FOR MY FAMILY
and for those who know that a bad day’s fishing
is always better than a good day’s work
We speak of course of that narrow strip of land
over which the ocean waves and moon-powered
tides are masters – that margin of territory
that remains wild despite the proximity of
cities or of land surfaces modified by industry.
W. J. DAKIN – Australian Seashores
Life’s short – go surfing!
Bumper sticker
one
On a low tide Monday afternoon just short of my thirty-third birthday the winter sun finally comes out to burn the sky clear of cloud and the kids and I gallop onto the beach to play. An easterly wind spikes out across the broad lagoon flattening the sea and running rashes across it in cold gusts. Under the sun the water shows its mottling of deeps and shallows, black and turquoise, reef and sand, dark and light, its coming and its going. The blunted swell butts against the barrier reef in feeble lines that lie down before the wind. Way out, the horizon looks like a ripsaw. At first glimpse of the Indian Ocean I stop running and feel the relief unwinding in my chest, in my neck and shoulders. Dinghies twist against their moorings. Gulls scatter before the blur of my insane kelpie. Two days off the plane, I am finally home.
The sand is cold beneath our bare feet and the dunes damp and spicy with marram grass and saltbush. We wheel down the wind hollows between the dunes, yelling and fooling about, shaking off the confines of the house, the stalemates and frustrations of winter indoors. The sun slants finely on our necks, barely felt, lighting the hard white beach to squinting point, to the momentary point of summer.
Down at the low-water mark, at the scalloped edges of the shore, the water is gigglingly cold. Clouds rise around our feet. The four of us hold hands and bend like a sail, raucous in the east wind, laughing with shock.
The kids fall to digging and damming and sculpting. They wet the knees of their trousers. They sniff back the gunk of their head colds and go quiet with concentration over moats and walls while I stand there in the water with my feet going numb and my mind drifting in a kind of fugue state that only comes to me here.
There is no one else around. I flinch at the sound of a school of whitebait cracking the surface a few metres away. It’s alive out there. After the still, exhausted Aegean, where nothing moves but the plastic bags, it seems like a miracle. Call it jet lag, cabin fever, but I am almost in tears. There is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.
Like most Australians I have spent much of my life in the suburbs. I was raised in the Perth suburb of Karrinyup. A quarter acre, a terracotta roof, a facade knocked out by some bored government architect, a Hills Hoist in the back yard and picket fences between us and the neighbours. It was the sixties and the street was full of young families, State Housing applicants, migrants from Holland and Yugoslavia and the English north – foot soldiers of the great sprawl trying to make our way in the raw diagram of streets we slowly filled to make a new neighbourhood. I lived there happily for twelve years but I do not dream of that house.
As an adult – well, a child bridegroom, really – I dabbled with the older, more substantial world of the inner city where the trees were thick-trunked and the grapevines gnarled and the roofs tin and steep with age. Here, old people were staying on and young people moving in to make lifestyle decisions and think long and seriously about themselves. It was the eighties. A quarter acre, fences, another Hills Hoist (the landlord’s) in the back yard.
A quintessential Australian suburban life, perhaps. But again, when I dream, when I remember, when I doze into reverie, I don’t see the picket fences and the Holden in the driveway. I don’t see the checkerboard tiles of the Karrinyup kitchen floor or hear the whine of mowers or the hiss of the boiling chip heater. On rare and dreaded family slide nights, I am shocked to see myself in a glistening yellow raincoat. It was never winter when I was a kid! I never looked so pale! I have to strain to recognize myself in Hush Puppies and a mohair turtleneck, ready for Sunday School with my brother, who is about to bawl. Because in my memory of childhood there is always the smell of bubbling tar, of Pinke Zinke, the briny smell of the sea. It is always summer and I am on Scarborough Beach, blinded by light, with my shirt off and my back a map of dried salt and peeling sunburn. There are waves cracking on the sandbar and the rip flags are up. My mum, brown as a planed piece of jarrah, is reading a novel by John O’Hara with cleavage on the cover and someone is spraying coconut oil on the bodies of girls in wide-side bikinis. Out there is west, true west. The sea is where the sun goes at the end of the day, where it lives while you sleep. I have a fix on things when I know where west is.
