‘It’s quite extraordinary,' he said. ‘Neither Nicholas nor I have any recollection of the aeroplane hitting the ground. Our brains had switched off before the final seconds of the big bang. The mind does that, I’ve been told.’ On coming to, John had somehow found the wherewithal to reach for his knife, cut down his dangling, unconscious son, and even pull out his phone to dial the emergency 000. ‘I don’t think I could have remembered my own home number,’ he said, ‘but I remember 000.’ Just as well, as being the sparsely populated place Flinders is, no one had actually seen the little aircraft ‘go in’.
Soon he’d been on his way via air ambulance to Launceston Hospital, from which Nick was discharged within a week. John had to endure several more, his wrecked foot being for some time the subject of unsettling conversations among the surgeons who regularly mentioned the word ‘amputation’. This was followed by a bout of the dreaded golden staph, which John was also lucky to survive.
‘My whole left foot today is completely numb. Apart from that I’m okay. Come on,’ he said, no longer able to resist, ‘We’ll go for a drive.’
We climbed into his truck with its cracked windscreen, and headed down the hill, making our own path through 2-metre-high grass towards an old hangar where one of his older mounts, a Thruster ultralight, sat slowly rotting, metal ribs showing through cloth-covered wings like the bones of a once-splendid animal.
‘I flew all over the island in this one. For years,’ he said. It looked awfully small to me, but I asked if it was fun. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he assured me, becoming excited. ‘Except when the engine stopped and I had about two seconds to decide where to put her down.’ How often did that happen, I asked. ‘About ten times in all. Not often,’ he said. I told him that seemed rather a lot of times to me, but he just laughed.
Over the next hill, he took me to look at his recent wreck, his once-sturdy Savannah, its still bright-yellow paint and lengths of sinewy wiring crying the injustice of its premature demise.
Here, in its new and permanent home – a ditch on a ridge overlooking Bass Strait – John walked around its remains, now and again pointing out its barely recognisable parts, inwardly delighting in it still, its near-claiming of the lives of both himself and his son long forgotten. John was obviously a forgiving person. His wife Helen, one suspects, a little less so.
27
JAMES THE MARINER
According to Leedham Walker, James Luddington was my best chance to get to Deal Island. Leaving from Flinders, I would be able to observe the islands of the Kent Group, of which Deal was the largest, and perhaps those of the Curtis Group to the north as well. James ran a small charter boat company, small as in just himself, and his boat, the Strait Lady. This modest-looking cabin cruiser didn’t look like much, but when James’ suntanned hand opened up the throttle, a deep surging noise ran through it from stem to stern, and I was almost thrust back by a raw and exhilarating surge that made me want to let out a long ‘Yee-ha!’
James had been kind enough to take me out on a freebie, tagging along with a party of payers who had chartered the Lady for an afternoon fishing in Franklin Sound, the channel off Flinders Island’s port of Lady Barron, and running beside some of its smaller island territories such as Badger and Goose Island.
‘What makes Bass Strait such an unpredictable piece of water?’ I asked him as he rested in his favoured position, laid back and cross-legged in his skipper’s seat in the small cabin in thongs and shorts. He answered, as he answered most things, with the hint of a smile and the sense that he might just be pulling your leg.
‘Basically,’ he said in an accent that hinted of an English gentleman adventurer, ‘it’s shallow and there’s a lot of current. Makes the water stand up like it’s got wings on it.’ He liked using colourful phrases like that. ‘Tides and eddies come in from unusual directions here. It doesn’t always follow the normal rules. People who don’t know it can get into trouble easily.’
This sunny day, in the lee of the long, low shore of Badger Island, there weren’t many fish about. It didn’t really bother me, as my keenness for fishing had diminished since my debacle a couple of months back on Three Hummock Island. The family, who had let me tag along on their family outing, put their lines in and waited. They were a handsome trio, the man I slowly recognised behind his sunglasses as a well-known footballer, his wife appropriately glamorous and their son, around ten, particularly well behaved. I felt a single tug on my line, which thrilled me momentarily then disappeared, but I had rather that the lad be the first to haul something up while I happily surveyed Badger Island’s low, granite shore. Then, bang, another hard yank and my rod was toyed with in a series of strong, fluttering jerks.
