strange fruit

In which the fish returns to the sea

2011-09-05T12:51:00.000+10:00

I had a think about it, and I could not remember a time for over two decades when I did not swim. Every day, wind, rain or shine.

For a few years, it was at 4pm when the shadows began to lengthen and the light lay obliquely on the surface of the sea.

Gradually, necessity dictated that I rise at dawn and greet the ocean as the sun rose.

Life is like that, always changing the rules of engagement.

For most of my life, the idea of not swimming was unthinkable, and at times the thought of doing without it was something incomprehensible and distressing.

I would feel physically ill at the prospect of a day with no swim.

Everything in life has the potential to become an addiction, I suppose.

Swimming was mine.

Thankfully, it was legal.

Like all addictions, one will go to great lengths to obtain a hit.

I once swam 2km in 10C water one winter by tricking myself that I was about to get out. I just kept going, saying I'd just do another few meters...

and another...

and another.

I began to realise a kind of useful philosophy.

when people asked with horror how I managed to swim so far in the cold at that hour,

I would try and explain that it is all a matter of the mind: that actual sensation of being so cold, and the burning on the skin is all transient. It disappears in minutes and your skin tingles and burns, so that you don't feel the cold at all.

And at dawn there is no warm sun to feel on your body, so the water seems a lovely prospect since it is often warmer than the air anyway.

I began to think of this idea in relation to things that made me anxious:

it will pass, it will change, these things are transient.

But this winter, because of reasons, it became harder to swim.

The ocean pool was demolished to be renovated, which ruled out dawn swims among the predators having their breakfast in the wine dark sea.

Work interfered with daytime swims, and my lovely sojourn in golden-hot Venice seemed to render me vulnerable to the cold. The sea spent the southern winter in a state of fury, waves lashing and rolling and thundering, making it particularly hard for the ocean swimmer to make any headway at all. I did my best, but I almost had my pelt flayed off by rushing columns of sand.

I was indeed a smelly and rotting dried up old fish out of water.

Until one day someone suggested I join her swim group, two beaches away.

Everybody is very loyal to their own territory, and at first I declined. But I began to think I might just have a try. I hadnt quite known where and when this bunch actually swam, so she ordered me to meet up and come along.

So,

I did.

We swim across a marine reserve, out to a headland which shelters the bay from the heavier waves rolling in from the sea.

Creatures breed in this bay. They are all protected:

Sharks, Rays, Eastern Blue gropers, Wrasse, Luderick,

Whiting, Squid, Cuttlefish,

Old Wives, Silver Bream.

and last spring, I am told (and have seen pictures)

a baby humpback whale joined in.

So the fish has migrated, and now swims in the bay in a shoal.

and every day now,

says hello to the Gropers, the Rays and the Sharks,

the Wrasse and the Luderick,

the Spotty Catfish, the Old Wives,

the Sand Whiting and the Silver Bream,

and the salt soaks into her gills, enlivens her scales, illuminates her big fish eyes

and she says to herself when she thinks of the woes in the world:

this too will pass

and swims boldly across the bay: into the ocean,

home at last.

North and South: Strange times in the Life of the Fish

2011-07-22T18:04:00.001+10:00

So.

I become a salted fish head in a box,

all staring eyes and hard scales sticking out every which way,

fins hard and encrusted. Smelling like some rotten piece of flotsam,

of marine life too long in the air, a rank and briny stink.

The winter has whipped the ocean into a frenzy, and the pool is boarded up.

Look at me, a salty fish head in a box. Nowhere to swim! Too much to do! I may as well be dead!

Too much going on in the world, thinks the fish brain in its limited and smelly way.

Too much in the world!

The sea says nothing for quite some time, because it is occupied having the mother of all seizures,

always seems to be mid-convulsion.

The fish, rolling out of its box, tosses to and fro at the edge of the howling sea, all staring eyes and stiff

fins, all clouded scales poking every way. The silver of its cheeks is worn dull, and it gathers a crusting

of sand, small barnacles, and the dried fronds of seaweed.

The sea, in a small moment between fits, reaches out a frilled and creamy wave, and rolls the stiff-finned creature swiftly into the deep.

you had better wake up,

said the sea, as it worked its way into the cracks.

Things float vast distances in the ocean,

strange currents circle and pull.

The outgoing tide pulls you under, where the sunlight is a mere green whisper,

submerges you in shadows.

When the waves lift up at last, you get to see the view. Who knows where you will be?

I opened my eyes,

and was back in the city of water.

And so the tidal pull takes me back to Venice,

where the sun breaks into a million pieces and reflects onto the palazzo walls,

where a hundred boats make their ways this way and that, weaving webs upon the malachite waters,

here, look at this one: lights strung across the deck,

or that one, carrying a little crane,

or this one, bigger than every island of Venice put together...

This fish from the south finds itself in the summer of the north,

in a summer hot and bright,

where the water is benign and silent,

and all around is colour: shifting with the fluid light.

And the salty fish leaps into the air,

all silver and lithe,

and lives awhile in the city of water,

taking deep breaths,

and looking with great round fish eyes,

happy as can be.

Am I dreaming? asks the fish.

No, no

says the sea.

You are not.

In which the fish greets Easter Sunday

2011-04-25T16:35:00.001+10:00

We were all there, on Easter Sunday.

The sea, warm as my blood, rocked and danced quietly

under an immense and luminous dome of blue.

I slipped out on the current and watched the heads of my offspring, sleek and shining with light, darting and bobbing over and under the waves. The seagrass below waved

like a field of green, a forgotten world.

I swam past them, and drifted awhile in the calm of the open water, breathing in and out slowly, drawing saltness and blueness deep into the heart of me. Folks sat on boards and chatted quietly waiting for waves, or dipped cupped hands along the surface, going here and there, looking for the best place.

The ocean was soft and green out here, far from the tangle and thrust of life. I floated with my hair down like tentacles.

I wondered what I might snare.

After some time I raised my head, and saw the horizon tilt.

For Me?

I asked the sea.

I flipped my fins and the sea picked me up on its wavering lip.

I stretched out my hand, holding the heel of my palm against the surface of the wave which had turned to glass as the sea rolled forward.

I was so high that I raised my head and watched the water speed beneath my hand, the froth and foam rushing, spitting out onto the dark green of itself.

I flew in like some strange heraldic sea creature all the way to the sand, where I stood up, flicked my hair from my face, and breathed once more

the salt of the sea,

into every small corner of my heart.

fish on good friday

2011-04-22T10:16:00.000+10:00

Yesterday

I did not want to leave to go to work.

I wanted to stay home,

sit on the red chair with the cat,

then go to the sea.

Today

I can.

Happy Easter everyone.

the fish in the phone

2011-04-17T14:37:00.000+10:00

Having contracted myself this semester to an unseemly number of classes, I have found little time to do much else, and thankfully I am now more than half way through the semester.

As can be expected when one works nine hour days, the family chooses to all have simultaneous breakdowns and issues, which contributes to all the excitement. There is not a lot of time to do much else at the moment: when I am not teaching, I am reading up for the two postgraduate classes I was breaking my neck to have. This week I am reading up on Bourdieu, Elliot Eisner, and pictorial conventions in Venetian portraiture. I am very thankful for this, as some of the other things I have had to read were very annoying.

Interestingly I looked at the photos on my iphone and found it had become a little journal of sorts, a record of my life in phone photos.

Classes

They are many classes. Lots and lots, so it is fortunate I actually like them.

Here are some students drawing a few weeks ago.

At the moment they are painting. All 180 of them...

thankfully not all at once.

Driving

I spend a lot of time in my car thinking about things. I look at the sky a lot because I go up and down a few big hills. This was on my way home.

Some days are of course nicer than others. This is Sydney, City of four seasons in one day.

The band

The Husbands band plays quite a bit, and here they were playing down the coast a bit and I drove down to watch.

I drove home in a rather melancholic state, because of reasons, and played Einaudi all the way home, looking at the scenery. It is an emotionally-laden landscape, full of nostalgia, change, and remembered other lives that I have led.

In contrast, they played at an inner city pub, which was fun even though I think that day I was fretting over some reading for that week, which was not Bourdieu but something very tedious if I remember correctly. It was good to get out and watch. the proprietor said it was his biggest crowd ever.

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes Opening Night at the AGNSW

Here I am with My friend Ben in front of his artwork. That room resembled, as Ben described it, a zoo.
As you can see I remembered to take my favourite bling (in the form of silver coral) to work, but NOT my hairbrush.
Pity.

Here is Lucy Culliton's painting of Ray Hughes. She is a great girl, and I have a few of her paintings here in the house, one is of cakes.

Here is the winning Ben (Quilty), with whom I have had the pleasure of speaking a number of times and been impressed by the depth of his feelings on various issues such as indigenous rights, australian history and identity, and the way young men in the outer suburbs enact various suburban rituals.

He seems a very generous guy, and before he moved to the southern highlands from Sydney, was happy to accomodate my painting students, and give them talks on his work and ideas for nothing.

In his speech at the opening, he gave a pasting to sportspeople who dont pay their HECS debts. Culture, he said, is the glue that sticks us together, and in hard economic times it was culture which provided social cohesion. He then questioned the legitimacy of famous swimmers who did not have to pay university fees, whereas others who made important contributions to life, still had to. He included in this equation his own brother who had just attained a doctorate in soil rehabilitation, rather than just swimming up and down a pool. It was interesting.

Peace and Quiet

The boys of the family spent some time on a surf trip. This meant that after I cleaned the house, it stayed that way.

Sadly, they have decided to return and fill my life with chaos.

Weather

Some days commence in spectacular fashion

and finish with a tsunami of sorts, right above my house.

And such is the life of the fish, whio ha managed only fragments of time in the water, and is hoping very soon to be spending far more time in the salty deep.

Tectonic chaos: In which the fish swims at the feet of The Buddha

2011-03-20T16:07:00.002+11:00

So.

That was more than a just a shiver in the spine of the fish

as it passed through the deep waters far away.

After I returned home from Japan, the tectonic plates gave an unholy shudder,

after which, the ocean broke it bounds, came flooding in,

erasing lives and places.

So fragile, that border between sea-and-not-sea.

And how cruel the huge surge that came shouldering its way inland.

The Buddha of Kamakura

The Great Buddha at Kamakura has survived a tsunami before, and I imagine it sitting there serenely as the ocean rises up to meet it

but the little potters studio I visited, and the shop with the antique indigo cloth, are likely to have been inundated.

I remember lingering to watch the potter, noticing the trays of damp, chocolatey pots awaiting his hand.

I complimented him and spontaneously bowed in deference to his craftmanship, as you do.

He was very pleased, and grinned as he bowed in return.

He then continued to work on his pots.

I think now the way that, underwater and untransformed by fire, that tray of unfinished bowls may well have reverted back to the earth from which they came.

I only bought a couple of his small pieces, as I was worried about carrying them. I have now set up a litle shrine, for Japan. The incense is from the Temple at Kamakura, where I visited the shrine of the goddess of the sea.

Where the sea meets the shore, Hasedera, near Kamakura.

In the temple of the Kannon at Hasedera,

the statue of the 11-headed kannon, or Boddhisatva of Compassion, has a story which is entwined with the sea also. It seems it was one of twins, and was thrown into the sea, where it stayed for many years:

"According to legend, in 721 AD. the pious monk Tokudo Shonin

discovered a large camphor tree in the mountain forests

near the village of Hase in the Nara region. He realized the trunk

of the tree was so large that it provided enough material for carving

two statues of the eleven-headed Kannon. The statue he

commissioned to be carved from the lower part of the truck

was enshrined in Hasedera Temple near Nara; the statue from the upper half

(actually the larger of the two) was thrown into the sea with a prayer that it

would reappear to save the people. Fifteen years later in 736

on the night of June 18, it washed ashore at Nagai Beach

on the Miura Peninsula not far from Kamakura,

sending out rays of light as it did. The statue was then brought to

Kamakura and a temple was constructed to honor it."

(from the story of Hasedera Kannon)

The Boddhisatva of Compassion

This Earthly Realm.

Because of reasons,

I am currently teaching nine courses at the university

Both undergraduate and postgraduate.
In one of the courses I had chosen to look at this Hokusai print, and my voice would waver just the tiniest bit, and I would have to stop speaking just for a moment
when I showed it.

Katsushkia Hokusai, "A Sudden Gust of Wind"
woodblock, 1820's

It seems that every second of my week is occupied with something,

and I work long days, getting home at 7pm.

Needless to say, my home is chaos, but easter isnt far away....

During this time, I try to imagine

the Great Buddha sending me serenity

as the waves of chaos lap at its feet,

just as they are lapping at mine.

Our family company has made a generous donation to japan Relief

if you would also like to make one, big or small,

please go here.

The devastation there is beyond imagining.

in which the fish regards the blue, the brown and all the white

2011-02-16T10:53:00.000+11:00

It is a long journey by sea, even for this fish.

This fish,

who, with a mighty and muscular sweep of the tail,

launches out into the open sea.

At this, the sea merely raises one salty brow and shrugs.

So be it.

Says the sea,

If you insist on spinning way beyond your normal trajectory, you will find what you wish.

So.

This fish

spins out past the known lands and grows and grows, spinning like a translucent thing through the vast depths where the sea becomes the darkest of greens, where the dried echoes of humpbacks still hang suspended like curtains of air, and heads north.

The sea is silent, shrugging a turquoise shoulder as the fish spins on, further, like a torpedo through a cloud of ribbon fish, as the waters warm. The sea speaks only once again:

You will see much that you like not, fish, but you will see also much that you love.

