The Lobster Man

By Will Spokes

Even idyllic lives can take an unexpected turn for the worse. This is a story of a proud young family living a good life whose future falls apart when the fates turn against them.

A boy grows up on King Island in Bass Strait with his parents on their farm. His mother is a beautiful hard working member of the community as a senior nurse in the Islands hospital a person loved and admired by all who know her.

His father is a successful farmer and lobster fisherman who is a hard working community member who dotes on his wife and son and provides for them from his toil on the land and the sea. Coming from a long line of mariners and fishermen he is idolised by his son who dreams of emulating his father and becoming a lobster fisherman on their boat the Abigail Marie named after his greatly adored mother.

A personal tragedy causes the boy's father to take a series of calamitous actions that determines the future of their lives on the island and the boy's hopes for a future following in the footsteps of his ancestors.

Dreams are sometimes all we have in a tumultuous world where an individual is subject to the fickle winds and tides of cruel fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: P Will Spokes
• Release date: Oct 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393903321

Will Spokes

Will Spokes recently retired after a lifetime in the commercial radio and insurance industries. He has a sharp sense of humour and an ever-inquisitive mind. His three grandchildren are his greatest joy in life and his wife his greatest supporter.Will has always enjoyed literature of all genres and some of his happiest memories involve a good book, a glass of wine and a warming fire. Sustained illness and partial loss of mobility gave him the opportunity to take up writing full time and develop some of the stories that had been floating about in his head.Will writes stories that demonstrate his flair for drama, peppered with his laconic humour and extensive research. Will enjoys quality popular writing as well as the classics. Life is too short to drink poor wine and read poor writing.

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Introduction

King Island is an island in the Bass Strait. It is the largest of three islands known as the New Year Group, and the second-largest island overall in Bass Strait. The island's population at the 2016 census was 1,585 people, up from 1,566 in 2011. The local government area of the island is the King Island Council. It has an area of 1,098 km2. *

Southern rock lobster

Other names: crayfish, cray, spiny lobster. Scientific name:  Jasus edwardsii

Minimum size: Male 110 mm, Female 105 mm

These large, spiny crustaceans are orange-red in colour with a rough textured shell, being darker red in shallower waters to almost white in very deep waters.  Their features include a tough carapace, long antennae, eyes on moving stalks, six small limbs around the mouth, five pairs of walking legs and a segmented tail ending in a fan with swimmerets underneath.

Size:  220 mm in carapace length and 5 kg in weight.

Habitat:  Found around Tasmania near rocky reefs and in crevices from close inshore out to 200 metres depth.  After hatching, the young larvae undergo several complicated life stages for between 9-24 months.  *Wikipedia

Chapter one    A Different Kind of Catch

The huge machine rumbled noisily down the street in the early morning light disturbing sleeping rate payers in their beds with its banging and crashing progress. Down the length of the otherwise quiet street on each side the wheelie bins were lined up with military precision patiently waiting their turn to be gathered up by the monsters robotic arm and emptied. The massive truck had been designed to perform this task efficiently by one man where it had previously taken a crew of four.

At the age of twenty eight the driver who answered to the name of James Fraser or Jimmy had in an earlier life been a man destined for a far different occupation. A hint of his strong character was apparent in his manner and bearing that spoke of hard toil and perhaps athleticism.  But this hard exterior bordering on brutishness was countered by his obvious intelligence in the way he spoke and acted that stood him apart from his co-workers.  Jimmy never swore or cursed and while his was a rough trade he was always gentle and considerate in his manner never entering into matters of controversy and to the best of anyone’s knowledge he never drank or used drugs.

Although he was obviously well educated he at no time used that intellectual superiority to denigrate or belittle fellow workers rather finding ways to offer encouragement and praise to them.  He was often observed to be in deep thought when his dark green eyes set deeply in a still young but weathered face below thick dark eyebrows seemed to be seeking far horizons. He was taller than average and carried himself with a slight stoop his long arms swinging by his side.

He spoke little and when he did it was in a deep resonant voice that commanded attention. The overall impression on first meeting him was a sense of strength and steadfastness, a man to be relied upon and definitely not one to cross.

He was kindly and caring yet he was a man with dark secrets from his past, violence, treachery and death had followed in his wake and lay heavily across his shoulders like a sinister cloak.

Jimmy’s story that he would never voluntarily reveal had etched his features telling the world of the anguish he had borne.

He had suffered great loss and subsequent grief that had cut across his well-ordered youth and destroyed his dreams in a cruel and heartless way, one awful episode after another piling one on top of the other. Each one conceived with bad luck as the sire and circumstances the dam.

