In the tidal wave of current discussions about extinctions, biodiversity loss and planetary crisis, a less visible current of knowledge pulls at our attention. Everywhere, there is both abundance and loss, thriving and declining. What we term weeds, or feral species, or invasive species, or common and abundant species, are plants and animals thriving in place, and it happens everywhere. In all the world’s oceans, while many apex predators are depleted, populations of cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish and octopuses) are increasing, despite continuous and heavy fishing. Cephalopods are particularly interesting, with complex intelligences described by Peter Godfrey-Smith as ‘an independent experiment in the evolution of a large nervous system, the only such experiment outside the vertebrates’. In my local seas, octopuses and giant cuttlefish are quite common, often curiously investigating us as we examine them. My local rocky shores are home to the only cephalopod that can kill a human, the tiny and potently venomous blue-ringed octopus. Hundreds of human families play in that habitat daily with no fatal encounters; we peacefully share the space. Because we have forgotten this truth, that we can share, that we are all connected, planet and landscape and seascape and human and innumerable other species, we have lost perspective on change, and these become liminal experiences: looking into the large, thinking eyes of octopuses and giant cuttlefish; sinking into depth, eyes closed, past the buoyancy zone; embodying the visceral sense of release and lightness of diving on empty lungs.
Liminality is a threshold state, the border between one condition and another. It is not either of them, it is ambiguous and disorienting. In many cultures, there are three stages in the liminal transition: a metaphorical death, a test and rebirth. The liminality of freediving has multiple dimensions. It connects us to ancient stories in many cultures of mermen and mermaids: beings between human and water creature. Western cultures know them as sea nymphs, nixies, silkies, and so on. Miskito Indian divers in Central America call these beings liwa mairin, and in modern times attribute decompression sickness and other diving illnesses to the inimical moods of these water spirits. Diving is also in the boundary zone between earth and water, with air the defining element. It moves from light to increasing darkness with depth and back again. It moves from swimming down against the natural buoyancy of the human body to freefalling with gravity as increasing water pressure overcomes that buoyancy.
And it is liminal between life and death – at great depth, you have to be exquisitely attuned to the totality of your body if you want to keep on living. You have to understand the symptoms of oxygen depletion in the particular way that it is expressed in your own body, and confidently know how much time you have to continue swimming deeper and also make the return journey to the surface before you black out. I keep in my journal a graph illustrating this relationship, with red and blue lines showing trajectories of living and dying. Freedivers I spoke with indicated there can be a wide range of physiological indications of oxygen depletion, and they had learned quite specific cues to which they would respond. Despite this, many experienced freedivers assured me that death is seldom in their thoughts. The safety framing in recreational freedive training and diving is usually rigorous and very careful, with a number of key rules described as ‘safety through redundancy’, designed to keep divers well within the limits of what is safe for them individually. This is reinforced by the buddy system, so you never dive alone. Spearfishers, routinely self-taught, tend to be less particular in their approach, with hyperventilation a common practice, and many spearfishers diving alone. Lifelong surfer and diver Tim Winton embodies this, with many lyrical passages in his writing reflecting the casual acceptance of these risks.
Moving away from the regulated structures of safety and risk control lead you onto the rocks of danger and uncertainty, and danger and uncertainty, normal in most of nature, are the complements of safety and fulfilment in life. To live amid all of these you need to be present, attentive – you need to learn to fail better. Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön argues that ‘all kinds of things happen that break your heart, but you can hold failure and loss as part of your human experience’. You need to find again your ancient bodily wisdom, your heart’s knowledge that while we are all alone, while there is always hurt and loss, your strength and beauty and intelligence and love are transmuted through your life’s relationships and work to be reborn in others.
