Salt Story (5 page)

Twertawaning
is the Noongar name for the ‘old/past dogs' according to linguist C.G. Brandenstein – dolphins who worked with the people.

A Noongar elder of Albany told the story of the ‘clever man' who stood on the beach with his sticks, tapping them and singing, calling in the dolphins. Fires burned along the white sands of the bay. The dolphins herded the salmon into the shallows. Lean men waded into the water and speared the salmon. Sometimes they could just pick them up off the sand. It is a bloody deal, worked out between man and dolphin over millennia. The dolphins are still doing it. An old fisherman told me that one year the dolphins herded a hundred ton of salmon into the pool at Nanarup and kept them there for days, feasting on the pilchards that the salmon had thrown up.

This day the dogs of the sea hunted and played in our wake and bow wave. Their white shadows flew through the sea and they turned up their faces to see us. Drowned pirates, frightened by the magic of their captive Dionysus, they are repentant and will do all they can to help sailors.

We were not to be shipwrecked this day but I nearly lost all four fingers from one hand. We trolled for salmon with thick line and a silver lure with barbarous hooks. Shearwaters, gannets, ospreys and Pacific gulls wheeled all around us. Pilchards skipped off the water, chased to the surface by salmon and bonito. Birds worked all over the Sound.

I lost a salmon. They were too overfed to take my lure seriously. I stood on deck, the odd slop that rocks between the islands making me unsteady. Salmon line wrapped around my fingers. I threw out the lure again.

Salt gunned the motor.

Line around my fingers and line around the propeller.

Just like that.

But it broke! The line actually broke!

The engine sounded clunky. I told Salt about the prop and climbed over the stern to untangle the fishing line. My hand hurt in the cold water but there was much to do.

About twenty minutes later I examined the deep, burning scores across all four fingers of my right hand. As soon as I considered my potential for fingerlessness I became wobbly and suddenly, I just really wanted to go home, to leave the Sound to the fish, the gannets and the dogs of the sea.

A humpback whale leapt about by the first portside marker outside the channel. We were setting flathead nets at dusk when I saw his body shooting out of the sea like black ink, the plumes of white spray on his return. His tail made a perfect crescent against the reddening sky. We motored into the Sound later to look for him but he was long gone. There was not even a footprint, those flat, circular marks on the water caused by the massive displacement of water from the thrust of a whale's tail.

I saw a stingray in the shallows too that afternoon. It was as big as the rug in my living room. Its body was patterned with white paisley marks against black skin. I'd know that stingray anywhere if I ever saw it again.

The next morning, we pulled up the harbour nets to find a smaller stingray with its stinger bitten clean off and its body sliced open with little bleeding arcs. Sharper than any filleting knife were the attacker's teeth. Salmon trout lined up in the net with only their heads left.

‘Bronzy,' said Salt.

Salt is always teaching me to identify predators. Sometimes the crab pots are full of carapaces and chewed-up claws, when an octopus has got in. Leatherjackets eat crabs too. In the harbour nets, crabs tangle in the mesh where they have gone in after the herring or bream. If there are crabs in the net, then the gummy sharks might follow them into the mesh. Sometimes the flathead nets come up with row upon row of heads or mangled carcasses with only their livers missing.
That's the seal.

There has been a five-metre white pointer hanging around in the Sound recently. It's had a go at a few boat propellers and gone along the fisherman Grievous' squid lines, stealing the bait, jigs and all.
Five metres.
My friends who kayak on Sundays have been sticking to the harbour.

Snow said he saw the shark circling Seal Rock. You can see Seal Rock from the lookout on Marine Drive. It's a rounded granite rock where the old bull seal hangs out, his harem lolling around him in the surging swell. Snow said this shark circled the rock for an age, hungry-like, round and round that big round rock, waiting for the old man seal to make
just one
mistake.

Whether the seals have been attacked or just frightened out of the Sound, they have been leaving the flathead nets alone. Salt reckons it's a good thing sharks like the white pointers are protected, especially when they do such a good job of keeping the seals away from ‘his' flathead.

