Montebello, p.8
Montebello, page 8
On shore again, if you’re shivering in the afternoon spring breeze, waiting for the wind to dry you, semi-naked and vaguely bored twelve-year-old boys, the corrugated rubber tubing dares one mask handler to stretch out the tubing to its full length. And, in a nonchalant, experimental sort of way, to fire the mask at his companion’s buttocks.
This is what Tony does. He fires it at close quarters. And as I turn slightly to see what’s happening, the heavy glass and rubber gas mask hits me smack in the cold, contracted testes and drives the left one up into my pelvis.
Out of embarrassment, until the aching nausea gets worse, I don’t mention the gas-mask incident to my parents for several days. Then they have the local GP poke inquiringly into my scrotum with his long fingers. Even more embarrassingly, at the Mount Hospital a week later, a gingery freckled nurse, wielding a frightening razor and a bowl of soapy water over my downy groin, begins to shave the four or five hairs down below while cautioning, ‘Don’t get excited now or I’ll have to get the cold spoon!’ The warning is unnecessary.
A Perth specialist, Hector Stewart, is called on to operate on me. For reasons to do with medical status – as if willing Perth’s windy St George’s Terrace to be London’s Harley Street – a couple of local surgeons with Royal College of Surgeons’ degrees have gone beyond mere ‘doctor’ and have travelled around the title cycle again to be called ‘Mister’.
‘Don’t forget to call him Mister,’ my mother says.
Mr-not-Dr Stewart subsequently retrieves the gas-mask-shunted ball and, apparently to keep it in place, sews my scrotum to my left thigh – a quarter of the way down.
The discomforting weirdness of this hernia-correction procedure is surreal enough to blight change-rooms and public showers for my entire adolescence. I’m beyond mortification. In the agony of cadet-camp, beach and after-sport shower stalls thereafter – if I dare shower at all – I stand in right profile so my elongated scrotum is, hopefully, not seen.
Months later, the stitches removed, the stretched and sinewy scrotum freed, I survey myself warily in the mirror and discover that the lopsided, now-thirteen-year-old boy standing in front of me has a vigorous growth of pubic hair and three testicles.
14
Drinks
Having come this far and delivered us to the Montebello Islands, the Tom Welsby’s captain and crew, Boxhead, Grommet and Glenn, decided to have several days break in the islands. They moored nearby in a deeper lagoon from which music and convivial laughter issued each night. One evening they came to our camp for drinks and dinner, generously bringing with them fillets from the fish they’d caught on our voyage out.
So how did the skipper come by the nickname ‘Boxhead’? It was explained that he had a German ancestor. Oh. ‘Grommet’ of course was a surfers’ term for a young surfer, even though in this case the grommet was a weather-beaten, laid-back old surfer – and, back in port, had been the modest rescuer of the drowning fisherman.
In one of those rare moments guaranteed to cheer up an author, it was the un-nicknamed Glenn who endeared himself to me, however, by producing a salt-stained hardcover copy of The Shark Net for me to sign. Not since 23 September 2010 had I felt so chuffed, when the salesman in Reece’s Plumbing Supplies in South Fremantle, noting my name on my credit card, praised my book while I was buying a new toilet seat.
I learned later that rather than my brusque description of the Tom Welsby as a ‘barge’, in Department of Transport terminology it was registered as a ‘bow-door landing craft’. As for the barge’s name, Tom Welsby had been an early twentieth-century Queensland businessman, politician and sportsman known as ‘Bung Bung’.
Interestingly, his maiden speech in State Parliament deplored the passage of the Liquor Act of 1912, which specified that no longer could any person from the age of fourteen purchase liquor. Bung Bung was in favour of everyone, regardless of age, enjoying alcohol.
Bung Bung would have been right at home in this part of Australia, especially in this generation. The heat, the isolation, the fly-in, fly-out mining-shift structure, the absence of family life, made heavy drinking, and its chaotic results, inevitable. At the Karratha airport bar, I’d seen the sign: Spirits or Full Strength Beer No Longer Sold. I also noticed that the police station was situated next door to the pub. Sensible Wild West thinking: placing the sheriff’s office alongside the saloon.