I often wonder about these two childhoods of mine, the one contained and clothed, between fences, the other rambling, windblown, halfnaked between the flags. Is it just nostalgia? Have I idealized these summers and chased their myth all my adult life? Did the suburban boy simply imagine himself a coastal life?
No, I lived both these lives and have the wonky slides to prove it. It’s just that I lived the coastal life harder, with more passion. As a kid I recognized that life, embraced it and made it my own. In sight of the sea I felt as though I had all my fingers and toes. I was relaxed and confident. At the beach I wasn’t just passive, letting life happen to me; I didn’t care about being smart or popular, I didn’t long to be better looking. The sea swallowed up all my primary school anxieties. Something suddenly consumed my whole attention. I surged toward shore through the laughing crowd, bodysurfing, careful not to lose the togs. Out beyond the break, I dived and brought up fistfuls of white sand to prove to myself I could do it. The sun on my back was like a blush of recognition, and in the rare moments I was still, I sat and stared towards Rottnest Island, at the wild glitter that bucked and swayed without resting. The remainder of my life was indoor stuff – eating and sleeping and grinding through spelling lists, laps of the oval – but even from school I could see the bomboras breaking way out to sea on a high swell, there at the corner of my eye.
I lived five kilometres inland, a blinding limestone road away from the coast. My house had no view; I was landlocked by picket fences and parked cars and homework, but in the afternoons I could smell the Fremantle Doctor coming in across the treetops, stirring the curtains and the copper-boiled washing. It came as sweet relief, cool and merciful, and at night as it moderated to a gentle breeze it brought the coast upon it in the scents of brine and seagrass. The pounding of the swell against the land’s edge was so clear it seemed the sea was only a dune away. I didn’t need a map to know where I was. In the atlas I lived in a dot, but with that breeze on my back I had a life and a place.
two
A still summer night a world away in a house that smells of cactus and dust and musty kapok. I am six years old and almost asleep in the hollow of the clapped-out mattress. Outside in the Tuesday dark a high tide cracks against the bar at the rivermouth. My skin is pleasantly tight with sunburn and smelling of vinegar. A stubbed toe throbs under the lightness of the sheet. The fridge kicks in and whirrs across the sleeping sounds of my mother, my father, my sister and brother. I am drifting, rising and falling in the early current of sleep when suddenly, above me, there is a snap and a scream that lasts less than a second. Somewhere in the dark a terrible struggle. I lie there transfixed, totally awake now, and something warm dabs onto my forehead.
I hear my mother murmur sleepily and my father scrabbling for his torch. The beam comes on and strays drunkenly around the long room of iron bedsteads and cast-off furniture before finding the shuddering pendulum above me. My
mother gasps but does not scream. Snug in its trap, a great dying rat swings from a few metres of cord tied to the rafters, and as it passes in its horrible arc with its hairy whip of a tail a few centimetres above my face, the creature offers up another glob of blood that hits the sheet with the tiniest sound imaginable.
For a few summers my family had Christmas holidays in a shack at the mouth of the Greenough River, just south of Geraldton. A strange house in retrospect, to a child it was the most remarkable place to have year after year, and I sometimes think that it was this house that caused me to become a writer. It was certainly the prime cause of my obsession with the coastal life.
Fronting the tea-coloured Greenough and overwhelmed by vast paddocks of hay stubble behind, it was a simple, peculiar shack in a lake of doublegees. The front yard was a dead stretch of buffalo grass upon which stood the most hideous concrete statues of birds and animals, all with marbles for eyes. I gave them a wide berth and often found myself shooting glances at them across my shoulder as I scooted along the big wind-blown veranda.
Out the back was a watertank, high on a rough jarrah stand, and sheds that contained the generator and the bucket shower I came to dread. Further along was the thunderbox dunny, a place of mystery and fascination, and a sort of half-open greenhouse crammed with cactus.