The fish finds itself in clouds of brown, where no brown should be, and the realms of land and water become blurred. A crowd of frightened black and white cows, hoofs kicking, rolls their eyes as they float out a river delta. Chairs and boxes and shoes tumble through the clouds.

At one point the fish feels the salt disappar altogether and sees the buried matte of grass, a field, fences.

Huge petals of soils spread out into the sea, where land and water do not seem to be able to tell each oter apart any longer and boundaries dissolve. Ribbon fish attempt to be civil to swimming cows, but the cows roll their eyes in terror.

The fish flees the silting of her gills and continues even further north, through vast archipeligos, past huge and friendly turtles and ever diminishing schools of other silver fish. The fish takes the shape now of some huge hybrid creature, with silvery scales the size of saucers, and long, thin, translucent teeth like those of a cat. The fish travels through brightly illumined azure waters of the equatorial seas, all the while heading north. All the while, spinning and dipping with great sweeps of the huge transparent tail, the fish swims so far, so far all the while, until the waters grow cold and dark again.

How to proceed, how to proceed,

laughs the sea to itself, as the fish considers its position and the iciness of the viridian depths into which it has arrived.

There are the Straights Of Korea to consider, and the murderous bays and troughs along the southern coast of Honshu: perhaps this absurd fragment of fishbone, foolishness and fish-meat will head into northerer waters.

face to face with vladivostok. Within sniffing distnace of Siberia...

And the fish considers this, because all the oceanic considerations are felt by the fish deep in her fish bones, that skeletal leaf-frond detecting all the thoughts of the sea itself.

And the fish, despite having felt the mighty cold of Russia once before, nonetheless turns its pointed silver face northwards away from Honshu, and up towards Hokkaido.

And here is the most dangerous realm in all the sea

for any kind of fish.

Casting her large fish head to one side, she listens out for the mournful sounds of slaughtered cetaceans, and creeps to the north, away from this southernmost isle of japan, and slithers her bulk past the Sakharin islands, around the tip,

and into the

Sea of Japan.

Japan....

In which the fish speaks of stones and bones and silence.

2010-12-22T21:35:00.001+11:00

Fish,

in case you were not aware,

have no ears.

It would be foolish to expect a fish to offer access to their heads via holes,

they have smooth heads stretched with silver drums of skin and scale. Fish swim like torpedoes, along the path of no resistance.

What use have they of flapping ears, to cause drag and all manner of problem? None at all, I would think.

Fish ears stretched like tympani on either side of the fish's long head, silver and smooth. You may have seen them, nacreous ovoids, turning apricot this way, mauve that way, depending on the tilt of the fish. There is no hole, no tunnel into the fish's head, no entrance into which the sea might pour and fill the fish with brine, flood its dreams, drown its thoughts. There is only tightly sealed silver fish skin.
Beneath the silver discs lie bones they call hearing stones. Stones to collect the sounds of the sea. The stone which orients us, much like, as Graeme Burnett points out, the Islamic qibla, the stone to which all Muslims turn and face for prayer. Our inner stones tell us which way is up, which way is down, and how far beneath the ocean you are swimming.

Otoliths:

Pebbles in the head, pearls with which to gather music, safely inside the head of the fish. It is said that a sea-bass has huge pebbles but humans have microscopic ones, a sac of tiny pebbles hanging inside the head.

As the years go by this fish's head strains and creaks to keep the sea out. My head works hard to close the entrance to my brain, to shut the sea out. The sea continues to poke long slithery fingers into my ears and tamper coldly with my brain, to softly clack against my ear stones, rattle them softly with a whispery rumpled sound. When I am back on land, the sea hides cunningly inside the ever-narrowing passages which lead to my ear stones. Walls of bone slowly close.

Cyprinus carpio (Common carp)
(Doug Ferrell, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.)

I try to seal my ears, to keep the sea out of my head, since having small oceans in one's ears is not a pleasant thing: it will whisper things to you as you go about your business, and distract you from the world of air. Every now and again an aquatic shift will echo largely as you reach across the table, or navigate your way across town, far from the conforting thrum of the restless ocean in which you swim.
No, I stuff my ears with waxes and plugs and wads of silicone, but the sea has become very cunning and contrives to pick them out in silent glee. I even took to using fluorescent orange wads of stuff which glowed brightly when they sank to the bottom and I was able to retrieve them, but gradually my supply was depleted. My bones continue to shift , and it becomes harder and harder to poke anything in them at all.

The stones in my head are drowning.

The sea worries the rocks underwater, tosses and pokes them as they are revealed by the great sucking of tide against sand. rock shelf and boulder, pebble and shard: all are the palest of green, like naked things untouched by the sun.

The rocks settle in the faintest of hollows, and roll about, from one edge to another, swirling and tossing, around and around, the sound of rock against rock agreeable aquatic clunk, an undewater percussion, travelling through the pale green like an orchestra of sorts. After some time, they create a lovely round rock pool.

The sea stirs and worries the stones on their rock plates, and the hollows grow larger and deeper. the stones grow rounder and become, in time, like eggs in a basket, worn and beautiful: a nest of stone eggs. When the sea runs out these pale clusters sit in the sunlight and children play in them, lifting out the stones before parents call to them the dangers of blue-ringed octopi, the sharpness of urchin spines. Children lift out the stones, and rub them against the rockshelf, to see what happens: the rockshelf, unused to such reatment and more used to slumbering beneath a blanket of snad and the weight of the sea, is brittle and soft. The children dip their fingers in the wet powdered rock and draw with it. The sea-stones carve holes in the rocks.

My world grows quiet, the sounds in my world, it seems, have taken on the aquatic softness of sounds far beneath the surface of the sea. I peer into faces and watch them speak. I worry that they will suddenly discern, just beneath my translucent skin, my scales, my fins, the silver of my surface, the strangeness of my bones.

Epinephelus lanceolatus (Giant grouper)

It is almost Christmas.

I am standing, with all the other parents at the formal speech night, all of us singing. I can hear my own singing in my head, ringing agreeably.

I like to sing, and I like to sing amongst other singing voices, so I sing clearly and strongly. Suddenly I worry that I am singing tooo loudly, and dart my gaze from side to side, but nobody is looking. Emboldened, I continue. I pretend I am in a grand cathedral, until the carol finishes, and I must be seated with all the others. I watch and endless stream of royal blue blazers filing past, and listen to speeches.

To my surprise, one of them makes me cry. A tale of kindness and generosity in an Indian orphanage run by an ex-student. Afterwards I walk through magnolias and gardenias in the warm dark air. I walk away from the sounds of father asking son to work harder, study harder, listen harder. the dark swallows me up like a tropical pond and I am glad for the way my fish ears filter sounds so well these days.

Next day at home, I sing. I sing and wonder what I sound like, since I am no longer sure. I walk down to the sea and find it as flat s anything I have ever seen and I poke my newest earplugs far into my narrow ear canals, to cushion my ear stones, to keep out the sea.

I swim all the way to the headland, but when I turn around to swim home I find a headwind has sprung up, and I have the devil's own time getting back.

in which the fish is hot, the fish is cold

2010-11-09T13:24:00.000+11:00

I am at Hot Yoga.

I am looking in the mirror, focusing on just one point, as I am told.
Not at the point between my eyes, as I am told, but at a point lower, where things are black and indistinct, just near my waist. I focus my gaze there, that is a good point to gaze, I think, because it is just a patch of black, and indistinct.

The mirror is vast, and runs the entire length of the front of the room.
It is the cosmic mirror, they say, and there are many of us gazing into it. None of us look at each other, we are just aware. I try ever so hard to be present, to chase thoughts out of my head, but
of course, my gaze flickers around before I can still it. My vision briefly registers the presence of so many bodies. The one next to me, like all the other women, features a pale and slender waist, an uninterrupted stare. Today I note also that I am surrounded by men, which is unusual. We all begin, moving, just as we are told, as one entity, listening to the words, trying to join together mind, body, breathing.

When I first came, I couldn't look at the mirror at all. I hid behind others and stared at their reflection instead of mine, because I am the only person in this room who does not have a slim physique. My body rolls and pouts and sticks out at all angles and the bags beneath my eyes catch the light and make shadows. I began by staring at the reflection of the pretty girl next to me, and pretended I was her. At the end of the first week I was right behind a very gorgeous young lady, all in white, with her boyfriend. I am sure her poise was shaken when, in the middle of triangle pose, she let out a small, but distinct fart. I felt for her, but I laughed silently all the same. That's what farts are for, after all: laughing at.
She was mortified.

When I first came, I covered myself up with long tights and baggy tops but the heat was dreadful, and my whole body went into a kind of distress. All around me was pale, shining skin, sparkling with moisture from the infernal heat. Waves of panic invaded me from time to time as I stolidly enacted the motions, trying my best to balance, trying my best just to stay in the room, the heat was terrible: sweat flowed like rivers from my every limb, my face so red I looked like a scarlet jellyfish. The first time I went there was with my friend, The Little Hen, who was very good at yoga and I watched her from the corner of my eye, realising quickly that talking and looking were not permitted. I watched her stand on one leg and place her head on the knee of her outstretched other. She never wavered, though I could barely manage a few seconds on one leg, and stumbled repeatedly, sweat running into my eyes. I'd hoped this yoga might be a way of fixing my badly assembled skeleton, fixing my crooked little feet, making me straighter, but that first time I thought I would die and could not look in the mirror.

Next day I went back.
And the next. I was immediately hooked.
It would not defeat me, but I didn't look into the mirror for six months. It's been a year and a half now, and I am working my way to looking myself in the face.

Strange how you are so extreme, said Kath. You're either swimming in icy water or poaching yourself in that diabolical room. Can't be good for you.
Eija said: You look great, and I am coming too.
She did. She still does.

I am looking in the mirror, focusing on just one point.
The young man just ahead of me, to my right, wears small blue trunks, his hair in a ponytail and is just on the edge of my vision. A young girl is ahead of me, just to my left. Her ponytail is long and shining, her waist tiny, her tummy neat and flat. Directly ahead is me myself, in small shorts and a singlet, both black, my dimply tummy beneath, hidden, my lumpy physique looking just a touch more petite than usual, because this bit of the cosmic mirror is slightly concave.
I smile to myself: I am right at the front, gazing into the mirror, people all around me. We begin and everybody moves in time: breathing, stretching, bending. Names in sanskrit, instructions, the same every day. The words of the guru over and over, we enact the most strenuous of poses, compressing this, stretching that.

Standing Bow.
The first time I tried standing bow I fell and almost knocked someone over and had to stand side on to all the others and hold the ballet bar, because it was impossible to balance. I had to show my body what it might feel like if we ever got this right. Today I lean forward towards the cosmic mirror with one arm outstretched, my other arm behind me, holding my foot and drawing my it above my head: I am a bow. I pull my self taut and stand strong, and I hold this and breathe. I pull air into my lungs and hold my foot high above my head, willing my foot not to move. None of us fall.

I look into the mirror.
That's the thing: I look into the mirror.

I am the biggest woman here and I am looking into the mirror and my foot is as high over my head as the
beautiful girl with the ponytail. I stand perfectly still and taut, foot above my head, arm outstretched.

I used to see swimming in the icy sea in the winter dawn as a test, a challenge. I thought if I could do that, I could face anything, and I suppose I was right in many ways. It taught me that pain is brief and that everything is in the mind. The cold only lasts a minute and after that it's like a wonderful buzzing of the skin, a rushing of blood, blowing strings of air into the pale morning water and listening to the sounds.

I am looking in the mirror, thinking of cold water. I see myself, misshapen but cheerful, hopeful, looking back. I can hold my ankles and place my face onto the floor. I can bend backwards and almost see the floor, but most of all, I can look into the mirror. Soon, I will look into my own eyes. One day soon.

when I am finished I race down to the sea and throw myself in like a blob of molten lava.
The sea hisses.
The sea grips my scalp and flings my air about as I stay submerged, looking for a grip on the sea floor so I might hang head-down for hours, but there is only sand so I dive down and down and down until the sea has cooled my flaming cheeks. The sea does not know what to say about this, and keeps silent when I am on my long hauls through the water these days, though I do know that the sea has enough trouble at the moment with all the storms and the whale migration. There is so much to occupy a body of water at this time of year that I hadn't considered my steaming hot dumpling act would attract too much oceanic attention, but I still get a good slap on the head to remind me who's boss.

So, my small triumphs buoy me along. The sea in my hair, my gaze in the mirror. My faultless backstroke, my motionless Standing Bow.
I cannot help marvelling in the miracle of breathing. Of taking breath, and letting it go.
In, and out again, pulling air down into my body, where it travels through tiny branches into my blood, into the sea of me.
Of releasing great soft cushions of air at the bottom of the sea and watch them wobble upward until they break that quivering meniscus,
and disappear.

I am looking into the mirror and I am taking no notice of my fat little legs and the bags beneath my eyes. Instead, I luxuriate in the fact that i can stand here at all, and that I can breathe. I am looking into the cosmic mirror pulling air into myself.

Endlessly, happily:
in, out, in.

or, in which the fish reveals the whereabouts of the lost children.

2010-09-20T15:18:00.020+10:00

Marin

(an extract)

My body healed up, days marched on, and nights reassuringly appeared as they always had.

After all, I am a champion fish, a strong fish, a winning fish.

Not such a fast fish perhaps, but a steady fish, a fish which goes the distance. A heads-down, fins-spinning sort of a fish, a fish who leaps at the starter’s gun and is capable of endless miles, full of baby or not.

