Saturday, June 19th, 1993- SHARK BAY
I once read that "Western Australia is everything Australia is thought to be, but twice as much." It has the loneliest and most expansive frontier, the reddest earth, the driest deserts, the deepest mines, the widest farms, the tallest trees, the most ambitious people, and so on. This is the Texas of Australia. Yes sir, everything's bigger & better in W.A... Or bigger, at least.
A coupla hundred kilometres north of Perth, you start to realise every truck you're passing is a road train: the full 3-trailer, 150-foot, Aussie outback classics. They are, in fact, the World's Longest Road Vehicles.
Shark Bay, on the coast about 800 klicks north of Perth, supports the World's Largest Expanse of Seagrass Meadows, and the pelicans that feed upon the fish that breed within the seagrass are- you guessed it- the Biggest Pelicans In The World. I'll talk about them in a moment, but the reason I went to Shark Bay was the dolphins. For here, at the Monkey Mia Tourist Resort, is the Only Place In The World Where Wild Dolphins Come In To Meet Human Beings. (It's kind of a sacred site to us whale-people.)
But first, those pelicans. They really are impressive. Watching those big wings come in for a landing, you think of a Jumbo on final approach. On the ground, these birds stand between 3 and 4 feet tall. They walk around on feet the size of an outstretched human hand, and positively tower over children. I saw one intimidate a child to get a fish the child was holding. It stood right in front of the kid, raised its head to look down on its victim, expanded its gigantic wings and flapped once. The kid dropped the fish and ran away screaming. The pelican calmly leaned forward, picked up the fish and tossed it back with a gulp... Candy from a baby...
Now to the dolphins. You simply step into the water a couple of feet off the beach. You stop when the water is up to your knees and you wait. Before too long a fin appears. The morning I went out it was a mother and her calf.
They came in slow: Mother was seemingly drifting, her calf was circling round her. Mum kept rolling over to put her eye out of the water and look at me... It's weird, a dolphin has such a human-looking eye: same shape, same structure, with whites on either side of a brown-coloured iris, and a big black pupil in the middle... and it looks straight at you, not at your body but into your eyes. You know you're being sized up: you wonder what judgement it's making. In my case I guess it was cautious approval, because this dolphin kept on drifting closer. In another 2 minutes, I thought, they might be close enough to touch, when out of the west like a cruise missile came this fin, and it looked like something out of Jaws as it sliced through the water and shot, like a grey flash, straight across in front of us.
Somebody said: "What was that?"
Just past the end of the line (of 4 people) this dolphin surfaced with an explosive breath (like the sound of the air-gun that fills up your tyres: "PSSHT!") and stopped dead. It didn't stop the way a boat does, drifting gradually to a halt. It stopped like something with disc brakes, then turned around and swam gracefully back up the line, lying half on its side. I reached down and touched its side as it passed. It just slid by. The skin felt like a tight-stretched rubber wetsuit, except that it was slick: it had no friction. The shape was flawless- not a wrinkle, not a bump. My fingers glided over it as if on a cushion of air. An author once described this texture as "wet velvet". That comes close.
I looked up... Suddenly, six dolphins were around us. The whole family had come! As indeed they've been coming every day for the past 30 years. Mother dolphins have brought in their daughters, and the daughters have gone on to bring their daughters: it seems to be a cultural tradition for the women in the family of Holey-Fin. Holey-Fin is now in her mid-30s: she's the matriarch. I remember reading about her in an account written back in the 60s.
Mother (I didn't catch that dolphin's actual name), who had been eyeballing our young female Ranger for a while and edging closer to her, suddenly swam up to the Ranger's knees, opened her mouth and nuzzled her. Looking at the gleam in the dolphin's eye, and the way it pressed its head against the girl's leg, I have to confess it looked like real affection: Mother knows and likes that Ranger. But an older woman Ranger (in her 50s) was more popular- the dolphins actually followed her as she walked up and down at the front of the ever-growing line of tourists.
However, the dolphins' favourite Ranger was the male- a wiry, friendly bloke of about 60. Four of the dolphins formed a cordon around him. One on each side, nuzzling his knees with their beaks, they formed a star-like pattern from which he could not escape. So he stood there and talked to them, and talked to us about them, and they loved it and apparently loved him. He asked if we'd seen a feeding. We all said "no". He looked down at the dolphins, who all had their mouths open, and told them "Ten minutes."
I stepped out of the water to warm up my feet: even though it had only felt like 15 minutes, I'd been in there for an hour and a half! So I took my frozen feet for a stumbling walk around the compound. I was only away for 5 minutes, but by the time I returned to the beach the dolphins and all of the people had gone. The dolphins hadn't hung around to pick up their free fish... They'd just come for the contact.
