by Bruce Pascoe
As we pass 3000-year-old Huon pines, the guide describes how two men could cut down 1000 of these trees each year, how there were at least thirty such teams – 30,000 trees a year – and how those fellows battled once the pine was all gone. (Hell of a surprise.) Rapacious companies and the government sooled them on until the hills were bare and their mighty labour was no longer needed, after which they were sacked. (More surprise.)
There are many stories of these indefatigable piners, their horrific accidents, the leeches that assailed them and the women who loved them, but not once are the words ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’ mentioned. The closest we get, and I listen intently, is the phrase ‘the first white men on that river’. That inconspicuous phrase is tantalising. There may have been men of other colour on the river.
Evidence of Indigenous Tasmanians has been found up and down the island’s west coast. There are the whalebone house constructions, the cooking ovens, the fishing machines, the whale etchings older than any other art in the world apart from that of mainland Australia. And yet their labours, their injuries, their loving women, their contest with the leeches, and their industry are of no interest on this wonderful craft.
I did appreciate the guide’s story of the logger who rowed nonstop for fourteen hours to get help for the axe wound in his brother’s leg. I hoped that we would segue from that story to the master boatwomen and -men of the Gordon, and the curatorial cray-fisherwomen of the west coast.
As we hoed into the locally farmed salmon, boutique cheeses and beers – I can devour seafood, camembert and Boag’s along with the rest, polish my plate and look around for more – was it too much to hope for even a scrap about the first people to inhabit the harbour and river?
Later, I scour Strahan’s information centre, a vast barn of Huon pine memorabilia and nightly re-enactments, but find no mention of whale petroglyphs there either. Nor on Bruny Island, south of Hobart, where I go to look for the whale songline.
Not one person I meet at any of the information centres can provide a single shred of information, nor can any of the glossy brochures for cheese, wine, salmon, oysters, bread, art and lawn bowls. Whales? Cultureline? How curious.
There are some people who sense the direction of my search and their jaws harden, like that of a boatman who has been rowing for fourteen hours.
Aboriginal people still perform ceremonies to welcome the whale, to thank him for regurgitating his lore onto the land. But apparently a living cultureline, tens of thousands of years old, that begins at Hervey Bay in Queensland and goes all the way to Albany in Western Australia is of little historical import when compared with convicts, bestial officers and old kerosene lamps.
Most Australians know about Burke and Wills, and Hargraves’ discovery of gold. But few know that Aboriginal people tried to save Burke’s silly life before he began to shoot at them, or that Hargraves was not the first to find gold. Locals had known about the metal for tens of thousands of years but had decided not to gild religious domes with it, slaughter for it or scrooge it away. Perhaps most Australians prefer not to know.
I admit that I sat curmudgeonly in my cruise-ship seat, watching schoolchildren on the forward deck allow the wind created by our thirty-two knots of progress to fill their parkas so that they all looked like Michelin kids. Even I, in my grumpiness, couldn’t deny them their hilarity, their exhilaration at braving the elements. But I would have liked to pose a few questions to them after they had come inside to fill themselves with chips and fizzy drinks. I would have liked to talk to them about other families on other exquisitely designed craft, when other children shrieked in delight at the bracing wind and the waves slapping the sides of their canoes.
But we ran out of time. There’s only so much history that can be revealed in six hours.
WATER HARVEST
When one of the early sailing ships limped around Victoria’s Cape Otway after a vicious storm in Bass Strait, the captain was astounded to find numerous canoes fishing in benign waters in the lee of the Cape. All the canoes were sailed by Gadabanud women.
The occupation of Montague Island, nine kilometres off the coast of New South Wales at Narooma, had to be negotiated by canoe, as sea levels were never sufficiently low to make it accessible by land. One of the enduring stories told by the local people is of a terrible calamity when a fleet of canoes was overwhelmed by a sudden squall as they returned from the island.
