Great Ocean Quarterly - Issue Sample

ISBN: 978-0-9942326-2-5

VOLUME 2:3

THE LOST EIGHTH

PHOTO: Mick Sowry - www.micksowry.com

MY OCEAN: Morgan Campbell

An inner song There is yet something more to seek in the sweet prayers of your experience. Still offerings of morning light to be humbled by, Witches of midnight rituals to wax lyrical the wisdom of silence. There is yet something more in the warm belly of the moon. Oh how I must not forget to dance with the dragons of my infant caves, And dream gladly of weeds grown in seed hungry soil.

An RMIT University Fine Art Graduate, Morgan has a subtle but potentially fatal birth anomoly which means she is on the edge of mortality every day, though her art is full of joy. On a waiting list for a transplant, she works constantly with the darkness, but keeps pushing towards the light.

Contents

FEATURES

10 That Last Great Day at The Springs

Tony Wright

18 Down to the Sea in Ships

Horatio Clare

22 Humans of Swimrise

Jock Serong

28 The Paddle Out

Kirk Owers

32 Alexander Semenov’s Neon Ballroom

Jock Serong

Chasing Giants

Tim Winton

Cargo Cult: Using Art to Highlight a Toxic Wave

Cameron Fergus

The Beach

Dylan River

The Deep Dreams of William Trubridge

As told to Jock Serong

Ghost Nets

Michelle Wright

SA Rips: Playing Fur Release

Jock Serong

Lorin Clarke

do a ‘shorey bash’, as they call it.”

118 Every Ray In The Sea Jock Serong

POETRY

22 They Will Not Be Drowned Stephanie Han

54 Melrakki

Dan Crockett

DEPARTMENTS

8 Mislaid Books of the Sea

George Mackay Brown: Collected Poems

Gregory Day

66 Oceanology Beneath the Emerald Glaze

Inke Falkner

72 The Church of the Open Sky Áine Tyrrell at the former Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Sellicks Beach.

Cameron Fergus

102 Greg Malouf Mussel Mulligatawny with Preserved Lemon Rice

116 Too High The Plague Arturo Bandini

a promise of continuity in a year that had broken adrift. Mick Sowry wandered down to Bells Beach, following a hunch about a certain light that comes through the valley there, just before dusk.

The powerful groundswell, when carried on a high tide, makes for near-perfect possibilities. “When I got there,” says Mick, “a bunch of teenagers were racing down the stairs to

Bells Beach slopes steeply down to the submerged rock platform that creates the famous wave, and the shorebreak can rear up and snarl like a Hokusai woodcut. “It’s unlike most you’ll ever see, and the local kids, having grown up with it, were just on it. I’d have sworn they’d be breaking necks but they were all laughing and hooting. This shot is one of many taken that day, of course. But it hit the right note for me in Searching for The Lost Eighth.”

For the record, the young man is Archer Daniel, and he emerged unscathed.

Contributors

HORATIO CLARE’s award-winning books include Running for the Hills, Down to the Sea in Ships, A Single Swallow, The Light in the Dark and Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot. He writes on travel for the Financial Times and other papers, broadcasts on BBC Radio and lectures at the University of Manchester.

LORIN CLARKE is a Melbourne-based writer and podcaster of biting wit and voracious scope. Her writing for children and her podcasting have won awards, and her cultural criticism frequently engages themes of fairness and social justice.

INKE FALKNER is a marine scientist who focuses on creative science and environmental education. Having moved to the Southern Tablelands, Inke now gets her regularly-needed dose of ocean working at the Australian National University’s Kioloa Coastal Campus on the stunning NSW south coast. www.inkefalkner.com

Twitter @inkefalkner

STEPHANIE HAN Stephanie Han’s manuscript ‘Passing in the Middle Kingdom’ was a finalist for the Wilder Poetry Prize. Swimming in Hong Kong (fiction) won the Paterson Fiction Award and was the sole finalist for the AWP and Spokane prizes. She lives in Hawaii and teaches creative writing at drstephaniehan.com

HAYDEN RICHARDS (known by his insta handle, SA Rips) has the South Australian coast as his backyard and muse. He can be gone for days on shoots, looking for perspectives in the landscape that reveal something otherworldly. His combination of stunning coastline, tangible danger and raw photographic talent summons the spectacular.

ALEXANDER SEMENOV is a marine biologist with expertise in invertebrate animals. He leads the divers’ team at Moscow State University’s White Sea Biological Station, and is a professional underwater photographer specialising in scientific macrophotography in natural environments. Alexander has collaborated with National Geographic, the BBC, Nature, The Smithsonian Institution and others.

TONY WRIGHT was raised in far south-west Victoria. Starting in journalism at The Portland Observer, he has spent fifty years writing for newspapers. He is currently Associate Editor and Special Writer for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has written plays and two best-selling books, and rides motorcycles.

MICHELLE WRIGHT lives in Eltham, Victoria. Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies and journals in Australia and internationally. Her short story collection, Fine, was published in 2016 by Allen & Unwin, and her first novel, Small Acts of Defiance, is due out in April 2021.

TIM WINTON is the author of twenty-nine books. He has won the Miles Franklin Award four times and twice been shortlisted for the Booker. He lives in Western Australia

(Photo

PUBLISHERS

Mark Willett Mick Sowry Jock Serong

EDITOR

Jock Serong: jockserong@yahoo.com.au

CREATIVE DIRECTOR & ORIGINAL CONCEPT

Mick Sowry: micks@greatocean.com.au

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

Mark Willett: m.willett@willettmarketing.com.au

DIGITAL DIRECTOR

Tim Semple: tim@waterwheelcreative.com.au

WRITERS

Arturo Bandini, Horatio Clare, Lorin Clarke, Dan Crockett, Gregory Day, Dr Inke Falkner, Cameron Fergus, Stephanie Han, Greg Malouf, Kirk Owers, Dylan River, Jock Serong, Tim Winton, Michelle Wright, Tony Wright

ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS

Morgan Campbell, Lorin Clarke, Peter Day, Robin Faillettaz and Adèle Fleury, Cameron Fergus, Anuar Patjane Floriuk, Jon Frank, Dean Gorissen, Einar Guðmann, JJ Harrison, Dr Lindsay Marshall, Warren Keelan, Kirk Owers, Brydie Piaf, Hayden Richards, Dylan River, Mark Roper, Matt Saville, Mick Sowry, Roger Swainston, David Trubridge, John Turnbull, Daan Verhoeven, Toni Wills, Tracey Williams, Peter Zuccarini

ADVERTISING/ACCOUNTS Mark Willett: m.willett@willettmarketing.com.au 0418 302 399

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cameron Fergus: ccferg@yahoo.com

PUBLICITY Ali Webb ali@houseofwebb.com.au

SHOP, BACK ISSUES & DIGITAL EDITIONS www.greatocean.com.au/shop

Great Ocean Quarterly is a conversation, not a lecture. We’d love to hear back from you about our journal; things that stirred you, provoked you or got you laughing. Even, though extremely unlikely, the things you didn’t like. Drop us a line.

For Giving Us a Wave – Thank You. Great Ocean Quarterly has always relied heavily on the goodwill of friends and family, supporters, subscribers, media and patrons of all kinds. And the Lost Eighth has reminded us how lucky we are to have you all. As well as those acknowledged here, thank you to all the people who have done us favours large and small in the making of this edition. Tim Baker, Nick Batzias, Dr Alecia Bellgrove, Jaber Bittar, Mike Bollen, Ren Inei and Kate Jacoby/Boom Gallery, Bron Burton and the saltsters at 3RRR’s Radio Marinara, Jo Canham/Blarney Books, Simon Cave, Rod Crole, CSIRO Publishing, Gerard Dalton, Ned Dorman/Pozible, Bern Emmerichs, Fremantle Press, Dr Joel Hissink, Grant Hutchins, Pete Hutchins, Karen Langford, Anyez Lindop, Tabitha Lowdon, Vin Maskell/Stereo Stories, John Mitchell/The Book Room at Byron, Carmel Molony, Brian Nankervis/ABC Radio Melbourne, Manny Ranieri, Elise Roka, Ryan Scanlon and Chris McDonald/Need Essentials, Naima Wilson and Sean Doherty/Patagonia, Penguin Random House, Megan Rule, Ed Saltau, Salt & Pepper Gallery, Brendan Sowry, Phil Stammers/Headsox, Ross Stevenson/3AW Melbourne, David Trubridge, Ros Willett, Simon Wylie.

GOQ is printed on PEFC (Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) certified stock. You have our assurance that the magazine in your hands is printed according to rigorous international standards of traceability and environmental management. These pages are elemental chlorine free, and our words and pictures are made from non-toxic, vegetable-based inks. Printed in Australia by Printgraphics Pty Ltd Rod Cutajar 0418 590 417

by Denise Winton).

Lost and Found

Five years.

When I see the words I hear the Bowie song, sung in Portuguese over acoustic guitar by Seu Jorge on the deck of the Belafonte in Wes Anderson’s greatest film (I will brook no argument), The Life Aquatic

Five years is how long it’s been since our last issue. There’s been much to celebrate, and much to mourn. Five years of steady increase in sea temperatures, in sea levels and ocean acidity. Five years of species loss, coral depletion and migratory birds that never returned.

Closer to home and more specifically, our founder Mick Sowry lost his beautiful wife Sue. In a way, it’s Sue’s fault that you’re reading this. Her funeral was a celebration of her lust for life and her raucous indifference to hardship. We gathered at her wake, Mick bereft but gracious, and we talked about making something good out of grief. There was some beer. Marky got enthused. And here we are. We knew this issue was still alive somewhere in the chaos of Mick’s office, banging at the digital walls of a hard drive and demanding release.

We knew some of the articles had been published elsewhere in the interim and would need to be replaced. We’d need to find some new ones. We’d need to honour the promise of the old ones. There would be work to do.

And then, of course, the world flipped on its head. Among much graver concerns, a great many of us were separated from the coast by circumstance. The lockdowns and restrictions have impacted the production of this Lost Eighth issue, but they’ve also fired the turbines: suddenly there was a pressing reason to raise the necessary money and make the magazine. People needed a lift.

That’s not unique to GOQ or its readers, of course. One of the redeeming features of this dark tide is a return to making and thinking, slowing down and re-evaluating

what matters. Many people will never live, or work, the same way again. Entire cities will re-configure themselves. The role of the coast in our communities, and of communities in our coasts, will fundamentally alter.

I went looking for something or other in Raban’s Oxford Book of the Sea, and I was struck by how much oceanic writing is haunted by notions of the sea’s pitilessness, its indifference to human wants. But there’s comfort to be had in that idea as well. In a pandemic, in an age of rampant intolerance and separation, the fanatical primacy of the self, the ocean doesn’t care. It is there, it is there.

The tide leaves and returns, the swell rises and falls in response to faraway storms; the wind explores the compass. In the times I’ve gone there near dark, clad in hooded rubber so that I exist only as two squished cheeks stubbled like a porcupine fish, I’ve found a migration of like-minded others. Mostly teenagers, but all sorts of people. Surfing, yes, but swimming, paddling, throwing themselves heedlessly at the waves that don’t care, exactly because the waves don’t care. Because here is something beyond anxiety, beyond argument. Here is only physics, and the coming dark. All of the psychic moving parts are within us.

Losses – the loss of money or health or freedoms - are the distillers of the stuff that really matters. Mick lost Sue, and among the gifts she left was a reminder to make something good out of sadness.

Here is that something. It’s dedicated to Sue. We hope you enjoy it.

In loving memory - Sue Coley-Sowry

Gregory Day

Mislaid Books of the Sea No.4

George Mackay Brown Collected Poems

place-love. In GMB’s case it was truly an obsession and an addiction. The Orkney Islands were his cradle, his wordfoundry, his tabernacle, his pub, and poet’s creel. It was there that he grew up in poverty and it was there as a man that he concentrated hard, peering into the blades of ocean glare for the right shapes of his vision, inscribing the foibles and fates of his people and their history in a body of work that seems more relevant than ever in our hyper-connective yet disconnected world.

Well conversant with the currents of twentieth century poetic movements through his early but brief foray into the big academic smoke of Edinburgh, Brown forged his own unique style of modernism from local and littoral sources, chiefly the image-based runes of ancient Norse that were carved into the stone cliffs of the Orkney shores. He took on the aesthetic lessons of these runes, absorbing them into his poetic bloodstream, and thus it is that his work feels so genuinely new and old. This art beyond time was no accident - ‘Language, open the sacred quarry,’ he cries in ‘The Image In The Hills’ – and his creative loyalty was not to any ideological or progressive concept but to the more elemental and imperfect truth of the islands. ‘Poor bright places’ as he called them, where ordinary working people eked out their days amongst the tragic scale and marvellous wonders of the sea.

‘And every swan and eider on these waters. Certain strange men

Taking advantage of my poverty

Have wheedled all my subtle loch-craft out

So that their butchery

Seem fine technique in the ear of wives and daughters. And I betray the loch for a white coin.’

Brown wrote volumes of short stories as well as poetry, novels too, one of which, Beside The Ocean Of Time, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Such splashes of fame however caused him great anxiety, living as he did on his own often precarious psychological fault line.

