Salt Story

by Drummond, Sarah

  Salt snorted, ‘Yeah, it’s fillin’ up, girl.’

  ‘No, it’s Mountain Man, he scares the crap out of me. Well, actually my crap’s too scared to come out while he’s yellin’ at me.’

  ‘He’s yellin’ at his dog,’ said Unruly.

  ‘Oh. Well. He’s creepy.’

  ‘He’s pretty harmless,’ said Unruly kindly. ‘Just took too many trips when he was young. Lives around all these beaches, he does. He was at Bremer last week. Or maybe Normans. He won’t hurt ya.’

  Salt and I both locked our cars that night. When I unzipped my tent, I shone the torch around before I stepped inside. In the morning I was climbing into my wet-weather gear, struggling to fit the plastic pants over my boots, when a silvery four-wheel drive cruised past all kinda sharky, no lights in the gloom before the sun. They drove onto the beach, turned around and went past our camp again. Plain clothes, looking for an escapee, I thought. Maybe. No doubt. Cops.

  An early nor’-westerly struck up a tune on the water while I picked undersized crabs from the net and shook out the coral. Salt backed along the net into the wind, keeping the propeller off the cork lines. He tried cracking a few jokes but they weren’t really working on me.

  I dug a bush toilet for myself in a nice quiet non-shouting space. Later, while I was packing the bream into boxes and icing them down, the radio announcer said that they still hadn’t caught the fugitive. He repeated that the man didn’t have his medication.

  At the roadhouse, fifty kilometres away, I bought some fuel for the boat and the woman at the counter volunteered an A4 printout of the runaway prisoner. He didn’t look like the fugitive from Great Expectations. He wasn’t whiskered and gnarly with bad teeth and nasty eyes and a pocked nose. He was a nice-looking young man, slim, pleasant, even given the police ID board he held in front of his chest – from different police station to the one where cops had botched his latest arrest.

  ‘But apparently his hair is shorter now,’ she said. ‘And he’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt.’

  We were both quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘Poor bugger. I hope he’s okay. It was really cold last night.’

  On examining the picture, he definitely wasn’t Mountain Man but that wasn’t much of a relief because it meant there were two freaked-out folk wandering around. The inlet is a good place to slide like a needle into the veins of country and never be seen again ... except by people like us living there.

  Before dawn the next day, I lay in my tent listening to the swans and the ducks and the grebes awaking. Then there was a new sound...

  A trumpeting, a blow like someone breathing through an amplified didgeridoo, then the slapping of huge wads of flesh and skin against the skin of the sea.

  The whales. The whales are back.

  Salt put the kettle on and turned up the radio. The fugitive had handed himself into a farmer last night. He’d been taken to hospital with hypothermia. Mountain Man had finally quit his hollering too. He walked past the camp with his dog and threw out a tattered sleeve in what I realised later was a wave hello.

  The whales. I could hear them from where I stood drinking my coffee, looking out to the sandbar. I couldn’t see them but the chilled dawn air was so still that I heard them like they were right in front of me. They sang for hours that morning. Ten or fifteen whales, singing the story of their return from Antarctica.

  BREATHING AWAY THE MACHINE

  An old lady told me once that her people used to take their teenage girls to Waychinicup for healing, to fix them up when they got sick or sad. This place has a kind of fey wildness that never fails to infect people with a creeping sense that strange, shy creatures are watching from the breathing scrub and waters. Waychinicup feels like it is making me better.

  A river runs through the deep, moist valley, darkening with the tannins of tea-tree until it reaches the stone-bound inlet. The sea squeezes in through granite gatekeepers and the two surges of river and sea combine to make a gentle, breathing tide.

  We returned to Waychinicup last night, swept down into the primal contours of her gully. I feel elation on return to this country – that, and a curious sense of unbelonging. That last drive down to sea level, the water laid out like silver paper between creased hills, makes me feel all of these things. I brought the girl Pearlie with me and set up the tent for her, watched her burrow into a swag and sleep. She slept for fourteen hours.

