Salt Story (10 page)

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.

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.

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.'

Sure enough, in the morning, the net was broken. Salt was cursing, again. ‘How the hell did they manage to run into it
three times?
'

This was about the time I met Nails. I've seen him in the distance but never met him until he came over while we were sorting through the black bream net. He pulled his boat in neatly next to Salt's and put his wader-clad foot on both gunwales to hold them there.

‘Hey Salt. Ran into yer net last night. Sorry mate. Woulda fixed it but it was dark. Couldn't see a bloody thing.'

It's a funny kind of honour, the running-into-nets agreement. Even though Salt had nets all around the channel that Nails used to get into the inlet, the onus was still on Nails to rectify the damages. I've seen this before when Salt ran into Bullet's nets in Oyster Harbour. Fishermen are supposed to fix them on the spot, by finding the stray ends of the cork line and tying them back together, but it doesn't always happen.

‘Don't worry mate. Shouldna set over there anyway.' Salt was feeling gracious. ‘I just couldn't get past everyone else's gear last night.'

Nails' dinghy was a neat little boat with a plywood deck. He stood, one boot on the gunwales and the other amongst his piles of net. He was using rag net, for catching cobbler. A beautifully carved cobbler waddy lay handy. Like most men who have spent their lives on the water, his face was cracked and worn.

‘Been gettin' a bit of mullet out in the middle but it's all calmed down now the bar's gone.' Nails meant the sandbar that breaches to let out the inlet flush out to sea, once there is enough rain.

‘Did it open by itself?'

‘Nah. Council came down and dug it out. We argued for about a week for them to wait until it rose another eight
inches. Shoulda gone up over the road really. But the water got just close to the road and they had to breach the bar. Ohhh, the tourists couldn't possibly drive through water!' He flapped his hands and grinned.

The high-water mark was all around the inlet, staining the reeds and paperbark trunks like a bath ring.

Later we happened across a big school of tarwhine. There was one monster, the biggest I've ever seen, his snout all burly and gnarled.

‘I almost want to chuck this old man back,' I said to Salt.

‘Oh, you're feeling a bit warm are ya?'

‘What?'

‘Feelin' a bit hot?'

‘Huh?'

‘
Wanna
go for a swim, do ya?'

That afternoon, Salt asked Jordie where he was setting. They stood in the shallows of the launching beach at Irwin's, water swilling around their boots. Salt was asking because it can get a bit hectic at Irwin's, when four or five other fishers have nets all over the place. The cork lines can get torn up by the propeller and if that happens in the evenings the net flays around in the water and catches nothing.

‘I haven't run over anyone's nets for years,' Salt told me for Jordie's benefit.

‘Yes, you have.' I can be treacherous like that.

‘Oh ... Bullet's. Yeah. Dunno how Nails manages to do it so much. Saw him run over my net next to the marker buoy once. Right in front of me. Ran over it three times last night.'

Jordie nodded.

The next morning, we pushed the boat out of the shallows.

‘Water's bright,' said Salt. There had not been much rain to wash the tannin stain down the river.

When we were level with the island, Salt fired up the two-stroke. I stood at the bow keeping an eye out for buoys. Salt
knew where Jordie had set, so he throttled it. He wanted to beat the pelicans to his whiting. The chill wind forced into the neck of my jacket. My plastic pants filled out like a clown's. The cold air bit at my eyes, forcing tears.

Then I was face down on the forward deck, surrounded in a clatter of plastic bins, milk crates and the pointy bit of the anchor. The motor was revving and turning the boat in a big lazy arc. Salt lay on the thwart, staring at the sky. The dog had gone overboard.

Still got my teeth? Check.

I climbed down to the stern, eased off the throttle and put it into neutral. The dog swam towards us, shaking water out of his ears. Salt completed an inventory of his body and got to his feet.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.'

‘You all right? What happened?'

‘Just ran into Jordie's net. Fuck.'

I dragged the dog over the gunwale and he shook the estuary all over me. As we motored over to the nets, a bit slower this time, Salt said, ‘The motor was on tilt lock. That's why we stopped so quick. I'm gonna have to find Jordie before he gets to that net and sees what we done.'

We started picking up the whiting net. The dog had forgotten all about his dunking. He looked like he was considering leaping out after the pelicans. Still no sign of Jordie. Finally I saw his white wake, racing from the car park on the west end of the inlet. I watched him go down the channel. ‘He's gettin' the other net first.'

Salt seemed quite rattled but not about the nasty fall he'd just had. He can mend bruises and dislodged gall stones but a busted reputation takes a lot longer. Another boat came out of the Kent River. ‘Good,' said Salt. ‘I can finally blame
something
on an amateur.'

The second net was full of cobbler. Salt used the waddy and I used the pliers.

On our way back, Salt pulled in to where Jordie had nearly finished his cobbler net. ‘Jordie, mate. I think I just ran into one of your nets.' Salt's demeanour was one of defeat. He even managed to look sad.

Jordie chucked his buoy onto the deck. ‘That's my last buoy in, Salt. I reckon you ran over Nails' net.

‘That's 'im is it? That other boat?'

Jordie nodded.

‘Well. That's okay then!'

‘Yep.'

‘Looks like Nails shoulda got out of bed earlier.' They both laughed.

The two fishermen talked for a while, with the boats anchored on the inlet, near the island, cutting the heads off cobbler with filleting knives and throwing them to the beggar pelicans.