Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Dr Whisky

  I guess the time has come to tie up the bits’n’pieces that have gone into this rather ramshackle story. The path a life takes inevitably meanders, and in the telling of its story some elements are seen as important, and others not. I’ve talked about the events I thought might be interesting, leaving out the subject of ‘earning a living’ – that day-to-day grind that earns us all a crust. Not that the thirty-two years building Ogoya Seafood Company into one of the nation’s biggest fishing fleets, with canneries the world over, wasn’t an interesting time or immensely rewarding. As Jimmy often says, snatching a few bars of an old number and altering the final word, ‘No, no, they can’t take that away from us.’

  The near-wreck of the Janthe was an early warning that life on a fishing vessel is never easy or predictable, but, of course, I always knew that. In the early years of Ogoya we had our good times and bad – but then, who doesn’t? Looking back I couldn’t have wished for better. I married Wendy a year after the three of us went into partnership. With me spending most of the time at sea, it was a bit of a struggle at first. I imagine it must have been a lonely time for a young bride who hadn’t been brought up in a fisherman’s family, and so didn’t know what to expect. As was the case for all young couples at the time, there was precious little money about, and our first few years together was a time of rented accommodation, second-hand furniture and scraping and painting, most of it by Wendy, who could make something pretty out of something I saw as junk. She would tend to a battered old chair and before you knew it friends would be saying, ‘Where’d you get that great-looking chair?’

  Wendy has put on a pound or two – or kilos, as it is today – but she’s still the most beautiful creature I ever laid eyes on. I often stop to watch her moving about, bringing in flowers from the garden or simply stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, and I shake my head in wonder that she chose me, Jack McKenzie, the freckled kid from the Queen Island family that wasn’t worth a pinch of the proverbial. Can you imagine what might have happened if, standing at the bus stop in Launceston, I hadn’t suddenly realised that Jimmy was going to be the number-one big-time romantic hit on the island, and had not rushed across the road to buy condoms from the chemist? That day, the day I first met Wendy, was one of the most fortunate of my life.

  Most couples have their problems, yet I can honestly say ours have never been too big to be solved by a kiss carried over to the other side of the bed and the cuddle that invariably results. But you can’t have everything and, although we tried, no kids came. I had all the tests, as did Wendy, but the results were inconclusive. Perhaps with today’s technology and know-how they’d find the reason.

  Jimmy hasn’t married, although there were a few kids on the island with very impressive year-round suntans. He looked after all of them, and their mums have never gone without. Most of his kids were eventually accepted into university in Hobart, and have made something of their lives. One of them became the youngest skipper in Ogoya’s fishing fleet. That was the thing about Jimmy – even the island blokes who married the girls who’d had one of Jimmy’s kids loved him. If the subsequent kids of these couples were bright enough, they too went on to further their education at Jimmy’s expense. To have had one of Jimmy’s children was considered a status symbol, because it had evidently taken some planning. In the early days some smart-arse fisherman whose sister was proudly pregnant to one James Pentecost Oldcorn might have a go at him, and Jimmy would flatten him. They’d have a beer, discuss the perfidy of a woman determined to become pregnant, agree that the guilty party’s offspring would be looked after and be mates forever.

  Now, about the fishing, canning and export business that today forms Ogoya Seafood Company Pty Ltd. Left to our own devices, Jimmy and I would never have made it past owning the Janthe and making a reasonable living from the sea. If Nicole had simply bought the boat and left us on our own I’m not sure what might have happened – certainly nothing like what did. Jimmy might have taken the business further – remember the tomatoes, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter? He was an organiser and he had plenty of ideas, whereas I was a details man, so maybe we’d have ended up a bit more than a couple of fishermen with a good boat. But it was Nicole’s business acumen, developed in China while she worked for Big Boss Yu, that enabled us to build what some people refer to as ‘a vast seafood and fishing empire’. And while Jimmy and I can hold our own in any boardroom in the world today, she taught us most of what we needed to know to get started.