But he could not avoid the respect and adulation. Though he only travelled to England once in his life, other poets began to make the pilgrimage to visit him in Stromness:

When winter comes and the moon-drawn sea cracks its whip in the rivermouth of sleepless nights, it is then that you want the poems of George Mackay Brown from the Orkney Islands on your bedside table. A postman’s son born in 1921 in the old Viking town of Stromness, Brown is a poet whose imaginative instinct in the face of the ocean’s amoral power is both beautiful and true. His poems teem with compassion for characters trying to measure up to the waves, others burrowing themselves away, some trying to mirror the enigmas of the sea in music, still others attempting to package it up for visitors. All of them of course end up in the same place.

The old go, one by one, like guttered flames. This past winter

Tammag the bee-man has taken his cold blank mask

To the honeycomb under the hill, Corston who ploughed out the moor

Unyoked and gone; and I ask, Is Heddle lame, that in youth could dance and saunter A way to the chastest bed?

The kirkyard is full of their names

Chiselled in stone. Only myself and Yule

In the ale-house now, speak of the great whale year.

Reading Brown’s poems here amongst the relatively new white settlements of coastal Victoria, it can seem at times as if he lived for a thousand years. In truth however this was an illusion of his art. He had explored and absorbed the Scandinavian aspects of his home islands, saturating himself in the ancient Norse, Icelandic and Orkneyinga sagas, until each line of his poems began to feel itself like something etched into the stone of a cold sea-cave. While Allen Ginsberg and co. howled from the tumultuous postwar cities of the west, Brown, through illness and shyness, stayed put in an independent, northern, and arcane world. His work became a freakish reticulation of nature’s voices. It could not be read as sentimental, nostalgic, decorative or cute, but rather as poetry from a deeply-lived local life, full of the failure and injustice of reality as well as the incorrigibility and social exposure of the coastal village. To his great benefit, and to the benefit of his poetry, and therefore to us, Brown suffered not only from tuberculosis but also from what W.H. Auden called topophilia - or

Charmingly antiquated as it can feel to read of stone and skerry, of firth-craft, and holm-sight, of slow wells and homing rudders, it requires a sophisticated poetic intelligence to travel beyond the ornamental spin that often passes for coastal culture these days. To put it simply, it is Brown’s uncompromising fidelity to place that makes his poems so powerful, nor can we forget the passion of his artistic commitment, which he declared early when he wrote:

‘In the fire of images/Gladly I put my hand’. He valued the ancestral lineage in both his own work and that of the fishing and farming community around him. Thus he developed powers of observation and paratactic expression unsurpassed by any other twentieth century poet. He watched, he read, he listened in the pubs, he ‘interrogated the silence’, he saw the way things were changing on the Orkneys, and how nothing had changed in the human heart at all. In response he crafted poems which reanimate the old sea-magic of the centuries of St Magnus and Thorfinn, also the violence on the islands during the Scottish Reformation, weaving it all in a long slow tapestry, right in amongst the tawdry muzak of modern tourism. Indebted to the natural world but observant of contemporary culture, he tells in the poem ‘Trout Fisher’, published in 1965, of the sad dilemma of Semphill, a fisherman whose money is made by helping city visitors fish the island lochs:

‘Forgive me, every speckled trout,’ Says Semphill then,

Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, people who knew a thing or two about stringing words together to form gale-shapes or to scale the rocky strata of the human heart. When they left to go back to their own poems, and their own numinous landscapes, Brown would carry on witnessing the creelers’ fingers burning in the dawn. And yes, even through the years of his celebrity on the island the poems kept coming, like the ‘purple samurai’ in the craypots, or the spuming pods sighted from the headlands back in the great whale year. The Orcadian poet would re-launch his boat of word and rhythm, his inner soundscape would flash and stream again with saltwater. After hard toil and in solitude his prey would be caught, the page would be printed. Another poem would go out from the islands, witness to the people he was from, the gull-gaunt tide and shore, the ocean of time which surrounds us all.

THAT LAST GREAT DAY AT THE SPRINGS

Story by Tony Wright Photography by Mick Sowry

No horizon. A blue-white sky melted into a blue-white ocean. Cicadas sizzled among tussocks on the dunes. Even the shorebreak was infected, plopping heat-struck to the sand.

My brother shaded his eyes and stared across the bay. I knew what he was seeing. What he was thinking. Way out there, the remnant of a great volcano reared from the sea. No white water surged today around those brutal rocks. No swell out there at all.

“The Springs,” he said. “What d’you reckon?” We piled into his old panel van, a tapedeck wired up to big speakers in the back. We were off to the greatest swimming pool in our world. It is possible to swim there only on the rarest of days: days like this one, when the elements grow lazy and the sea grows tame. Pink Floyd wailing, we rocked along the coast road in the van, the tarmac swimming with mirage lakes. I cannot hear the first bars of 'Wish You Were Here' without returning to that moment, Tim singing along, laughing with the pleasure of cruising. He shone like the sun.

We swung off down a back track, dust exploding from the tyres, and pulled up in front of a gate hung with a sign: Private Property - Keep Out. It seemed an invitation. Our family had been farming around these parts for more than a century and a half. Plenty of the family’s bones were knocking about beneath the soil just up the track, the coastal wind moaning through cypress pines that stand guard over the graves there. No sign could keep us out of this country. We had been coming here since we were children, shown the way by our father, whose father had shown him. Besides, the latest owner of the place didn’t live here - he spent his time in faraway Melbourne, and even farther-away Canberra.

His name was Andrew Peacock: born to rule but never quite to accomplish it. Occasionally he brought an actress named Shirley MacLaine to this isolated farm above the sea in the south-west corner of Victoria.

We swung the gate and bumped across the paddock, past an old stone hut the local rumour mill claimed had been renovated by the perfectly-named Peacock into a splendid love nest, and came to a stop behind a dune speckled with broken shells. Aboriginal people wandered this coast, feasting on shellfish and building middens, long before white interlopers from Britain and Ireland came and killed them with European diseases and worse, and shoved the survivors off to reserves and missions and damnation.

“Winter nights, when storms in the Southern Ocean kick up swells that roar hundreds of kilometres before pounding into the cliffs, you can hear the percussion of it far inland.”

The first British navigator to chart the coast around here, James Grant, wrote of seeing “several fires” on the shore as he sailed past on December 5, 1800, merrily giving British names to places that had been named forever by the people camped around those clifftop fires. A few months later, the French explorer Nicolas Baudin came by, giving French names to places that had Grant’s new British names. The Frenchman, too, wrote of noticing “fire on the top of a rise on the shore”, not bothering to make the connection that fires meant people, who already had their own names for everything. To those first people, The Springs must have been sacred, though their name for it has been lost. It was a place to gather water. The land around is waterless. Rain sweeps in from the ocean and sometimes it falls for days, but the land will not hold it. It is porous limestone country: water seeps straight in, leaving the surface thirsty. The Aboriginal people, the Gunditjmara, knew where the water went. Beyond the midden, the land ends in a cliff that falls precipitously to the sea. Way down, the water that has disappeared from the land collides with a base of volcanic rock laid as lava a million years ago, and begins seeping from the cliff-face. At the foot of the cliff, tables of black rock jut into the sea, and sunk into these tables are pools, collecting the seepage. Freshwater pools. They seem miraculous. There is nothing between the cliff and Antarctica and often giant seas roll in, great combers that boil over reefs and smash against the land. Winter nights, when storms in the Southern Ocean kick up swells that roar hundreds of kilometres before pounding into the cliffs, you can hear the percussion of it far inland. Yet perched only a few metres above this turbulent brine at the foot of the cliff are those pools fed with fresh water. The Springs.

Aboriginal people in a time before memory fashioned a path down the cliff to get to the water; a rough, narrow path where a foot wrong would likely be your last. When the white farmers came and cattle replaced the Aboriginal people on this land, a

ramp was fashioned from rock down the cliff face. It was a triumph of bush engineering driven by drought, and a bullock was trained to lead cattle gingerly down to drink at the rock pools. The path from the Dreaming remained for those who knew of its existence, though it has collapsed now. Hardy fishers clambered down to toss lines into the sea. My brother and I came only for the strange, spooky wonder of the place. And for the freshwater pools. We slithered down, rocks spinning over the edge, barely daring to look. Halfway, there is a wide ledge, slippery with lichen, the start of evidence of the seep. From this ledge on such a day, you can pause and peer out to sea, clear to the shipping lane that loops around southern Australia just before heading into Bass Strait, and you can pick out the silhouette of a cargo ship or two steaming serenely on the horizon. But if you had been on this ledge one fierce night in September 1851, you might have heard something that still has the power to haunt.

The barque Marie, of just 450 tons, with twenty-five passengers and crew aboard, was lost in a dreadful storm off these cliffs. The little ship, sailing from the European port of Antwerp bound for Sydney, could do no more than fire its cannon in a desperate effort to alert those on shore of its peril. The only ears to hear the explosions of the cannon were those of a settler or two.

“I turned and saw my brother peering down, laughing, the sun over his shoulder and a wide, blue sky. The memory of it, always slightly blurred, has never departed.”

Wreckage of the Marie, pounded to pieces, was found weeks later. Nine bodies were washed ashore at a little beach around the corner from The Springs, and a cairn can still be found there in memory of these unnamed travellers. I could never visit The Springs without imagining their last minutes of terror. But this summer’s day we did not pay long heed to lost souls. Sweat was pouring from us when we finally reached the world’s finest swimming pool.

The fresh water lay so still in the rock we could see clear to the bottom. There was a delicious, chill shock, and from the depths of the pool, I turned and saw my brother peering down, laughing, the sun over his shoulder and a wide, blue sky. The memory of it, always slightly blurred, has never departed.

It felt like salvation, that water. We cavorted and splashed. Later, we slid down closer to the ocean and sat on a platform of hot rock, dangling our feet and sharing a can of beer. My brother, always braver, leapt into the sea and dared me to follow. I jumped, afraid of the colossal openness and loneliness of this often vicious ocean. And when my brother took a breath and kicked and disappeared beneath the water, I could not follow - not down there among the streaming forests of kelp, not down there where passengers and crew of the Marie lay doomed.

As I floated alone on the surface of the indolent sea beneath the cliffs, there came a sudden, overwhelming sense of time collapsing: land meeting water, old world meeting the new, the Aboriginal people, here forever, shuffling away as Europeans displaced them with cattle, parts of my own family pulling to the shore, ending their days in a graveyard 12,000 miles from the place they called Home. Signs going up: Private Property, Keep Out. A desolation swept me, as if a cloud had appeared, blocking the sun. My brother burst to the surface, gasping and whooping for the cheek and daring of life. We struggled back up the rock and slid into fresh water..

It was the last great summer day for my brother and me. Within eighteen months Tim’s bravery had taken him too fast around the wrong corner on his motorcycle, and he lies now on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the wind moaning. He was twenty-one.

I have never returned to swim at The Springs. But I sometimes make the journey back and stand at the top of those cliffs, recalling the pleasure of the water on a hot day in a pool far below. I wonder, sometimes, about the feeling of dread that came as I lay on the surface of the ocean down there, waiting for my brother to resurface. I think I have figured out what it was.

It was merely a glimpse, amplified by the physical and historical vastness of the surroundings, of the truth that we are all simply passing by, and the land and the sea could not care less.

All the comings and goings, the loss and the tragedy, have meaning. They are part of this place called Australia. They are part of us. And there is a lesson taken from those few hours at The Springs: if a magical day comes our way, we should grab it, for it may not come again.

The Thresher Shark { Alopias vulpinus }

Thresher sharks are large lamniform or “mackerel” sharks, related to white sharks, makos and megamouths, found throughout the world’s temperate and tropical oceans. They were first identified in 1788 by the French abbot and naturalist Pierre Bonnaterre, who also identified the spotted wobbegong and the epaulette shark in Australian waters. Where sharks are concerned, Frere Pierre had some flair.

The three known thresher shark species are all in the genus Alopias, a name that comes from the Greek word alopex, or fox: the common thresher is also known as the fox shark.

Thresher sharks are pelagic, roaming the world’s open oceans. In Australia they appear from southern Queensland to Tasmania, across the Bight and north to the central coast of Western Australia, from the surface down to about 370 metres over continental shelves. A thresher shark was captured on video by a submersible monitoring BP’s Macondo oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico at around 1500 metres, far deeper than the 500 metres previously believed to be their limit.

Common threshers have a countershaded body, dark bluegrey or even purple above and white underneath, and an extremely long upper tail lobe, balanced by long, rounded pectoral fins. They have a short head and a cone-shaped nose, and relatively small eyes. By far the largest of the three known species is the common thresher, growing to over six metres and weighing more than half a tonne.

Feeding on pelagic schooling fish such as tailor, small tuna and mackerel, and even squid, threshers will follow prey into shallow waters. Although solitary and migratory creatures, they’ll sometimes hunt in groups of two or three; exquisitely beautiful swimmers, trailing their tails like ribbons.

