Salt Story (9 page)

We live on an island continent and yet, for Australians, it's always been about the land. There are different ways of thinking about these two spaces, water and land.

I asked Salt once where the Menang fish traps were because I knew they were around Oyster Harbour somewhere and had never visited them.

‘Somewhere over there,' he gestured vaguely towards the shore between the two river mouths.

We were setting four-inch nets to catch the big black bream and sea mullet that swim down the rivers with the rains. Near the river mouths, the briny lies over the top of stained and cold river water. Sometimes, when the tide is rising, the two waters flow in different directions. Big rains also mean unexpected treasure and detritus in the mesh: the skulls of ancient creatures, riverside prunings and pieces of the old jetty encrusted with barnacles.

Salt watched the movements of the other commercial boats. ‘What's their number?' He reckons when he gets his cataracts fixed he won't need me any more.

‘Dunno, Salt. Why don't we just go over and say gidday?'

He shook his head quickly. Fishermen, they're a weird mob (and that is my nod to you, Nino). The Fisheries Department have it all over the commercials because the fishermen don't always communicate terribly well with each other, in case they give their secret flathead or mullet spot away.

‘Watch out for the rocks around these shallows,' said Salt.

I was on the tiller while Salt played out the nets and I winced every time I felt the prop thud against a stone.

A week later, a friend showed me where the old Menang fish traps are. The tides were very low, so it was a good time for exploring the sand flats. Giant marri trees grew right at the water's edge. The reed beds were strewn with beach plastic, bleached and polished flotsam of upriver banksias and pine. Samphire crowded in crimson and green along the lower ebbs.

The stones of the fish traps are a conglomerate that looks like it is still being formed: rich ochre, nearly black in colour. The traps were scattered, breached, so as not to waste fish. The outlines of the convex arcs are still visible in the long shallows of the bay. My friend and I scrambled around and found old and recent camping spots and fresh, wild oysters, plump and intense with iodine and liquor. I looked out to the arcs of stone and remembered Salt's words from the week before.

‘Watch out for the rocks around here in the shallows.'

That day we could see the traps in their beautiful, timeless formation because the tide was so low. The only time that Salt has ever set nets in that area is when the tide is high enough to get the boat in and out. He has never seen the traps or known where they were because whenever he's been in the vicinity, they have been covered with silty water.

A historian said to me recently, ‘I can't believe such and such explorers both missed the mouth of the Murray. Couldn't even see a river mouth. They must have been asleep.'

‘It's actually really easy to miss a river, at sea,' I told him. ‘The river mouths just sort of fold into the shore. You often won't see one until you are looking right down it.'

The historian is essentially a land man. He's been a farmer for fifty years and has spent a lifetime negotiating the sea from the land. Salt has spent a lifetime negotiating the land from the sea. It takes a bit of a shift in perspective.

I find it strange that, for a continent totally surrounded by
sea, we spend so much time ignoring it. Once the dependence on sea highways lessened and the roads and rail prevailed, placenames began to lose that salty flavour: King George Sound became Albany, the Swan River Colony became Perth. We stand at the water's edge and dream but beyond the lacy breakers is the domain of itinerants, roamers, pirates and guys like Salt. Interesting though, that after seven thousand years or so of the fish traps being built in Oyster Harbour, the fishermen still set nets in the same location. Whether they approach the sea from the land, or the land from the sea, the Menang people and the estuarine fishers know where the black bream are.

I drove the old ute through the night to Pallinup. I'd just had a new windscreen fitted so the vision was good until the fuses started blowing. After that it was the moon, some white line hallucinations and the chilly radiations from Venus that got me there. I coasted down into a geological anomaly of rainbow-layered spongolite stone, a basin hollowed out by watery millennia, to the soundtrack of drumming rain and my car's rattly tie rod ends. When I got to the fishing camp perched on the paperbark edges of the inlet I saw that Salt had lit a fire in anticipation. A perfect welcome for a frayed spirit is a fire spitting with raindrops, and a decent cup of tea.

‘You've obviously been eating a lot of carrots,' was all he said in reference to my dark arrival. He had already set the nets for mullet and bream. It was my job to help him pick up before dawn and drive the catch back into town. The lightning storms and glass-off of the previous week were replaced by howling easterlies, constant drizzle and other rhetoric. It's the kind of misty rain that lets me think I'm waterproof until the moment of realisation that I'm soaked through. A bit like drinking really. I went to my tent quite sodden.

It was still dark when my alarm clock went off with ditzy, electronic muzak. I crawled out of the tent to meet the dawn The tinny was talking, a metallic splash against her sides with every little breath of water. Salt had made some tea.