  For the first few years Nicole and Wendy ran the business onshore and Jimmy and I took care of the Janthe – and then another boat, and another, and another, and so on, as the business grew under Nicole’s direction and with Wendy’s organisational ability. In those days not too many women ran a business, and main-island and mainland suppliers – salesmen, fish wholesalers and suchlike – thought a couple of women in charge would be a pushover. The good-looking sort, she’d be the bimbo – after all, pretty women are stupid, aren’t they? The older one, well, c’mon, she was a music teacher and a librarian turned bloody journalist – what would she know? We had to laugh. Mike Munday was far from the last guy to walk out of the office ruefully shaking his head, wondering what the hell had happened.

  Nicole started the export of cray tails to America, and had to go cap in hand to the bank in Launceston to beg for a sixty-day letter of credit or a loan to get us through one predicament or another on more than one occasion. The first five years were really hard going. Getting our product fresh to Sydney to catch the Qantas Super Constellation flight to San Francisco was a bloody nightmare, dependent on a factory boat that always waited until the last of the other crayfish boats brought in their catch before leaving for Melbourne, or it might be delayed by a sudden storm or some other mishap on the Strait. Often we’d miss the connecting flight from Melbourne to Sydney and have to dump the lot on the Melbourne market for a quick sale, not even earning enough to pay the crews and our sub-contractors.

  Fishermen from Tasmania to Eden thought we were bloody crazy, and there were times when I wondered the same myself. We were so often forced to use the Janthe and Sans Souci, our second fishing boat, as security for a loan, that they became known as Pawn 1 and Pawn 2. On several occasions we came within forty-eight hours of the bank foreclosing on us. Often, after we’d used up all of Nicole’s considerable powers of persuasion, I’m ashamed to admit our last card would be the ‘Miss Tasmania Factor’. Wendy would get dolled-up and go into the bank or the supplier to whom we owed money and turn on the charm – and then, if necessary, the waterworks. It’s got to be a bloody hard bastard that will turn a tearful and still very beautiful former Miss Tasmania down when all she wants is an extra week of credit.

  Somehow we pulled through, though it was invariably to Nicole’s credit. She was not merely good at business; she simply never gave up. I often wondered if she secretly believed she’d lost her daughter by not trying hard enough and was determined not to be on the losing end again. She could draw blood from a stone, make a bank manager beg for mercy, and get blokes to whom we owed money to eat out of her hand as a result of her incredible persistence and persuasive powers.

  The big turning point for us came five years in, when one bright spring morning the Gazette’s foreign correspondent from New Guinea, in the form of Michael Bloody Munday, turned up and wanted to buy the Janthe back. He’d completed his flying contract with the mining company and had the cash, and then a bit, to settle the deal on the spot. He seemed to be of the opinion that, while there was no contract or paperwork to prove it, we had a gentlemen’s agreement to sell the Janthe back to him.

  Of course we could have told him to go jump in the lake, but that had never been our way. There’d been many a contract in the early days that had been no more than a handshake, and some of them still stand to this day. Mike Munday believed, though incorrectly, that we’d shook hands on the return sale of the Janthe. The matter needed
to be urgently resolved, and with as little bloodshed as possible. I still believed that we owed our lives to him, in the first instance, for the way he’d fitted out the boat with the aircraft landing light and the caulking iron, but more importantly, for the methedrine stored in the Bex packets. You don’t kick a guy like that in the crotch.

  Jimmy went to work on him to soften him up and then turned him over to the Countess. Mike emerged out of the Gazette office scratching his head as he had done when he’d sold the Janthe for less than his asking price five years earlier. ‘I’ve just bought an army-surplus Gooney Bird and I’m now flying a regular crayfish run from the island to Sydney,’ he said, confused. ‘How the fuck did that happen?’

  Nicole helped him to start up a charter company, negotiating the purchase of an American Air Force surplus Dakota and doing all the paperwork with the Department of Civil Aviation. She then put him on a contract where we paid him for his charter services. We also gave him three per cent of the profits of Ogoya for ten years, after which the Janthe would become his again, but only in return for a twenty-five per cent share of Munday Aviation, as Mike rather grandly termed his fledgling one-aeroplane airline. The three per cent cut of Ogoya’s profits Mike received would not have amounted to more than beer money for the first couple of years, but by the end of the ten years he’d done pretty nicely.