The youngster was excited on my behalf and I awkwardly began to reel in. A silver shape darted just below the surface and I pulled quite a large salmon from the dark-green water. Exclamations of delight came from behind me as I flicked just a little too hard and, inches from the rail, it unhooked itself and plopped back into the water. No matter, there’d be more where they came from.
There wasn’t. In a comic re-run of my earlier humiliation, no one felt so much as a nibble for the rest of the afternoon. As the hours ticked by, we sat dangling, moving our rods uselessly up and down, re-baiting, casting out close and far. We even started up and moved somewhere else, but the fish remained unimpressed. James was perplexed. If ever there was a picture-postcard setting for the ideal fishing spot, this pristine passage between a series of remote islands was surely it, but not today.
‘Rather strange,’ he gave away at last, as the young family resigned themselves to their luck. James reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. There was a little mystery to him, a sense of history, like a retired James Bond – the stresses of life in MI6 behind him – now happy to spend his days in a place far away where he could talk about the sea, particularly his patch of it, Bass Strait.
‘It’s an unusual piece of water. On either side of it, the continental shelf drops away to 3000 metres,’ he said with a nod to the watery horizon, sitting back, crossing his brown muscly legs and leaning in his chair as we retired back to Lady Barron. ‘Out in Bass Strait, the average depth is just 60 metres so it’s really a set of rapids. Then you have things like the Pot Boil.’
As James explained it, this ominously named feature is a large horseshoe-shaped set of rocky, sand-covered shoals, beginning immediately off Flinders Island’s east coast and extending several miles. ‘When the tide turns,’ said James, ‘it roars through like a river. The swells from the east stand up and break. When it’s behaving itself it’s not a problem,’ said James, ‘but when the weather comes in strong you don’t go near it. Some parts are barely a metre deep.’
‘What does it look like?’ I asked.
‘Positively dangerous,’ he said. ‘Even when calm you have to be careful of the Pot Boil. Everybody has to. There are a couple of channels that can take you through it to the south and east, and there’s a northerly one that goes up to Babel Island, but that’s unmarked, strictly “local knowledge only”.’
As we disembarked up the ladder back on the wharf, he casually mentioned that he was due to take a new lot of caretakers out to Deal Island in a few days and although it was an official government trip, he’d be happy for me to tag along, providing it was okay with the ranger. Did I happen to know him? I assured him Wayne and I were old friends and promised to get back to him as soon as I could.
I bounded into Wayne Dick’s office as he was conducting a leisurely late-afternoon conversation with a colleague. Startled, he assumed I was reporting something dramatic. Few people, it seems, have cause to run and pant on Flinders Island. His flow was interrupted and he wound up his meeting sooner than I suspected he wanted to.
I put forward my proposition about tagging along on the Deal trip, recounting what James had said to me, sounding like an excited child attempting to lever some emotional blackmail over a parent. He looked serious but after mumbling som
ething about ‘not normally the sort of thing we do …’ agreed that if space permitted, it would ‘probably be all right’.
Perfect. This hiatus gave me two days to see close up one of the most amazing creatures on the planet: navigator extraordinaire, long-distance flyer par excellence, high-speed record breaker bar none, a meal in itself, and as much a part of the Bass Strait island culture as seals, currents and shipwrecks, a small, dull-looking master of both air and sea, the utterly extraordinary Puffinus tenuirostris. Known to the Aborigines as ‘yolla’, to others as the ‘moon bird’, officially titled the short-tailed shearwater, but most commonly called the mutton-bird.
