The water’s edge – by Craig White
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Last summer, at Cooee Beach in Tasmania’s north-west, a father drowned while swimming with his children. At Johnson Rock near Currie on King Island, a 43-year-old male tourist drowned while diving with friends when he ‘encountered difficulties in the water’. At White Beach on the Tasman Peninsula, a 36-year-old man drowned while diving for scallops with his mates despite ‘extensive CPR by first responders’. On the Hobart waterfront, a young man was ‘pushed from behind’ into the water as offenders attempted to steal from his female companion. She scrambled out; he could not swim.
Each drowning brings its own indelible devastation. It is the terrible price we Tasmanians pay for being islanders. Trying to make sense of our fraught relationship with our watery surrounds creates tales that are part truth, part fiction, and certainly mythologised.
In his books Death of a River Guide and Question 7, Richard Flanagan attempts to capture his near-drowning in the Franklin River when he was a 21-year-old river guide. The first book provides the distance and approximation of fiction. The second is a visceral first-hand account that provides exhausting immediacy. In Question 7, a fellow paddler, P__, dives again and again trying to free Flanagan’s pinned legs. Only the quirk of an air pocket is keeping him alive. Both spent at the end of an interminable period of stasis, Flanagan says to the exhausted P__, ‘I am going’. Dogged, P__ dives one last time and lifts the kayak fractionally, miraculously. Flanagan writes, ‘My knees suddenly came loose and my legs with them and the ropes went slack. I still remember vividly as my body twisted and I popped out of the kayak like a cork from a champagne bottle. Hit by the full force of the rapid with nothing to now anchor me I was thrown violently forward’.[i]
In January 2014, before The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker Prize, Flanagan and his mates were paddling down the Franklin River, a reunion. Having completed this, they entered the benign waters of the Gordon River. I was at Eagle Creek Camp, set back from the river, so their approach arrived first as their resonating voices from Limekiln Reach. One by one, the kayakers climbed out of their jellybean-coloured boats and introduced themselves by first name. A frisson ran through me when the penny dropped and (to my mortification now) I blurted, ‘Shit, it’s Richard Flanagan! I’ve just finished reading about your near-drowning paddling Bass Strait!’ (This lesser-known near-drowning is told in the essay, ‘Out of a Wild Sea’.[ii] The rescue is dramatic and fortuitous.) With a self-effacing manner he said, ‘Best not spoken about. It was with that bloke there,’ and pointed. I hoped that they might camp with C___ and me, but they paddled down-river, safely and companionably, to their rendezvous boat pick up.
In 2011 in the cruel cold and wet of April, J___ and I hiked the South Coast track. Camping at Louisa Bay, I walked the beach late afternoon with a metallic sky and the din of the sea – a six-metre swell with a fishing boat bobbing like a toy in the distance. On the second-last day, we arrived bedraggled at the crossing of South Cape Rivulet, normally a safe wade to the campsite beyond. With the intermittent rain and king tides of past days, the rivulet was swollen and fully alive, frothing at the edges. A small sign warned hikers to observe conditions for 15 minutes and if water remained dangerous to camp and cross later.
Hubris and impetuousness just about undid me. J___ slipped off the rocky ledge and began thrashing for the other side. I followed without unclipping the buckle and clips on my 20-odd kilogram pack; I left my sodden boots on, and they were like anchors. Unbelievably, I still had my scrub gloves and glasses on. The cold water made me inhale sharply and then I started freestyling in my hamstrung manner. The tannin water and the incoming tide were a hurly burly collision of water. In the confusion my glasses came free so now both above and below the water I saw only wobbly vague things like the shimmery auras of migraines. I gulped air, tried to make progress, but was held in suspension like the plaything of a malevolent sea god. Salt. The saltiness of the water pushing into my mouth and nose. The salty sting in my eyes. Bobbing up for a breath, down I’d go again, still frantically grappling at my buckle and clips, still trying to shed my gloves. Somehow, I turned, hoping instinctively to get back to the ledge. I propelled myself above the next collision of water, trying to get air, coughing at the same time. Then holding my breath, I was submerged again. Unbidden, thoughts came to me of my wife and young daughters, but I was spent and could not retain them.