But with a twitch, the ribbon becomes a whip. When hunting, threshers drop their head and slash the great tail forward overhead, herding and stunning small prey. English Researchers in 2010 filmed twenty-five instances of thresher shark hunting behaviour: racing in and screeching to a halt by twisting the great pectoral fins, then whipping their

powerful tails over their heads to smack them into schools of baitfish. The slender tip of the tail snaps so fast that a wave of low pressure causes violent percussion through the adjacent water. Some prey are hit directly by the tail, while others are killed by the pressure wave. Dolphins and killer whales were already known to use tail-slaps to muster and stun prey, and humpback and sperm whales use tail slapping to communicate across long distances. But tail slapping had never been seen in sharks before the 2010 research.

Thresher sharks are also one of the few shark species known to jump fully out of the water, tumbling and flipping like dolphins.

In the Philippines, near Cebu, a new population of very rare pelagic threshers has been found over a seamount known as Monad Shoal, exhibiting a relationship with tiny cleaner wrasses that’s never previously been observed in any sharks. Sadly, this unique population is under threat from dynamite fishing.

Thresher sharks are slow developers, reaching sexual maturity around eight to thirteen years of age, and living for around twenty years. Think about it – that’s roughly equivalent to a human hitting puberty at fifty: quite the mid-life crisis. But like all large sharks, they aren’t highly fertile. Embryos develop internally, and the two to four fully-developed pups are up to 1.5 metres long at birth – an event captured on film for the very first time in October 2013 by Attila Kaszo, off the coast of the Philippines. Slow breeding, of course, means vulnerability to overfishing; for their flesh, their liver oil and their fins, which are used in shark-fin soup.

Threshers pose no threat to humans, although they will occasionally nudge a surfboard. Conversely, thresher sharks are a prized game fish in the United States, off Baja, Mexico and South Africa. All three thresher shark species have been listed as vulnerable to extinction by the World Conservation Union since 2007. The European Union has been pushing in recent years for a complete ban on killing threshers and hammerheads.

They Will Not Be Drowned

by Stephanie Han

Photography by Jon Frank

Two sirens rise from winter’s sea. They leap from a shell into quicksand stone, a dowry of flint and fossils. Coltish, cream and tea sisters, no breasts, blood, or rage. A wideeyed sylph: rose lips fat with laughter, nylon slippers of treads and laces. Her plastic tiara tames a dark tangled mane. The other: helium gray eyes and a breathy voice that echoes the sea. Her wool coat festooned with silver buttons, her slim feet anchored by sturdy boots.

They race rocky dunes, wave arms, call to prehistoric avocets. Rusty chains tether moored boats, crab traps and wooden shacks. Great wheels once carted the bounty away. The girls shoot rocks at steel waves, shout for the morning. Dusk has begun. What of age and darkness? Their dreams—yours: myths of love you carry in silence. All is difficult, desperate—distant idols adorn walls, flushed faces fumble at bus stops. They feel the will to creation, damn ugliness and virtue, dare to pry open the shell’s mouth before the sky blackens to a crisp.

I hear those voices that will not be drowned.

Ignore the cries of men at sea! Let them roam from land to land. They will find their way home. Sirens never do. Pleasure, bitterness, freedom, entrapment. A baby’s tug at the breast, weary eyes of a loved one. The impossible solitude of forgiveness. A single day of birds and dunes.

A round red pebble rolls in your palm. A Pacific sun decades ago…

Four girl cousins near the bay’s lip measure distance by jags of volcanic rock. Uncle waves from Hanauma’s shore. Water laps backs and thighs, bold sun burns. Laughing under Hawai’i’s skies—before partners, husbands, bills, lovers, divorce, illness, children, work, death. Out to sea! Then before you succumb to sharks, you paddle back to sand that burns soles, slurp sugary drinks of melted ice. Laughing. You will never drown.

You kick rocks, beat down memory. A fragile shell spilling colors? You needed one of steel. Your gaze grabs the sea before the moon waxes. Sirens swollen from sunset’s bite, pearls of love’s mad belief, swing limbs over bicycles, chortle lyrics to the wind, head home in time for tea.

Raised by biologists, Alex Semenov grew up on the shores of Russia’s White Sea: the same shorelines that are now his office and laboratory, the focus of his singular vision.

He can trace his fascination for the sea’s invertebrates, with their cryptic domes and fronds and curtains, back to a school field trip in year eight. His long association with the White Sea Biological Station began with his studies in invertebrate zoology at university. The Station, with its evocations of snowbound Soviet facilities from the fiction of Martin Cruz-Smith, is in fact a modest collection of timber huts and piers on Kandalaksha Gulf, ten kilometres from the Arctic Circle in the northwestern arm of the White Sea. Established in 1978, it’s now an adjunct of Saint Petersburg State University.

The waters around the Station are cold: in winter, from October–November to May–June, the sea freezes, and the heavy ice creeps constantly towards the Barents Sea. The isolation might be gruelling, but it’s a scientific asset. More than 700 species of invertebrates inhabit local waters, and at the other end of the scale there are marine mammals, including beluga, bowhead and humpback whales, harbour porpoises and rorquals, bottlenose dolphins and orcas.

The sheer biomass of the marine environment here is

Story by Jock Serong

extraordinary. The seafloor moves in unison with the ice above it: thousands and thousands of nudibranchs, amphipods, hydrozoans and polychaetes glowing, festooned and bumping into each other, mating and murdering. A single dive might yield a hundred war-painted slugs. But coupled with the isolation, the diving and photographing conditions are harsh. People like Semenov are rare, and dedicated to what they do. Years of operating precision equipment in a clumsy drysuit in the dark and the bone-aching cold are the necessary price of images such as these. And his subjects are not above stinging him painfully while he works.

“You need to be a really good diver just to be able to stay in one position in the water column without any breath for a minute or two,” he has said, “with your eye finding tiny translucent jellyfish in the viewfinder and focusing manually.”

Semenov’s shots are constructed using two strobes to light the subject from opposite sides of a dish containing the animal, synchronised by a flash trigger. He works with a range of macro lenses: a Canon MP-E for super macro and a Canon 100mm/f2.8L for 1:1 or bigger scales. Anything larger than about two inches he’ll shoot in an aquarium setting. Invertebrates are simpler, he told us recently, but they’re also complex organisms, much

Aglantha digitale or Pink Helmet jellyfish. A tiny hydrozoan barely 1.5cm in size, it’s usually completely translucenta deepwater species that appears in the White Sea and other coldwater seas in mid-spring. “They’re super-fast swimmers, and may cover a few meters in less than a second with a series of quick powerful jumps. With a naked eye you see only red threads of tentacles, so you need bright sun or a torch to see them properly.”

older evolutionarily than vertebrates. Less brains, but a lot more specialised things to live comfortably in their ecological niche.

“I do this work because I love it. It started as a hobby, then I realised I’m not the only one who loves images and stories from the ocean, so I started a blog and became a storyteller.” That led to him selling stories to major media outlets, to what he now calls “moving forward on a full-power collaboration with scientists all around the world.”

From the humble outpost on the Kandalashka Gulf, he’s been making documentaries, working with renowned names in wildlife media, giving classes for schoolchildren, teaching scientific diving and filming methods and publishing books. “All that stuff boosts people’s interest in science; in marine biology, conservation and life on our planet in general.”

Cyanea

tentacles

tissues), photographed in the White Sea. An adult has thousands of tentacles that can stretch to an enormous length, or contract to thick cables, as seen here. “They’re quite painful stingers, but not really dangerous. They always end up wrapped around my second stage, burning my lips. When the tentacles are stretched they look like thin fishing line: you can hardly notice them in time to avoid them.”

capillata (Lion’s Mane jellyfish)

and oral lobes (red

Forskalia edwardsii, the Red-spotted Siphonophore, shot in the Mediterranean Sea during a night dive. “We look for upwelling streams that bring living stuff from the deeper parts of the sea, and dive every night for a few months when the weather allows us to do it. This thing is a colonial cnidarian, a super-organism made of blocks of specialised jellies. Every jelly in the block has its own function: the blocks are all connected to one main stem, and the creature can be super-long. The longest creature in the ocean is actually a siphonophore.” Just like casinos, siphonophores weave a deadly trap for prey by emitting flickering, coloured lights. Extremely delicate, they are much better observed in the wild than in a lab.

Cyanea capillata, in the Sea of Okhotsk.

“Cyanea is a quite widespread species, so you can meet them in seas all around the world. But surprisingly, they have different colouration and different pain potential. The species from the Sea of Japan are much more painful stingers than Cyanea from the White Sea. I just avoid testing how badass they are in the different seas, but I’m always surprised to see how different they are within same species.” A single broken-up specimen of Cyanea is believed responsible for stinging 150 beachgoers in New Hampshire in 2010.

Tiny hydrozoan jellyfish, Bougainvillea superciliaris. Only a centimetre across, but “quite a common ball of beauty in the Arctic seas,” they’re present in the water for a few weeks during sexual reproduction, but this species spends most of its time on the seafloor in the form of hydrozoan polyp colony (as most hydrozoan jellies do).

“Sometimes I’m super lucky to make a perfect shot just

on a safety stop. Sometimes I spend the whole dive chasing a few tiny bastards and get nice - but not perfect - shots in the end. Usually I spend some time with one object to get to it from the right side, to be sure that everything is in focus. On planktonic dives I rarely go deeper than ten metres.”

Trachipterus trachypterus, or Mediterranean Dealfish. “This is quite a rare find, because it’s a deep-water species and they go up to the surface only when they are young.” Dealfish have long, wide fins with soft tissue-like structures: believed to be a strategy to resemble dangerous jellyfish to avoid predation, called ‘Batesian mimicry’. Near the surface, Dealfish hunt tiny polychaetes and crustaceans, and sometimes small squid.

Alitta virens, or King Ragworm. This 40 cm-long polychaete worm, seen here in the White Sea, spends most of its life under rocks, “but when there comes the time for sex, they go out, exchange their crawling parapodia (legs) for swimming paddle-like ones and get an ability to swim like Chinese dragons.” For a few days, the sea surface is covered with billions of worms releasing sperm and eggs in the water. “It’s the worst time to go swimming. They’re not venomous, but they have big, sharp jaws hidden deep inside. They can shoot their pharynx out a quarter of the length of their body. It’s quite an impressive scene.”

Lecothea multicornis, the Comb Jelly (Ctenophora), photographed in the Red Sea. “Quite a common but beautiful, ancient creature made of the softest jelly. They are super-fragile and are not related to jellyfish: this is different kind of animal that uses sticky cells instead of stinging ones to feed on zooplankton.” The light source here is the bright, desert sun of Egypt, a world away from the chill and gloom of the Arctic. “It’s close to the surface, so there was no chance to change the camera settings to get a darker background.”

White sea. Cyanea capillata feeding on Aurelia aurita jellyfish. Lion’s Mane is a voracious predator with a diet comprised of other jellies (up to 70%). They can eat prey bigger than themselves by stretching the oral lobes that are their external stomach. Digestion begins when the lobes have smothered the prey.

Beroe forskalii has a way of igniting the lyrical possibilities in Alex Semenov’s Russian-inflected English. He describes it as a “spaceship alien tongue comb jelly from the Mediterranean Sea...a superfast palm-sized carnivorous ctenophore that hunts other ctenophores like Leucothea multicornis (the viking helmet one). It can swallow prey whole, even if they’re bigger than its own body. They’re incredibly beautiful because of the reflecting comb rows made of cilia that refract light in different colours. It’s like a glowing disco ball, but it’s not bio-luminescent light, just a reflection.”

Cyanea capillata in the White Sea, looking up against the clouds in still water. “Usually people are in awe at weird life-forms they’ve never seen before. There’s no need to look for special effects or try to shoot superscenic pictures, because nature has already done all the hard work in my case. For me most surprises come from modern high-resolution equipment, when I see stuff that I haven’t noticed by naked eye. The resolving power of modern lenses and sensors is really impressive - for a marine biologist like me, it’s just a gift of progress I can’t even evaluate. I’m more than happy that I have a chance to look at this world this way.”

CHASING GIANTS

I n winter the humpbacks are so close we can hear them breathing. On calm nights my wife and I listen to them crash and leap about as we lie in bed. When a whale slaps its tail against the surface the noise it makes is peculiarly solid. It’s the sound of precision engineering doing its thing with confidence and satisfaction, like the deep, luxuriant chunk of an expensive car door closing. Think of a bookie climbing into the Bentley after another day at the track – thwunk!

It’s hard to stay focused on work during whale season when you hear them all day, see their pillars of vapour from the kitchen window. As a distraction they’re worse than the fridge. Whenever we can, when the wind drops and the gulf glasses off, my wife and I grab the big paddleboards and pick our way through the spinifex to the water’s edge. Flat water paddling is good exercise and generally quite a meditative activity, but I’m always on the lookout for megafauna – I can’t help myself – and if we don’t encounter whales there’s always something else to see: turtles, coral-crunching tuskfish, schools of mullet. This winter we came upon small pods of humpback dolphins. A close cousin to the Chinese white dolphin, they’re only newly-described as a species and it was exciting to get a first glimpse of them. To me they seemed stumpy. They breached in hurried jerks. And they were hard to keep track of. Unlike the gregarious bottlenose dolphin, the humpback is shy, even cryptic. A bottlenose will dart and frolic beneath you – to get your attention, to satisfy its curiosity – but as we discovered, a humpback dolphin will keep its distance, always veering off or diving away when there’s a chance of things getting personal. We spent an hour playing cat-and-mouse with the pod and never made eye contact. They didn’t want to play.