They weren't always protected. When I was about eight, my dad came home from the fish factory and said he wanted to show me something. We got into the Kingswood. He drove back to the factory and walked me over to the freezer rooms. ‘Come and have a look at this.'

The freezer was the size of a small hall, with racks against the walls full of salmon or sardines or whatever was running at the time. My shoes stuck to the frozen floor. I saw the shark, frozen solid and lying upon carpenter trestles right in the centre of the room, like an exhibit. Its skin was black. It was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

Dad said, ‘See if you can touch both eyes at once.'

I couldn't. When I stretched my arms across the head of the monster, I couldn't touch both its eyes. He said then that the same fisherman had caught another great white a few weeks before, and that when he cut it open he found pieces of a kid's tricycle and half a dog inside its stomach.

It all just seems to go around and around. Perhaps the big sharks were coming in again because they were hungry and after seal. The seals consider our nets a bonanza, as much as the leatheries and the octopus enjoy the crab pots.

As a newcomer, I know it's their patch I am working and I don't mind the seal or other critters eating some of the catch. Salt doesn't agree. They are
his
waters, he reckons, as much as the next seal, stingray or shark. Perhaps he can claim resident predator status, having worked these waters for near on sixty years.

‘We'll have to get you a gun, girl,' Salt grinned at me, knowing my response. ‘Just like Annie Oakley, except you'll be sorting out seals. What's the matter ... don't you like guns?'

I'm fine with guns. He knows I was raised by folk with an affinity for black powder.

‘Ahh, shit. Don't tell me.
You like seals,
don't you?'

Last night as we hauled, a seal fought us for the net. It ate every fish, working its way from the red buoy at the channel entrance to the boat. The fish it could not tear out, it bit in half, ate their livers and devoured their roe-rich bellies. Finally it arrived at the boat and I peered down into the water to see its phosphorescent gleam undulating around the net. Like a marauding wraith, this seal.

In May, I camped on Breaksea Island. Every morning I lay across lichen and stone to watch the seals and sea lions. They rolled in the briny and ambulated into sheltered coves using their flippers as sails. On a high rock the babies gathered in their creche. The seals' capacity for pleasure was heartening for me, having escaped to the island for some peace and quiet. I needed no further evidence that lying around on warm rocks is good for the soul.

From the highest point of Breaksea Island where giant, streaked megaliths swooped down to the water on an angle that made my feet tingle, I saw a seal swimming far below. Smooth, missile-like; not the delightful, doe-eyed darlings I'd
seen earlier, this seal was hunting and its speed indicated a carnivorous intent.

One afternoon on the island I went hunting for limpets along the rocks for bait. A curious female sprouted out of the sea beside me, blowing a mist of air and brine, eyeing me. She dived and surfaced again through her footprint. I sang to her, as loud and true as I could. She snorted, dived and returned to watch me. For a moment I saw myself reflected in her huge, black eyes – standing on the rocks in a bright red jacket, wielding a filleting knife and singing.

When the resident seal was slaughtered at Emu Point a few years ago, older locals who could speculate on such matters looked to Salt. He didn't kill that seal. He did write a letter to the local newspaper, saying that tourist operators shouldn't feed wildlife for their own monetary gain, claiming it provoked bad behaviour in animals and humans alike.

But the reason for the sudden interest in Salt after the death of Sammy the Seal had nothing to do with the letter. A decade earlier Salt had created a furore by offering a reward to anyone who could ‘deal with' a rogue bull seal that had been raiding nets. ‘I didn't kill that seal either,' Salt told me. ‘But someone did something.' I suspect that Salt was quite happy to wear it at the time. The resulting drama made him more salty and notorious than ever and someone had seen to the seal.

He told me a story then, about the killing of a seal sixty years ago. ‘The old man and me went out to Waychinicup. He was gonna set some nets and catch some skippy, and right there, lying on the rocks in front of him was this big old bull seal. The old man picked up his axe and walked over there and put that axe right through his skull.'

