by Monica Tan
I was determined. Today, I would catch a fish.
It was the morning of day six on the trail—one of several rest days interspersed between the long walk through sand dunes, wet beaches, thickets of endangered monsoon vine and plains dotted with paperbarks. The day before, on the beach, I had met Sophia Roe, matriarch to one of the Goolarabooloo families, and she had kindly invited me to go fishing with them.
Now I was in a Toyota HiLux being driven by Sophia at a good clip, kicking up clouds of powdery pindan on a corrugated track that traced the coastline. She was the proud mum of four kids, two of whom were currently in the car: seventeen-year-old Raelyn and nineteen-year-old Imani. Next to Sophia was her mum—introduced to me as ‘Nanna’, so I called her that too—who held tight to a pretty, chubby toddler on her lap. The toddler belonged to a cousin living in a town a few hours east of Broome. Imani was the main one who took care of her, although everyone in the family seemed to pitch in.
‘Looking after babies is my thing,’ Imani explained, tucking her mobile phone into the strap of her bikini. ‘Especially newborns, just a few weeks old.’
She didn’t have a baby of her own, and I found her logic a bit curious.
‘Babies sleep a lot,’ she said. ‘That’s why I like looking after them.’
I was raised in a typical nuclear family: a workaholic dad, stay-at-home mum and three kids in a suburban, two-storey brick home. But the Roe family seemed to operate a lot more like my extended family in Malaysia, where it wasn’t unusual for children to be sent to live for periods with adult siblings, grandparents, uncles or aunts. Especially during my parents’ generation—my mum and dad came from large families with seven-plus siblings, and efficient child rearing involved shifting kids to whichever relative had space in their house or time to spare, or lived near a good high school. It kept the internal bonds of these clans strong.
Every time I went back to Malaysia, I noticed how enmeshed the lives of my extended family were. My cousins laughed and joked with one another like best friends, and treated our aunts and uncles as second mothers and fathers. Whereas with me and my siblings, their rarely seen Australian cousins, they were warm, sure, but unable to breach the courteousness that separates strangers. I’d always feel a stab of jealousy and regret we were so disconnected from our kin. How lonely our nuclear family was in Australia! And yet, among a nation of immigrants, how common was our story in Australia? Only Aboriginal families hadn’t suffered this type of isolation—although through decades of forced child removals, the Australian government had done its best to inflict on their people that same fracturing of clans.
Everyone in the car had cans of fizzy drink, and the seats smelt of day-old squid, something Raelyn complained loudly about. I was surprised by the way she barked out driving instructions to her mother: ‘Go to first!’ ‘No, fourth!’ ‘Put them locks on.’ She was as mouthy and brash with her family as she had been shy and sweet to strangers back at the campsite. ‘If you had any brains, Mum, you’d driven on them right side o’ road,’ she said. I waited for her mum to blow her top, but Sophia was utterly Zen. A calm smile spread across her face like melting butter. She just kept trucking along, bumpety-bump. She wasn’t a tall lady, yet seemed in her element commandeering this burly car. Her hands gripped the wheel tightly, and she leant forward, peering through the front window.
‘And what if them car come up that side from around the corner?’ asked Raelyn’s older sister Imani, sensibly. ‘If is you drivin’ us we’d all be killed!’
Well, Raelyn didn’t have anything to say to that.
A blanket of orange pindan and thick vegetation whizzed past my window, broken up by flashes of sapphire ocean. The beaches looked desolate of animal life. Many of the resident wader birds had left for their annual voyage to northern Europe.
I did glance a black kite making easy glides on an updraft. For the Goolarabooloo, their forked-tail appearance chimes with the forked-tail salmon being ‘fat’ and good to eat. Pelicans, mullet, catfish, dugong and kangaroos should also be fat now. It’s a different way to mark time: not via clocks and calendars, more like an elaborate yet reliable Rube Goldberg machine, in which components are linked and produce a domino effect.
‘Do you know how t’ tie your hook?’ Raelyn asked me, pointing at the handline I’d brought.
