Swimming to the Moon Read online

  So we have the port of Dampier (abutting the Intercourse Islands – Intercourse Island itself, East Intercourse and West Intercourse – familiar to iron-ore miners today but remembered by generations of sniggering Perth geography students), Dampier Peninsula, Hill, Terrace, Land, Creek, Archipelago, Monument, Road, Downs and Hotel; Roebuck Bay, Deep, Town, Plains and Hotel; Cygnet Bay and Hill; and Buccaneer Archipelago and Rock.

  All this acknowledgement is ironic considering what he thought of the place. Political correctness did not exist and he was less than enthusiastic. He was scathing about the inhabitants (‘the miserablest people in the world’); the landscape (‘dry, sandy, destitute of water’); vegetation (‘no trees bore fruit or berries’); and food (‘neither herb, root, pulse, nor any sort of grain’).

  Unlike his twenty-first century counterparts, he was unaware that beneath this bare red earth and coastal seabed lay treasure beyond the imagination of the shrewdest seventeenth century pirate. In a long and chaotic career, he managed more by accident than design to sail around the world three times and participate in mostly unsuccessful piratical and semi-piratical adventures. Then, at a low point, broke and back in London, he sat down and wrote A New Voyage Round the World, the first great travel book in English.

  The book had a huge impact on a generation of writers, influencing Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and remains a sharp picture of people, places, animals and plants – as well as being a vibrant account of the life of a second-rate pirate and a first-rate writer. For that ability alone, I guess I feel slightly better about having my knuckles whacked by Miss Langridge’s legendary ruler.

  THE DOUGHNUTS OF ROTTNEST

  One summer morning when I was fifteen and holidaying on Rottnest, I walked down to the bakery at 6.00 a.m. to buy fresh bread and some of the bakery’s famous jam doughnuts.

  In our bungalow the bakery run was my job. Adults on holidays liked to sleep late. You had to get to the bakery before the rush, but it wasn’t the fresh loaves that quickly sold out; it was the doughnuts.

  They weren’t American-style doughnuts, and nothing like today’s kilojoule-laden Krispy Kremes either. I’m not suggesting the Rottnest bakery doughnuts were a health food exactly but they didn’t seem bad for you. They weren’t flattened spheres of deep-fried batter, or like those fluorescent glazed wheels of flyblown fat you see raking up the mileage in fast-food shop displays.

  Rottnest doughnuts were less dense and doughy. They were bigger, higher and puffier. What they had instead of a central hole or hollow was a deep indentation filled with a sweet scarlet jam from some mysterious fruit – perhaps even natural – that tasted somewhere between strawberry and raspberry.

  To eat an island jam doughnut while it was still hot from the oven was a unique sensual experience, one unknown on the 1960s mainland of old-school baked goods and attitudes. You were impelled to devour one immediately on leaving the shop, while walking back to the bungalow under the Moreton Bay fig trees lining Thomson Bay.

  The yeasty smell of the figs, the salty air of the morning, the rising warmth of the sun, the powdered sugar on your lips and fingers: all these sensations combined to charge the day with optimism. Ever after, I associated the morning bakery run with sex. Come to think of it, in those days everything to do with Rottnest, any passing mention of it, made me think of sex.

  This wasn’t just my reaction. Everyone I knew back in those straitlaced days associated Rottnest with sex. Legend said it was where West Australians lost their virginity. It had a voluptuous vibe, this small limestoneand-coral outcrop on the horizon off Fremantle. When you mentioned Rottnest, people either winked or looked nostalgic.

  Arriving on the island, boys and girls stepped self-consciously off the ferry (under the curious eyes of earlier, already tanned teenagers who were present at the jetty to check out the new arrivals), found their lodgings or camping ground, dropped off their backpacks and camping gear, promenaded in groups, shrugged off their newness, mingled, joked, and gradually, hopefully, paired off.

  Around every headland lay limpid and deserted lagoons. There was a moon over Rottnest that I’d never noticed before, and glistening stars, too, obviously of recent origin. Crushed by our bare feet, the fallen Moreton Bay figs released an even headier seminal aroma over the settlement after sunset. By night, the day’s salt washed from their hair, all the strolling girls smelled of Sunsilk shampoo.