  But then, so had we. Munday Aviation became an Australia-wide operation as well as the principal charter aircraft for mining exploration throughout the Pacific Islands and Indonesia. It was claimed that Mike Munday could land an aircraft on a sixpence in the middle of the jungle or on a mountain top, but that he always made sure it would cost someone a few bob for him to do so. He became a very wealthy man, and our purchase of twenty-five per cent of his company in return for the Janthe proved to be a very good investment indeed.

  Nicole always denied that she’d been overly shrewd in negotiating the terms for the sale. It was, she claimed, a part of the original deal, so that Mike would know that we’d back him in his new aircraft venture and that one day he would regain ownership of the marvellous old boat. When the time came to hand her back to him, twenty-five per cent of Munday Aviation was fifty times what the Janthe was worth. Mike never batted an eyelid – he had his beloved boat back, and felt he’d done well out of the deal. ‘Mate, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan made the deal in my interest. Anyway, I would literally never have gotten off the ground if she hadn’t organised the whole shebang.’

  With the Dakota getting our cray to Sydney to catch the Qantas flight to San Francisco as regular as clockwork, things began to pick up. We only had one problem. The cray season ends on the 1st of September each year, when the crayfish lose their old shells and start to grow new ones, and restarts again in November, so for two months a year we had to convert to a regular fishing operation. As we had no overseas market we were competing with every man and his dog to get fresh fish to the mainland. Furthermore, the wholesale fish buyers did us no favours with the prices they paid. Jimmy commented that while the tuna we often caught was worthless on the local market, Americans ate a great deal of it, canned tuna being almost a staple food in the big cities. He claimed that on his medal propaganda tour of America tuna-fish sandwiches and salads had almost been a lunchtime necessity for the media personnel, particularly the women.

  Inspired by Jimmy’s insights, Nicole leased the machinery for a small factory to can fish. As it turned out, the tuna caught in Australian waters was of a very high quality and we were soon sending shiploads to America. In the meantime, the indefatigable Countess discovered the fresh tuna market in Japan. Jimmy was sent there to investigate and returned with the news that, providing it was of the highest quality, they’d take all the product they could get at prices we could hardly believe possible. We then had two highly profitable ways of compensating for the crayfish breeding and moulting season.

  Tuna, like most ocean fish, can be elusive. To combat this challenge we purchased a Piper Cub that Wendy learned to fly, and she became our fish spotter. She’d be up at dawn and became an expert at finding a school of tuna. She’d radio back the coordinates to our fishing vessels, and once in the area the echo sounders on the boats would do the rest. Wendy would then put in a day at the office. She loved flying, and eventually we developed a fleet of small aircraft as a subsidiary of Munday Aviation.

  Until we organised the export of fresh tuna to Japan, Mike Munday had been forced to find other work during the cray moulting season and gained a contract with a mining company in the Northern Territory. Eventually, with a little help from his friends, he purchased three more US Air Force surplus Dakotas. He continued to build this part of his business while still getting our fresh tuna to Sydney for export to Japan during the cray off-season. He would always explain his phenomenal success by saying, ‘I was working both ends of Australia, so why not the rest of the world?’ Then he’d add, ‘Wherever we decided to open for business in Asia there would be a local Chinese family that wanted a partnership. With Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan on my board, and with her knowledge of the lingo and how to deal with the shrewd buggers, getting set was almost easy.’

  All this was achieved over a ten-year period and, as I said, not without a good few very hairy moments, a tremendous amount of hard work and even, at times, sheer luck. ‘We had good joss,’ Nicole would reason when things went well. And the harder we worked, the luckier we got. But she also added a touch of heavenly intervention and insisted that every boat in the fleet carry a small statue of Buddha and Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. On one occasion I mentioned this quaint practice to Gloria, who suddenly grew very silent. ‘What’s up, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘How big?’ she snapped. In her old age, and with our success, she had gained the prominence on the island I suspect she’d always craved and was now somewhat of a matriarch.

  ‘How big?’ I repeated, not sure what she meant.