None of this would surprise a team of researchers from Queensland’s University of Technology, whose three-year study entitled Booze, Blokes and Brawls, appeared in the British Journal of Criminology the month I was on the island. It said Australia’s mining industry was propagating ‘a dark underbelly of alcohol-fuelled violence and social disorder’.
The study was the first to examine the social impact of Australia’s mining boom. The report’s author, Professor Kerry Carrington, claimed that the thousands of men constantly flying into and out of regional mining sites in Western Australia and Queensland were ‘catastrophically denigrating’ nearby towns. The rotating rosters of fly-in, fly-out workers had no allegiances to the local communities, large disposable incomes and few entertainment options except the pub. There was a hugely disproportionate ratio of men to women.
Professor Carrington described a culture of ‘organised drunkenness’, with the mining camps bussing the men to the pub at the end of a twelve-hour shift, where they were surrounded by concrete and steel mesh to keep them contained. The low numbers of women and the high alcohol intake had resulted in twice the national rate of violence. Prostitution was rife and there were problems of mental health and sexually transmitted diseases. The industry and governments were turning a blind eye, the professor complained.
The report was immediately rebuffed by the West Australian government and mining companies as ‘ill-informed’.
Nevertheless, alcohol is never far from your mind here. Seeing there were few named features on the charts to aid their navigation during the bomb tests, the British took it on themselves to name the Montebellos’ bays. They named them all after booze: Hock, Claret, Whisky, Stout, Cider, Champagne, Chartreuse, Burgundy, Chianti, Drambuie, Moselle and Sach bays. They also named Rum Cove and Sherry and Vermouth lagoons. Appropriately, there is a promontory named Hungover Head.
Not content with naming this Australian territory after alcoholic beverages (without local opposition, the names became official), the Royal navy then gave the most substantial islands in the Montebellos – apart from the two biggest, Hermite and Trimouille, named by Nicolas Baudin – the names of gentle English flowers.
This arid, sandy, tropically cyclonic and post-nuclear environment, as far removed from an English country garden as is possible on the planet, now has islands called Primrose, Bluebell, Crocus, Buttercup, Aster, Carnation, Dahlia, Daisy, Dandelion, Foxglove, Gardenia, Jonquil, Ivy, Hollyhock, Marigold, Pansy, Rose and Violet.
The Royal navy cartographers weren’t done yet. Next they named the Montebellos’ hills after zoo animals, such as Giraffe and Lion, the headlands after British Prime Ministers (Atlee, Churchill, and so on) and the channels after scientists (Bunsen, Wheatstone and Faraday).
One day in 1994 when strong winds forced the West Australian cat and rat eradication team indoors in the hut on Hurricane Hill, the conservationists decided to strike back against the English flowers. On the west side of the archipelago there were still many smaller un-named islands. They named them after Australian plants. Most of these are now official and include Eucalyptus, Waratah, Boab, Spinifex, Banksia, Marri, Karri, Wattle, Mulga, Snakewood, Bloodwood and Snappy Gum islands.
15
Wallaby World
Birds bathing noisily in the dew puddles on the roof woke us long before the camp alarm clock went off at five next morning. The birds’ racket seemed to please everyone, especially Karen, the bird observer. Until five months before, when they were transported here, Hermite Island had hardly any birds.
Karen had the most onerous job of all, rising at four a.m. to set off into the dark scrubland. There were no real trees on the islands and she had to catch sight of the birds as they rose from the bushes with the dawn. Her job was to confirm whether breeding had happened. Guesswork was involved, and she had to try to spot them before the chaos of their rooftop shower.
Birds are hard to count, particularly timid ones that hide in the shrubbery. The spinifex birds were especially hard to locate and monitor, as they were, in conservationist-speak, ‘a cryptic species’. As thirty-one fairy-wrens had been brought across the sea from Barrow Island, and Karen could tell which sex was which, it was possible (for her, at least) to ascertain that this species’ numbers were increasing.
