Montebello, p.6
Montebello, page 6
I didn’t blame them but I was unable to make moving-in plans. I was only capable of a browsing, skimming fondness. One woman had said abruptly and accusingly, ‘You’re not enchanted with me.’ She was attractive and intelligent and her remark took me aback. At the time I thought we were ‘seeing’ each other, and enjoying each other’s company. We were eating calamari and flathead at a beach café. I was watching snappy waves breaking on the sand and imaginative cloud formations over the Nightcap Range and I wasn’t prepared.
I laughed in nervous surprise. Enchanted?
‘Yes, I am,’ I said. It was too late.
I was turning such thoughts over in my mind as dawn broke over the ocean and a humpback breached in the low swell. Where the whale submerged again, the sea arched and rolled in on itself, slippery as mercury. Then the surface flattened into the quivery sheen of gin, and I wished my long-time friend and new hoped-for lover was sharing the experience.
Perhaps that was a test of enchantment: the wish to share experiences with a specific woman and by doing so turn them into adventures. The desire to share a whale sighting at sea, a moon-bright deck, a night on the ocean, far from land.
Up on the bridge, Grommet, the only other person awake, had spotted the whale from a distance. As it crossed our bows we smiled and mutually adored nature and simultaneously gave each other the thumbs up.
As I made this aren’t-we-blessed-to-see-a-whale gesture, I was struck by how dramatically things had changed in a single generation. Whales first entered my consciousness as cat’s meat.
It’s a sacrilegious admission now, but in my Perth childhood my nightly chore was to cut up a slab of whale for Jimpy, our ginger half-Persian. The whale meat was firm, dark and fibrous, and oily and strong-smelling as well. It took a lot of pressure for a ten-year-old to cut it into cat-bite-size cubes. I’m not sure why my mother bought whale meat. I suppose it was cheap. Maybe she was loyally supporting the main industry of Albany, where we sometimes spent summer holidays at Middleton Beach. Whale-consciousness certainly didn’t exist.
I doubt she thought of Moby-Dick. With literary whales, you think first of Herman Melville, and maybe outdoorsy writers like Jack London and Walt Whitman. But everyone from Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Proust, Garcia Marquez, Orwell and Kipling to Bob Dylan and Tim Winton has heeded the whale’s siren call.
My school English lessons ignored the literary whale in favour of Hamlet, As You Like It, Byron, Wordsworth and Conrad, but in geography class whaling matched such vital West Australian industries as pearling, timber and asbestos. Whaling was presented more dramatically than Collie coal or Donnybrook apples. In our Commonwealth Bank project books we glued photographs of men in woollen beanies aiming harpoon guns and brandishing flensing knives. The classic workers’ pose was to stand, gumbooted, inside a dead whale. I remember Jimpy preferred sheep’s liver.
The cat’s-meat recollection struck me recently as I watched the dreamy-eyed folks thronging the headlands and gazing wistfully out to sea at Byron Bay, near my home. The whales, mostly mothers and calves, were returning south for the summer. As whale-watchers rushed from their cars with their binoculars, something happened to their faces. They softened. They smiled. They looked mesmerised. Grandparents and children held hands and shared a sentimental moment.
Not so long ago, from 1954 to 1962, whale-watchers were those who came to see humpback whales being winched ashore and sliced up. Whaling was Byron Bay’s first tourism experience. Motorists diverted off the main highway to take in the spectacle, and excited children from Lismore and Casino were bussed into town on school excursions with the expectation of educational mayhem.
Byron Bay was far from a fashionable holiday town back then. A miasma of surf ’n’ turf slaughter hung over the beach. A cattle abattoir was the other major industry and as the school buses came down the hill into town all the children would gag and cough theatrically and hold their noses. Then they crowded the jetty – later destroyed by a cyclone – to watch whales being despatched.
This educational excursion was guaranteed to hold the students’ attention. The whaling station and abattoir pumped the whale and cattle offal and blood through a pipe on the jetty directly into the Pacific Ocean. This attracted schools of sharks.
