ESSAY: THE OCEAN

 

Often when I was very young and could swim a little my father took me to the beach nearby at Surfer’s Paradise.

One day we took my best friend Venetia who could not swim at all so we frolicked around in the shallows and made dribbly sand castles on the beach. It was fun but as usual I was desperate for my father to take me out beyond the line of breakers, way over my head. He would hold me in his strong arms and we’d flutter around in the deep water and watch the waves from behind crash onto the beach.

I felt so safe and yet daring at the same time. My mother couldn’t watch us, she was sure something dreadful would happen. Like the time as a teenager she had been dragged out to sea in a rip at Main Beach one Boxing Day. Like about a hundred others that day, she had to be rescued and afterwards lay very still on the beach recovering for a few hours. Apparently the dangerous surf and rip made the front page of the newspapers. Later she realised she was sunburnt quite badly and later still had large blisters pop up all over her face and chest and legs. Maybe it was her memory of that awful day that coloured her opinion of the safety of the ocean.

But my dad was a great swimmer, strong and elegant in the water. He’d won a prize in the army when he was in Italy, in a swimming competition. It was a bronze ashtray. Everyone smoked in those days, it was trendy and no one thought it at all dangerous. Cigarettes, cigars and pipes were all fashionable, and were permitted everywhere. There were no No Smoking signs except at the service station while filling the car with gasoline as my father called it. Posters and advertisements would extol the virtues of certain brands of cigarettes and, before my time, even proposed them as a health initiative. After our swim dad would light up a cigarette and relax on the sand, the smoke spiralling up into the blue sky in arabesques.

Beyond the breakers in the calmer water Dad and I would look for fish, often we’d see bream and whiting and once I saw a starfish but only the once. When large schools of fish would come into shore he’d say we had to get out of the water straight away as they’d been chased in by hungry sharks. More recently I saw that these glistening silver fish are also a staple diet of mackerel all along the stretches of Gold Coast surf beaches especially around the reef at Palm Beach. The mackerel go into a roiling frenzy and the fish bubble to the surface as if the ocean is on fire.

When the northeasters blow onto shore they often bring bluebottles with them and can they sting! Dad called them Portuguese Man O’War but I now know that here they’re actually called Pacific Man O’War, two slightly different species. They are so beautiful, but their indigo tentacles and translucent bubble body is dangerous even when dead on the beach. In the water, the wispy tentacles wrap around your legs and arms and long streaks of red welts need to be bathed in hot water. When I was a child the lifesavers would pour vinegar on the stings but we now know that just hot water is best to kill the venom.

But there is another type of blue sea creature that washes up on the beach during the northeasters and it’s called a Velella but I much prefer its colloquial name By-the-Wind-Sailor. Like the infamous cousins they’re also a stunning shade of Lapis Lazuli blue but there the likeness ends. Velella’s are flat, no bubble, no tentacles and best of all they don’t sting! Three cheers for all the exquisite By-the-Wind-Sailors stranded on our beaches like precious pieces of stained glass.

There were no blue bottles or Velellas the day we took Venetia to the beach, for ages we had a photo of us two girls with my dad lying in the shallows, his cigarette between his fingers, his hair wet from his swim without me.

We didn’t take her again.