As driver-operator of this big noisy rig he sat at the wheel positioned on the curb side peering intently into the rapidly disappearing gloom of dawn concentrating on positioning the vehicle precisely so that the hydraulic arm could reach out and grasp the waiting bin with maximum efficiency. Once the bin was firmly in its grasp another lever in the cabin was thrown and the bin would rise to be shaken and banged emptying its contents into the vast hopper that made up the bulk of the vehicles mass. The offering would then be compressed by a powerful hydraulic press to make room for the next.

This routine had an almost mesmerizing effect on him causing his mind to drift to a more salubrious time and occupation where a similar routine was followed almost with the same metronomic rhythm. He would see himself at sea aboard his father’s cray fishing boat on the pristine frigid waters of Bass Strait. The vessel named after his mother tracking down the line of buoys that marked the lobster pots in a similar disciplined line-up as the garbage bins he was now charged with emptying. He could clearly see in his mind’s eye the pots containing the desirable lobsters coming over the rail one after the other drawn up from the dark depths below by a powerful winch set on the deck.

He could hear the crew shouting in triumph as each pot loaded with the valuable crustaceans were emptied into the wet hold. The biggest weighing up to five kilograms the crew called Goliath. As they held it aloft in triumph George and would remind them of his favourite saying if it weighs it pays.

He could almost smell the sweet ozone and the rain on his trucks windscreen became the spray from the Straits wild waters. At times the mental imagery was so strong he could swear he heard the sea birds calling as they swooped and dived in the wake of his father’s boat.  

This was his cloak of invisibility that he had drawn over his old identity to shield him from the media and ridicule of the public.  In this way he could come to terms with his reduced circumstances and ignore the foul effluence only feet behind him that he would later unload at the equally foul council landfill site instead of unloading a bountiful catch of lobster onto the dock in Currie King Island.

************

When he had first taken the job as a Garbo (tongue in cheek they called themselves garbologists) he became the modern version of his predecessors in the business. His garbage collecting forerunners were a team that split voluntarily taking up different rotating roles as they ranged along both sides of the street keeping up a steady pace with their slowly moving truck. One had the job of removing the lids which were hurled Frisbee like against the owner’s fence with vigour reducing the original circular, firmly fitting item into a shapeless flattened piece of tin that would require the hand of a skilled panel beater to restore. While he was cheerfully committing mayhem his cohorts would be snatching up the bins and emptying them into a trough like structure on the rear of the garbage truck the empty bins then followed their lids against the fence with an energetic flick of the wrist. When the catcher was full a lever at the side was pulled and the rubbish was compacted and drawn into the cavernous rear that gave the truck its distinctive hippopotamus like shape. That’s when they took their turn at boyish vandalism by hurling the empty bins away in a joyous clatter. Cars parked in such a way as to cause inconvenience would be found by their owners decorated with some particularly rank garbage. The same compliment would also be granted to the householder who unwisely held back a Christmas offering. Above the crescendo of the bouncing bins and loud shouted exchanges of inhouse jokes and insults would be heard the constant clink of empty long neck beer bottles that were collected and added to the large hessian bags that hung from the rear of the vehicle to be cashed in later as part of the Garbo’s bonus on top of his wages. Those happy days of recycling beer bottles were also long gone and unlamented except by Scout groups and other charities that collected the empties and depended upon the cash benefit. After that it was aluminium cans for a while, but that died out as well, now sadly it all goes to landfill.

They were a team, a jolly bunch each loyal to his mate but sadly doomed to extinction.  Several years later most of the old team had either moved on or were reassigned.

Jimmy’s job was part of the technological upgrades sweeping through all sorts of occupations and considered a great efficiency by its instigators. But the hierarchy in this system continued to look down upon their humble drivers and would never dream of inviting the operators of the machines they were so proud of to dinner.

Jimmy had no such dining aspirations and loved the sense of freedom being out on the road gave him even if the rigid discipline demanded of him by the serried rows of expectant wheelie bins caused a little anxiety lest he miss one or worse knock one over carelessly spilling its contents.

Jimmy had thought he might have enjoyed working with the old crews but he would never know now, however there was solace in the isolation that gave him time with his own thoughts and dreams.

The huge vehicle moved on ponderously its machinery fracturing the serenity of the dawn with its loud hydraulic whining and clunking. The sky to the east was a gorgeous fusion of pinks reds and pearl greys as the rising sun lit up the low lying cloud.

Birds were already busy taking care of business and giving the world their song but the driver would never hear them over the constant barrage of white noise from his vehicle.  

