Kathryn Heyman’s wild escape on a Gulf of Carpentaria fishing trawler
Kathryn Heyman’s wild escape on a Gulf of Carpentaria fishing trawler.
The first time I saw the sun set on the Arafura Sea, I stood on the deck of a battered fishing trawler and spread my arms wide, wanting to see if my shadow would stretch across the water. Orange light spilt like oil across the sea, rippling and smooth, so aflame it looked like a painting. Burning and fat, the sun sat on the horizon, shifting from gold to orange to red. When the dark came, the stars were sharp and crisp above us.
I hadn’t yet turned 21, and I was on that boat to work – but the show put on by the sun and the stars opened me in ways I’d not imagined possible. I’d never been in real wilderness before then; my moments of connection to nature were contained and curated, facilitated through cars and highways and information centres.
After a series of traumas I’d bolted from my life in Sydney, running as far as I could go, until the land ran out. The further towards the edge I travelled, the more mysterious the country seemed to me and the more I felt a stranger in it. I understood – felt – for the first time the sense of being a visitor on the land, an interloper. Everything in that far north seemed alive; the earth itself pulsed with a music I couldn’t quite access.
I’d camped alone in Jabiru, slept under the stars in Humpty Doo, breathed under the waterfall in the springs at Katherine. And then, when I still wasn’t far enough away, I’d stepped off land at the end of Australia, flying east from Darwin to Groote Eylandt – Warnindhilyagwa land. At the top of Australia, two great fingers of land point into the Arafura and Timor Seas, and nestled between these two is the Gulf of Carpentaria. And there, on that rusty trawler, I found my way into a better story than the one I was in.
On the boat heading into the Gulf on that first night, the sunset made a widening lane of fire in our wake. Birds whose names I didn’t know flipped and soared, dipping into the disappearing light, and below them in the dark water a fin appeared, then another, and another, arcing in perfect rhythm.
The light was going but I could still make out the ash-grey slick of dolphin skin, the squint of their small eyes, the curve of their beaks looking so much like smirking smiles. A calf leapt into the air beside its mother. Scores more emerged, curving close to the hull of the boat. Some leapt alongside us, clicking and squealing. There would be times much later on that boat when I would hear dolphins shriek warnings or distress calls. Not then, though, not that first time.
When the first storm came, the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy, but I felt only freedom. The tub of the trawler – the Ocean Thief – rode up the waves, teetering on the smooth crest and dropping down. In that instant, the second between arrival at the crest and falling to the base of the next swell, we jumped across and ploughed forward. There were later storms when I clung on to the boom, terrified. But that first was glorious. Airborne, wind making a choral harmony outside, my arms up, my legs loose. Flying, that was what it felt like. A moment of wild escape.
In some ways, my whole season on the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria was an act of escape, not merely from my life so far but towards something new. Working as a deckhand on a fishing trawler is perhaps an unlikely route for salvation for a traumatised young woman, and yet it was mine. On board, only one thing mattered: were you awake and ready to work, ready for the catch?
Having been assessed in the past – and found wanting – for not being pretty enough, playful enough, flirty enough, this was like being untied. Beyond the gunwales of the Ocean Thief there was perfect liminal space, without boundaries, without restriction. There was the dark curve of the horizon, the kiss of it against the sky. But within that endless space I was contained by 50 feet of steel. That combination of wild expanse and contained restriction somehow allowed a new version of myself to begin.
It wasn’t all beautiful sunsets and frolicking dolphins. There were many moments that I thought I would not survive, and my season ended with treachery and failure. Yet at the end of the season – disastrous in so many ways – I stepped off the Ocean Thief transformed, ready to make a different story. The seascape, and the landscape that led to it, lodged in me. It has stayed there ever since, a constant reminder of the glorious size and wildness of this continent I was born on, and of the courtesies granted to me as a visitor, passing through.
Kathryn Heyman’s memoir Fury (Allen & Unwin) is out now; her novels include Storm and Grace and Floodline. She lives in Sydney.
