Tim Winton - Blueback

Late in the morning she got up to see the mess. She walked down to the shore to see a strange jumble of white stumps on the beach. As she got close she saw they were whale bones, thousands and thousands of them all along the bay. They stood like posts and broken teeth and tombstones where the storm had exposed them. Dora Jackson stepped over and under and around them. It was like walking through a graveyard. These bones had lain here under the sand of Longboat Bay for a century or more. She’d walked over them for forty years without knowing. It was a terrible feeling having history unearth itself so suddenly.

She sat all day with bones around her, bones the Jacksons had left here in their whaling days. It was whaling and sealing that brought the Jacksons here in wooden ships last century. Blubber oil and baleen, seal fur and fish had paid for this land over time. The Jacksons were all dead now, generations of men, women and children and only Abel and her were left. It had come down to them. They had lived from the sea all this time. Dora saw what must be done. Now it was time to help the sea live. She must protect the bay for all time.

That night in the wreckage of her house, Dora Jackson began writing letters. She wrote till dawn and the next night she went at it again. She wrote hundreds of them. They were like a coral spawn, those letters, tiny white messages that drifted out from Longboat Bay into the offices of people all over the country. Politicians, bosses, scientists all ignored her, but they had no idea how stubborn she could be. Month after month the letters went out, over and over, back and forward. Photos of Blueback landed on the desks of newspaper editors. There was something about that fat blue face with its moony eye which seemed to look right into you. Abel’s mother was patient. She outlasted them all.

Abel and Stella were diving in the warm everclear water of a rare lagoon when the fax came through on the expedition boat. Abel read it before he had towelled himself dry. He read it aloud to Stella as she peeled out of her suit. The message said that Longboat Bay had been declared a sanctuary, a marine park where everything that grew and swam there was protected by law. Stella went straight up the companionway to the bridge and called in a chopper. Abel went below to pack.

On the plane home, high over the Pacific Ocean, Abel Jackson had a dream. In the dream his mother was dead. She floated in Longboat Bay like seaweed as he swam from shore to reach her. Gulls and terns whirled above her, wailing. As he reached her he touched her face, her old, beautiful face, and she sank beneath the surface. She tilted over and wheeled like a starfish into the blackest deep. Out of the blur came a dark shape. Blueback. The old fish followed her down into the darkness, his tail swinging like a gate as they both disappeared.

‘You’re crying,’ said Stella when he woke.

‘Yes.’

‘Was it a bad dream?’

‘No, not bad. Sad, I suppose. All these years I just wanted to know about the sea. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve studied, I’ve given lectures, become a bigshot. But you know, my mother is still the one who understands it. She doesn’t go anywhere at all. She grows vegetables and eats fish. And she’s saved a place. I’m a scientist, a big cheese, but I’ve never saved a place. She learnt by staying put, by watching and listening. Feeling things. She didn’t need a computer and two degrees and a frequent flyer program. She’s part of the bay. That’s how she knows it.’

The jet rumbled beneath them. Stella squeezed his hand.

‘But you had to leave, Abel. You had school and work to think of.’

He shrugged. ‘But all I ever wanted to do was figure out what keeps it all together. When I was a boy I just wanted to know what Blueback thought about things. I wanted to learn the language of the sea.’

‘Like Dora says, maybe you don’t need words.’

The plane rumbled on, taking him home.

The night Abel returned, there was a little party on the verandah at Longboat Bay. The sea murmured against the shore and humpbacks sang somewhere out in the dark beyond Robbers Head. It was a hot, still night and the salt air hung upon them. Dora Jackson told them stories of waterspouts and lightning balls and manta rays and schools of salmon so thick you could climb out of your boat and walk across them. All the wonders of the ocean, the things she’d seen. She held the papers from the government that protected the bay as a sanctuary. The pages flashed yellow in the light of the lantern. Her face glowed with pride and relief. The three of them laughed and sang until it was late, celebrating the news, happy to be together again.

They were all going to bed when Abel’s mother fell. She stumbled against the rail and toppled down the verandah steps to the hard dirt below. She cried out, her voice small as a girl’s.

Abel rushed to her and saw that her hip was broken. Stella called an ambulance and they wrapped her in blankets for the long wait.

‘I’m old, Abel,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m old.’

He held her and cried with her under the warm, starry sky. She was too old to stay on here alone. Sooner or later she would have to leave and that was why she was crying. It hurt her more than the pain itself and Abel understood why.

During the long weeks his mother was in hospital, Abel began to clean the old Jackson place up. He was appalled and ashamed at how run-down the house and gardens had become. The jetty timbers were rotting. Fences and sheds were falling over and the orchard had begun to go wild.

The telephone rang day and night with calls from cities and beaches all over the world. A crisis here, some emergency there, but Abel kept at the job of fixing his family place.

One afternoon he walked up past the orchard to the peppermint tree and stood there a long time. He thought about his father and felt close to his memory there. He put his cheek against the rough bark the way he had as a boy and hugged the thick trunk.

At sunset he stood on the jetty and watched a big blue shadow circle beneath him and peel off into the golden light. The wind luffed at his hair. Cicadas in the dry grass clicked their tongues. Crabs bubbled and clattered across the rocks. Whalebones made a chain all the way along the beach, yellow in the sunset. Abel felt the place was calling him; it made him dizzy.

His wife joined him on the jetty.

‘How will she live somewhere else?’ he asked her. ‘My mother’ll die in a town.’

‘I know,’ said Stella. ‘She should stay here.’

‘She can’t do it alone.’

‘That’s why we’re staying,’ said Stella.

Abel laughed. ‘Really?’

‘Abel, do you want to talk about the sea or be in it?’

He shuffled his feet.

‘Do you want to be homesick or be home?’

He looked out at the water, purpling towards night. ‘It’s a hard life here, Stella.’

‘So why do you lie awake every night wishing you were here?’

‘Because it’s what I want,’ he said. ‘It’s what I always wanted.’

‘I rang the Foundation a few minutes ago and told them we quit.’

Abel brought his mother home to a freshly painted house. She was surprised at the yards and the fixed sheds and newly planted gardens. They made a special bed on the shady verandah and nursed her back to health. Dora stood with the aid of a walking frame the day the officials came to declare the bay a marine reserve. She pointed out the politicians who used to be businessmen, the same ones who wanted to build hotels here. With great satisfaction she watched them set the marker buoys that showed the boundaries of the sanctuary. It stretched all the way out to Robbers Head, a safe place at last. She wanted more of them, other havens along the coast, but for now she was content.