I have trained furiously for the race in which I find myself, but even so, my cheeks are plum coloured and my lungs twin sacs of burning lace . It is a few kilometres long, this race, out over the kelp beds and out towards the dark playground of Bronze Whalers and the other darker, shyer sharks off Long Reef. Through the roiling surf and out and away, through numerous clouds of jellies which pulse mindlessly like small milky geometries, Tall orange buoys appear from time to time to guide me, for me to shoulder around in these abstract unmarked trails in the ocean. I have a need to win, a need to overcome something.

I pull myself through salt water, with my hands my feet, my fins. My chest heaves, my face burns and the cracking thump of my heart echoes into the bones of my head. Below me all is blue-inked shadow, above me sky glimpsed as I steal silver loaves of air from the sky and hold them hard in my chest then before exhaling them, fragmented, in molten blobs to spin in my wake.

I must win, but it’s such a long stretch of ocean, a long long distance. I am wearing my face like a mask. At the start it is all fragments of kelp in a turquoise toss of foam, and later, in the dark of the deep somebody is catching a free ride in my wake, touching my toes as I thunder along. I am unable to shake them off, but they disturb me, lurking there just behind, waiting to chase and pounce. I steady my breathing and try not to lose my rhythmic stroke-stroke-stroke, my lungs smouldering.

I have passed into another reality, one in which I am nothing but air and light and salt and movement.

As I look down in to the deep and watch the silver bubbles trail from my endlessly digging hands, I suddenly think of Marin, of silver light and lost pieces of love. Then suddenly, it seems, every one of her little extinguished heartbeats is with me, surging along on a cloud of light. In fact there are hundreds of them: all of those tiny lights, all the tiny souls who never made it into the bright light of day are now ere in my sea, like tiny fish, like beams of light, buoying me along. The sun catches them: fragments of light, tiny beating hearts, clouds of bubbles, a bouquet of air. I am swimming on a cloud of souls, here they all are, out here in the kingdom of salt and loneliness, in my aquatic domain: all the love and hope, the energy of all and everything. And I am here, amongst it, stroking the blue with long fingers and strong arms.

I put the love I had for Marin out into the world, although she never came to be, and like the light from far away stars in distant constellations, that love continues on.

Love ends up somewhere, love ends up here, in the salty indigo depths. In the luminous foam of the waves, in the dancing currents, in the dip and swell of the open sea. In every sparkle on the ocean dwells the love and hope invested in those brief existences, and every one of them forms a deep bloom of happiness upon my heart.

Marin carried me, like a mandala-shaped raft. A raft made from all those little silver specks of love, those beginnings of hope, those hearts now stilled, those tears.

I won the race, although it didn’t matter,

not really.

from "Marin", a short story

By Fiona E.D

2006

Ultrasound

2010-09-18T12:01:00.007+10:00

It is difficult to see underwater without some kind of intervention, some kind of separation between eyes and water. Even my shortsighted fish-eyes need help, though most of my childhood was spent gazing at some blurry submarine landscape, and bearing the sting afterwards.

The first time I saw the bottom of the sea I got a fright, and drew saltwater into my lungs with the sudden intake of breath. I coughed a bit, and then went down for more keeping my feet raised in order to push my head down, to stop it floating up and out. I was wearing a huge hard plastic underwater mask, like a piece of cartoon headgear, which flared from my face towards the clear oval of vision in a swathe of sharp green plastic. The world of the sea was suddenly revealed to me, and I saw with a shock that it went on forever and ever and ever.

The huge mask was problematic when swimming in the waves, as one's head was tossed about like a large and bouyant bucket by the ceaseless pull and push. But I have never forgotten the lure of that world stretching out before me, where the pale ocean floor continued forever into infinity, the bright dancing canopy of the ocean overhead. I thought to myself with a thrill of fear: I want to swim forever.

My mother hauled me out by the straps of my swimmers.

Around the edge of the rock pool is where the rip leaps in and around, and creates a flurry of sand and small bits of weed. The ever present flock of spotted toadfish seem to exist solely to swim against the in and out of it, turning this way and that in charming unison, their wide spaced goat-like eyes unblinking. When the tide is low, deep turquoise pools are laid open, disempowered and benign, full of stranded toadies, but the tide comes back in and they revert to spinning hollows of light, dark, and fragments tossed about in endlessly moving water. The rocks hunch in their secretive manner, clothed in cloaks of dark red weed knitted by the tide, flecked with sand here and there. Down low it is dim and dark, it is hard to see.

I have rinsed the salt from my hair and driven across town, keeping my attention upon the roads, the directions. I am right on time for my appointment, and I sit down on a blue chair and cross my ankles. The hair at the back of my neck is damp: I realize that I have done nothing but twist it into a wet knot, leaving it uncombed, but I think also that nobody is really looking since these rooms are part of the Sydney IVF clinic, and everybody preoccupied with their own private hopes and sorrows. I am able to watch, as closely as I wish, the actions of everybody in the room, before I am shown into my own room, with a large screen above the chair, waiting to map me out. It is a larger, clearer screen than any I recall. The nurse asks a few questions, how many children do I have.

Two, I answer.

I am compelled at that moment to explain that I have been through this four times.

Four times, she says. Four times pregnant but only two children?

Thats right, I answer.

I do not elaborate, thinking instead of the time I saw a heartbeat glinting like a lighthouse, the time I saw those little hands flex and startle, and finally let myself exhale and love. I do not explain seeing that inert shape at fourteen weeks, like a stone at the bottom of a pond, lying still, no beating heart, no trace of light. I keep myself quiet and watch the sea inside of me, up there on the screen and say nothing. The blunt white muzzle of a very clever camera becomes a pair of underwater eyes, revealing my hidden ocean.

The shapes and hollows are aquatic and submarine, with flecks of light and dark shadows. Waves of sound mark the beat of my heart and the tides of my blood, so eerie and strange to see this space unoccupied, like watching the empty flow of the tide after the storm.

The nurse maps my inner fronds, the darker spaces. We listen to my blood, the soft thud of waves, moving in a fluid fashion from place to place. My chest tightens. My body cannot help but remember the joy, the looking, the finding. Those tiny fingers, all of them with their thumbs in their tiny aquatic mouths, the rolling and the turning. Those two creatures who are so formed and loud and airborne now, those other two that shine endlessly in the quieter stretches of the ocean, silent and bright.

It is strange, to be so uninhabited.

Incredibly, a newborn howls through the partition wall, followed by muted adult voices. I look quizzically at the nurse, who smiles and shakes her head.

That's pretty hard for some people in here, she says.

The crying is protracted. If it continues, I think, I will begin to lactate.

I lie there with my thickened chest, the shape of a flood of tears forming in my heart. I am remembering something else which often threatens to fall out of the edges. I remember being alone, watching all those hearts, those fingers. I remember greeting them all: my daughter like a small bear, my son who flung his hand up high, that bold soul leaping with arms raised to be the youngest then deciding to remain undersea, and the last one, who stayed incredibly for so long, whom I almost managed to convince that the world was a wonderful place, but who held her breath, and fell asleep on my ocean floor.

I remember it was only me who greeted them. Just me, their mother. I wonder now if I should have insisted, rather than ask, for company and be refused. Too busy, no time, no interest.

It is said to be churlish to bring up such things: that I was always alone.

But the fact was, it defined everything. It made me set back my shoulders, bear the solitary acts with as much grace as I could manage. Nobody else but me even so much as glimpsed the sea inside of me, when there were creatures furled in there. There was no "we loved him" or "we loved her".

Twas just me.

I'd not thought I had tears left for that, but I was wrong. In this unexpected moment in which I gaze into my own oceanic depths, and listen to the solitary beat of my own blood, this overcomes me.

Of course, there are many courses in life that I have not had to manage. I swim out into the open sea along the furrow next to the pool, the rip carrying me beyond the hunched woolly shoulders of the rock platforms, past the deeper pools and out to where the waves grow high like sharp blue dorsal fins trembling in the sun. I think of Katie, who was deserted with two babies, I think of Mary who was deserted at 36 with none, and of Jane who left empty handed. I think of Anne and her brand new breasts, her harvested eggs waiting in some dark storage for just in case...and I think of the fine babies they might have had for me to hold, to talk to.

I think of Georgie, whose firstborn leapt from a clifftop aged 17, a few months ago. I think of the hopeful eyes of the women hovering in wait for a scan to tell them that, somewhere in their private watery hollow, new life has been persuaded to take hold. I think of those who will never see anything but emptiness and silence in that underwater place up there on the screen.

Everything is relative, I think, as I head out towards the looming dark shape of the headland. I look at the small fronds of seaweed as I swim, at all the tiny points of light which trail from my moving hands as I disappear into the sea inside of me. I hope to myself that all these aquatic maps will, this time, be empty, and that what they find

is nothing.
Nothing but everything as it should be.

The sea tries half-heartedly push me under, but I'm not having any of it.I swim on: the points of light are buoying me up. Against the horizon my son hunches over his bright yellow board, gives me a wave.

I swim forever.

Postscript:
I am not having IVF, just a thorough look-over.

Paintings from Body of Water, 2010

in which the fish is herded into shore

2010-08-28T22:03:00.001+10:00

When the sea is breathing in such great sucking breaths I do sometimes worry what on earth will be dragged up from the bottom.
Sometimes it is dark, cold water from far below: from the domain of deep silent creatures whose blood is fixed at icy levels, whose fins fan currents which are viridian green and frosty. Other times, it is just sand, and the battered fragments of olive brown kelp.

When last the high seas came, huge rolling furrows of might marched in even rows from across the Southern Ocean, roaring and howling, foam dripping from salty lips. The cormorants headed inland and pelicans sought shelter in the lagoon in flocks like squat clergymen, the old geysers with oversunned pelts sat on their bench as always, waiting silently to pick a fight, the words hanging off their chins, waiting for me to slap. they restrain themselves mostly, as do I as I snap on my little swimming cap, adjust my goggles, daring them to make a stupid comment. Homophobia, misogyny, climate change...

On the first day of the swell I had to do nothing, for as I watched, my eyes round, my mouth open, the sea rose like the great wave off Kanagawa and reached up in an incredible arc, unbroken. Unbroken, it raced up the beach, unbroken it slapped the wall, and reached all the way to the beach house and slapped the old bastards right off the bench and strewing sand all the way up the car park. Up they jumped in fright, scrambling to stand on the wooden bench, drenched and grazed with sand and water. I watched, laughed silently, and gave the sea a knowing smile which it staunchly pretended not to see.

Never have I seen the like! They talk of that wave still, a week later. I smile at the memory of looking down the road and seeing the tops of the waves as if they were dancing over the houses like enormous muscular entities, the wind whipping the foam into plumes the size of trees. I swam in the rock pool that same day with my heart thumping like crazy, the sea desperately feeling round in the crevices of rocks with grasping fingers to toss me out or crush my bones. Folks, spying me there in my pink cap cutting through the slabs of storm foam, sure and solid, fancied they might join me, but soon retreated when faced with the walls of water.
I cant help being here, i feel like saying to them, I really can't.
And I know exactly what to do and where to go, where to hide from a thumping, how not to get flung out onto the rocks upon my head.
But i don't. They just shake their heads and scramble out. The Old Geezers laugh at them.

The next day after that the wind gave up and had a rest, so the sea had nowt to do except jostle and fret, its body muscling and rolling, curtains of sand rising from the ocean floor and foam like torn lace washing this way and that. Lively water it was too, sizzling with life, with things. It was this day. the day after the day of the Great Waves, that the dolphins came back.

I had not seen them for a month or two, but here they were, just off the back of the ocean pool, and the pod had grown by at least a third. The biggest one was there, that I call Two-fin, because it appears there are two dorsal fins, or one with a large slash out of the middle. Two-fin is always in the lead, purposefully leading the others around and around in that strange little love-knotty dance, tighter and tighter they embroider the surface of the sea until they all break free and fling themselves jumping into the air on the crest of a wave. Moving in circles. Revealing themselvs suddenly, amongst the surfers, their huge bodies silhouetted, silent, gliding.

It seems it is winter when you see them most here. They often arrive and circle and hunt for an hour or so and then at some secret sign all head off, leaping back out to sea, out towards North head. One dark winter day when the ocean was stirred much like this week I was in the middle of the beach at sunrise when they appeared. Quietly I put on my goggles and slipped in, alone, feet-first off the sand bank as they were so close to shore, and watched them from underwater, weaving and circling through the weed strewn water.

It is no small thing though, to be in water with such large creatures, face to face. For they are huge, muscled and dark: they are like water made solid, they are silent and full of purpose. One holiday, up on the North Coast, I swam in the ocean at the unpatrolled beach on which we camp. I am timid of this ocean, as it is warm and busy with creatures large and small. It is unknown, unwatched. I swam parallel to the beach with long hard strokes, looking below at the shadows in the ridges of sand, and the occasional stream of whiting pouring along them from time to time,
when suddenly a huge black shape appeared at my side,
then another,
then many.

I was surrounded by dolphins.

The sudden appearance, when one is out to sea, of an animal of equal size in very close proximity, is a terrifying thing. At eye level, you are vulnerable: it is an entirely different psychological perspective than to be at sitting height, with the relative safety of a piece of floating fibreglass from which to view the world.
They swam at me, around me, not quite touchingme until I realised I was being herded to shore.
They kept urging me into the shallows, swimming closer and closer around me in a tight and thrashing circle, until I could stand, at a depth I never imagined a dolphin would even swim. Still they herded me ashore, further, until I stood ankle deep, and then they all turned and headed back to sea.

The beach was deserted and I had to walk quite some way back, heart thumping, trying to make sense of it all. The fishermen dragging their tinny up at the end of the beach, gutting fish and spangling the sand with scales, remarked that they had seen a shark, which is nothing new.
It might have been a dolphin, I said, but they squinted at me briefly, shaking their heads.
I paddled out every day after that on a board, desperate for them to come again, but they did not reveal themselves to me again, not face to face, not from my board.

