ideas on a manifesto for urban literary guerilla warfare

First of all, if we put Che Guervara on the cover we will sell a shitload, even if few of the people who buy his merchandise feel the irony in his pop-star status, he is so hip!

Ok, i was thinking about newspapers a bit and a comment that the v/clever Ms Toa (see the body of crime listings) made on my first post which spurred me on a bit,

"don't you wish we could write like this all the time? Instead of essays and thesis and newspaper articles? Wouldn't everyone want to read again instead of zoning out to the box, if we wrote like this all the time?"

yes god please,  please help me if i could( write, like that, anytime, at all really), but if i am honest, most of the time i don't need assistance from the box to zone out  

if i could only write like below

Pastoral

WHEN I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

William Carlos Williams

and this man delivered 2000 babies, over about 40 years, covering both world wars and the great depression  

I wish this stuff was in the papers somewhere....... sometime...... instead of real estate and cars that no one wants or can afford.

Guerilla idea #1  :Pay for poetry space in paper, hold chook raffle to cover costs and print "i am a lit chick" t shirt to go with said chicken! ( phew..and this is only one beer and a little puff!)

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams

 

Guerilla idea #2 :When i die i shall take a full page for my self in a paper where someone knows me still and print the following. And you are right Sarah, it is the transition which is problematic, not after, on more considered thought. i will however leave my name off the page.( Shall not be a problem as I am paying. See #3)

Tract

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral
for you have it over a troop
of artists—
unless one should scour the world—
you have the ground sense necessary.

See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black—
nor white either — and not polished!
Let it be whethered—like a farm wagon—
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Knock the glass out!
My God—glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
the flowers or the lack of them—
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass—
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom—
my townspeople, what are you thinking of?
A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.

No wreathes please—
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes—a few books perhaps—
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople—
something will be found—anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.

For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him—
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down—bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all—damn him!—
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!

Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind—as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly—
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What—from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us—it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are ready.

Williams Carlos Williams 

Guerilla idea #3: Tone a topic down a little and send letter to paper.

(click below for big image)

Guerilla idea #4 : reply and politely ask editoral staff of paper to publish their names and positions or direct me to the page where it is written and i shall do similar.  

Guerilla idea #5 : bribe paper's potentially subversive staff with beer to place haiku's amongst the births and deaths.....

Anyhow

Happy New Year 

to all

and most of all

especially

the sharks amongst us

my new murakami 2009 diary

is good for one good idea a day

its 2nd inside cover

the one before the days start

and the page past the one with  

a black cat with green eyes i seem to recognise

has a big crimson dot in the right lower 

this dot has a another inside

front and centre 

a little pinker 

like oxygenated blood 

in a blood shot eye

above this 

 in small 

clean type 

Again and again  I called out for Midori from the

dead centre of this place that was no place. 

                                                                                                

                                     Norwegian Wood

now there's an idea.....

 a midori that is

the great shark hunt

Where's Hunter S when you need him. Fuck the New Years fireworks, lets catch a big fucking white pointer and shoot it out of a huge cannon in the shape of a cock(or cunt) on the top of Mt Clarence.  Ka Fucking Boom, take that! you fucking, fucker of a fish! If little johnny had let us keep our guns we could have necked Limeburner's whiskey, fired our 44's into the air in celebration and swum, cavorting nude and carefree in the black of night!  

After wanderlusting the day away out at Torndirrup Sunday, I ran into my denmark aunty at the West Cape Howe winery gig. More big sister than aunt, 

"whatcha been doing?"

"been out at the gap"

"didn't get inspired to jump then didya?"

"nah.... weathers too nice" 

A Hunter quote  "Too weird to live, too rare to die " kinda fits my take on life/death. I am shit scared of death and the nothingness it entails. Haven given up on a biblical after life at 7 or 8 along with the commercial deities( tooth fairy and cronies), I have honed a taste for self preservation and longevity. I'd  be pissed to die tomorrow, there's many seeds in the pomegranate yet to taste. 

Luckily, in our privileged little corner of the universe (and I am talking very local here), apart from having all the basics needed for life, breathable atmosphere, water, food, shelter, etc. we have lucked on a place where there is fuck all to kill us. No cyclones, floods, fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions, plagues, pestilence or wars (religious or otherwise) of note. Stable if uninspiring political and civil infrastructures, work places with safety standards, the stuff we buy is usually tested and our legal systems lock up the otherwise mad and dangerous. Who could possibly harm us but ourselves?  Even our dangerous land creatures are small, poisonous and avoidable(only scaring those from across the ditch) as opposed to being large, carnivorous and hungry. Nothing to worry about really ........ except big fucking sharks. 

