Storm Sounds, Storm Shapes

Extend the line of the west coast of Tasmania northwards and you strike the mainland of Australia at Cape Otway, on the Victorian coast. Midway along this line lies King Island, a substantial piece of land. It rises from the submarine shelf that connects Tasmania with mainland Australia, towards its outer, western edge. There is blue water round the island, hundreds of feet deep. But westwards, off this submarine shelf, the sea bottom slides down to ocean blackness.

If you were in a plane taking off from King Island on a really clear day, you would be able to see the Victorian coast by the time you reached cruising height, or going the other way, the north-west coast of Tasmania. But days so clear must be rare. And down at sea level you cannot see anything else from King Island. The effect is of remoteness. No other islands make an approach to it, the way they do with Flinders Island, two hundred miles to the east, at the other end of Bass Strait. No significant island stands opposite it, as a reference point or a companion island. It faces Bass Strait on its own.

The fortieth degree of latitude runs right through the middle of the island. These are the Roaring Forties, the belt of westerly winds and following seas that barrels right round the southern hemisphere with scarcely any land to interrupt it. The Southern Ocean gets funnelled through Bass Strait, laterally and vertically, and produces some of the most regularly turbulent seas in the world. Bass Strait may not look like a strait because it is never less than a hundred miles wide; but it is. The water has to boil up over a submarine slope thousands of feet high. The earliest navigators who sailed south from Sydney down the east coast of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) postulated the existence of such a strait before they ever found it, on the basis of the volume of the water and the set of the currents from the west.

And then there are the storms. As it happened, there was a storm the night I last went back to King Island. I lay in bed listening, and sort of stiffening at the louder gusts of wind. “Roaring Forties” is quite literally accurate. Above the regular whoosh there is the howl, and above the howl there is the roar. There were times during the night when the wind, which would previously peak at a roar and then decline again, just didn’t diminish, and became a continuous roar. Planes trying to land the next day were blown back up again. People in the supermarket were talking about eighty-knot winds—gusts surely?—and rumours of 110 knots from the northern end of the island. Yet even at the lower estimate, this is still hurricane force. Most days must be bad-hair days here. The islanders wear their beanies well pulled down, and the hell with appearances.

The storm did not blow out, it just declined into what the radio described in the weather warnings as a strong wind. (I don’t think they have weather forecasts here, so much as weather warnings.) When I looked around again the next day in the patches of sunshine, it was with a sort of respect for the trees and houses still standing. Not that there was as much damage as might have been expected, but that would be because everything that was going to blow away would have already done it long ago. The paperbark trees still picked out the line of fences and creeks, even though paperbarks look so fragile. The wild turkeys, the pheasants and peacocks—the island’s curious population of feral birds—were soon back in the more remote paddocks. And the sound of chainsaws was heard in the land. There was also talk of an inch of rain, and maybe there was, because by the time people were moving about again the island had turned green. But you do wonder how to measure rain that comes in sideways.

Much of the island is hummocky, especially round Currie, where the streets wind down into short, deep hollows. The houses face each other across these hollows, or hunker down behind cypress trees and boobialla hedges. The little harbour for the fishing fleet is shaped like a sack—a green-sided sack, with a tight mouth at the seaward end. In 1874, the Blencathra was wrecked on rocks just off this tight mouth. (No lives lost, but twenty-five cases of whisky missing.) The whole scale of Currie harbour, and of Currie itself, is intimate without being chic. The shop signs are old and weathered, but they are not imitation-old. The globalised world has not quite come to Currie yet. 

The hummocks are the result of the peculiar constitution of the sand. There are two kinds of sand on King Island, white sand and black sand. The white sand is not really sand at all, but pulverised sea shell, the product of storm and wave and rock. In time, it packs down into limestone and makes these hummocks—short hills, and hills heaped upon hills. In time, but not time on any human scale. On the whole, the white sand is to be found on the more exposed western side, and the black sand on the east. Both sands seem to grow grass in plenty, and the grass grows prime cattle; dairy cattle, beef cattle. The old story is that the island’s nutritious grasses came ashore from shipwrecks, in floating mattresses stuffed with English hay.

The other sand, the black sand, comes from the island’s old bedrock, and is the kind of sand that gets someone thinking about mining for minerals. There used to be a scheelite mine here. The mine drives followed the mineral out under the sea. This mine was the island’s largest single employer, and Grassy, the company town, was the island’s “other” town. You get tungsten from scheelite, a rare mineral used mostly in the hardening of steel. But not rare enough apparently, because the mine went into decline in the 1970s, and then shut down altogether in 1990. And for a while Grassy became a ghost town. A local inhabitant has bought up much of the town, and started repairing the houses and selling them off, piecemeal, to buyers from Melbourne and Sydney. They were only the fibro houses of a company town, but they have million-dollar views, looking high out over empty sea.

One of the island’s recurring stories is that someone is going to start up mining again, strip mining, and there will be a lot of jobs in it. You see a distant look on people’s faces sometimes, when you talk to them about the island. I think it must come from their anxiety about what will hold the young people when they leave school.