  To us young islomaniacs (islomania being a fascination with islands) nothing on the island ever registered as discomfort or aggravation. Certainly not the dusty camping ground, the ubiquitous bush flies or the crows waking you at dawn. The white beaches and turquoise bays, egalitarian attitudes and brown-limbed girls suffused the island with a golden summery glow of promise.

  Although first sensual experiences on Rottnest tended to occur al fresco or on a rickety camp stretcher, such was the island’s allure that recalling those youthful island holidays brings to mind the words of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: ‘I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over?’

  So enchanting was Rottnest’s attraction, so powerful its sense of distance from the Australian landmass and suburbia’s strict moral inhibitions, that any boy and girl finding themselves swimming at a deserted Little Parakeet Bay, say, were bound to try and mimic sea otters.

  I realise today that most of Rottnest’s magic lies in nostalgia for youth. Much of its charm is illusory, like the way the island, viewed from the mainland, often appears as a mirage. In certain weather conditions the island can spend days as an optical illusion, breaking and blurring into separate smaller islands that drift with one’s memories into the wider ocean.

  There was also a specific reason why the island’s bakery aroused bewildering and intense feelings in me that particular summer morning when I was a naive, girlfriend-less fifteen, sensations that I recollected many years later in my memoir The Shark Net.

  When I arrived at the bakery, the door was open but the bread-shop section in the front was empty. I could smell the freshly baked bread and the jam doughnuts and I could hear people moving and bumping about near the ovens in the back.

  I called out, ‘Hello there!’ but no one answered. A puff of warm floury air drifted out of the bakery into the shop.

  I walked behind the counter and peered into the bakery. There was a noisy disturbance in there, in the hot sweet air. Utensils were clattering and clouds of flour were billowing about. Something metallic fell and clanged on the floor. At first I thought it was a fight. A ghostly white figure was straddling another ghostly white figure.

  The one-armed girl who served in the bakery shop was lying on a table covered in flour. Her white legs were up in the air and the baker was riding her. Or was she riding him? Anyway, they looked uncomfortable and strangely menacing as they rattled and clanged.

  They still wore their bakers’ hats – not chef-type high hats, more like shower caps – and puffs of flour rose as they rode and rocked. Although they were caked white, occasional patches of pink skin screamed out. Against their floury faces their teeth were yellow grimaces. The flour was making their breath wheeze and rasp asthmatically, but not enough to make them stop what they were doing.

  The baker’s back was turned but the girl saw me. She didn’t stop when our eyes met, however, or indicate to the baker that someone was there. She closed her eyes and shut me out and hugged him tighter to her with her good arm and her stump.

  I left the bakery then and went and sat on the sea-wall nearby and stared out at Thomson Bay. I had a lot to think about. As I sat there I watched a man purposefully rowing a dinghy out to a moored yacht. Strangely, he seemed to be rowing to the same rhythm as the bakery ghosts. For some reason I felt very young and green, younger than my age, even younger than I’d felt only half an hour before. I felt as alone as a shipwrecked sailor in a
desert island cartoon.

  After a while, when I thought things in the bakery might be back to normal, I returned and bought my bread and half a dozen doughnuts. The door between the front shop and the bakery was closed and I was served by an older woman with two arms. Our transaction was the same as every morning. I searched her face for some hint of the floury goings-on in the bakery but it was as expressionless as a cottage loaf.

  I walked back to our bungalow, gnawing a doughnut and wondering if I’d dreamed everything. I didn’t mention the bakery scene to the adults. I didn’t know any suitable euphemisms and I suspected their shocked disapproval would somehow rebound back on me. I’d never seen the sex act before. It was even more dramatic than I’d expected.

  The jam doughnuts were the only acceptable food on sale at Rottnest back then. The random ‘meals’ offered to the public in the 1960s were just the hamburgers, sandwiches, tea and instant coffee provided when the whim to do so struck the proprietors of the dilapidated tearooms. Only daytrippers might partake of these offerings; old island hands knew better.

  Guests of the old Rottnest Hostel and the weatherbeaten Hotel Rottnest (the Quokka Arms) were fed, of course, in a manner of speaking. They could chance their hosts’ canned tomato soup, extensively cooked roasts, and the grey cold collations that followed the next day.