It's a primal fear, deep rooted, hard wired.... I don't want to be eaten.  

My 12th birthday sleep over, 5 mates, 2 movies, vhs not beta, Mad Max and Jaws. Still don't know how I got them past Mum, she obviously wasn't paying attention. Fucked us all up! Bug eyed, none of us slept much that night; and cars and the beach have never been the same since. 

I got my first surfboard not long after that, it cost me $20 for a yellowing, dinged up 7'2 pintail. I surfed everyday that summer, waves or not, but never alone.  If I was by myself I got the yips; rays, dolphins, shadows would set my sphincter clenching, skin crawling, heart pounding and blood rushing in my ears. It still happened when there were others in the water, but it was a communal fear then, we spooked together and shoaled like whitebait.  I have still never seen a shark while surfing but I know, deep down, that they are always there, somewhere, waiting, cruising. 

The shark of my fears is always a White. The others, with perhaps the exception of a Tiger or the taxi driversque Mako, will poke around for a bit and have a taste before deciding if you are lunch. The White that took the guy Saturday just fucking ate him, all of him, whole..... no questions, no trace. Same as the guy who got hit out at the Southern Group in the Abrohlos. Day 3 of his dream job skippering True North, bound for Broome, the Rowley Shoals and the Admiralty Gulf. A quick free dive for some crayfish; cackers are best, their heads twisted off live, a feeler poked up their arse to remove the shit shute, cracked in two with a chef's knife, and onto the hot plate in a bit of garlic, butter & NZ sem sauv, on the sunny deck, in a light easterly,with a beer, any beer, even EB works. I hope that's what he was thinking about when he hit the water and I hope he never saw the 6m fish that got him. I hope it hit him so hard he was out cold..... imagine any lingering consciousness in a sharks rancid gut...... what jonah, what did you say?  

We were drifting for King George in about 20ft of water, half a k off the beach at Hamelin Bay when I first saw a White. Hamelin is just around the Cape from Augusta. During the late 1800's it was a timber port with one terminus of an 100-km rail network running out onto a deep water jetty. The other ended in Flinders Bay and between the two ports the M.C Davies logging company at one stage exported a third of all timber out of the state. That early logging is the reason the Boranup Karri's appeal to the human eye so; uniformly sized trees, evenly spread, no under-story, a giant Zen garden where the hand of the gardener is generations lost. These days, like in Flinders, only the bones of the jetty remain. Hamelin was always a lousy port. Right at the southern end of a long wide j shaped beach it faces N'NW and the scant lee of the near shore island of the same name could not save a ship in a winter storm. The maritime museum has at least a dozen wrecks recorded from this era. The odd cray boat still uses it when a big high in the bight cranks up the SE summer patterns, but a camping ground, kiosk and boat ramp are about it now. Those constant summer winds were what drove us around the corner from Augusta to fish and swim in the early to mid mornings before the wind really howled. 

 Dad had borrowed Athol's 12 foot tinny because it was easier to launch there than our bigger Clark and we were drifting mid-morning, across the middle of the bay; all emerald green and turquoise, fading near shore to arayan blues. Polarised glasses for picking the seagrass banks, terry towelling hats, white zinc for cracked lips, a little leftover steak on a no.6  for the first fish and shiny cubes of whiting thereafter for the rest, a white bucket,  driftwood cutting board, boning knife ground past slaughtering a lamb, and a red fuel tank sloshing to the peculiar drumming rhythm of a drifting tinny.  

"Is that weed moving?"

"Where?"

"Over there"

"Na......."

Pause.

"Must be a raa......."

"Oh Fuck me!" 

With this a White cruised up alongside and we both lost the power of speech. At least 4 foot longer than the tinny, maybe more, the shark was huge. It circled around us casually at a slight distance before sweeping in close and rolling side on, to eyeball us impassively; in doing so revealing that smirk with it's row, on row, on row of teeth and vivid mottled graduations of hue, concrete grey fading to the unbearable whiteness of it's enormous  belly. I had the urge to reach out and stroke it like a dog, to feel the cold sandpaper rasp of it's hide. It was so close I could have. The old man finally snapped to and whispered,

"Don't make any sudden movements." 

