Death of a Whaler Read Online Free PDF Page B

open and close as the whales were sliced up, tiny, hairy mouths, their inner flesh like tongues. Their outrage at their own small deaths.
    After the accident, Flinch found he could remember with an uncanny and disturbing accuracy the minutest details of each whale they’d hauled that year. Still tests himself before he allows sleep to settle upon him at night, recounting each sea outing until that very last one. Every night for the past decade. He has heard of prisoners ofwar trapped in isolation chambers who recited the multiplication table in order to preserve their sanity. This ritual of his is nothing more than that.
    Scared of the curse he must have inherited from Audrey, that cancerous decline of a life via a series of misfortunes, he has never returned to the sea. He figures that water as his destiny is therefore also the element of his inevitable downfall. He can still read the ocean with more accuracy than the local radio station’s weatherman, but he is content to throw a line in from the shore. Gets wet only up to his thighs. More often than not, reels in a flashing silver fish to fry up for his breakfast.
    He listens to the tide times announced nightly on his radio, and feels the same dull yearning usually reserved for lovers long lost.

FOUR
    So many of the roads of Byron Bay are named after poets. Lawson. Tennyson. Wentworth. Somerset. Keats. At the time of their naming, an ill-informed council official in Sydney took it upon himself to maintain what he thought was a theme, though the bay itself was not named after the irascible poet but his grandfather, a vice-admiral and admired predecessor of Captain Cook. Better known as Foul-weather Jack. Cook named the bay after Captain John Byron during a period of fortuitous weather and successful landings. This was long before he grew sea-weary and became stranded on unforgiving reefs, before he became tired and desperate much further north. Those majestic northern shores and inlets still wear his mood and despair in their monikers. Thirsty Sound. Cape Tribulation.
    Cook, sighting impenetrable swampland and some unusual mountainous formations through his telescope, did not bother to drop anchor in this bay. He could not have known that the headland and rocks around which he sailed formed part of the world’s oldest caldera. Remnants of the rim of a gigantic volcano, now extinct, encircling a core that has over the millennia been whittled down to a solitary rock mountain much further inland. Still visible from the ocean, its nomenclature reveals nothing of its fiery past. Now simply a functional caution to sailors about the reefs they are soon to encounter once they spot it through their telescopes. Mt Warning.
    The goats that hassle Flinch and eat his laundry are falsely rumoured to be descendants of a goat from that same ship. Daisy. First goat to circumnavigate the globe twice. Once with Byron, once with Cook. A goat with sea legs, providing an endless supply of milk, buckets of it spilt in rough seas. She avoided, somehow, becoming the victim of the crew’s desire for fresh meat. Awarded, on her return to London, a silver collar engraved with a Latin couplet that had been composed for her by Dr Samuel Johnson. The collar buckled around her neck by Sir Joseph Banks. She became the well-travelled pet of the Cook children, and spent the rest of her years grazing on the family’s lush lawn.
    Long before Cook sighted the coastline, the northern and southern clans of the Bundjalung people, the Minjangbal and the Arakwal, called the bay Cavvanba. Meeting place. Where mother land lay resting in the ocean, they recognised the shape of her body and named the headland appropriately. Walgun. The Shoulder. This name for twenty-two thousand years. A place of ceremony and burials, of dancing and ritual. Miles of beach were swallowed once during that time by a rising sea that never subsided, drowning the ancient ceremonial sites forever. Later, the lighthouse was