by Monica Tan
It’s unsurprising that fresh reports of croc attacks often renew calls for a cull. When crocs upset the rule ‘animals are food for humans, but humans are never food to animals’, it triggers in the public a reflexive defensiveness: a sense we’ve given the animal world too much leeway and should tighten our leash.
Yet following her narrow escape from the jaws of death, Plumwood remained a strong advocate for the integrity of not just crocs but the entire natural world. In later years, as she processed her terrifying experience, she saw that ‘not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible.’ Crocodiles, she wrote, presented an important test for humans.
An ecosystem’s ability to support large predators is a mark of its ecological integrity. Crocodiles and other creatures that can take human life also present a test of our acceptance of our ecological identity. When they’re allowed to live freely, these creatures indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognise ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain, eaten as well as eater.
By 1971 crocodiles were teetering on the brink of localised extinction, so hunting them was banned. Since then, numbers have bounced back. An estimated hundred thousand saltwater crocodiles live in the NT wilderness—one croc for every two Territorians. Certain parts of the Top End are certifiably infested, and in the decade before my trip one human on average had died by crocodile in the Territory each year. Hardly numerous, but more so than the single fatal snake bite in the same period.
Samuel abandoned his plans for a swim, having concluded that today wasn’t to be the day he sacrificed himself to our saurian neighbours. Instead he gathered his fishing gear from the car. The lover of kitsch in me was enchanted by his tackle box full of lures: pretty plastic fish in every garish colour, some glittery, some iridescent, some attached to miniature metal balls that clattered when shaken, or feathers or long ribbon-like tails.
I watched Samuel string his rod. It was fiddlier than how the Roe family on the Lurujarri Trail fished with simple handlines. He stood up and approached the edge of the water. With a graceful flick of his wrist, the line whipped out, creating a smooth arc and landing with a splosh at the centre of the river. He reeled in the lure, wavering the rod so the lure quivered underwater like a real little fish. Within seconds it was wound back to his rod and, with another flick, sent flying back into the water.
After fifteen minutes of watching him, I asked if I could have a go. He showed me how to hold the rod in my left hand so that my right was free to reel in any potential catch, but my left wrist was weak and the rod felt ungainly. My cast had none of the power or grace of Samuel’s, and the bait landed at a spot much closer to shore.
I took my time reeling it back in. Because I couldn’t manage to flick it about, it feebly skimmed the surface rather than wiggling its artificial tail underwater as it had when Samuel had pulled the puppet strings.
I kept trying, though, and as I did he barked out suggestions to improve my technique:
‘You need to flick your wrist more.’
‘You should reel it back in immediately.’
‘You’re not getting it deep enough. Point the rod down more. No DOWN, not up.’
All of his helpful suggestions were making me nervous.
There was a commotion in the water: some sloshing and the briefest flash of dark colour. I yelped. Was it a croc? If it was a fish, it didn’t bite—but whatever it was, it had made a big splash.
‘Did you see that?’ I said to Samuel. ‘Something’s there.’
He nodded, distracted by his coaching efforts. ‘Look, you need to be standing closer to the bank.’
‘But I’m scared of crocs,’ I said.
‘Well, you’ll never catch any fish from there,’ he said impatiently. ‘Also, you better put your pointer finger on that plastic bit, or if you hook a fish it’ll just pull the rod out of your hands.’
I could tell he was getting frustrated watching me fish in such a numbskull fashion. He seemed on the verge of going up to the nearest paperbark and banging his head against it. I cast my line again; although it got a little further out, it wasn’t enough to satisfy Samuel. For some reason, wavering the lure was beyond me.
‘Did you even look at the way I was doing it?’ he asked, incredulous.
But there was no opportunity for me to reply, for I felt a massive yank. The entire rod was bent into a curve as the tip was dragged down to the water.
‘Oh, crap!’ I said.
‘Pull!’ yelled Samuel.
