The fishing camp ghosts have changed over the years. I have recently completed the manuscript of a novel that I have given the working title of The Unfinished Business of Fishermen and that may well be the final title when it is ready for publication sometime in the first half of next year. When I was working on the manuscript, I looked at some old photographs I had of my family and I also found this poem that I wrote a couple of years ago. The events described in the poem also appear in the novel.
A couple of things struck me when I thought about the poem and the photograph. The first is that when the little boy of the poem went to the fishing camp, the men in the photograph were all alive and now they are all gone and have become the new ghosts of the fishing camp.
The last of them to die was my father in November last year and to my father’s right is my brother who died a couple of years ago. My cousin John is to Dad’s left and directly in front of Dad is my Uncle Jack who was also John’s father. Six men, all of them gone left to stare out of the photograph like those photos you find of a smiling group of airmen who you read in the footnote died somewhere over Germany a few weeks after the photograph was taken. I am pretty certain that Dad took the photo himself and would have used the timer on his Ricoh Rangefinder camera that now sits on my bookshelf.
Invisible Histories
In the poem, I talk about the little boy being scared of the ghosts of convicts and this something that I remember so vividly from my childhood spending sometimes with the men in the fishing camp. The convict story was well known, and I count my own ancestors amongst them. There are convict graves located in a small cemetery near the fishing camp and I think my father might have taken me there the day before the nightmares.
What was not told, nor taught in schools when I was a child and not widely known even, I suppose to the men in the photograph, was the stories of massacre and dislocation of the First Nations people, the Worimi people of Port Stephens and I know that my poem is silent on this because it is about a little boy and what he knew, what scared him and yet, as an adult, I wonder if there really were ghosts in the trees at night on the shores of Port Stephens but not the ghosts of the convicts but other unsettled spirit, but these are not my stories to appropriate.
The Unfinished Business of Fishermen
I suppose the business of the fishermen in the photograph might be considered finished, apart from that business that continues in those they have left behind, their descendants and that business is, in part, to try and make sense of this place, to come to terms with all that has gone before and to acknowledge that the things we enjoy, a fishing camp on a quiet shore came with great cost to the original inhabitants and until we do come to terms with this, until we properly acknowledge the suffering and dispossession, the business will remain unfinished.
My novel is about other things, about living ghosts and that which haunts us and the choice that we make, and I will say no more until it is ready for publication but I hope you enjoy the poem.
Fishing Camp Ghosts (The Poem)
The men slept in their tents,
farting, snoring, soundly sleeping,
rocked to dreams by cans of beer,
Flag Ale with the pretty pictures
on the tin of the Harbour Bridge
and a fluttering Red Ensign.
The boy was left on the cold back seat
of a Holden Special wrapped
in an Onkaparinga with a torch
and a copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not
True Ghost Stories purchased
from the service station that afternoon.
Shadows moved outside the foggy window
while the quiet ebbing tide lapped
against the little tin boat pulled up on
the shoreline for the night and the boy
heard in the wind and the trees the names
he’d seen that day on lichen covered headstones.
Too close to convict graves for comfort,
the boy thought the groaning trees
were the angry men with the scarred backs
the ones he had learned of in primary school,
the miscreants and ne’er do wells from Ireland
coming back to haunt him in the darkness, in the night.
Great memories. I have always wanted to be a writer. Manual labour and the need to support others seem to have kept me from this goal. Might be time to put similar stories to paper. Thanks Glenn.
It’s always the challenge Pete – finding time when you need to work for a living. I think one of the best ways is to book yourself some writing time, doesn’t matter if it’s just an hour a week and just write. You don’t need to set yourself a project or anything and what you might find is that something will emerge from that writing – a couple of short anecdotes that turn into a short story, a short story that turns into a novel. I have heaps of writing scraps that will never see the light of day, that will never go anywhere. Everybody has a story to tell. One of my favourite quotes is from Lawrence Durrell and it is at the end of the Alexandria Quartet where he wrote: “Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow man. Word which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote ‘Once upon a time ….’ And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!”
Great post Glenn… had my mind wandering to my younger self and the scent of fish scales on my fingers and fishing line cuts in my soft hands… thanks.