Salt Story (7 page)

In 1841, the artist Robert Neill wrote that the flat-nosed mullet was the finest fish in New Holland and I completely agree. Mullet is seriously underestimated in this modern society that seems to want to consume only bland, white-fleshed fish.

Salt was shaking his head as each glossy specimen surfaced with the net.

‘Mullet!' I shouted with glee. ‘We're not sending these to Perth, Salt! I can sell all of them down at the Sunday market.'

‘On your head be it,' he muttered.

‘I can sell anything I'm enthused about. Just you wait and see.'

Here are some instructions on how to make hot smoked Pallinup mullet. Soak the fillets, skin on, in a strong brine for twenty minutes. Drain and coat lightly with olive oil. If you want, you can season the fillets with lemon pepper.

If you have a fish smoker then things are already looking good. If not, you will need a wok with a lid and a wire rack. Put some wood shavings or plain tea leaves in the bottom of the wok or smoker, place the mullet on the rack above the shavings, put the lid on and smoke that Pallinup mullet!

Remember not to place the fish smoker's little metho burner on your best friend's plastic outdoor table. It will quietly melt straight through the table and then set fire to her handbag that is underneath the table, destroying the handbag and all of its contents and testing an otherwise good
friendship. If this is your modus operandi then it is cheaper to go out for dinner.

Smoked mullet should be piled high on a plate and eaten with your fingers, shared with friends at the end of a sunny Sunday. Peel the smoky, oily flesh away from the skin and put it in your mouth.

A few years ago, camping by the sea in the back of a refurbished refrigerator truck with a solar-generated DVD player, I saw
The End of the Line.
It was with some apprehension that I watched this documentary about the potential collapse of the world's fish stocks. I thought the marine conservationists would be gunning for fisherfolk like me, considering I was working the inlets full-time.

By the end, I realised that the movie actually supported what I'd been thinking about for a while. Selling fish at the markets was already a weekly exercise in informing customers where their food came from, how readily available it was and whether or not it was a sustainable resource. So I rang a marine conservation society and asked them for their sustainable seafood shopping guide. The guide is the size of your average driver's licence and, once I explained what I did for a living, they sent me a wad of about a thousand copies.

The guide is not too bad for accuracy, with only a couple of local glitches. When I showed it to Grievous, he said that although pilchards were listed on the guide as a sustainable fish, pilchard stocks are still recovering from a disease that swept through the Southern Ocean twenty years ago and he questioned their inclusion in the guide. Looking at their traffic light system (red – don't buy it, yellow – aw, maybe, green – sustainable), another commercial fisher said, ‘Yeah, well it's okay but there's some species in here that I wouldn't bother working because there aren't enough around to make any money out of.' This is fisherfolk lingo for ‘scarce' and
therein is the key to the health of the small-scale, family-dominated fishing industries. Economics and long-term sustainability are intrinsically linked. If fish stocks decline for any reason, commercial fishers will go elsewhere until they have recovered.

This kind of self-regulation doesn't happen throughout the fishing industry though. Recently a restaurateur in Japan paid $1.7m AUD for a single bluefin tuna. Yes. One point seven million bucks; about the same you'd pay for an eighth of an acre in Port Hedland. This price and the media prestige that came with it troubled me and that is before I start to rant about the cost of real estate in Western Australia.

Salt and I went out fishing for crabs recently because he'd heard from old Kailis that blue mannas were fetching an obscene amount per kilo in Perth; twice what we normally sold them for. He got so excited about the price offered that he completely forgot about the breeding season. Every pot we pulled up was full of berried female crabs and we had to chuck them all back. We didn't make a single dollar. That was why the price was so high of course. Supply and demand. The market works the same way with gold, except you don't have to kill gold.

Aside from the prestige and publicity associated with the highest price ever paid for a single fish, the restaurateur acknowledged that at $7,600 a kilogram, he wouldn't be turning a profit. But the prestige factor only served to reinforce that bluefin tuna's worth will rise as its population in the world's oceans becomes scarce. According to the researchers of
The End of the Line,
there is already stockpiling going on to anticipate this event. Consider what a legal market in rhinoceros horn, elephant tusk or tiger penis would look like; then consider that doomed bluefin. Despite all that we know about the extinctions of the previous two centuries, rare creatures are still worth more dead than alive.

The day before a trip to Katanning on family business, Salt helped me lug two huge iceboxes onto the back of my ute. So the King George whiting, snook and herring came for a drive too.

‘Why don't you try and sell some fish up there?' he asked. ‘Whenever I go inland with fresh fish, I stop at the pub.'

‘Will they buy fish?'

‘Dunno, never asked.'

