Sample Two:

The Colour of Water

(originally published in Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2024. as the sole creative example of literary prose for the blue humanities)

i.

In North Queensland, a recent tropical cyclone has brought all that was below the water to the surface. The Bureau of Meteorology has assigned this storm a name – male, of Arabic origin. The practice of naming individual storms is a way of keeping lines of communication clear. A storm is like a message, or a messenger, that carries intel about the state of things.

Today, the Barron River, or the Bunawurru, is still, as is the mood. Palm fronds trip their way down the boat ramp. Ankle deep in the river water, the sting of the midges climb from my toes in the thick sand and up my bare leg. I swing the weight of my body into the boat.

The Barron is a nursing ground of barramundi, grunters, jacks and bream. The traditional owners of this stretch of river are the Djabugay Nation, and the five family groups that belong to it – Djabuganydji, Bulwanydji, Nyagali, Yirrganydji and Gulunydji. Over a hundred years ago, white settlers performed baptisms in this hot ruddy water. Once, during a storm, a rogue cow was washed down this river to Redden Island where it still lives now, freerange. All the other livestock turned up dead and bloated on beaches, legs in the air. Even fenced animals can be disorganised by nature.

Tropical storms can rip roofs off of houses, tear through glass shop fronts and disorder forests. A cyclone requires a perfect symphony of wind, rain and sea – according to the naturalist E.J Banfield, who wrote about two tropical storms in 1918 after three months of heavy rainfall. He described uprooted palm trees, cracked coconuts and shaken sea birds. Thousands of maritime birds were killed in the havoc. At school, we were taught to take shelter during a cyclone in rooms with the least windows, and drag gym mattresses along for protection.  The only species to maintain pre-storm numbers in the storms during 1918 were the cave-dwelling swiftlets, safe in their granite homes.

After the storm, Banfield wrote: nature spares no time in her soothing duties. The very next day the sun shines on newly arranged clearings, germinating seeds of jungle plants dispersed by birds from which a denser forest grows. The mess has a way of cleaning itself up. 

Of the developments brought on by the big wind, Banfield wonders whether they crop up not only in connection with plant and bird life, but with the human life of the island as well. The storm cuts deep furrows, raises ridges, and amends the shoreline. Perhaps, he suggests, it changes its inhabitants too, with a subtle shift in temperament. 

My brother Hal drops the engine into the river. The clunk of the vessel hitting the water triggers a flash of memory: South of France, 2001. My father pays us in francs to collect walnuts from a freezing pond. Hal falls for it, and emerges fist first, holding a wrinkled tree nut like a planet in his palm.

All his life he's been waterlogged.

As a teenager, instead of going school he went to the surf and came home after dark, stinking of salt, with sea ulcers festering on his skinny brown legs. Then we moved north, where the reef breaks the surf. Instead, he took a gun to the water. Spear fishing brings him closest to the marine life he loves, yet his weapon takes that life away. His relationship with the reef is one of both kinship and violence. He has swum alongside eels, sea turtles, and infant whales. He has killed fish the size of his young son. Once, he climbed inside of a croc trap to make the boys laugh, and ignored my desperate pleas to get out. So at one with the waterways, he thinks he is invincible. As we pull away from the boat ramp, I know this might be our last trip together.

When we were in our early twenties, I tattooed two runes on his inner ankle, one above the other, like an equation: 

protection

/

water

My mum has always called him the man who traded a paperclip for a house. When we first moved here, he acquired a rusty tinny, now long done-up and sold on. His new boat has a larger engine, wider hull and a shade canopy.

The charges laid against Hal have hung over the family for two years, and finally, they’re coming to a conclusion. On bad days I force myself to look up the lengths of possible sentences. I’ve read: eight years, twenty years, life. It feels impossible to imagine him locked in a place away from the river and the sea at Lotus Glen on the Tablelands where the sugar cane grows high and the mosquitos hover like black halos around your skull. But the colours on the Tablelands are so bright. In the wet season, the rain turns everything an almost fluorescent green. The water finds its way everywhere.