28
THE MUTTON-BIRD
There are many facts that speak of the short-tailed shearwater’s remarkability, but perhaps the most impressive is that in its lifetime, this dusky creature not much bigger than a pigeon will fly an astonishing 400 000 kilometres – the equivalent distance from the earth to the moon. Then there’s its mysterious ability to navigate a 30000 kilometre round trip from Bass Strait – flying north along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean – to Japan, across to Alaska, then back again through the middle of that featureless ocean, returning to the exact same burrow on the exact same headland in the final week of every September to begin its breeding season. How on earth does it do it?
The female will lay a single egg on the exact same day of every year, 25 November, no ifs or buts. It’s said you can set your watch by the regularity of its annual cycle. Not bad for a bird which weighs the equivalent of a packet and a half of butter. Not only that, but according to the Aboriginal people who have hunted, harvested and eaten them for over a century, they taste good too (although people tell me their unique flavour, from which they derive their nickname and which is described by some as ‘chicken cooked in fish oil’, is not for the faint-hearted).
Tasmania has all but five million of Australia’s estimated 23 million mutton-birds, by far our most populous and studied seabird, written about for well over a hundred years by both scientists and amateurs, including luminaries like Tasmania’s Bishop of the late nineteenth century, Henry Hutchinson Montgomery (one of whose five sons would become the famous general, Bernard Montgomery of Alamein).
Spread almost entirely across 167 colonies in the Bass Strait Islands, the shearwater’s annual migration was for many years a mystery. Come every March, they simply flew away and disappeared. Other colonies were known to exist in the northern hemisphere, but no one thought it remotely possible that they could be the very same birds.
It took one dedicated scientist and ornithologist, Dominic Louis Serventy from Western Australia, to pioneer modern short-tailed shearwater research. From 1947, he and a small CSIRO team spent year after lonely year on many isolated Bass Strait islands, walking hundreds of miles over rocks and grassy, snake-infested tussocks (he once killed thirty tiger snakes in a single day), keeping himself alive with a portable cooker, a tin-opener and a bottle of vitamin pills. Month after month he placed small metal bands on the feet of no less than twenty thousand birds, in some cases banding the entire population of an individual island.
Each band was inscribed with the message, ‘Notify Fauna Board, Hobart, Tasmania Australia’ and a number in the hope that a few would one day be returned. Eventually, in the mid-1950s, his work started to pay off when Inuit hunters started sending back bands found on birds as far away as St Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. The mystery of the mutton-bird was gradually being unlocked.
Watching it land, though, is quite hilarious. It’s called ‘shearwater,’ because that’s exactly what it does. Its metre-wide, exquisitely slender wingspan lets it ride the air above the waves and swells, only the slightest adjustment needed to manoeuvre with the aerobatics of a jet fighter. Out of the water, though, it’s hopeless.
On a blustery autumn evening, I stood shivering in the wind on Babel Island, off Flinders’ central east coast, home to Australia’s, indeed the world’s largest mutton-bird population. An estimated three million breeding pairs, 12 per cent of Australia’s entire mutton-bird population, inhabit this colony, virtually covering its entire four and a half square kilometres of lonely rock and tussock.
The trip came about very quickly, and as Babel is strictly private property, slightly clandestine. It was a short trip with some birding enthusiasts from the mainland I had starting chatting with over lunch at the Lady Barron pub. They had come over for a few days to look for shorebirds and albatross, but long hankered to witness the dusk return of the shearwaters to their island burrows after their day feeding on the ocean. They were a group of four, three men and a woman, all a little older than myself, and wore the uniform of serious birdwatchers: dull khaki pants and jackets with an excess of zips and pockets. As we talked birds over fish and chips, one or two of them glanced at each other, then admitted that they might be heading out to see the mutton-birds that very night, and that I might be able to join them. However, they were at pains to emphasise with winking and taps on the sides of noses, it was all a little ‘on the sly’.