I grabbed on to the rod with both hands and tried to lift up the fish from the water, but it was too heavy for me. The rod was curving precariously towards the water as the fish strained to swim away.
‘Pull harder!’ urged Samuel.
‘I’m trying,’ I cried.
Realising I wasn’t too far from the shore, I decided the best course of action was to take a few steps back and simply drag out the fish. With one last pull, it snapped free from the surface. The magnificent silver fish lying on the dirt had a pouty mouth and a low sloping forehead with the widest part set back from its gills. Its colour was brightest at the belly like that of a half-polished jug.
‘It’s a barra—you caught a barra!’ said Samuel.
On the shore it flipped about—every flip a cry for life, for water—but it could only manage bouts of twitching. Between episodes, it lay on the dirt panting painfully with one liquid eye staring up at me, begging me to have mercy and throw it back in.
‘I can’t believe I caught our dinner!’ I said.
‘Well, wait up, is it more than fifty-five centimetres?’
‘I reckon! Do you have a tape measure?’
It came to just a few centimetres above the legal limit—it was a goer.
Samuel passed me the knife so I could kill it. However, that was yet to be a straightforward task for me. I hesitated as the barra flipped and gasped. But I knew the longer I took, the more it suffered. I plunged in the knife behind its eyes. Its scales were tougher than they looked, and the blade crunched as it didn’t fully penetrate. The fish flipped furiously about, in full panic mode. I swooped over it and stabbed it again, forcefully, and brought the knife lengthways to cut vigorously at the neck.
Thank god the flipping stopped. There was blood on my fingers, on the knife and seeping into the sandy bank.
There could be no doubt the fish had passed into the netherworld. I picked its limp body up and moved it further from the water lest the smell attract any crocs.
‘You’ll be able to leave the NT now!’ said Samuel in a tight voice. He was busily restringing his rod.
I put the barra on the lid of our esky. Now that it had stopped jerking, it seemed a lot more like food. I slowly slid the knife lengthways across the belly—as I’d watched Tay do on the Lurujarri Trail—and reached in for the guts. I was amazed at the way they all came out in one contained Rubik’s Cube, barely connected to the skeleton. The cavity was empty and all the thick, juicy, delicious flesh was attached to the exterior of the bones. I dragged my knife over the skin from tail to gills in short strokes—stiffly at first, but quicker as I became used to it. Translucent scales thin as fingernails came flying off. Then I flipped it over and did the same, until the flesh was slimy and smooth on both sides. It was finally looking like the slabs of plastic-wrapped fish from the supermarket.
I’d read somewhere that ‘barramundi’ is a loanword from the Gangulu language of central Queensland. The Yolŋu have several words for the fish, including whether for young or mature barramundi. The distinction is an important one, for the species is sequentially hermaphroditic: it matures as male, and at about five or six years of age becomes female. Mine wasn’t large enough to have undergone the change. Many species of fish, gastropods and plants have this feature—conceptually challenging to us humans, and wonderful for its biological illustration of sex and gender fluidity.
> The Yolŋu phrase yothu yindi, the same phrase the famed band was named after, translates as ‘child mother’ and alludes to one of their most profound concepts: every child belongs to their father’s moiety, which is always the opposite of their mother’s moiety, yet the strength of the child–mother bond illustrates a connection that bridges the split universe of Dhuwa and Yirritja moieties. Their universe isn’t populated by warring parties flying different-coloured flags, but rather swirling pairs of dancers in which halves are separate yet unified.
I recognised this as synonymous with the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol, which isn’t a circle split in half but two teardrops that swirl around each another. In the belly of the white teardrop is a spot of black, and in the belly of the black teardrop a spot of white. It synthesises the interdependence of seemingly opposing forces, showing that coded into the dichotomy can be a gentler unity.
Dualities are rarely fixed or intrinsic within an individual—they flare up and die away moment to moment. One day a daughter is being cared for by her mother, but eventually she can mother her own daughter. In the same way the barramundi switches sexes, how we relate to the world changes over time and is dependent on context.
