In childhood you own little more than your secret places, the thoughts in your head. Everything else is lent to you on stern terms, so privacy and power are rare commodities. When I was a kid the house always seemed crowded. Every space, every morsel of food, every moment of quiet was contested – the shared bedroom, the tiny bathroom, the precious minutes alone in the dunny. I nurtured what privacy I had in the crooks of marri trees and burnt-out logs or in the balding hollows behind scrubby dunes. As much as I could feel it pressing on my skin, the world was growing inside my head. At times it was hard to distinguish thought from observation. In childhood such demarcation is beside the point. When I watch my infant granddaughter as she chants quietly in the mottled shade of a melaleuca and reaches for the purple-pink blossoms as if she’s conjured them that very moment, I remember the fugue-like afternoons I spent staring at water, when the ripples across the shallows were private enough to be brain waves or respiration. This is when thoughts are music. So often a child’s reveries spring from rhythms present in nature: the lapping rise and fall of birds stirring, settling, stirring anew; the swoon and sweep of wild oats in the wind; cicadas counting off the day in a million disapproving clicks of the tongue. It’s as if we automatically tune in. I used to lie in the sun and listen to the metronomic tick of blood beneath my temples. I remember how hypnotic the stroke of my newly mastered freestyle became. There was strange comfort in the hiss of the stick I trailed in the dirt all afternoon, and in my whispery footfalls on the empty beach. Somehow it seems we rest within patterns and contours that we claim as our own but do not generate. We subside and join in effortlessly, pointlessly, never conscious we’ve been overcome. There’s an intimacy with our surroundings we struggle to find later on in life. By the time we’re grown-ups we’re too busy thinking. We settle for organizing and manipulating reality, looking past ragged nature toward our intentions for it. We buy soothing soundscapes, light scented candles and join relaxation classes. We furrow our brows to study meditation. Some of us long for a bit of dreamy calm in which to nurture a secret self – no small thing in a culture suspicious of secrets and contemptuous of privacy. Once we acquire the agency of adulthood we seem to spend a hell of a lot of time seeking out the gifts and instincts of our powerless childhood. Peculiar that we should have to learn to relax, strive to let go.
It felt great, as a kid, hoarding private thoughts and secret artifacts in special places. Somehow the inkling, the site and the precious object are united in value. They are all sanctuary and sacrament; they become an enveloping, liberating field of meaning. I’m sure kids can still achieve this in high-rise apartments and McMansions – they’ll always have their secrets and artifacts – but such things are easier to come by in the organic world, where a questing child, a cleft in a hidden tree, and a shell the size of a baby’s ear can all be bound up in one arcane impulse.
Nowadays I live in a landscape of pindan and spinifex. Like a kid I have my trails and hollows, my secret places, my caches of pebbles and shells, my stash of arthritic-looking driftwood. I live in the littoral zone where terrestrial raptors like grey falcons cross paths with sea eagles. Getting old, you feel barefoot even in shoes. You feel the wild world anew. You’re relearning things you didn’t even realize you’d forgotten.
IV
Albany, 1973
Sullen, downcast and not quite thirteen, I break iron-hearted mallee roots in the afternoon gloom as a misting rain drifts in across the yard. Now and then sparks squirt and flash between the steel wedge and the nine-pound hammer. My arms ache and my elbows fizz with the impact. I hate this chore. I hate this town.
The moment I feel I’ve done my daily quota, I slope away without telling my mother. I head for the granites.
Like a pod of whales stranded high above the fibro neighbourhood, the dark, humpbacked monoliths are eerie, mysterious, irresistible. I cut through the peppy scrub from which this formation rises and pick my way up between calf boulders and fractured slabs. The rock surface is rough as a cat’s tongue. As I climb the clash of steel on steel from the wood-chopping lingers in my fingertips and elbows. A big King’s skink ravels into a fissure. Drizzle beads on the sleeves of my ugly brown school jumper. If it rains any harder I’ll retreat to an overhang.