‘How do you know you’re not counting the same ones twice?’ I asked her. She gave me a cryptic look. ‘Because I see them in widely different habitats.’ Karen had to do more walking and squinting into the sun than anyone else. On the second day she was struck by a wicked migraine which put her to bed for two days with a towel over her eyes.
The heavy nightly dew-fall in these parts left puddles on the roof and on the rocks of the shoreline. For the birds and animals it made up for the absence of streams and springs and the long dry season on the island. As for the humans’ water supply, the team efficiently managed to put the desalination plant together, and within thirty-six hours we were gulping cold glasses of ocean.
Even though the Indian Ocean is the world’s second saltiest sea, after the Atlantic, the desalination process made the water from the bay taste less salty than water from any Perth suburban tap. It also occurred to me that the first bomb, Operation Hurricane, was exploded in the sea nearby. Fallout from all three bombs had occurred over the ocean. Still radioactive? Let’s hope not.
In the early dawn our solemn Indian file shuffled over the dunes and through the nuclear-test rubble and gramophone needles, this time to check the soft-catch traps that had been placed at every grid stake the evening before.
There was a reason for the early-morning starts: to avoid heat-stressing any trapped animals. It was the first example I noticed of the team’s respectful but businesslike attitude towards their wildlife charges. It was an approach best described as ‘brisk tenderness’.
About half the traps had been successful. The peanut butter and rolled oats had worked their magic, and each victorious trap had either an anxious wallaby kicking and hissing inside, or a docile plump bandicoot cowering and snuffling. Often a skink or bigger lizard had gate-crashed a trap as well.
The trapped marsupials were each measured and weighed, Brent and Kelly holding them firmly to their chests, and had their new particulars checked against their previously micro-chipped details. Then they were released. If an animal had been born since the ark landed, its handlers were immensely pleased and the newcomer was also micro-chipped.
Satisfyingly to the team, every one of the Barrow Island emigrants had put on weight since their translocation, and most of the females were either pregnant or had raw pink babies in their pouches. In the wallabies’ case, their gangly hairless offspring resembled Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, while the baby bandicoots, attached to nipples bigger than their bodies, looked like shiny shelled peanuts.
Life can be rough in Wallaby World. There was a moment of group uneasiness while I was solemnly advised not to be upset by what I might see there. Female wallabies and kangaroos, I was informed, were not overly maternal. If stressed, a mother was apt to expel her offspring from her pouch without a qualm. This was because Nature was always pressing forward. There was always another baby growing in the womb, ready to pop into the pouch.
‘Best not to be squeamish if we have to euthanase a baby that she’s ejected and won’t take back,’ said Brent. ‘One that’s too young to cope in the outside world.’
The verb ‘euthanase’ seemed to often crop up in their conversation. It was the first time I’d heard it applied to anything other than old, sick humans caught up in legal-political-medical-religious controversy. It was an even more euphemistic term than the veterinarians’ ‘putting down’. I had an unsettling image of them wringing the neck of Jar Jar Binks or crushing him underfoot.
As it happened, one trap shortly afterwards did contain a mother and infant pair. This particular baby was three-quarters out of the pouch, and she soon ejected him out of it. He squirmed, helpless, in the bottom of the cage. His eyes weren’t yet open and he had no hair. He was surprisingly raw-looking and angular and big-eared and unprepossessing, and it shocked me when Brent, who needed to measure and weigh the mother, abruptly passed him to me.
‘Hold on to him,’ he instructed. ‘Hug him close to your chest for your body warmth.’ A vast and embarrassing responsibility suddenly fell on me. The creature’s eyes were still shut, yet protruding, and showing bright blue behind the translucent closed lids. More than anything he looked like something embryonic created by science fiction.
The sun was rising over the hill and with the first rays the bush-flies arrived and zoomed in on the moist baby wallaby. Slightly discomfited at the mandatory tenderness, I brushed away the flies and nestled him close to me. I hate forced emotion yet in seconds I felt sentimental about Jar Jar Binks. Suddenly the future of Australia’s threatened wildlife was in my hands. I didn’t voice anything but my mind screamed, ‘The little tyke must live!’
