Black Duck, page 11
More Dramas
I had to get on a plane and get to Redfern and then into the city for the rehearsals of my play Cutter and Coota at Hyde Park Barracks. I felt numb but the cast was vibrant and it is hard to be down when Billy Mack is around. Billy was cast as the cat and various other mischievous things.
After all these years of working on this play and the drama of recent events it was a relief to be distracted by staging it for kids.
Gurandgi pain broke out while I was working on rehearsals and hours were spent trying to find an even, considerate path. I was trying to write new scenes for the play while the phone kept ringing. I needed a break and went to the Rose to have a beer and get some food. It is a strange pub, but people leave me alone there. They are young and completely absorbed in being cool and ordering drugs on their phones. Someone writing in a notebook is as interesting to them as last week’s paper on a park bench. They are the generation who will never read a newspaper made from trees.
I was rewriting the play as hard as I could go, jinking and tinkering as the cast rehearsed. I had lunch at the library with an old literary mate, Ailsa Piper, and she told me about a sculpture that she remembered being close to the barracks. I decided I would look for it when I got a chance.
I ran into a whole mob of Blackfellas at the hotel and had breakfast with Tim Harris from Margaret River while we discussed getting our young people educated and employed. When all the young mob went off to the course at the uni I went back to rewriting. I flew home that day and it was a relief to meet only one wombat on the road to the farm. They are slow to make up their mind but once made up it doesn’t change. You have to change. Nerve-racking on a dark and windy road.
Next morning there was a solid mist in the valley. It was more peaceful than sombre but it did not lend itself to exuberance. I had to pick up wicking beds and ute parts in Bega and meet with old brother Graham Moore, who takes on a lot of the load in the Aboriginal community. His mother is a really important source of the cultural and family information which we all rely on so it’s always interesting yarning with Graham.
Knowing how the old wounds and traumas break out in flashes of negative behaviours it must be difficult for him every day. It is difficult for all of us. This morning’s mist in the valley and the muted calls of currawongs is my solace and I know that Graham is healed by the view from his verandah at Wallagoot.
I was thinking about all this as I worked on the wicking beds and later stewing feijoas and figs. The day was quite cool so I lit my first fire for the year, feeling sombre, not unhappy, just thoughtful and serious.
I would have watched footy on TV but couldn’t find the Tigers so I followed it on my phone. We beat Collingwood, which always proves that God is concentrating.
Lord Howe
Before the fires, before Covid, before we separated, I bought a ticket for Lyn and I to go to Lord Howe Island. Five years later and we decided to go.
The flight to the island was pleasant and so was our simple room. Our first step out the door revealed a Lord Howe Woodhen. Once on the brink of extinction this wonderful bird was saved by eradicating rats and cats.
Lyn and I were both exhausted from our work so we spent a lot of time watching birds over at the jetty beach. There was a White Tern roosting on the branch of a Norfolk Island Pine and we visited it every day around dusk to check on this strange bird. It lays a single egg in small depressions on the branches and the precarious nature of this act tugs at your heart.
We walked about the island as there is only one road and very few cars. There’s nowhere to go. But there was history everywhere.
I love museums, especially those with long yarns about boats and lighthouses, so I spent hours wandering slowly from exhibit to exhibit and lost track of time. I could feel my heart and pulse slowing. I was nearly asleep by the time I joined Lyn for coffee.
Lord Howe Island
In the afternoon I had a long snorkel at Ned’s Beach and while the coral was quite damaged I was on my own, submerged and drifting. A large blue, pink and purple wrasse decided my mood was her mood and so we dawdled around the reef together, it angling its strange eye toward me and me swivelling my masked eyes toward it. An unusual but relaxed sea couple.
There was a Galapagos Shark, Spangled Drummers and a monkfish to wonder at as well and I felt quite calm when I knelt at the water’s edge to remove my mask. Diving is the best therapy I can imagine and these days I don’t do it often enough.
Rambling Ronnie, the tour guide, gave a great talk at the museum and his broad knowledge of geology, history and the natural world gave great food for contemplation. His legs have eliminated his ability to ramble but he brought the island alive with science, which prompted all sorts of conversations in the group listening. Much of that conversation surrounded conserving coral reefs. Humans don’t want to lose their planet but we leave its administration in the wrong hands.
Politicians should be chosen from the ranks of those who refuse to apply for the position. We are finding that Gurandgi could benefit from the same principle.
We had a hard walk up the mountain at the north end of the island and then staggered home to cook bolognaise and watch the noddies and terns. The tern had a fish in its mouth to feed its young and it was a privilege to watch an act that began as an epic ocean journey and ended as a scene of silent domesticity.
The bird talk that night at the museum was a classic. Ian Hutton has a lot of information but he does not embellish it with any showbiz. It is a slide show to which he refers with a pointed stick. He dangles the wand toward the tea and biscuits in an indecisive invitation. But he’s right, the birds are sufficiently interesting in their own right.
On Friday we walked down to the south end of the island and took the cliff track to watch the Providence Petrels and shearwaters flying about their heathy headland. It is so remote and wild and looks so much like Cape Otway’s western headlands. In both places the arcing flights and shrieks of seabirds create their own world of wild ocean, wind and torn cries.