It was not until I had returned home and was watching a news report that I had a fancy as to what my rounding up by dolphins might have meant. A group of swimmers in New Zealand were herded together buy a pod of dolphins, which swam around them in a tight circle and herded them towards shore. They were protecting the swimmers from a large shark which was circling beneath the surface, by screening and bunching them together.

I have always wondered if those dolphins had surrounded me to protect me from an unseen shark.
I like to think they did, getting me safely to shore. Finding me alone out there, they gathered about and took me home.

***

The local dolphin pod stayed for a week, hunting and circling. Folks sat on the cliffs and paths above to watch them. I tried to swim out and join them, but the sea grabbed me by the head and threw me back, giving me a good slap on the way, so I pretended I had no intention of heading out the back throught he huge dark green channels and over the vast peaks. I made like I was merely rinsing my hair, making the most dignified exit I could muster, before hearing the sea say to me
leave them be, let them alone
and I stood dripping on the wind blown sand and watched them from there.

***

The wind made a good show of things at night, pushing the sea into submission, blunting the sharp edges, wrinkling the oily slick surfaces with icy vigour. After only four days, the sea had tired, and gave up. So did the wind, sitting back breathless and watching the sea become a hard flat millpond beneath a luminous sky.

I swam in the rockpool with burning skin, concentrating on my stroke, imagining the cold to be fire until I could not feel it anymore. Until my skin had turned to scales, silver and moonlit and impervious to the cold. All I feel is the soft breathing of the sea, shifting next to me, held back by rock.
I swim and swim and swim like a shard of ice.

It is a week since the Great Waves came, and the dolphins have returned to wherever it is that Two-fin always takes them: somewhere just out past the Heads, I imagine. They could be anywhere in my dark and vasty sea: I can never see as far as I would like beneath its shining skin. There is still a sandy
tide-mark and driftwood beneath the bench from when the sea told the Old Geezers to hush their mouths, and smacked them soundly.

I slip in now, and feel how the wind cannot defeat the great body of the ocean: it is warm and clear and full of life. The sun dances in patterns across the ocean floor, and blow as hard as the wind might, it can chill the rock pool, but not the sea.

I head towards the horizon. There is nothing but light, salt, and water.
Nothing but me, and the sea. And somewhere, not too far away, stitching together the endless shadows of the vasty ocean, Two-Fin and the dolphins swim wreaths in their endless dance,
round and round and round.

In which the fish speaks of dark glass

2010-07-14T14:20:00.001+10:00

The fish will speak today.

Even though the sky is low and sitting on my shoulders, and crows strut on the damp sand pecking and throwing their beaks into the air, even though the horizon looks dull and dim, I will speak, because I fear I may lose my voice entirely if I don't. So today will be the day that the fish will speak.

Six months is a long time in the life of a fish. Six months, to some, is longer than a lifetime. The last six months have brought me to an almost-halt, but not quite, and so I will speak myself back into existence. words will draw me back into visibility.

Its just i am so tired, tired beyond imagining. Even the sea knows this. It slapped me hard yesterday and I barely reacted. But I think I will wake soon, let me see.

I have woken in a film. I think the director may be sometimes Lasse Hallstrom, but sometimes others must step in and alter the tone slightly. The film is about a dysfunctional family, all of whom seem to exist in their own small spheres, and to whom any semblance of normal family life seem alien. It is as if I stepped on the wrong train and did not notice until now, thousands of kilometers later, barely able to remember where it is that I was supposed to be heading.

Nobody can have it all.

It is a conundrum, isn't it?

If I do not enact my self, paint my pictures, imagine things, make my way in what has been my life since I was seventeen, I may as well cease to exist altogether. But putting together my exhibition was all-consuming, and for the first time I realised that i could not do such things alone anymore. I could not rely only upon myself to haul paintings, plan catalogues, hang things and the many other things required just like I used to. That art does not fit into a neat space which allows you to drop children off at 8am and collect them at 3pm. Art wants to occupy your thoughts entirely and lucidly, with passion and imagination in equal measure. Art stomps on the shopping list in your head and banishes the phone numbers of the tradesmen you need to fix your creaky house, the dates of deadlines and visits to teachers. But still it presses in and you rear up

I have been putting everything else ahead of this for too long. i cant stop now

and on you clatter with your project and your thoughts.

Six months.

Eight half baked blog posts. Fingers that resist the keyboard, nothing to say.

I wrote a thesis.

i was terribly behind, and stayed at home while the family went on holiday without me. I woke at 6am and sat all day at the table typing the thoughts of the last two years into a large jumble and sculpted them into a vague shape. My hand ached and my shoulder acquired sensations, a pain when I swam. I competed in only three races, limping along slowly like a moth with one burnt wing. Thankfully my old art school friend was also typing in unison just as neurotically neurotically, on a similar project, and we kept in touch via panic-stricken email. She is represented in the Australian National Gallery and appears on the Art School website as a shining example. She wins big grants, she is a superstar, but still she cried and struggled with self doubt. I helped her with her work. She panicked about her husband and son. We both discussed the guilt of staying at home while the others go on holiday without us.

In late January she was hospitalised for five days, they thought she had a stroke. I knew immediately the sensation: the burning nerves in the face, the paralysed arms, the headache. Touch-pad itis. Worry. She even outdid me on the neurosis. This made me laugh.

In my head, there is a table.

It used to be a large and beautiful table with things piled elegantly upon it. Volumes of history, books, art. Ideas about the garden, ideologies on parenting. Opinions. Large silver antique compotiers filled with enthusiasm and joy, large paper chains of bits of philosophy, pomegranates, pictures, passion and desire. Platters of still lifes, the recipes for painting with oils stroke by stroke. Ink-marbled copies of half finished poetry, calendars and schedules. All piled up on that table.

But now the table seems to have shrunk to the size of a Parisian cafe table. Naturally, I am grateful that the table, tiny as it is, retains some charm in its european aesthetic. But the piles of things don't fit on very well, and I am only able to see one pile at a time. If i want something else, I must hunt endlessly through reams of tangled items which have fallen on the floor, rummaging endlessly. So all those grand ideas one retains in one's head in those glorious moments of lucidity seem destined not to return. Once they drop from the tiny table into that great chaos at my feet I have to struggle to find them. After a wile I forget to look. It makes writing things like theses rather difficult, makes remebering day to day things just as hard, and to make matters worse, this hunting is usually acompanied by the same refrain if you werent so precoccupied with your art.

But that is the thing: the art perches on the edge of this tiny table, waiting eternally. The pile in front of me is always the same tedious work books, shopping lists and parent-teacher schedules. Objections to council, appointments for Xrays. If i drag the art pile towards me, the other things crash down upon it. I hold firm to a small volume, and peek into it whenever i can. I keep my hand on it, so I can feel it when I am unable to see.

With one of my very favourite ocean swimmers, Glistening Dave

We passed, both of us. My friend and I.

I sent my thesis to the most wonderful person in the world who raked through it like a fine silver comb through the tangles hair of a flea-ridden wolf. He removed all the fleas, and helped me untangle the knots. It took two days. I submitted it at last, all tideied and neat. The report returned no corrections.

A miracle.

My daughter, for the past six months, could be said to have a condition.

Yes, let me put it like that: a condition.

It is easy to put it in a neat single-word box like that. The condition makes me miserable and makes me doubt my own existence. The condition has changed her into someone I can barely recognise and with whom I am running out of energy to deal with. I read of warm mother-daughter moments and wish to cry, wondering what i did wrong, accusations of an art preoccupation ringing in my ears.

But I cast my mind back and find myself seing the beginnings of it all. Words knock around in my head no such things as bad children only bad parents.

Reading stories to her does not work. I can no longer lure her to my bed and the Water Babies lies unfinished. I wonder what i should have done, and look at my own isolation within everything. I wonder. I wonder how other people experience happiness, and whether I understand this at all. Throughout my days this eats at me, eternally. Perhaps i should have phoned teachers at school more often, insisted on that hard-won appintment with professionals that she refused to attend. Perhaps i was preoccupied. Perhaps I missed the boat altogether.

She throws a fit at her grades, 89%, because she has not attained over 90%. I tell her this might be due to the fact that she did not sleep during her exams. She hisses at me.

My exhibition fell in the middle of term. The students gave me their third assessment task and I promptly threw all 149 of them into various baskets and threw myself into organising my exhibition.

Paintings seemed to me unfinished, not properly considered, but they were hung. I thought they looked quite good. It was so peculiar to see them somewhere else than the Nest of Fish on my easels.

It is the strangest thing, an exhibition opening: I wish in some ways i could have levitated above it all and watched all the people who had come. Had a good look at them from my position up in the air. Marvelled at the existence of them.

People that come to your openings are loved and treasured forever. Friendsips can be made and broken on opening night, honour among thieves and all that. But I smile to myself to think of the folks who came. I store all of them like dolls in my silver compotier, lovingly. I received such a thrill to see beloved persons from my past.

The swimmers came, in hordes, surprising me on a cold dark night far away from home. They all came and stood in the space and all of us were underwater together. All of us.

I was barely able to speak to so many people at once. I struggle to talk to people face to face one at a time sometimes, let alone everyone I know simultaneously, and so was sure to have offended at least somebody.

I remember once going to a friend's show, at which I knew nobody and was not spoken to, and I hated her for a year. After driving an hour and a half through traffic, I was handed a price list, listened to her husband hustling for sales, and made my escape as soon as I could. This came back to me as I considered the handful of people I must have neglected to speak to.

Offended indeed was the friend whose invitation remained in my bag for want of a postcode till the show was finished. He will not return my apologetic emails.

Oh well.

Folks ask, Did you exhibtion go well?

and I reply that it did, it went very well. But there was a payoff. It was a hard-wrung success.

One of the very best things was the presence of two of my favourite girls, Eleanor and Ulrike, like a dream come true. I am desperate to find my photo of Eleanor, but it continues to evade me. My laptop is a jumble of files in which it is hard to locate anything...but it is strange I cannot find the very photo I want the most.

I did, however, find this picture of Old Black, who came, silently and left without speaking. I guessed who he was later, when looking through the pictures. He put a photo of me up on his blog. You might know him, but maybe not. he is very quiet, but it is interesting to read about his life in Sydney which is quite different to mine. Strangely he also works at the same place I do, but I have never seen him there.

Old Black, bless him

For the rest of the term I continued to lecture, and for one day of the week I lectured for a straight six hours. The Faculty, in its administrative wisdom, also decided to schedule most of my year's allocation in the one semester, which meant I taught six courses instead of the usual three or four. For each of these 149 students, there were approximately eight more items per student each to assess and record. Those baskets of projects came back to haunt me with a vengeance. They took me two weeks, night and day to read and grade. Then I assessed all the painting, the sculptures, the digital media, the drawings, the essays, the journals. At one point I was so tired I was crawling along the piles of work on my knees because there just wasnt enough room on tables to place them. The projects were so deadly dull I would lose concentration often and have to stop.

Naturally the shy student to whom I had given an extension seemed to appear a regular intevals, and I was too disinclined to send him off. The resident snake did not appear, presumably because of the cold, which is a pity, because I'd have liked the snake to poke its little head in and say hello instead of forced conversation with extended students.

Meanwhile, my son continued to fail at school. His new, expensive school.

I am given a schedule to help with homework but he is as slippery as that snake and evades me. I arrive home from work and commence on the cooking, distracted by thoughts

if I make a nice dinner everything will be alright

As i chop and cut and juggle pans I try to ascertain what it is that my son must do. Usually his homework book is missing, or he spins me a tale about having none, or that he has done it. I hold his homework up above the saucepan and examine it for clues as he tells me that the teachers have told him how well he is doing, but this may be his fancy. He appears not to retain spoken words in his head,

like me, needing words to look at. I bark orders to learn his maths, write his history. He says he is working, listening, concetrating. we have im assessed at a professional outfit for such things. Sometimes when I arrive home from work he is still out in the surf. he returnd and I nag him, knife poised above yet more sliced onions, to get out his homework. I am trying yet another dish, I am chopping parsley, carrots, garlic.

More often than not my dinners are barely eaten. Excuses, absences, picky eaters, late nights. I slide the food off the plates and into the bin.

He contracts a virus and is laid in bed for ten days. I have to go to work and leave him with a pile of comforts. He falls further behind. I struggle to do my work, to teach, and to mark papers. I am not entitled to sick pay or leave. I receive letters about my own results, and do not read them for a week. I rush into the market and emerge with food, which I cart home and cook. Often it is uneaten. After that I keep on with my grading. I stare into space and more and more things fall into the chaos beneath my parisian cafe table. I have to phone teachers, sign detention slips, find socks, iron schoolshirts. Uniform demerits pile up on the kitchen bench, but not on my brain-table. I forget them. He receives even more. I iron faster, harder, higher.

Youre so distracted by your art

My studio is unvisited, the brushes gone hard, my life conducted at a run: I submit the university grades six hours after the deadline, feeling numbed. My touch-pad-itis makes me slower than ever to type them in.

We travelled to the snowy mountains almost the moment I finished everything and sent it in just outside the deadline. No failures, lots of splendid results. I barely managed to pack, and the house, after six months, resembles the cafe table, except with real life dust and dirt. I call our cleaner, let go months ago, and she agrees for a large sum to clean it. I spend six hours cleaning, and for 24 hours, our house is able to breathe. We are going on a Family Holiday. I am going too. I will be there, rather than typing at home.

We leave the house cleaned. First time in six months.

