Shark, p.1
Shark, page 1
Bruce Pascoe was born in Richmond, Victoria in 1947. He graduated as a secondary teacher but has also worked as a farmer, fisherman and barman. He now runs Pascoe Publishing with his wife, Lyn. Until recently, they also published the successful quarterly, Australian Short Stories. He has two children and lives at Cape Otway in Victoria where he is a proud member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Cooperative. His other publications include Night Animals, Fox, Ruby-eyed Coucal, and Shark. In 2013, Bruce won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Young Adult Category) for his novel, Fog A Dox.
Shark
Bruce Pascoe
First published in 1999 by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation,
2/28 Saville Street, PO Box 668, Broome, Western Australia 6725
Website: www.magabala.com Email: info@magabala.com
Magabala Books receives financial assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission
Copyright © Bruce Pascoe 1999
All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the authors, illustrators and the publisher.
Designer Samantha Cook
Cover Design by Christine Bruderlin
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Pascoe, Bruce
Shark
ISBN 1 875641 48 3
1. Title
A823.3
For Gloria and Alf
Acknowledgment
The author acknowledges the assistance of ArtsVictoria in the writing of Shark
“Just One Of Those Things” (Cole Porter)
© words reprinted with permission of
Warner/Chappell Music.
All rights reserved
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (Jim Steinman)
© words reprinted with permission of J.Albert
& Son Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved
Lyrics by Archie Roach reprinted by kind
permission of the author
Contents
One Tired Sailor
Two Orange roughy
Three Just one of those things
Four Shoulders to the wheel
Five A dream of sharks
Six The Reed Men
One
TIRED SAILOR
There was a place called Tired Sailor. A sea entrance backed by two estuarine lakes in the shape of a contented cow’s stomach.
As you would expect with any well-established community, the village on the banks of the first lake was quiet, peaceful, happy and industrious, although none of those elements persisted for sufficient time to become tedious. They were interrupted by noise, conflict, death and laziness in sufficient regularity for the people to seek out ways of inhibiting the latter events and promoting the more enjoyable former. They were not sure if their efforts at resistance were successful, but as they were more often happy and safe than they were scared and dead, they persisted.
Of course they were black and of course they were killed. In their time the place had been called Weeaproinah which in their language meant: good fishing plenty yam milky tits fat baby warm dog sunny place sit down carve stick.
The first white people they saw appeared like ghosts under moving clouds and although the whites gave them a fat seal and only rooted a few women in return the people were anxious. None of their endeavours at performing increase rituals for their food and themselves had included clauses for the deterrent of white ghosts with black teeth whose bums always smelt of excreta.
The people at Weeaproinah hastily set about incorporating such measures into their ceremonies but, as they suspected in their hearts, it was to no avail. More smelly ghosts brought cows, boats, guns, shovels and influenza and the old days beside the lakes were gone.
The people of Weeaproinah were not keen to give up their oyster beds, wallaby pastures and yam paddocks but they were shot, poisoned and sickened. Some people stole a cow, speared a rapist, made irritating attempts to resume residence of their own houses but in the end they moved back into the swamps surrounding the western sides of the lakes. The last of them died sixty years after seeing her first white ghost.
The old village huts of Weeaproinah were knocked over and the new town of Tired Sailor rose. Houses, wharves and farms began to be tacked onto the lake’s edge. It was a pleasant place. A row of small slab houses led down to the wharf and cow pastures velveted the rising ground behind them. Women brought in fruit trees, daffodils, lavender, honeysuckle and roses and the warm air of the estuary began to savour the new fragrances and mingle them with the old perfumes of pittosporum, bloodwood, bursaria and blueberry ash.
Old men sat on salt-bleached benches on the sunny side of their houses looking over the estuary and waiting for their sons to bring the boats across the sandbar at the entrance to the sea. The old men smoked their pipes and let the sun do those wondrous things it does to old bones. Tired Sailor, a lovely place for an old man to see out his last days.
Of course, it was these same old men who had shot and poisoned the black people, fucked their wives and drowned their children. But the old sailors reasoned that they had a king and an empire and the logical course for the peoples of empire was to become imperial and shift aside those who were not. Most of the pipe-smoking men in the sun regretted that Frazer had tied a child as bait to the bottom of a craypot and sent him into the deep still kicking and waving his arms. That was cruel and the others had always been wary of him since, but you couldn’t have black men spearing white women and you couldn’t have savages idling about on some of the best pasture land that God had created. It didn’t make sense to the order of things as they and their forefathers knew it.
Patience, patience. Yes, it’s black and white, starkly so, no shade, but there was no subtlety then, no room for it; the fight had to be won early or not at all and it was their duty as God’s children to win it. God made them strong and righteous; they heralded from the flower of civilisation and it could not be imagined that God had not willed them, demanded them, to take the Bible, holiness, cholera and syphilis into all the Godless places of the world.
That’s just how it was, the evidence is there and there’s no purpose now in masticating the history for our babies’ delicate digestion. Weeaproinah has become Tired Sailor. There is no more to be said.