The drivers’ real name was quite impressive although he had discarded it in favour of James Fraser.  He was a little embarrassed by his birth name drawn from his father’s enthusiasm for marine literature that had dealt him an elaborate handle. He often thought he had misread the situation and like Johnny Cash’s iconic song ‘A Boy Named Sue’ his father had done it deliberately to see him toughened up in the school ground. He was born Herman Ishmael Dana Fergusson without doubt a very nautically inclined appellation inspired by his father’s love of the book Moby Dick and more contemporary works by Chichester, Alec Rose and Robin Knox Johnston. How did he, a humble municipal servant come by such an illustrious collection of given names?

The explanation is quite simple, Jimmy or Jimbo as his workmates called him with the usual Australian love of epithets was the son of a sea captain, or at least the captain of a large southern rock lobster fishing boat plying the treacherous waters of Bass Strait.

His father George Arthur Fergusson had lumbered the poor lad with a preposterous name taken for all of his literary heroes and while Jimmy was still living on the island (as Herman) among fisher folk and the waters they plied it didn’t seem to matter.

But since those far off days his life had been swept up in whirlwind of drama, disasters and tragedy on an epic scale. Herman has now become James and his island life a distant memory and he prays that all connection to his father and his dark side are gone.

Chapter two  Call of the Sea

As hard as he might try to ignore it Jimmy’s connection to the sea was a powerful emotional and almost physical force. Each morning as he opened his eyes his first thoughts were of the sea, the call of the sea the old time poets and writers called it. The wonderful cleansing  aroma of salt and seaweed, the sting of sea spray on his face and the heaving tossing motion of the deck under his feet were all so real so compelling that he would sometimes be overcome with grief for the life he had turned his back on.

So why is Jimmy working as a Garbologist amid the stench of foul household waste? Why hasn’t he followed his ancestors out to the clean purity of the Bass Strait waters chasing the lucrative southern rock lobster? Obviously there was good reason and like many men before him his life had offered him many pathways with fate and circumstance dictating his eventual path. And it was a series of circumstances well beyond his control that led him to this humble occupation which was in fact an asylum, a refuge from the turbulence that his life had become.

Jimmy had found the predictable regularity of his daily round allowed him to switch off from the misfortunes that kept him awake at night.  It was a form of meditation that helped suppress the pain of the tragedies in his past.

So as he followed the curb in his reeking vehicle he dreamed of the sea and the times he was fortunate enough to spend out there in the wild seas of Bass Strait with his father fishing for southern rock lobster. His day dreams were so vivid at times that he swore he could smell the ozone and hear the cry of the albatross and shearwaters as they skimmed the ocean swells. But his catch wasn’t the desirable lobster but domestic rubbish, the accumulated refuse of dozens of homes.

He was far from the cold grey waters of John Masefield’s ocean where the winds like a whetted knife. Far from the sea he loved. He had only the lonely (sea) streets and the sky. He could recite all twelve lines of Masefield’s iconic poem Sea Fever and often did as he plotted his monotonous course around the suburbs in the lonely hours of the early dawn.

And as he did he reflected on the circumstances and events that afflicted his family and the life he had expected to live.

His father’s name was George Arthur Fergusson bland by comparison with his son’s but George was anything but bland. George’s father was also a fisherman and so was his grandfather. Ancestors going back several more generations were all either merchant mariners or fishermen their genes putting the spine in Georges back.

George had a swagger about him exuding a confidence that comes with earning a living on small boats on a very large unforgiving ocean where he needed seamanship but more often raw courage to survive. Physical strength was a part of it for he was surely among the strongest men on the island but it was more than that.  It was an ability to deal with whatever the day threw up at him from the dangerous vagaries of weather and often times a surly crew, engine troubles, always at the worst time, finding the target catch and getting home with boat and crew intact.

George loved reading but not just marine books his was a far more catholic library. He had at an early age memorised Rudyard Kipling’s poem If and always felt that this was how a real man should measure himself. He felt it was important that his son learned the character forming tract as well and ensured that the boy had a copy.

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run

Yours is the Earth and all that’s in it

And - which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!"

As he came from a very long line of seafarers of one sort or another it was natural that George was enamoured by the great writers of maritime adventures, Melville, Joshua Slocum, Francis Chichester, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. The books that came from the pens of these great writers and sailors adorned the bookshelves of the large room that served as a study in the family home on their farm a couple of kilometres outside of Currie, the main township on King Island.

King Island sees itself as a seafaring community despite the cattle and dairy industries that are an important employer and financial mainstay.