There are plenty of deep clefts in the ramparts, secret spots where staghorn lichen travels up the outer wall and where snarls of rock fig and kunzea serve as camouflage. Some days I spy older kids smoking out on a ledge or groping one another sombrely beneath the shadows of a gnarly old marlock. Today I wouldn’t mind meeting someone; it’d be nice to be hailed, even challenged. But there’s no one about. I don’t know anyone. Half the kids in the new school just want to fight, as if blueing is fun.
I crest the biggest, highest rock as a hawk banks into an updraught and climbs away effortlessly. And there it is before me, the whole sorry town under rain, leached of colour beneath steely hills and a heavy sky. The sight of its slumped rooftops and glistening streets is deadening. I turn my back on it. Across the rock is a shallow, wide, water-filled depression, a gnamma.
I drop to my belly on the damp rock and watch insects mince across the skin of the water in the pool before me. In the end I grow bored with watching. I rest my head on folded arms and register the impossible mass of stone beneath me. It begins to feel warm, like a sleeping beast that might stir.
Disgust and enchantment
When I was twelve my family left the suburbs of Perth and moved south to Albany. It was a radical dislocation. For a long time I was lonely and miserable and from the outset it seemed that the weather and the landscape of this new environment were conspiring to make things worse. Gone were the blue skies, the bright tutting of cicadas, the roasting consolation of the sun. I missed my friends, but I also felt the loss of home territory – the soughing dune sheoaks and dusty limestone scales of the dry sand country of the midwest. Here in the south a gothic gloom hung over the landscape. There were actual mountains in the distance. Sometimes snow whitened their peaks. Albany cowered between high rainswept tors, and the wind-torn harbour was flecked like the lips of a lunatic. Just as the local kids seemed to seethe and spoil for a bit of biff at school, the town felt like it was always about to lash out. It was dark, tamped down, sodden, but hot and unpredictable underneath, like a peaty paddock.
Out of town the hilly, crenellated coast was covered by olive-silver heath growing so low and spare it looked alpine. Gloomy black extrusions of granite reared from the scrub and on the high ridges above the sea their moody, chiselled faces shone like gods in the brief flashes of sun between squalls. The rain misted, pelted, dripped and stung. Inland, dark aggregations of red tingle and karri laboured against a sky as grey and cheerless as a sodden army blanket. The crowns of those giant trees were torn by gales and yet at ground level they didn’t move. The vegetation smelt odd. Beneath the karri trees the understorey stank like cat piss. The hakeas reeked of human poop and everything else smelled like some maiden aunt’s tea-tree-oil furniture polish. The leaf litter was deep, soft and slimy. Lurid funguses and squelching mops of moss clung to trunks and branches. So much of the bush was wet and dark. There seemed to be no flowers at all. Like the amateur botanist Georgiana Molloy a century and a half before me, I was bewildered and intimidated by what she called these ‘sombre eucalypts’. They were majestic in their way but en masse they were indeed opaque and eerie in their ‘unbounded limits of thickly clothed dark green’.3
It was a surprise to be afraid of the bush, but I’d never encountered this kind of scale and colour palette before. A tree the width of a car is impressive. Thousands of them together are a little unnerving; they press at you, cause your spirit to retract until you feel about as consequential as a beetle.
But in spring I saw flowers – callistemons, wattles, orchids. There were things I’d been brushing past that I didn’t even know were blossoms. After a gale, drifts of white from the blooming peppermints frosted the dirt. Bloody petals of red flowering gums dotted the coa
st. In the gullies the stately musk of boronia (including a species bearing Molloy’s name) rose like the smell of a country dance. At night trippy, luminescent mosses glowed milky green in clumps and the bush smelt crisp, clean, strong.
