Last Wave

It was one of those Portsea days when the north wind blew across the driest continent, across the vast Australian inland finally reaching the southern edge and continued south on its journey to the bottom of the Earth. On such magical days the wind compressed the great southern ocean and the waves lay in endless lines like furrows in a blue ploughed field, row after row, rolling mounds of water as far as the eye could see. You could swim out and cross those small mountains to the place where the water dissolved from green to azure to darker and darker shades of blue until you reached a distinct purple line where the sea bottom plunged downwards forty fathoms. It was here the waves began mounding, throwing out their curving chests, expanding and growing taller, the wind whipping their creamy tops so they glistened and shone in the hard sunlight, proud and taller than houses. They held their perfect rolling form which had traveled so far, for a delicious moment before slowly curling and collapsing, cascading foam rushing down their chests. 

This was what surfing was all about. In those days there were no fancy surfboards and fins - we called flippers - to make surfing easier. It was just you and the sea and these giants, “out the back”, hundreds of yards off the beach and if well positioned, you could catch one of those beauties and for a few frozen moments become part of the sea, gripped by its strength and power as it carried you on its broad shoulders to the shore. On such a day the local grocer’s son John was out the back waiting for the biggest wave to carry him home. 

At Portsea there was a front beach, calm and gentle, and a back beach where the great waves rolled. The front beach was in a protected bay called Port Phillip. The sand was fine and yellow and usually the sea calm and clear as the Dom Pérignonthat reposed in silver ice buckets at the big parties my parents held each New Year’s Day. Portsea was where I spent most of my childhood, the southern most town on the Mornington Peninsula where the land tapered to a narrow band about a mile wide separating the two bodies of water before finally dropping into Bass Straight. 

Bass Straight is a flexing body of water that took many ships to the bottom in the olden days and you could still see some of the rusty hulks at the Heads, that part of the land separating the ocean from the bay. One mile in from the Heads, fishing boats were moored in the L of the Portsea pier. They swayed and rocked on their rusty mooring chains waiting for their skippers to set them free and steer them into the open sea. 

It was the 1950’s and John's father Jimmy ran Wishart’s Grocery store in the small seaside hamlet. Inside Mr. Wishart’s store it was dark and cool and the wooden floor boards creaked and the door bell clanged when the fly wire door slammed shut behind you. Outside tall pine trees smelling of cypress shaded the street and the sweet resinous scent brushed up against the tart smell of the sea. The beach was just a stone’s throw distant; the clean yellow sand and a long wooden pier with rusty rails down its center for the wooden trolley that carried the fisherman’s bounty from boat to market. Sometimes early in the morning you’d see the fisherman rowing their long wooden clinker boats, two men standing one behind the other, pushing on the oars, leaning their weight forward and then pulling back in slow rhythm, the boats piled high with gleaming silver fish, gliding silently toward the pier, gunnels inches from the smooth green sea. 

Inside the store Mr. Wishart in a crisp white cotton apron and slicked-down white hair looked down at me from behind the tall counter. There were wooden bins and bulk biscuit tins with colorful labels and Mr. Wishart spooned flour and sugar into crisp brown paper bags and briskly shook the contents – he’d usually hit correct weight in one deft push and pour, hold the top corners of the bag, shake again and swing so the corners twirled and looked like tiny pig’s ears by the time the bag slapped down on the broad wooden countertop and he’d pull a thick wooden pencil from his top pocket and scribble the price.  

I remember those stinking hot summer days when the heat shimmered above the blacktop highway and the tar began to melt along the edges. I remember when the rank yellow grass that grew in unruly clumps along the roadside was so dry it might ignite spontaneously. I remember hobbling with no shoes on the sharp bluestone gravel beside the road, scurrying from shadow to shadow, cool pools of relief on my journey to the front beach. I’d stand resting a moment judging the distance to the next shadow wishing I’d worn my rubber thongs, thinking about the cold green sea and the yellow beach that awaited.  

On such days one might find a snake coiled on the path. Once I’d come across one, a huge black bastard. I saw it at the very last moment as my foot was about to fall on its shinning body. I can’t remember what happened next, only that I was propelled forward, an explosion of speed that catapulted me over the snake and I found myself thrashing through the tall grass that formed a kind of corridor on the sides of the road, my heart pounding and cold fear in my spine. 

