Montebello, p.9
Montebello, page 9
Its site was well chosen. From here the whole Montebello archipelago unfolded in the sun like a pirate’s treasure chart, a vivid map of hills, sandy coves, lagoons, mangrove thickets and island upon island stretching into the distant haze. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful or tranquil nuclear test site.
From my position now at the old observation post and detonation point the only sign of human existence was a lone yacht sheltered at anchor in the lagoon immediately below. Pristinely white, it appeared strangely vulnerable, a spotless toy boat alone in the ocean.
A tiny man in a hat sat fishing on the stern. Dark specks and smears – scattered shadowy sharks and rays – nosed through the shallows. Two rounder silhouettes indicated a pair of turtles. Then abruptly out of the north the shadow of a giant dragonfly passed diagonally across the white boat in the lagoon. The mining-company chopper clattered over my head and vanished in the direction of Barrow Island.
In the sudden silence the wind banged the old window frame and whistled through the wreckage. Two ta-ta lizards, miniature Jurassic Park velociraptors, peeked out of the rubble, studied me crossly, and ran urgently down the hill on their back legs, as if spreading news of the interloper.
I discovered excellent reception on my mobile phone, and eagerly called friends in Sydney. I was in adventurous outdoor mode, keen to share my enthusiasm for my uncommon surroundings. ‘Guess where I am?’
The calls were anticlimactic: ‘Monty-where? Are you outdoors? It sounds very windy there.’ Not one of them had heard of the Montebellos and their bombs.
It was still too early to ring my daughter for the guinea-pig poo lullaby. The phone signal wasn’t wasted though. For five minutes I was able to reach my new, not quite unattainable, love. She was interested in what I had to say.
On my tortuous way down the slope, grasping at bushes to keep from falling, another aircraft materialised from the north, circling low over the islands. This was the coast-watch plane, on the lookout for the boats of asylum seekers and shark-fin and trochus-shell poachers. It paid me close attention for a minute, then continued on its way.
17
That Spring
That spring we would meet of an afternoon at my rented house in Fremantle and drink a glass of wine and swing between moods of animation and stillness, and deliberately not go to bed, deliberately not make love, because she was married and unattainable. Unhappily and unwillingly unattainable, but unattainable nonetheless.
We’d remain sitting on straight-backed wooden chairs in the kitchen, the kitchen – decorated with holiday-cottage driftwood, carved fish and faux Mediterranean knickknacks – being the safest, most rigid room in a house, our knees touching, while the bedroom across the corridor – the room that was the Elephant in the Room – pulsated and beckoned but stayed unentered.
Our friendship was of long standing and our conversation was about anything and everything, from Pliny the Elder to the female obsession with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. We had a matching sense of humour. Once we even avidly discussed string – the way shop assistants in the past used to wrap parcels and snap the string with a deft flick of the wrist – and with our amazed laughter at our conversation (we were both suddenly fascinated by string) we knew we were in love.
We were alternately animated by trivia and stilled by reality, overwhelmed at the discovery of rare kindred spirits, and when she left, with her single farewell kiss still on my mouth, I would have to take a long walk around the boat harbour.
I’d tramp through the dandelions, veldt grass and pigface along the verges of the breakwater, the breakwater littered with anglers’ cigarette butts and rubbish. No-one was less environmentally conscious than fishermen, I’d think, becoming angry with their butts, plastic bait packets, prawn heads and nylon line tangles always crossly left behind when the sky was overcast and the fish weren’t biting. Unfulfilled people could be bitter, reckless and disorderly.
Yacht stays tinkled in the sea breeze and oily work boats swayed on their buoys and I thought of my feelings for my passionate not-quite lover and of the growing impossibility of the kitchen-and-Pliny-and-string situation and of the possibility of life together.