The island certainly did not hold its young during the Great War. There is a simple and, it must be said, ugly concrete war memorial in front of the municipal offices, but it has a surprisingly long list of names on it. More young men left King Island to enlist in the Great War than from any other shire in Australia, relatively speaking. Not just the war: the island itself must have contributed to the restlessness that called them away. It was a long, long way to Tipperary. And on the evidence of the war memorial, they must have died in the same proportion as they went.

I remember clearly the voice of a girl, school-age I should think, who rang a talkback program on Melbourne radio. I no longer recall what the talkback subject was supposed to be, but by way of small talk the announcer asked her how life was on King Island—what was she doing today? “Nothing,” she said. And after a short pause. “There’s nothing to do in King Island. Nothing ever happens here.”                                               

I had not come back to King Island to do things either, though I had a bag of books with me, favourite books, re-reads. But an island does draw you to its own ends: up to the Cape Wickham lighthouse, at the northern end (“the tallest lighthouse in the Southern Hemisphere”). It is made of granite—granite anchored on granite. Over to the fairy penguin walk at Grassy, on the other side of the island, where the weekly freighter docks, and ocean-going yachts put in. Down to the dangerous cliffs at Seal Rocks, cliffs that seem to go down into the sea in an accelerating curve. There are island cheeses to eat, and rock lobsters (called crays). There is a museum in the former lighthouse keeper’s residence at Currie (it is always a “residence”), where there are butter churns and corsetry and sections of submarine cable, notices from a century ago of benefit concerts for distressed shipwreck survivors, and photographs of the surprisingly tall forest that once covered much of the eastern half of the island.

There was one thing to do—though I hardly like to call it a purpose, because I was not sure whether what I sought was here on King Island or somewhere else, or whether it had ever existed anywhere, outside of dreams. I hired a car and drove south for just about as far as it is possible to drive. The black-top gave out first, and then the formed dirt road, until finally there were only wheel tracks left, winding round low hills, and barely visible at times on the short, tough sea-pasture. I dropped the car back to first gear, in order to pick out a way over the rocks, while the cows stopped eating and stared.

And then, there it was: Surprise Bay. There was the same low reef of rocks at the seaward end as I had seen in my mind, the same deep-bayed harbour with a perfect crescent of sand at the head of it. And there, high up in the hills, deep in the trees, was the glint from the window of the one house in all this sweep of land and sea, built so as to look out over what I had just been looking at, but now long abandoned. If the people who once lived there were to look southwards, down through the mouth of the harbour, there would be nothing but sea between them and Antarctica, two thousand miles away. The effect was not of melancholy, exactly. There was too much sunshine and wind for melancholy. But you do wonder what sickness, or what loneliness, looking out at that same view year after year, through all the changes of weather and sea, might have driven them away. It would have been endurable while the children were still young, and attending the local primary school, say an hour’s drive north. But what to do when they were of an age for secondary school? The little public high school in Currie? Even then, they would need to board out. Better, one of the reputable private schools down in Launceston, or up in Melbourne. Only once they leave, they seldom return, except for short unsatisfactory visits. 

I went back to Currie, and spent days poking round the rocks along the shore. Not doing things can itself become a kind of discipline. I made last week become a distant past, and the future not even a prospect. The present was not a heightened state either, nor even a dream. It was an emptied state, refilled with changing sunshine and shadow, and rocks along the shorelines that made you want to try them to the touch, or seashell shapes that led you on step by step to find a still more perfect one than the last. Recovered, simple things, almost nothings. One of the books I had with me was a collection of Wordsworth’s poetry: Wordsworth wrote of “the silence and the calm of mute insensate things”.

Off in the distance the island’s three tall wind towers on Huxley Hill still seemed to turn at their own rate, whatever the wind strength. They would disappear as you looked at them, and then reappear a minute or two later, according to the fall of cloud-shadow and light. Not even the same shadow and light as where you were, but where they were, though they were only a couple of miles away. Rembrandt-shafts of light, sometimes.

These wind generators have a braking mechanism in the computer mysteries of their sleek white heads, which sets a movable vane at the edge of each blade counter to the wind-strength, as with the variable-pitch propellers of aeroplanes. Without this braking mechanism they would send an electrical surge through the system, or even risk shaking themselves to destruction. I have stood beneath these wind towers, and even looking at them from a distance can instantly recall the sound of their three great long blades scything overhead, distinguishable even among the sounds of the wind off the sea. 

Like the facing coasts of Victoria, these are the shipwreck coasts of the nineteenth century, nineteen wrecks off King Island alone, in a thirty-year period, and more wrecks to date than any comparable length of coastline anywhere in the world. If you had got this far, in a nineteenth-century sailing vessel, coming from Britain to Australia, you still had the worst to face. The reefs where the Cataraqui was driven ashore in the middle of an August night in 1845 point out to sea on an angle of, perhaps, seventy degrees. They are so hard and so sharp that you can cut your hand just clambering over them.