I’ve been watching cetaceans, dead and alive, most of my life. I’ve seen sperm whales slaughtered. I’ve surfed with spouting southern rights in the break and felt the songs of humpbacks ring in my body like the pulses of an MRI. And when a twenty-two metre blue whale – the largest creature on the planet – washed up on the shore at my secret pointbreak, I paddled out anyway, and did what I could to ignore the cheesy stench. It lay there, rotting foully, for years. My kelpie loved to roll in the purulent mire. I, however, was content to look. Because for all its sensory outrages – and they were legion – it was still an awesome sight to behold. Vast carpet-rolls of sloughed blubber. A junkyard of ribs and livid organs. And after a few months its huge, tide-jumbled vertebrae looked like the aftermath of a brawl in a beer garden. Even its decomposition was epic.

So, I confess, I’m a bit of an enthusiast. The sight of humpbacks steaming by on their annual migration is no novelty, but it thrills me anew every time. When a whale writhes into the air at a distance I get an instant shot of

adrenaline. Some days in winter the water erupts with bomb-like percussions. It’s like someone’s set off a minefield out there with all those welters of spray, all those shining slabs twisting in the air as if blown out of the water.

Binoculars are fine; I give mine a flogging. But when the migration’s on, I want to be out there amongst it. So, as often as I can, I paddle out to meet the convoy.

Early in the season, excitement tends to outstrip experience. It doesn’t matter if the pod is already level with our place and hopelessly far out; I’ll give chase anyway, telling myself I’ll catch up in the end. What this actually requires of course is being able to paddle twice as fast as a fifteen-metre mammal for the best part of an hour. And believe me, even the lazy cetacean cruising speed of three or four knots is hard to sustain for long, especially for the middle-aged male who tends toward the portly. The first time I tried it I felt like I was re-enacting the last twenty minutes of The Blues Brothers

Over and over. And doing it on water. This was not strictly a car chase, but it was a hectic and absurd pursuit, every bit as overblown and under-scripted as the film. It was a dumb thing to attempt, but like Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, I’d come to believe I was on a mission from God. It took me an hour. When I finally drew near the pack, blistered and running with sweat, dusk was falling and I was kilometres from home. My longsuffering wife was but a speck in the distance; she’d given up the chase half an hour before. I knew I didn’t have much time, but for ten minutes I idled along at a legal distance as two calves turned to check me out and their mothers rounded up to wait and watch. The youngsters rolled and twisted, making currents with their glistening bodies. They slapped their tails and lifted their heads to take me in and if it hadn’t been for the fact that darkness was falling and my house was already lost in the gloom of the desert plain, I’d have stayed for hours. Later in the season I’m a bit smarter about it and by then the pods are in so close there’s no need for grand chases. Last September, on a dropping tide, we paddled out through phalanxes of lagoon rays and squid the colour of molten gold to meet a pod hardly further out than a stone’s throw from shore. Ahead of them, like an exuberant escort, a posse of humpback dolphins leapt left and right, chiacking and showing off to their giant cousins. When I’d thought the little humpies had no interest in play I hadn’t really considered that they just might not want to play with me. They were like kids wired on red cordial. But they were handy for gauging the whales’ movements. Whenever the big pod dived you could anticipate the point at which they’d surface again because ten or even twenty seconds before they breached, the dolphins would leap in a series of pairs, left and right, curling outwards, mugging and spinning like jesters before the court.

by Tim Winton

with photography by Anuar Patjane Floriuk and Warren Keelan

PHOTO: ANUAR PATJANE FLORIUK

That day the whales slowed; you could feel them easing back on the throttle. As if they sensed us and figured they’d check us out. My wife hung back prudently. Naturally I went in closer. As they let go their breaths, clouding me with gamy vapour, they groaned operatically, and in the muscular depth of that noise you could sense the remarkable mass of their bodies. They paused and began to make eye contact, taking me in languorously. It was obvious the adults were considering, making decisions, directing their young. However many times you experience this, it’s unsettling. For here is an embodied consciousness on a scale you can’t quite assimilate. No matter how familiar you are with the scientific facts and abstract conjectures, it’s a shock to experience this at a personal level. However wellbriefed you are, you feel radically unprepared. And awed, of course.

Once again, the youngsters were curious. And when they circled back on me I found myself caught up – caught out, really – because I was no longer keeping a safe or legal distance from the action. I wasn’t impinging on their space; if anything, it was the other way round. They rolled and lifted their pecs. They ran leisurely figure-eights around me. The water was shallow and the resultant eddies made it hard to keep my feet.

Now to have a whale beneath you is a thrill. But to have one slide under you in shallow water is a little nerve-wracking. Once I saw what was happening I lifted my paddle and braced myself best I could. All around me were footprints – churning fields of turbulence – and the dolphins, out skylarking amongst the adults at the perimeter, were not go-

ing to be any use to me in predicting where the calves were likely to breach. Then, beneath me and slightly ahead, I saw a shadow. For a moment it looked like the profile of a whale swimming across my path along the seabed. But we were in only five metres of water and the scale all wrong. A moment later I realized it wasn’t the whole creature I was seeing. This was only its tail. Right beneath me. Getting bigger by the instant, scything up underfoot.

I got ready to jump but at the last moment the calf tilted slightly and its mighty tail broke the surface barely a metre to the left of me. It was slick and black, looking all of a sudden as big as the tailplane of a fighter jet, and as it rose before me, above me, glistening in the sun and shedding water in trickles and droplets, I was in no doubt it could have swatted me to pulp in an instant. But the tail just hung there, almost perpendicular, while I staggered, flailing like a tightrope artist with only the paddle for a balance pole. After a pause and a moment’s inversion, the calf dived, breached just ahead of me and with a throaty bawl coursed away towards the adults.

We paddled homeward, chirping with excitement, swapping observations and laughing at our luck. As we came in across the sandy flats, we startled a few blacktip sharks that had begun their annual aggregation. They were slick and twitchy, each about a metre long, and as they bolted they left festive puffs of silt in their wake. It was like coming home to a fireworks display. It seemed fitting. It was that kind of day.

This story appeared in Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (Penguin, 2017)

“I got ready to jump but at the last moment the calf tilted slightly and its mighty tail broke the surface barely a metre to the left of me. It was slick and black, looking all of a sudden as big as the tailplane of a fighter jet, and as it rose before me, above me, glistening in the sun and shedding water in trickles and droplets…”

Melrakki

Melrakki by Dan Crockett

Photography by Einar Guðmann

They call this the driest month

But ducks divide by sex under boils of sky

Threatened into formation of gaudy males, drawing predatory gaze

Welts around sparse sun and

A pharalobe, red-throated on matchstick legs, skates in Drunk acrobat totter

Delicate

Fleeing splendid cries, an abandonment of rage.

Melrakki, of course

Little dead mountain wight

Darting below the rushing vibration of snipe

Disturbing fjord water still tracing the shadow of gulls

Melrakki

Lonely as sole whooper swans in the high lakes, fair plumage stained pissy by melt

Whose faint orange webs touch last year’s bear-berries

And whose shadows stir the glacial trout, the river flickers, unhookable

On the bar a north swell crunches

And the mouth, furious as the clouds, delivers harlequin ducks to sea

Past drab eider chicks amongst the dulse; tasty morsels for everything, hunkered between boulders against the sharp tongues of the easterly

Overhead, constant traffic, resonant delight in feathered soar

Guillemots scud

As if their bellies pull their wings south, surprising feet splayed below The arc of fulmars, they whose fishy shit clouds nostrils

Above birch forest, as grand as Staverton yet wizened as Dizzard, a great fishlord swirls

Culling chunks of air each flap

He of white tail-chock and talon

Two skuas in his wake, viperous

And even Melrakki cowers

Barrow goblin of brush

Fur blistered brown, the remnant white flocks off in pinches

Zebras with sharp teeth

A nest of brown eggs like maltesers and a nearby shriek, maternal Haunting

Naive longing for July’s hatchlings and August’s flight

Survival

Boulders like little buses rumble into the valleys

Echoing the Ptarmigan’s croak

From some high cave

Melrakki

And the white spots in the couloir, nosing up into tight funnels of rock, sure-footed on scree

And we, stood above a matted rug of woollen slump

Carcass becoming fibrous, feeding sphagnum below, fjallgrassa poking through

Þór says Melrakki becomes bolder for

‘He is old, starving’

Bites the bottom jaw out and lays up until they bleed out; juice to slake the thirst of stones

There are horns on the body, Þór prods one with his toe

Melrakki, what have you done?

An angry scream to chase us down the mountain, out of the livid tapestry, shivering

Naked in retreat, like a confidence exposed to

Outrage and defiance, willing our dismissal

Lonely as the sun’s stamina

As wedded to the mountains as rock and sky

CARGO CULT: USING ART TO HIGHLIGHT A TOXIC WAVE

by Cameron Fergus

with photography by Tracey Williams

The first thing we see is the captured whole. With our eyes at wide-angle we take in the larger form, traverse the boundaries of the single all-encompassing shape. Depending on the particular wiring of our artistic senses, maybe we see the centre piece, or notice the existence – or absence – of colours. Then the monkey brain kicks in, instinctively processing, sorting, pondering – trying to understand - all that is set out before us. Maybe we like what we see, maybe we don’t.

Regardless of what we each discern from these particular images, one conclusion is immutable. What we have here is a load of crap.

Take nothing away from the curator. There is evidence of time, care and thought in each collection, of attention paid to placing and spacing of content in the collage. In order to display the items in a way that is navigable, the curator has had to make judgements about what, where and how elements might be included, and shown a discriminating eye for just the right individual pieces to make up the greater whole.

All of that changes nothing. It’s garbage, the lot of it. But that doesn’t mean that the images are worthless: far from it. For perhaps the greatest value each of these displays offer is the invitation to delve deeper over repeated viewings - to see what realities and realisations might come.

So dive in again, keep moving. What else is in there? We’re hunting for treasure now, back to our younger days where almost anything was bounty, where value could be found in what we’d recognise later as the most worthless of finds. Step back. Consider colour and shape. Consider form. Finally, consider function and the deep dive becomes both clearer and murkier. For function leads us out of the art entirely and into the reason behind. While the individual pieces collected here were originally produced for a dubious array of functions, the higher purpose of the collages is where the value lies, as it provides us with a necessary reminder of our own short-sightedness, our drive to add comfort and utility to our lives, too often at inestimable cost to our environment.

Plastics were introduced to a willing global market as a cheap-to-produce, highly durable, and endlessly functional commodity. They have been all of that and more.

Plastics were introduced to a willing global market as a cheap-to-produce, highly durable, and endlessly functional commodity. They have been all of that and more. But the ubiquitous use of plastics is also one of our greatest ex-

amples of innovation over intelligence. Toys and trinkets – and our affection for them – aren’t meant to last forever, but when made of plastic they do.

Look again at the images, wander about in search of where the sinister hides amongst the substance. Notice the picture within a picture within a picture. For each plastic item itself is a collage, a closely-bound amalgam of ever smaller bubbles, bits, and beads, brought together as a whole for an array of purposes – from the terrific to the trivial. At its best each item will be used repeatedly, as intended, deliver on its promise, and fill its functional niche. But when discarded – either deliberately or subsequently - in the ocean, subjected to ultraviolent sunlight, wave activity, and salt, the once collage-like whole breaks down to become the commodity at its worst: microplastics.

Microplastics are everywhere, strewn across all environments and microcosms, derived not just from the disintegration of larger pieces such as lost and discarded cargo, not just bottles and plastic bags, not just straws and coffee cups. They’re also the lurking threats found in clothing filaments, tea bags, baby wipes, and the microbeads found in cosmetics and toothpaste. In the ocean, these miniscule dots of poison absorb other toxins in the water, before finding their way into the bellies of fish, birds, turtles, decimating all forms of marine life at all levels of the water column. Microplastics are even consumed by coral.

In the ocean, these miniscule dots of poison absorb other toxins in the water, before finding their way into the bellies of fish, birds, turtles, decimating all forms of marine life at all levels of the water column.

We know all this.

We have all heard the impact that plastics have on the health of those who live in the oceanic realms, as well as those – in and out of the water – who choose to consume them. Sadly, like most messages intended to save us from ourselves, this awareness doesn’t seem to result in much action or lead to any significant change. The dire state of our marine world is a warning call that needs to be sounded, over and over, in a multitude of ways, to get through. It is this plea that is at the very heart of Tracey Williams’ images. ****

Tracey Williams is, unsurprisingly, a beachcomber. Someone who ambles the sandy shores, walking the through-line that links land and sea, a long-time connoisseur of the lost and found.