"I wasn't planning any, actually." 

A whiting tukk tukk tukked my line. 

At this point the shark spooked. We don't know why, but later speculated it had brushed one of the whiting lines. Like a V8 auto when planted, the shark lurched, almost squatting under power, pectorals spread, the thrust emanated from the tip of its nose and shuddered through the body before erupting in it's scything tail and it was gone. 

My old man nearly ripped the cord off the outboard a split second later and we were up and planing instantly in a funk of fear and 2-stroke fumes, skipping whiting rigs along the surface, hand line reels merrily un-spooling before I could get them wound in and sorted, feet dancing to avoid the bait board and knife as it flipped off the seat. Dad forgot about the landing and pointed straight for the beach and we shot full throttle through the surf and halfway up the beach before we came to a stop. 

We sat there in the sun for a long time and debated if we should tell the swimmers and families near the jetty. We decided not to, the shark had gone the other way after all and was probably several k's away by now.

It would just fuck everyone's summer if we told them. 

"Shall we go back out?"

"Nah, lets go have a look at the island, hey." 

Postscript: I went surfing Boxing Day, my first since the Mid's attack and the day before the Port Kennedy one. I have a shark shield I bought before either attack; for surfing, swimming and diving. It got a few laughs the first time I wore it but no one laughs at the fucked up stingray tail anymore and I am kind of popular in the water. But you know I always knew they were there. 

BTW the only thing of note Howard did is enact those gun laws; otherwise he should have been shot out of a huge..........  

Torndirrup yesterday....

the goddess

i can still sculpt a semblance of you now

nape of your neck
dart of your tongue
run of your fingers
shortness of your breath
arch of your back
lilt of your breast
heat of your sex

i drank you in till i was sure i would drown
saw the depths of the sea in your eyes
smelt the damp soil in your scent
heard the build of a storm in your cry

you washed over me in waves
buried me in the earth
and moaned a funereal hymn

and like so i died in your arms

now words are gone
seemingly unthinkable
unnecessary
for there is nothing to explain
no one to explain to

who else but you could understand

that there is only the now of watching you die a little

over and over

pelagia #one

With feet dangling through the rails and swinging to the diesel's strum, you could see flying fish, four or five together, basking in  the sun. Caught in their slumber by the blunt bow they would franticly dart left, then right and on realisation there was no escape, they would break clear and glide 30 or 40 metres before plonking into the oily face of the next swell. Each takeoff left a sand dune snake track and on this peerless day, they were skipping, firing up their tails like old 2 strokes just before they hit the surface..... Brrraaaappp..... once, twice, three times, until they outran the boat.

"matar as saudades"

"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness" 

A.F.G Bell: In Portugal 1912

“Na verdade
Um homem só se encontra no que perde,
Porque ele abrange o espaço e a eternidade”

“In reality
A man only finds himself in what he looses,
Because he embraces the space and the eternity”

Teixeira de Pascoaes 1920

on a rising tide below the flotsam line
i shall write your name over and over in the sand
as fragile and beautiful as a nautilus shell
i shall stand alone
and wait for the waves to return my love to green seas

barefoot again

I finally threw out my deck boots the other day. They had been collecting spiders and dust for the last decade and somewhat piqued at shifting them to another shed for the 5th time, out they went. Expensive Ronstans, they were light, grippy and waterproof with a drawstring closure at the top. Aimed at the yachting crowd, they had caught my eye amongst the heavy, open topped boots the trawler trash wore. Three times the price, they had been on the chandlery shelf for a while, judging by their fine layer of red dust and wheat chaff. In a town where the value of an item was quickly calculated into how much booze, weed or speed you could consume if you went without the said item, it seemed these were not a good deal. 

Early on in the season I developed a couple of nasty cracks in my heels that would not heal due to my feet being continually wet. At the start of the day they always hurt like hell, the dry wounds, which had healed a little overnight, would open up fresh and raw again as soon as I got on deck. It had finally reached a point where I could hardly walk. The southerlies had harangued us for weeks on end, throwing up short, steep slop, which would lift off the bow in great plumes and wrap around the wheelhouse in a torrential drift. Our old fiberglass boat was a pig; blunt and narrow, it moaned, bucked and bitched in an unpredictable manner and worst of all, it was wet. I spent all day soaked head to toe, on waterlogged, slippery, carpets, dancing pots around deck in a convoluted, staggering waltz. In contrast the modern, alloy boats were broad and stable, with sharp, flared bows, which neatly turned down the sea, like they were ploughing a loamy paddock. Their shirtless, deckies wandered casually around dry, checker plate, decks in those useless, open topped, boots, which would fill in ten minutes if I wore them. The Ronstans went on the skippers account; it was his shitty, wet boat after all. 