Lady Julia Percy Island, ten kilometres off the Victorian coast, near Portland, was also inaccessible, even during low sea-level periods. However, it was occupied extensively by Aboriginal people, who called it Deen Maar.
Watercraft were a significant tool in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island economy. Rottnest Island, eighteen kilometres off the Western Australian coast from Fremantle, could be reached by land around 120,000 years ago. However, some of the artefacts currently under examination by archaeologists are reputed to be 60,000 years old. Ocean voyages must have been undertaken to reach the island under the lure of the enormous seafood resources.
In arguably his most evocative writing, George Augustus Robinson compared the night fleets fishing on the Murray to the harbour at Teneriffe, while homesteader Andrew Beveridge said of the fleets he observed, ‘[T]he flotilla presented a scene so quaintly striking as to be well worthy of an artist’s pencil.’ Canoes with outriggers were built in the north of the country and in the Torres Strait Islands, and were seen well out to sea hunting for pelagic fish. Small sails were also used for ocean canoes when line and net fishing. On inland waterways, canoes were employed as punts to cross rivers, and were often described by explorers as the only way they could continue their adventures of discovery. Many early photographs of Australian waterways feature various canoe designs and the nets and traps associated with them.
Yuin people of the New South Wales south coast have reintroduced the canoe-making tradition; several fine examples have been produced, including one made on the banks of the Brogo River.
When I visited members of the Pascoe family at Lockhart River on the Cape York Peninsula in 2009, I was struck by the number of people involved in the fishing industry. Every backyard seemed to have a tinny. Those east coast Cape communities have vegetable and fruit products in the jungles and on the plains, and harvest them still, but their eyes are forever turned to the sea.
Author Stephanie Anderson translated a terrific book about the French sailor Pelletier, who was cast away on this part of the coast in 1858 and lived for some time with the local Aboriginals. Hints of early reliance on the produce from the sea can be found in this account. Pelletier also discusses the people’s management of yam production to ensure a supply during the dry season, but it is the sea from which those people gained most of their nutrition and cultural solace.
The early history of Australia is crowded with references to Aboriginal watercraft and fishing techniques, yet Australians remain strangely impervious to that knowledge, and to the Aboriginal economy in general.
The Australian coast, from just south of Perth, across the southern coast, including Tasmania and her islands, west to Gippsland in eastern Victoria and north to Wollongong in New South Wales, supported the Aboriginal abalone harvest.
The skeletons of women from Victoria’s coastal regions were found to have an odd bone growth in the ear. Scientists recognised that the bone had thickened to protect the ear from extreme cold; the women had been abalone divers. They had what doctors refer to as ‘surfers’ ear’.
Diving for crayfish and abalone was an important part of the southern coastal economy. Not all the diving was done by women, but in Tasmania and Victoria the shellfish was collected predominantly by women.
Uncle Banjo Clarke, a Keeraywoorrong Elder, described to me the process by which men netted and speared crayfish. The most intriguing fact was how men would swim to a reef and hang onto the kelp while nudging with their feet for the feelers of a crayfish. They would then dive down and grab the feelers, and haul the crayfish from its ca
ve.
Access to large fish resources was common in Australia, and the methods employed to harvest them varied. Some resources were so productive that they allowed many communities to live a sedentary or semi-sedentary life close to their fish traps or their fishing grounds.
Women from the Eden area in southern New South Wales have written a book, Mutton Fish, chronicling the Yuin and neighbouring First Nations reliance on the abalone economy. The shellfish was a favoured high-protein item of the coastal diet in this part of Australia.
The shell of the abalone is beautifully coloured rainbow pearl. It was used in the making of traditional jewellery, but breaks down very quickly and is under-represented in living site remains as a result. The shells of turbo (warrener) or limpets (bimbula) are much more prevalent, although they probably represent a fraction of the protein yield.
