Salt Story by Sarah Drummond Page A

geological anomaly of rainbow-layered spongolite stone, a basin hollowed out by watery millennia, to the soundtrack of drumming rain and my car’s rattly tie rod ends. When I got to the fishing camp perched on the paperbark edges of the inlet I saw that Salt had lit a fire in anticipation. A perfect welcome for a frayed spirit is a fire spitting with raindrops, and a decent cup of tea.
    â€˜You’ve obviously been eating a lot of carrots,’ was all he said in reference to my dark arrival. He had already set the nets for mullet and bream. It was my job to help him pick up before dawn and drive the catch back into town. The lightning storms and glass-off of the previous week were replaced by howling easterlies, constant drizzle and other rhetoric. It’s the kind of misty rain that lets me think I’m waterproof until the moment of realisation that I’m soaked through. A bit like drinking really. I went to my tent quite sodden.
    It was still dark when my alarm clock went off with ditzy, electronic muzak. I crawled out of the tent to meet the dawn The tinny was talking, a metallic splash against her sides with every little breath of water. Salt had made some tea.
    The Pallinup Estuary had the highest level of nutrients out of the south coast estuaries sampled in 1988 – attributed to themandate to clear one million acres a year and then smother it with good ol’ superphosphate. The estuary also has one of the highest salt levels. This water is so briny that few fish other than mullet or bream can survive it when the sandbar locks them away from the sea. Sometimes the bream develop salt burns on their bodies. Yet this extreme salt content also produces the cleanest flavoured and most splendid-looking sea mullet.
    We pulled up a lot of mullet that morning. Salt reckoned it was the wind aerating the water that was bringing the fish in. I just thought we were a little bit blessed.
    â€˜Mullet!’ is my refrain when the fat, gleaming fish splash to the surface. I began to sound like the Energizer Bunny’s lacklustre companion an hour later when we were still pulling in mullet. The fish hit the nets hard and then roll in them, so they can be a job to get out.
    â€˜What’s wrong? Your battery run out?’ Salt asks. ‘Oh, mullet!’ He mimics me. ‘ Look! Another mullet! Yay, oh joy! I just want to know where the fucking bream are. They’re fetching eight bucks a kilo at the moment.’
    The water was muddy from the constant turbulence. Pale stretch marks laced her reaches. Water slopped over the stern as Salt reversed the boat against the wind. I hate that, it makes me unsteady on my pins. The wind strengthened and the pelicans began ‘scaling’ the mullet with their beaks, trying to rip them out of the nets. In the end we hauled the whole lot up and took the boat into shore to unmesh the rest. The water churned golden olive, boiling away from the outboard motor.
    Salt told me poaching stories while we wrestled the mullet from monofilament and iced them down in the red plastic bins. ‘Pullet, Sandy and Nails were down the pub in Denmark skiting about how they were gonna shoot the mouth of the Wilson’s for snapper. They were at the pub all night carrying on, told everyone what they were gonna do, the idiots. Just before dawn they got down to the mouth, it’d been opened thatday, see. Pullet said later that no bastard woulda recognised him if they saw him cos he was wearin’ a balaclava! Pullet’s the biggest fucking bloke I’ve ever seen, you’d know him the moment you laid eyes on him. But at least he had a balaclava on.’
    Salt told me stories of his father, poacher of legend. The Fisheries officer in those days rode a bicycle with the aim of arriving silently to witness Salt Senior’s nocturnal fishing crimes. One night, he rode that bike twenty kilometres to Torbay Inlet, where it was illegal to fish, to catch him out. Salt