Salt Story by Sarah Drummond

stained and cold river water. Sometimes, when the tide is rising, the two waters flow in different directions. Big rains also mean unexpected treasure and detritus in the mesh: the skulls of ancient creatures, riverside prunings and pieces of the old jetty encrusted with barnacles.
    Salt watched the movements of the other commercial boats. ‘What’s their number?’ He reckons when he gets his cataracts fixed he won’t need me any more.
    â€˜Dunno, Salt. Why don’t we just go over and say gidday?’
    He shook his head quickly. Fishermen, they’re a weird mob (and that is my nod to you, Nino). The Fisheries Department have it all over the commercials because the fishermen don’t always communicate terribly well with each other, in case they give their secret flathead or mullet spot away.
    â€˜Watch out for the rocks around these shallows,’ said Salt.
    I was on the tiller while Salt played out the nets and I winced every time I felt the prop thud against a stone.
    A week later, a friend showed me where the old Menang fish traps are. The tides were very low, so it was a good time for exploring the sand flats. Giant marri trees grew right at the water’s edge. The reed beds were strewn with beach plastic, bleached and polished flotsam of upriver banksias and pine. Samphire crowded in crimson and green along the lower ebbs.
    The stones of the fish traps are a conglomerate that looks like it is still being formed: rich ochre, nearly black in colour. The traps were scattered, breached, so as not to waste fish. The outlines of the convex arcs are still visible in the long shallows of the bay. My friend and I scrambled around and found old and recent camping spots and fresh, wild oysters, plump and intense with iodine and liquor. I looked out to the arcs of stone and remembered Salt’s words from the week before.
    â€˜Watch out for the rocks around here in the shallows.’
    That day we could see the traps in their beautiful, timeless formation because the tide was so low. The only time that Salt has ever set nets in that area is when the tide is high enough to get the boat in and out. He has never seen the traps or known where they were because whenever he’s been in the vicinity, they have been covered with silty water.
    A historian said to me recently, ‘I can’t believe such and such explorers both missed the mouth of the Murray. Couldn’t even see a river mouth. They must have been asleep.’
    â€˜It’s actually really easy to miss a river, at sea,’ I told him. ‘The river mouths just sort of fold into the shore. You often won’t see one until you are looking right down it.’
    The historian is essentially a land man. He’s been a farmer for fifty years and has spent a lifetime negotiating the sea from the land. Salt has spent a lifetime negotiating the land from the sea. It takes a bit of a shift in perspective.
    I find it strange that, for a continent totally surrounded bysea, we spend so much time ignoring it. Once the dependence on sea highways lessened and the roads and rail prevailed, placenames began to lose that salty flavour: King George Sound became Albany, the Swan River Colony became Perth. We stand at the water’s edge and dream but beyond the lacy breakers is the domain of itinerants, roamers, pirates and guys like Salt. Interesting though, that after seven thousand years or so of the fish traps being built in Oyster Harbour, the fishermen still set nets in the same location. Whether they approach the sea from the land, or the land from the sea, the Menang people and the estuarine fishers know where the black bream are.

PALLINUP
    I drove the old ute through the night to Pallinup. I’d just had a new windscreen fitted so the vision was good until the fuses started blowing. After that it was the moon, some white line hallucinations and the chilly radiations from Venus that got me there. I coasted down into a