In the mountains we ski. I watch my daughter from a distance, sweeping down the mountain at astonishing speed with astonishing grace. She is the first one down the mountain, the snow untracked, and i see her from above, sitting on the chairlift. Folks exclaim and point at her, so spectacular is she.

Then she catches an edge, and falls. As spectacularly as she skiied.

She plummets twenty meters, a plume of snow rising behind her like a volcano.

The mountain is silenced.When she stops, she is completely still.

I watch her then, standing up and laughing, raising her arms above her head in victory.

I watch her from a distance, from above, from the sky in my chairlift. If I catch her I am left standing in her wake, watching her tracks. People talk for the rest of the week about that girl on Mount Perisher, the first run down.

Every day the sun beats down as if we are in another world, except for one morning when a cloud drift obscures everything and makes me giddy. Some hours I feel the sense of flying, of shooting along the frozen air in arcs, as if I am a star in the sea or a fish in the sky and I remember something of myself, of my body but I feel heavy and earthbound much of the time. Normally at this time of year the Ski lub holds its training sessions for the juniors, but seemingly they have been abandoned now that a good portion of them are on sports scholarships at Mountains Grammar. There, they ski and train every day.

I drink Caprioskas in the bar and read in the afternoons. I fight with my daughter. she torments her brother and backchats me.

My body aches from fallout with her.

There is not enough snow to get to the other side of the mountain,

and many trails are closed. Rocks and grass protrude in places.

This time last year I was on my way to Venice.

The thought makes me groan unbecomingly.

On a day such as today the ocean floor seems untroubled by anything but its own large watery movements. No light plays in flickering lines, nothing is suspended in the water, no shadows, no weed and no creatures. There is no wind and little light at all, in the sky above the thick violet banks of liquid cloud flow from deep in the flatlands until, reaching the edge of the country and meeting the sea, they fall like waves from the sky, unruffled, smooth, oppressive. The water is a smoky turquoise, to watch the ocean floor so pale and quiet.

It is like looking through dark glass.

I am swimming with my friend Mal, with whom I swam through the cold winter of 1993 with the furled bud of my girl still stored inside me. we remeber it. We agree, yes, that winter was an icy one and the seapool got down to 10 degrees, but i felt nothing, warmed as I was by the presence of that girl and a network of bloodvessels.

On such a dark still day it was good to head to the deep still water with my old friend. A solitary group of bream scatter as we glide silently over them, heading towards the open sea.

Just past the break where the water became that green glass colour, the sea gave me a very hard and unexpected slap. I pretended it didn't hurt, righted myself and pushed on, without saying a word.

In which the fish speaks on her exhibition and two small scraps of home

2010-06-08T09:20:00.002+10:00

The fish has been unable to write:
Perhaps there are still folks who call by this quiet place, and, finding it empty, move on?
So here are some times in the
life of the fish, in the event I can induce you to stay a moment.

Exhibition (1)

It was a rather big job to suddenly have to empty out my nest

and take it somewhere new

and hang it up, all in the light rather than in stacks around the wall.


after two days it was nearly done.

Upon which a herd of dogs raced in to see what was going on.
Either that or they knew there as a fish in the vicinity: you know what dogs are like.

Domestics (1)

Upon receiving a note such as this one that I was given

one might be forgiven for puzzlement.
Unless you knew that the writer of the note
had been reading the Aberdeen Bestiary
and you knew it meant "good luck mum"
in an obscur and little-known dialect.

The above author also penned the following advice

To
Let you spirit Sore

I will try my best...

Exhibition (2)

At last the fish has hung the paintings up on the wall
in the sea-grotto
with the shiny white floor.
And look, someone has come early.


It's Constantine.



Here is Constantine and the fish about a century ago
at another of the fish's exhibition openings
only about 200m away from where this years one is held.
My, we look different.
Well the fish does.
Annoyingly, Constantine does not.

Here is a local who makes the fish laugh, and on doing so, laughs himself.
So we all laugh loudly and it rings in the grotto.
Even Div laughs out there in the street.

and it continues.
The hour before a show opens is not much fun. It is usually as quiet and scary as anything you can imagine.
I m glad Div and Con have come early.
But Div is not good on advising me on how to do my hair.

It gets dark



And the fish swims in the grotto
and waits for guests to arrive.



*

Domestics (2)

My daughter has issues at present.

She is 16.

It seems she has often has issues

but at the moment, it is quite distressing.

I develop anxiety pains at times like this,

when things seem to overwhelm me.

She seemed so distressed it got me wondering

what I would have done if she were a small girl.

In fact I looked at a photo of her as a little gitl and wondered where on earth

her baby face had got to, but there you go.

If she were small I would have cuddled her up in bed with a story.

So that is what I have done, cuddled her up in bed with a story,

which means I have to go to bed early and I bundle her up in my bed

and I read to her. I cram her and her puffy tear stained face and her smeary make up

and her big limbs into my bed and give her a bit of a pat on the back for a while and then read.

She thinks its very funny, and she thinks the story is boring.

But I pin her down tightly and I read a chapter of The Water Babies every night.

Persistently.

She falls asleep very quickly, in fact, I had to prise open one of her eyeballs last night and hold up the book closely

because she was going to miss the picture of Tom

with the beautiful Water Fairy.

Already she looks a lot better.

In fact she laughed when I marched into her room, turned off her computer

and said story time

instead of screaming at me, and she trotted on into my bed.

and curled up ready for the book.
She later said it was the most
silly story ever.

but the cats thought this was a grand idea too.

Her father does not like this at all.

He has been banished to her bed

and his feet get tangled in her wrought iron bedstead.

But look

I say,

You can see the improvement.

Indeed, she looks much better, with roses in her cheeks and

at least I know she is not on chat all night

or crying

till after midnight.

Her father says

I think I'll have to get her a bigger bed.

I say

Good idea.

*

Sea

and all the while

the fish swims in the vasty ocean:

where the fish belongs.

in which this fish is swimming as hard as she can

2010-05-12T07:38:00.000+10:00

and fixing pictures to walls,

and hoping to see lots of you

very very soon.

Thank you all of you for your good wishes, and

those of you coming tonight

I look forward to seeing you

very much.

In which the fish is on the wall

2010-04-18T13:48:00.000+10:00

Oh, the fish has been busy, yes she has. Days are a blur. She drowns in things other than the ocean.

If you would like to come to my exhibition, please email me and I will send you an invitation.

It begins on the 12th of May.

the fish lately

2010-04-03T08:58:00.000+11:00

The life of the fish has been caught up in a strange and turbulent tide.

Here are some fragments of it, the bits that I can navigate quite well,

for there are other parts that I cannot.

the fish at nine

2010-04-03T06:53:00.001+11:00

For Isabelle, and her flowers

What was I like when I was nine?

I lived in the beachside suburb of Merewether, in Newcastle. In a white timber house with a bay window and a typical coastal backyard with tough saltproof grass, and terrifying prickly pear over the fence. Lined up along the silvered wood of the paling fence were the white skeletons of coral and shells, collected over decades. When it was hot, the saltbush smelt like blackberry, and shells peered up from the sandy soil, no matter where you looked, there would always be one or two, even in the grass along the flat pathways to school. My mother used to pull snails off the daisies and drop them into a jar of salt to kill them: I remember having hysterics, and her laughing. I still think it is cruel and nasty.

My brother was younger, and I played with him when I emerged from my reading, but he was pliable and a bit too complicit. I bored with him easily, even though he was sweet enough. Sometimes we fought. One time we fought like the two cats of Kilkenny in public and my mother never recovered. Lots of hair pulling and slapping: she was so mortified I thought she would abandon us, but no, she was stuck with us.

My best friend was Lisa, who was pretty with green eyes and gleaming blond hair. She was very popular, and I was always amazed at her loyalty to me, so quiet and easily bewildered. Once I ran to the teacher to tell on someone who had dropped a paper at lunch, just so I could be rid of her and have Lisa to myself. My other favourite was Alice, who had large, pale blue dreamy eyes and long white plaits with ribbons, like a fairy person. She still looks like that.
Lisa married a very rich Italian lawyer. He was my landlord when I was at art school. Even later, her daughters turned up in my class at the posh school I worked at as an art teacher.

But me, at nine.
I was given a watch for my birthday, but I really think I could not tell the time, even then, because time was an abstract concept of which I had no grasp. Time meant nothing.

I loved Classical Mythology with a passion.
I preferred the Greek to the Roman, and my favourite was Persephone. Thanks to Volume 4 of Richards' Topical Encyclopedia, which I stole from my Grandma and still have, I actually believed the illustrations were photographs. They were, in fact black, and white reproductions of paintings by the likes of Ingres and Bougereau, and convinced me utterly of the truth behind these stories.

I loved my Derwent Pencils, their scent, their rich colours with names like Imperial Purple, Prussian Blue, Spring Green, Crimson Lake. I used them incessantly, going into raptures at the experience of using one freshly sharpened, or shading two colours together.

After school, I was only allowed to go to the beach if I was with with Lisa. Never alone. We used to go to the secret beach and find huge abalone shells, the likes of which I never see today. They looked so ugly from the outside, but their inner secret rainbows were so beautiful. I coveted the colossal shell that Lisa spied first one day, it would have covered my whole face. The biggest abalone I have found in recent times on my morning walk on the beach was almost the size of my ear, and usually they are much smaller.

Lisa and I used to swim in the ocean pool, silently, with only our eyes and nose above water level. We would noiselessly swim to the green net bags tied to the side by the fishermen and unpick the knots with our nimble fingers.
Out would swim whiting, bream and blackfish, freed from their bonds, and away we would all swim, fish and children, the silent liberators. We would and slip up and over into the surf, unseen, the fish would head for the safety of the dark shadows until the tide came up. The Merewether Baths are the largest ocean baths in the whole wide world.

At school they were strict with uniform and one day I wore pink underpants instead of regulation Navy Blue. I was ordered off the monkey bars, and had to play alone. At home I was always occupied with drawing, or books. I read endlessly, setting the stories in the coves along the beach with their towering darkness and sandy inlets: Ivan Southall, for example.
I went years later to that beach and was stupefied to note how small and low it seemed.

So, Isabelle, myself at nine?
Living in my imagination, swimming in the sea, collecting shells, setting free the fish, making up stories, drawing coloured pictures...
Sounds very much like...me!

in which the sky is sea, and the sea is a basket of sticks.

2010-02-14T21:36:00.003+11:00

Solidity:

There is no such thing.

Even our bones are merely clever things that seem to hold us up through sheer belief. Fluted columns as light as bird breath. Things which seemed solid become inevitably swept away, washed away by time. Even time itself seems completely abstract.
Nothing is forever.
When I was small I had such faith in things, in objects, in structures, in the slow and steady march of time. Now I just marvel at my own tenacity in hanging on to beliefs at all. Babies disappear and become complete other persons. Persons disappear altogether. A place evolves into somewhere unknown. Concrete things just melt away. Lose their meaning.

The sky is low today, and it showers at regular intervals in long wet breaths. The sea has pushed the sand into a hump, so that the beach stretches out a long way, rising in a long low incline then falling away steeply at the waters' edge. When the tide recedes, small lakes are left in the hollow of the sand. Here, small children sit and dig and play. I watch a father carefully construct a dam, his backside in the air, his small daughter, in four shades of pink, throws her spadeful of wet sand at the very moment he raises his head.

My daughter is on patrol. She watches the edge of the water with pale eyes, her hair in long wet strands from the wet air and the salt. The sea lifts itself up, and she narrows her eyes, watching and waiting. New lifeguards chatter excitedly around her; they have just passed their exam. There are so many of them, all eager to be watching, waiting, prowling at the edge of the ocean in brand-new yellow and red. They stand about with their hair in sheets, sand spattered on the backs of their legs. My daughter has removed her emergency toned lifeguard clothes, and hovers, pale skinned, in blue, silent and barely visible. Yet the small children follow in her shadow when she swims, then they follow her out again, like little doctor-fish. They sit nearby, cross legged. She moves, and they move with her. Looking at her in her blue club costume, I can almost glimpse her as a tiny girl, in the smaller version. Same colours, new girl.

It is warm and inky. Eveyone sits on the rain-pocked sand happily, playing in the tidal puddles, in the strange light. I can smell the base note of salt and the wetness of the sand in the warm air.

The sea beats itself on the steep incline of sand at low tide, snarling in a froth of flung sand like a serpent flicking its tail in its sleep. Beyond this, it is smooth between the sets of waves. Knots of people negotiate the wild rhythms at the edge, reluctant to step into the deep.

I wonder about the things I hang onto, I wonder about the things that disappear and I dont even notice.
I count the things which remain as a constant, forming a rhythm to my life and thoughts. Something that bundles me together, me, creature of salt and blood and bones and hair, all too ready to wash away. Dissolve.

The hard sloping bank of sand is pleasant to walk on and the low sky like dark watercolour seeping into the air just above my head. I enter the water, bracing myself for the onslaught, trying to look nonchalant, my goggles around my neck.

I have to drop quickly to the sandy floor as a nasty cracking wave curls swiftly out of nowhere, and I am immediately blasted with sand. Before I have time to so much as brush it from my face, I am forced to commando-roll beneath another two before I escape along the bottom and dart out across the deep.
Still the waves dance their vigorous waltz.

It is so dark beneath the blanket of wet inky sky that the ocean floor is rendered a dark green. It is cloudy from the rains, and shapes shift beneath me, yet the water feels like soft warm silk: so seductive, so beautiful, achingly alluring. Out here I am washed clean of sand, am nervously eyeing the shadows far below where indistinct swarms of fish move about in the swirl. The summer sea is filled with small animalcules, little lively swimming things, blue sea lizards. Transparent, spent carapace, small, soft and shaped like clawed hands drift and float, wave like tiny fingers. Tiny unseen creatures hover and dance. Nestle near to my skin, preparing to leave their constellation of pink marks on my body. My own body, without a carapace, without a bunch of claws, without a cloudy bag of ink to expel.

