Sensitive New Age Spy (21 page)

‘I wonder what Freud would have made of a man obsessed with photographing lighthouses?’ I said, looking round.

A tall thin man in his forties sitting behind the desk near the entrance looked up. ‘Probably the same thing
he would have made of photographers who run around in shooting vests with dozens of pockets all over them,’ he said. ‘It was all bloody sex with Freud.’

He stood up and walked around the desk. ‘You know, Tasmania started as a dumping ground for the very worst of the worst, the vilest of the vile, the most incorrigible of miscreants for whom there was absolutely no chance of redemption. And now you’re here! You’re only about two hundreds year late, Alby.’

Lucas and I shook hands and I introduced Ed.

‘Wardell?’ Lucas said. ‘Not related to Harry, by any chance?’

Ed nodded. ‘My brother.’

‘Good bloke, Harry,’ Lucas said. ‘You could rely on Harry. I was sorry to hear about it.’

‘How’s Joy?’ I asked. ‘Still flying?’

Lucas was a WorldPix and D.E.D. veteran who specialised in aerial photography. He’d had a rule about not flying with female pilots until he turned up one day to do a shoot of Uluru and found all five-foot-nothing of Joy Janssen doing a pre-flight on the Cessna. What happened thirty minutes later was legend, with either little Joy or six-foot-two Lucas accidentally knocking the Cessna’s radio to ‘transmit’, broadcasting Lucas’s induction into the mile-high club to the bemused crews of almost a dozen domestic and international aircraft in the vicinity.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority investigators had
been unable to trace the aircraft or the pilot, and Joy and Lucas were married within a month. Lucas retired from the spy game and they now ran JoyFlights Aerial Expeditions out of Hobart airport. They also worked together on Lucas’s obsession: photographing every lighthouse in Australia.

‘So what brings you to Tassie?’ Lucas asked. ‘Business or business?’

Adamek Island,’ I said. ‘But that’s for your ears only. Anything you can tell me?’

‘She’s a nice-looking light. Twenty-two metres high, sixty metres above sea level, constructed from cast-iron segments. Originally used a Chance Brothers lens and a vapourised kerosene light source. She’s now fully automated, running a quartz halogen lamp powered by a solar array, flashing one in nine seconds at 63 000 candelas, visible for thirty-three nautical miles.’

‘I actually meant the island,’ I said. ‘Got any snaps?’

Lucas placed a large folder on the desk and riffled through dozens of prints before pulling one out. ‘Here you go. Taken in 1996 on the twentieth anniversary of the de-manning of the station. Bastard of a place, really. Cold, bleak, and bloody windy. Posting of last resort for lighthouse keepers in the old days.’

The photograph showed a large barren rocky outcrop in the middle of the vast blue sea. There were steep cliffs on all sides, with white water everywhere as the waves of the Southern Ocean battered the shoreline. A white tower
stood high above what looked like a ruined settlement on a small harbour. Lucas handed me a magnifying glass.

‘That’s the old whaling station, abandoned in the 1850s. Apparently the island was heavily forested before the whalers came. They chopped everything down for fuel to fire the try pots for rendering down the blubber. They reckon you could smell the island twenty miles off.’

I ran the magnifying glass over the coastline. ‘Any place a bloke could go ashore if he didn’t want to go up to the front door?’

Lucas looked at me for a minute before leafing through more prints. He pulled out another and pointed to a small inlet. ‘It’s on the eastern side, ’bout halfway up. Might be possible to climb up the cliff face from this little beach. A dinghy or Zodiac might make it in, but it’d be hairy. You’d want a calm day.’

Ed picked up the magnifying glass, had a look and grunted.

‘You know that the Gaarg Foundation moved in a while back?’ Lucas said. ‘Joy and I flew out there about six months ago to update the photos for the new book I’m working on. There was a hell of a lot of activity happening – new buildings, wind generators, helicopter landing pad.’

‘Got any pictures of all that?’

Lucas shook his head. ‘A chopper took off from the island and some bloke pointed what looked like an M16 at us, so we figured it wasn’t worth it. That water is bloody
icy and you wouldn’t last five minutes in it, even if you survived the impact. I must be getting old, Alby, but no photo’s worth dying for.’

‘I’m with you there, mate,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the info. Say hello to Joy for me.’

Will do. And if you decide to go out there uninvited, Alby, take a box of chocolates.’