Silence, then deep sighs all round. A decision was made. Brent sat down on his portable stool and gripped the struggling mother wallaby with his knees and one elbow. He took Jar Jar Binks from me. Painstakingly, and with some difficulty, he began gently folding and pushing him head-first back inside the pouch.
Had the mother’s instincts already moved on? The pouch seemed to have lost its tension. It was prolapsed and cramped in there, and it took some time to insert him. There must have been maternal muscular resistance because no sooner did Brent manage to get one of his legs inside than the other leg, or his tail, or a paw, would pop out. But eventually he managed to prod all of Jar Jar Binks back inside. Then he carefully secured the pouch with surgical tape.
‘That’ll hold him for a little while. Maybe she’ll accept him, maybe she won’t. Fingers crossed.’
He released the mother and she bounded off erratically, programmed to elude and confuse a pursuing enemy. Zig-zagging madly over the sandy scrub as if the hounds of hell were after her, she carried her sealed issue over the dunes and far away.
16
The Observation Post
Hermite Island was far too remote for my laptop to get broadband reception. And I’d been told that mobile phones also didn’t work here. But I’d promised Anna I’d try to phone her nightly before bed.
The bedtime Fats Domino Blueberry Hill phase had recently been superseded by a sing-song chant in place of prayers that this small animal-lover had composed herself, and insisted on delivering and receiving to and from each of her parents. The sweet and zany two-way mantra stressed that her love for her mother and father, and ours for her, exceeded the tweets and moos, hops and poos of all the birds, cows, kangaroos and guinea-pigs in the world.
In her needy state since the break-up, this was an important ritual. I had to persevere, to try to pick up a phone signal from Barrow Island. By trial and error, on one particular dune abutting the camp, I finally found a five-minute communications window each afternoon when Telstra enabled me to get through to her. Because Daylight Saving in New South Wales put her three hours ahead, the call fortunately coincided with her bed-time. On the island, it also coincided with the team’s afternoon rest period on the veranda before the evening’s trap-baiting.
To my family, my daughter’s ditty had long since ceased to be unusual. To anyone else, however, the sight of a man standing beside the grimacing skull of a cat, atop a sand dune on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, flies crawling on his sweating face and ants over his legs, holding his phone high in the air to ensure a signal while shouting into the wind a lullaby about guinea-pig poo, might have seemed deranged.
The conservationists definitely looked intrigued at the daily performance. Silent glances passed between them, and the occasional meaningful cough, but no-one said anything.
There was one place in the archipelago where the phone reception might be clear and constant: the highest point, the old British nuclear operational headquarters and observation post. One day I decided to make the climb before the afternoon heat was at its height. But even before noon it was a sweaty, stiff ascent up the jagged and prickly fifty-degree slope.
Kelly accompanied me, in a fashion. I had the feeling the youngest party member had been quickly assigned to see the writer didn’t trip in a bandicoot hole, break his neck and bring bad publicity to the Threatened Species Translocation and Reintroduction Program. However, as either shyness or embarrassment prevented her approaching any closer to me than 100 metres, she could hardly have broken my fall if I’d tumbled down the hill onto the jagged limestone teeth of the shore.
It was difficult enough picturing the nuclear boffins and uniformed admirals and generals, including the First Sea Lord, Admiral Mountbatten, hauling themselves up through the rocks and the Bushes of Doom to observe the tests. It was impossible to imagine a perspiring Lady Mountbatten making the climb in hat, frock and high heels. Either a clear, gently winding path to the building had once existed or – of course – everyone was helicoptered in and out.
The observation post was bigger than I’d imagined: the size of a suburban house. Although several kilometres from the Ground Zero sites, it looked bomb-blasted itself. It was gutted and surrounded by rubble, its metal skeleton darkly crusted and holed by corrosion. A loose window frame banged in the wind, as it probably had for five decades. Rusty barbed wire and the webs of generations of orb spiders still barred entry at the door, but anyone could walk through where the walls had once been.
