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Authors: Sarah Drummond

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Salt Story

BOOK: Salt Story
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First published 2013 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
25 Quarry Street, Fremantle 6160
(PO Box 158, North Fremantle 6159)
Western Australia
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? Maybe 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.

BOOK: Salt Story
12.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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