Take today for instance. Here’s Em Frazer rowing on the estuary. Yes, the great-granddaughter of Craypot Frazer. Now a lot of people think that Em is not the full quid. Two Lan Choo lids short of a milk jug. You don’t get married, you spend twenty years looking after a mother with senile dementia and people think your soup bowl’s cracked. But that’s how it was. Em’s mother thought she was a rabbit or something and always tried to piss and shit in the back yard. She’d lift her skirts and squat, twitching her nose. Em would go and get her, clean her up and put her back to bed. Em wasn’t angry with her mother, the rabbit, just sad that this is how it had turned out and God had seen fit to make this her duty instead of having children or running the post office.
It had fallen to Em that, apart from the house, she also inherited her father’s dinghy. All the Frazer’s boats had been called Pacific. The old craypot murderer himself first painted the name on the clinker he built on the shores of this lake when he retired from the sealing business. The timber had been selected from the jungles at the further reaches of the river and sawn into planks in pits near the beach. All the boats since were basically the same and all were called Pacific. The clinkers were drawn up each night on the grass above high tide and there they rested aslant on their keels with Pacific on their bow and Tired Sailor on their stern.
So Em became the owner of Pacific IV. There would have been a neat boat per generation but Pacific II had been washed away in the great flood of 1909 and lost to the sea. Well, it wasn’t actually lost. It washed up well down the coast three weeks later and Percy Mulgrew raced home and came back with two pots of paint and replaced Pacific II and Tired Sailor with Mary Jane, Swan’s Reach. Mulgrew paid a carter £1 to load it on his dray and bring it into Swan’s Reach via the back road so that people thought he’d acquired it elsewhere. Alec Campbell didn’t think that because he’d seen the wheel ruts on the beach, but he settled for first use of Mulgrew’s daughter. It’s hard to like some people, although Colleen did indeed love her baby and in time even found it not too unpleasant to wash Campbell’s shirts and feed him stew. Accommodation. Most people on this part of the coast were practical and made the best use of what they found washed up on their beach.
And so was Em Frazer. She inherited Pacific IV and the bait licence that went with it. She was a worm pumper. At low tide, she’d row the dinghy out to the sandbanks either side of the estuary and pump worms and bass yabbies for the tourist fishermen.
She’d been doing this for many tides and sometimes in summer she was able to work two tides, morning and evening. On this particular day, however, she noticed something truly remarkable. Not a black panther escaped from the travelling circus, (although her father had seen such a thing fifty years ago), not a man murdering his wife (although Tired Sailor’s policeman had seen this twice in six years), not a lone shark chasing salmon over the bar in such shallow water that it had to belly hump across the sand (although she’d seen that herself several times), no, all of those things were remarkable, but Emily was transfixed by the sun rising and clouds slipping shadows across the intimate folding of the hills, into the places where, if you were God, you might splay your finger.
Emily let the bait pump dangle from her hand as she watched that slow caress and knew, what she’d always suspected, that there could be, even for one such as her, a benediction in love. He would come one day and take the bait pump from her hand and she would not be afraid. The man would not be Jesus but nor would it be the Rawleigh salesman or a squid fisherman. It would be a man who hardly spoke and therefore could not ask too much, could not ask for dinner at six or ironed pyjamas. She’d done that; she’d served as a nourisher and cleaner but her virgin body had remained her own and always would. The shadows of the sun had shown their intimation of intimacy and her heart warmed to the prospect of her vigil, waiting in certainty for him who would come with the hands shaped to the geography of her own undiscovered land.
And it was black as the ace of spades. As the doctor turned the baby’s face and slipped its shoulder from the flesh of its mother, Lester could see that the baby was not his. Despite the viscous smear of vernix, it was obvious the baby was black. Maree Fox McConnell had been right as had her Thursday Island lover; the curlew had called forth the baby spirit that night and it had entered Maree.
Lester watched as the baby was born and even the doctor, prepared for the constant miracle of birth, was uncertain about putting this dark child in the hands of the white man who’d so anxiously watched its delivery. But Lester held out his hands and took the child gazing down at its mottled face. Alright, he said to himself, I’ll be as good as my word; I’ll be your father if she wants me to be her man.
But Maree couldn’t care less. She was asleep. The older nurse was about to take the baby away and swaddle it in towels but the doctor tugged his mask and indicated to Lester to put the baby to Maree’s breast. The baby was not at all surprised and attached itself after only a moment’s fumbling with its lips.
The doctor held his hands out palms up, as if to say, well there it is, the miracle of birth again and again and again. He snapped off his gloves, slapped Lester on the shoulder and said, ‘You’ve got to look after it forever, mate. I’ve only got to play golf today.’
The nurses would have a field day at morning tea discussing the appearance of a black baby to a white father. In some respects, it would be a lot easier bringing up such a child in the north but Lester hoped Maree would stick by her decision to follow him south. It wasn’t so much that he’d had enough of the trading around Indonesia but that he wanted to put some distance between his new family and the first mate on his trading vessel, Tea Gardens, and the woman he’d made pregnant. It wasn’t Saul’s fault. He put the blame on the curlew. The curlew calls and babies turn up. Women put their arms out and men enter them. Lester knew that, but for him the tropics were finished; he was heading south to try his hand at fishing.
