A FLEET of cray boats is idling a mile off shore. There’s anger and hate out there. They’re pulled up close to each other with the crayfishermen shouting across the water about the fact of no crayfish. They’re running their diesels in neutral with dabs of Forward and Reverse keeping them stationary. Shouting accusations.
It’s the sewage outlet.
No. Shit never hurt crustaceans. It’s the fucking refinery.
The refinery’s too far away. It’s not the refinery. The refinery’s been there for twenty years.
It’s the fucking Vietnamese. I seen a whole mini-bus of them up on Cathedral Rock the other day. Filming me while I set pots.
They’ve been into the abalone for years. Looks like they’re branching out.
The fucking Vietnamese.
It’s true. In the following weeks plenty more Vietnamese are seen around Lorne. Some walking the beaches and scouring the rock pools, with their black patent leather shoes hugged to their chests and their perfectly ironed slacks rolled knee-high. All of them videoing out toward the craypots. Getting a record of where they’re set so they can find them at night. Their women are in on it, too. Brazen and laughing like it’s a walk in the park. A holiday.
It is for most of them. Two weeks annual leave. The Heavenly-Fortnight-Honeymoon package to Australia from Tokyo and from Kyoto. Those sort of Vietnamese. Vietnamese in a disc of binocular vision.
But no one can prove it’s not the Fucking Vietnamese. Just like no one could prove it wasn’t the Fucking Greeks when the crayfish disappeared thirty years ago and it wasn’t them. And the Fucking Vietnamese are the only new factor here to explain this crayfish drought. It’s known they’ve been rampant abalone poachers for years. And now they’re here where there’s no abalone. Crayfishermen from Barwon Heads to Apollo Bay stow rifles in their wheelhouses.
So in March, with the Fucking Vietnamese causing all this trouble, we get a battle at sea. Gun shots of various pitches come in off the water like a freak storm. Fast electric crackle and pop.
What has happened is this. Eight retrenched BHP workers are out on the water in the new Shark Cat they bought with their lump sum super payouts. They’re out there because the Pilbara iron-ore body they’ve dug with huge machinery all their employed lives has been turned into cars that are now hunkered low on flat tyres rusting into shit-boxes worldwide. The iron has petered out to low-grade and been called unprofitable. The mine is closed and the town is undone. Unbecome. Its residents are superannuated.
These eight men promised themselves they’d replace their working lives with fishing and that’s what they’re attempting. They’ve flown to Williamstown in Victoria to take possession of a Shark Cat built in the shipyards there. They’re riding it back to Western Australia. Fishing all the way. Three days out from Williamstown they’re anchored off Lorne.
The new Shark Cat is called Hannah, which is what the iron town was called. It’s fitted with twin Johnson MaxCascade inboards and can outrun anything that boils up off the horizon. They’re drinking beer out of hundred litre eskies and threading pilchards onto double-barb hooks. The boat is bristling with new graphite rods. Rods that taper fast and carry heavy line so big men can lean back on them fierce and dramatic when they get a strike. They’re black and shiny and as exciting as weapons. If you’re a fish they are weapons.
It’s a beautiful afternoon. The whole western run of sea is hostile chrome with sun. The men are sunglassed against it. But behind their sunglasses their eyes are dull. They’re fishing in the depths of Superannuation. Have just found out it’s not like fishing in the waters of Annual Leave.
The deck is strewn with fish. Alive and dead. The men not even bothering to put them on ice now. Trevally, kingfish, bream, snapper, tailor, Spaniards and flathead. Every now and then erupting in moves that once had them cutting water but now leave them staccato-slapping fibreglass and fallen back gaping at hostile atmosphere. Scales are plastered on every piece of new equipment.
Some of these fish are long and thin with silver skin. Some are round and pink, huge-scaled and big-eyed from the deep. Some are hard and spiky as crayfish. A few are crayfish, hauled out of the commercial pots set off Cathedral Rock. But to the ex-BHP men all these fish look the same. What they see every time someone pulls some outrageous tack of marine evolution on board is the same dull green carp-shaped fish. Just Another Fucking Fish. The sea has flattened out to boring. It surrounds them thirty years wide instead of the usual four weeks in fifty-two.
Ora’s reel squeals. His Jarvis Walker Thunder Stick points deep at the culprit. He unplugs it from its holder and stops the run of line by laying a hand over the reel. He leans back hard enough for the shiny black of the Thunder Stick to go dull grey with strain half way down its length. The fish turns. He doesn’t whoop or yeehah or swear or give any sort of Maori hallelujah. He reels it in slowly. He’s still holding a stubby in the hand that’s winding the fish up through the fathoms.
It explodes into the air on the west side of the boat spreading molten silver wide before the sun. Ora hangs it out over the water. That uninterested in its fate.
It’s a long silhouette of frenzy. Then hang-spin. Frenzy then hang-spin, frenzy then hang-spin. Up against the sun. It’s a five-kilo Australian salmon. Long and silver as something NASA made in the sixties for the religious task of proving communism wrong. Beautiful.
What Ora sees is a dull green carp-shaped species. The damn things in plague proportions here. He suspects there might be a salmon there. He may even catch a flash of silver. But it turns back into Just Another Fucking Fish before he can be sure. Fat, green, slimy and inedible. He’s forty and damned if he knows what’s going to get him to seventy. Fish were supposed to do it. Fish were supposed to keep him excited all the years until his death. But maybe it’s a burden too heavy for fish.
He unhooks his new catch flopping onto the deck.