‘Got one,’ I said.

‘Hard centres?’

Armour-piercing.’

‘Good.’

‘I don’t miss the old days, Alby, not one bit,’ Lucas called after me as we walked out the door. ‘You look after yourself on that island.’

As we headed to the Salamanca markets, I was thinking about Harry and young Max and some of the other Dedheads who were no longer around. That was the thing about not missing the old days, you had to be alive to do it.

It was a sunny afternoon and the markets were packed with tourists and locals. By the time we got to the food vans at the bottom of the hill, I was certain we weren’t being followed. With apologies to Ed and his diet, I grabbed a roll stuffed with slices of freshly roasted lamb and a serve of delicious tiny Dutch pancakes called poffertjes, and ate as we walked. Once I had a proper lunch in my belly, we headed over to Constitution Dock to pick up the ingredients for dinner.

On one of the fish punts moored at the dock, a bloke in a blue plastic apron was filleting salmon, occasionally tossing a carcass out into the water where a sleek, happy-looking seal was waiting patiently. When it scored it floated on its back to tear the fish carcass into bite-size chunks. Looking at the seal’s fat wet round belly, I realised I probably shouldn’t have eaten all those poffertjes.

I bought snapper and Spanish mackerel fillets from Shane’s Punt, along with prawns, scallops and mussels, and some fish heads and trimmings to make a stock. Walking back through the markets, I grabbed a baguette, tomatoes, leeks, fennel, garlic and saffron. As we headed to the jeep, Ed told me about meeting Artemesia at several rowdy anti-logging meetings.

The old Artemesia can get pretty bolshie when she’s wound up,’ he said.

‘You never struck me as the environmentalist type.’

Ed shrugged. ‘I reckon those conservationists might have a point. If we keep chopping into the old-growth forests the way we are, the old map of Tasmania may wind up with a full Brazilian.’

The road to Peppermint Bay follows the coast. Out in the distance, across the channel, you can see Bruny Island, where they farm the best oysters I’ve ever tasted. The coastal views range from extraordinary to unbelievable, and they change every time you crest a rise or turn a corner on the winding road.

The sun was low in the sky, and to our right tall stands of trees cast long shadows across the rocky outcrops and sandy bays. For a minute I allowed myself to imagine being here under different circumstances, heading for dinner with an old friend before setting out on a trek down the Franklin, maybe to photograph the ancient Huon pines.

Ed’s place was a few clicks past Peppermint Bay, a two-storey weatherboard set on pilings on the water side of the road. There was a long jetty sticking out into the channel with an elegant cabin cruiser moored at the end. Elegant
or not, it was still smaller than an aircraft carrier, which put it into my category of modes of transport best avoided whenever possible. But if I was going to find out what was happening on Adamek Island, I really didn’t have a choice.

Dinner Chez Ed was my take on a bouillabaisse, which was really a fish stew since we were a long way from Marseille, and anyway, my mate Armando would be happy to tell you the French ripped off bouillabaisse from the Italian zuppa di pesche. Ed’s state-of-the-art kitchen had every pot, pan and gadget a man could ask for, and even if I wasn’t dragging on a Gauloises or sucking down some Pastis 51 while I cooked, the local seafood and the saffron-infused tomato, garlic and anise-flavoured fish soup all came together with a nice gutsy, Mediterranean feel. I found a Jansz rosé in Ed’s wine cellar to help wash it down.

We had dinner out on the deck overlooking the water, and afterwards we reminisced about Harry over a half-bottle of an excellent vintage port. When the subject of Harry’s affair with Julie came up, Ed said that Harry reckoned she was just filling in time, and she was carrying a torch for someone else. Not that he’d complained – Harry had been going through yet another relationship break-up and he appreciated having such a soft shoulder to cry on. None of us Dedheads could lay claim to a decent long-term relationship.

I turned in around eleven. I hadn’t had much sleep over the previous two nights and I needed to have my wits about me the next day. Ed’s guest bedroom was huge, with
a king-sized bed and a balcony overlooking the channel. It must have been the fresh air and the wine and the gentle lapping of water, because I went out like a light, right in the middle of musing about Julie and her torch-carrying.

Sunday morning we were up at sparrow’s fart, and while Ed rechecked the weather forecast I made coffee and raided his fridge for breakfast fixings. I figured Ed deserved a decent breakfast, as well as dinner, for his trouble.