I have always preferred to go bare foot. Shoes have fundamentally changed our relationship with the landscape and the way we move through it. No longer concerned with the tactile nature of the earth we walk on, our gaze has elevated and we glide over it, for the most part, disinterested and disconnected. Barefoot, you avert your gaze at your peril. Most of what I know on the nature of pain I have learnt with my feet. Hay stubble, pea gravel, coastal limestone, barnacles, hot coals, glass, bull ants, double gees, thistles, red ants, fish bones, cigarette butts, blackberries, bull ants, bees stings, melting asphalt and coral. Each inflicts their own peculiar quality and duration of suffering. Most vividly, as an 8 year old I drove a garden fork clean through my right foot and was left pinned to the back lawn, like an entomological specimen. My younger sisters ran screaming in circles around me, pausing briefly each lap to revisit the horror, re-inflate their lungs and high step on the spot; until after what seemed an eternity, my mother came and bravely removed it. 

Barefoot as a child, I meandered sheep and cattle trails, paused on the faint woodland traces of kangaroos; while bucks, scented with elemental sulphur pursued coy does, fed ferrets into rabbit warrens, dragged dogs out of fox holes, stomped to raise the heads of thick, black tiger snakes sunning on fishing tracks, fell though mutton bird burrows, and wandered the flotsam lines on solitary beaches. The wider panorama was punctuated by my deliberate footsteps, viewed at a reduced frame rate, as if shot with film. Constantly reframed and refocused, the finer detail in the vista became apparent, the changes noted frame by frame, before returning focus, always to the ground and the next step.

And it was here the real discoveries could be made. Furious trapdoor spiders that would chase when annoyed with a twig, tiny, delicate orchids and smelly flytraps, neon green aphids, meat ants battling locusts, ponderous stag beetles, tracks of dugites, racehorse goannas, brushtails and emus, fox scats; emerald and turquoise with the shells of nameless bugs, caravans of spiny caterpillars and anxious quail which jinkered hurriedly through the stubble before bursting into flight. My best find was a spider, which disguised itself as an ant. Walking on its three rearward pairs of legs, the front two were red and half moon shaped. The spider tightly held these together in front to create the ant's head. I spent hours spell bound by this tiny charlatan as it moved about, almost indistinguishable amongst its prey. 

My preference for working barefoot on deck was re enforced early on in my fishing career. The skipper had dropped the pick just off the Windy Harbour cliffs in a light South Easter. Tucked out of the relentless wind for the first time in days, we ate a relaxed meal, shared a joint and I slept soundly, free from the nagging fear that a wheat ship would run us down in the night. Unable to hold onto his crew, our downbeat skipper often dropped anchor in the shipping lane with no one on watch. My tiny bunk was barely long and wide enough for my frame and its similarity to a coffin was enhanced by the bunk above being so close my shoulders wedged if I turned in my sleep. I became obsessed by the radar, getting up to check it whenever claustrophobia got the better of me and I rarely slept for more than an hour at a time. 

I woke sometime around 3 am with the boat rocking wildly from side to side; to the sickening realisation we were dragging the pick back towards the surf at the base of the cliffs. At some stage in the night a deep low had swept up out of the Antarctic and on the passage of the front the wind had swung back around the compass to the SW and the building swell had wrenched the anchor free. Now just off the back of the breakers, the skipper had fired the boat into life, we cut the pick and roared out to sea, thudding into the darkness off the back of ugly swells, crew madly securing the deck while the skipper fired abuse over the radio at the BOM for fucking up the forecast. As we bottomed out in a valley, the pot tipper catch released and started banging against the hull. The new bloke on board, half asleep and quietly cursing ever going to sea, made a dash to lock it back in place and slipped as one of his thong straps gave way. He flipped, silently, backwards over the rail into the darkness. I thought he was gone until I realised seconds later that there was a pair of thonged feet grimly clamping the gunwale. When we hauled him upright he was deathly pale, owl eyed and speechless and remained that way until he told the skipper to "go fuck your cunt of a job" when we finally hit port. I followed him a few trips later.