Then, out of the blinding westward chrome looms a diesel thud and a low ugly ride of commercial fishing boat. The men on the Hannah all call greetings. Unanswered. The diesel motor dies about two boat lengths away and the heavy boat drifts in and slams her prow into the brand new Shark Cat. The eight men on the Hannah step sharp-west once for balance and shout ‘Shits’ and ‘Christs’ and ‘What The Fucks’.
There are three crayfishermen on the commercial boat. All of them are holding rifles. The captain, who is the boat’s owner and the holder of the cray licence, steps up to the bow and looks across at the men in the Hannah and at their knee-deep-in-sea-life situation. He looks all around at the sea, pouting his lips and nodding.
‘You brazen little fucks are out in broad daylight now,’ he shouts. Ora looks across at Merrill, the other Maori aboard the Hannah. They stare at each other. No one’s called them ‘little fucks’ since they were five. Ever since then they’ve been called ‘overgrown fucks’.
‘Just out for a bit of sport, I’m guessing. Recreational. Eh? Little fucks,’ he shouts.
He calls them ‘brazen little fucks’ and calls them ‘little fucks’ because when he looks into the Hannah he sees Vietnamese. So do his two crew. There are two Maoris, three Scots and three drunks descended from English stock on board the Hannah. But crayfish thieves around here now are Vietnamese. Common knowledge. So the crayfishermen are hunting Vietnamese. And when they see crayfish on the deck of the Hannah her crew shrink and yellow and their hair blacks and their eyes narrow.
‘I reckoned you’d get around to this daylight shit,’ shouts the crayboat captain. ‘I reckoned those slanty eyes of yours’d struggle at night work.’ The rifle in his hands has a huge scope on it. Ends as wide as tea-saucers. It gathers light so well it would blind you to look through it during the day. He bought it to hunt nocturnal Vietnamese.
‘What the fuck do you blokes want,’ asks a Scot called Cam.
‘Blokes?’ says the crayboat captain, surprised, like it’s not a word for Vietnamese to be using. For a minute he suspects there might be someone white there on the Hannah’s aft deck. He may even catch a glimpse of red hair. But it blackens again when he sees a seven kilo eight-year-old male backed up against an esky hissing and claw-rampant to keep the slippery tide of fish at bay.
He hasn’t seen a crayfish that big since ’75, when the Department of Fisheries extended the grounds into virgin reefs ten miles off shore and he and his father motored out there and snapped up their share of the pre-white lunkers that were growing into movie props. They were all gone by ’77. He points at it with his rifle. ‘What’s that?’ he asks, hearing in his head the low whistle his father would always give when he hauled a cray that big.
No one answers. They wonder can’t he see what it is?
‘Fuck’s that?’ he asks again.
‘That,’ says the Scot called Cam, his voice sad with the mystery, ‘is just another fucking fish.’
The crayfisherman is outraged. The thing he’s spent his whole life hunting, the thing that’s the centre of all his knowledge and craft, the thing that’s kept him alive and afloat and a free man all these years has been called ‘just another fucking fish’. He shakes his head wide and slow and poignant like the men on that boat aren’t only blind to sea-life-variety but they’re blind to white morals as well, and here, here is something to shake your head slow about and look to your crew about and say a disgusted ‘Fuck’ about while they slow-shake their heads and say their ‘Fuck’ of agreement back at you.
‘Wrong guess, Ho,’ he tells the Scot called Cam, and with a reluctant shrug shoots him in the stomach. Ora jumps onto the deck of the crayboat and knocks the crayfisherman down and heaves him overboard where his distressed metabolism sucks for air but gets water. The man at the wheel of the crayboat slams the throttle flat forward and it starts to climb over the Hannah, pressing the Shark Cat into the sea.
On the listing deck of the Hannah a crew member takes up his Weatherby .458 magnum, a rifle built to stop charging elephants in the days they were alive and charging, but brought on board to dissuade what he called ‘marauding sharks’ with what he called ‘its superior submarine penetration’. He starts to fire it up through the hull of the crayboat, taking guesses as to the whereabouts of the crew up there. Huge misshapen chunks of copper-coated lead go splintering through the deck into the sky. The crayfishermen start returning fire down through their deck along the perceived trajectory of these slugs.
A battle rages through the heart of the crayboat as each boat yaws and shivers from the push of the other, with men holding on for balance and shooting just for voice.
It’s not a long battle. Just long enough for the grey-haired, verandah-sat listening types of Lorne to get their heads cocked best ear seaward and ask themselves, ‘What in the name of Heaven is that’ before it stops.
The Hannah is sunk. The police Bell DoubleCondor copter is in the air for three days but no trace is found of her.
The crayboat turns turtle killing the Hannah. It’s found drifting hull-high off Wye River, empty of crew. Police divers go down and in and when they come up they tell how it’s perforated with heavy-calibre shafts of sunlight.
Speculation is both boats have been attacked by pirates. Speculation is also of drug deals. Speculation is also of wildlife smugglers taking cockatoos out of The Otways. Funereal cockatoos worth twenty thousand dollars a pair in endangered species shops in Beverly Hills and in Third World back streets.
But crayfishermen from Barwon Heads to Apollo Bay speculate unanimous. They nod agreement in coastal pubs. They know. It’s beyond just Vietnamese now. It’s Triads. ‘Fucking Triads,’ they say. Impressed. ‘Fucking Triads. Moving in on the crustaceans.’
For most people in Lorne it stays another mystery at sea. They drink on their verandahs after sundown, staring off at the whole black journey of night water, slowly shaking their heads and saying, ‘Just another fucking mystery at sea.’