From the front windows you could see out beyond the eyelid of the veranda to the bright limestone road and the rivermouth. Out there, the sand was packed hard and cars could be driven across between river and sea. The surf hammered night and day, never calm, never quiet, blue all the way to Africa.
The house itself consisted mainly of one huge L-shaped room lined with beds, remnants of other houses and times and places. They were a wild assortment and a kid could jump from one end of the place to the other without touching the bare concrete floor that was always adrift with balls of dust and streaks of beach sand. Under our beds we had boxes of comics – Archie, Donald Duck, The Phantom, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, Little Lotta – and there were boys’ and girls’ annuals from England, books of adventure, scuffed blue-spined novels that smelled of antiquity and fried bacon.
Above us were the rat traps on the bare rafters, and in every corner, under every battered cupboard and gutless armchair, were neat little saucers of Ratsak. In the mornings my father would clear the traps and bury the rats out in the paddock where he emptied the thunderbox, out in the evil field of doublegees where no thong was thick enough to protect you. Dugites and bobtails rustled out there, and in the evenings, bronzed by the sun as it dunked into the sea, whole mobs of kangaroos lined the ridge until they became silhouettes and childish cutouts of themselves in the last of the light.
There was so much mystery in that house. The kitchen was a fairly basic affair – sink, kitchenette, fridge. It smelt of gas and kero, spent matches and rusty cans. The sink emptied into a bucket in the cupboard below and around the bucket were piles of strange little tins that kept all of us gasping as we read the labels. There were sugared ants, Italian anchovies, pâté from England, olives from Spain, and squarish tins of frogs’ legs that we hardly dared to handle. The whole cache was shocking and hilarious. Now and then, on a dare, my father would hack a can open and bravely squelch something down, his cheeks red with valour, and he’d murmur with great satisfaction and offer it around. We scattered like gulls.
I never ate anything out of that cupboard, but I went back to it regularly to work through the contents and wonder at the cities on the labels. These were things from the outside world, somehow potent and terribly exotic. Somewhere there were people who ate this kind of stuff!
There were two other rooms in the shack. One I can only dimly remember as a sort of parlour with a rat-chewed chaise longue and glass cases full of whisky miniatures, ash trays and knick-knacks of the pub trade. The other room, the room that really interested me, was the library. The shack at Greenough was the first house I ever knew to have its own library.
The owners of our beach place were my mother’s relatives from Geraldton, Clem and Connie Penniment, former publicans and substantial figures in the port town. As a freckle-faced kid of six I thought they were my uncle and aunt, though I later discovered that they were in fact my great uncle and aunt. Large and imperious, they were also old and rather eccentric. The concrete animals should have told me something. The poor moulting black crow in the cage behind their newsagency might have offered a hint. The rooms of stuff above the shop, the fistfuls of brightly coloured tablets they took like so many mixed lollies, the way Uncle Clem looked down at his skiff-like brogues and muttered to me, ‘Hm, what d’ye think?’ before striding off grandly – and then saying exactly the same thing to me next year. Really, these things should have let me know they were quite unlike the people I knew in my raw little suburb of plainness at home.
What finally sent the message was the library. It was no bigger than a bedroom but it was four walls of books, a world unto itself. There were regiments of books, whole blocks and processions of uniform editions; Somerset Maugham, Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Melville, Twain, Mrs Gaskell, Virgil, Homer, Edmund Burke, Galsworthy, J.B. Priestley, Poe. There was a fruity, illustrated edition of The Decameron in two volumes, and an early edition of Mein Kampf, whose author sounded familiar. Leather spines, dustjackets from the twenties, thirties and forties, pocket editions, bookclub editions, rat-punctured art books, Gilbert and Sullivan librettos, tomes on medicine and the human body. All this finally told me that the tall people who slipped me the odd Archie comic on our weekly bread and milk trip were not ordinary people. Ordinary people had a Bible, a set of cheap encyclopaedias, stacks of As You Were and Reader’s Digest; a yarn by Ion Idriess, perhaps, but not all this. This was outrageous, and it was probably just the overflow they couldn’t squeeze in at home.