I drove through shocking yellow fields of flowering rape, pondering, as you do on a long drive alone. Someone told me recently that the rape flower is the closest colour to pure yellow in the light spectrum. It's pretty hard not to feel emotionally moved, stunned even, by that vision of gold, punctuated by moments of emerald trees. In reality, it's a hard-nosed agriculture with a multinational at the helm. And how do you market
rape oil
to the modern-day gatherers, the mothers, wives and other females of the species? Better still, how do you market
genetically-modified rape oil?
There must be a way ... ah yes, in one stroke of marketing genius, it gets renamed something pretty, rounded, innocuous –
canola.

I stopped at a wheatbelt hotel looming on the corner of a dying street, a grand old shady lady clad in turquoise peeling paint. Yellow tape roped off the groaning veranda – ‘Do not cross. Party scene.'

I went into the front bar. It was ten in the morning and
the balloons were already up. Sky Channel blared. The bar was packed. I forgot it was Grand Final day.

‘I was wondering,' I asked the barmaid, ‘if the cook wants to buy some fresh King George whiting fillets?'

The bar went silent beneath the racket of the TV and everyone turned to stare at me. I felt like backing up with my hands in front of my face – or perhaps going on the offensive – ‘I'm licensed to fish and insured to sell!' whilst waving around a pike.

She explained to me, waving her jingling silver jewellery and spider tattoos in the direction of the coast, that the frozen fish van comes once a week to deliver them basa. So thanks but no thanks.

I drove on to the next town, to another pub. A man on the footpath was doing something strange with one of those blower things. He was blowing dust out of its bag and into an ice-cream container. Dust was going everywhere, all over the walls. It made no sense to me. I got out of the car and asked him about the fish anyway.

He looked at me as though I were the strange one (a curly-headed hippy from the coast trying to flog some fish, perhaps). It didn't go well. ‘Nah, I fink we're right love,' he folded the words around his beard and occasional teeth. ‘We get basa from the fish bloke once a week.'

Basa sometimes gets the cruel moniker of Mekong blind mullet. As a freshwater catfish imported from one of the most polluted rivers in the world, it doesn't have a terrific reputation. But it is bland tasting and very cheap.

After that I gave up trying to sell fresh fish to sea-starved inlanders and focussed on my original reasons for the visit. On my way out of Katanning a few hours later, I stopped in at a great little antique shop on the highway. The proprietor stood out in the sun, polishing something brass, listening to the footy on a transistor radio.

Whilst chatting, my attention was drawn to the bicycle. Ooh, a bicycle! And what a darling. A proper postman's
bicycle from the 1960s. Bright red and white! Back brakes! I couldn't believe my find. It turned out she just loved King George whiting. She did me a great deal for a kilo of fillets.

‘There's been rumours,' Salt said as he drove away from the fishing camp. ‘It happens every year.
Oh, there's salmon over at Cheynes. There's salmon at Nanarup. They're coming.
Every bastard's heard a story about the salmon coming.'

The massive schools of salmon that work their way from east to west against the Leeuwin Current are on the minds of every southern fishing community this time of year. Despite the death of the local cannery businesses – now the salmon is usually sold as pet food or cray bait – the salmon arrival still bugles the age-old call – the seasonal harvest, the abundance.

I visited Cable Beach, where the Southern Ocean rolls in and deposits improbable boulders onto limestone plinths. A family of enthusiastic Noongars followed me down the steps, bristling with fishing rods. We reached the sea together. We all saw the small school of gathering salmon in the window of a wave and cried out, ‘There they are!'

People make some fatal mistakes on the rocks during salmon season. The fish can mass at the base of granite slopes made slick with black algae. The southern sea is dangerous and unpredictable. Swell smashes into the rocks and occasionally, that bigger rogue wave will wash a hungry fisher away.

After the yellow flowering of the Christmas tree comes the red flowering gum. These scarlet blooms herald the salmon run. The Menang people used to get together this time of year with neighbouring peoples to discuss things. From the ranges of the east and the inlets and tingle forests of the west, they came to
talk business: the hatched, matched and dispatched, who was annoying who, and what the season was producing – and there was always enough food for everyone because the salmon were here.

During World War II, Dan Hunt, an ex-copper, realised that the soldiers were tiring of bully beef and saw an excellent opportunity to sell salmon. This was the real beginning of the south coast commercial salmon industry. Fishers began to seine net salmon from the beaches. They used the detritus of war including blitz trucks for driving on the beaches and camouflage nets for catching the fish. Someone used an armoured tank to cart nets and fish over the sandhills. Dan Hunt flew a spotter plane, looking for big schools of salmon and, when he spotted a mob near a licensed beach, he would write its location on paper, wrap it around a stone and throw it down to the camp.

The original purpose of the salmon camp was to catch salmon in huge seine nets. When a school comes into the bay, the fisher men and women row a boat around the school, spooling out the salmon net. Then they use tractors, four-wheel drives and bare hands to drag the net onto the beach. Big trucks from the processing factories drive onto the white, kelpy sands of the beach and are loaded up with salmon.