The colour of the Barron River is dependent on the weather: an angry storm will stir up the sediment and redden the water. On calm days, it is almost teal. The mineralogist Abraham Gottleb Werner created a nomenclature of colours as a reference to describe objects in nature in the pre-photographic era. The best way to describe the indescribable is to place it next to something else. Each hue is prescribed an animal, a mineral and a vegetable. 

The colour of that French water beneath the walnut tree in my memory was Verditter blue (lenticular ore, a stone of green and cyan); so cold it was almost purple. But the colours of nature are so gradual, so various. Werner knew this too, he showed it when he wrote: When one colour approaches slightly to another, it is said to incline towards it… When it approaches very near to one of the colours, it is said to fall, or pass, into it.

The Barron is like this: the river falls – or passes – into the ocean. The brackish water (spot of a guinea pig, breast of a hooper, iron flint) passes into a wood brown (hazel nuts, mountain wood) and then falls into a leek and bluish green (egg of thrush) at the mouth of the river. From here, the water flows into the ultramarine blue of the open ocean (upper side of the wings of a small blue heath butterfly). 

Many writers have been beguiled by the colour blue. Every scrap of blue, according to Maggie Nelson, might be the fingerprints of God – a tarp flapping in the breeze, spilt ink, pebbles, and fish. Rebecca Solnit writes: The world is blue at its edges and at its depths. This is the blue I imagine philosopher William H. Glass was referring to in his meditation of blue, when he wrote that blue is the colour of spaces – that is to say, blue is the colour of possibility.

In colour theory, blues and violets have the highest frequency, or, the smallest wavelength. Hue, chroma, value, saturation, tones, tints, shades all affect the way we perceive colours. Blue and green might have the greatest emotional range: sadness, envy, distance, loss. Reef fish have an ability to perceive colours invisible to the human eye. Some fish, like the Triggerfish, see the same spectrum of colours as humans, but their colour discrimination is different. Their colour perception has blue-bias, and they see all other colours in relation to blue.

Out on the water, the emotional range of the ocean feels bottomless. Steve Mentz writes: the ocean is an emotional reservoir. Our shared history, Hal’s and mine, is expansive but it feels like it is sinking. Our memories span northern and southern hemispheres, our father’s cruelty, these boat trips, our childhood malaise – which is mauve, like a faded bruise.

ii.

 An estuary is a place where the river meets the sea.

 To be estuarine is to move like a snake.

 To contemplate Hal’s demise is to write an impact statement to a judge. How can I make succinct the oceanic depth of our childhood and its repercussions? I have tried to write it many times, but it feels impossible.

 Our childhood ripples into our adult lives. We don't talk about it, but we swim through it.

When we were young we looked for omens. As we’ve gotten older, I’ve grown out of it, but Hal hasn’t. He still calls and asks me to send something out into the universe, as though my goodness (against his badness) has some kind of bearing or power on consequence.

I humour him, but secretly, I send no message to the universe, because I’ve stopped believing in this kind of thing: crystals, weather warnings. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. The day the cops raided his house, the sky flooded crimson. My mother saw protection, like a cloak, but all I saw was red, the colour of spilt blood.

It feels childish to look for messages in the sky, but then again, even scientists give a name to a storm, and with a name comes a character and a whole story. In a letter to Sigmund Freud, the lofty French writer, Romain Rolland, coined the phrase oceanic feeling: a sensation of eternity, of being whole.

A mathematician, of all people, named Angela Krebs contemplated that perhaps human beings start their lives this way, with a sense of wholeness in the universe. She bases her belief on a 1994 study by psychiatrist Ulrich Gebhard, who found that at ages six to seven, a child still believes everything to have a consciousness. He quotes children’s phrases like: the sun shines because she is kind, the clouds want to make it rain. At age eight this is limited to mobile things, and at twelve only to animals – though Gebhard believes such child-like animism never fully leaves us, but that adults still feed off these past experiences of unity.

This suggests: our enlightened worldview conceals the magical only with a flimsy layer.

As children, we shared a collective imagination, Hal and I. Born only fifteen months apart, our memories begin at the same time. Me younger, my memory better, him older, his memory obscured – our conscious lives align. A burnt down tree at the back of our bush property was an elephant we took turns riding. Once, I snuck out alone – I wanted to have it to myself. But without Hal there, I saw it for what it really was: a hunk of charcoal and ash. It was only in our shared internal life that the animal existed. William. H. Glass believed blue to be the colour of internal life. Maybe this is what Serpil Oppermann meant when she described the sea’s two-fold condition: both a physical geographical site, as well as a vast domain of imagination that can never be conclusively charted.