The period of the Byron Bay Whaling Company’s existence coincided with the beginning of surfboard riding in Australia and the town’s teenage boys perfected a particular surfing routine. They would lie sunbaking on the whaling jetty, waiting for an ideal set of waves. As the sets began to roll in, they threw sheets of newspaper into the sea. This was the dramatic test. If sharks were about, the newspaper would disappear in a frenzy of foam. If the newspaper gently floated and sank untouched, the boys would throw their Malibus off the jetty and jump the four metres down into the ocean, retrieve the boards, paddle into the take-off zone and catch a wave into shore.
For onlookers there was an entertainment bonus if tiger and whaler sharks were clinging like leeches to a dead whale when it was winched ashore. To the delighted squeals of the audience, maddened sharks leapt and writhed on the jetty, snapping and tearing chunks out of the carcass. Adding to the pandemonium, boys with .303 rifles were employed to protect the catch. Amid the chaos of shark-shooting and shouting, further down the beach other teenagers would be stolidly swimming out to sea and around the ocean buoys, practising lifesaving drills for their bronze lifesaving medallions.
The town’s former Whaling Inspector, Stan Nolan, paints an affecting picture of those gruesome days. The whales’ survival impulses were either protective or realistic, he says, depending on their gender. ‘The whales travelling north in pairs, male and female, were vulnerable for a double capture if the female was shot first.’ The worried male would remain in the area and become an easy second kill. ‘If the male was shot first, the female kept going because she was heading north to give birth.’
Nowadays whales trouble people’s tender emotions. Not long ago a female pygmy sperm whale washed up on Broken Head, my nearest beach. The Whales Alive people and the Marine Mammals Rescue Team from the National Parks and Wildlife Service were quickly on the scene, but the whale died. An autopsy showed an abnormal growth in its uterus, and it was riddled with parasites.
Beached whales have autopsies these days and the death was described in the local Press as ‘a tragedy’. The whale was buried ceremonially in the Arakwal National Park. Around the graveside people held hands and sobbed.
During the morning, trolling a heavy line in the barge’s wake, Glenn caught a barracuda, two big Spanish mackerel and a pink coral trout. He cut the troublesome and toothy barracuda loose but put the other fish in the deck-wash to stay fresh until they could be cleaned and filleted. They lay flapping and bleeding on the deck, tossed back and forth in the deck-tide, their gill workings exposed and vibrating like red anemones. It became unbearable to watch them. The gasping mackerel took the longest to die.
It reminded me why I gave up fishing. I spent my childhood and early adolescence keenly fishing the Swan River and ocean coast around Perth. One day my hook caught in a tailor’s eye, not for the first time. I was acutely aware of the time it took to remove the hook – and the eye came too. For once I felt sorry for the fish, and I hardly fished again. With customary double standards, however, I still ate them.
Around the barge, three more humpbacks breached in mid-morning, and dolphins surfaced, too. Several mating sea-snakes, some striped, some golden, floated past. Transported by their sexual activity, oblivious to the barge and its churning wake, they slowly writhed together on the surface like strands of the Gorgon’s hair.
Then in mid-afternoon, as the heat cooked the steel deck and the sky above the horizon faded in the ocean haze from sharpest azure to slate, and we’d been at sea for thirteen hours and travelled a hundred and twenty kilometres, a line of stark, flat islands suddenly appeared in the distance.
9
The Mayfair and the Bomb
I’m nine years old. It’s an afternoon in early October when I call my mother after school from a public phone box in West Perth to make a plea. My friends are going to the Mayfair. Instead of immediately catching the 3.40 p.m. bus home as usual, can I go too?
The Mayfair Theatrette in downtown Hay Street runs a sixty-minute looped program of Movietone news, MGM cartoons, James A. Fitzpatrick Traveltalks, Pete Smith comedy shorts and dramatised documentaries. Despite the Crime Does Not Pay and Pathe Pictorial episodes being more than twenty years old (their characters sport unfamiliar hats, loud wide ties and double-breasted suits), they’re entertaining in a sharply monochrome, American cops-and-robbers way that I enjoy.