We were only in Albany three years. So I still puzzle over the disproportionate impact the place had on me. I think of the experience as a chain of sensory assaults. Or maybe it’s fairer to call them epiphanies of disgust. In its way the town itself seemed rather genteel. With its old Victorian cottages and churches it looked English. The preponderance of retired farmers and impossibly staid townies rendered sections of the place peaceable, conservative and dowdy, but along the waterfront there was another civic reality entirely, for here lay the wildness beneath the veneer. Down from the rugged, racist pubs of the terrace, the jetties and wharves were a literal connection to the primal savagery that had animated the place since colonization. At the docks every afternoon the tuna men came alongside beneath a shitting cloud of gulls. Nearby deckhands hosed gore from the whale-chasers at their moorings. Further along, the shift-horns of the factories bawled and greasy steam billowed across the railway tracks. Those great work barns, the fish cannery, the abattoir, the wool mill and the superphosphate factory, chugged and roared day and night, every one of them spewing effluent into the harbour. It honked down there. The estuarine shallows were livid with algal blooms and ramparts of toxic slime mounted around the shore. The water’s edge, you quickly understood, was bloody, dirty and dangerous. But this was what the town was built on: a century and a half of seizing, killing, breaking and boiling.
In time I saw a lot of this savagery firsthand, the sperm whales dragged flukes first up the flensing deck, their heads hacked off with a steam-powered saw. The sharks shot and clubbed. The beef carcasses sliding by like dry-cleaned coats on endless racks. The viscous blood hosed across the concrete. I stood on beaches as biblical draughts of salmon were hauled ashore in nets and shovelled onto tip-trucks, leaking crimson on the sugar-white sand. Those tonnes of salmon were carted off for pet food.
A copper’s son, I sniffed the reeking desperation of the lockup, saw the squalor of the native reserve. I witnessed sudden, vicious fights, steered around drunks sleeping in puddles of their own piss and saw bullet holes in car doors. I overheard the whispered accounts of rape and suicide and slowly put the stories and names and faces together. For the best part of a year I saw only dark, unknowable nature and brutal humanity and I felt lost.
In time it was the long and lonely coast that lifted my spirits. The white southern beaches won me over. They were the purest, the least trammelled and the loveliest I’d ever seen. And there were so many of them. Every granite headland hid a new cove, another rivermouth, a grove of tea-trees, an empty camping spot, a beachbreak where the water was turquoise and the waves unridden. The low skies and grim hills and misted cliffs began to seem wild and grand. Perhaps it was because I was now seeing them from the water where I spent every hour of freedom I could beg, borrow or burgle. Surfing was not just my escape, it was my way into a place that had previously felt as if it were resisting me. This was the beginning of my lifelong love of the southern coast and its hinterland.
It’s easy to imagine surfing as mere sensation, mindless vigour; narcotic, repetitive activity. It’s certainly that. But for me it was never only that. Because for all those hectic moments spent hurtling across the water (or bouncing along the seabed in a welter of sand and foam) there are hours more spent bobbing on the surface. This is when a surfer does little else but watch and wait. The watching and waiting are the bulk of what it means to be out surfing. It’s about observation as much as anticipation. In adolescence I was hooked on the creaturely thrills of momentum and submission. Half of a young man’s rebelliousness is the quest for a worthy force, something large to submit to. Hence the flirting with danger, the often disastrous compulsions and addictions. For me, the secret release of surfing was the experience of being overtaken. Flying across a breaking swell, I loved the giddy speed, but what I needed most was the feeling of being monstered by a force beyond my control. This was how I came to understand nature and landscape. By submitting. And by waiting.
Waiting sharpens the senses. Which is to say it erodes preconceptions and mutes a certain kind of mental static; the clutter and glare in the foreground recede. Immersion and duration are clarifying. While waiting for the next set, for the wind to change, or the tide to turn, I had thousands of hours in which to notice things around me. I began to put them together geographically. Beaches, for instance, were constantly subject to dynamic processes. In fact a seashore, now I saw it clearly, was a live system. And so was a creek, a coastal heath, a forest. Even a blunt dolerite cliff was somehow in motion, under power, subject to endless force. Forefront and backdrop, wave and shore, tree and stone, it was all network and linkage. Some of it was obviously beautiful – the blue-green water, the sparks given off by chalky white sand when you chuffed your feet through it – but the beauty of other things lay in how they worked, how they caused stuff to happen elsewhere. The way a storm in the Antarctic produced an echo that became a completely distinct event in my own world. From some unspeakable terror across the horizon came a day of pleasure for me. Surf was old energy transformed. And so were granite monoliths or karri trees. Everything I saw was an unfinished and perpetually open-ended process. In its mass and in its physical arrangement, the bush bore the consequences of occurrences unwitnessed and unrecorded.