One morning that particular grey spring I experienced the novel sensation of raindrops falling on my eyeballs. I was swimming back-stroke lengths in the Fremantle public pool, staring up at the clouds gusting past while Volare and Thriller and Que Sera Sera seeped into my thoughts. In the adjoining lanes, elderly bouncing women were performing water gymnastics to taped music.
I swam a couple of Dean Martin laps and two Michael Jackson laps and a Doris Day lap and then the aquarobics instructor told the women to applaud themselves for their morning’s efforts and, chattering away, they left the water.
In the sudden silence I reached the end of the pool and kicked off again with the renewed resolve of the fresh lap. It was simple. Life now had three necessities: my children and my writing. And her.
We went back so far that when I first saw her she was wearing the uniform of an army officer. She was a student funding her way through university in the Army Reserve. Some scientific or pharmaceutical branch of the military: Bunsen burners rather than Bren guns. Anyway there wasn’t much marching or weaponry involved.
Strange clothing for a beautiful young woman, I thought, even the lightweight summer khaki. Two pips on the epaulettes. The uniform not masking her breasts; her pale blonde hair just flicking her collar. Her skin, too, was pale, Nordic, and without a freckle or blemish. Undoubtedly, she was the most attractive second-lieutenant in the service.
Even the unexpected uniform couldn’t draw my attention away from her most noticeable feature, her Scandinavian hair.
Except for the one who was her boyfriend, who treated her casually – not looking up, secure in his ownership – all the males in the room stopped talking when she came in. A few seconds of silence passed before anyone could gather their wits and then, as one, we all came to attention and saluted.
That spring when she visited me every afternoon, and we sat chastely in the kitchen and drank wine, the view from the house veranda was the same nineteenth-century skyline of pine trees and limestone you saw in historic photographs of the port.
You could see over the old prison walls to Fremantle harbour and beyond, where the live-animal ship for the Middle East halal-meat trade was crammed with sheep and all lit up like a city block at night, and the lines of waiting tankers and container ships in Gage Roads brought the scene abruptly up to date.
Then the wider Indian Ocean stretched to the horizon and to Rottnest Island and the panorama became timeless again.
18
The Ancient Mariner
The night after my visit to the old nuclear observation post on Hermite Island we had another guest for dinner. The man from the pristine white yacht paddled a kayak to the island and turned up at our camp. His name was Don Drabble and he lived aboard his yacht, Scarlett. Such hospitality was expected and given in the north-west. He brought two coral trout, which he filleted for the barbecue, and a wine-cask bladder of Reisling slung over his shoulder. He was a salty old sea-dog.
Don was in his late fifties. He was bald, wiry and barefoot and his long ginger beard and sideburns were so tangled together with his copious chest curls that it wasn’t clear whether the general hair flow was orange and downwards, or white and upwards. He resembled the castaway Ben Gunn in Treasure Island. But for an Ancient Mariner he was dapper. His long-sleeved pink shirt looked ironed for the evening’s socialising, and his Hawaiian board-shorts rejoiced in a rakish hibiscus motif.
Don was proudly garrulous about the difficulties of maintaining a sea-vagabond lifestyle in the twenty-first century. As he drank from his Riesling bladder, he told of his running fights with the mining companies’ ‘security stooges’, who tried to prevent him mooring off their islands. He mentioned hectoring radio calls from the Customs, navy and Fisheries Department planes.
‘You’d be surprised how often the various authorities and I have a chat,’ he said.
The swashbuckling outlook is not a rare viewpoint on Australia’s north-west frontier, home to many daredevil dropouts and treasure hunters. The Pilbara has long championed the anti-establishment capitalist, the libertarian adventurer.
Don went on to talk of all the pirates, villains and unhanged murderers he’d known, and his close shaves with cyclones and official corruption in various lands. He interspersed these anecdotes with tales of his three African wives and daughters in Mombassa. Then there were his blood-curdling adventures while skippering a barge down the east coast of Africa, culminating in his doing time in a Somalian gaol.
