Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks. Bob Magor
It abutted a covered concrete wash-down area where netted barramundi were filleted and processed.
Behind this lean-to stood a modern structure that seemed strangely out of place. A state-of-the-art freezer-room proudly looked out from an open-fronted shed. Its purpose was to freeze barramundi fillets in stainless steel trays for market and to make and store ice for fishing trips. At first glance, the casual observer would dismiss the camp as crude, but in reality, everything worked and served a purpose.
Roy made his plastic chair complain again as he leaned back and absorbed with satisfaction the serenity of his surroundings. The only sound apart from the workers preparing to head to sea was the guttural rhythm of the generator, which, after a while, tended to blend in with the environment and ceased to be an annoyance.
From his caravan, Roy’s current ‘wife’ descended. Married Northern Territory-style, Lenice was a local girl from Borroloola. A stunning, statuesque lass clad in a neat cotton frock, she made Roy smile with approval as she moved towards him. Her black curly locks, dazzling smile and athletic build reminded me of the stereotypical Aboriginal girls in the Jolliffe’s cartoon series of my youth. From behind her dress stared two shy brown eyes. The eyes belonged to Kimberley, their three-year-old daughter. Clad only in a disposable nappy, her brown curly hair and olive skin showed clear evidence of the mixture of races.
‘Good morning, Kimberley,’ I grinned trying to break the ice.
‘Don’t get upset if she tells you to get fucked,’ Roy grinned. ‘Don’t know where she gets that language from. Come here, little gin,’ Roy called with his arms outstretched. Suddenly becoming brave, she slipped out from behind the protective dress and made a run for dad. Bouncing her on his knee, he beamed at the latest member of his family.
‘You know,’ he grinned, ‘I’m seventy and should be playing with my grandchildren, not my own youngsters. But what the hell. Lenice wanted a family and I’m still worth breeding from so it’s all good.’ Roy’s proud face was almost reflected in Kimberley’s dazzling smile as she squirmed from tickles on her bare skin.
Roy looked at the rising river level.
‘Well, it’s time we got these useless pricks working and pulling some pots. Grab that gear,’ he ordered, throwing his arm out to point. ‘That gear’ consisted of plastic crates, hessian bags, lengths of soft string about eighteen inches long and a box of foul-smelling cubes of horse meat which I guessed would become crab bait. Roy didn’t actually help but supervised from the back of the boat next to the motor. It was quite clear that he was in charge.
‘Any crocs in these waters?’ I inquired, as I stared into the muddy flow coming in from the sea.
‘Nah,’ he said in a nonchalant manner. ‘If they do come in I relocate them,’ he grinned. ‘A shot between the eyes and a tow out to sea. They stop coming after a while.’
With that he hit the starter switch and the outboard motor fired into action. His ear-splitting ‘ Yeehah! ‘ was drowned out by the motor churning the water at full throttle as we took off at maximum revs. Roy couldn’t hide his grin of satisfaction as the force of our departure flipped me backwards from my seat to land in an embarrassed heap at his feet.
Hanging on for dear life as the tinnie hurtled forward, I untangled myself from the floor of the boat and clambered back onto the seat. For the second time in less than a day I thought, “What the hell have I let myself into?”
We headed out from the protection of the river to the milky waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a windy morning making the water choppy, but thanks to an intimate knowledge of the area and the wooden posts his workers had planted at low tide to mark the passages Roy effortlessly manoeuvred his aluminium craft through the maze of sandbars. As far as I could see we were heading aimlessly into open water when, all of a sudden, a long line of coloured floats materialised in our path. Roy swung alongside the first and yelled at me to check the pot hanging underneath.
‘How?’ I asked. Which seemed to me to be a reasonable question.
‘Pull it in, you dickhead!’ came the mixture of answer and order. Not needing, or wanting, any more advice I dragged at the rope below the float and up came a wire mesh cage containing seven confused mud crabs of various sizes.
‘Hand it here,’ ordered Roy. He opened up a trapdoor and tipped a couple out into the boat next to his bare feet. They brandished their sizable nippers, which Roy informed me could take a toe off. I lifted my legs up quickly onto the seat. Roy grabbed each crab from behind and squeezed the shell to see if it was full. Softies and female “jennies” went back and the males that were big enough went under Roy’s big flat foot. Showing years of experience, he tied them quickly with string. The upset crabs soon had their defence mechanisms tied to their bodies making a neat package so they couldn’t hurt their captors or each other when they were stacked in their plastic crate.
Sixty pots later the morning work was done and we sat drifting as we admired the catch.
‘You always lived up here?’ I asked, as I swung my eyes from the mangrove shoreline in the distance to the odd tropical island that broke the pale turquoise horizon. I couldn’t see any palm trees but I could almost taste the pina colada as I swung in my hammock, caressed by tropical breezes.
‘Shit no,’ Roy grinned. ‘I started life down in your soft country. As you’ve probably heard I’ve been in trouble all my life and it all started down south. It was the old man’s fault. He was a loose cannon and I inherited his genes.’
The wind had dropped so we had a reasonably flat sea with a low swell as we headed back to shore. Roy began to tell me how his grandfather had been killed in the First World War so his old man never knew what it was like to have a dad.
‘After the war,’ Roy yelled between swells, ‘the family moved from Adelaide to Port Noarlunga. Now it’s a suburb, but in my days it was a little town where the coastal boats came in to the jetty and where all the locals wet a line. That’s where young Lloydie, as the old man was always known, developed his love of fishing. I reckon that was about the only thing of any value he passed on to me. That and his rebellious spirit perhaps. Apparently the old man was good looking and became a bit of a ladies’ man. There you go,’ Roy blurted out. ‘Something else he passed on. Never thought of that before. Thanks Dad,’ he grinned as the mischievous look came back to his face.
Roy continued, adding that besides fishing Lloydie’s other love was one of the local lassies, Myrtle Sweeney.
‘She hated the name Myrtle and was always known as Jean. Jean set her sights on young Lloydie so it wasn’t long before they became an item. They were both only sixteen and, while the young stud was by all reports clean-cut and a hard worker, Jean’s family reckoned he was from “the wrong side of the tracks” and wanted better prospects for their Myrtle. The friendship was banned.
‘Now madly in love (or lust), they packed their bags and hitched a ride over the hills to the little farming community of Inman Valley. The old man reckoned the local Methodists were a bit thick because they accepted them at face value and took them under their wing. That comment was probably ungrateful because the same locals found them somewhere to camp. Jean worked in a local tearooms while Lloydie got a job on a dairy farm. The old man always laughed that they were trying to blend in and that was the first and last time he went off to church on Sundays.
‘Their honeymoon was cut short after a few months