Ever Present Predator

Memoir | Karen Lethlean

An almost full moon, like so many others gone before, shimmers across blue-grey paddocks. Evening colours mute dry daytime hues. A few grey sheep sleepwalk away from highway edges. Movement alone makes them visible. 

Dead eucalypts stood like sentinels. These trees form a thin skeletal reminder of once dense populations. Mighty forests grew, are felled, are burnt and grow again for millennium, but not now. Why so few, I wonder how did they die? Clearing, mining, die-back and now drought all thinning those robust giants. Too few trees now remain grey upon grey, like a black and white television with minimal contrast. Sunset’s sky-fires, akin to others stretched out over time, provide a startling contrast to this dull landscape.

Into growing night, we drove. Tides of color mark our departure from Perth’s outer suburbs. Only minimal traffic cruising highways out of this oversized country-town capital city. Others like us, with clear goals and desires.

We stare ahead, almost unaware of how light change from sunset to night as if in stages; brightness controls being slid from one level, resting there, then moving again. Peering through protective windscreen to a view now resembling ash after a burn. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight sky display momentarily looks like sea bed undulations, then fades. Our movement felt like travel across an alien sea-bed, exploring new deep dimensions, in the manner of other explorers across time. Instead of sailing vessels, canoes or space ships our car headlights are cutting a swath into deep-sea darkness. We might be whales migrating to coves, destinations for safe mating. 

A new moon’s illumination surrounding us as we now lurk in part shadows. Familiar night hiding crimes; moonlight icing over sin, gone are daylight’s prying fingers. Speeding away from city streets will negate fears of discovery. We breathe deep of anticipation, rather than slither into our sinfulness. 

410 km, the distance to Albany’s sanctuary, some might say a ludicrous distance to chase a few days’ bliss. Bearing a touristy-title of Rainbow Coast, haunted by history of being a place of death and destruction as a center for whaling, plus Port Albany provided a jumping-off point for many young men leaving their homelands to fight for King and Country in The Great War, never to return. I can’t help wondering about all those khaki clad arms reaching up in a wave farewell to Albany’s low hills, smoky scrub and white sand beaches, their young brows partially hidden under slouch hats still emitting a newness aroma akin to fodder. Will we encounter their ghosts, or meet them in other lives?

With Seddon by my side, on this pilgrimage to Albany road-center white line dashes out our progress, as if we were being pulled by some ratchet on a giant cogged wheel. 

Anticipation wrapping a blanket which makes distance easy. Conversation centered on art galleries, films, countryside and memories of my childhood trips into this region; platonic small-talk. 

Although I made one exciting announcement, ‘I signed mortgage papers on an apartment today.’

To which Seddon cruelly responds, ‘damn. I was going to ask you to run away with me.’  

In this moment I picture him as a shark, circling, testing my defenses. I am sinking into panic. Contemplating how much truth might Seddon embed in those words? 

Eventually twinkling lights of Albany beckon. A town cupped between two hills granted mountains titles out of a flat-land legacy. First people would not have so named these lookouts, or perhaps eons ago, when Noongar’s arrived water and wind had not yet worn-down uplands.

Albany Township blinks from edges of oceanic blackness. Beyond this tiny tiara of lights looms King George Sound. 

Won’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy sleeping in his embrace. After a generous breakfast, our new day permeates into the real reasons for being in Albany. We were there for Seddon to assess WA Museum’s acquisition of Whaling station sites. 

I recall documentary images of workmen wincing whales up a ramp. Probably something I’d seen, as recipient of special privileges including invitations to Seddon curated exhibitions. Those sea beasts as shattered hulks belching blood, hooked knives ripping away their skin and blubber making nightmarish, scraping chain sounds. Workers shoving long, jellied ribbons of whale-hide through great deck holes into furnace-cookers below. Albany town covered in stenches of death on more than one breeze. As I watch, those grainy black and white films, feeling an urge to vomit, clinging to bench surface in dark, wondering why Seddon invited me. But found it impossible to look away because still further out to sea, over a tumbling wind born choppy bay, at bases of slick bloodied slopes, were tethered carcasses of six dead whales, each pumped full of air to keep them afloat. Dead creatures looking like six black pontoons, each gushing rivers of scarlet, spilling precious oils over water surfaces. I remember circling sharks; their jaws closing repeatedly on rough black whale hides. Bloodied water driving them mad with hunger, lust and desire. I couldn’t help wondering what sort of macabre tourist would visit this temple to death when, and if, it became an exhibition space. Ignorant of how these ruins would be born again and draw curious crowds, along with memorials of troops sent to die in France. Thinking no one would be interested in a whaling station is not the only assumption I’d wrongly made in Seddon’s company.

