Salt Story (17 page)

I met a poet from Tipperary. A man in his fifties; his humour, his wisps of hair and pale, elfin face made him a different creature from anyone I'd ever met. I wanted to tell him that, despite his bemoaning the status of poetry in Australia, clandestine visitors to one of the isolated fishing shacks I frequent had stolen only my copy of Philip Larkin's
Collected Poems.
They could have shot holes in the rainwater tank or taken the gas bottle or generator. But no ... a book of poetry.

He nodded slowly. ‘Larkin. They showed good taste.'

‘I thought so too.'

‘I heard that you are a fisherwoman,' he said.

‘Yes. We work the estuaries and beaches with nets, in a little boat.'

He took his time during the conversation. He looked distracted and stared across the table at something or someone. ‘You look like you are strong.'

‘I am.'

‘I shall tell my wimpy public servant friends in Ireland all about you,' he said. ‘How did you begin this fishing life?'

‘I grew up here. Then there were tuna fishermen and whalers, hard men, and it was a woman's job to serve them beer or shovel the fish in the factories. I did that for a while but I wanted to work on a boat. One day I started working for Salt.'

‘Do you argue on the boat? It must be hard, sometimes...'

‘We argue, often. It's a small boat.'

‘But you work for this man, because ... you must feel some affection for him.'

‘Yes. Yes. I do feel affection for him.'

He shook my hand goodbye but then stopped and said that he would like one day to read this book, this
Salt Story.

Smoke lies low. The burning season has begun. Plumes rise from the dark hills and curl over the inlet, creeping along the country and fingering across the water. One border of the inlet is still smouldering from a controlled burn: black stalks of trees with their ochre, scorched leaves, grasstrees already sprouting new shoots, golden light. The eastern side is emerald green, regrowth from last year's fires. A bald, surprised-looking hill rears above the sand dunes. Grasses, sedges, reeds curb the waters.

Kermit was caught last year – setting his nets on the midnight prior to the commercial season opening at Irwin's. The confiscation of his gear, boat, catch and a fine ten times the value of his catch nearly took him out of circulation. It hurt anyway.

‘They did let us set at midnight one year,' Salt told me. ‘Ohh! It was bedlam! Everyone sat around in the shack here, drinkin' and carryin' on. Come midnight and we were all out on the water running over each other's nets in the dark, fouling props and wreckin' nets and gettin' into barneys. Funny. Prissed as crickets we were and the night as black as pitch.'

We camp in a salmon fisherman's shack by the roaring, reef-strewn ocean of Foul Bay. We drive down to the paperbarks to fish the inlet. Evenings we set nets along the cockle banks; two- and quarter-inch mesh for whiting and herring; three- or four-inch for the cobbler and mullet and skippy.

We go back to the shack, where for years the south coast fishermen gathered like migratory birds for the opening of the season. Now it's just us. We light the fire, cook some chops, tomato sauce and bread kind of fare. We drink wine, tell stories, read books and sit on swags on the floor.

I read about Flinders encountering the magic of Kinjarling (‘place of rain'), or King George Sound. I am wedged into the corner of the kitchenette and asbestos wall. Stormboy cuddles Digger in his swag under the table. Digger is normally an ‘outside' dog and neither dog nor boy can believe their luck. Salt camps near the kitchen sink, mounded upon olive green carpet, playing ringtones on his mobile phone and texting, gradually surrounding himself in a snow of lolly wrappers.

Before dawn, I'm fighting the dog for leg space. Salt puts the kettle on and stumps out into the gloom. Ocean noises thump through the doorway.

At the little paperbark forest, a man gets out of his campervan to watch us launch. He won't talk to me until Salt is present and then tells him all about his pre-retirement vocation selling outboards to fishermen up and down the east coast. He knows all about fishing. Salt humours him and poses for photos while I punt out with an oar, dogged as always by the pelicans.

We pick up the nets.

Cold feet on chequer plate again, warming as the sun rises. Thick fog turns the little island into a mysterious Avalon. Smoke is dense on the water.

Cobbler, huge, angry creatures, their eel tails writhing around their fatal bonds, their slimy mottled skins cool and slippery to the touch, all the colours of the cockle beds.

Snapper, pale pink of dawn skies, iridescent blue spots along their spine, too small, they get thrown back alive.

Yelloweye mullet in the red box give off their intense iodine odour.

Squadrons of opportunistic pelicans come at us out of the
smoke and fog, skidding to a halt alongside the boat. Swans watch from a distance. The elegant snowy egrets are shy too. The inlet – she's closed to the ocean by a quicksandy bar sodden with brine that quivers beneath my feet.

Littered with kelp and strange flotsam, she is a woman-space with womb-soft skies and nacre'd water of pearl.

Back at the shack, we lay the fish into huge iceboxes and shovel crumbly salted ice over them. A late breakfast: the muscular, spiny limbs of broken blue manna crabs, fillets of herring whose heads were chewed off by a shark trapped behind the bar, fat fillets of yellowfin whiting, sea mullet.

To the men, women and children who played a role in the creation of
Salt Story:
Murray Arnold, Paul Benson, Hazel Brown, Harley Coyne, Richard Davy, Judy Dittmer, Jon Doust, John Drummond, Maya Drummond, George Ebbett, Michelle Frantom, Bill Harsley, Selina Hill, Bob Howard, Gareth James, Colin and Robyn Kennedy, Graeme and Nancy Kennedy, Ray Kilpatrick, Christine King, Mark Kleeman, Lynette Knapp, Alex Levack, Morgan Lindberg, Karina Mitchell, Pauline and Ken Mitchell, Carmelita O'Sullivan, Chris Pash, Carol Pettersen, Scott Rogers, Alan Rule, Sheilah Ryan, Kim Scott, Alf and Bev Sharp, Greg Sharp, Terry Sharp, Jimmy Simpson, David Sims, Yann Toussaint, Kathryn Trees, Sally Drummond Wilson, Adam Wolfe, Guy Wright, the oystermen, with thanks for Georgia Richter's keen editorial eye, and special thanks and appreciation to Bill North. My apologies to any I have left out.

Also thanks to: Department of Fisheries, Albany; Department of Indigenous Affairs, Albany; Fremantle Press; University of Western Australia, Albany campus; and the Western Australian Fishing Industry Council.

Special thanks to Sue Morrison, Acting Curator, Fish Section, Aquatic Zoology, Western Australian Museum, and to the museum for their provision of images in this book, which have been drawn from
The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus & Terror: under the command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross, during the years 1839 to 1843
by Sir James Clark Ross (Sir John Richardson and John Edward Gray (eds), E.W. Janson, England, 1875.

Sarah Drummond
lives on the south coast of Western Australia and has published short works in anthologies and journals.
Salt Story
is her first book.

Visit the
Salt Story
photo archive at
sarahdrummond.org
.