Salt Story

The Great Southern

Kinjarling (King George Sound and surrounds)

Older or local names of places that do not appear on these maps, or appear under another name include: Brook's Inlet (Broke Inlet); Casey's Beach (adjacent to Nanarup); Cathedral Rock (at Windy Harbour); Irwin's (Irwin Inlet), Floodgates (adjacent to Torbay Inlet and Muttonbird Beach); the Gordon (Gordon Inlet); Kinjarling (King George Sound and surrounds); Pallinup (the Beaufort, Beaufort Inlet, Pallinup Estuary); Possum Point (in Irwin Inlet); Seal Rock (adjacent to Point King); Skippy Reef (off Possession Point); Wilson's, the Wilson (Wilson Inlet); Whalebone Beach (Doubtful Island Bay).

He was burly and sad and smelled vaguely of mutton. He handed me an apple and talked about fish. ‘They're not real salmon, y'know. That was Captain Cook's fault. He thought they looked a bit like a salmon and the name stuck. They're really a kind of overgrown herring.'

The old fisherman looked to me for a response. Folds of skin nearly obscured his eyes and scabby cancers colonised his nose. ‘You eat an apple just like I do.'

‘Core and all?'

‘Yeah. Don't those seeds taste good?'

Salt Story
was born in the Great Southern inlets and bays of Western Australia. Initially, these tales of fisher men and women may appear to read as fragments of a day, a life–ripping yarns, beautiful lies and a few home truths. But these sixty-two pieces contribute to a living history of the estuarine and inshore fishers.
Salt Story
is my tribute to the beauty and fragility of the industry.

Small-scale, inshore fishing on the wild south coast hasn't changed much in the last century. Aluminium boats with outboard engines have replaced a lot of the wooden carvels and clinkers, and fish find their fate meshed in nylon monofilament rather than heavy cotton nets tarred with grasstree resin. Trailered boats allow fishers to work estuaries further away, for shorter hours. Once a fisherman's whole family may have camped on the shores of Wilson Inlet for the six weeks that
the mullet were running. Now he can drive out, set nets and make it home in time for dinner.

I first met Salt when I camped by the beach and helped his salmon team seine tons of the fish into shore. A pink and whiskery bloke, wearing a beanie, a pair of jocks and a jumper that stretched over an impressive beer gut, he sat aboard an ancient tractor and towed one end of the net up the beach. The net strained against the suck of the swell, full with thrashing salmon. Men, women and children held the net upright, heading off any fish that threatened to leap out. The six or seven dogs present managed to look concerned, excited and bored, all at once. When the fish were dragged up on the beach, Salt climbed off the tractor and stepped with thorny feet through the small sharks and salmon, grabbing stingrays by their mouths and throwing them back into the surf.

As a wayward teen, I found myself hanging around a lot of jetties and beaches. Beaches, piers and wharves reminded me of another point of arrival and departure – the roadhouses – where at night the neat red lights of the big rigs signified to me the will of a people removing themselves from housebound communities. The lot of fishermen, yachties and truckies seemed to be a purposeful shiftlessness, a nomadism that raised a middle finger to the myth of the Great Australian Suburban Dream.

‘You never stray far from the sea, do yer,' said Salt, when I hatched my next project out loud. What was it again? Getting a berth on the anti-whaling crusader
Sea Shepherd?
Writing a biography of a Norwegian whale chaser? Maybe it was my plan to head down to Antarctica with the Patagonian toothfishermen for a season.

I have always wanted to hang out with these kinds of people. I want to understand them, to rub through the veneer of people who spend their lives on the water. I say ‘veneer' because being away from land and then returning can produce a kind of aloofness. Land people will never
understand what sea people are talking about. They are creatures from different universes.

Back in the days when Salt was still being nice to me, he said, ‘Dunno girl. I just don't swear around women. Never have.'

How touching and old-fashioned, I thought.

It's funny how things slide. Aboard, Salt has the tongue of jellyfish tentacles. It is not a hasty generalisation to say that fishermen can swear a bit. So be warned, there is some ‘language' in these stories.

The places we fish are the inlets and bays of the Great Southern: Broke Inlet, Irwin's, Pallinup Estuary or the Beaufort as it is also called, Oyster Harbour and Princess Royal Harbour, Waychinicup, Stokes, The Gordon, Wilson's, King George Sound and Two Peoples Bay. Some of the inlets are stone bound and permanently open to the sea. Others are closed by a sandbar until it rains enough. Then the rivers rush down from high country and the sea pushes in. Sometimes people bulldoze a channel, to save their cow paddocks, their road, their fishing shack or their sea-changer from the seasonal, watery annihilation as the inlet swells into the country. The inlets tend to sit behind a mound of sand-dune country. These are fertile, furtive places, protected from the open ‘yang' roar of the ocean and onshore winds. They often seem to have their own climate, their own little raincloud hanging in the stillness, a cooling breeze ruffling the water, the reeds dripping with moisture and threaded with tiger snakes.

From fish traps and spears and cooking beneath the ground wrapped in paperbark, to netting the Pallinup estuary for mullet and bream and sending the fish in trucks to the Perth markets, the south coast inlets and bays hold stories about men and women within them: the fugitives, shell-shocked hermits, bird lovers and salmon-fishing families. The fishers told me stories about their ancestors, some of whom
have fished this coast for five generations. They mostly work at night or in the dawn hours and tend to keep to themselves.

Theirs is an existence which is challenged today by constant wrangles with government departments over licensing, industry reviews, and the uncertainties presented by proposed marine parks. Some south coast fishermen think of themselves as an ‘endangered species' and, considering the social and political pressures, popular anxieties about overfishing and friction between commercial and amateur groups, it's not an unreasonable status. In some countries the commercial fishers are a valued part of their nation's cultural heritage but this is not always so in Australia.

Salt Story
tells of netting with Salt in a little tinny in the southern waters of Western Australia, and of some of the other fishers who work the same grounds: sea-dogs, fisherwomen, tough guys, oystermen and storytellers.