It reminded me of a day on Cape Otway when I went looking for some Aboriginal burials. They were supposed to have been discovered by a fellow planting potatoes. He refused me permission to enter his property so I had to approach it from the ocean side through dunes and swales and tangles of tea tree. I ended up on a sort of mesa with 240-degree views of the ocean, lighthouse and beach.
I could see I had no hope of getting to the property from that direction as there was 3 kilometres of scrub so tangled that Scott Morrison couldn’t wriggle out of it.
I looked about this blasted headland and its benches of red waxy sand which I knew had been created by the local mob, the Gatubanoot, as they butchered seals caught on the rock platforms below. The seal oil seeps into the sand and the particles adhere and gradually form a bench, which is more resistant to wind erosion. Further to the east there are old house sites amongst these old butcheries. The archaeologist, Lourandos, worked here many decades ago but his findings found little interest from a nation convinced Aboriginal people were incapable of building a house.
One prominent rock caught my eye and I walked over to it with the hair on the back of my neck creeping and crawling. There was a seat and an anvil created from conveniently arranged blocks of stone. In front of the anvil there was a spray of debitage of chert and silcrete left over from the work of a stone artisan. I didn’t have the impertinence to sit in his seat but I cast my eye around the panorama and something shifted within me.
It felt like he had just left to go off to have a drink of water or take a piss and at any moment he might come back and resume his work. He had situated his work station so that he looked out to the ocean, such a mesmeric view and just the right atmosphere for a jeweller’s concentration.
I stood there for hours in wonder and honour.
That is what I was thinking as I watched the wheeling and shrieking of the seabirds at Muttonbird Island’s wild outpost.
The next morning was spent lazily reading and writing. I swam out to the deep hole at Old Settlement Beach and stooged about with the coral fishes. The Double-header Wrasse is a curious creature with, apparently, not much to do, so you get a good look at him and his manner.
I couldn’t help but think of a very vague professor whose brain is too big for his head.
We’ve had a few meals at Anchorage Restaurant and on our way there this night we saw the supply ship tie up at the jetty and it reminded me of the island trading vessel excitement on King Island when I was a kid. Men and women used to gather at the jetty and watch the unloading while speculating if their sewing machine or ratchet screwdriver was in that box or the other.
And tea and sugar. One month the island ran out of tea and sugar after a particularly bad stretch of weather and people hung around the jetty like addicts outside an injecting room.
While eating our lovely meal at Anchorage, a ute pulled up with the tails of huge fish hanging out the back. They were really big Kingfish and very fresh, their tails still flexing with every lurch of the men carrying them around to the restaurant’s cool room.
Once on Skiathos Island while writing my novel, Fox, I got up from my hermit desk and realised I hadn’t eaten anything but biscuits and cheese for two days. When editing I find it best to read a new book aloud. It is the perfect way to discover a clumsy sentence or a failure of punctuation. I taught a thousand kids the same trick and saw it transform their understanding of the structure of the English language. My fellow tenants may not have been so grateful to hear sonorous English at three in the morning. ‘But every now and again the snake remembered where it had been. Might take two hundred years. Maybe forever. But then the waters’d start. Outlet Creek’d fill up. Bring in all the duck and black fish. Pelican’d come. Cod. Mobs of big cod. And then in the sand it remember its old way and push the dust and leaves, nudge the sticks, flick its tongue out. Find its old path, sniffing towards Brmbruk’ (McPhee Gribble/Penguin 1988).
I staggered out looking deranged and took the hill path to a bay where I thought there might be a restaurant. And there it was, perched high above an azure bay. The waiters were hanging around the empty restaurant and fetched me a beer and as I raised the glass to my lips I could hear slap slap slap in the bay below and turned to see a fisherman thwacking squid on the rocks.
I ordered the squid.
On Lord Howe Island order the Kingfish.
We went on the Coral Tour and another wrasse sought out my company. As I snooped into caves and crevices the wrasse shared my interest. When I turned over empty shells the wrasse looked askance at me as if to ask what exactly I had expected to find.
The reef out in the deeper channels is much less bleached and has a richer marine life. I saw a type of dragon fish with long streamers billowing like Elvira Madigan’s exotic scarf.
In the afternoon we planned a trip to see the Providence Petrels at the island’s southern end. It seemed like a good idea to hire bikes to make the journey but Lyn is not a bike person and her panic was palpable. We fiddled with raising the seat to make it more comfortable for her knees, as we both agreed she’d never make the journey on foot, so, the bike seemed like the best option.
We pedalled in a veering wobble down to the Secret Island and enjoyed the walk through the rainforest. The birds wheeling above us were fascinating but there were a lot of people about so I had a swim amongst the rocks and then reclined in a cave sheltered from the wind. I became intoxicated by the thousands of milling birds and thoughts of their sad history of exploitation by sailors. Hungry sailors need to eat but the Western world seems to have no spiritual handbrake on its consumption.
Time and time again a species will be wiped out. And not just by Europeans, the Māori did it to the Moa and the Easter Islanders cut down all their trees. What did that axeman think as he stood at the base of that final tree?
