When Salt and I are fishing in the channel, we’ve come across him. He will brandish a knife that looks suspiciously like the Asian machetes seized by Fisheries up north; the ones shaped from car springs and sharpened, the handles wrapped in string and fish leather. Salt grudgingly respects him, because he knew his dad, and his dad’s dad. He could exist in any era. He could be one of those sealers who lurked around here in the 1820s. Bearded, lean, tattooed, full of a stringy, muscular hunger; an anarchic, five foot tall package of a fisherman.
INTERVIEW WITH A FISHERWOMAN 2
Ms Mer asked how Salt was going. I said he was still fighting with Grievous.
‘That’s been goin’ on for a while now. He’s a bandit, that Salt! Oh yes, he’s been a wild one in his day.’
‘I’ve seen him go off once or twice.’
‘You shoulda seen him during Fisheries meetings!’
‘I’ve been in the same room as him during a marine parks meeting...’ When Salt starts blathering at meetings I feel strangely protective of him and embarrassed at the same time.
‘Yes, the marine parks...’ We finished our lunch and she tidied the kitchen. ‘Thought you might like to go for a drive.’
I’ve not spent much time on this part of the coast. It’s up near where the Southern and Indian oceans meet and jammed between two limestone capes. The winds are different – a nor’wester here can blow for weeks during the winter.
‘You must need good moorings,’ I said, as we stared out at the grey sea through a trail of cracks in the Landcruiser’s windscreen. Five fishing boats were rocking madly in the swell that crashed over the reef and into the little harbour.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘That’s why we don’t like leaving them there over the winter. Gotta keep at the moorings all the time.’ She’d put on her beanie and wraparounds again and out of the kitchen she appeared like any old man of the sea, but when she spoke her voice was gentle, tough and female. I wondered if I could live her life. When she was my age, she’d already been fishing commercially for twenty years.
‘How do you fuel up your boat? There’s no jetties here.’
‘We take out fuel drums in the dinghy.’
‘And all the ice?’
‘Yeah, the ice too.’
Ms Mer drove over the hill past the lighthouse to Salmon Beach. ‘Here it is!’ She swept her arm across the horizon. ‘West! Straight out there. Leeuwin.’
‘The Cape?’
‘Yeah. My boat’s over there, at Augusta. I woulda brought her down this week, if my back hadn’t laid me up.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘Augusta to Windy? About five hours. Some blokes would flog it but I take my time. Saves fuel.’
‘Is this where you catch salmon?’
‘Nah! I catch them with my neighbour, up the other end near the Gardner River. Though I saw some down by Cathedral Rock the other day. I was sitting up in the car park and saw this whole school of salmon go single file, like Indians, out to sea through the little channel there.’
They’d tried catching salmon at Salmon Beach. It took two days to walk the catch back over the dunes because they couldn’t get a truck down there. ‘Never again,’ she grinned.
The wind was brutal at wild Salmon Beach. Intermittent sunshine sent the water’s strained surface into a blinding mess of white.
‘You used to be able to land an aeroplane on this beach,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think someone did!’ Then the Department of Environment and Conservation planted the dunes with introduced grasses, to protect them, she told me. They protected them so well that two more dunes appeared and now the beach was a tiny strip of sand. ‘You can hardly walk along it.’ The marram grass ran away up into the bush, waving against the native scrub-like flags.
Later, back in her kitchen, Ms Mer began to explain the obstacles that she must overcome if she were to continue fishing. One of the leasehold conditions on her home is that she mustn’t spend more than twelve months away from commercial fishing. ‘If I do, I’m supposed to pull down the house and return the block to its natural state.’ She blew lightly. ‘So I’d have to sell the licence too and then sell the house lease with it. There’s all these things happening – the marine parks, the review – all wild cards. We just don’t know where we are at the moment. We can’t sell any licences until we know what’s going on.