This was not a standard dinner-party conversation. While we sat mesmerised in the sand outside Hurricane Hut and marsupials scampered over our feet, Don talked solidly for two hours. He had the habit of volunteering something dramatically off-the-wall, and the random statement, fascinating in its lubricity and brooking no answer, would hover defiantly in the air for some minutes.
‘According to all my wives, the Ugandan marijuana made me perform like Superman,’ he announced, out of the blue. He swigged from his wine bladder, stroked his beard, grabbed and twirled handfuls of chest hair. ‘Unstoppable,’ he chuckled.
We absorbed this information for a moment. Eventually I said, ‘Somalia, whew. That must have been tough.’
‘What a shit-hole Somalia is,’ he enthused. ‘Everyone carries a knife in order to stab their girlfriends in the buttocks during arguments.’
‘Really?’
‘Women squat down in front of their cooking fires with their legs apart so the smoke fumigates their vaginas.’
‘I was referring to the gaol in Somalia.’
‘It was no picnic,’ he agreed, stroking his beard again. Or his chest hair.
‘How did you survive?’
‘Friends brought me food, and I paid people not to kill me.’
A couple of hours later, his wine and our day’s beer rations all finished, he stood up and apologised for dominating the conversation. ‘I don’t get to speak to people very often,’ he muttered. ‘I miss the company.’ Then he stumbled down the dark hill to his kayak and, in the face of a stiff westerly breeze, paddled off into the black lagoon. His white yacht was just a pale blur half a kilometre away.
Clouds clotted the moon and within seconds Don disappeared from sight. We couldn’t see the yacht any longer. Paddling back to it in the dark, against the tide and wind, seemed a perilous prospect. Just to lose his paddle overboard would mean disaster. A school of panicked fish was jumping and flopping on the surface. Something big was chasing them. I thought how easy it would be for the kayak to tip over and for Don to disappear forever.
Next afternoon Brent and I were sightseeing in the dinghy when we came across Don in his kayak. For fun, we’d just gunned the dinghy through a narrow gap between islands called the Hole in the Wall. Even with outboard-motor power, the onrushing currents were stronger than we’d expected.
Don was heading that way. He saw us, grinned, and held up the coral trout and rock cod he’d just caught. Then, like an Olympic whitewater canoeist, paddling frantically to avoid the rock walls pressing in on either side, he speared the kayak through the swirling tidal surge of the Hole in the Wall.
‘He likes a risk,’ I said.
‘He treats every day like his last,’ said Brent.
Perhaps Don’s attitude to destiny had something to do with the purchase of his immaculate white yacht. As the only bidder in a government auction he was able to buy it very cheaply. Five tropical summers before, the yacht had been found drifting far out in the Indian Ocean. Its lone skipper was lying dead below deck.
The man had been dead for some time. It took months to get rid of the stench, which permeated the boat from sails to stern. Even five years later, people who ventured aboard, especially those who’d crawled into the cramped quarters below, said the fumigation efforts had not been wholly successful.
The luck of Don Drabble, the risk-taking raconteur that dark night on Hermite Island, continued to hold. But there was something ill-fated about the pristine white yacht the old sea-dog had bought cheaply at auction after it was found drifting at sea with a corpse lying below.
This previous skipper had died aboard her. Five years passed. Then, sailing at night between Dampier and the Montebello Islands twelve months after our dinner, Don Drabble felt the yacht strike something ‘hard and heavy’ in the darkness.
‘I heard a bang and rushed below to find the rudder gone and the yacht taking water. I thought, “This is going to be a problem. I’ve lost my steering and there’s too much water coming in.” Then it sank.
Don had seen whales pass around the yacht earlier in the day and he wondered if he’d hit a humpback. Or perhaps it was a sea container fallen overboard from a ship. There were many navigation hazards here, natural and man-made, as evidenced by the scores of shipwrecks along the coast over centuries.
