stones and building paddocks with clothes pegs, we played on the beach and in the sea. If we had been in the sea, we didn’t have a bath, only our hands and feet and faces were washed.
At the beach, we played with water for hours, running down the sand with small tin buckets that Mrs Swiggs had made us. Moats and rivers were our games and as theyfaded into the sand we ran and swilled them full again. Water had a mystery. It was there, and then not there. It was ever present, and ever vanishing. It filled tanks and yet there never seemed to be enough and we could never waste it.
Iron pumps stood above every underground tank or well or bore and we pumped these heavy, black, ornate, cast-iron Victorian curves with a will. To see the water gush. To prime the pump by pouring a silver dipper of water down the mouth of it, and then to have it regurgitate up with a flood of extra water in a fluid plait was a game we fought for turns to play.
Later, when we were adults, I could shampoo my hair, rinse it and wash my whole body with the water held in a two litre ice-cream container. I learnt to do this when I travelled through deserts with my middle brother, Bill. It gave me a curious pleasure to be so frugal. I did not have to wait until we reached the Birdsville Hotel or Cooper’s Creek. My childhood stood me in good stead. Sometimes I think I could have done the job with a thimbleful of water.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fishing
O n the west coast of South Australia, white pointer sharks, King George whiting, tommy ruffs, snook and the biggest snapper to be found anywhere are what men fished for. Cane laundry baskets were used to carry the fish when there was a big catch. Sometimes fish that weren’t whiting were simply thrown back. When there was a very large catch, a man called Pompa, who was a hero to Tucker, would be given the extra fish to smoke. There was no refrigeration, and if Pompa did not smoke the extra part of the catch, it was wasted.
Tucker had a pair of rubber boots because he loved Pompa and Pompa wore rubber boots, too. He followed the old man down the jetty, trying to walk with the same gait.
Who was Pompa and where did he live? His other name was Harris and he lived alone in a stone hut he had built on the edge of town. Mainly he lived by barter. Our mother gave him tomatoes, and sometimes a roast dinnerwas cut off and left covered with a soup plate to be given to Pompa to take home to eat.
Whiting love cockles. That is the main bait that has always been used for them. Mainly they were caught on lines with sinkers made of lead, which I remember our father making by pouring hot lead from a billy-can into holes he had made in a box of sand. Sometimes the fishermen used nets. These nets were dyed by making a broth of wattle bark, which was soaked for days in an old tin bath kept in our shed. The tannin from the bark protected the twine of the net. The whole business of making sinkers, soaking nets and mending nets took hours and was a source of astonishment to children.
Sometimes, on the end of the Tumby Bay and Port Lincoln jetties, a white pointer shark was hung, malevolent and gigantic, blood seeping from the jaw. As I stood with my brothers below, it seemed to hang far up in the sky. Nobody explained that these sharks were dangerous and that we should not swim far out from shore, but somehow we knew it. We dreaded sharks far more than snakes. Yet one of the deadliest snakes in the world lived in the sand dunes where we played. The death adder. At that time there was no antivenene but nobody ever died, as far as I know, from the bite of a death adder. And neither did anybody die from a shark attack, although divers nowadays do.
My brother Peter says that now abalone divers are taken because they work down deep where the sharks are. Spear fishers are eaten too, but there were none around when we were children. Abalone was not seen as a delicacy; neither were mussels nor cockles nor leather jackets nor salmon
At the beach, we played with water for hours, running down the sand with small tin buckets that Mrs Swiggs had made us. Moats and rivers were our games and as theyfaded into the sand we ran and swilled them full again. Water had a mystery. It was there, and then not there. It was ever present, and ever vanishing. It filled tanks and yet there never seemed to be enough and we could never waste it.
Iron pumps stood above every underground tank or well or bore and we pumped these heavy, black, ornate, cast-iron Victorian curves with a will. To see the water gush. To prime the pump by pouring a silver dipper of water down the mouth of it, and then to have it regurgitate up with a flood of extra water in a fluid plait was a game we fought for turns to play.
Later, when we were adults, I could shampoo my hair, rinse it and wash my whole body with the water held in a two litre ice-cream container. I learnt to do this when I travelled through deserts with my middle brother, Bill. It gave me a curious pleasure to be so frugal. I did not have to wait until we reached the Birdsville Hotel or Cooper’s Creek. My childhood stood me in good stead. Sometimes I think I could have done the job with a thimbleful of water.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fishing
O n the west coast of South Australia, white pointer sharks, King George whiting, tommy ruffs, snook and the biggest snapper to be found anywhere are what men fished for. Cane laundry baskets were used to carry the fish when there was a big catch. Sometimes fish that weren’t whiting were simply thrown back. When there was a very large catch, a man called Pompa, who was a hero to Tucker, would be given the extra fish to smoke. There was no refrigeration, and if Pompa did not smoke the extra part of the catch, it was wasted.
Tucker had a pair of rubber boots because he loved Pompa and Pompa wore rubber boots, too. He followed the old man down the jetty, trying to walk with the same gait.
Who was Pompa and where did he live? His other name was Harris and he lived alone in a stone hut he had built on the edge of town. Mainly he lived by barter. Our mother gave him tomatoes, and sometimes a roast dinnerwas cut off and left covered with a soup plate to be given to Pompa to take home to eat.
Whiting love cockles. That is the main bait that has always been used for them. Mainly they were caught on lines with sinkers made of lead, which I remember our father making by pouring hot lead from a billy-can into holes he had made in a box of sand. Sometimes the fishermen used nets. These nets were dyed by making a broth of wattle bark, which was soaked for days in an old tin bath kept in our shed. The tannin from the bark protected the twine of the net. The whole business of making sinkers, soaking nets and mending nets took hours and was a source of astonishment to children.
Sometimes, on the end of the Tumby Bay and Port Lincoln jetties, a white pointer shark was hung, malevolent and gigantic, blood seeping from the jaw. As I stood with my brothers below, it seemed to hang far up in the sky. Nobody explained that these sharks were dangerous and that we should not swim far out from shore, but somehow we knew it. We dreaded sharks far more than snakes. Yet one of the deadliest snakes in the world lived in the sand dunes where we played. The death adder. At that time there was no antivenene but nobody ever died, as far as I know, from the bite of a death adder. And neither did anybody die from a shark attack, although divers nowadays do.
My brother Peter says that now abalone divers are taken because they work down deep where the sharks are. Spear fishers are eaten too, but there were none around when we were children. Abalone was not seen as a delicacy; neither were mussels nor cockles nor leather jackets nor salmon
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