‘The Fisheries are gonna do this review soon and then we’ll know where we are. They don’t seem to know when they are gonna do it. They don’t even know what time period they will be reviewing or the cut-off catch rates – or they’re not saying. I’ve got a good enough history on my boat. I’ve been fishing since 1971. But they might decide that I’m not killing enough fish for a certain time period and take my licence off of me. At the moment it’s all up in the air.
‘Then there’s the marine parks. The government has just changed their proposal and now they want this patch out here.’ She pointed out the window.
‘But won’t all the reserves be three or more nautical miles out?’
She looked at me. ‘We don’t fish any closer in. We’re finished if that goes through.’
‘But you can still fish the inlets?’
‘Yeah, while they’re open waters. Six months of the year. See, the line fishing is my main kind of fishing now. Snapper, dhuies, kingies, that sort of fish.’
‘What about the petitions?’
Ms Mer’s patch has recently been subject to another recreational fishing group targeting the netters.
‘Oh that idiot!’ She laughed. ‘It’s just constant, isn’t it, keeping up with blokes like that. I’d like Fisheries to start jumping on those amateurs who are selling fish out of Windy Harbour too! You wouldn’t believe the amount of fish they’re pulling out of here.’
Ms Mer had her arms resting on the table with her hands folded together, just like a farmer does when he comes in for a cup of tea. ‘This sittin’ around is drivin’ me mad, you know. I’m normally up and at it by four thirty, five, in the morning. I want to get up to Augusta and bring the boat back and get out fishing. I’m fine sitting down, which is why I can drive around like always but I just can’t bloody walk. Can’t do anything. Read some good books though. There’s so many things to sort out, the boat, the Fisheries review, the marine parks thing ... but first, first there is my back operation. And my deckie’s gone AWOL.’
Despite the limbo period imposed upon her, it seemed that nobody told Ms Mer that she couldn’t go to sea, build her own boats, run lobster pots or catch shark for a living. She shrugs off any thought of a cosseted life. Theatre nurse in a civilian hospital during wartime, busting the gearbox in a heavy swell with a gang hook through her foot ... (‘They’ve got boltcutters at the nursing post now. Didn’t have them that day.’) They sound like tales of derring-do and adventure; to the woman who sits in front of me now, amid her placemats and crocheted rugs, it is the only life she has led, and a fine one too.
GAFFER-TAPED WADERS
‘There’s no future in this for me,’ I told Salt as we sat outside at a plastic table at the fishing camp.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know.’
Inshore and estuarine commercial fishing is played out in the magenta light of dawn and dusk but it is also the most visible kind of fishing. Our interaction with the public is daily, whether it be at boat ramps, beaches, the bream banks, or selling the produce at the markets. It also seems to be the most criticised form of commercial fishing by anglers and other special interest groups. The irony here is that small-scale, inshore fishing has historically shown the least impact on fish stocks and the general ocean environment. The guys you don’t see at the boat ramp, trawling the ocean floors off the Continental Shelf with huge operational overheads, by-catch wastage and quotas, are the ones who I would examine more closely for environmental concerns. Estuarine and inshore fishers tend to have few overheads and work a small operation. It’s also in the best interests of local fishing families
to keep the fish stocks healthy, so they can return the next season and their children can inherit their licences, through the ‘Grandfather Clause’.
On the south coast, the gentrification of inshore waters and the social shying away from primary industry to embrace the more profitable sea-change real estate and leisure industries mean that small-scale commercial inshore fishers are really copping it. Estuarine and small wetline licences are being bought back by the Government, killed off by quota restrictions or simply taken away by Fisheries Department reviews when there is no evidence of a licence being worked hard enough. Recreational fishers run populist campaigns on the internet and in local fishing tackle shops to rid certain areas of commercial fishing, their argument often plonked on top of a misleading environmental plinth.