The Mayfair is a popular spot. Adults and children with time to kill drop in for an hour’s cheap, varied – although often dated – entertainment. The theatrette is usually well attended. It doesn’t matter when you come into the Mayfair. The program has no beginning or end. Because you enter in the dark, sit there until something you recognise comes around again, and leave in the dark, there are always audience members coming and going.
One thing I like to do is buy a ham and salad horseshoe roll at the deli next door and eat it during the show. If people are constantly squeezing past you to their seats or to the exit, this can be a messy performance involving poppy-seeds, crumbs, shredded lettuce and especially beetroot.
But my visits to the pictures – and Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy and Phantom comics, and Choo-Choo and OK and White Knight bars, for that matter – are strictly rationed. I’m allowed to visit the Mayfair and the local Saturday afternoon matinees only after a suitably self-denying interval of at least two weeks between sessions.
I can’t understand why my pleasures have to be staggered. My parents are fearful that if I’m indulged by two consecutive Saturdays of Tarzan, or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or Choo-Choo bars, I’ll become ‘spoilt’. Spoilt children (generally ‘only’ children) are anathema to them, and it’s their primary role as parents to prevent this happening. So if I spend all my pocket money at once on four comics, they’re confiscated and doled out to me at the rate of one a week. Better that I play outside in the baking sun as usual.
However, as gratification has been successfully delayed of late, and I haven’t been to the Mayfair for ages – and I’ve picked up a few helpful dish-washing and garden-weeding credits – I don’t think I need to plead this afternoon. But my mother’s voice sounds unusually panicky. ‘No. I want you to come straight home. Hurry up or you’ll miss your bus.’
Further begging is useless. ‘Listen to me,’ she says. Her voice becomes firm and serious. ‘They’ve let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A.’ I can visualise her anxiously blowing cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth so it doesn’t pollute the telephone mouthpiece. ‘Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.’
This first Montebello bomb was code-named Operation Hurricane. Within one minute the local sands were activated by neutrons, and a fall-out plume of contaminated rain and mud, activated particles and a liquefied navy frigate fell directly downwind of Ground Zero on to all the other Montebello islands except Hermite Island.
My mother needn’t have worried though about fall-out striking the Mayfair Theatrette, 1500 kilometres south. Instead it was blown due east by the notoriously strong westerlies, and its radioactive particles spread across Australia.
A fortnight later, no complaints of nuclear nuisance having issued from the Perth suburbs, and mollified by Federal politicians’ soothings that the British nuclear test was ‘helpful’ for Australia’s international status, and State politicians’ provincial optimism that ‘this will put Western Australia on the map’, my mother relents and allows me to visit the Mayfair again.
On the Movietone news I see the nuclear cloud rising and unrolling dramatically from the Montebellos’ shores. The voiceover announcer, though Australian, is Britishly upbeat and plum-toned about the atomic event. Matching his optimism, the Operation Hurricane personnel, wearing shorts and sunglasses, stroll earnestly about with clipboards, appearing for all the world like entertainment officers on the Manoora.
10
A Friend to All Peoples
The Montebello archipelago appeared like a maze stuck in the middle of the ocean. The barge slowly threaded its way around flat islets of bare limestone edged with concave, sharp shorelines. These boat-repelling platforms encircled the central islands in a protective labyrinth, and on each islet platoons of cormorants stood drying their wings in the wind. On the sandy inner islands, silently watchful, scores of high pink termite mounds, shaped like wigwams and sentry boxes, stood guard.
The archipelago would have looked exactly like this to Nicolas Baudin in 1801, and named by him in honour of Marshal Jean Lannes, whom Napoleon had created the first Duke of Montebello for his bellicose endeavours against the English.
‘Beautiful mountain’ doesn’t even faintly describe these one hundred and eighty horizontal islands and islets of limestone and white sand plains. So liltingly does Montebello trip off the tongue, however, that it graces not only the original small medieval fortress village in Italy but a string of international locales and hotels, hilly and otherwise, from New York to Guadalupe.
It had looked decidedly bare and uninteresting to the morose William Dampier a century before. ‘The Part of it that we saw is all low, even Land with sandy Banks against the Sea. Only the Points are rocky, and so are some of the Islands in this Bay.’