Some time later we rendezvoused at the wharf and a local man took our money as we loaded into his boat and slipped quietly out of Lady Barron with the setting sun. Our course took us east, then north towards the prominent peak of Mount Capuchin, Babel Island’s towering granite edifice, which rose magnificently from the water as we approached. Remembering James’ description of the local route through the Pot Boil, I asked our young bearded captain if he intended to use the unmarked route to the north.
‘Who’ve you been talking to?’ he asked warily. My lips remained sealed.
Matthew Flinders named Babel, it is said, after precisely what we were this night coming to experience: the cacophonous voices of millions of chattering birds. While not an easy island on which to land, our guide was tempted by the cash and an almost dead calm evening at high tide.
We came in at South East Beach, directly under the impressive island mountain, landing on a patch of sand to the left of some mutton-birding huts, thankfully unoccupied. As if on a secret raiding party, we scrambled up to a high point overlooking the water, where part of the cliff had fallen away to make a rather terrifying gap he called The Gulch. It being just after sunset, however, we sensed rather than saw it and heard the sea echoing angrily up from below.
Around the woman birdwatcher’s neck hung the largest pair of binoculars I had ever seen. The wind picked up and we sat, the five of us, on a bare mound at the edge of thousands of lumpy grass tussocks, a burrow with a waiting chick under each one. Our driver, a committed bird lover himself, was at pains for us not to move from this spot to avoid unnecessary impact.
The rookeries were all but invisible until up close; we saw that under each was an entrance about a hand-width across. Expectantly, we waited for the calls of the birds, but nothing was heard except the rapidly cooling southerly breeze through the treeless landscape of granite folds and tussock grass. It was a clear night, and the dusk lingered in the western sky, a blue and golden curtain behind which the light of Venus gradually lost her shyness.
‘There they are,’ someone said. We held up our binoculars and everyone made all sorts of appreciative noises, but all I could make out was a darkening ocean. ‘Use these,’ said the woman beside me, handing me her gigantic, light-gathering thoroughbred binoculars. I gasped, as before my eyes, about a kilometre out to sea, was what looked to be a swarm of gigantic black moths. Thousands and thousands of darting, wheeling shapes, dipping and gliding in a delighted melee above the surface of the water.
‘Just look at them!’ one of us exclaimed for all.
‘There they are,’ mumbled our mostly quiet boat captain, a little relieved.
‘Why don’t they come in?’
‘They will. They’re waiting for dark,’ he answered. Slowly, the cloud of black birds broke up slightly and made its way closer. Now a swirling mass above our heads, first one, then another made a tentative approach, the throbbing of their wings vibrating in the a
ir above us. Hundreds and hundreds of individual wing beats, whooshing and swirling at what seemed inches over our heads. Then the first of them came in and hit the ground hard, like a softball hitting the sand, then another. Soon they were plopping all around us, their landings a chaotic contrast to the grace of their flight.
In the beam of a torch that had been doused with a sheet of red cellophane to avoid dazzling their tiny retinas, a bird just a few feet from where we sat pulled itself out of the tussock it had just collected, shook the sand out of its head, then performed a distinctly duck-like waddle before giving us a rather imperious look and vanishing down a burrow.
‘No stopping power in the wings, you see,’ the woman next to me said quietly. The slender wingspan, perfect for dancing on the slightest updraft and cruising up to 160 kilometres in a day to look for krill, does not make for good air brakes, and neither are they particularly proficient at taking off.
It’s for a good reason that shearwater colonies invariably inhabit steep foreshores, as here the wind can provide instant lift, then a steep dive down the precipitous slope or cliff face to gather speed enough to transform this land-wobbler into a true master of the air. First, though, they have to find some way to get some air under them. Fine on a windy day, when any hilly tussock will do, but when calm, the mutton-birds with their fleshy, webbed feet will scramble up almost perpendicular rocks, metres high if need be, wings outstretched, then perch, waiting for a gust to lift them off.
The Forgotten Islands Page 17