In July 2010, the State Minister for Fisheries announced the closure of commercial netting from Busselton to Augusta, putting eleven fishing families out of work. Although they will be compensated for their licences, the natural history knowledge and the cultural heritage of these fishers deserts the beaches with them. The Fisheries Department conceded that the decision to ban commercial netting on that coast was based primarily on appeasing beachgoers and anglers and had nothing to do with conserving fish stocks. In fact, the kind of fish that were netted on the beaches between Busselton and Augusta tended to be small run and bait fish – environmentally sustainable, high in omega-3 oils and very cheap to buy.
There are twenty-five estuarine licensees in the southwest of Western Australia and the Government is trying to cut them down to fifteen. The licences cannot be sold or leased to anyone else, though this may be subject to change in the future. The owner of an estuarine licence must be present during netting. None of these guys are getting any younger.
‘But there’s more isn’t there,’ I ploughed on, reckless and a little annoyed that Salt wouldn’t commiserate with me being stuck working for him. ‘Look at what is going on in Oyster Harbour. There are folk who’ve spent a million bucks on a house overlooking the sea who don’t want to be woken up by a dirty old two-stroke at five in the morning. They go to Greece or Thailand if they want to experience authentic fishermen. And those other guys, the ones who buy one-fifty horsepower jet boats and use it for a black bream anglers’ competition? They don’t want you catching their fish. These people have the power of wealth behind them, more than old-school fishermen. They’ll just import fish, or farm it, or something.’
‘It’s not over yet. We’ll be here for a long time yet.’ Salt refused to believe my argument but still a fat tear rolled down his cheek. ‘How many anti-commercial campaigns have you seen since you started fishing?’
‘Oh, three?’
‘Well, we’ve been dealing with them for years. And the government. They haven’t stopped us yet.’
Maybe he’s right, and crusty old fishermen in waders with gaffer tape covering the holes in the bum will continue to fish the harbours around here for another century.
These fishing families are the greatest observers of aquatic change and diversity in the Great Southern. They’ve been decades, generations, watching and interacting with nature. It’s another reason though, why I sit outside this shack talking to Salt, why I get up before dawn to punt a boat smelling of fish guts out into the inlet; and why I struggle with the two-stroke and put up with the same stupid crab jokes and get scared stiff at night surfing the channel home and pick sea lice from between my toes and get mutinous but never really, truly quit. When I pick apart the politics of this work, I get an ominous sense of the industry’s fragility. Perhaps it is just that, like farmers, commercial fishers have always felt endangered by outside forces beyond their control and I am daily exposed to their woes. But although I feel close to the tribal ties of these south coast fishers, I am still an outsider, an observer, and the social historian in me worries that fishing lifestyles on the south coast are dying of a thousand cuts; and that the stories and knowledge will go with them.
SARAH AND THE POET
I met a poet from Tipperary. A man in his fifties; his humour, his wisps of hair and pale, elfin face made him a different creature from anyone I’d ever met. I wanted to tell him that, despite his bemoaning the status of poetry in Australia, clandestine visitors to one of the isolated fishing shacks I frequent had stolen only my copy of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. They could have shot holes in the rainwater tank or taken the gas bottle or generator. But no ... a book of poetry.
He nodded slowly. ‘Larkin. They showed good taste.’
‘I thought so too.’
‘I heard that you are a fisherwoman,’ he said.
‘Yes. We work the estuaries and beaches with nets, in a little boat.’
He took his time during the conversation. He looked distracted and stared across the table at something or someone. ‘You look like you are strong.’
‘I am.’
‘I shall tell my wimpy public servant friends in Ireland all about you,’ he said. ‘How did you begin this fishing life?’
‘I grew up here. Then there were tuna fishermen and whalers, hard men, and it was a woman’s job to serve them beer or shovel the fish in the factories. I did that for a while but I wanted to work on a boat. One day I started working for Salt.’
‘Do you argue on the boat? It must be hard, sometimes...’
‘We argue, often. It’s a small boat.’
‘But you work for this man, because ... you must feel some affection for him.’
‘Yes. Yes. I do feel affection for him.’
He shook my hand goodbye but then stopped and said that he would like one day to read this book, this Salt Story.
