Tim Winton - Blueback

In time Abel’s mother was walking again, but she never went far without help. Some days she took a chair down to the jetty. When she was strong she made the climb up to the peppermint tree to be alone with her memories.

The three of them mended nets and bottled fruit and smoked fish and told long, ludicrous stories as they worked. Abel and Stella supervised the bay and kept an eye on the summer visitors. They wrote papers on the breeding habits of abalone. They walked in the forest and sat up high on the ridge to watch the migrating whales pass. Some days they took divers to see Blueback gobble crabs and swim grumpily round his reef.

One cold winter night a baby was born at Longboat Bay. They called her Dora after her grandmother. Her fists were like pink sea shells and she cried like a bird.

After a few years Abel’s mother could no longer walk along the beach she loved. She was too frail to dive any more and too stiff to pick fruit or dig vegetables. In the end she lay in her bed and listened to the sea. On fine days Abel carried her to the verandah so she could watch the tide and see the life of the ocean. Her hair was white as the sand on the shore and little Dora liked to feel it silky between her fingers. Old Dora Jackson slept a lot but when she woke she told stories.

‘When Abel was born,’ she said, ‘his father thought we should let him meet the sea straight away so he wouldn’t get homesick. After all, he’d been swimming inside me all that time. He was always a swimmer. So we took him down while the water was warm. We knelt in the shallows and lowered him gently into the sea. For a moment he went stiff as coral and then he kicked like a fish about to be set free. He wanted to swim off right there and then. He cried when I took him back to the house. He was always like that. Just like his father. Couldn’t get him out of the water.’

The day before Dora Jackson died, Abel carried her gingerly down from the verandah and took her to the shore. Her nightie flapped and her hair became a tumbleweed in the breeze. He walked out a little way as whiting darted past his feet. He cradled her in his arms, laid her back and let her float against him in the clear, still water.

‘We come from water,’ she whispered. ‘We belong to it, Abel.’

She lay back smiling, her arms and legs bobbing lightly. She weighed nothing at all. A long, blue shadow swerved into the shallows and swam around them once, stirring up the sand like confetti against them.

The next afternoon she died in her sleep and Abel made a new cross for the little graveyard behind the orchard.

Abel Jackson never regretted staying on at Longboat Bay. He lived the life of his boyhood every day and he was happy. The bay grew rich with life as fish came into it for sanctuary. They seemed to know that, just past Robbers Head, hooks and nets awaited them. They bred in their haven and swelled the stocks of the coast beyond. Seagrass, coral and sponges thrived. Abalone grew like snails in a garden. Dolphins and sharks came in. Sea lions returned to Robbers Head after being gone a hundred years. People dived into this teeming world and saw how the ocean could be itself.

Abel and Stella went back to being scientists. People came to visit them from all over the world and they continued to watch and listen and read. But they never discovered the secret of the sea. Abel figured his mother knew all the secrets by now and his father before her. He guessed that Mad Macka might have a few ideas too and that his own time would come eventually. In the meantime he let the sea be itself.

On little Dora Jackson’s third birthday, three divers drifted in clear water off Robbers Head. The smallest diver hung like a sail between the grownups as they flew down to the rubbly bottom.

Out of the shadows, from a crack in the reef, a huge blue creature came swirling at them. The little girl’s eyes grew big in her mask and she chirped in her snorkel.

The fish’s head was enormous. She felt that it was about to swallow her and she pressed against her parents in panic. But Blueback slipped in close to them, fins rippling. His scales shone. His tail fanned. He was the colour of all their dreams and he rested against the child, quivering with life.

Tim Winton has published twenty-one books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer , won the Australian /Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath ) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music ). He lives in Western Australia.