Throughout this trip I’d been forced to confront an uncomfortable question: had I been colonised or was I the coloniser? I empathised with those Indigenous Australians who had been stripped of their culture and language and had little choice but to assimilate into a whitefella world. On the other hand, the immigrant story is one of sacrifice by one’s own volition, of hard choices but choices nonetheless; ancestrally I belonged to the many waves of people who had come to these shores and benefited from the dispossession of Indigenous land.
In a Darwinian worldview, everything is in competition with one another. The strong outlive the weak, and evolutionary processes funnel the passing of time into one line of progress: everything gets better, faster, bigger and stronger. But in many ancient Indigenous Australian and Chinese philosophies, the passing of time is marked by an organic toing and froing between states of imbalance and balance. Neither Yin nor Yang, Dhuwa nor Yirritja has ever been viewed as intrinsically bad or good, but the domination of one half over the other leads to a state of imbalance. Harmony is achieved when these parts cooperate, acknowledging difference yet acting with reciprocity and mutual understanding, and maintaining a reverence for the integrity of the whole system.
I looked up at Samuel, who had headed back down to the edge of the water and was flicking in his rod. He was so different to me: we were the embodiment of ‘opposites attract’. With my fish prepped and sitting in the esky, I wandered over to a high bank and collapsed onto it. I sipped from a can of cider that had turned warm and watched Samuel fish. I felt hot, tired, stinky, but also extremely proud of myself. Ol’ Slim was right about the joys of catching barramundi. I was a right proper bushwoman now.
Samuel was shirtless again. From where he stood, all I could see was his back, solid and tense as he held his rod. He reached up and pushed his Barmah Squashy Kangaroo hat further back on his head. His body was so much stronger than mine. How easily and quickly he could, if he wanted to, turn that powerful arm into a weapon and knock his fist right through my face. It was an absolute privilege for men to have that advantage—a superpower one half of the population had over the other.
He began yanking at his line in a frenzy. At first I thought he’d caught something, then realised it must have snagged on a root or rock. I fished around for his pliers in the tackle box, then hovered self-consciously behind him, unsure if I should offer them to him. Ever since I’d caught the barra he’d been tense. It left me nervous of further damaging his pride.
He was still yanking furiously. ‘I’m snagged,’ he said, hopeless.
‘I know.’ I offered him the pliers so he could cut himself free.
Looking hangdog, he silently went back to the tackle box to restring. His sullenness was mildly irritating. Lord, talk about sour grapes! He was seriously dampening my post-catch high.
I watched a mottled slick of white foam drift down the broad and calm section of the brown river. The trees on its banks were generally of the swampy kind, with thin trunks and branches that grew diagonally over the water. Leaf debris hung from the uppermost branches like socks on a washing line; they indicated how high water levels rose during the wet seasons. I found it strange to think that all of this, where we stood now, could be several feet underwater with grinning crocodiles drifting lazily downstream.
Here in Yolŋu Country the crocodile is called bäru and is the totemic animal of the Gumatj clan. Gumatj elder Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu once spoke of the animal’s significance to ABC television: ‘I see a crocodile as an animal that is part of me and I belong to him, he belongs to me.’ Through thousands of years of living with crocodiles, his people never considered them dangerous animals. ‘We have always lived with them. They lived their own life and we lived our own ways, as long as there is common respect for each other.’
In ceremonies, the bäru is sometimes depicted as a nurturing mother searching for her nest, then laying and burying her eggs until she’s sick with exhaustion. Yes, bäru are aggressive, but they’re also respected for their intelligence and uncanny memory. Over the tens of thousands of years that the Yolŋu have shared this land with the bäru, the humans learnt to identify its presence by depressions in vegetation, tracks on a stretch of beach, or bubbles popping on the surface of a calm river. On the rare occasion a crocodile strikes a human, this isn’t viewed as an individual man-versus-monster struggle. Instead it is located inside a dense web of cultural associations. For example, the death might be attributed as divine retribution with lengthy discussions as to which sacred protocol the departed had broken.