Archaeologists can only measure what they find, so soft-skeleton and friable-shell creatures such as crayfish, whiting, shark, abalone, urchin and snapper are often under-represented in surveys of the Aboriginal maritime economy. European settlers shunned the abalone, referring to it derogatorily as ‘mutton fish’. English cooking has never enjoyed much of a reputation, and so the colonial chefs applied their most subtle method to the abalone: boiling. The flesh of the abalone takes on the texture of industrial rubber when handled this way, and so the ‘mutton fish’ was considered food for ‘blacks’. The Chinese and Japanese knew otherwise. They pounded the fish, sliced it finely and cooked it quickly – for no more than thirty seconds – in a searing pan. Treated this way, the flesh is delicate, tender and full of flavour.
One Aboriginal recipe suggests cooking the abalone in its own shell on hot coals. I tried this, expecting the flesh to toughen under these conditions, but instead found that it remained tender and even more flavourful.
Once entrepreneurs realised that Australian Chinese were exporting abalone meat, they lobbied the state departments of primary industry to establish licensing, quotas and closed marketing boards, which operated like cartels.
Aboriginal people are now seen as poachers simply because the shellfish is so valuable. When it was ‘mutton fish’, they were allowed to harvest as much as they wanted. Today they are jailed for pursuing their traditional harvest.
THE UNAPPROVED DAY
I wasn’t poaching. Not really. But because thieves are abroad, restrictions have been placed on the collection of abalone that only became valuable because the Japanese think it is an aphrodisiac.
So I wasn’t really poaching, just lifting my half-quota of abs, but on an unapproved day of the month. Oh, the blessedness of the unapproved day. I’ve had a few and they have been entirely glorious.
And this was the latest. Reclined in the patchy shade of a white berry bush and a dwarf boobialla on a sun-warmed rock. Green sandstone smooths to the wash of the sea and usually provides a small eroded dish to accommodate the hip, and another for the shoulder, and if you angle yourself properly there should be another to receive the head.
I can feel the warmth of the rock infusing my muscles. I’m naked, but nobody comes to this corner because you have to swim to it and there’s no coffee bar within a stylish stroll.
I doze and dream and dream and doze, the sun a mesh of striated flares through my lashes. Ah, the unapproved day.
I have four abalone pressed together in pairs pretending they are still sucking to a rock. I’ve wrapped them in wet sacking. I saw four crayfish too, but they’re far back in a deep ledge. I left two abalone for them, and they’ll be fighting over these while I wait for the tide to fall. I have no pride, no honour; I am seducing a very stupid animal so I can pluck it from the cave and later drown it in fresh water and cook it, where it will glow cherry red from chagrin. Pardon me, southern rock, I’m a murderer.
I pick up the flippers, mask and snorkel, diving bag and gloves. Even thinking about the luxury of immersion, I tingle for the total watery embrace. I’m recharging here in the sun but dreaming of cool depths.
I sit on a rock at the edge of one of those magnificent pools where weeds and starfish, guppies and crabs, do a slow semaphore. Tiny black molluscs scrape indecisive runes on the sand-silted rock as I don the monster gear of the diver, a crude and unconvincing approximation of the seal.
I love the entry, the slide, the languorous glide as my weight belt makes me the equal of gravity and air and ocean. Wrasse and beautifully spangled pearl perch swivel their eyes to my grotesque impersonation so they can mock it later in their dark caverns. Man swimming, what a laugh!
The manta ray is in her personal trench, all but covered by sand, and only revealed by her horns protruding through the grit and broken shells of the ribbed sea floor.
As I approach the cave I’m sure my pulse would race if it wasn’t for the sedation of the sea and the slow frrrk, frrrk, frrrk of the snorkel and the salt sluicing through my sinuses, the bony tubes below the skin of my face tranquilised, my whole being sung by deep silence.
The cave is just below me and I crawl down a long ribbon of kelp, hand over hand, to peer in where my spiky friends are slow-motion wrestling for possession of the abalone. Is it an intellectual life, the existence of a crayfish? Do they spend long cave hours contemplating the government’s position on climate change? Observing this slow and irresolute wrestle for flesh, it is hard to believe quick thoughts pass between their horns. The crayfish, not the government.
