The teachers sweated, and it wasn’t heat. Vertigo to the left, vertigo to the right, there’s no Sunday wakeup call like a wobble board on water!
Spencer Gulf floats beneath a highway in northern South Australia. It looks as innocuous plastic pads floating on it to join a boat to land. In a world of dodge tides, where for days between the new moon and the full the tide line never moves, a man who loves this country ferries people on a boat. He accommodates many of them in his small, clean and comfortable motel (http://www.augustawestside.com.au/ ). Desert lovers he takes on day trips.
His boat travels for two hours into the world of his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather, and beyond. They too lived by a wharf beyond the eucalypts, where myall trees, twisting trunked acacias, meet mangroves, and Pakistani camel drivers planted palms.
The teachers came to be taught. They leant forward in their seats, turning their heads in unison, noses forward like pointers. A sea rescue boat bobbed hopefully beside them. Race swimmers in hot pink bathing caps grouped for a photograph on a pier. “Oh, look!” said the teachers in unison. A hydrophone chattered as crustaceans gossiped underneath them.
Beyond the bridge of a highway joining three cities – north, west and east and each 2000 miles away- people disappeared, and houses shrank, until even the houses faded out. To one side low red cliffs rimmed the sea lane like a river. An insect in the distance turned into a canoist. The wind smelt not of salt but saltbush. A last lone walker looked back, and was gone.
The boat moved through colours as if it passed through a painting. Remnants of ancient mountains ran indigo in the east under a sky like a blue bowl. Green mangroves hemmed green water. The hydrophone’s chattering was easing too, but now there were other sounds. A dolphin surfaced beside the bow. She was talking to its calf, days old, and still learning how to breathe. The local paper’s reporter on board tried not to fall into the water as she took the calf’s picture from every angle. “Ooooooh!” said the teachers.
Kangaroo tracks scarred the surface of a bank between the mangroves. Above it stood a salt works long abandoned to rot slowly in red sand. The teachers rubbed mangrove leaves they picked from the side of the boat and licked the salt from the underside of the leaves. Then they nibbled on snacks: chunks of smoked kingfish, and cubes of roast roo, dipping them in a native peach sauce. “Mmmmm!”
Ten kilometres from the swimmers of the pier, tiny pylons, a miniature railway bridge, and a distant chimney, hinted at insigficant human existence. The hydrophone was almost silent in the salt lakes, salt bush, sand dunes and four wheel drive tracks riddled in corrugations. From the west the Baxter Ranges and Eyre Peninula of the west pressed hard towards the Yorke Peninusula and its Flinders Ranges.
The sea had thinned to a saline thread. Not even a flat bottomed boat could carry teachers awed to silence any further from classrooms of their working week.