You can't help but wonder what's in it for them. What do these wild animals see in us, and in the people that particularly interest them, like the smiling old lady who had only to set foot in the water to make Mother (who had kept her distance from the rest of us) shoot straight between our legs and stop in front of the old lady, offering up her beak to touch? Apparently the dolphins prefer children and old people: one story the old Ranger told us was from a few months ago, when this dolphin swam up a line of tourists allowing every child to touch it, but as soon as one adult bloke tried, the dolphin bit him. An English girl in her 20s, who was standing next to me, touched the "Cruise Missile" dolphin's side when it was looking the other way, and it swished a foot sideways to get out of her reach. It didn't come close to her again. What does it say that Cruise Missile allowed me to stroke its side? Did it judge me to be a good human? I like to think so.
Later that day, the dolphins did stay around to pick up a few fish... and they don't snap it out of your hand like a hungry dog, but take it from you as gently as a baby, which, given that these animals are capable of killing fully-grown sharks when provoked, shows just how deeply civilised these creatures are. They understand the meaning of politeness.
I asked the Ranger if he thought the dolphins would continue to come in if the feeding were stopped altogether. He said he liked to think they would- that by feeding them we were simply treating them as we would our human friends- offering a drink and a bite to eat when they come around to visit. But my question was answered much more powerfully and directly by a dolphin that surfaced just off the beach at sunset.
I moved to the water's edge and made a little splashing but it swam right on by, resurfacing 100 feet down the beach where a man was winching his boat out of the water onto its trailer. It surfaced about 5 feet behind him, raising its head to see what was going on. Boy, did that man get a fright! He thought it was a shark.
The dolphin watched him winch the boat up on the trailer. The man leaned down and splashed a little water at the dolphin to attract it, but it didn't come any closer. It didn't seem interested in him. The winch, on the other hand, was making a whining, grinding noise which seemed to fascinate the dolphin. When the boat lurched, the dolphin swished back a couple of feet, then swam around to the other side and watched and listened from there. Indeed, it seemed to be interested in the whole process of lifting the boat out of the water. About ten seconds after the boat and trailer had been towed clear of the water, the dolphin turned toward the bay and disappeared.
So the reason the dolphins come in, it seems to me, is neither fish nor love, but curiosity! They find human beings interesting. They are interested in things we do. I was afraid that visiting Monkey Mia might destroy my romantic image of dolphins as thinking, sentient creatures, but today I feel it more than ever.
Saturday, June 26th, 1993 - PERTH
So how's life over there in the fast lane? That's how Perth people think of Sydney, you know. That fast city. What exactly they're referring to, I'm not sure. Do Sydney folk talk faster? Walk faster? Drive faster? None of these I've noticed. The only clear behavioural difference I have noticed between the citizens of Sydney and the citizens of Perth is that here, everybody is nice to each other. Shopkeepers smile when you buy something, ask how you've been, stop for a chat. There's a kind of ambient friendliness: people are not defensive, which makes it very hard for you to be defensive, which means that smiling at strangers and saying "G'day" and "How are ya?" and "Good on ya" quickly feels perfectly natural.
I never thought of Sydney as a rude place, but it is, you know. People take each other for granted over there in "the Metropolis". You only need to be flipped off or honked in the traffic a couple of times to lose the urge to smile at the next stranger you meet, and in Sydney it's hard to think of a day that doesn't start like that. So you march into your day feeling peeved, and everybody else is feeling similar, and by lunchtime we're all taking it out on each other. Shopkeepers act like they couldn't care less, public transport ticket-sellers act as if they're doing you a favour, taxi-drivers act as if we're all the bloody enemy.
I guess it's partially a function of population. The bigger the city, the lower the value of friendliness. Shopkeepers in Sydney know there are ten customers right round the corner as soon as you've gone, the ticket sellers never see the same face twice, the taxi-drivers spend their lives in bumper to bumper traffic. Although, with over a million people, Perth ain't no country town. There must be other factors working here. Sunshine is one, I'm convinced, because Melbourne is even more hostile than Sydney, despite the fact it's smaller. I've toured the lot now: the five major capitals: Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide: and Melbourne people win the Golden Raspberry. Worse than rude, those sullen, pasty sods are downright miserable! And they make you feel miserable too.
Between the friendliness, the cleanliness, the sunshine and the Swan, it's hard to be depressed in Perth. By rights, I ought to be depressed. I don't know a soul here. I don't have a job. My money is low. And starting Monday, I'll be hitting the streets and the phones as a salesman for Video Williams, which is something I've been dreading doing for six weeks.
I took five weeks to get here and, apart from the evenings, which got a bit lonely, loved every minute of being on the road. I'd love to earn some cash and drive around the north coast of Australia back to Sydney. Complete the loop.
Unfortunately I've done a Cortez. He was the Spanish Conquistadore who, on reaching the New World, ordered his crews to burn their ships. He figured this would give them the motivation they would need to carve a viable colony out of the jungle. Same here, except what I've burned is my bank balance. Until I get a gig, I'm shipwrecked here.
- David Williams, 1993