 On the water, the child in Hal is reanimated, and I can see him again at five, at seven, diving for walnuts and coming up blue. At twenty-eight, staring with eyes the colour of sky at the open water and its endless possibilities.

 The mangroves in the estuary give us shelter, like the swiftlet in its granite cave. Crocodiles stick out of the water with scales the colour of a dried wound. Hal knows the river like the back of his hand. Even when the water levels rise after a storm or flood, he knows to swerve the boat where a tree trunk lingers just beneath the surface, scouts the wreckage of an old trawler, notices croc nests in what seem to me nothing more than a pile of mud and straw.

 He has created an imaginary chart of the river with these emotional pinpoints of destruction and play, but the ocean is a different story. When the boat moves through the mouth of the river, it is spat into the sea and the water becomes choppy and white. It is no longer soft and malleable, it hits the hull like cement.

 We know the reef lies in the distance like a rare jewel of a thing that makes us feel rich for living here. Despite the swamped house that floods in the wet season, despite the rotting wood of the deck, the charges against his name. It is there like a guardian, like a wish, and to visit it like this, is a different kind of homecoming.

 I try to find words for a sensibility that is estuarial: multiplicity, flowing, mixing, mingling, when one thing becomes another. A person is fluid – there is damaged child and complicated adult. How to chart this within a letter for the eyes of the law?

iii.

 Here in the north, there are two seasons: wet and dry, which is to say, there are two moods.

 I am visiting from Victoria, the South East of Australia where the seasons are stark. Hot dry summers frame black cows against the blonde grass. Crisp ombre autumns colour the ground yellow, cold winters bring an abundance of garden citrus, spring rain conjures a green that is wet and bright like paint that is yet to set.

 I’ll admit that the heat here still makes me mad.

 Two Christmasses ago, I brought Max, home for the first time, and Hal took him out on the boat. Afterwards, about Max, Hal said, well he’s very Victorian, and I knew what he meant by that: educated, boring. Not infected with this tropical madness that seems to make all the boys up here bad. That is: criminal, fun.

 The streets were hit that year with flash flooding. After an argument, I drove my dead grandmother’s car from my mother’s house to Hal’s house and the car filled with water up to my knees. My grandmother’s cigarette butts were resurrected as they spilled out of the ash tray and sloshed around, turning the water brown. I cried and let my madness drive the car, swerving chaotically around the wide roundabouts, speeding so fast the cane became one colour: white, like fearful eyes. As quickly as everything flooded, the sun came out and turned the water into steam.

 Max said: this is what it’s like to be here with you. One minute, a deluge. The next, it is calm.

 This is what it’s like to be a part of this family.

 Of the elements, Aristotle says they have four qualities: hot and cold, wet and dry. Everything is affected by the interaction between them. In every case, he says, heat and cold determine, conjoin, and change things of the same kind, and things of different kind: moistening, drying, hardening and softening them. Constant becoming and constant destruction. Putrescence is the end of all things, he says – the end of all natural objects except those destroyed by violence: you can burn flesh, bone, anything else, but the natural course of their destruction ends in putrefaction. He writes: the sea putrefies quickly when broken up into parts, but not as a whole, and all other waters likewise. And the body made of water and determined by its own boundary must be either hard or soft – for it either yields or does not.

 Along the journey to the reef, the water turns from brackish to salt, although it is hard to pinpoint the exact place where the water becomes completely oceanic. Even specifying a certain concentration of salt to fresh water would be unclear, as this place would vary depending on the time of the day, the strength of the current. The idea of the reef as a destination itself is unclear. The reef is not a determined place, but a place made up of many places. Collections of corals and fish and organisms that shine in a multitude of colours, some bright, some fading, some flourishing, some dead.

 Instead, Hal picks a seemingly random place to stop, based on intuition. There are no waves on the reef – the boat and water have become one again, as it laps softly against the metal shell. The anchor enters the water like our bodies, with a heavy weight. Our flesh is protected by thick wetsuit skin, we use snorkels to breathe and flippers to propel ourselves through the water. It is illegal to hunt fish with breathing apparatus aside from a snorkel, there has to be some even playing field.

