habitat July 2012 - Australian Conservation Foundation

Marine biodiversity
Sea change
Tim Winton is an acclaimed Australian author of 21 books. Tim is also patron
of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a collaborative partner of ACF
working together to create a network of marine sanctuaries in Australian waters.
In the early light of morning, I back the dinghy into the water,
jerk it free of the trailer and leave my father holding the painter
while I park the vehicle against the dune. As I walk to the
water’s edge I see the bait truck rolling onto the jetty a few yards
away beneath a haze of gulls. Out at the edge of the lagoon, a
crayboat steams in through the passage in the reef.
The old man has the outboard running, but he’s still standing
in the shallows. He’s over eighty now and climbing aboard isn’t
the simple matter it once was. We get him in, one stiff leg at a time,
and before I can leap in after him there’s a swirl and a huff behind
me as one of the local dolphins surfaces an arm’s length away.
It sidles in, cocks an eye at me, and familiarity being what it is, I
haul myself aboard without a backward glance. The dolphin drifts
alongside, rises on its tail, and lets off a few shameless squeaks, but
I’m immune to all entreaties. Still, before I can put the motor into
gear it leans its scarred head into the boat and tries one last time to
charm its way into a free feed.
“Go on, you lazy bugger,” I say. “Get your own.”
As we get under way, the dolphin shadows us, jumps, flashes
ahead to ride the bow wave. But none of the old moves pay off and
eventually it peels away to join the others rounding up herring in a
pack along the bay.
We skate across the lagoon with its mottled seagrass pastures
and anchor in a sandy channel to fish for whiting.
“How many are we allowed these days?” asks the old man.
“Thirty,” I say.
“Only thirty?”
“Dad, thirty’s still a good feed.”
He shrugs. I guess things seemed better, freer in the old days. As
kids in the thirties and forties, he and his siblings caught crays and
herring and silver trevally from the shore. They collected their own
maggots for bait and humped their catch home in hessian sacks.
Sometimes, as the stories have it, they caught more than they could
carry. Back when there was so much more coast than there were
people living on it, the sea was livid with fish.
“I spose thirty’ll do,” he says.
I cut bait and look out over the water, the hulking white dunes,
and the low roofs of the hamlet in the narrow margin between
them. The good old days may be long gone, yet here we are,
as ever, launching a boat from the beach in a quiet bay, under
cloudless skies, bobbing on clean water. In an hour we’ll have
enough sweet-tasting fish to feed two households. Not so long ago
we’d have fished until we ran out of room in the esky. Now, thank
God, thirty whiting will do.
Since I was a teenager, when I first began to write stories for
a living, I’ve stayed close to the wild shores of Western Australia
where desert meets sea. The littoral – that peculiar zone of overlap
and influx – continues to sustain my spirit and fuel my work.
In the early 1990s I wrote a little memoir called Land’s Edge, to
describe the coastal existence I was clinging to and the natural
world that inspired me. Back then I was the father of young
children. I loved introducing my kids to the lifestyle I knew as a
boy and which my parents and grandparents had enjoyed before
me. We lived in a fishing community of 600 people. The school was
over the road, the beach was a block away and dunes towered over
everything, strange and changeable as the sea itself.
In many ways the conditions of our life together as a family
were very modest, but I’d lived in Europe and seen just how
constrained a prosperous life could be. So I was conscious of how
6 habitat July 2012