Free Salt Story by Sarah Drummond Page B

began to entertain the women-and-bananas-on-boats superstition.
    I met him at the roadhouse on his way into town. He was sleeping in his car when I pulled over. I showed him some bruises as evidence of my mountain misadventure but he was having none of it.
    â€˜You know, last night the caravan went up on three wheels in that storm. This morning I was trying to pick up, and nearly rolled the boat in the wind. I had to tie the net onto the bow and pick up fish and all. And that was only the first fuckin’ net! The boat filled with water. I had to come in. Sandy saw me come in and asked if I needed a hand pickin’ up the other two nets. Of course I said no but he insisted.’
    Sandy had then helped Salt unmesh his fish and pack them into boxes. Once Unruly had finished with his own catch, he came and helped too.
    â€˜You owe them both a slab,’ Salt told me. ‘They were bloody good blokes, those two. I always thought fishermen are bastards but those two ... they’re really good, they are.’
    I dropped off a carton of beer to Unruly’s shack last week. It was a surreptitious operation; it had to be at an hour when I knew the two fishermen wouldn’t be there to refuse my gift of thanks. I drove past the shack lands, through deep puddles in the chewed-out track and into the mallet country.I pulled into the clearing where their shack stood among the mallets and burnt out car wrecks. They had a fireplace crafted from a truck’s brake drums and inside the three-sided shed was a tent, a cooker, some wire beds. I’ve seen them cooking up in the evenings. Unruly will boil potatoes and fry sausages, or Sandy will make a kind of cabbage, carrots and steak meal. I placed the carton on the bush kitchen bench and left.
    Unruly and Sandy had a late start out on the inlet the next day. Later as they were chopping ice and packing fish into boxes on the shore, I wandered down to say thank you, for saving Salt in his moment of need (and probably his life) but they both looked at me like I was quite superfluous, nodded and went back to their work. They didn’t see their heroism as anything other than ordinary behaviour and I wonder if they found my gratitude necessary.
    It’s a code that I’m still unsure how to navigate. ‘Fishermen don’t ask for help,’ Salt has told me more than once. ‘And if anyone offers, refuse them. But always step up when yer needed.’
    How do you work that one out? And how do I renegotiate it, being a fisher woman?
    Anyway, the irony of my absence while Salt got into trouble on the inlet was that instead of getting sacked for a no show, I’d proved myself indispensable. There was a price apart from the beer though.
    â€˜Those blokes, they are the best fishermen I’ve worked with for twenny years. I want you to put a feed on for them at the end of the season, Sarah. We’ll invite them over to my camp for the night. Give them a real slap-up feed. Whaddaya reckon?’
    Salt was quite definite about the ‘nibblies’ he wanted me to provide. ‘Some cubes of cheese and bits of pineapple on toothpicks. I know you don’t like Spam but they do.’ He hassled me about it all week, even ringing me while I was shopping. ‘So get them some Spam, okay? And those little green cocktail onions. Yeah, and maybe some bickies too.’



GONDWANA MER
    We live on an island continent and yet, for Australians, it’s always been about the land. There are different ways of thinking about these two spaces, water and land.
    I asked Salt once where the Menang fish traps were because I knew they were around Oyster Harbour somewhere and had never visited them.
    â€˜Somewhere over there,’ he gestured vaguely towards the shore between the two river mouths.
    We were setting four-inch nets to catch the big black bream and sea mullet that swim down the rivers with the rains. Near the river mouths, the briny lies over the top of