  But was anyone critical of this extraordinary lack of proper sustenance? Not if you were a loyal West Australian. We adored the place. Historically, the island had never been noted for the quality of the food it provided its guests, not when quokkas and kelp were on the menu when it was a dismal Aboriginal prison, from 1838 to 1903, nor when it housed European internees during two World Wars. Not even when the tourist brochures in the 1950s turned it into ‘The Isle of Girls’.

  The whole point of a Rottnest holiday was that you either brought your food with you on the ferry, or you took it from the ocean.

  Fish were plentiful. So were abalone. Back when western rock lobsters were called crayfish, you didn’t even need to set craypots; you could pluck them from most reefs with your bare hands. Even craypot thieves had a certain panache, leaving behind bottles of beer in place of the crays they pilfered. After a few days holiday, as the freshly grilled delicacies segued into crayfish mornay, families grizzled at mealtimes, ‘Not crayfish again.’

  And nowadays: although the bakery of my adolescence has morphed into a shiny, stainless-steel bakery-cafeteria where you queue for service – and the baker and his one-armed lover have long since disappeared into the floury mists of time – there are still jam doughnuts. Some things don’t change. Though get them while they’re hot.

  FRIDAY BORONIA

  I used to take out a pretty girl who always smelled of boronia. At first I thought its perfume was her personal female fragrance, but it turned out she bought a bunch of brown boronia in Hay Street at the end of the working week, clutched it to her chest all the way home on the crowded bus, and its scent lingered on her.

  She bought it from the old codgers who called out ‘Sweet-smelling boronia!’ on the city corners on Friday afternoons in early spring. I only saw her on Fridays, so I’m guessing she didn’t smell of boronia on the other days of the week. Anyway, by the end of the program at the Lakeway drive-in, squashed up together in my ancient Ford Prefect, I smelled of boronia too.

  Unfortunately, I only smelled of boronia for three consecutive Fridays, and then an up-and-coming league footballer with a better car began smelling of boronia instead.

  Although I then disagreeably associated boronia’s heady scent with the Claremont Football Club, I drew solace from the fact that the footballer’s Friday-night boronia episodes soon played havoc with his Saturday games, he was dropped, and my favourite team, East Fremantle, coincidentally prevailed. Boronia recovered its nostalgic corner of my mind as synonymous with Western Australia.

  I have a special place in my heart for distinctive West Australian flora: boronia, kangaroo paw, Geraldton wax, grass trees (then insensitively called ‘blackboys’), flowering banksias and red flowering gums. And ones with funny names, like cockie’s tongue, cow kicks and bacon-and-eggs.

  At primary school we were grimly warned that picking the rare black kangaroo paw and blue leschenaultia was a heinous crime, akin to firing your ging at a twenty-eight parrot. We were told there were wildflower detectives roaming the bush, on the alert for offenders. Heaven forbid that our native plants should fall into Eastern Staters’ devious hands.

  Even picking ordinary red and green kangaroo paws was a misdemeanour along the lines of disorderly conduct. Although picking wildflowers of any description had never even vaguely occurred to us eight-year-old boys, the fact that prison presumably awaited those who did so, gave these flowers a mysterious celebrity and value. I imagined gangs of elderly blue-rinsed Melbourne tourists, their secateurs seized, being rounded up in police wagons.

  So imagine my amazement years later to notice many varieties of rare West Australian plants growing in profusion in Victoria and NSW. What had happened to the state’s strict flora embargo? Had the wildflower disciplinarians given up? Perhaps their investigative resources had been diverted to the elite Sparrow Squad?

  Anyway, how dare slick Sydneysiders and pompous Victorians freely gaze upon our unique and wondrous blooms that were growing, even thriving, in their suburban gardens! Black kangaroo paws began appearing in South Yarra florists’ windows, and no North Sydney insurance company or Woollahra architect’s office was complete without several transplanted, fully grown grass trees looming sombrely over their entrances.

  My last two residences in NSW had firmly established garden beds of kangaroo paws when I moved in. I was pleased, but also rather disturbed to see them doing well. So be it, I thought, finally. I decided to enlarge my own domestic patch of WA flora by planting my favourite tree, the red flowering gum, Corymbia ficifolia. I knew they grew to about ten metres high and five metres wide, but I had plenty of space.

