In Tasmania (22 page)

NEXT MORNING I WENT WITH DUSTY ON HIS TRACTOR, BOUNCING
along a sandy path to the rookery where Tas and Angus stood in the tussock grass.

They staggered towards us, two stooped figures in a thunderstorm of feathers. Each carried a spit of 50 birds across his shoulder and the backs of their hands were scratched red. Tas complained that the beaks were starting to toughen up and that the burrows near the shore were occupied by penguins with beaks like pairs of bolt clippers. He said that he had to put on antiseptic cream every night and bathe his cuts in salt water. ‘Main thing in birding is all the time look after your hand.'

He slithered his harvest onto the back of the tractor.

‘How many will you catch today?' I asked.

‘I reckon if you get a hundred birds a day you're doing a pretty good job.'

‘If we're not getting them, it's a dirty bastard of a job,' Angus growled. ‘Matter of upstairs agreeing with us.' He cursed the work, the distance from the shed, the rain darkening the sand.

But for Tas the rain was a good thing. It made the birds scratch their pen feathers out, and so the flesh was firmer and easier to pluck. ‘Without rain, they're soft and shitty,' and he pulled out a feather and snapped it. A dark colour half-filled it, the shade of ink in a quill. He said: ‘When they fly, they don't have blood in their feathers. They drink salt water and it dries up the blood.'

‘Couple of days of this, that's enough for me,' grunted Angus. He offloaded his spit and I saw that he had ‘Hate' and ‘Love' tattooed across his knuckles. Robert Mitchum in
The Night of the Hunter.

Dusty started up the tractor, and I walked into the field with Tas and Angus to catch my first mutton-bird.

 

It was once called a ‘flying sheep' or a Norfolk Island petrel, but its correct name is the short-tailed shearwater, or
Puffinus tenuirostris
. It lives to an age of 38 and got its nickname after a British officer remarked that it tasted like mutton.

A shearwater is five before it lays its first egg. This takes 53 days to hatch, and until the chick can fly it is prey to water rats that swim over from Little Dog Island to suck its brains out. And tiger-snakes.

The image of a tiger-snake waiting in a burrow for a mutton-bird to hatch reminded me of Kemp. In February 1805 at York Town he had watched Paterson make the experiment of putting a tiger-snake into a cask together with a wounded seagull to see what happened. The snake at first attempted to choke the gull by twisting his body round the bird's neck. Then it bit the gull in the foot and under the eye. ‘In about two minutes the poison began visibly to operate … and in one minute more he had two or three spasms and died.'

Tas wore no gloves so that he could better gauge the temperature down a hole. Generally speaking, if the burrow was warm a chick was inside. ‘Reckon if it's cold, a snake's in there.'

‘Last half of March is the mating season,' Angus said. ‘They'll chase you down the track for a hundred metres.' It was the second week of April, but two days earlier Angus had come across a snake. At first he thought it was a bracken fern root – then it moved across the back of his hand and he felt cold scales on his knuckles. He said: ‘A copper-head will kill you – you've got two hours.'

Already, I had asked the women in the shed if the danger from snakes was exaggerated.

‘It is
not
exaggerated,' Patricia said. ‘My nephew was bitten twice, two years in a row. On this island.' A man had died on Chappell where her uncle, Wallaby Jackson, had killed 90 snakes in half an hour. Tiger-snakes thick as his wrist.

Frances was Wallaby's sister and had been birding since 1947 and has seen off many snakes in that time. ‘I've grabbed them in the burrow by the tail and chased them and cracked them.' She advised me: ‘When you grab a snake by the tail, you crack it like a whip, very quickly.'

Once on Chappell Patricia saw a tiger-snake swallowing a whole mutton-bird, fully grown. ‘It was a lump in its stomach.'

Not to be outdone, Frances recalled the first occasion when she put her hand down a hole and felt something. It was 1952. The burrow had an awkward turn and there was a granite stone in the way. ‘As soon as my fingers touched the smooth skin, my hair stood up. I felt this cold scaly thing, and Jesus, I came out of that quick.'