After that I avoided foot wear of any type on deck, experience telling me that nothing could match the purchase and dexterity of bare feet or allow you to know instantly if the surface was slippery or not. 

So pulling on those Ronstans was a big deal. They turned out to be very good, my feet dried out and healed, they gripped pretty well and I only came unstuck in the boots once. Every now and again a pot would come up with a Wobbegong in it. These bottom dwelling sharks would somehow manage to curl themselves into the pot and eat the crays. The one that had come up on this day was big, 4 or 5 foot long and heavy. The best way to get rid of them was to open the pot door and drop them on deck before throwing them back overboard. Now Wobbies can bite their tails and therefore, it also follows, the hand of whoever has hold of it. The best technique involved grabbing the tail and quickly hammer throwing the shark up and over the rail while the gravitational force of the spin prevented the shark getting at your hand. With the big ones this often required a full rotation to clear the gunwales. This particular day I had grabbed hold of the shark with both hands and completed almost a full turn when my feet slid out from under me on some weed on the deck. The shark went straight up and I went down hard on the deck, winding myself in the process. The shark came down next to me and started wildly thrashing against the gunwale. The Skipper turned to ask what fuck I was up to, before dryly noting it was no time lie down on the job. 

I wore the boots for the best part of a month before they got wet inside one day and by the time they dried out again I was happily barefoot once more. I can remember the last day I wore them pretty well. The crays had just disappeared, entire lines of pots had been coming up empty for days and the skipper was getting despondent. Prone to bouts of self-pity, he hated days like this and would blow off the gear in long lines, over weedy bottom. We would steam at 8 or 9 knots and drop a pot every 50m or so. This kept me moving from pot to pot pretty quickly. The sequence would involve standing with the pot on the rail with the short leader rope in one hand. On the skippers call, I would throw the pot and leader, scoop the 20-fathom coil off the deck, throw that, before finally collecting the floats and throwing them over last of all. Halfway down the second line of the day it all went pear shaped. I threw the pot and the coil but the floats had fallen down into the neck of another pot on the stack. I reached in to free the floats, as I had done hundreds of times before, but this time as I did, the pressure came on the rope as we started dragging the pot I had just thrown. My gloved hand was jammed hard up into the neck and as the weight really started to come on I thought, oh fuck there go my fingers. I shouted wildly at the skipper, "OHY OHY OHY" which usually signalled a serious problem but the boat just kept steaming. I was leaning over the pot trying to take some of the pressure off my trapped hand, pulling frantically on the rope with my other arm, when finally the motor cut and at that instant we took up the full weight of the pot. Suddenly I was airborne, 8 foot up and heading straight over the bait box at the back of the boat. The pot on deck catapulting me overboard as the floats, thankfully, were ripped free from the neck. Had I remained tangled in the neck, the pot and I would have been heading for the bottom, every deckies worst nightmare. There I was floundering in the foaming wake, fully dressed in apron, overalls and those boots.  I floated on my back for a bit and took in the clouds and blueness of the sky while waiting for the boat to turn and come back alongside and tried to recall if I had seen any of the big bronze whalers, who always shadowed the boats, today. 

We gave it away after that, the rest of that day and the next. We went to the pub and the boots went in the shed to dry out, never to return. 

Stranded

Another pod stranded on the mulloway beach east of the river mouth in 88, when I was in my last year of school. 84 whales this time round, many had already died before they were discovered. 

I was in an early ute load of volunteers. They were visible from a long way down the beach, as if somehow columns of Black Point basalt had been strewn there by a disgruntled Brobdingnagian child. As we slowly lurched and drifted closer the scene turned surreal. These creatures, so full of grace in the open sea, were hopelessly doomed in the shallows.  Those first stranded were now completely exposed and baking on their sides, sandpapered by the wind, hide cracking, weeping oily tears congealed with sand; which also slowly filled their blowholes when they sighed a breath. Those in the shallows still struggled, but the prolonged pounding of the shore break and the increased weight of their own bodies was slowly crushing the life out of them.  

A small bearded man moved rapidly between the living animals examining each one before instructing each distressed carer how to make it as comfortable as possible. I later discovered he was Dr Nick Gales, now head of the Australian Antarctic Division's whale research program. The 86 rescue had resulted in a rapid response plan being drawn up to cope with the eventuality of a future mass stranding and he was quietly implementing this, inspiring and guiding the ragtag bunch of mainly novice whale paramedics through the triage care needed. I carried buckets of water, helped right those animals on their side, four or five of us to a whale, heaving in unison until each one was upright. I dug holes for pectoral fins in the same wet sand  I had once squirmed my feet in for cockles, while dad lent on a big fibreglass rod under a gas light. 