I shook my head. She gently retrieved it from my hands and unlaced the end of my brand-new fishing line from the plastic wheel it was wound around. After threading a metal ball sinker, she tied a knot and threaded it through the eye of a hook; holding the hook in place with her teeth, she wound the line back around itself before knotting it. ‘There you go,’ she said with a smile.
It had been so neatly and deftly done, I was certain Raelyn could tie hooks in her sleep.
She looked out the window to the sea, eyes glittering. ‘I’m goin’ spear all them fish!’
As the family spoke, they seemed to me fixated on the tide: what time it was high, what time it was low. Raelyn pulled out a laminated chart from a car seat pocket, looked up today’s date, and said that later this afternoon the tide would peak at seven metres. Only now, at low tide, was the reef exposed enough for us to fish. The dramatic high tides along this part of the coastline meant water levels were always rising or dropping at a rapid rate. Sophia explained to me that when you were perched on an elevated section of the reef platform, it was easy to forget the water was closing in from behind you—and that could leave you trapped in open water. ‘You’ve always got to be moving backwards,’ she warned.
She pulled off onto the side of the road, and another truck appeared and parked beside us. It was manned by her husband, Warren, and carried more family members including their two young sons. Both cars had their windows rolled down, and everyone argued boisterously in the gap between about where they should park: up along the cliff where the vehicles would be out of the tide’s way or more conveniently down on the beach.
‘On the beach!’ yelled Raelyn. She made it clear that should the family make the mistake of parking on the cliff, she wouldn’t help carry any of their gear.
Eventually the group arrived at the same preference.
Raelyn smiled at me, haughtily. ‘In the end, they all follow Raelyn’s plans.’ She was careful to say it just loud enough for only me to hear.
We veered off the track and down a crumbling, treacherous path onto the beach. The car rocked from side to side as it careened up and over the collapsing waves of sand. We landed with a thump, all four wheels now safely on the flat beach. Sophia had barely put the car into park when Raelyn swung the side door open and started running towards the water. She clutched a spear gun in one hand and pulled on a snorkel with the other.
We were at Dugal, one of the most picturesque spots on the trail. The rocks looked like a model-sized, crumbling lost city painted in curry-powder yellow, coral pinks and reds. It was named after its rich deposits of white ochre, and I could see white chunks sandwiched between the rock like a layer of crumbly feta. I was given the okay to try some—white only, though, as the red was strictly for men. I mixed it with saliva and painted the back of my hand and fingers with it. It had a dazzling, almost metallic sheen; I bet it would practically glow in the night by a bonfire. Before application it would be mixed with animal fat or grease and used medicinally, decoratively on ritual objects and on the body in ceremonies and initiations, enhancing the wearer’s spiritual power and causing them to enter a transcendental state.
I looked out and smiled at the sight of Raelyn terrorising fish in the water. All I could see was her back and the top of her head, floating above the waterline. While the kids went spearfishing, the rest of us—Sophia, Warren and a couple of adult cousins he had driven in his car—walked along the rocks, headed to a section of exposed reef that during low tide jutted into the ocean. To the right of us was gushing water, and to our left a long and low pindan cliff wall, fluted like the folds of a scarlet curtain drawn across this stretch of coast.
&n
bsp; Someone cried out, ‘Octopus!’
Sophia snatched the creature out of a nearby rockpool with her bare hands—a slimy, purplish, liquid thing. Its sucker-covered tentacles immediately wrapped around her arm. There was something nightmarish about seeing her hand disappear under that serpentine mass of translucent skin. It was like glue you couldn’t get off your fingers, and every time Sophia peeled one tentacle off another had taken its place. After some wrestling, she clutched the octopus by its sucker-free head and threw it onto the rock with great strength—splat, like runny egg on a frypan. The legs still squirmed weakly. She took it by the head and threw it down again. Now it was well and truly dead. We had our bait. I was impressed by her coolness.
‘Do you like oysters?’ asked one of the sister-cousins, turning to me after peering at the waterline.
‘Do I ever,’ I said.
‘Plenty o’ them oysters here.’ She pointed at some nearby rocks encrusted with frilly shells, mauve and white. Taking her knife, she banged in the tip so she could pry an oyster open; inside was a slug of beige mussel that she passed to me on the snapped-off shell.