The Montebellos have a six-metre tidal range. Lime-green shallows drop abruptly to indigo depths, then just as quickly merge into turquoise sand banks. When the tide rushes in, surging through narrow channels into the lagoons, so do the bait fish, impatient as rush-hour commuters, followed by bigger reef fish, stingrays, turtles and sharks.
Our arrival was timed for high tide so the Tom Welsby could lower its bow door directly onto the rock-ledge shore of the biggest island in the group. This was Hermite Island, one thousand hectares of rock, sand dunes, acacia and spinifex. Here the stores and equipment could be easily unloaded, and we stepped ashore.
So this was the place that had burst into my nine-year-old brain, and was still detonating when I turned thirteen, the year of the next Montebello atomic blast, Operation Mosaic. This particular bomb was the reason I’d joined the Eureka Youth League. As the League’s manifesto, boldly outlined in its magazine, Spotlight, pointed out, its immediate aim was to ban atom bomb tests in the Montebello Islands.
This accomplished, the League and I would strive to become friends to all peoples. Being ‘friends to all peoples’ was the League’s overarching aim. I saw us as a cooler, more dramatic and courageous version of boy scouts: Baden Powell crossed with Ned Kelly; with, in my case, a touch of Louis Armstrong.
At thirteen I was looking ahead. I couldn’t wait to be older and shaving and wooing long-legged girls with La Vie En Rose on the trumpet. Hearing Satchmo play that tune filled me with an exquisite longing and envy. I was labouring to learn the instrument from a musician with the perfect jazz name of Sammy Sharp, whose studio was just down the road from Eureka Youth League HQ, in a rundown part of Perth’s central business district.
Sammy had a distinguished musical past. He’d played the London Coliseum with Ted Heath’s Band and his trumpet had headed the brass section of two English orchestras. Back home, he’d led the band at the Embassy Ballroom while recording three weekly radio programs: Sunday Serenade, Sammy Sharp’s Rhythm Five and Thursday Night at Eight.
By the time I met him twenty-five years later, however, up two flights of stairs in a bare, dusty warehouse, Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel and Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock had long since arrived and swept Perth’s teenagers before them. Sammy, no longer young and dapper, was grumpily resigned to teaching the trumpet to those few remaining adolescent boys with jazz aspirations and copies of Downbeat in their pockets.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a dented cornet. ‘Blow it like you’re spitting a piece of tissue paper off your lips. Take this home and practise every day. Give the neighbours a thrill.’ The neighbours were not delighted. There were two protesting deputations to my parents and there was no doubt they represented a wider range of opinion.
Now that I live in the country, there’s a sound I often hear at night: the plaintive bellow of a cow after her just-weaned calf has been removed from her. It’s a sharp moan, a sudden sorrowful blast in the dark. That’s the closest sound to my trumpet playing. Apart from my ear-splitting and mournful bursts, the cornet mouthpiece painfully pressed my lip onto my irregular front teeth. The bloody spit dribbling out the bell-end during my attempt at Cry Me a River marred any cool jazz-lick effect.
I knew Satchmo carried a hanky for his trumpet dribble, but it somehow had a stylish effect which I couldn’t manage. After six weeks I wiped my chin and regretfully farewelled Sammy Sharp. I handed him the battered cornet. ‘It cuts my lip,’ I explained.
Sammy didn’t get up from his chair. ‘Rock ‘n’ roll, is it?’ he sighed.
I couldn’t say how much I’d always loved Heartbreak Hotel. And in my gut I knew the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan loomed ahead. ‘I really like Miles Davis,’ I said to him.
He frowned at the condescension. ‘Is that so? You better push off, son.’
If my triumphant trumpet solos couldn’t lead the Eureka Youth League parade, I could still march, shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellows, against the atom bomb. The League and I were for world disarmament, more swimming pools and recreation activities for young West Australians, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, equal pay for women, equal rights for Aborigines, an end to whipping and capital punishment (hanging was still popular in Western Australia) and – last but apparently not least – a People’s Government to Build Socialism in Australia.