Twelve months ago, a Japanese fishing boat sailed into Tired Sailor with a fisherman suffering acute appendicitis. The local doctor operated quickly and successfully but while the ship was in port several boys played on its deck. One of them took a strange fish home to his father. It was bright orange. The fisherman had never seen such a thing and returned to the boat and cast a studied eye over the fishing nets.
The Japanese boat left port but Alec del Maro converted one of his nets to the shape he’d seen on its deck. Three weeks later, after trawling without success, something hit the net with such weight that the stern dipped to the water line. Alec couldn’t winch the net in without sinking his boat so he had to release one rope and let out some of whatever was in the net. Several hours later, he winched the net on board and two tonne of orange fish spilled onto his deck. He’d discovered the orange roughy.
Lester read about the fish at about the same time Maree went in to hospital and thought he’d seen a sign. He’d sail the Tea Gardens south and try his hand at the deep sea scoops that brought up the new fish. It didn’t seem to matter to Maree where they went so he bought a small house in the dunes near the entrance to Tired Sailor’s lakes. The town never tired of speculating about the black child and even the Koori mob from back in the swamps came to town to have a look.
Eventually, however, the town had to swallow its prejudice and get on with things. After all, when you think of it, if it hadn’t been for the arrival of Rueben Grange, Tired Sailor would have fallen one short of enough kids to qualify for a kindergarten teacher. Maree made sure they all remembered that.
And it was about this time, the arrival of the young kindergarten teacher with the blonde hair who sent most of the Tired Sailors into a sweat, that Jim Fox arrived. Orange roughy weren’t the only strange things Lester Grange brought back from the sea. After five years of writing letters and flying backwards and forwards to Port Moresby, Maree was able to arrange for her father, Jim Fox, to meet Lester on the island of Saibai and return south. After years of assisting Papuans resist the Indonesian government, the man had become tired and the leg he’d smashed in one of those border clashes needed better treatment than he could get as a rebel in the jungle.
He was older. Old. He tried out the word a few times and didn’t like it. He found himself having to push himself up from a sitting position using the arms of the chair; he could no longer thread the eye of a fish hook without bringing it up close to his face. For the last two years, he thought the cuckoos hadn’t arrived after the wet season until he realised he just couldn’t hear them.
And birdsong was part of his disaffection. It wasn’t just the hopeless cause of the Papuan resistance marching against the might of the Indonesian army and world apathy, it was his age ... and identity. The people who had involved him in the resistance were all dead, and unlike the other fighters he had no family to fall back on. All the years of fighting for their cause had not made him one of them. He did not belong.
Maree’s glum entreaties to return ‘home’ to Australia had little impact on him at first, but as the realisation dawned that his fellow freedom fighters were finding his presence less and less useful, Papua becoame more and more foreign.
The birds were exotic. Birds of paradise, hornbills, manucodes, beautiful exhilarating birds, but foreign, they had no relationship to him, nor he to them. You grow up in a country and its sounds are your music. If you live in the city and grow up only hearing engines, backhoes and jackhammers, well, you are practically stateless, but if you live with the magpie and currawong, the grey thrush and boobook owl, well, it becomes a part of your DNA. Spring will never be the same without the first cuckoo, the cuckoo that called in your first ten springs.
Sailing down the eastern seaboard, he was unlikely to hear cuckoos, but one morning off the New South Wales coast, he heard magpies, carolling in the morning, their wonderful voices carrying to him a good kilometre across the water from South Solitary Island. A couple of evenings later, he felt sure he could hear boobook owls, and the next day, just off Newcastle, he heard currawongs and thought to himself, these birds are not exotic. They are ordinary background noise, birthright. These birds, knowing him, could talk to his spirit, whereas the hornbills spoke to him as if he was wearing a pith helmet and jodhpurs – a foreigner.
So, he was coming home.
They sailed the entire eastern edge of Australia covering the routes of Cook, Flinders, Bass, La Pérouse and the Bugis, a fitting journey for a part-Aboriginal rebel returning to his homeland as an illegal immigrant.
But who cares about such things in towns like Tired Sailor. He seemed a decent enough old coot. He caused no offence and the discovery a few years later that he was part Aboriginal allowed the townspeople to tie up some loose ends, a habit of white Protestants, assuming that it helped explain Rueben Grange and his blackness.
Jim would rug up in his old greatcoat, he suffered terribly from the cold, and enjoy a few beers at the pub, but most of the time he was out at sea helping Lester with the fishing. He slipped into the town so easily, hiding his past with so little self-consciousness that the town gradually overlooked the fact that he was part nigger and had arrived anonymously by sea. He was a good bloke, you see, always bought a ticket in the hospital raffle, joined the Country Fire Authority, enjoyed a few beers and wasn’t up himself. If he limped and shivered on warm days, well then everyone got old, didn’t they?