Residing in Cornwall, in the south west of England,

Tracey has abundant opportunity to take in the coastal realm; always searching, always fascinated. While Tracey has as many curious finds as she has miles beneath her sandy feet, there is one of her discoveries in particular that illustrates well our complicated relationship with plastics.

Walking the shores of South Devon in 1997, Tracey and other likeminded wanderers started to discover pieces of Lego in amongst the usual detritus. Unlike most of her other finds though, the age and origin of these particular Lego pieces could be readily traced, some twenty miles offshore, where nearly five million bricks and minifigures were lost overboard, from one of the many shipping containers that spilled into the ocean off the Tokio Express earlier that year.

Within weeks of the spill, and indeed ever since, Lego pieces have washed up on the UK’s southern shores, particularly after large storms and king tides; the stronger pulses tumbling the mix into coves and corners all along the open beaches. Not all of the pieces have floated to land of course, so in addition to those millions of tiny bricks, figures, flippers, octopuses and dragons washing into the hands of beachcombers in Cornwall, a submerged utopia for brick fanatics is still being pushed around on the sea floor, the pieces clicking together in ways beyond human ingenuity, or forming a rolling multi-coloured swell that must confound as well as decimate the oceanic species that swim within it. It has also no doubt inspired successive generations of British eight-year-olds to learn how to snorkel, with eyes on the loot.

Lego makes a stronger case than most for plastics production. Maybe. It’s fun, encourages creativity in little minds, and is often passed generation to generation, making it if not sustainable then at the least enduring in utility and contribution, as is our affection for it. However it’s also Lego’s cuteness factor and apparent harmlessness (unless found in tiny mouths or under cursing adults’ bare feet) that plays us for the suckers we are, that hooks us into a spurof-the-moment purchase - one that also commits the earth to paying the real and eternal price.

In recent times, the Lego Company has announced a shift to the use of more plant-based plastics in their products which will, given the approximately 400 billion Lego pieces in existence worldwide, at least slow the future flows of the noxious bricks into the environment, and just maybe demonstrate the sort of corporate leadership that is so desperately needed if we’re going to change the course of our sinking ship. ****

Before we return one last time to the images, to the realm of edge, line and shade, let’s confront a different picture – one drawn from data and reality - to get a sharper and bleaker view of the future that we are looking at. In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that each year more than eight million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean - the equivalent of one garbage truck’s worth of waste every minute. Of every day. Every single year. Without genuine action this is projected to increase to two per minute by 2030, and four by 2050, the year estimates also suggest that there will be more plastics in the sea – by weight – than fish. Let that sink in. Deeper. Let it hurt enough to change.

…each year more than eight million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean - the equivalent of one garbage truck’s worth of waste every minute. Of every day. Every single year.

Take a final look. For each time we recognise a piece in one of Tracey’s works, it is also important that we accept that we bought that item – or something very similar – before, and that we likely have no idea of what eventually became of it. With eyes opened to the true disaster that the images portray, see in them a system of priorities skewed, a temporal scale out of whack, a toxic tidal wave of neglect, and our own place in it. While the curator herself does not consider these collages art, the pieces undoubtedly belong to that realm. Colour, shape, composition are all there, in a form that invites deep enquiry and much-needed debate about the origins and alternatives to the broken path that we have taken. Not bad for a load of crap.

You can find more of Tracey Williams’ images on Twitter @LegoLostAtSea. Tracey’s book ‘Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea’ will be published in the UK next year.

ÁINE TYRRELL Oh Salty Water

Recorded at the former Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Sellicks Beach, South Australia.

She couldn’t get past it. Heartbreak will do that. The oppressive weight of grief and an impenetrable mist of sorrow that will surely never lift. Face tired and drawn, eyes spent of tears and a mind spinning with images and events recalled and recreated. Words said and unsaid. Solutions, if-onlys trailing off to silence, questions left unresolved. Emotions on a tight, relentless loop, no respite or end in sight.

There is no immediate cure for heartbreak of course, no best way to nurse a raw and open wound. The heart of a songwriter, so indelibly in tune with the frailties of spirit and soul is perhaps more vulnerable than most to shatter if not treated with care. A true friend and long nights with rambling discussions cut through with pauses and trembling hands can ease - but never erase - the pain. She’d done all of that and it had left her strung out, thread bare, but with the need to keep things in check for the tiny faces that looked upon her smile as their ever-bright guiding light. But there was a way out, an escape more than a solution, a way of creating momentum so that the inertia of past days might be lifted. She knew the remedy, but it took a friend to give it form and make it so. Directing her to the car, her surfboard and the coast, her ally’s instruction was simple. Go.

****

Her eyes were wet long before she made the shoreline and it was there that she paused. Deep breaths, a moment of calm. Tears – again - as if they’d never stop. Sorrow sets deep, drawing ever downward until torso, legs, feet are gravity’s plaything. Watching the water, seeing the surfers’ joy in cruising the glassy faces of the Southern Ocean’s great gift, she longed to be just another smiling face in the grow-

ing crowd. The waves weren’t much, she noted, but there might be a little something out there for her if she was patient and kept her expectations low. Riding perfect peeling waves wasn’t the primary purpose anyway, she needed only to get out into the ocean, to be cleansed, rocked gently by the rolling swell, to leave the realities of the now back on shore. Stepping into the dark, wet sand the early indicator of the sea’s temperature was upon her. Cold, she reckoned, but nothing compared to back home, a place which had never held a stronger pull or felt further away. Then, just as the foamy remnants of the last wave washed over her feet, it all started to happen. ****

“If you have your antenna up,” Áine Tyrrell tells me, as we set up in the corner of the otherwise empty hall of the former Wesleyan Methodist Church, a small stone chapel between the fertile hills of the Fleurieu Peninsula and the waters of the Gulf St Vincent, “then some songs will come.” And when Oh Salty Water came, it did so in a rush. As Áine paddled out on that Autumn day a year earlier, the ebb and flow of the tide caused a pulse, a rhythmic blip, to appear on her songwriter’s radar. Something in the wash and return of the swell fed the feel of the piece and by the time she’d duck dived her way beyond the breakers she was able to sit atop her board and tap this mysterious new beat on its deck. A few waves, the meditation of sitting in the ocean watching the horizon, slowed her mind, the sensation of diving into and being held by the sea shook, cleansed, and re-fuelled her, provided some longed-for peace. The salt water stripped away the layers of self, history, and responsibility, fed the rawness and emotion unquestioned and unedited

directly into her creative soul. The inertia shifted.

By the time she was back on the sand “the song was just there,” - words, rhythm, melody all in place - “a divine gift” - from the creative ether, as if it had been out there all along, beyond the Heads, bobbing around in the deeper water, waiting for the right conditions - time, mood, clarity of mind –to move into the bay and be collected by a songwriter with her antenna up and net out.

****

Oh Salty Water is an ode to muse and mother both, born from and dedicated to the sea. But it was never meant to be a song, at least not one for anyone other than its author. It came when it was needed the most, as a way of healing and a refuge amidst the turbulence. Perhaps that’s why, when most other songs are laboured over for weeks, months, years – lyrics added and edited, instrumentation changed, extended, abandoned – Oh Salty Water hasn’t changed at all, its form entirely the same now in the chamber of the chapel as it was when it first washed ashore. Swaying gently as she finger-picks her tenor guitar, Áine’s body follows the flow of the tune as it shifts and drifts, her bare feet padding the beat on the aged floorboards of the church. With eyes closed she starts to sing, only opening them to instinctively check the positioning of finger and fret, before letting her gaze drift away, its destination unfathomable but seemingly somewhere well beyond the stone and concrete walls of the old chapel.

Opened in February 1862 to service the spiritual needs of the fledgling rural community at that time, the church has fallen silent in recent times though the structure still holds its form, standing strong well into its second century. Inside, the plastered lower walls are flecked and cracked like an aged and weathered skin, and through the exposed rafters high above the stony

Story and Photographs by Cameron Fergus

skeleton of this old place is visible at both ends of the hall. Áine’s voice drifts up through the aging rafters, out through the creaking timber doors and into the small forecourt garden where two iron cherubs greet those entering the chapel gates, their tiny faces corroded by years of exposure to the westerly wind’s invisible menace, sea salt. High on the chapel’s façade an iron cross has suffered the same fate while in contrast the surrounding flora – banksias, she-oaks and nitre bush - thrive under the salt-infused conditions. On the chapel’s eastern flanks sits a small cemetery and beyond that an almond orchard meanders further uphill. On the west side eucalypts stretch their way into the cloudy blue, the leaves releasing their bounty into the salty air, wafting through the open timber windows of the chapel making it a truly sacred place of earth, sea and sky.

Beyond the chapel gates Sellick’s Hill tumbles down to the coast, the road ending abruptly as the landscape drops off the limestone cliffs to the pebbled seashore below. Today the waters of the Gulf are a deep blue and streaked

white as a moderate south-easterly slips across the surface. The waves are knee-high, messy, and disorganised and not enough to tempt our surfer-singer-songwriter into her wetsuit. While the waters are often sheet glass here, the rotting remnants of the Star of Greece , the stump of its mast still visible at low tide, are testament to how quickly the ocean – like life itself - can shift from calm to chaos. A short distance south of the wreck the worn timbers of an old jetty stand tall above the sand, fragments from each length taken with every shift of the tide, the bolts that once held the structure together now rusting loose, their own battle against the sea unwinnable.

Salt water corrodes, destroys - timber, iron, rock. All are vulnerable to the formidable combination of water and salt. But such things also galvanisethoughts, ideas, commitments. Sea water cleans physical wounds and nurses emotional ones, re-activates tired neurons, breaks thought loops, opening the ports for new possibilities, new inspiration. And it can soften the brittle and frazzled pieces of a heart so that with time they may one day again be a fitted whole.

As the final notes of the song ring out Áine’s gaze shifts to an inscription writ large on the aged and paint-flecked far wall of the chapel, words meant as a reminder that all of life’s moments – the good and the bad - are rendered to memory and that all are to be treasured. If so, then what might be made of our darker, broken-hearted times? Perhaps the clue lies in the song itself. Oh Salty Water serves as a reminder to us all – audience and singer alike - that while the pain attached to our loss is something best left to drift away on the outgoing tide, something true and enduring may yet be salvaged from the wreckage: a new beginning, a spirit unbroken and the creation of a true heartsong.

To listen to Áine’s performance of Oh Salty Water from the Sellicks Beach chapel go to https://soundcloud.com/great-ocean-quarterly.

See also ainetyrrell.com Instagram: @ainetyrrellmusic

Our thanks to Chloe for the use of the chapel. Instagram: @bergherringwines

PHOTOS: CAMERON FERGUS

“If you have your antenna up... then some songs will come.”

The Pied Oystercatcher { Haematopus longirostris }

The Pied Oystercatcher is one of those birds that unites beach-going Australians in casual affection. There’s something about its scuttling gait over the shiny flats of low tide that calls to mind Gary Larson’s cartoon birds, head down and figurative hands behind back with worry, scanning the shallows as if for a dropped phone. This humble wading bird was named in 1817 by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot, but birds of such ubiquity as the Pied Oystercatcher were not Viellot’s specialty: he was better known for his work on the Puerto Rican Lizard Cuckoo.

All oystercatchers are black, with a bright orange-red bill, eye-rings and legs and a red eye. Pied Oystercatchers also feature a white breast and belly – that’s how you distinguish them from the closely-related Sooty Oystercatcher, H. fuliginosus, which is all dressed in black. Pieds are not fussed about roaming the mudflats with sooties, and are even found among curlews and sandpipers. The chaps can be differentiated from the ladies by their shorter, wider beak, and the juveniles look a lot like the adults, but don’t have that striking vermillion trim, and are chocolate-brown rather than black. All oystercatchers are wary of humans and will weave across the sandbank in an anxious fast-walk to avoid an encounter.

Found on coasts right around the Australian continent except for long stretches of sea cliffs, the Pied Oystercatcher seeks out mudflats, sandbanks and ocean beaches. They’re harder to find on rocky coastlines, but might occasionally appear in estuarine mudflats and even paddocks. They feed on worms, crustaceans and bivalve molluscs, although ironically never on oysters. The bivalves they prefer are found on sandflats, not on rocky shores, as oysters are. They find food items by sight, or by probing with their long beak, then lever the shells open with that specially-evolved beak, severing the adductor muscles that keep the two halves of the shell together, just like a shucking knife. It is believed that adult oystercatchers teach this technique to their young.

Pied Oystercatchers breed from September to January,

establishing and defending a territory of around two hundred metres – they’re tenaciously loyal to their territory and to each other. The parents make a shallow scrape in the drifting sand beyond the high tide line, then produce a clutch of two or three eggs, well-camouflaged in pale brown with dark blotches and streaks (as for many shorebirds, this camouflage is both blessing and curse). Both sexes share parenting duties, and the chicks will fledge in under ten weeks, that is, before the summer warmth begins to give way to the southern autumn. While the chicks are vulnerable, the parents will go to great lengths to protect them, swooping and calling loudly, and using “injured wing” displays to distract predators.