The Pallinup Estuary had the highest level of nutrients out of the south coast estuaries sampled in 1988 – attributed to the
mandate to clear one million acres a year and then smother it with good ol' superphosphate. The estuary also has one of the highest salt levels. This water is so briny that few fish other than mullet or bream can survive it when the sandbar locks them away from the sea. Sometimes the bream develop salt burns on their bodies. Yet this extreme salt content also produces the cleanest flavoured and most splendid-looking sea mullet.

We pulled up a lot of mullet that morning. Salt reckoned it was the wind aerating the water that was bringing the fish in. I just thought we were a little bit blessed.

‘Mullet!' is my refrain when the fat, gleaming fish splash to the surface. I began to sound like the Energizer Bunny's lacklustre companion an hour later when we were still pulling in mullet. The fish hit the nets hard and then roll in them, so they can be a job to get out.

‘What's wrong? Your battery run out?' Salt asks.
‘Oh, mullet!'
He mimics me. ‘
Look! Another mullet! Yay, oh joy!
I just want to know where the fucking bream are. They're fetching eight bucks a kilo at the moment.'

The water was muddy from the constant turbulence. Pale stretch marks laced her reaches. Water slopped over the stern as Salt reversed the boat against the wind. I hate that, it makes me unsteady on my pins. The wind strengthened and the pelicans began ‘scaling' the mullet with their beaks, trying to rip them out of the nets. In the end we hauled the whole lot up and took the boat into shore to unmesh the rest. The water churned golden olive, boiling away from the outboard motor.

Salt told me poaching stories while we wrestled the mullet from monofilament and iced them down in the red plastic bins. ‘Pullet, Sandy and Nails were down the pub in Denmark skiting about how they were gonna shoot the mouth of the Wilson's for snapper. They were at the pub all night carrying on, told everyone what they were gonna do, the idiots. Just before dawn they got down to the mouth, it'd been opened that
day, see. Pullet said later that no bastard woulda recognised him if they saw him cos he was wearin' a balaclava! Pullet's the biggest fucking bloke I've ever seen, you'd know him the moment you laid eyes on him. But at least he had a balaclava on.'

Salt told me stories of his father, poacher of legend. The Fisheries officer in those days rode a bicycle with the aim of arriving silently to witness Salt Senior's nocturnal fishing crimes. One night, he rode that bike twenty kilometres to Torbay Inlet, where it was illegal to fish, to catch him out. Salt Senior was ready for him. The wily, one-armed fisherman watched from shore as the inspector waded out through the silty mud of the inlet and pulled up a whole cork line. No leads, no net, just a rope with corks attached.

In the archives of the State Library, the enmity between these two men forever lies detailed in the annual Fisheries reports archives. ‘Salt Senior came in to pay his fishing licence today and threw five shillings on the counter. He said nothing and nor did I.'

I feel very lucky to be witnessing the work of these briny dynasties firsthand. After unmeshing the fish and downing a breakfast of hot coffee and an apple, I drove the one hundred and fifty kilometres back to town and lugged the bins full of iced-down mullet onto the truck for Perth.

‘It's great at the depot,' I told my dad. ‘You get to see all the other fishermen's bins and check out who is catching what and how much.'

Dad laughed. ‘You are beginning to sound like the rest of that bloody mob.'

Jordie's one of the two other fishers who have been working the Pallinup since May. He's a tall, raw-boned man with a vulpine smile. ‘I'm nearly sick of the inlet, mate,' he told Salt. He doesn't normally say much. He blurted this out, a moment of odd candour for the quiet fisherman.

‘Yeah, it gets like that towards the end of the season,' said Salt.

‘Do you get bored?' I asked Jordie.

‘Yep, after fixing nets or whatever, milling around all day, I'll go for jaunts into the bush. But I never see anything worth shooting,' he laughed.

‘Have you been up through the valley?' I asked. ‘Where the scarp is all hollowed out?'

It's ancient, high country swallowing down to the estuary. The sandbar at the east end stops the wild ocean from rushing in. You can understand how the land has changed just by looking at it. It's the water, running down between the hills and loosening massive tracts of dirt into the sea. The place reminds me of Madura Pass, near the Nullarbor Plain, where you can see the edges of the world, the curve of the earth and the glacial pace of the friction between land and water. Eleven thousand years ago, the loss of country to the sea as she swelled and flooded the land marked the rise of weapon technology, changed clan boundaries from one season to the next and is remembered in the flood narratives of the Noongar. Maybe in the future, when it happens again, it will be a real estate issue. The mad, ultramarine blue of leschenaultia flowers against red spongolite, is a contrast to all this millennial longevity.