  ‘Them heathen statues!’ It seemed a curious question but I told her how they were all positioned in the wheelhouse of the boats so as not to get in the way, and were no more than nine inches high.

  Soon after she visited the company headquarters with an equally ageing Father Crosby in tow. At that stage we had eleven working vessels and a factory ship, and Gloria and Father Crosby delivered a dozen statues of the Blessed Virgin, all of them standing ten inches high.

  ‘They’ve all been sprinkled with holy water blessed by the Holy Father himself,’ Father Crosby declared, bringing his palms together in a pious gesture.

  John Champion, who by now had put Queen Island cheese on the national map, had quarrelled with Reverend Daintree’s successor, Reverend Unworth, predictably known as Reverend Unworthy, and, like Gloria, had gone over to the Catholics. Ever the big-noter, he had visited the Vatican on a tax-deductable cheese-making, machinery-buying trip to Europe and returned with a small bottle of holy water, which he’d presented with a great deal of fuss to Father Crosby.

  This grand event had taken place a good five years earlier, from which moment every new child, boat, building or object of any importance had ostensibly been sprinkled with what the non-Catholics on the island referred to as ‘the Pope’s piss’, so that by the time we received the statues of the Blessed Virgin, Father Crosby would have needed a bathtub full of the stuff to have met all the past sacred sprinklings. He even sprinkled a generous drop on the coffin of Reverend Daintree, whose last eccentric request had been to be buried by Father Crosby. This resulted in the biggest funeral ever to take place on the island, and Gloria ever after maintained that the Anglican minister had finally seen the error of his ways, and if he hadn’t quite asked for the last rites this had simply been an oversight on his part and he was henceforth to be declared a good Catholic.

  Anyway, the Blessed Virgin joined the other two celestial images in the fishing fleet to form a trinity of protection. I feel sure the Abbot Wang Po, master of wind and water, wherever he sits in the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, would approve.

  While I’
m dusting the cobwebs from the corners of my mind, I need to say that Jimmy, Nicole and I all had a problem in common – from time to time we each suffered from some sort of depression. When these bouts occurred we would absent ourselves for a few days, and sometimes weeks. Even Nicole would need to break away and be alone for a period of time. Today we know this affliction as post-traumatic stress disorder. I realise now that I’d first encountered it in Japan, when Rick Stackman climbed the crane and refused to go to Korea with K Force. As they say in the vernacular, ‘it was a bastard of a thing’ when it happened – you couldn’t explain it and there was no name for it, and I sometimes felt that people might think I was carrying on. Wendy knew better, and had her own name for it – she called it ‘Jacko’s sadness’.

  After Ogoya started to prosper, I had the idea that I might try to find some of my mates from Korea. If these bouts of depression were troubling Jimmy and me, then I figured they too might be having a bad time. If any of them was doing it tough and wanted or needed a job, we’d make a place for them in the fleet or find something they could do ashore.

  Finding Rick Stackman took a fair bit of effort, but eventually I tracked him to northern Queensland, where he lived as a virtual beachcomber in the Daintree. I flew up to Cairns, hired a four-wheel-drive vehicle and eventually found him cooking his breakfast one morning outside a bit of a hut set beyond the tide mark on a deserted beach. He’d pretty well lost the habit of conversation and, in effect, told me to bugger off. I left him my card, told him to call me if he needed any help, which I admit was bloody presumptuous on my part, and did as he’d less than politely requested. A month later he turned up on the island, and asked for me. ‘In trouble is yiz? Need a good man to get yiz out the shit, do yer, Jacko?’ Rick really took to the life at sea and eventually skippered one of our boats until he retired to go rock fishing.

  Over the years we brought a few more of the mob together, such as Catflap Buggins, who’d married his Japanese Lotus Blossom and had six lovely kids. Today an ageing but still graceful Lotus Blossom and her kids own a business that franchises sushi bars in shopping centres throughout Australia. Catflap passed away twenty years ago from a heart attack. The priest referred to him dying peacefully in bed as a good man should, but Lotus Blossom, hiding her grin behind her hand, told me he’d died ‘in the saddle’, doing what he did best.