Why the sea…
Why indeed?
Without even mentioning my childhood, I would say that when one is an islander like me, being surrounded by sea one comes to terms with the ocean very early on in life. It’s as natural to living as breathing.
But in my case, the sea is in my blood. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t on, in or beside the sea.
(on board Wanderer in Hobart for the Hobart Regatta and in ‘proper’ clothes for the sail past the Governor.)
My grandfather had a beautifully crafted wooden boat called Wanderer.
It was a wonderful motor yacht made of Huon and King Billy pine and it felt like Britannia to we kids. Invariably when Pa took women and children away he would motor, not sail – sailing was men’s business. He also always had the women and children back to the jetty by no later than 3 PM because in those days before climate change, one could set one’s clock by the sea-breeze coming in at 3PM and thus roughening The Passage (Mercury Passage – the stretch of water between Maria Island and the Tasmanian mainland).
He also believed that the northern end of Maria was the absolute furthest women and children could be taken. Any further and we wouldn’t be back by 3PM!
He’d wake us at 6AM, walking round the house banging a kerosene drum with an old cricket bat, shouting ‘Come on, you milky crew. Underway at 8.30! If you want to come, be at the jetty!’ We kids would leap from bed into our swimsuits and shorts and our parents had no option but to blearily load eskies and boxes with food and hasten. Those two expressions – ‘miky crew’ and ‘underway’ – are firmly in our family lexicon.
(Pa at the jetty waiting for the milky crew to get underway)
I didn’t care about coming back by 3PM because the trip was such an adventure! There were no such things as requisite life-jackets – we wandered all over the boat. I expect if we fell in we would have been expected to float until the boat had turned back to pick us up. But none of us ever did go overboard!
On very rare rough days (very very rare!), we kids would sit along the sides of the boat, dangling our legs or sitting before the mast and getting wetter and wetter and roaring with laughter.
(The Michelin Man look is from the wind filling my spray jacket!)
It was all very Swallows and Amazons! Pa would tie up at the old Maria jetty and we would swim under it in pristine aqua water amongst the fish and kelp. The oldies would all lie in the sun on the beach and sleep and Pa would snore with his mouth hanging open and we would snort behind our hands! In those days, we would be the only pleasure boat there … an occasional fishing boat but no one else. It was quite simply our own private playground – both the water and the old convict settlement of Darlington because this was well before the island became a World Heritage Area and a popular day trip spot.
If The Passage was beset by a northerly he would take us to Okehampton for the day, We’d anchor in the lee of the south-facing shore and I would take the little clinker-built tender and row myself over the kelp forests, peering down into another world of sheer fantasy where shadows would waft back and forth giving glimpses of white sand and then rock. Sometimes the strangest puff of air would disturb the surface of the water and spoil my view and I would say: ‘Bloody Un-breeze!’ and love that I could swear so without being told off!
(Moored at Darlington. My Dad with the ubiquitous cousins on board)
Morning Tea on the journey was often fresh pikelets spread with real butter and homemade raspberry jam. Lunch was always egg and bacon pie and salad and we drank fizzy cordial (usually red) and we’d lie around the deck getting sunburned (who knew about melanoma in those days?), marvelling at strap marks and red noses. My cousin used to see if she could peel layers of dried skin from her nose in one sheet. If we were burned, we’d just dive into the water, cool off and start all over again! Life was for living!
The journey home was always placid, the throaty throb of the diesel motor so very soporific. We’d be saturated with sea air, sea water and exhausted with energy expended. I’d find my way to the for’ard cabin in the bow, under the for’ard hatch, and I’d lie on musty old canvas sails either looking out the porthole or upward to the hatch, seeing nothing but sky and seabirds. I’d hear the water creaming along the planks, I’d run my fingers over knots in the wood and I’d drift into a state of perfect being. Awake and aware but elsewhere. Wonderful!
(Darlington Beach, Maria Island)
Life on shore was punctuated with the ocean summer and winter, and so it’s a fair enough bet that I would always love the ocean. Even now, when I am taken inland where I can’t see water, I feel something in my soul stretching back, back, back to the coast. When we finally see the water again, I can feel myself becoming fluid and content.
I doubt it will ever change.
*
(PS: this has been the most deliciously time-wasting post to write. I had to go through all my mum’s old pics in order to find ones that were just right. What a fabulous journey it was!)
This reminds me so much of my sister–we lived by The Baltic as children and she says that she cannot sleep without the sound of the sea. During World War II there were 3 years when we lived with a partisan group which wandered the forests between Lithuania and Poland. Some years later, in boarding school in Belgium, she said to me “When I grow up I am going to live in a forest by the sea” She achieved it! Now in her late 70s she owns tree-covered woods that stretch down to The Solent in The isle of Wight, which she and her no longer living husband bought back in the 1960s.
While she spent all of her married life in England I am a roamer and my husband and I are now in Delaware, USA–near the sea but not in sound of it.
Thank you for a very evocative entry
Erika, you are welcome. I have to say though, that your comment is even more evocative and I should dearly love to hear the story of how you and your sister were with a partisan group during the war and how you then came to be in boarding school in Belgium! Sometime, I should like to interview you! Best wishes and cheers.
Fabulous. Now I ache to smell the shore!
Hallo Buck, welcome to the blog. We’re in the midst of a sea-driven weather front at the moment and I took time yesterday to stand on the beach, close my eyes and just breathe in the air to see what I could smell. It was beautiful – sea, seaweed, fish and just an indefinable freshness that comes from being on the edge of the Southern Ocean!
Wonderful pictures. Enjoyed taking the journey with you. Thanks for sharing.
Pleasure Ann. I enjoyed the revisiting of the past as well.
What a beautiful boat! Looks as if you had an idyllic childhood. Love to see these photos of the other side of the world!
Hi Anne. My childhood was filled with fun to be sure. I think Australian babyboomers were fortunate to have a glorious freedom and the most readily accessible places in which to grow. I was lucky my grandfather was a boatsman in the same way as my husband was lucky to have grandparents who were farmers. We each brought loves to our own kids which they then went off to experience. As I mentioned in the post, my own childhood was really very Swallows and Amazons, filled with boats, picnics, adventures and the most God-given freedom that the children of today just don’t have. And the best part is that many of those experiences and observations creep into my writing. Ysabel, Lady Gisborne, spent time lying against the planks of a nef and running her fingers over and over a knot in the hull. Funny how life can imbue (should imbue) our work!
Discounting a few rather hairy Channel crossings via Newhaven and Dieppe, Swallows and Amazons are the only way I’d ever sailed – until your books and blogs, Prue. You always manage so well to take us with you.
And not a ‘milky crewman’ amongst you, Giselle!