At some point in the day a Japanese news crew arrived by helicopter . The female reporter did a 30 second piece to camera next to the largest dead bull, tottered back to the chopper, shook the sand out of her heels, daintily climbed back onboard and thundered off into the ether again. They left completely unaware that had they stayed a minute longer, they might as well have been in an R.S.L on Anzac Day, such was the animosity which built with their arrival.

I rode back and forth along the beach all day on the back of  the 4wd C.A.L.M truck which had come in round the back of Scott river, wetting the hessian sacks covering the whales  till daylight ran out and only the dead were left.  Once at the river mouth the whales were slung alongside the local doctor's game boat and I came back across the channel with the last whale. 

The whales were loaded back onto a truck and taken to Flinder's Bay.  I had never seen so many people there, tourists, news crews, punters, gawkers and a few locals bemused they had road blocked the settlement. Old Athol had driven straight through it, bluntly telling the SES on guard not to be "so fucking stupid" when he was told he would be unable to return home . He sat on his veranda with his binoculars sulking , screened behind the peppermints, while the belittled SES reported him to the police. I am not sure if his later clandestine removal of several neat square blocks of blubber off two whales awaiting burial in the dunes was simply his blunt pragmatism or him making a point. The blubber was boiled down to pungent oil in the copper out the back, his secret weapon for when the herring were fussy. 

They backed the truck down the boat ramp and eased the last whale into the now waist deep swimming hole where I had learnt to swim. I don't really know how many volunteers were there by now, I guess there was a couple of hundred in the water at any one point. 3 shifts rotated through the night, after a last minute attempt to herd them out to sea failed. People continued to arrive late into the evening after it was reported widely on the Perth radio and TV stations. 

It drew out just about everyone, the hippies who had disappeared into communes and bush blocks in the 60's and 70's appeared en-mass. I recognised ropey men, who I had only ever seen sitting way, way out the back at Marg's on big days, picking off the biggest wave in each set, blasting past all beard and Mark Richards style, while we shat ourselves and paddled for the horizon. The hard, stoner barmaids from the Settlers stood chest deep alongside women from Claremont and Dalkeith, who later during the Tampa debacle, got tagged disparagingly as "doctors wife's" by the far-right . It turned into a party between shifts. Fires were lit, food was delivered, harmonicas and guitars appeared and we sat with the earthy Witchcliffe crew who shared our $5 flagon port and handed their strong bush weed joint round the circle, which I toked on when it passed my way with as much nonchalance as a 17 year old can muster. A deferential meeting of eyes across the fire with the joint's owner, an balding warlock with a huge beard, established that I knew his gear was good and was grateful. Imperceptible to the casual observer, his acknowledging nod told me I was doing all right.  

3am, the tide was in and I was up to my neck, floating a calf in the ink black sea, high on the seething mass of life surrounding me. Warm from port, wet suit piss and the heat which sporadically erupted from the calf's blowhole in a miasma of phlegm, water and the fishiest of breath. The wind dropped out and the calf and I fell into an easy company, lulled by the squeaks and lullabies, snorts and songs, sighs and quiet entreaties that rippled across the water. I staggered back to the shack at around 4 to shower and snatch an hour or two before dawn  when they planned to herd them out to sea. 

I watched them go at sunrise, standing away from the crowd, next to the burnt stumps on the little point. These stumps and their carpet of black volcanic ballast, prescribe the direction the deep water jetty once ran before it burnt to the waterline. I turned that ballast every other low tide as a child, hunting out crabs, starfish and fat periwinkles which I dropped onto waving red anemones and launched at brazen pacific gulls. It was some years before I connected the ballast and stumps with the bleached rib bones and vertebrae displayed amongst the geraniums and roses of the settlement shacks. 

This small pod of 34 survivors milled uncertainly in the boat channel, before turning for the open sea to the relieved roar of the exhausted crowd. As they slowly heading out towards the island, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps things had almost come full circle. 

A few years later a pod of perhaps 200 false killers appeared in the wake of the miserable crab boat I had gone to sea in and cheerily accompanied us for hours as we pounded back to Flinder's in a festering storm, green swells crashing over the bridge and 50 knots howling through the rigging. I was scared that day more than most.  

I like to think they were guiding me home safely.