All are netted into my swimming costume, a harvest of sorts. I move through this lively soup like a whale shark on Ningaloo, sifting the water. Only a thin skin separates my inner body from my outer, the sea as warm as my blood, too warm to seize my head by the temples and knock sense in to my brain. Too warm to enliven my slow and bedevilled dreams. I feel as if I move slowly and fill myelf with a mad bevy of microscopic monsters.

It has rained so much that the lagoon has burst its banks, and leaves swirl past me. Casuarina needles poke at me, needle my arms. Large brown eucalyptus leaves flap past like huge moths in the dark green waters. The sea is laughing quietly to itself, like some demented thing, toying with folks at the edge and flinging them about. I keep silent and as still as possible, gliding through the depths, trying not to stare, pop-eyed at every thing that moves, trying not to shudder at the sensation of the clouds of casuarina needles, the flapping moth leaves. The dark indigo shadows

When the lagoon bursts into the ocean it carves a huge river into the sand. Out of the dark the water rushes, pale blue in the blackness of a rainy night, and empties into the sea. In the morning there are just the mudflats, inspected by a team of concerned pelican, walking seriously from puddle to puddle, inspecting the flat chocolatey silt with their beaks. All the lagoon dwellers have been expelled into the sea: tortoises, mullet, plovers, flushed from the rushes and the reeds at the foot of the casuarinas. Sometimes ducks and their ducklings, their striped fluff spiked by a sea-dunking, scooped up in cupped hands quickly and saved from the waves.
Along the shore lie reeds in bundles, a handful facing one way, the next another, all along. Tennis balls, odd shoes. Strange things knitted along the edge of the sea.

Now the sea has gathered everything, the lagoon contents, and fashioned a kind of floating raft of rushes, pointing this way and that, woven in between with small pieces of bark, pine needles, branches, and has placed me in the middle like some archetypal foundling. Jostled among the flotsam and the creepy jabbing reeds.

Enough, I say,
I cant stand you today.

And I make some mutter about summer water, how the soft silkiness of it is so beguiling, but just so unrewarding. And so populous. How I am bedecked with a tiny bestiary and a collection of lagoon items. How nasty the prickling of casuarina needles, the prickling of tiny things.
And I am unashamed to say it, and rush to the edge, prepared for by sandblasting, prepared to be knocked this way and that, to drop to my belly and let the nasty flapping curl of snad filled water pass above me.

I can't bear you today.

I look up from my raft of rushes, poked this way and that incessantly by pieces of rush and reed, and the world has changed again, like the magic faraway tree. Folks have shifted, children have grown, the sky has fallen and there are trees in the sea.

There is only one constant in this world of flux, there is only one thing. Endless. Constantly changing, but always there. I shall enter its summer self, among the frenzy of seaweed bits and mad swarms of fish, its raft of needling rushes and the red sand which tosses in plumes beneath the sudden violet storms. I shall spread my arms and lie on my back, watch the cumulus clouds pile up on the horizon, and the sea will say

shh shh shh!

such utter nonsense you always speak:

shh shh shh!

and as it throw one last spray of sand on to the backs of my sorry legs it shouts again:

Nonsense!

on drowning

2010-01-26T12:40:00.000+11:00

I have spent the last two years considering the notion of drowning.
I have made pictures of it, read about it, considered it in cultural terms, in aesthetic terms. How drowning is considered a feminine death, a womanly thing. The relationship of madness and drowning.

But the reality of drowning here and now, in the real world, intrudes upon my considerations. The secret truth of drowning, not the paintings of Ophelia, of female martyrs, the literary drownings of Edna Pontellier, of Maggie Tulliver. The truth is it is men who drown, men who overestimate their capabilities, who are reckless.
Four people have drowned this week, three men and one woman. Three of whom went in to retrieve children, three of them on unpatrolled beaches.

I swim in rips. I swim when the beach is closed, I swim when the surf is outrageously huge. I can do that, because I know intimately every breath the ocean, here in my small stretch, will take. I know each bump and runnel of sand beneath. Every artery of pulling water. I have competed in marathons swims of up to 8 kilometers. I have swum in the ocean every day for at least twenty years.

Even so, I rarely swim at unpatrolled beaches. And when I do, it is usually at a very shallow depth. Unknown waters make me nervous, edgy. Who knows what secret rips lie beneath? what unmet creatures? If I swim I wear fins, in case I need to sprint to shore. I holiday at a remote and lonely beach, where the cicadas are shrill and the dry heat bites, and I am always cautious. Dolphins once herded me to shore when I set off to do a swim along the beach. They circled me and drove me in until I was knee deep.

Dolphins, as benign as they are, are still colossal great mammals, dark and sleek. To have them suddenly appear at eye level is disconcerting at the very least: a fin is a fin at half a meter away. To have a whole bunch of them appear and shuffle you to shore is alarming, and I wonder to this day whether it was a sharkl they were herding me away from, or their babies. The pod is a familiar sight at that beach, and they delight in catching waves next to surfers. As I said, it is vastly different to see dolphins from the relative safety of a board from seeing one eye to eye with no warning. With nothing between you.

I think of that pod often, the way they appeared, how huge they looked, how close they came and how insisitently they urged me to the shallows before departing themselves back to the deep. It was an overcast day, and few people were around. The water, as is usual up there, was the temperature of bathwater, and full of fish. I was swimming parallel to the shore, in not too deep water, nervously trying to concentrate on my stroke, when the dolphins appeared and sent me out. I remember standing knee deep in the surf, incredulous at their cheek.
There was a shark the next day, though to be sure, there are always sharks.

It only takes twelve seconds to drown.
I remeber leapin over the rockpools to reach the three five year olds who, washing their feet, spilled into one of the waterholes and began to drift very quickly.

It is hard to hold three children at once. The thing is to make a game. A chain, holding hands hold tight, children.
Twelve seconds. The lifeguard had gone home.

I remember the pull of the ocean against their chests. I remember having to use evey ounce of strength to pull them in, every little bit. A little chain of bodies, laughing, even. Had the water been even two inches deeper when I reached them, I would possibly have lost them. It was up to my chin.

And once, even longer ago, when I was sixteen. I was at an unknown beach, surfing with my beloved. He lent me a wetsuit, which had no zip and was meant for a boy. My physiology made it such that it was very very tight in places, and loose in others.

I was way out to sea. The beloved sat in his usual position, hands on thighs, nonchalant. Ignoring me completely. I caught a wave, stood up, and nosedived. The board washed in, I was out in the deep, so I set off towards shore. It was quite a way, but I was a strong swimmer.

What I had not accounted for was the binding qualities of wetsuit rubber, and the weight of the water which filled the wetsuit. Unable to escape, the water made me so heavy as to sink. I could barely raise my arms.
The beloved rose and fell from view, still looking out to sea, flicking his hair.

I sank to the bottom.
And had an idea. I ran along and then pushed as hard as I could to the surface, like a seal. Took a breath, sank again, ran again, and pushed. So I was running along the seafloor, and then rocketing up for air. All the way to shore.

I was absolutley shattered when I made it to the sand, and lay there like a castaway. A bunch of boys, sitting on the sand, clapped and grinned and hooted. I tried to remove myself from the wretched wetsuit to find that I couldn't budge it and was wedged inside. I writhed and twisted and pulled. I used all feet hands and teeth and managed to wedge it up over my head so I was blind. With a wetsuit stuck between chest and upraised elbows, I pulled it with my nails with superhuman strength, millimeter by millimeter, until finally my face was free.

I flung the wetsuit onto the ground and collapsed onto the sand by the waters edge, exhausted. The boys hooted and clapped. I stood up, my dignity in tatters, arranged my bikini into some sense of order, sniffed, and tried to ignore them.

I was mute with rage when the beloved finally sauntered in. He flicked his hair, glanced at my audience, and gave me a look, as if to say, have you been flirting?
What I wanted to say was, no, I have been drowning,
but that was back in the day when such words evaporated on their way out of my mouth, and I said nothing.

Right now, among the crowds of holiday swimmers, there are twelve people on the beach staring out to sea. I can hear them calling out to swimmers who stray, I can see them circling the swimmers on their yellow boards.I can see also those invisible folks on the beach, who will leap to their feet and go to the rescue of anyone who looks like they may be in the wrong place, whose eyes , like mine, will see these things, who cannot help but watch. I can see the dawn patrol who saved the bipolar man from heaving surf one morning at 5am: myself, the vet and the dentist. And I know in those deserted places all along the coast, far away from here, the only watching eyes are those of birds, of dingoes, of dolphins, of silver bream.
No doubt one day lies the prospect that the sea will get the better of me, will capture me, and I will become a part of it forever. But that lies far away, for now I am watchful, watchful of myself and others. The ocean is a vastness and a terrifying force: this week has proved that so.

I am going now, to be in the sea, to have a few words, to pay my respects.

the year of the fish thus far

2010-01-09T22:55:00.000+11:00

This is the story of my life so far in 2010.

Somebody got on a plane.

leaving this

to arrive in this

as for me,

I myself have had quite enough of this

and more than enough of this

and this

(abandoned finery)

and certainly

not enough

of this

May your new decade be prosperous and fruitful.

Happy 2010

in which the sea demands an explanation

2009-12-23T13:44:00.000+11:00

I dipped down, slithering out through the runnels under and under, weaving my way seamlessly, out to the blue. It was the brightest, hardest, bluest part of the day, and part of me was chattering quietly about how I ought to have been and gone hours ago, and should have gone to the markets.

But the rest of me just let that thought go, and I stretched out my arm, tucked my face to my shoulder, and sailed through another wave beneath a surging plume of turquoise foam.

The sea surprised me then by speaking first. Quite directly, startling me with its sudden and unexpected voice, unheard for so long that I thought it lost.

Where have you been?

I stopped still. A cormorant flew low, almost directly above my head, as I rocked up and down. A fizz of salt burned my nose. I felt myself giving over to the utter sensuality of this, my eyelids dropping, my feet floating upwards.

I've been here.

I said to the sea,

Here and there. Around.

I felt the sea turn me this way and that. I put my head back and let my hair hang down, allowing this scrutiny.

Where have you been? said the sea.

You've not really been here.

Just last night, and the night before, I was here till the light bled from the sky, I answered.

And you know it.

I danced a mad dance in the lowtide push and pull, and you covered me with brick red sand as I danced so hard I could hardly breathe.

The sea remained silent then, waiting. Waiting for the right answer.

Alright then,

I said,

I have been places, and I have done things. I have been distracted. And I have not been out here.

and as I said this I did indeed realise that I had not been out into the deep, to think and dream, for quite some time. That my world seemed different. That I have been in far places, and that my dreams have washed me into different waters.

I have swum in an icy lake, beneath snow covered mountains,

where the water is as clear and green as the ice that feeds it,

I told the sea.

I know

said the sea.

I know all these things,

said the sea.

All water is me.

I swam a bit then, heading north. I could see Charlie Taylor and the three Miss Bennets out on their boards, Charlie glancing over the waves to see who I was. I dived down deep to say hello to the enormous crowd of snapper that had gathered far below me, but they all flicked their silver tails and fled: it is an error to approach Snapper from above in such a fashion. I had forgotten. I said hello to their disappearing forms, shadowy in the plumes of sand rising from the dappled sea floor.

Some things, I explained to the sea,

are just too big to talk about. You know that. I don't have to explain.

I still love you,

I told the sea.

which now held me suspended in a deep blue silence,

just the breaking of the waves further into shore, and began to swim in long strokes,

rolling with each stroke, pulling hard through the water till the bubbles flew in wispy illumined trails.

It was then I realised that the whole beach was one gigantic rip, and I wasn't moving except seawards. Charlie Taylor was a speck in the distance. My own son was around the next headland on his board with his friend, if I tried I could probably spot him from out here.

I took a long slow breath, and put my head down, carfully hiding my thoughts. The sea was holding on, quite firmly. I continued to swim north, so as to conceal the fact that I was being dragged eastwards. This was no usual rip, but one enormous, continuous surge, like an ongoing intake of breath. I maintained my lazy pace, my even stroke.

I could see the Taylor boy now, looking over, sitting on the Rescue board. The two older miss Bennets not far away, I could call them, and escape. But I don't. I turn over and backstroke, my hair hanging down, my body suspended.

See? I am not afraid. I can stay all day, forever if I choose. I will not flee, I will stay.

I dived down again, but there were no snapper in sight. Indeed, the ocean floor was so much further away. The sun sparkled on the water and the sea held on. A tiny helicopter passed overhead and three more cormorants so low I could see the downy feathers beneath their outstretched wings.

I swam. A piece of ribbon grass entwined itself into my hair. Some unknown fish flashed silver and disappeared. Dark blue swell lifted on the horizon.

I must go now, I told the sea. But I am here, I am always here.

the sea said nothing.

The dark blue swell picked up, and I began to swim hard, beating my feeet, pulling in long hard strokes, hearing the sigh as the wave picked up beneath me, tucking my head down, soaring. Soaring.

Until I am waist deep, then I stand, still feeling that firm strong pull heaving against my legs, coaxing me back. I am mere steps away from rejoining the world with its clatter and clamor and seasonal nonsense.

I turn around to face the horizon, and dive one more time in an arc beneath the waves.

Then I walk towrds the edge and up onto the slick wet sand, flinging my wet hair and feeling the sun on my feet.