I have failed to understand my father’s suicide all my life. There was no note, no message; I had not seen him for a year. Freediving has shown me a new way to understand death. In the yoga traditions, breathing in engulfs you with life. Breathing out generously gives that life back out into the world. After deep practice of yoga breath control, pranayama, the need to breathe often falls away for long, relaxed minutes. As the water closes over my head each time I dive, I let go my earthly concerns to sink into the blue embrace of an alternate world. On that dune in the tropical night, my father took a different measure on his life and cast off his quotidian moorings. One of those moorings was me, and I have to fathom the place in my life of both harbour and open sea, port and storm.
In freediving I often think about death, but it is not always ‘death anxiety’, as the psychologists construct it. There is real danger, as well as the imaginary circling sharks. In physiological terms, breath-hold diving is progressive asphyxiation. It is possible because of a profound suppression of metabolism: it changes the way your body functions. Surfacing after a prolonged dive, you are not the same person: your body has moved through dramatic changes, you have been to a place where few venture. If much life is lived on the surface of things, freediving lets you plunge beneath that surface. Freediving has led me to an understanding of the paradoxical joy of being close to death, the compassion and peace.
I have lived much of my life feeling marginal, feeling like an imposter in my jobs: I expect rejection, a predictable outcome of two parents sequentially leaving when I was young. Only recently have I begun to understand that there might be strengths in those places on the margin. Freediving alone, freediving actually free of all that positivist framing and safety paraphernalia and other people, brought me back to my father’s death. He had become more and more marginal to what the world considers important, and eventually, alone, stepped off that edge, stepped free of all that judgement and demand. There is no possibility of answers once that boundary is crossed. Alone, immersed in the spaces of the silent water, I am maybe learning to let go of the questions.
In blue-water diving most life is not visible, for most large sea creatures live in shallower waters. In deep blue water the freediver is exposed in every direction, completely vulnerable. That vast continuous space, that absence, is an entry, an opening. Empty space is open to anyone, an invitation. Can I live without trying to fill the silences and empty spaces? Can I learn to live in these silences and spaces? In the extraordinary emptied bliss at the end of a yoga session, when my teachers cup their hands over my ears in the penultimate position of savasana (appropriately, the corpse pose), the muted roar of the ocean fills the silence: the tides of salt blood pulsing through my body. It feels like the hand of God.
One of my teachers in Bali urges us to swim on the shallow reef before the deep water, observing and learning local marine species and ecologies, as well as being in the sea generally: ‘you need to spend time in the ocean, make it your friend’.
We become familiar with one turtle that seems always to be found in the same patch of reef, we know the batfish are curious and often come to investigate us in the deep water, we begin to understand the diurnal patterns of changing activities and species across an undersea topography that becomes familiar. And fundamentally we engage with the salt water itself: we taste it, swallow it, rinse it through our sinuses, feel it flow across our skin – it is both all around us and within us. The tears in our eyes, the sweat on our skin, the blood in our veins, arteries, organs, have the same salt concentration as ancient oceans, reflecting the time when the ocean water itself served as the fluid transport
in the bodies of our biological ancestors.
Deep in the ocean’s embrace, on one breath, feeling your mind and body change: freediving is a transformational encounter. Like all of life, it is a journey between two breaths, the first breath of life and the last breath before death, the last breath before immersion and the first breath of surfacing again into air. In yoga and meditation, practitioners speak of ‘resting in the space between breaths’. In marine mammal physiology, researchers describe the way seals will drift underwater, not swimming, not breathing, not hunting – resting in the space between breaths. On this blue pathway, naked of technology, with just one breath, the freediver’s unshielded body is open to the silent sea. The transformative encounter connects the World Ocean to the ocean within, bringing us home to the cycles of how we are born and die alone and together on this planet.
Peasant Dreaming
Sam Vincent
When we were kids, my sisters and I weren’t allowed to watch TV during dinner. The risk of seeing John Howard was too much for my parents to bear. In the months after he became prime minister, Mum and Dad wore their opposition proudly, chortling of his imminent demise and slapping a ‘Don’t blame me I voted Labor’ sticker on our dusty family van.