Whatever that was. Being a friend to all peoples?
I was watching Gunsmoke when my father spotted a copy of Spotlight on the kitchen table, and his face, his eyes, his neck, his whole bald head – though not his attitudes – immediately turned red.
I laughed in nervous surprise. Enchanted?
‘Yes, I am,’ I said. It was too late.
I was turning such thoughts over in my mind as dawn broke over the ocean and a humpback breached in the low swell. Where the whale submerged again, the sea arched and rolled in on itself, slippery as mercury. Then the surface flattened into the quivery sheen of gin, and I wished my long-time friend and new hoped-for lover was sharing the experience.
Perhaps that was a test of enchantment: the wish to share experiences with a specific woman and by doing so turn them into adventures. The desire to share a whale sighting at sea, a moon-bright deck, a night on the ocean, far from land.
Up on the bridge, Grommet, the only other person awake, had spotted the whale from a distance. As it crossed our bows we smiled and mutually adored nature and simultaneously gave each other the thumbs up.
As I made this aren’t-we-blessed-to-see-a-whale gesture, I was struck by how dramatically things had changed in a single generation. Whales first entered my consciousness as cat’s meat.
It’s a sacrilegious admission now, but in my Perth childhood my nightly chore was to cut up a slab of whale for Jimpy, our ginger half-Persian. The whale meat was firm, dark and fibrous, and oily and strong-smelling as well. It took a lot of pressure for a ten-year-old to cut it into cat-bite-size cubes. I’m not sure why my mother bought whale meat. I suppose it was cheap. Maybe she was loyally supporting the main industry of Albany, where we sometimes spent summer holidays at Middleton Beach. Whale-consciousness certainly didn’t exist.
I doubt she thought of Moby-Dick. With literary whales, you think first of Herman Melville, and maybe outdoorsy writers like Jack London and Walt Whitman. But everyone from Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Proust, Garcia Marquez, Orwell and Kipling to Bob Dylan and Tim Winton has heeded the whale’s siren call.
My school English lessons ignored the literary whale in favour of Hamlet, As You Like It, Byron, Wordsworth and Conrad, but in geography class whaling matched such vital West Australian industries as pearling, timber and asbestos. Whaling was presented more dramatically than Collie coal or Donnybrook apples. In our Commonwealth Bank project books we glued photographs of men in woollen beanies aiming harpoon guns and brandishing flensing knives. The classic workers’ pose was to stand, gumbooted, inside a dead whale. I remember Jimpy preferred sheep’s liver.
The cat’s-meat recollection struck me recently as I watched the dreamy-eyed folks thronging the headlands and gazing wistfully out to sea at Byron Bay, near my home. The whales, mostly mothers and calves, were returning south for the summer. As whale-watchers rushed from their cars with their binoculars, something happened to their faces. They softened. They smiled. They looked mesmerised. Grandparents and children held hands and shared a sentimental moment.
Not so long ago, from 1954 to 1962, whale-watchers were those who came to see humpback whales being winched ashore and sliced up. Whaling was Byron Bay’s first tourism experience. Motorists diverted off the main highway to take in the spectacle, and excited children from Lismore and Casino were bussed into town on school excursions with the expectation of educational mayhem.
Byron Bay was far from a fashionable holiday town back then. A miasma of surf ’n’ turf slaughter hung over the beach. A cattle abattoir was the other major industry and as the school buses came down the hill into town all the children would gag and cough theatrically and hold their noses. Then they crowded the jetty – later destroyed by a cyclone – to watch whales being despatched.
This educational excursion was guaranteed to hold the students’ attention. The whaling station and abattoir pumped the whale and cattle offal and blood through a pipe on the jetty directly into the Pacific Ocean. This attracted schools of sharks.
The period of the Byron Bay Whaling Company’s existence coincided with the beginning of surfboard riding in Australia and the town’s teenage boys perfected a particular surfing routine. They would lie sunbaking on the whaling jetty, waiting for an ideal set of waves. As the sets began to roll in, they threw sheets of newspaper into the sea. This was the dramatic test. If sharks were about, the newspaper would disappear in a frenzy of foam. If the newspaper gently floated and sank untouched, the boys would throw their Malibus off the jetty and jump the four metres down into the ocean, retrieve the boards, paddle into the take-off zone and catch a wave into shore.