I must have looked horrified. ‘Why?'

‘He'd driven the truck fifty miles to set nets. Five kids to feed and all that fuel and he knew the seal would eat every fucking fish before he got them out of the mesh.' Salt shrugged. ‘Just the way it was, back then.'

‘You gone to see Captain Crackpot yet?' Salt asked me.

‘Who?'

‘Isn't he coming to town to save the whales?'

Ahh. The Captain and his
Sea Shepherd
mob.

Apparently the
Steve Irwin
and the
Brigitte Bardot
were coming into port to launch their season's campaign from the old whaling station. The dramas continue to play out in our town, the last land-based whaling station in the southern hemisphere.

‘I think he's an arsehole,' Salt was trying to get a rise out of me. ‘Putting people out of work. He should get a real job instead of sailing around the world, stopping good people from doing theirs.'

The problem with working in a small boat is that you are stuck with whatever conversation is going on. Sometimes when Salt wants a barney, I'll ask him to drop me off on an island. That is a good lurk. This afternoon I was forced to stay aboard and, well, I'm quite partial to a rant if it suits me.

‘Where was the Australian Navy when the whalers were cruising through the Australian Whale Sanctuary? Where? ‘Crackpot' Watson was the only one out there. It's a territorial matter as much as anything but the government were behaving like total limpdicks.' (I've been trying really hard to rein in my deckie mouth but, at sea, things are different.)

‘I reckon the Australian Government has some agreement with the Japanese we don't know about,' Salt said. ‘But they've been eating whale meat for centuries. That should be
their right. Imagine how many people you could feed with a single whale.'

‘Poor people?'

‘Yeah.'

‘They can't afford to eat Japanese whale meat.'

He muttered something about poor people breeding too much and I smiled away to the water. I know he hates that.

‘But they should be able to kill whales if it is a part of their ancestral heritage,' said Salt.

‘Yeah, with diesel-powered gunships, thousands of nautical miles from their own waters. Yeah.'

Salt laid both the oars across the gunwales to make a seat for himself. ‘When I was whaling here in the '60s, oh, it was a good life. We were a bunch of rascals, out at sea, coming in with shitloads of money, tearing up the town ... yeah, it was good. But I wouldn't do it now. I never liked seeing those creatures die. It was a terrible thing, to see them die.'

Picture this: you are driving around aimlessly on a Sunday, looking for something to look at. As you do the curve on Marine Drive you see a whole bunch of people standing together, quite a gathering. When you pull up to see what is happening, you discover a truly disconcerting combination of citizens. The pock-nosed real estate salesman is holding hands with the Noongar elder. Night nurses yawn and rub their careworn paws against the Health Minister's Chanel jacket. A couple of teenage girls actually smile at their mothers and the mothers actually smile back, before looking out to sea.

All right, I'm making that last bit up. But whales
do
these things to people.

When whales appear, rolling off their barnacles on the white sandy bottom of Middleton Beach and parading their babies, people who would normally stride past each other actually begin to commune. They lend out binoculars and stand close enough to feel the warmth coming off each other's bodies. Everyone seems to know that the whales are here to visit us.

Salt, the old whaler, came back from a trip in the Sound, all misty-eyed and converted.

‘It was great,' he said. ‘They swam right under the tinny and all around us. We could have touched them.' He said it was the closest he'd been to a whale ‘in peacetime'.

Native American tradition says that whales are the record keepers of the earth. These pelagic archivists, closer to us in
physical structure and sentience than their fishy fellows, are said to have witnessed times when the earth went through catastrophic change. They were land-based creatures when the oceans of the world rose and their motherland Mu sank beneath the waters forever.

I think that when we see the whales, something in us recognises them as our archivists. They remember where we came from. With such memory, it is no wonder that the people of Albany are in love with whales, are now humbled by the leviathans gracing us with their presence. It is only thirty-odd years ago that the last whale was harpooned in Albany waters.