I thought of ‘Auntie' Furley, who two months before on Babel had sat down on a rock. ‘I felt something go across my leg, and of course I didn't look down straight away, still daydreaming, and when I looked down there was a black snake coiled up right beside my foot.' And I thought of the old Scottish lady gesturing at the leaves in her ‘remarkably unproductive' strawberry patch, where, the same month, she had been taking a break from her Gaelic lessons when a four-foot tiger-snake raised its head. ‘This is where it bit me. The poor creature was stuck in the nylon netting trying to get the strawberry, foolish fellow. I was picking out weeds and I idiotically put my arm into its mouth, poor thing. It was quite like a needle and I felt pretty queer.' The bridge to her farm was down and the ambulance had taken a while. She was eventually flown to a hospital in Launceston where she was bombarded with questions to find out just how bad she was. What was her name, how old was she, what day was it?

She replied correctly: ‘My name is Lady Mary Mactier, I am 88 and today is February 27, 2003.'

Most of all I thought of Fred Willis, an old birder with unlined skin and kind, unseeing eyes that shone like the oil he sipped each morning from a 44-gallon drum. He was going blind and this was the first year he had not been birding since 1920. ‘I reckon I've caught my last one,' he said. ‘But if you think about snakes, you'll never catch a bird.'

 

Angus had worked in a supermarket in Alice Springs.

‘Did you get to know any Aborigines there?' I asked.

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Their smell put me off. It's a really strong smell. Not bad BO or anything. But it put me off.'

I stopped and looked at him. He had just told me that he came from Launceston and was 20 when he discovered that he was Aboriginal. I asked: ‘Weren't you interested in their culture?'

Angus stared intently at a lomandra clump. ‘They've got their own particular way of living. They're different tribes and they talk in Aboriginal lingo. They virtually keep to themselves.'

But his mind was not in Alice Springs. He fell to his knees. ‘I don't worry about snakes, blue-tongues, spiders. All I worry about is the mutton-bird.'

‘Come on,' Tas said.

I followed him between the tussocks, my ankles sinking into the burrows.

He approached a small opening and pushed back the grass. ‘When the parents come to feed, they regurgitate at the edge of the hole and you can smell it. It's not real good.'

Tas stretched out and thrust in his hand. He creased his nose. He was nine when he caught his first bird. ‘I didn't like putting my hand down a hole like this. I still don't. Jesus, this is a deep hole.' Then: ‘There's one in here. Put your ear to the ground.'

I listened to the thump-thump-thump of the wings.

‘Jesus, it's nice when you get an easy one. I hate it when there's not a bird down the hole. I hate it. 'Cos it's a bloody effort. Ah, you bugger.'

He pressed his thumb and finger to the neck, and flicked. There was a squeak and a quiet clatter of wings as he whirled it. The oil oozed down and blackened the beak. Then he lifted the slack bird and pierced it through the bottom of its mouth onto the spit.

Now my turn.

‘This one?' Tas said.

I sensed his impatience. I had rejected a dozen holes. ‘All right.'

The opening in the sand was about four inches wide. I prayed that it would be shallow and warm. I lay on my side and inserted my right arm at a 30-degree angle, stretching forward inch by inch. The wind had frozen my hand and the air that it clutched seemed extraordinarily cold. The tips of my fingers felt for a head, but would it be a reptile's head or a beak? I touched a stone, some roots. Had I moved past him? Or was this a ‘blind' hole, and if so what did that suggest? My arm was in up to my shoulder and my heart was drumming.

A peck.

‘Bring him out slowly so you don't bruise him,' Tas said.

 

We were soon back at the shed. New regulations demanded that no more than 40 minutes elapsed between my catching a bird and plucking it. Tas moved with an urgency he had not shown before. He carried the spits to the gurrying rail and we ripped off the birds and squeezed them, squirting oil and undigested krill into a drum full of the viscous red fluid.

This was the oil that cured Furley of her chest colds and gave Fred Willis's skin the clarity of a man 50 years younger. Patricia, who leased the shed, sold the oil for $20 a litre, and she said that if I doubted its properties then I ought to speak to Bruce Binzemann in Bridport about the effect of mutton-bird oil on his angina, or Harold Hislop in Penguin about his arteries, or Lester Jones, another who, properly speaking, should not be alive this morning. Later, I rang Lester. ‘I'm still taking it,' he said. ‘Half a cup per day.'