The salmon season was a financial bonanza for the fishing families, who often struggled for the remaining year. Because of the money, squabbles were inevitable as fishers scrambled for position on the most lucrative beaches. Sometimes they waited weeks for a big school to come along the coast. Salt's mate remembers the windscreen getting shot out of a truck by an irate competitor who had someone shoot a net
inside
of his own seine.

Eventually it was organised so that certain licence holders stayed on their own beach and no other commercial salmon fisher could work that beach. And that's the way it is today ... only those camps tend to be a lot quieter than they were in the heyday of the south coast salmon fishery.

During a period of time working another job with a more predictable income, I wasn't always available as Salt's deckie. He retired to the salmon camp and rang every other day entreating me with stories of massive schools of fish.

‘There's salmon all around the bay. And mulies and birds working them. And there is mullet too, in the pool, right in front of me. The weather's great. D'yer wanna go fishin'?'

He knew that I was moving house this day but just thought he'd let me know, in case I was getting tired of lugging freezers and wardrobes on to the trailer.

‘I can't come out today.' I looked at the sky. Mares' tails and mackerel scales. ‘I can come out tomorrow but it looks like it will blow up by then.'

‘Nah, it'll be fine tomorrow. Bloody gorgeous out here right now. Can't do a shot for mullet anyway. Too much weed onshore at the moment.' So why did Salt ring me with mullet stories if we couldn't even catch them?

Because he knew my penchant for mullet and that I was moving house.

It transpired that this was the first and only occasion I've out-forecast Salt. The next morning was wet and howled with a dirty south-easterly that turned around to the south-west by lunchtime to make a mess of the foreshore in town. The whole harbour was a creamy slush and seagulls fought the wind, like scraps of paper, on their daily flight from the rubbish tip to the new entertainment centre.

‘Never known you to be so wrong about the weather and me so right,' I crowed to Salt. ‘No thanks. Maybe on the weekend.' See? When not officially working for Salt, I can go fishing when I feel like it and I can give some lip. A few months before, this kind of behaviour would have earned an entirely different outcome.

‘Weather shithouse out here,' he sent a message back, and then slapped me down anyway. ‘Don't get too smug about 4casting. Once in 5 years no Einstein stuff.'

I think Salt turned seventy-five this year and he knows his weather. The only other time I've heard a dodgy forecast from him is when he's trying to keep me out at sea in order to get the nets picked up a bit later than I would like. ‘Oh the wind will drop at sunset,' he says when he's trying to bluff me into staying in a bay where the wind is blowing us into the surf.

Salt stayed out at the camp and watched the salmon swim in and out of the bay. The market has crashed for this cheap, coarse fish. People are importing Asian fish or just not liking the flavour of Australian salmon. So Salt's camp has morphed into a kind of seasonal village for retired salmon fishers.

When the weather calmed down, I drove to the camp. We launched the dinghy into the surf and motored off to hook some salmon and set the whiting net at Dunsky's. On the way is Forsyth Bluff where the southern swell crashes into barnacled granite. The heads, where granite protrudes from the land to create the separate bays, are always a good spot to troll for salmon. We watched for birds working. They are usually after the pilchards or whitebait, pushed to the surface by bigger schools of predatory fish. Salt ran the boat through the middle of one of these mobs, against the chop bouncing off the Bluff.

Arripis trutta ...
catching salmon is visceral and exciting: that sure yank against nylon, the fight that turns my fingers raw, the blue heads of the salmon surfing through the wake wave behind the boat, shrieking birds and finally hauling a
big fish onto the deck. It's enough to make me want to down a Bloody Mary at the end of the day and call myself Hemingway.

On we went, the boat swilling with brine and the blood of salmon, past The Eyes, a ghostly pair of deep, round holes worn into the cliff's face, past the murder scene where the burnt-out four-wheel drive crouched on the rocks, on past the turquoise waters of Shelley Beach and into Dunsky's Bay.

We set the whiting nets and waited, watched the smoke from a fire at West Cape Howe move over the sky. ‘We should sell those salmon all right down the markets,' said Salt. ‘Ten bucks each.'

On our way back to the camp we came across some albatrosses who were working the whitebait and pilchards with muttonbirds. The big ocean birds waddled over the water as we neared them, took off into the sky and settled again. Muttonbirds buzzed the boat, shearing so close that one nearly touched my hair.

‘I'll do the next season at Pallinup,' said Salt. ‘Then I might just finish up.' He looked at the box of beautiful King George whiting. ‘Though pulling up those big bastards makes me think I'll hang up my boots when I hang down my head. Days like this, I wouldn't call the king my uncle.'