‘I've tried but the midgies drove me back,' said Jordie.

‘Not enough bats around to eat all the midgies,' said Salt.

‘There's been heaps of bats here in years past,' agreed Jordie. ‘Now, no bats and shitloads of midgies.'

Both fishermen nodded.

These kinds of men have always intrigued me. My fascination is with their innately tough, strangely compassionate natures and their knowledge of natural history. People who fish for a living know more about their prey and their workplace than anyone. They learn by a lifetime of watching. Call it research with vested interest.

Jordie's camp is a tidy array of fish bins, iceboxes, a caravan and a clothesline with only his gloves and a towel slung there. He lives in town normally but, currently undergoing a divorce, he says, ‘I really live in the back of my car.'

He fishes the inlet every night except Saturdays, heading out in the early evening to set nets near the mouth of the inlet. On our first day at Pallinup, Salt was throwing his hat and stamping on it. ‘He asked me where I wanted to set and I told him! And look! He's fuckin' settin' there – right where I said I wanted to!' Jordie had been setting in the same spot for months. It was just good manners to ask Salt, I think, before he went back to doing what he always did.

Out on the water, we hoisted the prop over his net and went to say hello. Jordie's boat was a little plywood dinghy that he'd built himself, painted warship grey with a stow hatch under the bow and open scuppers at the stern. He stood on deck, resplendent in wet-weather gear, and threw up his arms when Salt asked what he was after.

‘Who knows?' His weathered face split into a coyote smile. ‘Could be anything. Maybe even some mullet.'

‘You ever set up the river, Jordie?' It's illegal for us commercials up there.

‘Nah, 'course not, mate. Too many big fat bream up there. Clog the nets. Make a right mess.'

They both chuckled. The conversation meandered. Direct questions receive loaded, abstracted answers. Words, information, spiralled around the weather, the fish, the market price, until both men had the answers they sought and felt they have given little away.

We set Salt's nets against a reddening sky, tying the end of the net to a submerged paperbark and spooling out into the centre of the estuary. Pelicans lurked. Brown ducks with metallic wings busied themselves in the wooded shallows. Evening sun beat against the striped ochre cliffs. A light sou'wester ruffled the water.

When the keel crunched onto the little beach, I looked
up to Jordie's caravan perched on the edge of the inlet, facing out to the sandbar and beyond it to the ocean. I could smell sausages and frying onions, the scent mingling with the salty broth of the inlet.

The year after we were at Pallinup, Grievous and the Blunt brothers got the ballot to fish there. I drove out to the camp on my way east and ended up staying a few days. Samwise smiled quietly when I arrived. The day was freakishly hot and the two brothers sat near a smouldering fireplace. Bullet was reading the newspaper. They'd parked the dusty caravan in the same spot where Jordie's had been and a Jolly Roger fluttered from the mobile phone aerial.

Samwise is always smiling. His hair is wild and long. He has a careless, gappy grin a flattened nose and the feet of a hobbit. His face appears to still be growing; broader, chunkier, jowlier with every smile. His demeanour sidesteps the usual combination of furtiveness and bombast found in the other fishermen I know.

‘Doesn't say much, does he?' said Salt, later.

Bullet must have been a stripling when he was a kid. Now he has a Bombers tattoo on his calf, sand-dune thongs on his feet and a buzz cut all over his head. He's been fishing commercially since he was fourteen, like his dad, and his grandad too. He either talks machine-gun style, no room for interjections – or he is quiet, inward – neither state is easy to talk through.

At first I thought Samwise was Bullet's deckie. I didn't realise these two fishermen were brothers, and then Bullet told me they were twins. ‘Like chalk and cheese we are,' said Bullet. ‘Samwise fishes barehanded and I wear gloves–'

‘–nah, I never wear gloves,' said Samwise. ‘Except at the beginning of the season when the bream wore my hands out...'

‘He never wears sunnies or a jacket or a hat. Leaves all the knots in the mesh too...'

‘I thought you'd gotten them out for me, Bullet.'

‘Bastard to set the next day, nets with twigs and shit in them, knots and shit.'