I was afraid of the bäru. Not because it was a monster, but because in this highly regulated world, I was the source of chaos, not the croc. I had no place here; I didn’t know the rules. I was neither Dhuwa nor Yirritja and therefore occupied no position in the social grid that otherwise managed a human’s relationship to the bäru. Anything could happen, and that meant anything bad could happen. I was inept at detecting the bäru’s presence. On the other hand, I was certain—from all the macropods and birds that reacted with pure terror at the sight of me—that I fit in about as much as a croc would in a bowling alley. It was hard for me to shake a constant low-level feeling of terror from being on the bäru’s terrain.
‘Why don’t you have a fish now?’ Samuel asked weakly, offering the rod to me.
‘I’ve got one. No need to be greedy.’ I tried not to sound smarmy. I didn’t dare take the rod in case I accidentally caught another fish and showed him up again.
His face was hard as stone as he turned and threw the line back in. It immediately snagged again and he swore, loudly. After cutting himself free, he stomped back up to the tackle box. I took a swig of cider and asked if I could have a go at restringing the rod—I wanted to be able to do it on my own.
‘You’ll probably do this better than me too,’ he said, thrusting the rod to me.
I knotted the line just as I’d watched Samuel do. I might have been a novice at fishing but I’d done a bit of handicraft in my lifetime, and so my braid was tight and even.
‘See?’ he exploded. ‘That’s neater than any I’ve ever done!’
He walked back down to the water’s edge with the rod, the vexation almost visibly coming out of his ears like steam. I took another swig of cider and sighed.
In Samuel’s injured manhood lingered evidence of pressure to live up to the ideals of Australia’s original jolly swagman. The endurance of the Bushman as our national icon is nothing short of astounding, considering Australia has one of the highest urbanisation rates in the world. Even in 1911, only 15 per cent of Australians lived on rural properties or in small towns, with the rest living in regional cities and towns or capital cities.
I had recently finished reading the excellent rollicking novel We of the Never Never by Jeannie Gunn. Through her eyes, and
the eyes of other Australian writers such as Henry Lawson and A.B. Banjo Paterson, the Bushman was a tireless, salt-of-the-earth trailblazer, taming the wilderness, overcoming incredible hardship, and bearing fruit from wasted, uncultivated lands—or so they believed. This myth has persisted, as seen in the words of former prime minister Tony Abbott: ‘Our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land.’ Non-Indigenous Australians always found it more comfortable not to muddy our portrait of the Bushman with his role as the bringer of brutality, death, sexual violence, environmental destruction and racial persecution. To achieve such a simple and romantic vision of ourselves had required bleaching historical accounts until they were pristinely laundered.
In this, a bias for the countryside was born, peddled as the last bastion of Australian morality and national character. After all, in doing battle with the harsh, dry landscape of this continent, the first generation of white Australians was forged. Out there those pioneers were tested by deadly bushfires, floods, dry spells, snakes and bloodthirsty ‘natives’, and judged accordingly on their strength of character. Life on this inhospitable land was the ultimate democratiser for a nation of British immigrants, among them the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English, who didn’t all share the same education, class, religion or sense of history. As David Walker points out in his essay ‘Broken Narratives’:
it was not so much their origins that mattered as the shared experience of settling a new continent. The floods, droughts and bushfires that were so important to pioneering histories reinforced the story of Australia’s particularity and the special qualities needed to survive or, in the vernacular, to make a go of it.
Mateship, egalitarianism and fortitude were romanticised as qualities of the stoic stockmen and larrikin sheepshearers. So even as the country’s population steadily gravitated towards cities—true of all the rapidly industrialising countries around the world—we wouldn’t let go of our nostalgia for the silent, rugged Bushman.
