of human nature:
Nothing makes him hesitate; no bulk, no obstruction, no consideration of splendid material, no majesty of nature. If the immensities of nature are within his reach he batters them down. This side of God which can be ruined, tempts him; and he undertakes to assault immensity, carrying his hammer in his hand. The future will, perhaps, witness the demolition of the Alps . . . The child breaking his plaything seems to be seeking its soul. Man also seems to be looking for the soul of the earth.
four
With the sun on my back and the outboard purring, I head out through the passage in the reef, riding nicely on the fat tide and making a long arc towards the southwest. The sea is smooth and quartzy. Flying fish glide up ahead and abeam, working their fins to get the best plane possible. Out past the little bombora I almost plough across the back of a loggerhead turtle and my companion whistles in relief. The ocean is fairly teeming this morning. It’s Thursday and I should be at work, but it’s cruelly hot and the sea is too much to resist for another full day. That wonderful truant feeling buzzes through me. The echo sounder bleeps, the hot wind tears at my hair and I keep my bearing.
Several kilometres out I find my spot and my mate drops the anchor. As usual I’m the last in the water, fumbling with excitement. I tumble out into the gentle shock and see the tantalizing swathe of iridescent blue plankton spinning like fireworks, sequins, stars in the sunlight. I squint and train my eyes past this veil till I see the bottom of craggy limestone reef and kelp. My friend, who is two thirds marine mammal, is down there at fifteen metres already; he trails a silky set of bubbles and his red fins turn lazily.
Out this far there is always a moment of apprehension for every few seconds of pleasure, and that open-ocean shiver goes through me as I take a breath and dive to where the water is cooler, deeper, where the pressure rings the changes through my whole body. I relax, drifting down, feeling the water run over my skin like a tremor of lust. The sea rings and quacks and clicks. My heartbeat is soft and regular. I am gliding, flying, with the country unfolding below.
The speargun creates a slipstream before me. My eyes ache with alertness – the old hunting impulse that hasn’t faded since boyhood. Scalyfin and silver trevally turn carefully from me and a breaksea cod hovers above the brow of the reef and the shadows of the overhand are thick with pomfrets, buffalo bream and even a foxfish that lies orange and upside down like a wilful bohemian.
I angle up toward the light, out of breath, the pressure hard in my chest, and at midwater I see my friend hovering patiently as a big, chromesided samson fish makes a pass. On the surface I blast out my old air and pant a while, watching the scene below.
My friend taps gently against the steel of his spear shaft and the samson turns, curious. It circles him at a distance and the tapping continues. This fish is all muscle. It eyes the diver and closes the circle to get a better look. The spear flashes – for a moment the same metal colour as the fish – and flies with an eerie, innocent sound. It enters the fish behind the head, high in the shoulder, and my friend heads up for air with line trailing through his hands. This fish is capable of towing him round all day, drowning him if he’s not careful. But the shot is too good, the samson shudders and changes colour from silver to yellow, to white to brown, in waves and blotches. Its gills flex and suddenly it coughs up a great gout of squid and small fish which becomes a cloud before its eyes. From every corner of the reef come feeders, scroungers, opportunists who tear into the stuff, unafraid of the twenty-five kilo monster quivering next to them. The samson heads for the bottom, claiming line, making my friend work hard on the surface. It turns and tries a run but dies before it can get up any speed. As it comes up in its jetstream of blood, I see it has gone bronze, the colour of its death. I feel mixed emotions but I don’t think anything noble. I am not at one with the fish. I am in the sea, where I do not belong, where I have never belonged all these years of watching, hunting, collecting, forgetting.
I see my own fish, a baldchin, fluttering between bombies way down, so I take a draught of hot continental air and glide the descent like some predatory bird, making myself small to the eye, coming out of the sun, seeing my chance. I am in the sea but not of it.
I learnt to snorkel at Mettams Pool at the age of seven. It was a fine way to see girls’ bums underwater and in this regard it never disappointed me. For a while I took far too much notice of cartoons in which a bird lands on the snorkel and lays an egg. I was forever rolling over to survey the sky.
Having a mask, snorkel and fins, I was suddenly unselfconscious in the sea. Face down, I floated without thinking. There were too many other things to notice to bother with ‘swimming’. My mother and my snorkel taught me how to swim. As a teenager, having moved with my family to Albany, I learnt to dive in the granite clarity of the Southern Ocean, the home of the Great White shark, where the awesome sight of submarine boulders and dropaways sobered me up considerably. Here the ocean was completely consuming; it was a threat with one hand and a gift with the other.
Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting. Surfing, swimming laps, drifting a bait from a jetty or a boat are similarly forgetful things. They are forms of desertion, retreat, hermitage, a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed into the long moment. The sea is immense, trackless, potent, but above all, neutral. I used to console myself with the thought that if the sea drowned me, if a shark took me or a blue-ringed octopus or stonefish or sea wasp had its impersonal way, then at least there was no ill-will involved.
Of all water occupations, freediving is the mos
t forgetful. You turn your back to the land, to the sun, and slide down to where all sound is flattened to chirps and rumbles. The deeper you dive the heavier is the blanket that insulates you. You wilfully forget to breathe; you sidestep the impulse and your thinking thins out to the moment at hand. The poet John Blight had it clearly: ‘All reason drowns: drowning in you.’ It’s a religious feeling. On the seabed, or gliding midwater with everything sharp in focus and my body aching with pleasant, urgent hunger, I understand the Christian mystics for moments at a time. I too feel swallowed, minuscule, ready. The diver, like the monk, however, contemplates on borrowed time. Sooner or later you have the surface to return to.
The sea got me through adolescence, pure and simple. I was loved and supported, maybe even indulged by my parents as a teenager, but I fairly burned with turmoil. I was frustrated, impatient, confused, angry. From thirteen to eighteen it was the tyranny of hormones – what a republic that was!
Surfing and diving became a necessary escape. They burned off dangerous energy and gave me a great release from the entanglements of school, family, the agonies of love and loyalty. I was unsociable but not quite antisocial. The diver’s daze, the surfer’s daze, they leave you with more than the drunk’s daze or the junkie’s stupor. Not that what I did was entirely safe. Feeling immortal, I cheated death all the time, diving deeper and deeper, taking risks in caves at the end of my breath limit, pushing that bit further till the fish shimmered and the light wobbled and the final forgetfulness hovered at the edge of vision. Sweet, evil rapture. I wore my nosebleeds like a badge of honour. The teenager is a fascist and a fool as well as a seer.
As I slowly mellowed and became more sociable I spent weeks each year camping along the south coast with friends. In a way, these trips were a kind of living out of my childhood reading: The Coral Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, a harking back to the summer days at Greenough. I lived those weeks as though we had truly been stranded out there at Cheyne Beach, Waychinicup or Cape Riche, and imposed a regime on my poor companions of foraging in the mornings and reading in the afternoons.
We dived for abalone, speared and caught fish, even tried hunting roos and rabbits with spearguns – thankfully without success. We picked over the beaches, walked for hours a day, climbing black granite headlands to come back to camp with firewood, flotsam, food and some kind of communal pride. We had a hell of a time.
In the afternoons, up a tree, in a tent, by the fire, I read Moby-Dick, Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Henry Handel Richardson, Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut. It seemed like a civilized life, but it always had to end. There was always school, town to go back to.
I met hermits on those trips and observed them respectfully. At Waychinicup I met Frank Cooper who had lived out there on his own since the war. His shack was beside a pristine inlet in the granite that was fed by a freshwater stream. He had a clinker boat and some nets, a woodshed, a fish smoker and a handmade sunflower that birds lit on and turned with their tiny weight in front of his bright-painted tin house. He was ambivalent about company, but I talked with him many times, traded stories and supplies with him. His immaculate compound was almost invisible in the lonely landscape of heathland and granite extrusions. I saw his life as ideal, though I never saw him with a book.
All along the coast I met solitary men in squatters’ shacks surrounded by raw bush and sea, and I saw a life for myself out there until I began to sense their fear. I was eighteen before I saw these quiet, cranky, lonely men as people who had sought refuge and become stranded. There was always a wife, a father, a detective, a boss they were fleeing. They were stuck in time, always in their moment of betrayal or humiliation or outrage. They had stayed too long in their shacks or at some place in their memories, and everyone had forgotten them. Their own forgetting had left them with nothing to go on with. They scrounged furiously for firewood and shot at anything unfamiliar. They were exiles, not hermits the way Frank Cooper was a hermit. Most of them never seemed to even have names anymore. They gave me my first stories and my first novel, then the councils and governments weeded them out, knocked down their shacks, and I wonder what happened to them.
Recently I went back to those bald patches in the bush and found the places changed; I found myself changed, too, but the white squeaky beaches and the sea were the same.
I lived in a city, finished school and endured university with the coast always close as it mercifully is in Perth. I wrote books, married, had children and travelled. In Europe I tried the landlocked existence. In Paris I experienced my first apartment and my first truly dispiriting body of water, the Seine. The city itself was a revelation, an astounding and beautiful place, but after six months I found myself crazy for the margin. At St. Malo on a freezing, windblasted day I stood on the dun beach at low tide with the choppy channel out there before me and felt enormous relief at the air and sudden space, but I couldn’t say I suddenly had my bearings again. Even on the Galway coast, at the cliffs of Moher that reminded me so strongly of Albany, when I at last saw west, recognized the wildness of the weather coast, the familiar loneliness and romance of being at the last edge, I was still hesitant, unsure of myself, troubled. It just gave me a taste for the real thing.