‘It’s okay to eat?’ I asked tentatively. I’d only ever eaten oysters washed and sitting on a tray from a fish shop—not cemented to rocks, doused in ocean water.
‘It’s good. Real fresh!’ She nodded encouragingly.
I popped it into my mouth. It was smaller than commercially sold oysters, but oh it tasted good. A creamy liquid full of flavour, naturally seasoned by salt, burst in my mouth.
With not enough knives to go around, another cousin began smashing oysters with a rock, so I did the same. Part of me could have happily done that all day.
Over on the reef platform, Sophia was prepping her line. When I joined her she cut an arm off the octopus for me, and I threaded it onto my hook. She showed me how to swing my line so that the hook circled in the air like a lasso, and throw it as hard as I could into the ocean. On my first cast it dropped feebly into the surf, tumbled back and promptly snagged on the reef. I had to clamber down into the water and unhook it. Five minutes in, and I was already soaking wet. On my second cast the hook swung wildly back towards me. Sophia said I should make sure my finger was off the line. ‘But it is off the line,’ I said with a sigh.
For the next hour the others proved they could cast their lines twice as far as mine, beyond the whitewash. Every time I thought I had the hang of it, the next cast I’d mess it up. My line would catch on the plastic wheel or under my finger then swing erratically towards me and my fishing buddies.
‘Darn it,’ I said, as my hook almost took out one of the sister-cousin’s eyes.
She picked up her bucket. ‘I’m fishing over there,’ she said and moved a few steps away.
‘Monica’s still learning!’ said Sophia, trying to be supportive.
But eventually even she shuffled away to a safer distance, because when I looked up again I saw the entire family squashed in a tight heap on the furthest corner of the reef. I laughed hopelessly.
Another thirty minutes passed, then there was a commotion. I turned towards Sophia. She was in a tug of war with a fish, her feet steady on the rocks and her face contorted with concentration. Her thin plastic line was jerking and yanking all over the place, but she held on tight. Finally, in one heaving wrench, she pulled the fish free from the almighty hands of the ocean and sent it flying through the air. It landed with a thud on the rocks by her feet. Fate sealed. It was a sizeable blue bone groper, shaped like a paddle. For a while it flipped and gasped, one visible eye staring at me mournfully.
We’d been fishing for nearly two hours, and I still hadn’t caught anything. I told myself it didn’t matter. I was brimming with joy just being out in the wind and water and sun.
As we fished—or as they fished and I fed our bait to the ocean—my buddies pointed out things that were barely visible to me but to them ‘was legible as a newspaper’, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Mitchell’s surveyor journals. ‘Monica, look, a mob of fish!’ I saw a blurry flash of silver. ‘Monica, look, a gullal!’ I saw a pointed dark thing that was possibly the snout of a giant turtle, or gullal as they called it. I really only half believed them until that mob of fish and gullal came close to shore, proving their keen eyesight correct.
But when a metre-long sea snake appeared, it was obvious even to me, as if someone had drawn a giant white-and-yellow ‘S’ onto the ocean. Was it moving? It must have been, for it was growing larger every second, yet its movements were so imperceptible it gave the impression of floating. I couldn’t tell which end was its head, as sea snakes have flattened tails that help with swimming. They’re generally considered non-aggressive, although they come loaded with toxic venom like many Australian snakes.
We were entranced. Even the kids, who by now had rejoined us, hushed for a moment.
Then Raelyn shouted, ‘Go away!’
Her younger brother picked up a rock as large as his head and was poised to hoist it like a caber toss when his mother stopped him. ‘Leave it alone,’ she said. ‘It looks injured.’
We watched, feeling tense, as the snake swam to within just a few metres of us.
Then it started to grow smaller—it was swimming parallel to our reef platform and away. Sophia’s son, unable to resist, heaved the rock into the water where it plopped with a splash. The snake was long gone.
Everyone relaxed and resumed fishing. One cousin asked Raelyn to hand back the knife. She stood up and threw it, and her cousin caught it adroitly by the handle midair. I looked at them, amazed, with Raelyn giving me a cheeky grin.