I'm still here, always, I tell the sea before I climb the stairs.

I'm here.

Wishing everybody happiness, love and light, wherever they may be.

xxxx

Six Months in a Leaky Boat: In which the Fush looks at Long White Clouds

2009-12-10T08:07:00.003+11:00

Aoteoroa,

rugged individual,

glisten like a pearl

at the bottom of the world,

The tyranny of distance,

Didn't stop the cavalier

So why should it stop me?

I'll conquer and stay free

I didn't mean to disappear:

Things surrounded me, and hid me away, but not the things one might think.

I have been reflecting on an extraordinary year, which seems to be determined to show its wonders

right up to the last minute.

The visit I made to see my father right after he was drowning

I was astounded to come face to face with him, chatting and completely back to normal.

In fact he challenged me to a breath-holding contest, in which I almost took part.

The year continues to be filled with surprises.

in which the fish considers the deepest parts of the ocean

2009-11-17T12:33:00.000+11:00

He is underwater.

Air is pumped into his lungs via a large tube. He wakes, and is frightened, scrawls a note, his hands scrabbling in the air, like crabs dislodged from a rock crevice. He writes my name.

Dutifully, I appear when summoned. When he opens his eyes he seems to look at me as if from the bottom of the ocean, as if he has dreamt me. When I speak, his heart rate increases. I am not sure in what place or form he sees me. His eyes seem full of the ocean. He weeps.

Next day he is still peering at me from his subaquatic dreamspace. His hands, crabs again, clutch at the air, writing in the air with a finger. I can recognise the number 2, but I can't follow the rest.

I give him a pen and hold the board up. He scratches laboriously with the pen:

2/19

Awareness dawns. The 2/19th Battalion:

He wants his father.

His father, my grandfather, was a prisoner of war, and worked the Burma railway. In the morning he would carry stones uphill, after noon he would carefully carry them down again, so that no work was actually done. He of the secret diaries, he who only just survived Changi. He of the long face, the blue eyes and the secrets unmistakeably shared his genes with me.

My father misses his dad.

Next day I bring a book. Expecting the worst, I am prepared to read aloud to his underwater stare and scrabbling fingers, but there he is, awake and talking. Breathing.

The first thing he tells me is that all children should know about Changi.

About the Burma railway.

I read aloud the chapter anyway. He listens obediently.

He speaks about his father, ceaselessly, like I have never heard before. I wonder where he has been, down there in the underwater caverns, whether he has been swimming with souls I never knew were there. Naturally enough, since he is the father of the fish, the one who taught me the ways of the ocean in the first place, perhaps when he was absent from his body up there in intensive care he went for a wander, and ended up in the deepest places of the ocean, face to face with ghosts.

The sea has risen overnight: to look towards the horizon is like looking into the foaming jaws of a seamonster. Along the edge are scattered groups of people, most of them skiving off from school. A group of young men, that gleam of strawberry gelato upon their white flesh, are on their knees joyfully and energetically digging an enormous hole at the water's edge. They scoop great dollops of sand with their large hands, laughing. Making a pond. The foam crackles up at speed, and fills the hole, creating a fountain which explodes all over them.

On my return lap, I see from a distance that they have waded in. This concerns me, as the beach is closed. The pale lavender tints of their complexions tell me they are not from here, and I know the sea would fancy taking them and holding them deep in the underland, where they might meet old soldiers from Changi or God knows where.

As I try to decide what I will say to get them out, the lifeguard buzzes up on his trike, and gently coaxes them out of danger.

***

I find a quick place, and slither in, just to make my heart race. The water is turquoise flesh marbled with fat white streaks, totally opaque. I am under, over and around and out before anybody sees me.

In the rockpool the water is dancing wildly. I am surprised to see a swimmer, a grandma, clad in a crimson sunhat, paddling across the wild water. The ribbon on her hat is printed with crimson flowers and tied in a bow, her bathers are black, against the ghostly white of her small white limbs. Her feet make tiny movements, which seem to propel her slowly, gently, a single lap across the end of the pool. She looks up at me, her face filled with joy, and I call to her hello, hello so happy and pretty she looks you look so pretty in your hat I tell her and she smiles and swims on, her soft decolletage like a cloud billowing to the surface with each stroke. Watch out the tide is not yet full I tell her.

***

The sea is full now, so I enter the rockpool with wild delight. Great rolling waves obliterate the edges, huge spilling surges roll on in. Here I am in my own element, the moment I hit the water I am all speckled underbelly and webbed fins, spinning through the slabs of creamy foam and the speeding water. Head down, body tight, elbow high, reaching as far as my fins will reach. People drift by, and seeing me there cutting through the water, dive in too. They are not to know that just below the waterline I am all fishspecked belly, pouting jaw and great goggling fish eyes. They are not to know that I flick to the bottom at the sound of the whitewater coming, without putting my head up. That I circle and hold fast to the sand at the bottom at the sound of a certain sea-pitch in my fish ears.

My dad taught me that.

***

Old Tony, shadow boxing at the top of the steps, smiles when these people clamber out, weak kneed at the hammering they have received. He says he is tempted to tell them not to go in, but my presence there is deceptive, so they follow me. I find it hard to say please get out, it is dangerous because that would sound arrogant, but they scramble out pretty quick smart anyway, thank goodness.

***

My dad says he wishes he had asked his dad a whole lot more, too many things he will not know. He says that his surf club colours were those of the Navy, the Army, the Air Force. He says somewhere there is a medal, that it is for me. Give it to me then I say to him but he says No.

I swim on, like a fat speckled sea thing. There is no medal for this, I say, hanging onto the sand, feet in the air as the waves roar over . No medal needed for this.

In which the fish is surprised by a tragedy

2009-11-10T09:52:00.002+11:00

He has always been present at any significant art event in Sydney for as long as I can remember.

As a young art student, I remember Nick Waterlow's name spoken with both affection and reverence: he was responsible for putting Sydney on the cultural map with his curating of the Biennale of Sydney. Recently I watched him in dialogue with Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, marvelling at the ease in which he articulated his ideas, the way he spoke, and how much he was respected. His knowledge and understanding was international.

He didn't suffer fools gladly, and was not known to schmooze or curry favour with artists, yet he was able to create exhibitions which demonstrated ideas: they always showed things in a new light. He was passionate about art, and he was passionate about ideas.

I saw him buzzing around the MCA at last years' Primavera, with his little greek cap on his head, always part of what was going on. He looked wonderfully offbeat, his face maintaining a regal air in counterpoint to his general appearance. Occasionally I plucked up the courage to have a chat with him, because to be honest, he always made me slightly nervous. I didnt always talk to him about art, but sometimes about his daughter, Chloe, who I had been one of my very first students when I began teaching. He was close to Chloe.

I remember her when she first started high school: she was just like a Victorian Porcelain doll: beautiful white skin, dark eyes and ringlets. She had a particular look about her, and always remained a contained child, growing up to be a beautiful woman. I see now she abandoned the curls, no doubt letting some straightening device loose on them. I very much wish I did not see a photo of Chloe's straightened hair in the newspaper, I truly don't. I would prefer to think of her wearing her crown of flowers in the Jubilarian ceremony when she graduated. With ribbons hanging down.

Nick Waterlow has been so much a part of the College of Fine Arts for so very long I cannot imagine the place without him.

It is all so senseless. As Ian Howard says, it is the worst kind of tragedy.

(Photograph from the COFA website. My apologies.)

The scent of Blue

2009-11-02T10:37:00.002+11:00

When I was small, I seemed to see and feel things a little differently to everybody else, or so my mother seemed to think, though I was quite unaware, most of the time, of what other people did and felt.

Certain colours gave off a particular feeling and smell, the sounds of peoples' names prompted colours and shapes. I would be compelled to pick things up, if they were a certain colour, to feel them with my fingertips, or even my lips. Music always had colour and form, as did the sounds of words.

Sometimes I would see a coloured haze around peoples' head or bodies, and colours or noises would give off a sensation of smell. I didnt really think much of this, or the fact that Mum remarked on how odd it was when I remarked upon the colours of things which she only saw as black or white.

You are a strange child, she would say

I was much older when I read about the term synaesthesia, and it seemed to sound very much like the way I responded to things, as if the hard-wiring of my senses was a little bit off, or turned up to excess. At certain times I would have very strange reactions to things, to various physical sensations. Nabokov wrote so synaethetically, that when I read "Speak, memory" I understood the language implicitly.

After I had children, my synaesthesia seemed to diminish somewhat. I figured that I probably had sensory overload, and my brain had closed down certain areas which were not immediately important.

Last week I managed to get to my studio.

The moment I closed the door behind me I felt a beautiful feeling come over me. I welcomed the smells, the traces of the indigo dying from last summer still hanging as a base note, the aroma of gum turpentine very faint. Cineraria leaves which had been simmering, the fragrant little cigarettes Shoufay smokes.

But today I have a small parcel: inside it is a CD and some pictures of paintings, originally Venetian, but currently in Paris. I begin to feel that strange soft buzzing in my face and hands.

I put on the music.

It is Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

It is so known yet unknown, so beautiful that images immediately seem to swell out of nowhere into my head. I hold my large fat brush, with Titian's girl beside me, and spread the colours: Ultramarine blue, a golden Olive green, Viridian, Indigo, turquoise. Light flickering on underwater skin.

As I paint I seem to fragment into some multidimensional world, where I am in the pastoral scene described by the music: edges of land and sea, indigo shadows, bright cliffs and undulating landforms. Birds.

There is light coming in the windows as I spread the layers of paint onto the surface. As I change colour, I become aware that I can smell them, sharply. Not the actual scent of paint, but the sharp smell of the colour itself: the Olive Green smells like rotting food, the Ultramarine sharp and salty, high and sweet, Indigo smells like the darkest tone of a rose.

I look at the detail of the sash in the Titian painting: he has used Ultramarine for the highlights of the fabric, and a golden shade of Olive green for the shadows, like shot silk. The same exact two colours i am using.

The Fantasia continues in my head. It has been quite some time since I found myself in this state. I wonder then, if Titian and the Venetians ever had the same sensation.

Closing the door behind me when I leave, the real world floods in.

I sit with the children later that afternoon and eat watermelon, wondering if I should share the sensation of falling into colours and sounds today,

but find I haven't the words.

working from home in the house of fish

2009-10-26T14:35:00.000+11:00

Things are busy in the House of Fish. I am supposed to be writing today.

It is a non-teaching day.

But the house looks like a cyclone has been through it and I am hunting for a Very Important Piece of Paper, which of course I cannot find.

I have gotten the scanner to work though.

Naturally, I am allowing this to completely take over what I am doing and not one word has been written.

I did find some notes I took in a boring meeting.

and then I found a picture of my models wearing some of my Titian inspired brooches.

I wonder who is wearing these now?

Oh, look. Some flowers in Monets garden when I was there last. What splashy dahlias!

Ah, so pretty!

Looking at the time, I see I have lost another day as it is almost time to pick up the children on this rainly day. So much for working from home: the sum total of my efforts today is to make some scans, create even more piles of mess in the search for things I need, and a total avoidance of the Big Issue: the unwritten thesis.

Of which I have entirely lost the thread, the plot, and half my notes.

But have agreed, having been thoroughly shamed, to take the daughter Formal Dress Shopping.

Apparently, she and her friend are the only two children not to have a dress. All the Other Mothers have long taken their girls and spent their every dollar to clad them in some wonderful dress...the other said mother rang me in horror "do you know what i had to do today? take georgia shopping...oh, it was horrible"

so that leaves only me, the Failed Mother, yet to tackle the job.

Which sounds only marginally less horrid than writing a thesis in one weekend.

Oh, one day. Saturday, I'll be shopping...

In which the fish goes to see Veronese in Paris: or, How to Live in a Delusional Universe.

2009-10-14T11:44:00.005+11:00

Today

I am in Paris.

Long, long ago on the Passerelle des Arts.

Yes, Paris.

What's that you say? That the last time you saw the Seine it was not rearing up in plumes? That the water outside my window looks suspiciously like the Pacific?
Ah, yes. Fair enough observation.
My physical surroundings might say otherwise, but really, truly, today I am in Paris, and not in Sydney at all.
I am in the Louvre, looking at paintings.

No, no, that noise you can hear, the squabbling, no, that's nothing. I can't hear that here in Paris. Nor the moan of the stormy wind, nor the accusations that I have not done the grocery shopping correctly. I can only hear the murmur of the folks around me, and the delightful clack of my own heels on the floor as I tappity tap my way along the grand halls of the Musee du Louvre, pausing, almost in slow motion, to watch the trees along the Seine appear and disappear as I pass windows.

I'm not entirely sure what I will look at first, because there is an exhibition on which I am really wanting to see. Perhaps it might be nice to call by Ingres Odalisque, and then have a short black in the cafe before visiting Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto. Yes, the Venetians are in town, in Paris, and I am of course wanting to see the Venetians, naturellement.

It is a marvellous light which falls in the new section of the Louvre, just like in the British Museum, a seamless fusion of old and new. How I love it here. I begin to think about the way I inhabit cities almost entirely by their museums. How little I seem to see of other things in European cities. Ok, I have been up the Eiffel Tower twice, but I have never been in the Tower of London. Again and again I have navigated my way between the art galleries of major cities, familiar with the track between them, often oblivious to other features I may be passing.

You may, at first glance, think that I am in a beachside suburb of Sydney, curled up sheltering from the storm outside, the storm inside. But I am dreaming, so vividly that I feel as if I should say
laissez-moi tranquille, je suis en train de regarde les peintures
but instead, I merely half close my eyes, and continue walking through the Louvre until I get to the exhibition, holding my sketchbook and my little tin of London pencils how I love them so, you were with me when I bought them Gina, do you remember?
Holding my sketchbook clack clack clack say my heels: I must be wearing my boots. I look down, yes , yes, I am.