I spent a lot of time in that library. It was there that I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson and then Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, the books that snatched me from the world of the Archie comic and never quite let me go back. Physical and compelling, these stories were the world of the desert island, the lonely beach, the still lagoon. I read The Coral Island, about chaps making do on whatever was to hand, and though I knew for sure that I’d never end up a chap and say ‘Grand!’ a lot, there was the chance that I could make do quite nicely on crayfish and rabbits and sleep nights in the warm sand. These were the first books that offered me some of the real world I knew, then carried me off completely to somewhere that didn’t exist at all. Since then I’ve lived with a weakness for old-fashioned books from that library on my own shelves today. In many ways I’m still that openmouthed boy, turning the pages, wanting to know what happens next; who pored, perved, flicked and sniffed his way from wall to wall every afternoon all those years ago.
For the library was an afternoon place. On the west coast in summer the morning is for the beach and the afternoon is a time to find shelter. The western summer is ruled by wind. Here the wind is a despot. It rushes off the land before dawn, ploughing out into the sea, full of wheat dust and pollen, crashing at the curtains and rattling every loose sheet of tin, warm and unrelenting. It heats up with the coming of day, an allergenic blast that scorches flat everything in its path. Wild oats and Paterson’s Curse lie down before it. Out of the mysterious interior it barrels to tear the tops from breaking waves and hollow their troughs into glittering cylinders. On a summer’s morning the sea smells of the land and the dunes become airborne. Sand falls far out beyond the smoke of bushfires to become a haze in the water, a puzzlement to fish.
It’s morning when people are about, when the sea is bullied flat by the wind and the air is hot and dry. Just before noon the easterly mellows and becomes benign and before long it gives out altogether. The ocean glasses off, cicadas and birds find full voice in the sudden quiet, the coastline briefly becomes Mediterranean. This mild interlude might last five minutes or an hour, but it is never more than a lull, an imitation of gentle weather.
Before long
the horizon begins to go wobbly. It stacks up mirages of boats, islands, capes, and the milky sea is streaked with lines of gooseflesh. You can see the Doctor coming in the distance, a ruffling line, an advancing front that curves in from the sou’west. When it arrives, there is a sense of relief, a cool rush of air and a softening of the sea. Then a light chop appears and confuses the surf. People begin to open up their houses. On the beach they shake out their towels and, out at sea, anglers haul anchor because, within a few minutes, beach umbrellas will be uprooted and sand flying as the sea loses its colour and gathers a nasty chop. Great plumes grow from the backs of the dunes and the heathland rattles with the afternoon gale. The sky goes white with sand and the trees on the coastal plain kiss the ground they grow on. The afternoons are the time to be inside on a bed with a book.
Just after dawn on those holiday mornings my father would shake me awake quietly and slip out to make himself a cup of tea. I’d find him in the kitchen scratching his whiskers in the blue glow of the Primus.
Out in the morning breeze he carried a hessian bag of shucked abalone and ham hocks for cray bait. Together we walked down along the mud-smelling river and crossed the crisp white of the bar to head up the bush track behind the dunes. We never said much, just listened to the close sound of our feet in the sand.
Down on the reef at low tide the rock pools and solution holes were brimming pits in the great exposed shelf. Octopus clambered about from hole to hole and startled sweep blurred away as we passed. Out at the edge of the reef where the surf clapped up against its face, the bag was handed to me and my father pulled the jarrah-slat pots up onto the limestone shelf. We snatched out the creaking, twitching crayfish, baited up again, and he heaved the traps back into the deep. Now and then a big swell hit the reef edge and reared up to come charging across the platform at us as a wall of boiling foam. I stood wide-legged and side-on to it as I was taught, holding the waistband of his shorts, feeling the crays kick and butt the bag against my legs. The force of the water was immense and terrible. Sometimes I was blasted completely off my feet, only to feel my father’s grip anchoring me to the earth.