For onlookers there was an entertainment bonus if tiger and whaler sharks were clinging like leeches to a dead whale when it was winched ashore. To the delighted squeals of the audience, maddened sharks leapt and writhed on the jetty, snapping and tearing chunks out of the carcass. Adding to the pandemonium, boys with .303 rifles were employed to protect the catch. Amid the chaos of shark-shooting and shouting, further down the beach other teenagers would be stolidly swimming out to sea and around the ocean buoys, practising lifesaving drills for their bronze lifesaving medallions.
The town’s former Whaling Inspector, Stan Nolan, paints an affecting picture of those gruesome days. The whales’ survival impulses were either protective or realistic, he says, depending on their gender. ‘The whales travelling north in pairs, male and female, were vulnerable for a double capture if the female was shot first.’ The worried male would remain in the area and become an easy second kill. ‘If the male was shot first, the female kept going because she was heading north to give birth.’
Nowadays whales trouble people’s tender emotions. Not long ago a female pygmy sperm whale washed up on Broken Head, my nearest beach. The Whales Alive people and the Marine Mammals Rescue Team from the National Parks and Wildlife Service were quickly on the scene, but the whale died. An autopsy showed an abnormal growth in its uterus, and it was riddled with parasites.
Beached whales have autopsies these days and the death was described in the local Press as ‘a tragedy’. The whale was buried ceremonially in the Arakwal National Park. Around the graveside people held hands and sobbed.
During the morning, trolling a heavy line in the barge’s wake, Glenn caught a barracuda, two big Spanish mackerel and a pink coral trout. He cut the troublesome and toothy barracuda loose but put the other fish in the deck-wash to stay fresh until they could be cleaned and filleted. They lay flapping and bleeding on the deck, tossed back and forth in the deck-tide, their gill workings exposed and vibrating like red anemones. It became unbearable to watch them. The gasping mackerel took the longest to die.
It reminded me why I gave up fishing. I spent my childhood and early adolescence keenly fishing the Swan River and ocean coast around Perth. One day my hook caught in a tailor’s eye, not for the first time. I was acutely aware of the time it took to remove the hook – and the eye came too. For once I felt sorry for the fish, and I hardly fished again. With customary double standards, however, I still ate them.
Around the barge, three more humpbacks breached in mid-morning, and dolphins surfaced, too. Several mating sea-snakes, some striped, some golden, floated past. Transported by their sexual activity, oblivious to the barge and its churning wake, they slowly writhed together on the surface like strands of the Gorgon’s hair.
Then in mid-afternoon, as the heat cooked the steel deck and the sky above the horizon faded in the ocean haze from sharpest azure to slate, and we’d been at sea for thirteen hours and travelled a hundred and twenty kilometres, a line of stark, flat islands suddenly appeared in the distance.
9
The Mayfair and the Bomb
I’m nine years old. It’s an afternoon in early October when I call my mother after school from a public phone box in West Perth to make a plea. My friends are going to the Mayfair. Instead of immediately catching the 3.40 p.m. bus home as usual, can I go too?
The Mayfair Theatrette in downtown Hay Street runs a sixty-minute looped program of Movietone news, MGM cartoons, James A. Fitzpatrick Traveltalks, Pete Smith comedy shorts and dramatised documentaries. Despite the Crime Does Not Pay and Pathe Pictorial episodes being more than twenty years old (their characters sport unfamiliar hats, loud wide ties and double-breasted suits), they’re entertaining in a sharply monochrome, American cops-and-robbers way that I enjoy.
The Mayfair is a popular spot. Adults and children with time to kill drop in for an hour’s cheap, varied – although often dated – entertainment. The theatrette is usually well attended. It doesn’t matter when you come into the Mayfair. The program has no beginning or end. Because you enter in the dark, sit there until something you recognise comes around again, and leave in the dark, there are always audience members coming and going.