Once I went to the Clignancourt markets and bought a pair of charcoal grey trousers to wear here, with the black polo neck I always wore, and a new ribbon, which I tied in a bow on my ponytail, just so I would feel Very Dressed Up. Ribbons can do the trick quite nicely.

But no, Indigo dress and boots it is, when I visit Paris this time, to look at Veronese and Titian and Tintoretto.
Years ago I used to hand-paint miniatures in tiny little frames and sell them as brooches. in fact I was known as the Brooch-lady, I sold so many. I spent every Friday night and many others besides making and painting these brooches. It was endless, but I loved it.
I derived the faces from Titian and Veronese, tiny little faces I painted with a small brush, learning all about the shadows and shades, the skintones and the plaited tresses of these painters as I copied them with my brush. I surrounded my creations with fake pearls, and gold leaf, so beautiful. When I see the beautiful faces of Titian's women, I can recall the smell of paint, of being bent over my board, listening to the late night movie which ended at half past two in the morning.

But this time I am reminded of my beloved Venice, the faces in these paintings reminding me of drifting through the Accademia, or standing in the chapel looking at Peter Greenway's homage to the Wedding at Cana, or being surprised in the hot air of Scuola dei Frari by the whole universe of Tintorettos.

Paris.
Today,
today I am in Paris.

I am neither looking out at a storm swept sea, nor negotiating the various domestic minefields that weekends bring,
I am looking at Veronese in the Louvre, holding my red and white sketchbook and my pencils, sketching faces and beautiful sumptuous bodies, the details of braids entwined with pearls.
Let nobody tell you otherwise.

Porte de Saint-Cloud

(this is a rather depressing post)

It was my wish to be just like Caroline, I was in awe of her from the minute I heard about her.
I had been to Paris before, but this time my friend and I were going to spend time with her cousin Caroline, an Australian married to a Frenchman, Pierre.
Somewhere on my agenda I thought that I too might meet a nice frenchman, and be like Caroline, teaching at the language school.

Caroline was tall and fair, a little taller than Pierre, with large kind blue eyes and a gentle manner. She spoke beautiful French, and despite all the years I had studied French, including two at Alliance, I could not quite keep up. From the age of 12 I had decided that one day I should like to speak French and live a while in France. It is hard to keep up practice in Australia though, but the school excursion to Noumea was fun, even if it wasn't like going to France itself. I satisfied myself with Kieslowski films, and pretending I was Juliette Binoche, despite the fact that I am not shaped remotely like a French woman.

I loved their apartment, and I loved the address: Pierre and Caroline lived in Porte de Sainte-Cloud. Gate of Clouds, I often thought. An entry to dreamland. I can still picture the large gate, hear caroline saying that name, Porte de Saint-Cloud, the walk to the apartement. They had little notices in the kitchen, one featured a figure with a tricolore-croissant for a head. Pierre would say ello, breakfast-ead! as he passed it.

Caroline and Pierre introduced us to a heap of friends, one of whom I stayed with numerous times when I visited, he lived near the Sacre Coeur. They seemed to have friends in Paris from all corners of the earth. We often ate together, or strolled in the gardens, went to the Bois de Boulogne. I wished I could be Caroline, work in the language school, but I was not clever enough to get a visa, and frankly, my french was not that good.

But it seems Caroline pined for the blue skies and light of Sydney, as expats often do. The grey seeped into her soul. She had two children, and pined even more. She wanted to come home, she wanted to leave Porte de Sainte Cloude.

She rang her family in tears, and was told by her mother she had to stick by her family: she had chosen to live in Paris, and to stop complaining. Pull herself together.
The grey seeped ever further into her soul.

She stood in the sitting room one day, after many tearful years, and asked Pierre:

Do you love me?

To which Pierre replied

For gods sake, we are not teenagers!

At this, Caroline ran across the room, plunged through the beautiful, tall, open window, and down down down to land in a crumpled pile on the cobbled street below.

The children, recently in Australia finally visiting the cousins, asked about their mother. Wanted to hear everything about her, wanted to see this magical place where their mother was from, which they were now seeing without her.

Tell us about Maman, they asked.
Noone ever speaks of her, not Dad, not anyone.

I am thinking of Caroline now, because I have only just recently heard about what happened. It breaks my heart, I was so shocked I was incapable of speech.
And it teaches me a lesson not to envy the lives of others, that you can never tell what goes on beneath the surface. Had my mythical frenchman materialized, I may well have ended my days wishing and yearning for the bright skies of home. Or I may not have, I will never know. But it is not a good thing to envy the lives of others, no matter how golden those lives may seem, how hidden those shadows may be.

apropos of my last remark

2009-10-05T00:48:00.002+11:00

Humpback whale surfacing among the regular Ocean swimmers, Manly beach, august 2009.

(outside of Shark net season)

Baby whale freed from shark net

DEBRA JOPSON

October 3, 2009 - 1:09PM

"A six-metre long baby humpback whale has been freed after becoming tangled in a shark net off Kirra Beach on the Gold Coast.
It took three hours for a 13-strong rescue team to cut the whale free while its mother waited nearby, Matt Davidson, an officer with the Queensland Boating and Fisheries patrol said.
After being alerted by a shark net contractor that the whale was trapped, four crews, including one from Seaworld, used special "shoehorn" knives on the ends of poles to cut the net, while a strong northerly blew and sea conditions deteriorated.
"Once you lay the knife on the whale's body, it is manufactured in a way that will not cut the whale," said Mr Davidson.
The whale was unharmed and resumed its southerly migration, he said.
This is the second time a whale has been caught in nets off Kirra beach and the third incident involving humpbacks on the Gold Coast this spring.
On September 1, a humpback measuring eight-metres was freed at Kirra and on September 28, a 10-metre whale suffered tail injuries in a net off Miami Beach before being released.
The numbers of whales becoming entangled in nets is likely to grow as the humpback whale continues to recover from coming close to extinction in the 1960s, the chairman of the Australian Whale Conservation Society, Paul Hodda, said.
‘‘They are designed to kill sharks, to keep numbers down and unfortunately they kill whales, as well as other marine animals including turtles, dugongs and harmless sharks,’’ he said.
An estimated 10-14,000 humpbacks are migrating south to Antarctica this spring after breeding in warm northern waters and this is likely to increase again next year, he said.
Rescue crews are on hand around tourist areas like the Gold Coast, but in other less populated areas, whales become entangled and die, he said.
He called on people concerned about the impact the nets have to lobby politicians at all levels to get rid of them.
Alternatives which are not as dangerous to whales, such as drums anchored to the seabed with sharkbait on hooks are available, he said."

Sydney Morning Herald Oct 3 2009

in which the fish tells of a happy ending

2009-10-01T09:14:00.001+10:00

I saw the shark-net man and his boat laying out the nets and my heart sank. The silhouette in the hard glitter on the first day of the season moved along, dropping the curtain of silver rings in to the deep.

Surf Patrol not yet started, the sea quiet, the beach lonely.

After only two days, the word was out: there is a shark stuck in the shark net!

Kayakers and paddlers, perhaps even swimmers, had seen it there struggling.

Hilariously, the Police were called. There were nine of them, summoned by various phone calls by the distressed paddlers. All had phoned the police.

Seven uniformed policemen stood lined up along the edge of the rock pool and gazed out to sea.

Fur Coat, doing his laps, stopped and leaned a wet elbow on the edge and asked

What ya gonna do about it, mate?

and the constable nearest him answered,

Buggered if I know

Paddlers in their kayaks, looking down as they passed, saw it struggling, caught in the rings. All day and night I am filled with the horrible vision of the shark caught there, wriggling and thrashing. Some say it is a Tiger shark, which puzzles me. All these months the creatures of the sea have had free passage to do as they wish, and now here is this awful obstacle suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Today a shark, tomorrow a turtle or a dolphin.

Naturally people get very emotional about the issue. Anything to do with a shark terrifes all and sundry, but truth is the likelihood of being bitten is so slight.

I dreamed of the shark. I wondered how long it would struggle , bewildered, before dying.

Next day I was drying off after my swim. I mentioned the Tiger Shark to Trumpet., wondering if it were still alive.

Tiger shark? he said. No, it was a Grey Nurse. Oh, the coppers all lined up on the edge, gotta laugh...

Oh, no! a gentle, almost extinct shark, huge and shy....even worse!

But just before tears sprang from my eyes , he said

The Boat crew set it free.

The Boat Crew?

The Boat crew who had been training that evening, had heard about the shark. They had rowed their wooden surfboat out to the nets, lifted the heavy steel with their oars,

untangled the tired shark,

which, having been let loose,

swam free.

the fish on Sunday

2009-09-27T14:18:00.001+10:00

The temperature has dropped, my feet are cold, and the patch of sun has shrunk now that the days are longer and the sun is higher.

I want to curl up in the corner, where it is warm, and put my toes in the sun.

It doesnt take long for the disagreements to grow, even at this hour of morning. Hiding among the clutter, I try and ignore it. I pick up a book and try to read, just for a minute, but the words are aimed at me.

Sporadic shouting, muttered words. Silence. I go upstairs and fold clothes. Have another sneezing attack from the layer of fine dust that has seepd into everything.

Going to the wardrobe I am unable to get in to put the clothes away for the second time this week. Shoes spill over the floor in piles, thrown haphazardly in a frenzied search for a pair. I counted forty pairs last time. My chest contracts in fury. I bend down and begin to pick them up. It seems there are hundreds and hundreds. It is impossible to stand on them, as they roll and shift beneath my feet. Some are hardly worn.

Crumpled on the floor next to the shoes is a Zegna suit which has fallen from the hanger. I pick it up, and try and push the other suits apart to put it away, but it is a hard job. Finally I cram it between Armani and Hugo Boss, and tell them all not to fight. The bar on which they hang is beginning to bend.

I think of yesterday, when I was downstairs looking for a book on my bookshelf, and found the way barred by three stern looking suits, like man-effigies, barring my way. They are hanging on my shelf, for goodness sake, and another on the door handle.

These three very arrogant suits are standing between myself and my art texts, which says it all, really. I had wanted to throw them on the floor, but didnt dare.

I notice the suits have begin to creep over to my side of the wardrobe, shouldering their way across like bully boys. I note my own small row of shoes, my Russia Boots with their tops bent over looking decidedly dusty and old. I hurl the last of the pile of shoes in to place: the last boot I throw so hard at the back of the wardrobe that the cat comes scampering in to see what the noise is. There are still eight pairs of shoes lined up along the staircase, waiting for their flight up here. None of them are mine.

The wind having swung around to South west has swept away the warmer waters that have lately arrived, and the sea temperature has plummeted again. The sea and the wnd fight tirelessly: yesterday the sea put on a mighty show, rising high and bending over in huge curls at the westerly. Today the wind has flattened the sea, which glares and shifts. I am still trying to iron out the knot in my stomach from the last of the arguments as I went out the door. The one which made me shout at the children

As I had stood shivering on the edge, an english man was climbing the steps as he passed and said to me,

"If you swam in the North Sea, you wouldnt think it cold."

I don't suppose I would, no. If I swam in the North Sea.

I dive in and the water burns me all over. It burns the top of my head.I swim for longer than I have since early July, it is so cold that the burning sensation keeps me warm. I feel all the dirt from my lungs, the dust in my head, leaving me in a cloud. The whole surface of my body is being scoured away. I swim and swim and swim, as my elbows lift they draw great swathes of windblown surf. Each kick sends up a tower of spray which arcs towards New Zealand. Below me are dark fragments of things which rock backwards and forwards as I pass above, pieces of rolling cunjevoi, swathes of darkness, the roots of kelp.

It is freezing. I pass through surfers in their wetsuits. I dive under.

After nearly half an hour, I take off my swimming cap. eyeing the sea carefully.

I'm not having you steal another hat, I say, and tuck it into my swimmers. There is a wave coming.

Just for a moment I rise above everything, then, face down and arms out in front, the waves takes me all the way in. I have no need of breathing or seeing, I am part of the water.

As my hands touch shore, the sea picks up all of my hair and pushes it into my eyes as best it can, knotting it around my face.

When I stand I have to fling it out, and make to walk up the sand, but something stops me.

I turn around, face back out to sea with the cold wind at my back, and begin to swim again, out to the horizon, like I am never coming back, but swimming forever,

I am swimming forever.

in which the fish sees the end of the world

2009-09-23T21:35:00.000+10:00

This morning when I woke, it did not look like this at all.

In fact, when I sat up in bed, I thought the world had ended.

I hope the world has returned when next I wake.

Thank you for your comments regarding the Trumpeter.

All is ok.

a taste of honey

2009-09-17T09:56:00.002+10:00

My father played the trumpet in a jazz band.
He learned to play it at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.
I have never heard him play. Not once.
It was sold,that silver trumpet, and I was never told what that money was for.

I remember the house filled with trumpet music of all kinds when I was little.
Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong.
I remember when I was little the sound of Louis Armstrong singing made me scream for some reason,
Even more so when my Dad sang along. He did it to tease me.

Perhaps I might have liked his trumpeting better than his singing.
When I was a teenager i thought jazz was so anachronistic.
Years later I love Louis Armstrong.

But if I ever wish an express ticket to babyhood, I can play this, which I found courtesy of Boynton

My dad was taken to hospital in the early hours of morning, incoherent and raving.

I would like for him to be standing on a rock in the sea playing the silver trumpet, the trumpet that I never heard him play.