For a small and vulnerable bird, it’s remarkable that Pied Oystercatchers are found in equal numbers on the Torres Strait islands and the southern coast of Tasmania. Closely related species of oystercatcher are found in almost every continent: there’s a South Island Pied Oystercatcher in New Zealand. But they seem to have declined in numbers here: the current Australian population may be as low as 10,000. Nevertheless, their conservation status around Australia is listed as secure, with the exception of New South Wales where in 2010 they were declared endangered. In fact, the breeding population on New South Wales’s south coast may be as low as fifty pairs, raising a very real possibility of local extinction in that state.

Threats to Pied Oystercatchers include human activities like beachcombing, horse-riding and driving vehicles; introduced predators like foxes and cats; pipi harvesting (which depletes the birds’ favourite food); entanglement in fishing line or other litter, and coastal development removing habitat. Natural predation can sometimes fall out of balance too: artificially high numbers of silver gulls (Larus novaehollandiae) are thought to be responsible for egg predation in New South Wales.

PHOTO: J J HARRISON

The Deep Dreams of William Trubridge

as told to Jock Serong

Photography by

Robin Faillettaz and Adèle Fleury

David Trubridge, Daan Verhoeven

Peter Zuccarini

In 1982, English couple David and Linda Trubridge made a fateful decision. They sold their beloved home and bought a 45-foot cutter, the Hornpipe, and for ten years, the vessel and the oceans around it were home to them and their two small boys, Sam and William. When eventually they settled in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, each of them found ways to incorporate the experience into their lives. David’s design practice gained an international profile. Linda practised yoga, writing and drawing, and Sam became a performance artist and curator. The sea kept its hold on each of them, and for the smallest boy on the boat, William, it became the focus of a remarkable athletic career.

William Trubridge’s voice crackles through the digital fuzz from the other side of the world. Despite an online presence he remains an enigma, a citizen of the blue globe. The first human being to descend one hundred metres on a single breath, he’s now forty years old and the holder of eighteen world freediving records, living between the Bahamas, Japan and New Zealand. His daughter Mila saw thirteen countries before her first birthday. His underwater home and test lab is a 202-metre abyss known as The Hole. Will’s tired. “Had a double training day today,” he murmurs in an accent that’s somehow Pacific and Atlantic. “But I’ll have a crack at answering your questions…”

boys coming home

When we left on the Hornpipe, I was about twenty months old. We got to New Zealand when I was five. My earliest memories are in the middle somewhere, places like the Marquesas and Fiji and Tonga. But there’s definitely images and feelings that have stuck in my mind: the whole experience had such a formative effect on my life. Being surrounded by the sea and that environment for those years means it’s natural for me to be in the water. As kids we’d compete to see who could go deepest, myself and my brother. We got down to fifteen metres, which was pretty good for the ages we were - eight and ten, in old school fish-bowl masks and stuff. It was definitely freediving, but we didn’t know the techniques – relaxation, breathing, all the important things. It was an idyllic childhood because we were learning so much, not just from our parents, but from being in such close contact with the environment.

It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I heard about freediving as a sport. I’d seen The Big Blue as a kid, but I’d never realised this was something regular people could train and compete in. I decided to go to the Caribbean for a few months, and every day when I was there I went out with the dive boat, morning and afternoon, and spent my whole time freediving shallow depths and building up slowly. When I discovered it again, it was like returning to living on the boat: like coming home, I guess. It was always there, calling me back. When I was at university I’d taken to trying to swim a lap of the pool underwater, which I did fairly easily, then trying to do two. Coming back on that second lap (it’s only fifty metres, which in freediving terms is nothing), not knowing any techniques I experienced that burning urge to breathe, for the first time.

PHOTO: PETER ZUCCARINI

PHOTOS: DAVID TRUBRIDGE

SamBack then, on Hornpipe, my brother Sam was more creative and artistic. I’d been more the scientist, and trying to be an adventurer. And we had that little rivalry between us to see who could go the deepest. As adults now, the difference is magnified –he’s gone into theatre and a life of scholarship, a director and designer, whereas I’m pursuing the career of a dive bum, (laughs) but also teaching, and the book, and lately getting more involved in motivational speaking. We’re definitely still close, and even though we haven’t lived in the same country for quite a long time, we still try to catch up at least once a year if we can. Sam comes to Vertical Blue, a competition we organise here, and helps as part of the crew for that, and whenever I’m back in in New Zealand I visit Sam, so we’re definitely close.

There are several mental states that we pass through in a deep freedive, but they’re all part of the same theme: we want to be completely relaxed. Not just the body, so the muscles consume less oxygen, but the brain itself. The brain only weighs 2% of our body weight but it consumes 20% of our oxygen supply at rest. It’s this guzzling, oxygen-hungry organ. The more you can slow down mentally, the more you conserve oxygen. In the phases before a dive, I’m trying to focus on the present moment and not get trapped into the spiral of thinking about outcomes - about world records, or blacking out, or failing in another way. When we go down these paths we inevitably get ourselves agitated: the solution is focusing on what I’m doing in the present moment - putting on my equipment, breathing, relaxing. Once the dive begins, it’s easier to stay in the moment and enter a flow state than in almost any other sport. Athletes say that after running for forty minutes or an hour they fall into this state where time passes super-quickly and they realise they’re not having any thoughts. And that happens twenty or thirty seconds into a freedive. But if those negative thoughts come back, you return to the present moment and tell yourself to think about them later. Delay them. I try to focus on just swimming - without any fixed target or anticipating a fixed point of arrival. I’m just a mouse on a wheel, doing one stroke as it comes.

flow

gases

Those experiences and the mechanisms we develop to deal with them, they definitely help with everyday life. They give you greater equanimity in the face of daily adversities, small or large. When you realise all the baggage is created by us, it’s not part of the actual experience itself, then it’s easier to do away with it. In a breath-hold, we experience this strong primal urge to breathe, one of the strongest, most visceral drives you can experience. But in order to be successful and to perform in a free dive, you have to be able to treat that as just information that’s coming from your respiratory centre about the concentration of a couple of gases – carbon dioxide and oxygen – in your system. Most of the time those gases are nowhere near levels that are critical. So treating it like information that at this point is not life or death; that’s the way towards detaching from panic. That process can be applied to day-today life when something goes wrong or someone says something nasty to us: not having the reaction, the anger or whatever would normally come from it.

mortality

Mortality is definitely something you consider. Among sports that have that connotation - mountaineering or diving or BASE jumping - I’d say freediving is the safest and has the lowest mortality rate. But it’s still present there: I’ve lost friends in this sport. It’s something you do contemplate. I’m sure it has an effect on loved ones, but at the end of the day - I can’t remember the exact quote from Shakespeare, but it goes like “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste death but once.” The risk in not following this dream, or doing what you’re passionate about, is greater than the risk inherent in the actual sport.

PHOTO: DAAN VERHOEVEN

PHOTO: DAAN VERHOEVEN

In this sport we’ve seen athletes who’ve continued to break world records in their forties. The dominant female athlete in our sport, until she passed away in an accident, was fifty-two, fifty-three and still head and shoulders above the rest. It remains to be seen when the peak is, but it’s probably like long-distance running, where you peak late, in your thirties or forties. I don’t think I’ll ever give it up: I’ll always be freediving and enjoying being underwater for the rest of my life. It’s not yet clear when I’ll actually stop it as a career, but obviously that day will come. Compared to other sports, the stress on the body is pretty low. If you look at rugby, soccer, tennis players: most have had serious operations. They’ll end their career with problems that will be with them for the rest of their lives. But in freediving there’s no stress on the musculo-skeletal system. It can be damaging to the lungs, but if it’s done properly and gradually that should be avoidable. And so far, we know of no long-term effects to any other organs such as the heart or the brain. Freedivers have retired after competitive careers of twenty years or more and had the full gamut of cerebral scans and shown no longterm damage. And so far, touch wood (faint knocking sound audible) I don’t know of any significant strain on my body. But we still don’t understand completely what happens in a freediver’s body, the long-term effects in the circulatory system, or the heart or the brain during a deep freedive. That makes it more fascinating – it makes it a journey of exploration of the human body and its potential as well.

Oxygen, by William Trubridge (Harper Collins, 2017)

Passages, by Linda Trubridge (Mother Media NZ, 2018)

1⁄2 teaspoon ground ginger

1⁄3 cup parsley leaves, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon chopped celery leaves

(from the heart)

200 ml thick cream

Preserved lemon rice

knob of butter

1 cup leftover cooked rice

1 1/2 tablespoons chopped preserved lemon

Mussel Mulligatawny with Preserved Lemon Rice

One of the things I’ve noticed through the many years I’ve spent working with food is that people are often reluctant to try out ingredients at home that they think are ‘tricky’, and seafood seems to present more than its fair share of challenges. Mussels are a classic example: while most folk are delighted to dive into a big steaming bowl of these blue-black beauties in restaurants, they are uneasy about preparing them at home. It’s partly to do with the mess factor – and the splash-and-stain risk is high, it’s true – but I think it’s more to do with concerns about food safety, and not being sure of the correct way to handle them.

In truth, mussels couldn’t be simpler to prepare or to cook. The days when they came caked in mud and barnacles are long gone and it’s highly likely that the mussels you buy – often in a neat, vacuum-sealed plastic packet – will be already cleaned. The most you will have to do is – maybe – tug out any remnants of their whiskery little beards and check them over for cracks and chips. Any that are open should close if you give them a brisk tap.

One of the great virtues of mussels is that they are incredibly speedy to cook, which means they are a terrific option for feeding friends. A splash of wine, a little garlic, a big handful of parsley – and in a few minutes your kitchen will fill with heady, sea-scented steam. Time was, we were advised to chuck out any mussels that refused to open after

cooking, but Australian mussel producers now say that around ten percent of mussels will always stay closed after cooking if the adductor muscle inside the shell doesn’t separate from the shell. So use a knife to prise open any that do stay shut. If they smell bad, you’ll know soon enough to chuck ‘em. For me, the best thing of all about mussels is that they are a feast for all of the senses. I don’t think there is anything else that distils the sea quite so completely, with their aromas of seaweed and surf and their bitter-edged briny tang. I love their clackety-clack in the cooking pot and, on a grey winter’s day, there’s something wonderfully cheery about the sight of those plump saffron-orange morsels, nestling in their gleaming, gaping shells. Best of all, there are few other foods that offer such a hands-on eating experience; you really do have to get in there with your fingers and you will get messy!

And if all that isn’t enough for you, mussels are inexpensive, nutritious and sustainable – and they can be married with all kinds of flavours, from the traditional French classics of shallots and white wine (or cider!) to the South East Asian options of kaffir lime and lemongrass with a touch of creamy coconut milk.

Their slight saffron-bitterness also works surprisingly well with curry flavours and a touch of chilli heat, as in the recipe I’m offering here. The liquor released by mussels

during the cooking process is one of the best things about them, and here it provides the base for a wonderful mulligatawny soup. Rice, the traditional accompaniment to Asian curries, is also terrific in soups, turning them into more of a meal. If you don’t fancy cooking rice especially for this dish, then any leftover rice or risotto you might have hanging around in the fridge will do. Just stir through some diced preserved lemon, celery leaves and a knob of butter as you warm it.

This soup is a bit more ‘cheffy’ than your average mussel dish as you’ll be doing the shelling for your guests ahead of time, so that all they have to do is slurp up the gloriously golden, silkily smooth soup and enjoy the uniquely addictive chew of the mussel flesh. What more could you ask for?

Serves 4 as a generous starter or as a light lunch or supper dish

2 kg black rope mussels

60 ml olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 leek, white part only, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

100 ml white wine

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon chilli powder

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon chopped celery leaves

Scrub the mussels briefly, pulling away any beards that are still attached. Throw away any mussels that refuse to close after a sharp tap. Heat the oil in a large heavy-based cooking pot and add the onion, leek and garlic. Stir around over a medium heat for a few minutes, then tip in the mussels and shake the pan to move them around over the heat. Pour in the wine, cover the pan, turn up the heat and steam for three to four minutes. Shake the pan vigorously from time to time.

Remove the lid from the pan and stir the mussels around well. Most should have opened – remove them now – but if there are any that remain closed, stir them around, put the lid back on and steam them for a further two minutes. Any shells which still stubbornly refuse to open can be prised open with a knife, but discard any mussels that are obviously bad.

Remove the mussels from their shells and return the mussel meat to the pan with all the aromatics and the cooking liquor. Put the pan back on the heat, and add the spices, parsley, celery leaves and cream. Bring to the boil and mix everything well.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and warm the rice gently. When ready to serve, stir through the preserved lemon and celery leaves and place a small mound of rice into each soup bowl. Spoon the mussels, vegetables and lovely fragrant creamy juices around and serve straight away.

PHOTO: MARK ROPER

CORKY

I

n the early days of GOQ, we asked the beloved Kiwi-Australian satirist John Clarke if he would write us a story about his love of bodysurfing. He was interested. “I’ll give you a whistle,” he said genially. But it was not to be. Tragically, John passed away in 2017 and his bodysurfing story, along with so much more, seemed lost. Later that year, John’s daughter Lorin wrote an eloquent foreword to a collection of his writings called Tinkering, and we asked her if she would write her father’s bodysurfing story for us. This is the result.

