Gone fishing
By Wendy ClarkeÓ 1999
From the time I turned six years old, on the odd Sunday Dad
would take me fishing, though I’d only been out with him a handful of times
when I decided to give religion a try. We weren’t a church-going family. Mum
read us bible stories most nights when she tucked us up into our beds, and we
were taught the difference between right and wrong the old-fashioned way, with
a clip under the ear when we erred. Both parents agreed that was sufficient
moral education.
Still, most of the kids I liked at school went to Sunday School.
From thinking they must be a sandwich short of a picnic - I mean, we already
had to go to school five days a week; what kid in their right mind would want
to go to school on Sundays as well - I began to think to myself, “There must be
something in this!” So, having been baptised in the Church of England at birth
I decided to give their classes a try.
Only halfway through my first attendance, I was sent from the
room for talking. I didn’t think much of that; maybe the Methodists wouldn’t be
as tough. They, however, judged me to be spiritually unenlightened for my age.
The teacher put me in with the pre-schoolers’ group, a bunch of babies for
Heaven’s sake! My seven-year-old dignity sorely affronted, I went home and
relayed my trials and tribulations to Dad.
Frugal with his words as always, he said, “Which would you
rather do? Go to Sunday School or go fishing?” So from that day forward, on
Sundays I went fishing with Dad.
Dad took his fishing seriously. The best rods were deemed to be
those made of black cane, and the right stuff was only available at Redcliffe
in Brisbane. After a marathon trip of twelve hours each way, over unsealed
roads for much of the distance, we arrived back with our prize—six perfect
lengths of black cane. Carefully, Dad proceeded to make up our new rods, and
the very first time we took them out I was given the job of loading them into
the back of the ute. Halfway to our fishing spot we heard an almighty thwanggg!
and looked back to see our rods lying in the middle of the road behind us in a
tangled heap. A vision leapt into my mind of the moment I’d put them into the
truck. I’d been careless enough to leave a sinker dangling over the tailboard,
thinking, what could it matter? How could I know I was soon to receive a lesson
on the inevitable consequences of gravity?
The sinker’s weight pulled the hook and line down, slowly, inch
by inch until the hook finally caught on the road and the rods were reefed
right out of the ute. The results were spectacular! Dad’s taciturnity vanished
completely. He had quite a few words to say to me in the next fifteen minutes,
most of them uncomplimentary.
We mostly fished off The Pines, at Point Vernon, in the bondwood
dinghy Dad and I built together. There was live coral less than fifty metres
from the beach, running out four to five hundred metres to three fingers of
reef. Every colour and shape you could imagine lay there in the ocean’s blue
depths. Thousands of rainbow-hued fish could be seen darting in and out of the
coral, together with teeming squid and the odd octopus waving its tentacles
languidly at us as we passed overhead. To the southeast lay another circular
reef enclosing a deep-water lagoon. Within the reef’s shelter the larger
varieties of fish thrived - coral bream, sweetlip, parrotfish and more - you’d
barely get your line wet before you got a bite, so needless to say that was our
favourite fishing hole.
Further along there were vast beds of sea-grass, where the
dugongs made their homes. One would often surface beside the boat while we were
anchored out there on tranquil winter mornings. They’d creep up quietly beside
the boat, and I’d start in surprise when a sudden loud snort would bubble up,
with a cloud of steam rising as their hot breath struck the cold surface of the
water. There was no malice intended, though - they were just satisfying their
curiosity, Dad said. Our dinghy was just about their size, he pointed out, and
they probably thought it was a prospective mate and wanted a bit of a
snuggle-up.
On those winter mornings, we’d get there at sun-up, sky and
water tinted with rose and gold. It was so cold that a thick coating of frost
covered the sand right to the water’s edge. It crackled as it broke up under
our bare feet when we ran across it to launch the dinghy and boy, did we run—as
fast as we could! Oh, the blessed relief of stepping off the ice and into the warmth
of the dawn-chilled waves. By comparison, they felt like a hot bath to our frozen
toes.
One day, coming back in with our usual good catch, Dad asked me
if we were far enough in. As we got close to the beach, he’d jump out when the
water was shallow enough, and tow the dinghy in the rest of the way, and it was
my job to tell him when. I looked over, and there was the bottom under the bow,
as clear as a bell. “We’re there dad,”
I said, “There’s sand right underneath us.” He vaulted over the stern and to my
consternation kept going—down, down, down into the twelve feet of ocean below!
The front of the boat wasn’t up on sand as I’d thought—it was
over a platform of tabletop coral, surrounded by deep water. Once again, he
made some far from flattering remarks about my aptitude and general
intelligence!
We never went fishing when the wind was blowing from the
northeast. The sharks would come in close to land then and surf the waves. One
day, we were out over our favourite hole, hauling them in one after another,
too preoccupied to notice the weather-change - that the wind had shifted around
to the northeast.
“Hey, look, Dad, the porpoises are bad today”, I called,
watching them jump and frolic in the waves just off our bow—a dozen or so at
least. Dad took one look, and we were up anchor and out of there as fast as we
could row! They weren’t porpoises at all, they were school sharks as big as our
dinghy, and, as dad said, “If one of them lands in the bloody boat, we’re
sunk!”
He and Uncle Tom were always after The Big One. One day, Uncle
Tom rang dad up and asked him to bring the ute down to the jetty - he’d caught
a fish too large to fit into the boot of his car. Dad scoffed, but curiosity
got the better of him, so off he went, and sure enough, Tom had caught a 120
pound blue groper - an enormous fish - so big it could hardly even fit in the
back of the ute. That was the only time I ever saw Dad’s face turn green with
envy.