One thing I like to do is buy a ham and salad horseshoe roll at the deli next door and eat it during the show. If people are constantly squeezing past you to their seats or to the exit, this can be a messy performance involving poppy-seeds, crumbs, shredded lettuce and especially beetroot.
But my visits to the pictures – and Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy and Phantom comics, and Choo-Choo and OK and White Knight bars, for that matter – are strictly rationed. I’m allowed to visit the Mayfair and the local Saturday afternoon matinees only after a suitably self-denying interval of at least two weeks between sessions.
I can’t understand why my pleasures have to be staggered. My parents are fearful that if I’m indulged by two consecutive Saturdays of Tarzan, or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or Choo-Choo bars, I’ll become ‘spoilt’. Spoilt children (generally ‘only’ children) are anathema to them, and it’s their primary role as parents to prevent this happening. So if I spend all my pocket money at once on four comics, they’re confiscated and doled out to me at the rate of one a week. Better that I play outside in the baking sun as usual.
However, as gratification has been successfully delayed of late, and I haven’t been to the Mayfair for ages – and I’ve picked up a few helpful dish-washing and garden-weeding credits – I don’t think I need to plead this afternoon. But my mother’s voice sounds unusually panicky. ‘No. I want you to come straight home. Hurry up or you’ll miss your bus.’
Further begging is useless. ‘Listen to me,’ she says. Her voice becomes firm and serious. ‘They’ve let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A.’ I can visualise her anxiously blowing cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth so it doesn’t pollute the telephone mouthpiece. ‘Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.’
This first Montebello bomb was code-named Operation Hurricane. Within one minute the local sands were activated by neutrons, and a fall-out plume of contaminated rain and mud, activated particles and a liquefied navy frigate fell directly downwind of Ground Zero on to all the other Montebello islands except Hermite Island.
My mother needn’t have worried though about fall-out striking the Mayfair Theatrette, 1500 kilometres south. Instead it was blown due east by the notoriously strong westerlies, and its radioactive particles spread across Australia.
A fortnight later, no complaints of nuclear nuisance having issued from the Perth suburbs, and mollified by Federal politicians’ soothings that the British nuclear test was ‘helpful’ for Australia’s international status, and State politicians’ provincial optimism that ‘this will put Western Australia on the map’, my mother relents and allows me to visit the Mayfair again.
On the Movietone news I see the nuclear cloud rising and unrolling dramatically from the Montebellos’ shores. The voiceover announcer, though Australian, is Britishly upbeat and plum-toned about the atomic event. Matching his optimism, the Operation Hurricane personnel, wearing shorts and sunglasses, stroll earnestly about with clipboards, appearing for all the world like entertainment officers on the Manoora.
10
A Friend to All Peoples
The Montebello archipelago appeared like a maze stuck in the middle of the ocean. The barge slowly threaded its way around flat islets of bare limestone edged with concave, sharp shorelines. These boat-repelling platforms encircled the central islands in a protective labyrinth, and on each islet platoons of cormorants stood drying their wings in the wind. On the sandy inner islands, silently watchful, scores of high pink termite mounds, shaped like wigwams and sentry boxes, stood guard.
The archipelago would have looked exactly like this to Nicolas Baudin in 1801, and named by him in honour of Marshal Jean Lannes, whom Napoleon had created the first Duke of Montebello for his bellicose endeavours against the English.
‘Beautiful mountain’ doesn’t even faintly describe these one hundred and eighty horizontal islands and islets of limestone and white sand plains. So liltingly does Montebello trip off the tongue, however, that it graces not only the original small medieval fortress village in Italy but a string of international locales and hotels, hilly and otherwise, from New York to Guadalupe.
It had looked decidedly bare and uninteresting to the morose William Dampier a century before. ‘The Part of it that we saw is all low, even Land with sandy Banks against the Sea. Only the Points are rocky, and so are some of the Islands in this Bay.’
The Montebellos have a six-metre tidal range. Lime-green shallows drop abruptly to indigo depths, then just as quickly merge into turquoise sand banks. When the tide rushes in, surging through narrow channels into the lagoons, so do the bait fish, impatient as rush-hour commuters, followed by bigger reef fish, stingrays, turtles and sharks.