On July 2nd 2017, at my father’s memorial in the Melbourne Town Hall, director Matt Saville stood up and told what he called “my John Clarke story”. Dad and Matt had worked together on the film A Month of Sundays a few years earlier in Adelaide and Dad had driven there from Melbourne with my Mum, Helen. They’d taken the long coastal road, enjoying and photographing the spectacular views. Matt describes discussing this with Dad, and the conversation turning to bodysurfing, a favourite pastime of my father’s. Matt pressed him on this, and Dad described a recent experience he’d had: “I caught this big wave in, all the way to shore, and as soon as I got in - bear in mind, I’m a sixty-five-year-old man - as soon as I felt the sand on my

belly, I looked up and down the beach to see if Mum and Dad had seen.”

There’s a photo of Dad at the beach when he was a kid. It’s black and white, and his father is holding his hand as they both enter the sea. My grandfather, Ted Clarke, is smiling, and so is his little boy. The New Zealand sun bleaching the black and white photo so much you can almost smell the sea and hear the sounds of summer around them. They’re happy. There were unhappy times ahead as Ted and his wife, Dad’s father and my grandmother, Neva, would divorce in years to come, but in this moment there is pure delight. It was a photo Dad treasured. Every summer of my childhood in Australia, our family would head to the surf beach and (as Dad used to say) we’d “fall into the sea”. I don’t remember learning to bodysurf. I remember adoring it, feeling empowered and brave and delighted and rising from the wave as it hit the shore to see who saw – Mum was usually watching and Dad was behind me somewhere. As I got older, I’d spin around at the end of a particularly good wave to find him much further out, across a crowd of floating surfers, a fist raised to the sky in celebration of my triumph. Sometimes, when that happened, I’d find him with his back to me, heading out to sea and, after a moment, one fist would rise and pump the air. I would grin in the noisy surf. He’d seen it after all - smartarse

Story by Lorin Clarke.

Photography by Brydie Piaff, Lorin Clarke, & Matt Saville.

…he chose from several pairs of underpants from a range of eras, and some white ex-bathers so heinous we eventually confiscated them. I found a family email chain recently in which he defends the ancient white bathers as “attractive translucent apparel”.

Both my sister and I remember diving into waves a few times as really young kids and getting dumped - feeling the wave roiling beneath us, being pulled into it sideways, utterly losing control - and being yanked out of the sea by Dad, somehow right there next to us. We kids were eventually given boogie boards by a family friend and loved them, but Dad only ever bodysurfed. We never owned a wetsuit between us. Other families brought equipment and picnics and set up mini neighbourhoods on the sand. It was never discussed, but now I realise our own approach was decidedly low-fi. This was in no small part, I suspect, due to my parents’ unspoken belief that “falling into the sea” was a matter between nature and the human being, and to make too much of a meal of the human side of things would be an embarrassing misreading of those power dynamics.

One can take this idea too far. We petitioned Dad every year to do something about the mortifyingly down-market collection of garments he believed passed for bathers, but he (gleefully) never invested in a proper pair. Instead, he chose from several pairs of underpants from a range of eras, and some white ex-bathers so heinous we eventually confiscated them. I found a family email chain recently in which he defends the ancient white bathers as “attractive translucent apparel”. Translucent or otherwise, all these “bathers” had a permanent home in

the boot of the car in a milk crate with the frisbee. Items to never be without.

Something not a lot of people know about Dad is that he was a champion diver and gifted gymnast when he was a kid. He was good at sport generally and loved watching it, adored reading about it, and wrote and narrated a documentary about sport in Australia called Sporting Nation. As part of the documentary, he interviewed Olympic swimmer Murray Rose –an experience he wrote about after Rose died in 2012:

[Murray Rose’s] areas of expertise ranged across the history of Australian swimming, the Olympic movement and its ideals, drugs, suits and technology, broadcasting, literature, other swimmers, coaching, psychology, the feeling of being in the water, strategy, bodysurfing, philosophy and self-reliance. His voice was soft, with a slight accent from his years in America. He saw the universal and the particular as Astaire and Rogers.

The conversation Murray Rose and John Clarke had seems to have covered a lot of ground, from Dad’s childhood pool in Palmerston North to the poetry of Byron. At the end of this tribute in 2012, Dad lets Murray Rose do the talking. It’s a lovely reflection on, among other things, bodysurfing:

‘I’m still learning about swimming technique. Every time I go in the water I’m conscious

PHOTO: MATT SAVILLE

of my technique and I’m looking at new ways of relating to the water, and learning, as the elite swimmers and elite coaches are today. They are still learning. We’re not done with this. You never become a master until you’re able to go out there on Bondi and watch and be a dolphin, which we do sometimes.

‘We had an experience one day last year; there was a fairly big surf coming in and the sun was shining, the wind was coming off shore and we were looking for waves. And then a rogue set came up from the back, so we swam pretty hard to make sure we got over it. And half-way up the face of the first wave I knew that I was going to make it. So I just relaxed and streamlined, and the power of the wave just shot me almost up to my ankles out of the water, because it was a fairly big wave. And the spray was being blown by the wind and it caught the sun and I was literally flying in a rainbow.’

I suspect Dad enjoyed talking to Murray Rose about sport partly because their conversations covered elements that weren’t just about physical prowess. Sport is about judgement and timing and balance. It’s about never becoming a master and thinking hell’s bells - can I? I think I can! I bloody can! and taking the plunge all inside half a second. Dad’s advice when throwing a frisbee was the same advice he gave when kicking a footy or swinging a golf club: it’s all about where your weight is. Get your balance and your timing right. It’s the same with bodysurfing. And poetry. And comedy. A well-judged pause goes a long way.

If you ever lost sight of our Dad at the beach, you wouldn’t have to search for long; the sun bouncing off that shiny bald head in the surf, a literal beacon in a choppy sea. It earned him a nickname once on a film he worked on when we were kids. The film was called Blood Oath and was shot on the Gold Coast, so we went with Mum to stay there with him for a few weeks while it was being made. The cast and crew used to head out whenever they could between filming and fall into the sea together - Dad included (sans wetsuit, surfboard or anything resembling acceptable bathers) - and they’d emerge, the surfers, after an hour or two, looking back to see if they could find Dad, who’d still be out there. “There he is!” someone said, “bobbing about like a cork in that huge wave over there.” So that’s why, when went to Queensland that time, some people referred to our Dad as “Corky.”

Matt Saville’s lovely “John Clarke story” has come back to me several times – various people having been told it, various people connecting with the idea that if you grew up around beaches, falling into the sea can give you the illusion you’re falling back in time.

This summer, as an adult with children of my own, I watched my eight-year-old ditch the boogie board (the same one from my childhood) and take to bodysurfing instead. The magic of catching a wave unassisted, traveling with it all the way to the shore and rising from it back into the world, thrilled and drenched and leaping into the air. It’s nice to discover, all these years later, that the moment is just as lovely when you’re the parent being looked at, raising your fist to the sky.

PHOTO: BRYDIE PIAFF

TOO HIGH: THE PLAGUE

In this time of plague, one’s mind turns naturally to matters of liberty and the sacred. Here, on the Surf Coast, the primary conception of the former is animated by the lycra and wellness set. A smug and crushing conservatism, wrapped in puffer jacket and sense of entitlement, freedom is nothing more (or less) than insulation from the mob (from the other side of the bridge of course) and an unimpeded view of Junior (of the genetic sneer and designer mullet) “ripping” at Juc. As to the latter, these dog days have provided incontrovertible proof of something More Than This, as my old mate B Ferry swooned in that gorgeous secular hymn of my (comparative) youth. The providential lesson is clear enough: take your liberty for granted at your existential peril. As the plague rages, there is one socio-political fact that is as stark as it is revealing. To install at the ballot box male, narcissistic buffoons leads to death and ruin. Seemed like a good idea at the time ‘eh? A bit of harmless populist fun! All Hail the Schoolyard Bully! The citizens of Brazil, the UK and the US must now reckon with the iron fist of science that has smashed through and into the virtual world of pathetic make-believe which “Balsomito”, Boris and the Screaming Carrot Demon (aka Lord Tiny Hands Trump) inhabit.

Yet maybe Mencken was right all along. That democracy is indeed “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” If so, the constitutional abolition of representative democracy might well be in order. Why not a return to what the ancient Greeks called “aristokratia” - rule of the best! But in its 21st century manifestation, this new form of global governance must consist of two principles only. The first is called Angela Merkel. The second, Jacinda Ardern. I, for

one, would happily submit to an aristocratic dictatorship where the former developed policy and the latter secured its administration. It worked well enough in Ancient Greece until that peanut Solon got the idea that government must be reformed by, and for the benefit of, the people. The obvious error in the aspiration of democracy is that humans are involved. As Plugger, Scotty from Swell’s old mate from Pascoe Vale once pithily observed of our species, “Generally disappointing”. As a co-ordinating principle of government, it has much to commend it.

In terms of the sacred, wittingly or not, I suspect we are all Buddhists now. There is nothing but the present moment. No airports, no travel, no gigs, no road-trips, no sport, no markets, no restaurants, no bars, no libraries, no fun. Just the grind, unbearable for some, of right now There are of course those who claim to have “flourished” during the plague. But forgive them Father, for the “influencers” know not what they do…starting, as they do, from such an awfully low base. What solace then for the soul? From where the good life? I took it as sign from above (and within) when it was reported that Peter Doherty, celebrated Professor of Immunology, had posted on his twitter account a request for Dan Murphy’s opening hours at 1.40pm on a Monday afternoon. His follow-up tweets were salutary also. A Jesuitical combination of logic and science of the kind which led to his 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology: “I’d rather have a bottle in front’er me than a frontal lobotomy” and “Whole lot safer than bleach”. Of course. It was a lightbulb moment. Hitherto, “now” had been prison, with booze it could be paradise. I resolved immediately to develop a new vice.

“Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también”For everything bad, mezcal, for everything good, the same. Ancient wisdom from Oaxaca, Mexico, forged in lived experience. A philosophical tenet to live by in this time of plague. The first, tentative step towards reformation of my Holy Trinity – booze, sport, and music – would, of necessity, be taken online. The decision to be made was complex: Del Maguey, El Silencio or Los Amantes? It was resolved quickly and satisfactorily. All three bottles were purchased. It was not my intention to dilute this smoky magic within the histrionics of the cocktail. But intention and action are two very different concepts. So, the prompt mixing of a “Mexican Firing Squad” must count, then, as a feat of philosophical dexterity and/or proof of the illusory nature of free will. Yet such a simple execution! 2 parts Mezcal/2 parts fresh lime juice/1 part agave syrup/4 drops of Angostura bitters/shaken with, then poured over ice…with a dash of soda. Agonia y extasis.

On music, my strong preference for sounds not words was, I assumed, a manifestation of living in plague times. When the spoken word, official and otherwise, brings lit-

tle but misery, boredom and despair, then to shelter in crackle, crunch, thud, hum and echo seems reasonable enough: the holiness of “A Love Supreme” (John Coltrane), the abstract melancholia of “Selected Ambient Works Volume II” (Aphex Twin) and the strangely cathartic stoner/doom of “Dopesmoker” (Sleep). Deep listening/Press the Escape. The latter, in particular, always makes me chuckle. In the post-Nirvana frenzy of 1992, a lost world where A&R men were confused, coke-addled and desperate, Sleep were signed to a major label and given large advance to create the next anthem of teen angst. Four years later they handed the label one song…52 minutes long…one crushing, cascading, hypnotic riff… Dopesmoker…indeed!

Sport, however, has proven more elusive. By sport, I mean of course (and have primarily in mind) the idea of watching others do it, but at the level of the gods and whilst partaking liberally in both of the above. The resumption of the AFL has proven singularly unsatisfying. Empty cavernous stadiums and a backing track of canned crowd noise so ill-timed that even Ia lifelong watcher of cult TV series Monkey had occasion to blush. The NRL, on the other hand, has flourished. Rugby league is the most unique of games. Even when close and exciting, it’s boring. Yet one cannot help be impressed with its ability to adapt to the new reality of no one attending the games. It would be churlish indeed to note that this new reality is indistinguishable from the old.

Is wood-chopping a sport? Yes, of course it is! The Sunday mornings of my youth were spent watching World of Sport. It commenced with “Ready, Axeman…” whereupon Jack O’Toole would demolish two opponents and a rounded block of wood which looked more like a telephone pole to my neophyte eyes. In any event, the gong went off. In these times of plague, in the cold and clear winter afternoons, I have taken to the shed with splitter and UE boom and chopped wood. I am joined, often, by four kookaburras. These magnificent birds sit high above me, puff their white and silver-grey feathers, look down and guffaw. A fire is set and I enjoy a Pacifico and Del Maguey (neat) and watch as the sun drops behind the gums. The Holy Trinity manifest…liberty (of the mind) in lockdown. More than enough for now. A silent prayer for the many who are suffering.