One crusty red devil is reluctant to forfeit the feast, and I grab him by the feelers and stuff him in my sea bag, scoop up two snowy sea urchins and roll away from the cave. I rise in a lazy glide. I allow the swell to sweep me onto a reef covered in bubble weed and limpets. I drag the mask from my face and lie there, lifted and tumbled by the wash of waves, cradled by the sea.
My pride in this small victory is repulsive. Tonight I’ll bring a luxury to the table. My wife will smile, and the efforts I am prepared to make to ensure she does this are sly and despicable. It is a very beautiful smile, and even to think of it makes my chest cave. It is certainly a guilty and reprehensible pleasure.
I crack an urchin with the ab steel and scoop out the orange row, sliding it down my throat. They taste like salty tongues. One more for old time’s sake, and I’m aquiver with pleasure.
The sun is a snare of blazing tendrils through salt-gummed lashes, and I allow this sea dream to lave my loins. I’m beyond all decency now. The sea’s great heave is rocking and dandling me on one of her chosen rocks. She has tried to kill me twice, but not today, not on this unapproved day.
WHALE AND SERPENT
Bingyadyan gnallu birrung nudjarn jungarung.
A woman stood in a cave sheltering from the rain. A man stood beside her. She was pregnant. Heavily. They looked out at the bleak sea, grey like lead, moody, mean. They stared at it, waiting for the rain to stop. They knew this bay like they knew the path to their back door.
A reef appeared where none had been before. And grew and grew and grew until it loomed over the wave like a great tower. And there was an eye in the tower that swivelled to where the man and woman stood in the cave. The beast looked at them. Guruwul.
She sank below the wave and another smaller animal appeared at her side and the two swam away, out to the horizon, and the man and woman watched even though the rain had stopped and weak sunshine seeped through the clouds like the disappearance of tears. The whales returned to the bay and the man and woman saw the mother’s eye watch them before it turned to the ocean again with its calf. They repeated this giant pelagic loop time and time again. She was teaching her calf to swim and sift the ocean for food. This was a lesson for the woman whose child would become, of course, Guruwul.
This is an old story. Older than everything. When the world was new, the lore was created, and the whale and the serpent looked about and saw the ocean.
I will look after the land because that is my home, but who will look after the ocean? said the serpent.
I will look after all the salt water, said the whale, becaus
e the fish and the turtles, the crabs and the weeds, the coral and the caves all need care.
But you will need to return to the land every now and then, said the serpent, to bring back your lore.
I will, said the whale. I will beach myself on the sand, I will come back to the land to regurgitate the lore so that the lore can be complete and the land and sea can know each other.
And that’s how it has always been: the whale patrols the oceans and the serpent slides across the land, creating rivers and mountains, lakes and plains.
The dedication of the whale in regurgitating the lore is visible in the deep south of the world, where her many lives can be seen in a long row of her bones – thousands of bones, thousands of skeletons – counting the aeons of the earth. Those aeons are remembered in the lore, as the lore is observed.
One day the people saw a great cloud sail down the coast, following the path of the whale. What is that cloud? thought the serpent. The people were concerned and called on the serpent to tell them what to do. Watch that cloud, replied the serpent. So the people lit fires from headland to headland, all along the coast. At each point the cloud passed, fires sprang up and the smoke told the people in the south that a great cloud was approaching them.
An old man paddled a boat out to the island with no name so he could see the cloud more clearly. The old man had to ask permission of the whale and the serpent to visit the island because it was the island of boys’ blood and men’s scars. A sacred place only visited at the time of boy’s blood and men’s scars. He watched and he saw the ribs and the rigging. It is not a cloud, the old man decided; it is a giant pelican.
He paddled back to the land and told the people that the cloud was in fact a giant pelican and they must follow the pelican. I saw it from that island, he said, pointing to the east. The island with no name, he said. Barrangooba, that land is the land of the passing pelican.