It was a crisp, clear morning and we ate out on the deck again: wholewheat toast triangles topped with slices of avocado, crispy rashers of bacon, poached eggs, Thai sweet chilli sauce, and a sprig of coriander.

After breakfast we walked down the jetty to the forty-foot Riviera Flybridge Cruiser tied up at the end. The name painted on the stern and the life preservers was
Suzie-QC
. Ed had named the boat after Susan Winter, the barrister who’d won him another impressive settlement a few years back, in one of those legal actions he enjoyed so much. The twin Cummins B370 diesels had a very reassuring rumble to them as we pushed off from the dock just after nine, heading south and towing a Zodiac inflatable with an outboard motor.

The sky was clear, the sea as smooth as glass, and all the signs pointed to me being able to keep my breakfast to myself. My last boat trip in ocean waters had been from Bali to Broome on a yacht that was attacked by a speedboat full of heavily armed pirates. We barely escaped with our lives, and now even a trip across the harbour on the Manly ferry
tended to make me a bit edgy.

Up in the wheelhouse, I pulled the MP7 from its holster and checked it out. With a folding front grip and a retractable rear stock, the MP7 is not a whole lot bigger than a hefty combat pistol.

‘Is that thing bloody plastic?’ Ed laughed. ‘It looks like a toy.’

‘They use a lot of polymer,’ I said, ‘so I guess it’s sort of plastic, but it’s no toy.’ I pushed a magazine into the base of the grip. ‘Heckler and Koch PDW personal defence weapon, 950 high-velocity rounds a minute on full auto. Forty-round magazine, and the bullets will punch through serious body armour at up to a couple of hundred metres.’

‘Oh,’ Ed said. ‘That’s a lot of personal defence.’

‘Works for me.’

Around eleven, as I was brewing coffee in the galley, Ed called me up on deck. He had a pair of binoculars focused on something off the starboard bow.

‘Take a butcher’s at that,’ he said. ‘Looks like old Artemesia’s sent out a welcoming committee.’ He handed me the binoculars. ‘Thar she blows.’

It took a moment to find them, and then I saw the plume of white spray, and then another and another, and then suddenly a huge flat grey tail broke the water.

‘Humpbacks,’ Ed said.
‘Megaptera novaeangliae
. Heading back south to feed after having their babies up in warmer water. Let’s see if we can get any closer.’

Fifteen minutes later, he had brought the boat near the edge of the pod. He shut down the engines and let us drift. There were a dozen whales in the group, including a couple of young calves, who stuck close to their mothers, but none of them seemed too fussed by our presence.

We stood out on the bow and I wondered if I should shoot some pictures, but decided against it. Having your eye up to a viewfinder means you get pictures of an event but sometimes no actual experience of it. And this was something that was worth experiencing.

I felt an almost imperceptible lifting motion on the boat, and down through the deep blue water I saw the shape of a huge whale slowly rising up towards us. He stopped just a few feet under the surface, rolled slightly, and then I was looking into a great big inky eye. We studied each other for what seemed like hours but was probably only seconds, and then the giant bulk of the whale faded back into the blue-grey depths.

It was an amazing feeling, looking into that eye. I had a sense that there was a soul inside that great body, and the whale was checking me out to see what I was doing in his backyard. Seconds later, the boat rocked violently as the whale leapt up out of the water not ten metres off our bow, twisting in the air like a twenty-tonne ballerina before splashing back down into the waves. I had to get a good grip on the deck rail to stop going over the side.

‘Showing off,’ Ed yelled. ‘Maybe she fancies you.’

We were completely surrounded by whales now, showered with spray from their blowholes. The air was filled with the sound of their exhaling breath, and their massive tails slapping down on the water. It was breathtaking, and yet at the same time somehow intensely peaceful. Any one of these huge creatures could smash the little
Suzie-QC
to pieces with a flick of the tail, but they seemed perfectly content to have us floating along with them on the gentle swell.

Several whales were lifting their heads up out of the water then arching their bodies before plunging back into the foaming sea. ‘That bending motion when they dive is why they call ’em humpbacks,’ Ed called out.

We drifted along for about fifteen minutes, with the pod slowly drawing away from us as they headed south. When they disappeared over the horizon Ed restarted the engines, and about an hour later he pointed to a grey bump in the distance.