As a child I’d been told to “watch out for snakes”. In Australia where I was born, snakes were killers and I’d been taught how to treat someone bitten; cut a deep cross through the two puncture marks with a razor. Make the wound bleed. Suck the cut. Spit out the venom with the blood and tie a tourniquet between the wound and the heart. Raise the limb. Immobilize it. Keep the patient as still as possible so as not to excite the heart. Australia has some of the deadliest snakes in the world. And spiders too. In Australia we live with this fear every day. Fear of snakes was like fear of sharks. 

II

It was dusk, the end of another magnificent north-wind day drawing to a close. There’d been a surf carnival at the back beach where bronzed young men from the small ocean-side towns in south-eastern Australia gathered for the fray. The spectator crowd was slowly dispersing loaded down with multi-colored beach umbrellas and kids burned black as raisins carrying empty ice boxes and soda bottle clinking, fingers jammed in the necks so you could hold at least three in one hand. We trudged up the steep zigzagging path, up the sandstone cliff face to where the cars were parked and at the top rested after the long climb, leaning on the wooden rail looking down on the beach and the snaking line of people who followed us.  

Down on the beach the crowd looked like miniatures and you could see the churned up sand and a few small clumps of people still sucking the last moments from the sinking sun. And we looked out across the endless southern ocean, blue and massive, geometric lines of waves as far as the eye could see, almost purple now as the sun dropped more quickly towards the horizon. Out the back we could see the last line of surfers unwilling to leave the water, four black specks on the endless sea.  

Now the sun was very low and ready to disappear into the ocean and the light was changing turning a blazing orange and the sea inky and steely blue except when the waves rose. It shone through them and the black specks elongated and took on waving human form in a watery window of orange light. And then the wave passed and they disappeared again, dropped out of sight until the next wave pushed them into view again in a lovely syncopating rhythm. The four boys had been out there a long time. It was their last chance to catch a boomer, the biggest wave that might carry them all the way to the beach and the crowd watched and waited. 

Another mountain lifted the four boys and for a second revealed their bodies, arms and legs waving gently in the window of the wave but now there was another silhouette captured in that crystalline moment before the wave passed and dropped the men from view. It was the distinct profile of a huge shark.  

Out in the ocean so far from shore, the four boys could see the spectators waving and they looked forward to catching the final wave that would bring them home to the beach. Amid the roar and crash around them they could not hear the panic and the shouting and probably interpreted the crowd’s signals as encouragement and they laughed and joked and made bets about who would be first one home, carried to the beach on the shoulders of a foaming giant. 
Some lifesavers now gathered on the roof of the plain wooden building that was the Portsea Surf Life Saving clubhouse, looking though binoculars at the horrible drama that was unfolding wave by wave. They’d raised a special danger flag on the clubhouse pole but it hung limply in the lea of the cliff in the still evening air that smelt of the day’s heat and no doubt the four so distant could not see it. 

With each rise and fall the dark shadow moved closer to the swimmers and now  was easing past one of them. The crowd hushed and seemed paralyzed. Another giant pushed the tableau into view once again but now only three bodies floated in the window of the wave and the shadow of the shark was gone. There had been no dramatic thrashing, kicking, frothing and splashing, just three boys left suspended in the wave’s glassy interior and Mr. Wishart’s son John had disappeared. Of course we didn’t know it was John gone then, only that there had been four boys out the back and now there were three. 

Now the boys understood the gestures from the shore and they began frantically swimming toward the beach. A couple of waves lifted them and passed, not yet ready to break and carry them to safety. But soon they were riding home and the crowd came alive again and a chill murmur rose above the roar of the ocean as they watched the swimmers spearing towards the beach. 

Mr. Wishart in his crisp white apron and cheery smile who reached into biscuit tins and passed me handfuls of broken treats had lost his son, dragged beneath the sea on one of the most magnificent surf days of the season. He’d learn about it soon enough, how his son was the one taken by a huge shark at the Portsea back beach that day.  

Early the next morning the small hamlet was abuzz with the news and fisherman and every man who owned a boat were down at the Portsea pier early. They pushed large drums filled with bloody offal from the local abattoirs and carried thick coiled fishing lines and six-inch hooks with vicious silver barbs and wire leads attached to miles of heavy lines, the tools with which to catch a shark and loaded the gory drums and tackle onto the boats. One by one they left the safety of the calm bay and made for the Heads and the rolling ocean.

By dusk that day they’d caught a lot of sharks and each they’d slit wide open pulling the white belly flesh back exploring the gut. In one of those grisly cavities they found what was left of Mr. Wishart’s son young John. I remember that soon after the grocery store fell silent; the fly wire door slammed shut for the last time and I never saw Mr. Wishart again.