The next time Dad and I went fishing, as we were coming in I was
cleaning and gutting our catch while Dad rowed. A couple of his mates from work
stood on the beach watching us.
“Hey, Bob, there’s a shark following you in!” they called out to
Dad. “ A big one!” Undeterred, he beached the boat, and Dad baited up a
heavy-duty line with a suckerfish—he’d show Uncle Tom a thing or two! He’d
catch this bloody shark, by hook or by crook or by any other means he could
think of! Wading out into the water up to mid-thigh, he threw in his line, but
the shark didn’t take the intended bait. Instead, the giant shadow rolled onto
its side and charged him, whooshing through the water with all the power and
speed of an express train. It was a tiger shark about fifteen foot long, with
the biggest, sharpest teeth I’d even seen, and boy did Dad get out of the water
fast! His mates, coo-eeing him from the beach at the top of their lungs,
reckoned it was the first time since Jesus they’d ever heard of any one walking
on water.
The experience didn’t hold Dad back. He was still determined to
get a fish bigger and better than Tom’s. One day he thought he’d done it. He’d
thrown in his line, and soon after there was an almighty tug on it as the
dinghy took off, towed along at a great rate of knots by whatever he had on the
hook. I was jumping up and down with excitement as he struggled to reel the
monster in! Eventually it surfaced, and Dad’s jaw dropped nearly all the way to
his chest.
Apart from the ubiquitous Australian adjective he’d never been a
man to use profanity: a throwback to the overly strict religious upbringing
he’d walked away from as a young man. Nevertheless, the anguish in his “Oh, no!” was unmistakeable. He’d somehow
managed to hook the shell of a giant turtle, and we had to row like blazes to
catch up to it so he could free up his hook and let it go. All that work and
still no big fish for Dad. Not that day, anyway.
My uncle George would often tell us about all the fish he caught
on the Mary River. He offered to take me with him any time I wanted, but Dad
would never let me go. There were no explanations, and I never could understand
why; after all, he was my mother’s brother, wasn’t he? Years later I got to
hear the true story; that Uncle George never bothered with such mundane things
as a hook and line. He used to wait until the tide was due to come in and
string a net across the creek, then he’d chuck in a couple of sticks of
gelignite. When the stunned fish were swept into his net, he’d scoop them up
and make a quick get-away. But my parents’ objections weren’t just that such
proceedings were highly illegal. One of his mates had once blown off two
fingers from his right hand while using pliers to crimp the detonator onto the
fuse.
Not that George let a little thing like that worry him. He
wasn’t about to lose any fingers! “You wouldn’t catch me using pliers to crimp
my detonators on!” he’d tell Dad. “That’s what God gave a man teeth for!”
Dad and I went fishing at least twice a month right up until the
time I finished my Junior year in high-school, usually at the Pines, though
sometimes at night we’d go out to Gattakers Bay. We didn’t use the dinghy there
- instead, we walked out along the natural fingers of reef that jutted seawards
over the oyster lease. Those oyster beds were the only place to catch bream,
though we lost a lot of tackle trying to reel them in over those razor-sharp
rocks!
It was a beautiful spot. There was a song out at the time on the
radio, “Sailing along on Moonlight Bay.” On those nights as I watched the moon
rise huge and golden over the water, it seemed to fill half the sky as it cast
its reflection on the ripples in the water, paling to silver as it climbed.
Gattakers Bay became my very own “Moonlight Bay,” a secret I kept to myself. I
didn’t know then that my Dad had written poetry while he was away at the war; I
thought he might laugh at me, and at fourteen a boy hates to be laughed at.
Well, like the man said, all good things must come to an end. I
was done with school, and there was no work to speak of in the Bay. Of course,
I could always join Dad as an apprentice painter in his business - I’d been
working with him over the school holidays for a couple of years by then, and,
always a fair man, he paid me third year apprentice wages once I’d learnt
enough to be useful. Like most fathers, Dad wanted more than that for me,
though. He said, “I want to see you earn your living with your brains, not your
brawn, like me.” So I applied for a position with the Railways, the Post
Office, and the Bank, sat their entrance exams and aced the lot.
The Commonwealth Bank in Sydney, over a thousand miles away, was
the only one to offer me immediate employment - I didn’t turn fifteen until
April and the others not only wouldn’t give me a start, they said I’d have to
sit their exams again the following year. When you’re almost fifteen, a year
seems like forever, and anyway Sydney seemed like a big adventure to me, so off
I went, leaving my family behind without a backward glance.
Dad still went fishing twice a month - my younger brother took
over from me as his regular companion. And I’m glad to say he finally caught
The Big One on a fishing trip with Uncle Tom, out off Nimbi Ledge. It was quite
a respectable fish, a 75-pound horse mackerel, although to his chagrin, it
still didn’t beat Uncle Tom’s record.
Over the years, as we lived our separate adult lives, we got
together from time to time for just one more fishing trip - not as often as I’d
have liked, but as often as we could manage. My father died in October 1998 - he
had a Digger’s funeral complete with flag and the Last Post, and it was from
his War mates that I learnt about his poetry. I wish I’d known that about him
while he was alive, but looking back, I don’t think I missed out on much. For
instance, did my spiritual development suffer when I decided to swap Sunday
school for fishing with Dad?
Those trips taught me resourcefulness, to appreciate my father’s
good qualities, and not to take more than I need. They also taught me patience,
the value of quiet meditation, and a profound respect for life and for the
beauty of this world we live in. Plus I learnt to build a dinghy, and
consequently other things.
All in all, I don’t think I did too badly on the deal.
THE END