 In gloomy daylight we drive the short distances around to Frenchman’s Bay where a beach totally empty of other humans greets us. Earliest whalers after which those shoals were named, long gone. Pity more of their prey didn’t survive these Frenchman’s harpoons. Only now are these gentle giants daring to traverse global migrations, to gain sanctuary in safe havens like King George Sound. Even if all along the South Western Australia coast shoals bear European, particularly French names which remain much longer than those used by first peoples. 

Invisible birds twitter in South West Peppermint trees. Air filling with this tree’s gentle fragrance juxtaposing with ocean salt. Fine sand squeaks underfoot as each tiny bead pushes against tiny chaste white bead. A line marking water/sand boundaries because ocean is transparent. Out to sea ripples deepen to bright aqua. Reefs, underwater rocks and weed banks create contrasts of ebony blue. Speckled grey brown granite, which once crawled toward ocean edges as lava flow now lies frozen, exposed like bones of a giant earth beast. In town suburbs those rocks are called ‘Albany Gnomes’. We kick up shriveled, sun dried seaweed and feel like trespassers.  

‘Ever thought what it would be like to be the only set of foot prints in sand, for all time?’ I ask my secret lover. ‘Like that old movie, after a nuclear holocaust, was it with Cary Grant…On the Beach.’

He contemplates my verbal dribble, and then answers, quietly. ‘Yes, I have.’

Oh please, squawks an inner voice, let me be there with him. I look out to turbulent ocean and expect to see a breaching giant matching my elation. Or celebratory sunbeams breaking through ominous looking clouds. 

We find a rock altar, drink our sacrificial wine, and feast on chicken flesh, pulled apart using our fingers, partake of a flesh and wine ritual. On this bright morning we are bohemians. No one stops us, no one judges, or denies our being together. 

A blissful day, being mer-creatures, who jump off smooth rock surfaces. Then lizard warm afterwards. How cold is the Southern Ocean! In tousled, untidy, windswept, surf we splash and play water games relevant to those hopelessly enamored. 

‘At least I left my underwear on.’ I remark. 

‘I have to go back to work this afternoon. And would not be able to sit still with sea-grit-sand itching in my pants. Would not look good on Museum publicity shots.’

‘Make a change, sand causing your itchy pants.’

Our footprints retrace, mostly over undisturbed sand, until he finds a piece of driftwood. Dolphin shape, including an eye hole where once a rope might loop this piece to a timber boat fitting or deck; a piece of shrapnel maybe broken off by some roaring forties thundering storm, or lashing loose after slapped by Antarctic born waves to float on currents until ocean waves wear it smooth and shape change this to a new token. An off cast so sculptured by sea Gods becomes art. My lover makes an elaborate show of presenting this as a memento.  

After our few blissful days, as we depart brightness pales. Like favorite jeans, skies are washed and rewashed; sunset drains blueness away. A golden hue, strongest in the west resembling gold rims on pale, translucent china. As if an ordinary dusk, shadows begin to gather. By the time a sky-hole moon rises we are speeding many miles closer to Perth. He stops at an elevated place, paying homage to Luna. Our faces point skywards as we worship the moon’s phases, all its implications, and all its connotations. Her silvery halo visible. I am sure an aura once called a Hunter’s moon. What quarry do we pursue? White light overwhelms inherit darkness. I wish this time to never end. But moon’s orbits cannot stop. Rising tides, lover’s eyes and wishes for time to stand always pull away. 

Wasn’t long afterwards I get a postcard from Rottnest; sent from his overseas, by a mere 20km, sojourn. A craggy limestone rock island off Perth’s coast which early Dutch explorers wrongly named after a rat’s nest. Believing Quokkas inhabiting this future resort, jail and army training camp/defensive location are oversized rats. Evoking all sorts of satanic imagery, or perhaps making links to Princess Bride, film worlds… Rats of enormous size… I don’t think they exist, said the dread pirate Roberts. 

In cryptic manner, so like Seddon typical communications I learn this trip is to counter disruptions during his home renovations. I am a lover spurned while his wife enjoys a break away from workmen trudging dust and building equipment through living regions in efforts to remake their house. 

I did not heed those warning signs. I did not see my own vulnerability mirrored inside that cabinet of his affair. 

Unfortunately it will take several years, and his eventual death for my heart to learn I will never be able to truly run away. He lurks in my memory, in my worlds, in my thoughts, always visible in the water; a predator circling.