I went out in the boat one evening with Bullet, setting four-inch mesh for black bream out by the ochre cliffs. Bullet wore khaki waders over his board shorts. He seemed to fold himself over the nets as they rolled out of their nest on the deck and over the shadecloth gunwale, into the olivey wake of the dinghy. He grabbed the tiller to straighten out the boat. The wind kept blowing it off the course he chose. ‘Listen how quiet that motor is ... good poaching boat this one. Nice and quiet. If I was the sort that is. So quiet. Four-stroke. Just purrs along. Honda. Bloody great motors. Lead core rope on the net too. No fucking sinkers or lead wraparounds clanking over the side. Net goes out real quiet, real quiet.'

Bullet set three lots of net. The four-inch went across another channel further off where the mullet were and another lot out in the middle of the inlet. Then he motored back to the camp. Samwise was already there, piling mallee roots on the fire.

This season the three commercial fishers took turns to net near the river mouth. It's the most lucrative set in the inlet, catching the fish as they swim into the estuary from the river at night. Samwise had the river mouth that night. The next night was Grievous' turn. Grievous only came out on the nights he had the river mouth.

‘He'll be here at...' Bullet looked at his watch, ‘five to five. That's the earliest he's allowed to set. Then he'll drive the one-fifty back to Albany, boat and all. He'll come back about two in the morning to pick up. Fuckin' full-on bloke, Grievous.
Thought he'd chucked the shits with us the first time he took the boat back to town after setting. But then Samwise said he was going out in the Sound at night to check his leatherie traps.'

‘Yeah, that's what he said,' Samwise nodded.

Samwise woke me at four thirty the next morning. Through the window of the tent, he said, ‘You up, Sarah?'

He was down at the water's edge, bailing out his tinny by the time I got my act together. I dodged through the paperbarks. Branches dragged at my hair. The moon was gone and Scorpio flexed its tail over the western sky.

‘Bullet won't be up for a while yet,' Samwise said.

He gestured for me to climb into the boat while it lay ashore, so my feet didn't get wet. He and Bullet and Salt all do this. Then he pushed off and leapt in, poling with the oar out to deep enough water to let the propeller down.

The river mouth worked all right. Samwise bent over the gunwale as each fat bream appeared, golden like a huge water sovereign, and grabbed them before they fell out of the mesh. He squeezed some fish through the mesh or worked the mono backwards over their gills, holding the fish against his body. Mullet thumped into the bins, thudding their tails against the side in protest. He had one bin for bream and another for mullet. The mullet were huge, nearly as big as Australian salmon. Their gills were often bloodied by the net. Their loose scales fell onto the deck. The eyes of the bream turned downwards.

The little boat, emptied of all its nets overnight, began to fill again. The aluminium insides were stained with mullet oil, algae, seaweed and red gravel dust. ‘This ol' girl,' said Samwise. ‘I've been using this boat for twenty years now. Never had another boat, could do with another motor though. Always got oars in me boat.' The questionable two-stroke was covered in splatterings of seaweed and slime from the nets. It rocked back and forth as it chugged along. I told him I feel the same way about oars, no matter the motor. When we got to the next net
he turned off the motor and used the net to keep the boat in place.

There were a few cobbler and some leatherjackets. And a tailor. Samwise cleaned them on the quiet beach below their camp, surrounded in sculptural red boulders. Pelicans came in for their daily feed, nosing through the paperbarks and waddling up the yellow sand. He threw them the heads and guts. They rolled the cobbler heads around in their beak sacs until they had the spines lying down. Then they swallowed them. I've seen old pelicans with so many holes in their beak sacs from being spiked that they look like colanders.

The twins carried their boxes of fish up the hill to the camp where the ute was parked. The boxes were thirty kilograms, or forty if full of cobbler tails. They each laid out their fish neatly in a six-hundred-litre icebox, counting their catch. Bullet shovelled crushed, salted ice over the top, smoothed it out. He fitted the lid and taped it down with masking tape.

All this time, their conversation was that of brothers working, or people who have spent many years working together. Their sentences were abbreviated, respectful but truncated, agreeably surmised. Quick words, said quietly. A question would answer itself. It was obvious that these words did not involve me but it was a pleasant sound as the twins readied the bins of fish for the Perth trucks, their words like a birdsong, waves breaking, a radio playing somewhere close by.

Samwise got out of his waders, threw them over the washing line and disappeared into the gloom of the caravan. When he came out, he was wearing his good black jeans and a clean t-shirt. He shook my hand shyly. His hands were short and strong, his wrists thickened with old muscle. He got into the ute and left for town. It was about seven thirty in the morning and normally, I would be having my first cup of coffee.

‘He'll fish at Wilson's tonight,' Bullet said. ‘Hey. You said you wanted to go into Bremer to buy some camera film. I was thinking of doing a drive through there and over to Dillon Bay. Bit of a look around. Wanna come?'