  ‘I want to live there,’ I pointed out the granite elephant to Salt, the lithic, slumbering creature, one of the many strange rock formations that bind the inlet. Perfect hindquarters displayed her fanny to the world. Someone had lovingly constructed a dry stone wall around her hind legs, to keep out the wind. Inside was the carcass of a cooking fire.

  ‘I want to live in the belly of that elephant.’

  ‘Well, the rent would be cheap.’

  We both said, ‘Till the ranger drops in.’

  The mountain above is sprayed with rocks, streaked with rain. In a not so distant past, a pilot, legendary spotter of whale chasing days, along with some detectives on a search for floating drums of illegal drugs, obliterated themselves and their plane against this unforgiving mountain.

  I could live here though, away from the complications of machinations of my current existence. I could fish for just enough to eat each day and garnish that with native spinach and celery. I could grow quiet and hermity, surprise myself with words occasionally. I could live in the belly of the elephant. And I would sing. I would watch and listen to the gentle meanderings of this isolated universe. I would stitch myself into the inlet. I could do that.

  Till the ranger dropped in.

  WAY, WAY WAYCHINICUP

  An old man wobbegong slides back into his stony grotto.

  We wrestle a whole school of clumsy, striped ludericks out of the nets and slip them back into the water.

  A Port Jackson shark, a dinosaur, the biggest I’ve ever seen, fins like Cessna wings, crusher teeth hooked into the mono. I untangle him, eyeing his dorsal spike. He folds back into the murk and just ... disappears.

  Glossy skipjack the size of my forearm. Keepers.

  Poisonous angelfish, their bristling spikes keep them entangled.

  Cobbler. Waddy thump.

  Black branches of long-sodden tea-trees, dreamcatchered with green ribbon grass.

  Oily, soft yelloweye mullet

  Good honest herring.

  And a quickening pace to the buoy.

  When the sun came up I filleted the skippy. The wobbegong had taken a bite from each one. I threw the frames back into his grotto, shooing away the Pacific gulls.

  ‘You feeding that bloody carpety again?’ yelled Salt from the shore. ‘All the better, so I can catch him later and eat the fat bastard!’

  WHALE TRACKS

  Tonight the humpbacks visited. We were waiting for whiting to mesh, sitting out the sunset, twitchy with the need to pick up the nets and see what was there and not leave it too long before the dastardly squid ate the lot.

  Sometimes the waiting becomes the event and the nets are a mere by-product. Tonight was like that. The sun set over the houses and dunes at Goode Beach and at an indefinable moment of half-light, the motorbike frogs began revving from their swamp behind the primary dune. A couple fishing on the beach turned on their gas lamp. Mares’ tails and mackerel scales, a sure sign of storms to come, dotted and streaked the sky with crazy colour. Out to sea, Breaksea Island glowed magenta and white-water monsters crashed against her rocks.

  Three humpback whales rounded Mistaken Island. Two of them cruised back out of the bay as I cut the motor. The third stayed nearby. I watched his footprints slowly dot across the surface as he moved towards us.

  The footprints enchanted me: the closeness of this beast, his massive bulk beneath the surface, undetectable but for those circles of calm.

  He rose to the surface about fifty metres from the boat, presented a mottled fin and rolled sideways to look at us. His head was all bumpy and alien, cow
led with barnacles and glistening with brine. He breathed in the night and then arched straight into a dive.

  ‘That means he’s diving deep,’ Salt told me. ‘The way he arched sharp like that. He won’t come up for a while.’

  We began looking around for footprints. I was reminded of sitting in a paddock, giving up on catching an errant horse. Eventually the horse would eat its way in a spiral to my feet.

  And there he was! About ten metres from the boat. We both stood in the very little tinny.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Salt. ‘I hope he doesn’t have any barnacles he wants rubbing off.’

  The whale dived again, then a footprint appeared right beside the boat. I spun around, trying to track the whale and turned the wrong way. Finally, turning clockwise instead of withershins, I saw it. A perfect clock face of whale tracks. Salt and I stood in the centre like the hour and minute hands.