So, in that Nautilus-shaped cave I thought about the gentleness and conservative nature of Aboriginal spiritual and economic life. How important is that philosophy to the world? It’s not a noble savage sentiment, you could think of it as hard-nosed economics. We must not kill the golden goose. The psychology that allows for the last tree to be felled and the golden goose to be killed is an aberration in human history. We must find ways of constraining our greed. Australian Aboriginal people lived as the oldest continuing civilization on Earth while maintaining the fertility of the continent. It wasn’t an accident, it was a philosophic adaptation to the nature of resource preservation.
I was grateful to that cave as the waves crept up to my feet and the screech of petrels were a soundtrack to my thoughts, but then we had to walk back to the bikes and wobble our way north. Lyn came to grief and hurt herself but she is a stoic and while she recovered we were visited by Kingfishers sitting on the airport fence.
We got back to the town but will not be investing in bicycles.
We were soon due to fly off the island but the weather was too wild and after a long wait at the airport the flight was called off. The plane from Port Macquarie flew over us but couldn’t land and had to turn back for the mainland. Strangely, we met a couple a few weeks later who had been on that plane.
We returned to the accommodation and got our old room back. We were able to check out the petrel feeding its young and watch the unloading and reloading of the Island Trader. I’m not sure, but it looks to me that the sewage is removed from the island in tanks. The world’s large population develop some unsustainable habits generated by people rich enough to export their shit. And I owned some of the shit. One more night on the verandah of the pub-type thing opposite the Anchorage as we watched the antics of the Black Noddies, talkative and frenetic birds of good humour.
Eventually we got off the island and travelled home on a series of planes. Soon enough I was feeding ducks at the farm.
Elections and Gardens
The following day I was in Mallacoota at a meeting of the bushfire timber recovery mob who convert fallen trees into timber. I had been hopeful of making use of fallen trees but ours may not be suitable, either too burnt or too small.
The fire recovery continually runs into weird rules and roadblocks and really doesn’t warrant the time it takes to apply for assistance. Meanwhile, Terry and Chris had modified the threshing machines to accommodate our grain. Their dedication to finding viable solutions is incredible. We are getting very clean seed now thanks to the method they have perfected to refine our harvests. These are exciting days for everyone at the farm as we develop a machinery process to achieve the results the Old People perfected with completely different tools.
I had a flu but I worked in the gardens and cut wood and then voted in the federal election at Mallacoota and returned home with a feeling of dread. I turned on the TV and gradually the trend of repudiation of a nasty government became clear. Women to the fore.
I worked on the wicking beds and was entertained by the butcher-birds patrolling the ground from the edges of the enclosed gardens. Kookaburras, Mudlarks, ravens, eagles, currawongs all love these vantage points.
My old mate Pete Sands had a serious heart attack but was very lucky to have people staying at his remote Nungatta farm. We have known each other for fifty years, gone fencing together, boating, music, the lot. It rocked me when I heard the news because we’d only just lost Freddy Becker.
The Murnong undergoes a real dieback in late summer but are now shooting again. The lilies never seem to go into recess and we have found that we can get delicious tubers for at least nine months of the year and often twenty to thirty tubers per plant. We harvest five or six times a year without noticeable damage to plant vigour. I think this will be a staple of Australian salads in the future. But will Aboriginal people be allowed in the industry? Or is it just one more dispossession?
Labor had a clear victory in the election and I was expecting the same triumphant gloat of the victor, but Albo hushed the crowd to silence. I thought he wanted a dramatic backdrop to his hubris but, instead, he announced that his government ‘would enact the Uluru Statement in full’. I was so taken off guard that I cried, then the great Penny Wong repeated it. What was going on? What had happened to Australia? I was confused, my cynicism about politics cut off at the knees. Suddenly hope seemed possible. I stared at the TV for normal service to resume but the first statement by the new government was about Aboriginal people. It was a new dawn.
New dawns can turn into hot and blustery days but as I write this ten months later the government wrestles its way toward a date for a constitutional acknowledgement of Aboriginal people, and in Victoria the stoic elders of the Treaty group edge ever closer to a treaty, which will cause a cascade of states to follow. We might have treaty, constitutional change and sovereignty within the space of a few years. I hear, and understand, the views of those who think that altering the colonial constitution is not the way to forge change, but I cannot find it in me to reject this offer of a new start for Australia.
The result will be known by the time this book is published and, while I am very anxious, I feel that Australia wants to change its mind about its identity. We don’t need to ditch Vegemite and Southern Cross windmills but we must recognise the shovel of Australian history that we chose to call a garden trowel. There will be challenges and bruises in the future but at least it won’t be the niggardly past we have endured.
Language on Fire
The fog hung over the valley in totally still air and within the silence of this gauzy world I worked on the wicking gardens. I shovelled scoria in and started to build up the soil with Kangaroo Grass straw and fish frames.
Noel and Trish arrived in the afternoon after a tour of Victoria. That pair were badly knocked around by the fire. Losing the house and all Noel’s grandfather’s traditional implements was hard enough, but it is their souls for which I fear. There is a kind of lethargy and immovable dread that hangs like vapour.