Cattle and dairy products nowadays are the major breadwinners down there. But when young Jimmy (Herman) was a boy it was cray fishing, boats and the sea that filled his world and fired his imagination.

His father’s study was filled with fascinating books on seafaring and sailing, Beken’s Hundred Years of Sail filled with glorious photographs of the magnificent J Boats of the early America’s Cup days, intricate models of square rigged sailing ships and one or two models of the families fishing boats that his father had created from memory aided by old photos and the paintings that decorated his walls.

In a large wooden brass bound trunk were old drawings and construction plans for some of the family boats that aided the construction of the models including the one he operated when Jimmy was a lad. It was aboard this boat that Jimmy (Herman) had his first experience of blue water sailing. She was named after his mother Abigail Marie and was in his eyes the most beautiful boat in the fleet that is if you can consider the brutal industrial look of these commercial fishing boats attractive. They were fashioned stoutly to meet the tough conditions of the roaring forties they faced as they went about harvesting the seas riches.

As a rule a traditional southern rock lobster fishing boat has a long foredeck with the usual mast, winches, cranes and cray pots heaped in an orderly way covering much of the foredeck.

Any excess pots were stored behind the wheelhouse. A powerful winch resides squarely in the extreme end or the stem for hauling up the anchor which in practice was seldom used as they sailed from the jetty to the fishing grounds and after unloading their catch to the wholesaler on the dock they would pick up a mooring buoy at an allotted area in the harbour. But should they need it the anchor was there and ready to be launched and retrieved by the big winch.

Below the foredeck there was a special hold for the live catch called a wet hold. This was a large space divided lengthwise where the catch is deposited when it comes aboard brought up from the depths with the aid of a power winch on starboard side of the vessel. To ensure the live southern rock lobsters remain healthy the wet hold as the name implies is open to the sea through a number of round holes penetrating the hull of the boat. This allows the sea to wash in and out keeping a constant flow of fresh sea water over the catch and designed such that the vessel loses no buoyancy. A large heavy hatch covers the hold when the boat is not fishing and removed to allow the crew to scoop out the catch. Southern rock lobster boats of this design were built for decades and many still go to sea but like all things technology have overtaken their design and operation. Now many cray boats are built from aluminium or heavy glass fibre driven by very powerful marine engines that will have them reaching cruising speeds in excess of eighteen to twenty knots. Their profile has also changed with the pilot house toward the bow and the working deck in the stern.

In the early twentieth century southern rock lobster was a cheap meal selling for as little as 50 cents a pound in Melbourne and was as common as chicken on the plates of Melbournians. Now it’s a high end luxury product that sells for up to $120 a kilo or roughly $60 a pound. The majority of the catch is sent to China or Japan and is a multi-million dollar business with fishing licenses changing hands (rarely) for eye watering prices.

Chapter three  Abigail Marie

Young Herman loved the Abigail Marie almost as much as he loved his dear mother for much the same reason, as over time they both represented security, familiarity and calm.  Whenever he visited his father on the boat (when he was far too young to go to sea) Herman found being aboard the seagoing Abigail Marie was like being enveloped in his mother’s arms, a sort of surrogate motherhood. As soon as he stepped aboard he subconsciously breathed in a clearly recognizable bouquet that hung over the boat. It was created by the heady smell of fresh paint mixed with raw diesel fused with the ever present pungency of fish, seaweed and the ocean that instantly calmed him.  

His mother, a senior nurse at the local hospital was best described as a strikingly handsome woman with strong features and a confident bearing. Her hair was a dense mass of dark glistening curls framing her character filled face that was more often than not split by a gleaming smile for everyone she encountered. She carried with her a warm fragrance of daphne, vanilla and sandalwood in the perfumes she favoured that lingered long after she had left Herman’s bedroom after calming him with a cuddle and kissing him goodnight. The pungent aromas on board the boat had a similar effect on the young boy as he sat in the wheelhouse. These familiar aromas meant safety and security but above all else the certainty that he knew he could depend upon from his parents.

Warmed by the big diesels below decks the cabin was a comfortable sanctuary against the frigid weather outside.  He found he could settle into the wheelhouse opposite his father who sat at the controls to starboard while he wedged himself into the corner where the leather couch formed an L shape.

Young Herman had never been to sea with his dad who promised that when the weather was fine during the next school holidays he would take him aboard.

Unfortunately for the youngster on King Island that was their home, that happy coincidence of clear weather and school holidays did not align all that often.

Weather in the Roaring Forties was the stuff of myths and nightmares. The Strait had claimed many ships over the early years along with