EVERY RAY IN THE SEA

In 2016, Australia’s chief scientific body, the CSIRO, released a huge, hardcover book called Rays of the World. As the name suggests, it catalogues every single ray on earth, from the ones you no doubt know, like stingrays and manta rays, to the rare and beautiful wedgefishes, guitarfishes and devilrays, through to the downright obscure – the skillet skate and the coffin ray.

Every animal is described by identifying features, colour, size, habitat and biology, and given a distribution range on an individual map (the exquisite Suriname Freshwater Stingray occupies only a tiny red dot in northern Africa). Every animal is illustrated in all their weird perfection. It’s a colossal feat of scholarship, and the names of the august scientists who managed it are listed on the front cover. But there’s one name missing: the name of the young scientist who painted every ray in the sea.

READING FINS

Dr Lindsay Marshall lives on the Sunshine Coast, halfway between the range of her earliest scientific study, the Southern Fiddler Ray (Perth to Gippsland) and the focus of her PhD: illegal shark finning in northern Australia. Lindsay’s doctoral work examined ways of identifying sharks - oceanic white tips, black tips, even rare creek whalers - from the shapes of their fins.

Shark finning is an emotionally charged issue; one that many of us don’t fully understand. In discussing it, Lindsay is very careful to remain objective: she knows the conservation debate better than almost anyone, but she also knows the human factors. Working in enforcement as a consultant scientific expert during her PhD study, she saw the vessels: everything from small Indonesian boats whose crew live in squalor, to massive Taiwanese long-liners equipped with significant tech.

Organisations like the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) and the Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol would notify Lindsay when they’d intercepted boats. The fins were often semi-dried on deck on the small vessels, while the oceanic long-liners had massive industrial freezers.

Lindsay’s task was to go through the catch and compile a report for the court. “So there’s many different scenarios under which the fins came to me,” she explains. “From the actual fishermen, or from a dealer, or seized at the border…the

Jock Serong

closer it is to the fisherman, the better the data you can get from it, in terms of collecting information that’s useful for managing sustainable fisheries.”

The work led her to draft a guide for the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on fin identification globally. “When I was doing my PhD, everyone thought it was important, but no-one wanted to fund it. There was, and still is, a huge drive to develop an app to automate it. But it’s necessarily manual, expert analysis due to the complexity and vastness of the problem. It’s a forensic thing that takes judgment.”

Aside from the impression of sea-going cops and robbers, there’s a striking intimacy about the way Lindsay describes the work. “Genetics gives you the barcode of life,” she says. “Doing sampling, you can see copepods on the fins; you can tell size, see deformities or old injuries on the animal. You can know very personal details of these leviathans you wouldn’t normally ever get close to. I respect and am aware of that privilege.”

PAINTING RAYS

Ever since high school, Lindsay had dabbled in painting. She thinks it might have started with drawing the animals in National Geographic. She did art in year twelve, but she’s otherwise self-taught. In the long hours of her undergraduate studies, and on into her PhD years, she kept up her drawing practice, turning often to images of fish. “In my PhD I was doing morphology,” she says. “Thinking about shapes.”

Lindsay’s spare-time painting came to the attention of Peter Last, the (then) manager of the National Fish Collection, housed at the CSIRO in Hobart. (“It’s the taxonomic hub of fish in Australia,” Lindsay explains. “A whole lot of fish in jars.”) Peter’s a world authority on ray taxonomy, and was Lindsay’s PhD supervisor.

The ever-improving accuracy of identification has meant that scientists can now see trends in the choice of target species over time. Wedge fish, for instance, are a very high-value target. “If you look at enough boats you can see the patterns,” she says. “They’ll even use the flaps of the rays as fin product. But the flaps don’t have ceratotrichia, which are the small fibres that look like vermicelli rice noodles that make up the soup.”

A 2018 Washington Post article said that consumption of shark fin soup in mainland China had fallen by 80% since 2011, but conversely that the popularity of the dish had increased in other Asian societies. “It’s a status thing,” Lindsay explains, “for instance, at a wedding you’d serve it to demonstrate the importance of the occasion, of the family. As the middle classes became wealthier, demand skyrocketed. Now there’s lots of education, so younger Chinese people are aware of the issues.”

Finning is widely condemned, but there is room here to carefully challenge our ethical position. “Everyone says it’s terrible,” Lindsay confirms. “But in any fishing, if you’re worried about the conservation of species, it’s not the finning, it’s the taking of species beyond their ability to sustain themselves that is the concern. Shark finning can actually be fine if managed in an ethical, sustainable and non-wasteful way. Fishermen are humans who need to make a living too. The notion of hacking off fins and throwing away the carcass can be misleadingly reported. For example, the Indonesians are expert fishermen and they use every part of the shark: the skin to make wallets, the flesh to eat, the internal organs, the teeth and thorns for ornaments, the backbone, everything. The trouble is that a lot of it is illegal fishing, so it’s not known to the fisheries managers. This means it’s outside the modelling you do to calculate sustainability.”

Lindsay is studiously neutral about the debate. She compiles evidence, as scientists will, and leaves the arguing to others. “I’m not an advocate – I’m a scientist,” she says. “I believe in effective, real conservation of species. I deeply care about that. But it’s so important to have credibility. If your message isn’t accurate, it dilutes your effectiveness. I love people for being passionate about things they care about, but I guess I’m saying people (need to) listen to and respect expertise more. Trust the scientific process and support it. We need this more than ever these days.”

But perhaps the vital link between Lindsay’s two worlds – studying sharks and painting fishes - is Gavin Naylor, the respected scientist who created the Tree of Life project (sharksrays.org). Naylor wanted to look at the genetic inter-relatedness of the chondrichthyans (sharks and rays), and create a visual representation not only of how they evolved, but of their speciation. Traditional taxonomy looks at morphological measurements – how animals differ in shape and form. According to Lindsay, sometimes those differences are barely discernible. “But genetic taxonomy is a new school – we’re all trying to get our heads around it.”

So for his project, Naylor needed an illustration of every single shark and ray.

“Peter asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. At that time, painting was a spare time thing for me. ‘Do you think you could do this?’ he asked me. It’s no small ask – this is the first time that a single natural history artist has captured one of the larger extant vertebrate classes for the last 100 years. It’s somewhere between 1200-1300 species illustrations.”

It’s thoroughly modern science: a young Queensland scientist (who happens to be a woman and now a mother of two girls), vaulting clear of the whiskery aristocrats of the nineteenth century in their sailing vessels. Lindsay, of course, feels the need to temper this with her scientific precision. “Strictly speaking I still haven’t painted every one of the chondrichthyans, because they keep describing new ones.”

How did Lindsay – how does anyone – react to such an invitation? “There was a definite freak-out, but my eagerness blasted right through that. You just have to work out how to do it. I’m not a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of person. I’m very clear about whether I can do something or not. I have confidence in my painting. In a PhD, you feel like everyone in the world is smarter than you are. But with my painting, I had no doubts.”

There are more species of rays in the sea than there are sharks. The point of distinction between them is important: some of these creatures exhibit features of both sharks and rays. But rays have their gill-slits underneath their head, whereas the sharks have theirs on the side. “You can see that distinction best on the sawfish,” says Lindsay, “as distinct from the saw-shark. This kind of taxonomic minutiae really floats my boat!”

At the end of her PhD in 2010, Lindsay did some trial paintings. The scientists were satisfied with those, and with the fact that they had an illustrator with taxonomical knowledge. For Lindsay, much of the learning was how to curate the images and the data file, to streamline her workflow to get all the paintings done. “I competed around 1200 paintings in all,” she says. “I actually painted all the sharks as well, for the Tree of Life project. The Rays of the World book was a spin-off from that, rather than the reverse. The timing of that work varied, but

As GOQ was preparing to go to print in September this year, we asked Lindsay Marshall to send us a picture of herself. She went one better: she’d just returned from Perigian Beach on the Sunshine Coast, where she had found a washed-up specimen of Mobula eregoodoo, the Longhorned Pygmy Devilray. Designated ‘Near Threatened’, it ranges through tropical Australian waters, but was at the southward end of its range on the Sunshine Coast. It gives birth to a single pup after a gestation of one to three years.

Mobula eregoodoo didn’t make it into Rays of the World, because it hadn’t been described by science yet.

Lindsay asked a friend to take some shots of her with the ray. The images capture the mixed emotions of scientist in such a moment: barely contained excitement at the significance of the find, wonder at the beauty of the creature, and sadness at its demise. “It’s going to the Sydney Museum,” she told us. “There are no voucher specimens of that species in Australia at all. It was in perfect condition.”

“You see deformities or old injuries on the animal. You can know very personal details of these leviathans you wouldn’t normally ever get close to.”

Ornate Numbfish Narcinops ornata Honeycomb Whipray Himantura undulata

Ocellate Spot Skate Okamejei kenojei

Atlantic Torpedo Torpedo nobiliana

Spotted Eagle Ray Aetobatus ocelatus

Largetooth Sawfish Pristis pristis

Australian Blue Spotted Mask Ray Neotrygon australiae

Bluntnose Guitarfish Acroteriobatus blochii

on average I would complete about one painting a week. I think they took longer at the start, as I was learning how to do it, and were shorter towards the end.

when to let go of a piece. “At the tail-end of a painting, there was a lot of deliberation time. Was I finished, or not? I have to make myself stop at some point. Sometimes I need to step away from it, and it becomes easier to see.”

“All up, it took me six years. I worked twelve-hour days, often, and a lot of weekends too.”

Sometimes, Lindsay tried to work on one family or genus at a time. “I had so much to do: in a perfect world, I’d pin out my own fresh specimen animal. But because I was working on all the species in the world and I had so much to get through, I mainly worked off images that were sent to me by my colleagues at the National Fish Collection. So I’d sketch the animal, send it off for approval, then when I had that, I’d paint it with acrylics on watercolour paper.

The vast span of the project calls to mind Max’s private boat in Where the Wild Things Are, sailing through night and day, in and out of weeks. As the book deadline loomed, the human realm reasserted itself - Lindsay got married. “For the first few months of our marriage I was holed up painting sunrise to sunset, while my new husband poked sandwiches under the door. He’s a marine scientist (he works for the Marine Stewardship Council) so he understands. Also, the cricket was on, so he had the TV to himself.” Then Arthur, the old rescue boxer who slept

“All my inspiration is from the animals: the amazing range of colours and shapes.”

“All up, it took me six years. I worked twelve-hour days, often, and a lot of weekends too.”

Ornate Eagle Ray Aetomylaeus vespertilio

Fiddler Ray Trygonorrhina dumerillii

Blue Skate Notoraja azurea

Speckled Guitarfish Acroteriobatus ocellatusi

Bottom right: Kuhl’s Devilray Mobula kuhlii

at Lindsay’s feet through the project died just before it was completed, having faithfully seen it through. “He was the best dog. Very sweet and just completely stoked with anything nice that came his way. I remember the first comfy bed I bought him. He could not believe his luck. He hopped on it instantly and didn’t dare leave it for the rest of the day/night for fear it would disappear.”

And then, new life. “I actually finished painting my last shark for the Tree of Life project on a Friday (a wobbegong) and I had my first daughter Edie on the Sunday. She was a week early: I thought I was going to have a week off, but as is the way with children, no.”

On a screen from far away, Dr Lindsay Marshall weighs the enormous book in her hands and considers what she felt when it finally materialised. “I was heavily pregnant with Edie (the book came out before the Tree of Life project was finished), so my memory of seeing the book for the first time at the end of all this work is a little hazy. I got it in the post. It came out around Christmas, I remember, because everyone was expecting a copy, but they were $200 each, and I only got one author copy!”

She laughingly hopes her kids might think she’s cool for doing it, one day. “I went to a fish conference last year, when my second daughter was eight weeks old. I did a keynote address: a few of the younger students were taking selfies with me. In this very niche little space, I felt briefly famous – my friends were laughing at me. I think the fish conference is the most famous I’ll ever be.”

Lindsay does think about the prospects for women in STEM at times, but also chooses to put the discussion to one side. “Fisheries is a very male field,” she says, “but it’s getting better. I’ve spoken about it to a class at university. There’s a club called the Gills Club (based in Massachusetts) which is for young women interested in sharks. I’m on their list of scientists, which is nice.”

In case you’re wondering (we did) whether Lindsay has a favourite animal, or a favourite species among the hundreds in the book: she doesn’t. “I’m a taxonomist – I’m into diversity and discovering new stuff. But having said that, I do love the Rhina ancylostoma). It’s fantastical.”

Aldrovandi’s 1640 chimera, the “ray dragon”, self-evidently an argument for restraint in fish illustration.

Dr Lindsay Marshall’s work appears in Rays of the World (CSIRO Publishing, 2016). All of her shark and ray paintings can be found at the remarkable online resource www.sharksrays.org But best of all, Lindsay does commissions through her website, www.stickfigurefish.com.au

Suriname Freshwater Stingray Potamotrygon boesemani

Above: Thornback Skate Dentiraja lemprireri

Australian Butterfly Ray Gymnura australis

Coffin Ray Hypnos monopterygius

“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

Nelson Mandela

PHOTO: Mick Sowry - www.micksowry.com