But as the Howard months became the Howard years, their mood turned first to frustration – Dad would refer to him no longer as ‘the miserable little man’ but ‘the little shit’ or ‘the little dickhead’ – and eventually to enforced censorship. Should the PM slip through their low-fi parental block, unexpectedly cropping up on the 7.30 Report beside Kerry O’Brien, he could expect an incoming missile before having his feed cut. My mum was throwing shoes at Little Johnny long before it became fashionable on Q&A.
But I for one relished what televised glimpses I could manage: those bushy eyebrows, suddenly plucked to make him electorally palatable; the chunky bulletproof vest under his shirt after the Port Arthur massacre; the loud shirts at APEC summits; the louder Wallabies tracksuit on his morning power walk … He was a strange sort of fashion icon.
My favourite item in Howard’s wardrobe was his akubra hat. Reserved for visits to marginal rural electorates, it was always accompanied by a Driza-Bone coat – irrespective of the forecast – and a pair of R.M. Williams boots.
What I found most intriguing about the hat was its pristine condition. Flat-brimmed, symmetrical and impermeable, it was so different to the hats my farmer father wore in the paddocks of my youth – tatty, smelly rags of things, luridly stained bright pink with herbicide dye and full of holes to facilitate melanoma growth.
Years later, a few weeks before I turned thirty, I was at home in Canberra when my mum called. Dad was in an ambulance. He’d had an accident, and the thumb on his favoured hand was broken in several places. Farming families often need a crisis to start a conversation about succession, and this was ours. In time, my dad’s thumb made a near full recovery, but since that phone call I’ve spent one day a week working with him as an apprentice primary producer.
In honour of this new direction, and largely in jest, a friend gave me an akubra for my thirtieth birthday. It was – I was appalled to realise when I took it out of its box and studied it – flat-brimmed, symmetrical and impermeable: Howard’s hat. In becoming Dad’s deputy sheriff, I resembled the Deputy Sheriff. And I felt as much of a phoney.
*
This is a companion essay to a companion edition. In 2006, Griffith Review published The Next Big Thing, dedicated to gen X writers, thinkers and activists. One of them was my eldest sister, the writer and anthropologist Eve Vincent. In her contribution, ‘Confusions of an Economist’s Daughter’, Eve deconstructed the generational divide between her ‘ratbag’, World Economic Forum–blockading self (Eve was then twenty-nine) and our Keating acolyte of a father (then fifty-eight), set to the backdrop of the farm they both loved. Eve’s the best writer I know.
We lived half an hour’s drive from Canberra. In the morning our dad would race into the kitchen after checking the sheep, his tie slung like a scarf around his neck. He’d leave in a hurry, his ute slipping around dusty gravel corners, the radio loud. ‘Good morning, this is A.M.’ I imagine him now, knotting his tie in the rear-vision mirror in the car park at work. My dad is a free-trade economist.
My parents bought the farm, then 200 acres of overgrazed grassland, in 1983, the year before I was born. The Hawke–Keating reform years, Eve wrote, were a good time to be in the business of offering economic advice. ‘Those beautiful paddocks, scattered with rocks and flecked with scars, quickly became ours.’
‘Confusions of an Economist’s Daughter’ caused a stir in our family. It was a brutally honest public airing of Eve’s attempt to reconcile the unselfishness our father espoused with the self-interest of the economics he practised.
My dad the economist, who worked so hard through decades of relentless change, is an unfailingly generous person, and he has poured his successes back to his family. He instilled a social conscience in us all, but he’s dismayed by my interpretation of it. Most of all, I suspect the thing he wants from me is stability. He’s looking for some certainty.
And now he’s got it. Eve has since had children (tick), scored a plum academic posting (tick) and bought a house (gold star and koala stamp). I remain single, childless, underemployed and a renter. The farm is now 650 acres (they’ve bred like rabbits); our father, sixty-nine years old.