I turned to Sophia. ‘Are there things like snakes in the water all the time?’ I’d never seen a sea snake before. Unlike snakes on land, they weren’t something I’d given much thought to. Now I gulped, looking back on all the times on this trail I had swum in the ocean so carelessly.
‘Yeah, but have you noticed we’re always looking around?’ she said, referring to her keen-eyed family.
‘But shit, us walkers don’t! Sometimes we just go swimming and we don’t pay attention to anything.’
‘Don’t worry. One of us mob is always watching. It’s like with our kids—we’re always watching them, keeping an eye out for danger.’
We stopped fishing when the rising tide swept over much of the reef platform, forcing us to island hop back to shore. It was already afternoon but I was running on so much adrenaline I’d failed to notice we hadn’t eaten lunch. We walked further up the beach, past our parked cars. From a distance I could see a boat being moored by a group of young Goolarabooloo men, mainly in their teens, dressed in board shorts and baseball caps. They’d just come back from sea. Some of them were already on shore, crouched over something I couldn’t quite make out. Then I saw the blood-splattered carnage.
Two gullal had been carried off the boat and placed further up the shore. I had never seen such giant gullal. Their shells were the shape of satellite dishes, mottled with olive and brown splotches and quartered by long, white lines. Parts of the shell were broken—hunting wounds through which bloodied flesh oozed.
One gullal was tipped over, stomach-side up. Nearby were its dismembered front flippers, one atop the other like a pair of leather gloves. A man stood barefoot in a growing pool of cherry-red blood, slicing at the edges of the gullal’s hard underbelly until it was pried open; the lid on a can of muscles and organs. Disconcertingly, the gullal’s head and amputated stumps were still moving in soft, slow jerks as a man pulled out its entrails and spilled them all over the sand. Its eyes were dark opals, now dull, and its nose ended in an almost sharp-edged beak. They hadn’t yet cut off the back legs, which unlike the front flippers had the flatness of a duck’s webbed feet.
Soon more young men were giving the other gullal the same treatment.
I recognised Tay, who smiled at me shyly. ‘Today we let some of the boys have a turn at hunting,’ he explained.
Hunting gullal the traditional way isn’t easy. From a moving boat the men and boy
s had thrown a wooden wongami spear and a wire harpoon with enough strength and accuracy to penetrate the swimming animal’s shell. Tay said the young men had done well and proved their mettle to their older male relatives.
Even a novice like myself could identify the gullal organs, which didn’t seem too different from a human’s: a bean-shaped stomach, dark liver, and thick red heart and lungs. Sophia began emptying a stomach of thick, fibrous stuff she said was seagrass.
‘Can I help?’ I asked her.
‘Sure! Do like what I’m doing but with the intestines.’
I picked up one end of a steaming pile of pink intestine, encased in yellow skin like uncooked sausages. I slid my thumb down the skin as directed, creating a long tear, and used my fingers to scoop out the fibre that became more like poo the further down I went.
I found the slaughter provocative but not distressing—which surprised me, considering my weak tango with the crab. Because I didn’t grow up in the bush or on a farm, none of this—blood and guts, two half-dead animals—was in my vocabulary. But in this context, surrounded by so many old hands, I felt comfortable. And I think some deeply rational part of my brain felt that to regard the animal as food, or better yet as sustenance, was not a form of disrespect. Far from it.
In traditional times gullal lived good, long lives because saltwater people took care of the seas, the coastline, and all the animals who lived there. Sustainability was embedded into their entire worldview. Outsiders, not blackfellas, discarded into the ocean masses of fishing nets that tangled up and slowly drowned gullal. Outsiders, not blackfellas, first polluted marine environments with plastic debris and toxic agricultural, mining and coastal development run-off. And outsiders, not blackfellas, took the world and sent it off the cliff of climate change into rising sea levels and rising sea temperatures, drastically altering ocean environments.
Of course, the right of Goolarabooloo people to hunt gullal as they have for tens of thousands of years, in an era of high-speed tinnies and the bald reality of dwindling marine life, isn’t a cut and dried issue. But for these nine days, when it came to respecting and connecting to the land I chose to trust that my hosts knew best.