After seeing the damage to the rudder and hull of the Scarlett he realised the yacht couldn’t be saved. ‘Sometimes you can block holes temporarily with blankets and mattresses and all that sort of stuff, but it wasn’t possible.’
His seafaring experience across the Indian Ocean, up and down the east African coast, paid off. Unlike the crews of all the other ships wrecked off the north-west coast since the seventeenth century, he was able to send off an emergency beacon before escaping in his dinghy.
As the dinghy drifted in the dark ocean, thirty kilometres from the wreck site and his original satellite detection point, he thought, ‘I just have to sit through this. I don’t really have much choice. You can’t go into a state of panic. There’s no good tiring yourself and freaking out.’
Fortunately the beacon’s signal was received by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in Canberra. They sent up a search plane from Perth which spotted him and alerted the North-West Water Police in Dampier. They set out in their vessel Delphinus and picked him up in the middle of the Indian Ocean five hours later.
According to the ABC’s and West Australian’s reports, he remained in good spirits when brought ashore in Dampier. He was fortunate the weather was perfect for an emergency rescue. ‘A flat sea, and the breeze was only ten or twelve knots, so I was really lucky. It’s part of the life if you live on a boat.’
The Scarlett had been his thirteen-metre home and he’d lost everything. It was his closest call, but Don was happy to be alive.
19
Two-and-a-Half
Eventually the surgical handiwork of Mr Stewart revealed itself to me. By the time I turned fourteen the number of testes facing me in the mirror had diminished from three to two-and-a-half.
Not only was Mr Stewart no mundane ‘doctor’, he wasn’t even ‘mister’ for much longer. Avidly Anglophile West Australians still hankered after British titles and were dismayed when the Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, scrapped them and introduced an Australian honours system. In the nick of time, Mr Stewart was knighted and became Sir Hector.
I was almost able to deal with the excruciating embarrassment and necessity of always standing and shuffling right-side forward in change-room showers. But the elongated scrotum that the surgeon had created by nailing the left side to my thigh, and which now presented as two-and-a-bit (the extra, a subsidiary ball of gristle) hadn’t quite finished causing me grief.
In case I burst Sir Hector’s stitches, I’d had to forego rowing as a sport. But for some reason Australian Rules football was given the medical go-ahead. Within a minute of the ball being bounced in the first quarter of the first game, an ordinary house match, while leaping up to mark a pass on the wing, I was kicked in the balls. The two left ones, to be precise.
Walking painfully with my mother down the St George’s Terrace hill to the surgery of Dr/Mr/Sir Hector (maybe Lord Stewart by now) for a testicle roundup, she said, ‘You know what they’re for, of course?’
What? Good grief. Of course I knew. Mothers. Testicles. Would the embarrassment never cease?
‘Umm, yes,’ I mumbled.
‘So you can have babies when you’re married,’ she said.
20
Prison Diary
Even if I’m lucky enough to pick up a signal on Hermite from Barrow Island, the five-minute, top-of-the-dune opportunity for communication is insufficient for someone in a new romance. Without making the long and arduous trek up to the Observation Post, I missed being able to properly contact the woman in question. And I missed the children. No matter how pleasant the island, there’s a point when it dawns on you that you’re stuck there.
I know some women who won’t attend parties on islands around Sydney Harbour and Pittwater for that reason. Usually they’ve had a bad experience on an island where they felt trapped and helpless. If the host was the person in charge of the boat, this put him in control of events. (I know a psychiatrist who tries this blunt sexual approach.)
Perhaps being driven to existential despair by an island is another form of islomania. It can cause deep anxiety being in a place you can’t leave.
While dentists these days play films of tropical isles to get you to relax during drilling, and a psycho-therapist wanting a patient to sink into a dreamy trance encourages visions of an island’s waving palms and translucent waters (maybe with added dolphins), islands are also traditionally evoked as places of punishment and misery. They’re the devil’s islands, at the furthest remove from the romantic coral atoll.