‘Spoonful in their milk makes a horse's skin real shiny,' Tas said. He tossed the last of the gurried birds through a sliced plastic curtain, and jumped onto Dusty's tractor. He was going back to the rookery.

Now that I had caught my mutton-bird I was determined to follow the process to the end. Under the guidance of an old Aborigine called Harry, I sat in the pluck-room and filled a tub with sticky black feathers. In the scalding-room, a large woman with ‘Joanna loves John' tattooed on her arm showed me how to dip the bird in a basin of bubbling water and to rub off the fine down. Then I went into the opening-room to remove the stomach and guts, and to cut off the head, wings and feet.

‘My dog used to eat the legs, used to love 'em,' Harry said, his white beard pricking through his dark skin.

For all the mutton-bird's anti-rachitic properties, the men and women in the shed had about them a sadness. This was their most manifest culture, and yet the very tradition that they clung to as defining them was under threat. The activity had diminished enormously in recent years. In 1978, the total harvest was 250,000. This year the number was unlikely to exceed 25,000. The industry was dying for several reasons: a decline in the bird population, the collapse of the feather market in Eastern Europe, internal politics, costly health regulations. But potentially most damaging was a shortage of people wanting to do it. Those in Patricia's shed were distressed that a new generation had little inclination to bird or to join in what had been a significant family occasion. They felt that something vital was slipping away.

‘The younger ones are
not
interested in birding,' Patricia said. ‘My children are. My grandchildren aren't. It's tragic.'

‘It's not tragic,' Joanna said. ‘I wish I'd never learned. Five weeks is a long time sitting on your arse all day.'

Harry said glumly: ‘My son's a good mutton-birder, but I couldn't get him over this year.'

‘You can't force 'em to come,' Joanna said, ‘and you can't blame 'em if they don't.'

I asked the blind man who had caught his last bird: ‘In ten years' time, do you think people will still be birding?'

Fred Willis had visited his first burrow in his mother's womb. ‘I doubt it.'

 

But Frances was excited. Pelagic shells had come in with the east wind from the open sea. She was heading down to the beach to collect them.

‘She gets all my shells,' Patricia said. ‘It takes three months for her to fish them out and clean them.'

‘Show him, dear,' Frances said.

‘No.'

‘Show me,' I said.

With reluctance, Patricia produced a plastic bag and drew out a necklace. She had threaded it from green Mariner shells and I remembered that the last time I had seen such an object was in Margaret's cutlery box. I didn't feel that I ought to ask, but I asked anyway.

Patricia thought about it. ‘All right.'

It was time to go. Frances offered to walk to the end of the beach and point out a short-cut to the jetty. Within moments she had picked up a spirula covered in barnacles, and a blue and white pelagic shell. It had floated in on a raft of bubbles, and when she waved goodbye I saw that it had stained its purple dye on her palm.

I left her on the beach collecting shells for my wife's necklace and hurried up the dune swale towards the boat.

THE CAPTAIN WAS DROPPING OFF SOME CHILDREN ON CAPE BARREN,
and I took the opportunity for a walk. There was a line of ti-trees above the sand, with a matchless view over Flinders, and further back in the grass a monument.

The war memorial commemorated 18 men from Cape Barren who had fought for King and Country in the First World War, two of them giving their lives. Reading the names of these Mansells, Browns, Everetts and Maynards, I thought of the sacrifice they had made to safeguard a society that persistently ignored them, and I remembered a story that the captain told me on the boat, about a Cape Barren lad who had worked on his farm and Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

As a boy, Bernard Montgomery used to visit this island with his father, ‘the mutton-bird bishop'. Bernard would climb in the hills and swim in the sea with his friend Cecil Williams, and Cecil took him birding. By the time he left Tasmania at the age of 14, Montgomery wrote, ‘I could swim like a fish and was strong, tough and very fit.' Their paths crossed once again, in North Africa. Bernard was then a General and Cecil among one of the ranks in the ninth Australia Division that he was inspecting in Alamein. Monty walked slowly along the line of troops, stopped before Cecil, straightened his collar, looked him in the eyes, and walked on.

We head back. A big swell thumps the boat. The sky has grown darker and I see the mutton-birds skimming the waves. I watch them dipping up and down, and I know that because of me one of them is returning to a burrow that is empty.