Tassie’s own engaeus

I WAS SEVEN. I HAD JUST GOTTEN MY FIRST PAIR OF GLASSES AND WITH THEM I SAW MINDLESS CARNAGE. THE DISMEMBERED CORPSES OF HARMLESS YABBIES WERE EVERYWHERE, SHINY OBSIDIAN PINCERS AND DELICATE HEADS AND TAILS DISCARDED ON THE CONCRETE LIKE CRUNCHIE WRAPPERS USED AS CONDOMS.

I would never have helped dig them up from the ankle deep mud if I had known this was how they’d end up. I never would have chopped up that rubbery snake carcass and helped stuff it into a green net. I thought we were only temporarily keeping them in that bright yellow bucket.

My uncle used a nerve tickling trick to make them stand on their heads, and he guffawed when I tried to grab them from under his thumb. I sobbed for hours. It was the first real experience of adult betrayal I had ever endured.

“You’re cruel! You’re all so cruel.”

Mum had to take me home so I’d calm down.

for my Dad to find work on a farm. Our new neighbours took us to Gunns Plains Caves, only four kilometres away from our house. Bulging stalactites and marble formations that looked like a curvaceous lady’s thighs, dripping with sweat. A huge quartz wedding cake, iced with dripping, glittery, cascading rock. Sheets of stone that looked like flesh.

Our tour guide had an explosive white beard with creamy yellow patches around his mouth and nose, and a deep smokers crackle. He turned off his torch, so we could see the hundreds of dimly neon glow worms glued to the pocked ceiling of the cave. This was the real wow-we-are-in-a-cave moment for most of the visitors. But for me, the tour didn’t start until he explained the echoing burbles in the cave, and the black flowing water beside shambled wooden paths:

“In this ancient cave, there are Tasmania’s very own endemic crayfish - or ‘yabbies’, as yew mainlanders call ‘em. They are huge and fat and delicious. But, ermm, because they are endangered according to our Government, we are no longer allowed to hunt ‘em. Good news for the yabbies. Some of ‘em are hundreds of years old!”

I had been remarkably underwhelmed by Tasmania up until this point. When I heard this, my mind burst with possibilities. A place where you weren’t allowed to kill yabbies! Surely this must also be a place of unmatched social and political progression. When I discovered that I was gay, I found out that this wasn’t necessarily true. Like a burrowing crayfish, I had to dig into the hollows of the earth to hide the most shining parts of myself. For years, I had flowing uncut hair in an attempt to prove my femininity. One summer, it became dreadlocked because I was lazy and I had to cut it all off. I felt like I had been dug up by hunters for my flesh. Every part of my being was exposed, and I heard whispers both from others and from the throbbing inside of my skull. I slipped a love letter into the head girls locker. Because of my partially bald scalp, everybody knew it was me. Me and the yabbies, desperately but unsuccessfully skittering through tunnels in the Gunns Plains cave. Hiding, even though everybody knew we were there.

Much later, I came back to Hobart for University. The queer community dug me out of the ground. And instead of eating me, they protected me. They knew I was vulnerable. They invited me out and made Hobart my home. I found out that Tasmania’s freshwater burrowing crayfish are called Engaeus, which sounds kind of like En-Gay-Us. With yabbies like this, how could Tasmania not be my home.