At thirteen or fourteen I had only the fuzziest apprehension of the natural world, but this is where my reverence for it began. This growing awareness had a mystical tinge to it, it’s true, but by and large its inspiration was material, the result of long immersion in the physical facts. In my case it was a very literal suspension and absorption, for when you’re in the water all day, day upon day, with dolphins and sea lions, when you swim in a shoal of salmon beneath a halo of diving birds, it’s hard for even the most dull-witted boy to ignore the inkling that you’re a small part of a larger process.
But I was a boy of my time, the son of a culture still resisting such notions as submission to a greater complexity. In the seventies Australians were devoted uncritically to the conquest and mastery of nature. The only encouragement I had in thinking of the world in more relational terms was from the weathered old hippies I occasionally bummed rides home with. They had an undisguised awe for the ocean and whimsical, Aquarian notions about ecology. They were dreamy, dope-addled loafers but I enjoyed hearing their muddled disquisitions about how the ‘straight’ culture had lost its way. I guess their outlook was mostly hedonistic romance. They lived off the taxpayer and produced nothing you could hold in your hands. Their kids were snot-nosed and the women looked ancient and careworn. People at church said they were degenerates, but in a town where butchering whales and poisoning the harbour were respectable activities, that didn’t count for much.
I fell in love with the south. I hiked and camped along the coast, fished for groper from rockshelves, dived for abalone, climbed in the Stirling Range and trekked in the Porongurups. These places, the mountains and rivers, headlands and beaches, ate into me, scoring me for life.
Inhuman scale introduced me to process and to earthly mystery in a way that school largely failed to. It taught humility out of season. It drew upon the wonder I had as a child but was pressured to disown as an adolescent. This is a tough time to be humbled because you already feel reduced and traduced at every turn; you’re utterly resistant, fending away for dear life. Yet when I felt tiny in nature I became calm, the rage dissipated. Somehow it was better to be bounced and flogged across the seabed, subjugated by the impersonal ocean, than to be singled out for humiliation in company. It was a relief to be dominated by something without malice.
I’ve been drawing on such experiences for decades; those landscapes are the bedrock of my stories and novels and they draw me back, haunt me, feed me still.
Whenever I return to the south-west I am of course reminded
of adolescence, of people I knew and things I did, but the surge of feeling that overtakes me isn’t nostalgia so much as recognition, a kind of sense memory that has never diminished. No matter how long I’ve been away this sensual familiarity means I quickly have my bearings. The wind off the happily rehabilitated harbour. Faint sun glancing from granite tors. Just a whiff of peppery coastal heath or a glimpse of the bloody blossoms of flowering gums and I’m confident. The ground feels firm beneath my feet. I don’t live there anymore but it still feels like home.
V
Cape Keraudren, 1997
Headed for Broome in September, I pull over early one afternoon to camp for the night at the southern end of Eighty Mile Beach. Once I’ve gathered driftwood and unrolled my swag on the white sand, I blow an hour casting lures to the incoming tide. Just before dark I get a savage strike and the reel fizzes and whines as something big takes off across the flats. After a few minutes of exertion and excitement I have it bucking, wild and silver in the shallows at my feet, and when I grab the leader and swim the furious thing ashore I find I’ve landed a fish I’ve never seen before. Chrome-sleek, as thick and long as my arm, it sports rows of nasty, curving fangs every bit as sharp as they look. While I struggle to set it free it flails and lashes. Within a few moments it’s gone in a blur and I’m left, startled and bleeding, coated in the sort of mucus you’d only expect to encounter in a science-fiction movie.
Back at camp, despite the adhesive slime that glues my fingers together and turns my fish identification book into an expensive papier-mâché fan, I see I have met my first wolf herring. I spend half the hot night scraping the fish’s ectoplasmic smegma from my hands and shins.