I have been haunted by this story for years. The Cataraqui was an immigrant ship, crowded with families bound for Melbourne. The captain had been unable to take a sighting for days, and was sailing on dead-reckoning. According to his calculations, they were off Cape Otway when they slammed pretty much into the middle of the island’s west coast, sixty miles to the south. Most managed to make it to the deck, so that at least they did not die below, in utter darkness. But the ship turned broadside on, and quickly broke up; and they were all plucked off during the night, in groups or singly, as an especially heavy sea or exhaustion took them, some of their bodies dismembered on the rocks. The sealer who followed the trail of wreckage the next day, and found the pitiful number of survivors, nine of them, was himself a castaway from an earlier wreck. It was another five weeks before they were found and rescued by a passing ship. The worst of it must have been the mass graves in which they buried the dead, the women and children especially. They still lie buried there, up in the dunes behind the rocks. Only cows, and wind, and long grass now. But exactly 399 of them died that night and the following morning, all within 150 yards of shore. To come twelve thousand miles round the world, and then want for 150 yards!

There were other fearful wrecks too—seventy-nine lost on the British Admiral, over 200 on the convict transport the Neva. The Neva broke up into four pieces, and took days to be completely destroyed. The convict women who were its main cargo broke into the rum store under the poop deck and got drunk. But it would have been as much in despair as in riot. It is said that the few who made it to shore could hear the cries of the women and children still on board, whom they were powerless to help. How far distant it all seems now, how interminable their agony then. Men can still die working in these waters.                                                                                                                                 

There are strange wheel tracks that run for miles along the shore line, down the western side of the island. They follow every turn of the coast, every tight little cove. They will take you out to each successive low, rocky point, where you can watch the ocean swell not only advance towards you but roll past you, into the cove. You stand dry while you watch the wave from the back as well as the front, and you see it from close range. These are low rocks, and you are close to the water, because hard rocks are always low.

The tracks are made by kelpers, who gather the bull kelp ripped off the bottom of the sea by storms. On lonely coasts you see them off in the distance, solitary men bending low over something along the shore. Wordsworth comes to mind again: his lonely leech gatherer on the Cumberland moors, an old man stooped and looking intently into the mirror-water of an upland tarn. Wordsworth was a bit of a peasant botherer: he would not so much talk to the occasional country people he met in his long walks as interrogate them. I say this on the evidence of the poems themselves: “We are Seven”, “Stepping Westwards”, “Resolution and Independence” (“The Leech Gatherer”). Again on the evidence of the poems, he did have the grace to be abashed by them, by their stoicism, or by a peasant wisdom that set his tortured feelings or his over-complicated thinking to rights.

I did not bother these solitary men. I just watched them from afar, doing whatever it was they were doing. What they were actually doing was hauling kelp out of the water, and hitching it in long heavy ribbons to winches mounted on the back of their rusty old trucks, and winding it in. This kelp is dried and shredded; and then it is shipped off round the other side of the world to Scotland, to be transformed into some strange ingredient of cosmetics, or paint, or ice-cream. Apparently it makes a stabiliser for whatever it is added to. 

There is also this trick that the island plays on you in its quieter coves. Perhaps it is the original kelpie trick of Celtic folklore. From kelp to kelpie. You stop falling for the trick, yet you still like to fancy that the roll of something fluid and glistening, just beneath the water, is a seal maybe, and not more kelp washing ashore. There are still seals here, though not in such numbers as when sealers first descended on Bass Strait and clubbed them to death in their tens of thousands, indiscriminately. Occasionally a flipper will break the surface. Only it’s not really a flipper, though one time it will be. They really were two albatrosses I saw that time, and not just big Pacific Gulls. I knew it when I threatened to come too close—though they were still fifty yards off—and they spread those long narrow wings in alarm. They are the Shy Albatross. Wings three times the length of their body. Narrow white wings, like the blades of a wind turbine.   

Strange fish also come ashore after storms, with pouting mouths and spines that you touch carefully, even though they are long dead and sea-washed. There is crumbling cuttlefish shell everywhere, and the occasional carcass of an exhausted penguin. And up on Yellow Rock Beach, I counted forty-seven stranded eels, flushed out by the freshet of water from the storm.

There is manmade sea wrack too—since everything that floats must come ashore somewhere, eventually. Plastic bottles, woven nylon strapping, little plastic bait baskets, torn lengths of fish-net. They say that occasionally you will find wreckage with print on it in Spanish. When you look out due west from King Island, there is no land in that direction until you reach Tierra del Fuego, two-thirds of the way round the world. (Africa lies on a line to the north of where you are, so Africa does not get in the way.) And if you look due south, there is nothing that way either, until you reach Antarctica.

Among the plastic bottles and rubber gloves along the shore, one day there was a single sneaker. I took it up in my hand and turned it over. Robinson Crusoe found a single footprint, I had a sneaker. He must have been a big man who wore that sneaker. I did not find a leg to go with it, but it did cross my mind that there might be one.