  When we saw the whale again, he was heading out into the open water, spouted and then arched into another deep, long dive.

  ‘Well,’ said I.

  The water lay completely still, glassed off, the sun nearly set and everything silent but for those frogs. We stood in the dinghy in a perfect circle of whale tracks.

  ‘This is really quite unpleasant,’ said Salt. ‘I can think of better places to be, like sitting on my couch at home, watching TV or something.’

  SMOKED PALLINUP MULLET

  In 1841, the artist Robert Neill wrote that the flat-nosed mullet was the finest fish in New Holland and I completely agree. Mullet is seriously underestimated in this modern society that seems to want to consume only bland, white-fleshed fish.

  Salt was shaking his head as each glossy specimen surfaced with the net.

  ‘Mullet!’ I shouted with glee. ‘We’re not sending these to Perth, Salt! I can sell all of them down at the Sunday market.’

  ‘On your head be it,’ he muttered.

  ‘I can sell anything I’m enthused about. Just you wait and see.’

  Here are some instructions on how to make hot smoked Pallinup mullet. Soak the fillets, skin on, in a strong brine for twenty minutes. Drain and coat lightly with olive oil. If you want, you can season the fillets with lemon pepper.

  If you have a fish smoker then things are already looking good. If not, you will need a wok with a lid and a wire rack. Put some wood shavings or plain tea leaves in the bottom of the wok or smoker, place the mullet on the rack above the shavings, put the lid on and smoke that Pallinup mullet!

  Remember not to place the fish smoker’s little metho burner on your best friend’s plastic outdoor table. It will quietly melt straight through the table and then set fire to her handbag that is underneath the table, destroying the handbag and all of its contents and testing an otherwise good friendship. If this is your modus operandi then it is cheaper to go out for dinner.

  Smoked mullet should be piled high on a plate and eaten with your fingers, shared with friends at the end of a sunny Sunday. Peel the smoky, oily flesh away from the skin and put it in your mouth.

  DEVOURING THE DODO

  A few years ago, camping by the sea in the back of a refurbished refrigerator truck with a solar-generated DVD player, I saw The End of the Line. It was with some apprehension that I watched this documentary about the potential collapse of the world’s fish stocks. I thought the marine conservationists would be gunning for fisherfolk like me, considering I was working the inlets full-time.

  By the end, I realised that the movie actually supported what I’d been thinking about for a while. Selling fish at the markets was already a weekly exercise in informing customers where their food came from, how readily available it was and whether or not it was a sustainable resource. So I rang a marine conservation society and asked them for their sustainable seafood shopping guide. The guide is the size of your average driver’s licence and, once I explained what I did for a living, they sent me a wad of about a thousand copies.

  The guide is not too bad for accuracy, with only a couple of local glitches. When I showed it to Grievous, he said that although pilchards were listed on the guide as a sustainable fish, pilchard stocks are still recovering from a disease that swept through the Southern Ocean twenty years ago and he questioned their inclusion in the guide. Looking at their traffic light system (red – don’t buy it, yellow – aw, maybe, green – sustainable), another commercial fisher said, ‘Yeah, well it’s okay but there’s some species in here that I wouldn’t bother working because there aren’t enough around to make any money out of.’ This is fisherfolk lingo for ‘scarce’ and therein is the key to the health of the small-scale, family-dominated fishing industries. Economics and long-term sustainability are intrinsically linked. If fish stocks decline for any reason, commercial fishers will go elsewhere until they have recovered.

  This kind of self-regulation doesn’t happen throughout the fishing industry though. Recently a restaurateur in Japan paid $1.7m AUD for a single bluefin tuna. Yes. One point seven million bucks; about the same you’d pay for an eighth of an acre in Port Hedland. This price and the media prestige that came with it troubled me and that is before I start to rant about the cost of real estate in Western Australia.