  All West Australians are familiar with the red flowering gum. It’s a spectacular eucalypt, widely used as a suburban street tree. It produces a profusion of flowers in January that range from crimson to orange, pink and white, but looks best in its luscious deep-red version. Its masses of bright flowers are highly attractive to honeyeaters and other birds.

  It’s mildly frost-sensitive, but there are no frosts here on the NSW north coast. It tolerates a sandy coastal position, too, another bonus. It likes well-drained soil and full sun, is low maintenance and gets by with little water. I envisaged a colourful avenue of red flowering gums. I sent away, and bought and planted six of them. I made sure there were no other eucalypt varieties around them to deter their survival. There should be no problems anywhere.

  Except that they didn’t grow, much less blossom. They wavered, weakened, then died. I guess they just didn’t like it in the Eastern States.

  A NIGHT AT THE SEACREST

  Scene: The Seacrest Restaurant, Cottesloe Beach, early evening, summer, 1960s. A young couple arrive for dinner, atremble with the excitement of sophisticated restaurant dining.

  He wears a chocolate-coloured sports jacket and a tie; she has a new aqua-coloured dress and matching stole. Her blonde hair has been sculpted by Mr Hans of Vienna into a pearl-coloured helmet. It’s their first date.

  It’s still broad daylight. The restaurant is hot but the boy keeps his jacket on. Giggling nervously, the girl shrugs off her stole, which slides onto the floor. Gallantly, the boy reaches for it. So does she. Their heads collide.

  With arched eyebrow, a languid waiter arrives on the scene, snatches the stole from their hands and, with a flourish, spreads it over the back of her chair. What would Sir and Madam like to drink, he wonders. The words ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ are delivered with heavy irony.

  Sir orders a Pimm’s No. 1 Cup for Madam and a beer for himself. They arrive with a flourish. Eventually Madam finds space on the rim of her glass that isn’t booby-trapped with toothpicks, fruit rinds and celery sticks, and th
ey sip their drinks.

  Sir is boiling hot. Sweat runs in rivulets down his chest and back. But if he removes his jacket, his drenched shirt will be visible to her. Wishing to remain suave, he keeps it on and swigs his beer. Sir is not an accustomed drinker; the legal drinking age is twenty-one and he is nineteen. But he’s very thirsty and the beer is cold.

  They know it’s compulsory in restaurants to order several courses. The entrees on offer are prawn cocktails, Angels on Horseback or Oysters Kilpatrick. Although in gourmet mood, they find the idea of oysters repugnant and, anyway, he says sagely, he has heard oysters have to come all the way from the Eastern States and will be pretty old and well travelled by now.

  Pink prawn puddings arrive in stemmed glasses. It turns out she doesn’t like prawns as much as she’d thought. However, he gulps all his cocktail and washes it down with beer.

  Their main courses come surprisingly quickly: Chicken Maryland for her and Steak Diane for him. To accompany the meals, the drinks menu lists Swan Lager, Emu Bitter, Barossa Pearl, Ben Ean moselle, McWilliam’s dry sherry, Orlando port, crème de menthe and Tia Maria. Barossa Pearl rings a bell. ‘Good choice,’ says the waiter. The date is going really well.

  Though well done like Sir prefers – especially after the waiter sets it on fire – the steak is too elaborate and creamy for his taste. He scoffs it anyway, between alternate swigs of beer and Barossa Pearl. The Chicken Maryland is a triumph, especially the pineapple and banana layers.

  Primed by the Barossa Pearl, Madam can’t stop giggling. Her stole keeps slipping to the floor, and the waiter, sighing dramatically, picks it up. ‘Can’t you keep your clothes on, Madam?’ he huffs.

  Sir dearly wishes he could take clothes off. He’s so awash in sweat that he needs to visit the gents to cool off. Once inside, he removes his jacket and shirt and splashes himself vigorously. Accidentally, his trousers are immediately soaked. He hangs the clothes over a cubicle door, and sits in the cubicle in his underpants while he dries off. Suddenly his head spins and he vomits. It’s much cooler now.