hooks, used for hanging the bodies of pigs and horses slaughtered on the station while they were cut up for crab bait.
All around was organised chaos. Roy’s twenty-eight foot caravan rested under its corrugated iron shelter with a kitchen, a bush bathroom and store room attached. On the walls of these fragments of civilisation were crude signs painted with the even cruder message, FUCK OFF. When I questioned Roy about who these signs were directed at, he mumbled, ‘That’s for the camp doggies. Dirty bastards haven’t been house-trained,’ he snarled as he waved to indicate the dark lads who lived in lean-tos and aged caravans that hid under trees along with an assortment of vehicles.
‘Get moving you lazy black bastards!’ he yelled at the top of his baritone voice. ‘If you don’t want to work, piss off,’ he added as a handful of dark heads materialised from the gloom. Not politically correct, but there appeared to be no offence implied and none taken. The lads wandered past grinning, except for Junior, Roy’s son, whose brooding dark eyes flashed under his dark curly hair. He appeared to have taken a lot of offence at his father’s affectionate comments.
‘Ah, you’ve got to be tough with the bastards,’ Roy grinned as he spotted the shocked look on my face. ‘Although he belted me a lot, my old man was weak. I’ve always hated weak people. You’ve got to be tough to get on in this world,’ he growled with feeling.
The workers moved off to the business end of the camp. A shed of mesh and hessian allowed ventilation to keep the trussed-up crabs cool in their crates while they awaited their trip to market. 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