In the edition brief for Millennials Strike Back, there was a reference to those who came before us, the class of The Next Big Thing: ‘In the decade since, this group has gone on to make their mark; it is now time for the next generation to take up their mantle.’ And so it is I give you my own daddy issues.
*
I am a third-generation farmer, and I know how that sounds – predestined, aristocratic. But it’s by default, not design. My late maternal grandfather, whom I called Papa, was a Western District grazier and longstanding president of the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria. His was the squatter’s life of horseback mustering, lawn tennis parties and gentlemen’s clubs. (My dad tells a story of once answering Papa’s phone and taking a message from an acquaintance, a ‘Mr Fraser from Hamilton’.) But my uncles didn’t want to take over Papa’s farm and my mum and my aunt – who still listens to The Country Hour despite being a Bangalow yuppie – weren’t asked. It was sold before I was born.
From there, the farming line changed sides, states and narratives.
If millennials only exist as a construct in opposition to baby boomers, that my dad was able to buy a farm and that I am now taking it on is because we are firmly placed on each side of the dichotomy.
Dad, the clever son of a clever man – my paternal grandfather, born in a bark hut in the Gippsland bush and forced to leave school at age twelve by the Depression – was never going to become anything other than a white-collar professional. But though he co-founded a successful economics consultancy and is proud of his role in helping to liberalise the Australian economy, he has always looked uncomfortable in a suit. This is a man who, when I was in kindergarten, cut off much of his left big toe with a chainsaw – and drove himself to hospital. Five years later he shot a fox in my sister Lucy’s bedroom while the rest of us were eating dinner (roast chicken, which we figure attracted it inside in the first place).
Dad was raised in Melbourne but spent his school holidays ‘mucking about’ on a cousin’s farm in the Wimmera; Mum, whom he met studying agricultural science at university, pined for a return to the land. They named their block Gollion, after a Swiss village where, while backpacking in the 1970s, they had found relations to an ancestor of Dad’s, the first Vincent to arrive in Australia, in 1854.
Gollion was once part of Fernleigh, a farm established in the 1870s, but it is my parents who have most shaped its landscape since white settlement. Armed with the boomer audacity that held the postwar world as theirs to conquer, Mum and Dad built themselves a house and set about constructing their Eden. Dams were bulldozed, fences strained, and
my three sisters and I enlisted to plant thousands of trees on freezing August days.
They subscribed to Grass Roots, the self-sufficiency bible of 1980s Australia, grew vegies, kept chooks and established orchards. Confounding the Nationals-voting ‘cockies’ around them, they brewed compost tea to fertilise their pastures organically, restored their section of a creek to the ‘chain of ponds’ it would have resembled before land clearing turned it into a drain, and introduced a holistic management regime in which stock is moved regularly through many small paddocks to replicate the bunch-grazing and pasture-rest periods of wild herd and predator ecosystems. The place boomed.
But here’s the thing: Dad, who ‘retired’ fourteen years ago, still sees Gollion as a hobby farm. Some people, he reasons, play golf when they retire; he manages 150 cows and their calves, two large orchards, a small mob of sheep and a shantytown of sheds – and, until last year, was the president of the local Landcare group. While his former colleagues cruise the South Pacific, Dad seeks adventure atop dodgy ladders or by roll-starting a rollbarless tractor. (‘Best not tell your mum I’ve been doing that again.’)
Gollion was never meant to be a legacy project, and I was never raised to be its successor. If anything, I was raised to believe that farmers – as opposed to the ‘go-getters’ (a favourite expression of Dad’s) of the service economy who have farms for fun – are largely ‘losers’ (another favourite): either lazy aristocrats who inherited the good fortune of their forebears, or uncouth bumpkins with their hands out for government assistance. Throwbacks to pre-Gough, cultural-cringe Australia. Laggards to the message that we no longer ride on the sheep’s back. ‘The bigger the hat,’ Dad is fond of saying when Barnaby Joyce appears on the telly in his own akubra, ‘the smaller the brain beneath it.’
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 26