AVALON
Smoke lies low. The burning season has begun. Plumes rise from the dark hills and curl over the inlet, creeping along the country and fingering across the water. One border of the inlet is still smouldering from a controlled burn: black stalks of trees with their ochre, scorched leaves, grasstrees already sprouting new shoots, golden light. The eastern side is emerald green, regrowth from last year’s fires. A bald, surprised-looking hill rears above the sand dunes. Grasses, sedges, reeds curb the waters.
Kermit was caught last year – setting his nets on the midnight prior to the commercial season opening at Irwin’s. The confiscation of his gear, boat, catch and a fine ten times the value of his catch nearly took him out of circulation. It hurt anyway.
‘They did let us set at midnight one year,’ Salt told me. ‘Ohh! It was bedlam! Everyone sat around in the shack here, drinkin’ and carryin’ on. Come midnight and we were all out on the water running over each other’s nets in the dark, fouling props and wreckin’ nets and gettin’ into barneys. Funny. Prissed as crickets we were and the night as black as pitch.’
We camp in a salmon fisherman’s shack by the roaring, reef-strewn ocean of Foul Bay. We drive down to the paperbarks to fish the inlet. Evenings we set nets along the cockle banks; two- and quarter-inch mesh for whiting and herring; three- or four-inch for the cobbler and mullet and skippy.
We go back to the shack, where for years the south coast fishermen gathered like migratory birds for the opening of the season. Now it’s just us. We light the fire, cook some chops, tomato sauce and bread kind of fare. We drink wine, tell stories, read books and sit on swags on the floor.
I read about Flinders encountering the magic of Kinjarling (‘place of rain’), or King George Sound. I am wedged into the corner of the kitchenette and asbestos wall. Stormboy cuddles Digger in his swag under the table. Digger is normally an ‘outside’ dog and neither dog nor boy can believe their luck. Salt camps near the kitchen sink, mounded upon olive green carpet, playing ringtones on his mobile phone and texting, gradually surrounding himself in a snow of lolly wrappers.
Before dawn, I’m fighting the dog for leg space. Salt puts the kettle on and stumps out into the gloom. Ocean noises thump through the doorway.
At the little paperbark forest, a man gets out of his campervan to watch us launch. He won’t talk to
me until Salt is present and then tells him all about his pre-retirement vocation selling outboards to fishermen up and down the east coast. He knows all about fishing. Salt humours him and poses for photos while I punt out with an oar, dogged as always by the pelicans.
We pick up the nets.
Cold feet on chequer plate again, warming as the sun rises. Thick fog turns the little island into a mysterious Avalon. Smoke is dense on the water.
Cobbler, huge, angry creatures, their eel tails writhing around their fatal bonds, their slimy mottled skins cool and slippery to the touch, all the colours of the cockle beds.
Snapper, pale pink of dawn skies, iridescent blue spots along their spine, too small, they get thrown back alive.
Yelloweye mullet in the red box give off their intense iodine odour.
Squadrons of opportunistic pelicans come at us out of the smoke and fog, skidding to a halt alongside the boat. Swans watch from a distance. The elegant snowy egrets are shy too. The inlet – she’s closed to the ocean by a quicksandy bar sodden with brine that quivers beneath my feet.
Littered with kelp and strange flotsam, she is a woman-space with womb-soft skies and nacre’d water of pearl.
Back at the shack, we lay the fish into huge iceboxes and shovel crumbly salted ice over them. A late breakfast: the muscular, spiny limbs of broken blue manna crabs, fillets of herring whose heads were chewed off by a shark trapped behind the bar, fat fillets of yellowfin whiting, sea mullet.
REFERENCES
Culotta, Nino (John O’Grady), Gone Fishin’, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1962.
Brandenstein, C.G. von, Nyungar Anew: phonology, text samples and etymological and historical 1500-word vocabulary of an artificially re-created Aboriginal language in the South-West of Australia, Pacific Linguistics, Pacific Linguisitics, C-99, Australian National University, Canberra, 1988.
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