Our arrival was timed for high tide so the Tom Welsby could lower its bow door directly onto the rock-ledge shore of the biggest island in the group. This was Hermite Island, one thousand hectares of rock, sand dunes, acacia and spinifex. Here the stores and equipment could be easily unloaded, and we stepped ashore.
So this was the place that had burst into my nine-year-old brain, and was still detonating when I turned thirteen, the year of the next Montebello atomic blast, Operation Mosaic. This particular bomb was the reason I’d joined the Eureka Youth League. As the League’s manifesto, boldly outlined in its magazine, Spotlight, pointed out, its immediate aim was to ban atom bomb tests in the Montebello Islands.
This accomplished, the League and I would strive to become friends to all peoples. Being ‘friends to all peoples’ was the League’s overarching aim. I saw us as a cooler, more dramatic and courageous version of boy scouts: Baden Powell crossed with Ned Kelly; with, in my case, a touch of Louis Armstrong.
At thirteen I was looking ahead. I couldn’t wait to be older and shaving and wooing long-legged girls with La Vie En Rose on the trumpet. Hearing Satchmo play that tune filled me with an exquisite longing and envy. I was labouring to learn the instrument from a musician with the perfect jazz name of Sammy Sharp, whose studio was just down the road from Eureka Youth League HQ, in a rundown part of Perth’s central business district.
Sammy had a distinguished musical past. He’d played the London Coliseum with Ted Heath’s Band and his trumpet had headed the brass section of two English orchestras. Back home, he’d led the band at the Embassy Ballroom while recording three weekly radio programs: Sunday Serenade, Sammy Sharp’s Rhythm Five and Thursday Night at Eight.
By the time I met him twenty-five years later, however, up two flights of stairs in a bare, dusty warehouse, Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel and Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock had long since arrived and swept Perth’s teenagers before them. Sammy, no longer young and dapper, was grumpily resigned to teaching the trumpet to those few remaining adolescent boys with jazz aspirations and copies of Downbeat in their pockets.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a dented cornet. ‘Blow it like you’re spitting a piece of tissue paper off your lips. Take this home and practise every day. Give the neighbours a thrill.’ The neighbours were not delighted. There were two protesting deputations to my parents and there was no doubt they represented a wider range of opinion.
Now that I live in the country, there’s a sound I often hear at night: the plaintive bellow of a cow after her just-weaned calf has been removed from her. It’s a sharp moan, a sudden sorrowful blast in the dark. That’s the closest sound to my trumpet playing. Apart from my ear-splitting and mournful bursts, the cornet mouthpiece painfully pressed my lip onto my irregular front teeth. The bloody spit dribbling out the bell-end during my attempt at Cry Me a River marred any cool jazz-lick effect.
I knew Satchmo carried a hanky for his trumpet dribble, but it somehow had a stylish effect which I couldn’t manage. After six weeks I wiped my chin and regretfully farewelled Sammy Sharp. I handed him the battered cornet. ‘It cuts my lip,’ I explained.
Sammy didn’t get up from his chair. ‘Rock ‘n’ roll, is it?’ he sighed.
I couldn’t say how much I’d always loved Heartbreak Hotel. And in my gut I knew the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan loomed ahead. ‘I really like Miles Davis,’ I said to him.
He frowned at the condescension. ‘Is that so? You better push off, son.’
If my triumphant trumpet solos couldn’t lead the Eureka Youth League parade, I could still march, shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellows, against the atom bomb. The League and I were for world disarmament, more swimming pools and recreation activities for young West Australians, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, equal pay for women, equal rights for Aborigines, an end to whipping and capital punishment (hanging was still popular in Western Australia) and – last but apparently not least – a People’s Government to Build Socialism in Australia.
Whatever that was. Being a friend to all peoples?
I was watching Gunsmoke when my father spotted a copy of Spotlight on the kitchen table, and his face, his eyes, his neck, his whole bald head – though not his attitudes – immediately turned red.