 Hal swims backwards, the tip of his spear pointed away from me, like a compass or a weathervane, guiding him somewhere I’ll never go. He always offers me a gun, but I prefer to be a submerged voyeur: implicit, yet not active in the hunt.

 Hal dives down deep, and emerges from the water with a cray. As we breach the surface, he throws it into the boat. The crustacean’s body is hard on the outside, soft on the inside. When it hits the floor of the boat, it does not yield, but scatters like rice.

 The ocean is broken up into parts: coral reef, breeding ground. Divided by lines: okay to fish, illegal to spear. The water is zoned by colour: general use (light blue), habitat protection (dark blue), limited spearfishing permitted in a conservation park (yellow). But things aren’t so black and white, these territories leak into one another. Without this knowledge of subterranean worlds or underwater life, it seems like one block colour. All water is messy then, as are our memories.

 Hal was a sensitive child. He cried when a pet fish died. Each one had a whole life of its own. As an adult, he has participated in this violence, on the water and the land. When he was charged with it, the whole family became complicit. My mother buried guns over the property line of her rainforest home, but a big rain came, unearthed the burial and washed them back.

 Aristotle explains that bodies which contain water are either foreign or connatural. Foreign he says, like the water in wool. Connatural, like that in milk. I want to tell the judge this: it’s not so clear. It’s not so easy to zone a human being like this, to categorise or define them as one thing. But if you wade through the debris, if you wait for it to be washed down the river, there is a pearl of truth somewhere. And perhaps it is both things, that we are good and we are also bad, but it is the properties of our mixed up experience that make us so.

 About the cray, Hal says, that one's just a baby. He pulls himself into the boat, picks it up and throws it back. Somehow, that cray has crossed the boundary of two worlds and managed to return home. Bits of splintered shell that cracked in the fall cover the bottom of the boat like crushed glass.

 We spend the next few hours hunting for reef fish to smoke later in the ground, which we will serve with sweet chilli sauce. The wings, Hal says, are the best, the cheek, the meatiest.

  When the sky starts to turn grey, and the wind becomes warm, we know it is time to head back. From my view, there are no boundaries on the open ocean, just blue, blue, blue. Somehow, Hal knows his way back. We coil through the estuary like smoke, to return in some way, to our primordial home. If my brother is the fish that grew legs, found a paperclip, traded it for a tinny, swapped it for an illegal substance and got caught, then our childhood is the wave he rode in on.

 Timothy Morton says that nature appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon. Things blur into one another, brackish becomes salt which dissolves and dries up on our skin, which leaves fingerprints, and traces of our DNA on everything it touches.

 What happens when a storm hits is that nothing can be hidden. A storm mixes it all up, spilling like brush water onto a pallet, combining all the colours into a clumsy swamp. A storm messes things up but it also leaves a clearing on which to start again and regrow. Except we’ve learnt from these waterways that nothing is ever clear . There are always particles of debris, sediment, algae, and salt. Even a cleared spot of land is rich in soil, seed, worm, history. We can dig it up but we can’t rebury it. All we can do is try to make something new out of it, and hope the water will wash us clean.

 The colour of that water depends on the mood of the day, the weather, the current, the trail of a boat’s engine, the ripple of human legs and arms that thrash and part the water. And colours, like a storm, come with a message. Skin that turns purple is cold. A wound that goes red is infected. Blue lips, red cheeks, dark eyes all say something about the state of things. The reef is like this too, every colour of the coral, of a fishes’ body, carries with it information or a message of warning. And every act of violence has a consequence. Glass wrote: every colour is a completed presence in the world, and when these colours fade, or change, something goes with it.

 When we get back to land, Hal pulls the boat onto the truck and winds it up the ramp. I sit in the back while he drives it home, past the Holloways Beach bar, the cement block toilets, the palms lining the shore, to the house swamped by the weather with its rotting deck. When we get home, Hal wonders aloud who will feed his pet fish while he’s gone, and the moment is yellow, like the streak in the eye of the Kingfisher, or the glare of sun after a storm.