For many years now I have lived in a redneck crayfishing town of six hundred people and seven hundred dogs. I am by turns sociable and reclusive. I have my own library and houseful of kids and I go to the sea every day I can. Those days I can’t, I have the smell of rotting seagrass and the blast of the Fremantle Doctor to remind me I’m close. The summer air is white with blowing sand. We live morning and afternoon the way I did as a boy in Greenough. Thank God we don’t outlive all of our childhood fancies.
five
An endless small boy’s night in a sea of dunes silver and pearly with moonlight. Some Good Friday night, before reading and writing, when the moon rides the crests and hides in the troughs as we plough on. My father rides the step of the Land Rover, my mother says nothing. Someone drives, doing all the talk, and the gearbox growls. I drift back to sleep, tucked against my mother who smells of coffee and the rubber seal of the Thermos.
When I wake we are sinking and the vehicle lows and kicks like a drowning steer. The doors crash open and we are out on the dreamy softribbed sand that stretches off like sleep itself. I lie there cool and run my hands through it where the moon spills. Behind me, my father and my uncle bow before the voice of their old mother. Sand flies into the puce sky and there is grunting and swearing as the wheels spin. I could walk off into this silky sand, into the dream of dunes beyond the moon, but someone hoists me up to see the Land Rover toil free and fantail up the final slope until it tips out into the sky and waits there.
Dunes have always been strange, hallucinatory places for me, especially at night. From the early memory of thrashing our way toward Wedge Island in the early sixties, I always associate them with dreams and awakenings.
I recall running through dunes south of Geraldton years later with a cousin. The only sound was our breathing. There was no moon and the undulations were mesmerizing. We tumbled down ridgebacks and blowouts, dizzy and blind with grit, and I began to panic, falling behind. I staggered, fell. I was lost. The sand soaked up my voice and I ran madly on, my cousin out of sight. I could not hear the sea or the wind. I clawed my way up a long, evil hissing slope and saw the light on the lonely beach and my father with a mulloway slung across his back like an aura and I sat at the crest and cried till I couldn’t anymore.
From a dune I once saw an uncle running madly from the shallows with an octopus coiling up his leg. It was red like his hair and he was convinced it was after his dick.
I used to dig holes in the moist sides of dunes to stick my head in and listen to the silence. I scared the hell out of myself in dunes, now that I think of it.
Once, while my father caught salmon at Floreat, I ran in the scrubby dunes that went mauve under the lights of West Coast Highway, and stumbled upon a bloke and a girl going at something very strenuou
s and peculiar in a shadowy hollow. I fell to the sand and lay still, then crawled to the lip of the dune and peered over. I must have started something of an avalanche because the bloke – who had big black sideburns and looked like Oliver Reed – left off his huffing and puffing and reared up, grabbing his jeans, to come roaring up at me. I barely felt the sand beneath the tips of my toes. My father looked startled when I came barrelling into the light of the lamp where salmon jetted bright blood onto the sand.
Driving in dunes I find myself mistrusting every surface, seeing treacherous patches of light drift everywhere, until I’m almost paralysed with indecision. Not a state of mind to be in when you need to be going flat out in order to stay afloat. He who hesitates is lost, as my old football coach used to say, singling me out, I’m sure.
Nowadays I live with dunes more or less at my back door. They are the same dunes I remember as an infant. In the sun they fairly glow. Japanese video clips are often shot there and on occasion I walk out into that contained desert to watch men in black leather trousers miming their songs on some virginal crest with the sun in their eyes. I wonder what they make of all this bare space. I don’t guffaw at their miming; I know what it’s like to call out in the dunes and be robbed of your voice.
Year after year, the local cops bring bodies out of those dunes. Kids killed in motorbike collisions or falls from impossible slopes. Middle-aged men who had heart attacks in their beach buggies. Suicides long dead and found by accident.
When I was eight or so I went to the drive-in with my family to see Lawrence of Arabia. From behind the rear seat of the station wagon in my jarmies I saw great sculpted dunes like those I knew from Geraldton and Wedge Island and Eucla. There was much cutting and slashing and camel thrashing. There was the disturbing face of Peter O’Toole, whose car I would not have hopped in for all the lollies in Australia had he come lurking round my playground. But the scene I remember fondly is where Lawrence and the merry slashers crest the last dune and arrive at Aqaba. They galumph down onto the beach on their camels and spill into the sea, still in their dressing gowns. The waves break sweetly upon them and they dance gaily about. I cheered for them, mistakenly thinking that the whole film had been an epic struggle, a great journey to find a decent beach and have a swim.