  Salt and I went out fishing for crabs recently because he’d heard from old Kailis that blue mannas were fetching an obscene amount per kilo in Perth; twice what we normally sold them for. He got so excited about the price offered that he completely forgot about the breeding season. Every pot we pulled up was full of berried female crabs and we had to chuck them all back. We didn’t make a single dollar. That was why the price was so high of course. Supply and demand. The market works the same way with gold, except you don’t have to kill gold.

  Aside from the prestige and publicity associated with the highest price ever paid for a single fish, the restaurateur acknowledged that at $7,600 a kilogram, he wouldn’t be turning a profit. But the prestige factor only served to reinforce that bluefin tuna’s worth will rise as its population in the world’s oceans becomes scarce. According to the researchers of The End of the Line, there is already stockpiling going on to anticipate this event. Consider what a legal market in rhinoceros horn, elephant tusk or tiger penis would look like; then consider that doomed bluefin. Despite all that we know about the extinctions of the previous two centuries, rare creatures are still worth more dead than alive.

  ANOTHER FISH AND BICYCLE YARN

  The day before a trip to Katanning on family business, Salt helped me lug two huge iceboxes onto the back of my ute. So the King George whiting, snook and herring came for a drive too.

  ‘Why don’t you try and sell some fish up there?’ he asked. ‘Whenever I go inland with fresh fish, I stop at the pub.’

  ‘Will they buy fish?’

  ‘Dunno, never asked.’

  I drove through shocking yellow fields of flowering rape, pondering, as you do on a long drive alone. Someone told me recently that the rape flower is the closest colour to pure yellow in the light spectrum. It’s pretty hard not to feel emotionally moved, stunned even, by that vision of gold, punctuated by moments of emerald trees. In reality, it’s a hard-nosed agriculture with a multinational at the helm. And how do you market rape oil to the modern-day gatherers, the mothers, wives and other females of the species? Better still, how do you market genetically-modified rape oil? There must be a way ... ah yes, in one stroke of marketing genius, it gets renamed something pretty, rounded, innocuous – canola.

  I stopped at a wheatbelt hotel looming on the corner of a dying street, a grand old shady lady clad in turquoise peeling paint. Yellow tape roped off the groaning veranda – ‘Do not cross. Party scene.’

  I went into the front bar. It was ten in the morning and the balloons were already up. Sky Channel blared. The bar was packed. I forgot it was Grand Final day.

  ‘I was wondering,’ I asked the barmaid, ‘if the cook wants to buy some fresh King George whiting fillets?’

  The bar went silent beneath the racket of the TV and everyone turned to stare at
me. I felt like backing up with my hands in front of my face – or perhaps going on the offensive – ‘I’m licensed to fish and insured to sell!’ whilst waving around a pike.

  She explained to me, waving her jingling silver jewellery and spider tattoos in the direction of the coast, that the frozen fish van comes once a week to deliver them basa. So thanks but no thanks.

  I drove on to the next town, to another pub. A man on the footpath was doing something strange with one of those blower things. He was blowing dust out of its bag and into an ice-cream container. Dust was going everywhere, all over the walls. It made no sense to me. I got out of the car and asked him about the fish anyway.

  He looked at me as though I were the strange one (a curly-headed hippy from the coast trying to flog some fish, perhaps). It didn’t go well. ‘Nah, I fink we’re right love,’ he folded the words around his beard and occasional teeth. ‘We get basa from the fish bloke once a week.’

  Basa sometimes gets the cruel moniker of Mekong blind mullet. As a freshwater catfish imported from one of the most polluted rivers in the world, it doesn’t have a terrific reputation. But it is bland tasting and very cheap.

  After that I gave up trying to sell fresh fish to sea-starved inlanders and focussed on my original reasons for the visit. On my way out of Katanning a few hours later, I stopped in at a great little antique shop on the highway. The proprietor stood out in the sun, polishing something brass, listening to the footy on a transistor radio.

  Whilst chatting, my attention was drawn to the bicycle. Ooh, a bicycle! And what a darling. A proper postman’s bicycle from the 1960s. Bright red and white! Back brakes! I couldn’t believe my find. It turned out she just loved King George whiting. She did me a great deal for a kilo of fillets.

  THE SALMON ARE HERE