Accepting I was going to die in this remote flow of water in the Southwest of Tasmania, I stopped thrashing and sank a little deeper, still being jostled this way and that but not resisting now. When I thought I was done, incredibly, my right foot touched sandy bottom, a feathery touch. I held my breath with water in my mouth and up my nose, seeing stars, lungs at bursting point, and ducked down and pushed with all my strength and surfaced. I battered my way to the ledge. There – something solid! I clutched it with both hands and clambered up, pack-ladened, my scrub gloves slimy and flapping, and coughed up water and snot. Rolling over, I heaved in and out, blinking into a gauzy sky. And just lay there like tossed-up flotsam.
J___ returned on a surfboard to bring me safely across the rivulet. There was a group of surfers at the campsite we were heading to, and they’d observed my near calamity. All skin and bone, his teeth chattering, J___ had goose bumps up his arms and on them the blonde hairs raised as though electrified. I climbed on behind with my pack up front of J___, but I spooked at the feel of water on my legs dangling over the side. The slapping of the water against the board frightened me beyond measure.
‘Turn around!’
We bumped over the swell to the ledge. J___ turned towards the warmth and companionship around the campfire. ‘I’ll wait it out,’ I said, shivering.
D___ strode from the surfers’ campsite wriggling his black wetsuit on and waded across the rivulet closer to the sea where it was shallower. He and his mates, I would learn later, had been out surfing for hours in the frigid pounding surf. Stepping back into the water was self-sacrificing. Clinging on behind D___ I breathed rapidly at the touch of water, but we crossed to safety without further incident. He was taciturn when I thanked him profusely. He and his mates boiled us some water and J___ and I made hot chocolates. Staring at the small clumps of powder swirling on top, I felt giddy; it was as though I’d been on a rolling ship and was yet to find my land legs. Huddled around their campfire, steam rose from our damp bodies like mist and my eyelids stung from the heat.
In the tent that night with J___, I woke at 1.30am and in the darkness I experienced a profound sense of silence, and I felt set apart from myself and the temporal world in ways difficult to describe. Jeanette Winterson says if we don’t have the words, the complexity of our thinking will shrink to the words we do have. With searching inadequacy, I have cast a net hoping to capture what I felt in the tent, honestly. Weightlessness? Loss of self? Or was it the private spaciousness reserved for the escapee when a human body and spirit has been to the brink? I also think occasionally of Fish Lamb, drowned, and then revived from a night netting accident in Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. His God-fearing mother Oriel simultaneously beating the water out of him, the ‘sounds … you only got from cold pastry’ and praying, ‘Saviour Jesus’ until ‘the great gout of river hit Oriel Lamb in the face’. But the Lambs would come to realise that ‘…not all of Fish Lamb came back’.[iii]
One summer years later, after traversing the Southern Ranges and wading New River Lagoon with C__, I crossed South Cape Rivulet and the water made small Vs against my shins. It was like stepping into a child’s paddling pool. C__ stood at a distance. I looked up into the source of this trickling stream and then turning, gazed at the glinting, calm sea. How close I’d come, I thought. How miraculous that I wasn’t a drowning story and my wife and daughters living in the aftermath of a death so abrupt, so baffling.
Relatives and friends, bystanders and emergency personnel surely live with the drowned and their circumstances in deeply connected grief; in a population of a mere half-a-million, everyone knows someone who knows… But it is worth remembering that these narratives don’t just mythologise the lost and nearly lost; through stories, we are reminded of those whose selfless doings have saved us from watery deaths – tethered us in the spate of a rapid, plucked us from a wild sea, returned shivering on a surfboard, allowed a hand-hold as they waded us across a swollen rivulet to a fire and a hot brew. ▼
Endnotes
[i] Flanagan R (2023) Question 7 Knopf p254-8
[ii] Flanagan R (2011) And What Do You Do, Mr Gable? Random House Australia
[iii] Winton T (1991) Cloudstreet McPhee Gribble p32
Image: Patrick McGregor - Unsplash
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